Part 2 (1/2)

IV

But quite aside froroup of poetic painters which stamped its impress so deeply upon the romantic movement at the outset, that to this day it is Delacroix and Millet, Decamps and Corot e think of e think of the moveh the period of greatest stress and least confor under the ro to what may be called romantic methods, nevertheless possessed the classic teree that to us their work seems hardly less acaderes, but Delaroche and Ary Scheffer, painted beside Gericault and Delacroix Ary Scheffer was an eloquent partisan of romanticism, yet his ”Dante and Beatrice” and his ”Temptation of Christ” are admirable only from the academic point of view Delaroche's ”Hemicycle” and his many historical tableaux are surely in the classic vein, however free they may seem in subject and treatres They leave us equally cold, at all events, and in the same way--for the same reason

They betray the painter's preoccupation with art rather than with nature They do, in truth, differ widely from the works which they succeeded, but the difference is not tee, plus c'est la meme chose_ Gerome, for example, feels the exhilaration of the free air of ro his enthusiasm He does not confine himself, as, born a decade or two earlier, certainly he would have done, to classic subject He follows Decamps and Marilhat to the Orient, which he paints with the utmost freedo even to the _danse du ventre_ of a Turkish cafe He paints historical pictures with a realism unknown before his day He is alenre_ subjects But throughout everything he does it is easy to perceive the academic point of view, the classic temperament David assuredly would never have chosen one of Gerome's themes; but had he chosen it, he would have treated it in much the saeneral feeling of the aesthetic environe in ideas as to as fit subject for representation and fitting eration to say that Ingres would have sincerely applauded Gero from the carpet roll before Caesar And if he failed to perceive the noble dramatic power in such a work as the ”Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant,” his failure would nowadays, at least aent amateurs, be ascribed to an intolerance which it is one of the chief ed absurd

It is a source of really aesthetic satisfaction to see everything that is attempted as well done as it is in the works of such painters as Bouguereau and Cabanel Of course the feeling that denies theitimate one The very excellence of their technic, its perfect adaptedness to the nificance of the motive, subject for criticism; inevitably it partakes of the futility of its subject-matter Of course the personal value of the man, the mind, behind any plastic expression is, in a sense, the measure of the expression itself If it be a mind interested in ”pouncet-box” covers, in the pictorial setting forth of themes whose illustration most intimately appeals to the less cultivated and more rudimentary appreciation of fine art--as indisputably the Madonnas and Charities and Oresteses and Bacchus Triuuereau do--oneits productions Life is short, and nificant irounds on which the works of Bouguereau and Cabanel are admired are certainly insufficient But they are experts in their sphere What they do could hardly be better done

If they appeal to a _bourgeois_, a philistine ideal of beauty, of interest, they do it with a perfection that is pleasing in itself No one else does it half so well To minds to which they appeal at all, they appeal with the force of finality; for these they create as well as illustrate the type of what is admirable and lovely It is as easy to account for their popularity as it is to perceive its transitory quality But not only is it a mark of limitation to refuse all interest to such a work as, for exa of which a vast deal of technical expertness is enjoyably evident, and which in every respect of s done elsewhere than in France; it is a still greater error to confound such painters as M Cabanel and M Bouguereau with other painters whose classic temperament has been subjected to the universal romantic influence equally with theirs, but whose production is as different froh and pure romanticists, the truly poetic painters

The instinct of sient and sound one Its satisfaction is a necessary preliminary to efficient action of any kind, and indeed the basis of all fruitful philosophy But in criticisently and soundly by a consideration of everything appealing to consideration, and not at all by heated and wilful, or superior and supercilious, exclusions

Catholicity of appreciation is the secret of critical felicity To follow the line of least resistance, not to take into account those elements of a problem, those characteristics of a subject, to which, superficially and at first thought, one is insensitive, is to dispense one's self froreeable industry, but the result is only transitorily agreeable to the sincere intelligence

It is in criticish no doubt in criticism alone, preferable to lose one's self in aas this is to the critic who appreciates the indispensability of clairvoyance in criticism--rather than to reach swiftly and simply a conclusion which candor would have foreseen as the inevitable and unjudicial result of following one's own likes and whims, and one's content sense of insecurity In criticis counter-considerations than to deter a whole set of the theht In this way, at least, one preserves the attitude of poise, and poise is perhaps the one essential element of criticism In a word, that catholicity of sensitiveness which may be called mere impressionism, behind which there is no body of doctrine at all, is more truly critical than intolerant depreciation or unreflecting enthusiasnificant passage, ”is to get one's self out of the way and let huly simple to deny all importance to painters who are not poetic painters And the temptation is especially seductive when the prosaic painters are paralleled by such a distinguished succession of their truly poetic brethren as are the painters of the romantic epoch who are possessed of the classic teests that prose has its place in painting as in literature In literature we do not insist even that the poets be poetic Poetic is not the epithet that would be applied, for instance, to French classic verse or the English verse of the eighteenth century, colish, which we mean e speak of poetry Yet no one would think of denying the value of Dryden or even of Boileau No one would even insist that, distinctly prosaic as are the qualities of Boileau--and I should say his was a crucial instance--he would have done better to abjure verse And painting, in a wide sense, is just as legitimately the expression of ideas in form and color as literature is the expression of ideas in words It is perfectly plain that Meissonier was not especially enamoured of beauty, as Corot, as Troyon, as Deca could be less critical than to deny Meissouier's iitient person, in spite of his literalness and his insensitiveness to the elenificance whatever in the wide range of subjects that he essayed, with, in an honorable sense, such distinguished success

Especially in America, I think, where of recent years we have shown an Athenian sensitiveness to new impressions, the direct descendants of the classic period of French painting have suffered froitimate attachment to art, instead of the Fontainebleau absorption in nature, has given them a false reputation of artificiality But the prose element in art has its justification as well as the poetic, and it is witness of a narrow culture to fail in appreciation of its ad of the French ro is marked precisely by a breadth of culture that is itself a source of agreeable and elevated interest The neo-Grec painters are thoroughly educated They lack the picturesque and unexpected note of their poetic brethren--they lack theand exquisite touch of these; nay, they lack the penetrating distinction that radiates even froured as it appears in such works as those of Millet and Rousseau But their distinction is not less real for being the distinction of cultivation rather than altogether native and absolute It is perhaps even more marked, more pervasive, more directly associated with the painter's aim and effect

One feels that they are familiar with the philosophy of art, its history and practice, that they are articulate and eclectic, that for being less personal and powerful their horizon is less lie, at all events, and in many cases their aesthetic interest, wider They have more the cultivated man's bent for experimentation, for variety They care more scrupulously for perfection, for form With a far inferior sense of reality and far less felicity in dealing with it, their sapient skill in dealing with the abstractions of art isof line and lect a source of refined pleasure To lament their lack of poetry is to ret their ihtful decorum

V

As one has, however, so often occasion to note in France--where in every field of intellectual effort the influence of schools and groups and reat that almost every individuality, no matter how strenuous, falls naturally and intimately into association with some one of them--there is every now and then an exception that escapes these categories and stands quite by itself Insuch exceptions, and widely different from each other as the poles, are Couture and Puvis de Chavannes Better than in either the true romanticists with the classic strain, or the acade of the classic and romantic inspirations is illustrated in Couture The two are in him, indeed, actually fused In Puvis de Chavannes they appear in a wholly novel combination; his classicism is absolutely unacadee of mysticism, and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does _not_ exist--in the converse of Gautier's phrase His distinction is wholly personal He lives evidently on an exceedingly high plane--dwells habitually in the delectable uplands of the intellect The fact that his work is almost wholly decorative is not at all accidental His talent, his genius if one chooses, requires large spaces, vast direat deal of rather profitless discussion as to whether he expressly imitates the _primitifs_ or reproduces them sympathetically

But really he does neither; he deals with their subjects occasionally, but always in a cohly personal, way His color is as original as his general treat, in the ecole des Beaux Arts sense A brief period in Henri Scheffer's studio, three ether different field of effort, yielded him all the explicit instruction he ever had His real study was done in Italy, in the presence of the old masters of Florence With this equipment he revolutionized modern decoration, established, at any rate, a new convention for it His convention is a little definite, a little bald

Oneof it, even It is a shade too express, too confident, too little careless both of tradition and of the typical qualities that secure perine how insipid it ht become It has too little body, its scheme is too timorous, too vaporous to be handled by another Puvis de Chavannes will probably have few successful imitators But one must immediately add that if he does not found a school, his oork is, perhaps for that reason, at all events in spite of it, a the most important of the day Quite unperturbed by current discussions, which are certainly of the noisiest by which the current of artistic development was ever deflected, he has kept on his way, and has finally won all suffrages for an aesthetic expression that is really antagonistic to the general aesthetic spirit of his ti figure in French painting to-day Couture is little more than a nao he was still an iure He had been an unusually successful teacher Many American painters of distinction, especially, were at one tie Butler He theorized as much, as well--perhaps even better than--he painted His ”Entretiens d'atelier” are as good in their way as his ”Baptisuished talent, but he was too distinctly clever--clever to the point of sophistication In this respect he was distinctly a reat work, ”Romains de la Decadence,” created as fine an effect at the Centenary Exhibition of the Paris World's Fair in 1889 as it does in the Louvre, whence it was then transferred, but it was distinctly a decorative effect--the effect of a fine panel in the general n; it reatest performance, the perforh as painting it lacks the quality and breadth of ”Le Fauconnier,” perhaps theof his works to painters themselves, and of the ”Day-Dreams” of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art Its permanent interest perhaps will be the historical one, due to the definiteness hich it assigns Couture his position in the evolution of French painting It shows, as everything of Couture shows, the absence of any pictorial feeling so profound and personal as to h to endure indefinitely And it has not, on the other hand, the interest of reality--that faithful and enthusiastic rendering of the external world which gives i of the present day

Had Regnault lived, he would have more adequately--or should I say more plausibly?--marked the transition from romanticish romanticist--far more so, for instance, than his friend Fortuny, whose intellectual reserve is always conspicuous He essayed the most vehement kind of subjects, even in the classical field, where he treated them with truly romantic truculence

He was himself always, moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature as a fairy-story teller In this sense he was more romantic than the romanticists His ”Automedon,” his portrait of General Priree that is either superb or superficial, as one looks at them; but at any rate they are romantic _a outrance_ At the sas rather than their significance, rather than his view of them, that appealed to him He was farther away from the classic inspiration than any other romanticist of his fellows; and at the same time he cared for the external world estions, than any painter of equal force before Courbet and Bastien-Lepage The very fact that he was not, intellectually speaking, wholly _dans son assiette_, as the French say, shows that he was a genius of a transitional , and one thinks so not sooff by possibly the last Prussian bullet fired in the war of 1870-71, as because of the essentially experi Undoubtedly he would have done great things And undoubtedly they would have been different from those that he did; probably in the direction--already indicated in hismore consistency, more vivid definiteness,conceptions

III

REALISTIC PAINTING

I

To an intelligence fully and acutely alive, its own ti than any other The sentimental, the scholastic, the speculative teret; but that sanity of reeable sensations in the data to which it is intiht upon Greek literature and art for which we study Greek history, the light upon Roman history for which we study Latin literature and art, are admirable to us in very exact proportion as we study them for our ends To every man and every nation that really breathes, true vitality of soul depends upon saying to one's self, with an emotion of equivalent intensity to the emotion of patriotism celebrated in Scott's familiar lines, This is my own, my native era and environment Culture is impossible apart from cosmopolitanism, but self-respect is more indispensable even than culture French art alone at the present time possesses absolute self-respect It possesses this quality in an eree; but it possesses it, and in virtue of it is endued with a preservative quality that saves it from the emptiness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism It has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence of the pri ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism It has escaped also that almost abject worshi+p of classic models which Winckelmann and Canova made universal in Germany and Italy--not to speak of its echoes elsewhere It has always stood on its own feet, and, however lacking in the higher qualities of iinative initiative, on the one hand, and however addicted to the academic and the traditional on the other, has always both respected its aesthetic heritage and contributed so of its own thereto

Why should not one feel the same quick interest, the same instinctive pride in his time as in his country? Is not sympathy hat is modern, instant, actual, and apposite a fair parallel of patriotises” is analogous to chauvinised an attitude as that of provincial blindness to other contemporary points of view and systems of philosophy than one's own Culture is equally hostile to both, and in art culture is as important a factor as it is in less special fields of activity and endeavor But in art, as elsewhere, culture is a means to an actual, present end, and the pre-Raphaelite sentienuine expression is as sterile as servile iht, dress, and demeanor is universally felt to be The past--the antique, the renaissance, the classic, and romantic ideals are to be used, not adopted; in the spirit of Goethe, at once the inal of modern men and the : ”Nothing do I callinherited I have not reconquered forwere the field of aesthetics the only one uninvaded by the scientific spirit of the time The one force especially characteristic of our era is, I suppose, the scientific spirit It is at any rate everywhere manifest, and it possesses the best intellects of the century _A priori_ one ue about its hostility, essential or other, to the artistic, the constructive spirit; but to do so is at the most to beat the air, to waste one's breath, to Ruskinize, in a word Interest in life and the world, instead of speculation or self-expression, is the ”note” of the day The individual has withered terribly He is supplanted by the type Materialisospel; it is not at all the formulated expression of Goethe's ”spirit that denies” Nature has acquired new dignity She cannot be studied too closely, nor too long The secret of the universe is now pursued through observation, as for is sacred nowadays because everything receives respect If absolute beauty is now smiled at as a chimera, it is because beauty is perceived everywhere Whatever is ht--the maxim has tooOur attitude is at once humbler and more curious The sense of the is, is more intimate and profound What one ht be done, more justly appreciated There is less confidence and more aspiration The artist's eye is ”on the object” in aze than ever heretofore

If his sentier ”inevitable,” as Wordsworth complained Goethe's was not, it is more reverent, at any rate more circumspect If he is less exalted he isless of a philosopher If he scouts authority, if even he accepts someeakly the thraldom of dissent from traditional standards and canons, it is because he is convinced that the material hich he has to deal is superior to all canons and standards If he esteems truth more than beauty, it is because what he thinks truth is more beautiful in his eyes than the stereotyped beauty he is adjured to attain In any case, the distinction of the realistic painters--like that of the realists in literature, where, also, it need not be said, France has been in the lead--is ot rid of solecisms; to have made, indeed, obvious solecisms, and solecisms of conception as well as of execution, a little ridiculous It is, to be sure, equally ridiculous to subject romantic productions to realistic standards, to blind one's self to the sentiment that saturates such romantic works as Scott's and Dumas's, or Gericault's and Diaz's, and is wholly apposite to its own tireat difficulty with a principle is that it is universal, and that e deal with facts of any kind whatever, universality is an impossible ideal Scott and Gericault are, nowadays, in e have coht be well to try and imitate them, if imitation had any salt in it, which it has not; or if it were possible to do what they did with their different inspiration, which it is not Mr Stevenson is, I think, an exa this latter in literature, just as a dozen eminent painters of less talent--for no one has soBut there are a thousand things, not only in the technic of the romanticists but in their whole attitude toward their art and their material, that are nowadays impossible to sincere and spontaneous artists Details which have no importance whatever in the _ensemble_ of the romantic artist are essential to the realist Art does not stand still Its canons change There is a constant evolution in its standards, its requireround is nothan in tapestry; a perfunctory scheme of pure chiaro-oscuro is no blemish in one of Diaz's splendid forest landscapes; such phenomena in a work of Raffaelli or Pointelin would jar, because, h the very force of evolution itself, subscribe, they can but appear solecisms In a different set of circumstances, under a different inspiration, and with a different artistic attitude, solecisms they certainly are not But, as Thackeray s” Our circumstances, inspiration, artistic attitude, are involuntary and possess us as our other belongings do

In Gautier's saying, for instance, ”I am a man for who the key-note of the romantic epoch, it is to be noted that the visible world is taken as a spectacle siestive or merely stimulant, in accordance with individual bent Gautier and the roenerally had little concern for its structure To many of them it was indeed rather a canvas than a spectacle even--just as to many, if not to nificance that altogether appeals; the roeneral sketched their ideas and impressions upon it, as the naturalists have in the main studied its aspects and constitution, careless of the import of these, pictorially or otherwise Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import?

Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your a of ”docuedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's ”Cantonniers,” Manet's ”Bar,” or Bastien-Lepage's ”Joan of Arc,” perhaps But what is indisputable is, that we are irretrievably coeneral aesthetic attitude and inspiration, and must share not only the romanticists' impatience with academic formulae and conventions, but the realists' devotion to life and the world as they actually exist The futurein the present, and what is important is, after all, to live It is also so difficult that not to take the line of least resistance is fatuity

II