Part 3 (2/2)

VIII

Whatever the painting of the future is to be, it is certain not to be the painting of Monet For the present, no doubt, Monet is the last word in painting To belittle him is not only whimsical, but ridiculous He has plainly worked a revolution in his art He has taken it out of the vicious circle of conformity to, departure from, and return to abstractions and the so-called ideal No one hereafter who attempts the representation of nature--and for as far ahead as we can see with any confidence, the representation of nature, the pantheistic ideal if one chooses, will increasingly intrench itself as the painter's true aim--no one who seriously attempts to realize this aim of now universal appeal will be able to dispense with Monet's aid He must perforce follow the lines laid down for hi naturalist Any other coursefuture is certain, it is certain that the future will be not only inhospitable to, but absolutely intolerant of, soleciss is bound to be solid and not superficial, real and not fantastic But--whether the future is to commit itself wholly to prose, or is to preserve in new conditions the essence of the poetry that, in one foran--for the superstructure to be erected on the sound basis of just values and true ireater interest and a nity than any such preoccupation with the basis of technic as Monet's can possibly have

And though, even as one says it, one has the feeling that the future is pregnant with so will in some now inconceivable way have to suborous standard than it does at present--I have heard the claied--at the same time the true ”child of nature”

may console himself with the reflection that accuracy and competence are but the accidents, at most the necessary phenomena, of what really and essentially constitutes fine art of any kind--namely, the expression of a personal conception of what is not only true but beautiful as well In France less than anywhere else is it likely that even such a powerful force asdominate the constructive, the architectonic faculty, which is part of the very fibre of the French genius The exposition and illustration of a theory believed in with a fervency to be found only aence is the chief element and object of experiy and activity But no theory holds theives place to another formulation of the mutinous freedom its very acceptance creates And the conformity that each of them in succession imposes on mediocrity is always varied and relieved by the frequent incarnations in masterful personalities of the natural national traits--of which, I think, the architectonic spirit is one of the ain become creative, constructive, personally expressive Its basis having been established as scientifically iance, the iinative freedom, exhibited within the liral part of the French painter's patrimony

IV

CLassIC SCULPTURE

I

French sculpture naturally follows very s, however, are Gothic, and the Renaissance emancipated rather than created it Italy, over which the Gothic wave passed with less disturbing effect than anywhere else, and where the Pisans were doing pure sculpture when everywhere farther north sculpture was idly architectural, had a potent influence But the modern phases of French sculpture have a closer relationshi+p with the Chartres Cathedral thanhas with its earliest practice; and Claux sluters, the Burgundian Fle who modelled the wonderful Moses Well and the to his other anachronistic reater influence upon his successors than the Touraine school of painting and the Clouets did upon theirs

These works are a curious compromise between the Gothic and the modern spirits sluters was plainly awith Gothic material and amid Gothic ideas In itself his sculpture is hardly decorative, as we apply the epithet to idity, of insistence in every detail of its right and title to individuality apart from every other sculptured detail The prophets in the niches of the beautiful Dijon Well, the undian tombs, have little relation with each other as elements of a decorative sculptural composition They are in the same style, that is all Each of them is in interest quite independent of the other Coeries rather than a composition Compared with Goujon's ”Fountain of the Innocents” their motive is not decorative at all Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah asserts his individuality in a way the more sociable prophets of the Sistine Chapel would hesitate to do They have a little the air of hermits--of artistic anchorites, onethus sculpturally undecorative and unco beautifully subordinate to the architecture which it is their unhtful way i in a word architecturally decorative The e of the two arts is, Gothically, not on equal terms It never occurred, of course, to the Gothic architect that it should be His _ense, one may almost say the sole, interest is structural He even imposed the condition that the sculpture which decorated his structure should be itself architecturally structural One figure of the portals of Chartres is almost as like another as one pillar of the interior is like its fellows; for the reason--ees an identical function

Emancipation froreat distinction, however He isanything like so far--as the modern sculptor who divorces his work from that of the architect hom he is called upon to coreeable to the sense satisfied by forures, subordinate as they are to the general architectural purpose and function of what they decorate, are not only not purely structural in their expression, stiff as they still are from the point of view of absolutely free sculpture; they are, moreover, not merely unrelated to each other in any essential sense, such as that in which the figures of the Pisans and of Goujon are related; they are on the contrary each and all wonderfully accentuated and individualized Every ecclesiastic on the Dijon toure on the Well has a psychologic as well as a sculptural interest Poised between Gothic tradition and ust aesthetic conventionality and the dawn of free activity, sluters is one of the ures in the whole history of sculpture And the force of his characterizations, the vividness of his conceptions, and the coive him the added importance of one of the heroes of his art in any ti extremely Flemish in his sense of personality A similar interest in humanity as such, in the individual apart from the type, is noticeable in the pictures of the Van Eycks, of Meer Van der Weyden, wherein all idea of beauty, of composition, of universal appeal is subordinated as it is in no other art--in that of Holland no more than in that of Italy--to the representation in the most definite, precise, and powerful way of some intensely human personality There is the same extraordinary concreteness in one of Matsys's apostles and one of sluters's prophets

Michel Colombe, the pupil of Claux and Anthoniet and the sculptor of the monument of Francois II, Duke of Brittany, at Nantes, the relief of ”St George and the Dragon” for the Chateau of Gaillon, now in the Louvre, and the Fontaine de Beaune, at Tours, and Jean Juste, whose noble masterpiece, the Tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, is the finest ornae the distance and mark the transition to Goujon, Cousin, and Germain Pilon far e froh the monu a practical sculptor's hand, is really to be classed a painters And Gerraceful and fertile sculptor as his many works show him to have been, resulted in a lack of personal force that has caused hiht on the one hand ”seriously injured by the bastard sentiment proper to the school of Fontainebleau,” as Mrs

Pattison somewhat sternly remarks, and on the other to be reprehended by Gerothique_--some reminiscence of Gothic taste Jean Goujon is really the first modern French sculptor

II

He remains, too, one of the very finest, even in a co since his day He had a very particular talent, and it was exhibited in manifold ways He is as fine in relief as in the round His decorative quality is as eminent as his purely sculptural side Compared with his Italian conte and severe He has nothing of Pilon's chameleon-like imitativeness He does not, on the other hand, break with the traditions of the best models known to him--and, undoubtedly he knew the best His works cover and line the Louvre, and anyone who visits Paris enius--certainly anyone who in addition visits Rouen and beholds the lovely tracery of his earliest sculpture on the portal of St Maclou He was eminently the sculptor of an educated class, and appealed to a cultivated appreciation Co as he did at the ac with intelligent selection whatever it considered valuable fro distinctly ”swell” in his work He does not perhaps express any over, nor does he stamp the impress of French national character on his ith any particular emphasis He is too well-bred and too cultivated, he has tooand more national character than the works of his contemporaries elsewhere

For line he has a very intimate instinct, and of mass, in the sculptor's as well as the painter's sense, he has a native comprehension Compare his ”Diana” of the Louvre with Cellini's in the adjoining rooroup is superb in every way

Cellini's figure is torh decorative aestheticisures of the Innocents Fountain are equally sculptural in their way--by no means arabesques, as is so much of Renaissance relief, and thein fine that Goujon did is unified with the rest of his work and identifiable by the mark of style

III

What do we , at all events, very different from manner, in spite of Mr Hamerton's insistence upon the contrary Is the quality in virtue of which--as Mr Dobson paraphrases Gautier--

”The bust outlives the throne, The coin Tiberius”

the specific personality of the artist who carved the bust or chiselled the coin that have thus outlived all personality connected with them?

Not that personality is not of the essence of enduring art It is, on the contrary, the condition of any vital art whatever But what gives the object, once personally conceived and expressed, its currency, its universality, its eternal interest--speaking to strangers with familiar vividness, and to posterity as to conte And it is this so and not specific personality that style is Style is the invisible wind through whose influence ”the lion on the flag” of the Persian poet ”moves and marches” The lion of personality may be painted never so deftly, with never so y, charh the rhyth influence of style

Nor is style necessarily the grand style, as Arnold seehtening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitenity and distinction to it” Perhaps the most explicit examples of pure style owe their production to spiritual coolness; and, in any event, the word ”peculiar” in a definition begs the question Buffon is at once juster andother than the order and ular that this simple and lucid utterance of Buffon should have been so little noticed by those who have written in English on style In general English writers have apparently misconceived, in very curious fashi+on, Buffon's other remark, ”le style c'est l'homme;” by which aphorism Buffon merely meant that a man's individual manner depends on his temperament, his character, and which he, of course, was very far fro would ever be taken for a definition

Following Buffon's idea of ”order and movement,” we may say, perhaps, that style results from the preservation in every part of some sense of the form of the whole It implies a sense of relations as well as of stateht in a manner peculiar to the artist (in words, color, marble, what not), but it is such expression penetrated with both reminiscence and anticipation It is, indeed, on the contrary, very nearly the reverse of e y Stylefor the _ensemble_ on which an inharmonious detail jars Expression results from a sense of the value of the detail If Walt Whitman, for example, hat his admirers'

defective sense of style fancies him, he would be expressive If French academic art had as little expression as its censors assert, it would still illustrate style--the quality which modifies the native and apposite for with reference to what has preceded and what is to follow it; the quality, in a word, whose effort is to harmonize the object with its environhtened, and universal instead of logical and particular, we have the ”grand style;” but we have the grand style generally in poetry, and to be sure of style at all prose--such prose as Goujon's, which in no wise elect in soree the specific personality that tends to make it poetic and individual

IV