Part 10

His peculiarity of giving his pictures fine and pretentious names, such as “Black and Gold,” “Blue and Silver,” “Ivory and Gold,” “Purple and Gold” is also generally misunderstood. People read “Silver and Blue,” and saw indistinctly intricate brush-strokes of blue with elevations in dead white, representing, by way of indication, the high seas by night and in a mist. People hurried to the picture labelled “Ivory and Gold,” expecting to gaze at something like an ancient chryselephantine marvel, or a Florentine masterpiece of splendour belonging to the days of the Medici, and what did they find? The lightly executed sketch of a woman in a yellow and white harmony, in which one looked in vain for the costly materials promised by the title. Not Philistines alone have shaken their heads over this, and evil-disposed critics have talked of hoaxing, foppery, and American bluff. They have wronged the artist bitterly. He was absolutely honest; his optical hyper-sensitiveness felt the colour with so heightened an appreciation of tone that he really saw gold, silver, and purple, where a less susceptible sense could only see dull yellow, deadened white, undecided reddish-brown. In all probability, it was long before he realised that others failed to observe, in the appearance of the actual things and his pictures of them, the rare metals and precious stones, the pearls and ivory, which gleamed from them to him. The common phrase, which is a precipitate of the universal thought and feeling, speaks of sun-gold and moon-silver. Sun and moon consequently make such a strong optical impression on even the average man that he thinks of gold and silver with the accompanying higher notes of ideas of splendour and magnificence. In Whistler’s consciousness, however, these ideas began to be felt with gentle excitations, as whitish foam on dark waves in the night, or a woman’s pale complexion in cream-coloured raiment yielded them. These delicate charms affected his sensitiveness just as the force of the sun or moon affects others. In maniacal excitation, of which the acutest form is madness, the brain of the sick person becomes so supersensitive that it reacts on the ordinary impressions of the senses just as on intolerably violent irritations. Moreover, certain poisons, of which hashish is the best known, derange the central nervous system into a condition of supersensitiveness, in which the person poisoned feels himself inundated with floods of light, and sees a blinding brightness everywhere. The sensitiveness to which only illness or poison raises the average brain, was from nature the peculiarity of Whistler’s sight-centres. He was conscious that in certain respects he had more than others, and he felt as superior to them as the Indian hunter does to a pale face of the towns on a game-beast’s track, which the latter does not notice at all, whilst it gives the former a thousand clear indications. As an artist he was amiably modest, as a man amusingly arrogant. He did not flatter himself on his work, but on his finer organisation, _i.e._, that he was kneaded out of better dough than the majority.

His supersensitiveness is expressed not only in his revel of colour; it is also curiously and graphically revealed in the impressions which he feels of the appearance of women, and which he conveys in his best portraits of women with an intensity no longer restrained within physiological bounds, but positively touching on the morbid. The intensity with which he feels young, high-bred, nervous women has quite an uncanny effect on me. I think of his “Lady Meux,” and other capricious femininities, which were exhibited, in the last fifteen years, in the Paris _salons_ and in London. He plants his model before us in some wonderful position. One stands with its back towards us, but turns its head, as if in a sudden caprice, to us. Another shows us its full face, and looks fascinatingly at us with pinched mouth and impenetrable eyes that think troublous thoughts. These perverted, whimsical beauties wear remarkable and personal toilettes which, except the face and often the hands, reveal not a finger’s breadth of skin, yet, in spite of the interposition of silk and lace, cry out for the fig leaf. They are bundles of sick nerves that, from the crowns of their heads to the tips of their fingers, seem to thrill with Sadic excitement. It is as though they wanted to entice men to wild attempts, and at the same time held their claws ready to tear, with a loud cry of pleasure, the flesh of the daring ones. Everything madly Mænadic, or inexorably Sphinx-like, that Ibsen was incapable of incarnating convincingly in his Hedda Gabler speaks distinctly from Whistler’s female portraits.

They have become typical—typical for copying painters who exaggerate his neurotic women into the pornographic; typical for hysterical women, to whom they suggest poses and psychological states. Félicien Rops perhaps owes him nothing, although often enough his female demons seem Whistler-portraits divested of clothing; he has, from analogous organic hypotheses, independently attained to analogous conceptions of woman; but Zorn’s, Boldini’s, Alexander’s women point to Whistler’s demoniacs. The woman of a given epoch likes to form herself on the ideal which the art and poetry of the time give of the “interesting” woman. Thus Whistler, by means of his female portraits, became an educator of the æsthetically superfine woman of the present day; but Whistler, as an educator of woman, is to me incomparably less sympathetic than Whistler, the delicate appreciator and symphonist of colour.

VIII

GUSTAVE MOREAU

The house in which Gustave Moreau spent the seventy-seven years of his life (1826-98) has been turned into a museum which contains nearly all his life’s work, according to the catalogue 1132 items, from the copies and sketches of his youth, through the great finished paintings, down to the promising sketches, unfulfilled promises, of his old age. This collection falls little short of being complete. Perhaps, with the sole exception of the incomparably less interesting Wierz, there is no contemporary artist less often met with in public and private galleries than Gustave Moreau. He never sold his pictures, for he was lucky enough not to be obliged to do so; and, in the time of his maturity, he did not exhibit, for he shunned contact with men who were strange and unfamiliar to him. He who wishes to get to know him must, then, not shirk a pilgrimage to his house, which he inherited from his parents, inhabited by himself, and left as an unencumbered legacy to his native town. And the journey will be found worth the trouble, for Gustave Moreau is a curious phenomenon, affecting to melancholy and depressing, at least for men enamoured with life and action, but nevertheless full of mysterious, strangely pathetic allurement, even for those who prefer to breathe in air and sunshine under a bright sky.

Gustave Moreau stands apart from the mighty procession of French art in the nineteenth century, which was headed by the classic cohort, continued by the powerful band of the knights and squires of romanticism, and then unrolled itself before our eyes, in the legion of the bourgeois National Guard of Philistine academic routine-art, in the blouse-wearing troop of Realists, and, lastly, in the vacillating and oscillating sun-flower groups of Symbolism. He is not to be classed in this line of development. He went his way alone, deaf to the strains of the world of which he heard only those with which he himself was in harmony from the beginning. He had some few kindred spirits among contemporary painters, but he did not know them, and they did not know him either, and they exercised no influence on each other, but grew up independently of one another from the same conditions of like temperaments and peculiar moods that in the middle decades of the nineteenth century dominated narrow, exclusive circles, without being characteristic of this or any other time. For these temperaments are purely subjective, and accord with the external only so far as civilisation, when it has reached a certain grade of intensity and artificiality, always produces men with widely preponderating development of fancy, who are continually looking into their inner selves, and cannot withdraw their eyes from the fascinating spectacle of the wonderful events being enacted therein.

Moreau was just such a visionary. Remote from life, remote from actuality, he ever remained engrossed in his dream, and his noble art served him to retain his apparently multifarious, but, in reality, little changing dream-pictures. His museum is, then, a world by itself, with which the objective outer world has no more in common than have dreams and ravings with pictures of the actual which serve them as a stimulus, and furnish them with the elements of their subjective combinations.

Since the earliest stages of development of the spiritual life there have existed, side by side with men of observation and action, thinkers and dreamers who turn away from actualities, and build up around them a world of ideas which their excessively developed power of imagination could fashion, and endow with romantic life according to their own inclination and necessities. Thus arose all symbols, mythologies, fables, and superstitions that were enshrined in folk-lore, traditions, and, more especially, in all arts. Civilisation brings with it, by this means, besides its recognition of nature, a world of shadows invented by men freely—even if according to fixed psychological laws—like a ghostly double, the astral body of the real world; and our prescriptive education, which comprises in itself more æsthetic than positively scientific ingredients, renders us all double citizens of the real and the imaginary world. The majority of us chiefly live in the former, and visit the latter only in rare moments, which to some mean only recreation, but to others consecration and exaltation. A small minority, however, renounce their citizenship of the actual world and withdraw wholly to the world of imagination, which has been conjured up by the artistic fancy of mankind in thousands of years of creative activity.

Moreau was a citizen of the shadow-world, wherein he spent, an eternal Phæacian Sunday, and he never grew weary of lingering over its beauties. We learn by his representations to know it thoroughly in all its parts. Its landscapes are curiously jagged rocks which seem to be formed of corals; chalk plains with moon-glimmering reflections; mountain steeps in cumulous clouds; lakes and seas of oil, opalescent or charged with indigo. The animals that people this hypnotising paradise are unicorns with silvery coats, amazing dragons that are too curly to inspire fear, milk-white flying-horses, seven-headed hydras standing bolt upright on the tips of their tails, Stymphalian birds with women’s faces, sphinxes, chimæras, and phœnixes. Even the flamingos, which come nearest to the terrestrial fauna, are here with the tips of their wings dipped, as it were, in blood, immeasurably more oddly pathetic than we know them. The flora exhibits (besides monumental marvels of Peru, which remind one of the rose windows in Gothic cathedrals) a “mystic blossom,” a somewhat calla-like creation that sprouts forth from a luminous rock in the blue, mirroring mere, and on its slender summit, between great high leaves, bears the Blessed Virgin surrounded by a dazzling halo. The spiritual beings that move amidst these marvellous animals and plants, are gods, heroes, and poets: Tyrtæus, Orpheus, Hesiod, Sappho, Jason, Helena, Odysseus, Penelope, Pasiphae, Hercules, Dejanira, Œdipus, Jupiter, Apollo, the Muses, Semele, Leda, Europa, Prometheus, the Oceanides, Moses, Buddha, Jesus Christ, the Good Samaritan; the acts or, more correctly, the states in which these gods, demigods, and genii are represented are taken from all mythologies and theogonies. Every mysticism that has at any time or place arisen, like a silver haze, from the chaotic brain of man, has found admittance into Moreau’s soul and flows up and down in it in changing pictures. As to orthodoxy of any sort or kind, he is quite unconcerned. His mind, when stirred, clings with the same delicacy to the saint of every origin, and he kneels, like the large-hearted heathen of antiquity, at the threshold of the most varied realms of divinity. The Pallas Athene in the hall of the king’s palace at Ithaca, who enjoys the massacre of the suitors, is formed after the same type as the Blessed Virgin of the “mystic blossom”; hovering in long, trailing, white garments, radiant with a halo, ecstatic in look and mien and the clasping of her hands. The statues of the Chaldæan gods in the triumph of Alexander the Great imitate hieratic repose, and the Eastern posture of the Buddha-Amina statues. Prometheus on the Caucasian peak, palpitating beneath the vulture’s beak, is allied by a family likeness to Christ scourged at the pillar. Jason on the poop of the _Argo_, and the fair man among the “Three Magi from the East,” are cast in the same mould. Moses, looking down from the frontier hill on the blue plains of Canaan, and the great Pan, gazing at the spectacle of the procession of the spheres, seem brothers. Jupiter, with Semele on his bosom melting away with its heat, has the unapproachable sublimity of the canonical, the orthodox God the Father. For Moreau there are no dead religions; with a humble shyness and feelings of awe, he approaches all that has ever been reverenced by man.

Moreau’s transcendental imaginations necessarily reveal themselves to the senses in other colours, as in other forms than those familiar to us by experience. An eerie light fills his pictures with the shimmering radiance of mother-of-pearl. The rarest, and, therefore, as jewels, the most treasured exceptional forms of the planetary world are the material of which everything in these pictures consists; the buildings are of gold and precious stones; there is a twinkle of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds everywhere. Moreau’s amazing art produces from his palette of oil-colours effects that lie far outside its technique; they are huge Limoges plates with rivers of transparent enamel; paintings on glass with sun-illumined, jewel-like fragments of colour; Byzantine mosaics of bits of _lapis lazuli_, jasper, and cornelian. With this palette certain Quattrocentists such as Mantegna, certain Flemish artists as Van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, as also Holbein, have in their pictures produced a small number of beauty-spots. No one prior to Moreau has painted big pictures entirely with it.

The first impression received from the Moreau Museum is that of having entered an enchanted castle, which has about it something of the treasure cave of the mountain sprites, something of the palace of the Elf-queen, as we know them from the “Thousand and One Nights,” and German folk-stories. And if we have tarried longer, and our eyes have grown accustomed to the ripple of pearls and precious stones, of enamel and gold, we are astonished at the strange, weird stiffness and stillness of all these splendid creatures, and really feel we are surrounded by ghosts and spectres that have assumed only in pretence the guise of men.

Moreau formed his views on Baudelaire’s rules. In the rooms of his museum we fancy we are looking at a series of book-illustrations for the _Fleurs-du-mal_.

“Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes, Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.”

“I hate the movement which displaces the lines, and never do I weep and never laugh” would, as an inscription above the entrance, most fittingly convey in words the main feature of Moreau’s art. For nearly all his pictures, but most of all for the “Triumph of Alexander the Great,” “Penelope’s Suitors,” and the “Daughters of Thespius,” the verses of the _Paris Dream_ would suit as a deliberate description.

“J’avais banni de ces spectacles Le vègétal irregulier . . . . . Babel d’escaliers et d’arcades, C’était un palais infini, Plein de bassins et de cascades Tombant dans l’or mat ou bruni. . . . . . C’étaient des pierres inouies . . . . . Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles Planait.... Un silence d’éternité.”

This _silence d’éternité_ is the characteristic of Moreau’s art. Here nothing moves; all is as stiff as Lot’s wife after she was turned into a pillar of salt, as the men in the fairy-tale after the wizard has, by a wave of his magic wand, made the warm life stagnate in their veins. Moreau succeeds in reversing Pygmalion’s miracle. His brush takes the life out of every human body he paints, and turns it into a statue. In none of his figures do we feel that he painted from a model. They all give the impression of being copies from statuary, and we are, for instance, not surprised that his manifestly unfinished “Moses Looking at the Promised Land” has a long bearded head as white as marble on an almost flesh-coloured body. We assume that Moreau has here simply reproduced the natural colour of his stone prototype. Among all his thousand works, one alone has really struck me as having something like a stir of passion traceable, viz., his “Messalina.” The abominable empress, slave of her animal passions, is ascending the dirty couch at a den in the Suburra. The young vulgarian whom she has beckoned to her clasps her waist with both arms; the attendant torch-bearer of the crowned slut turns her head away from the repulsive sight. One can very well understand the movement of this slave who is ashamed of her mistress, but has only to obey and hold her tongue. The eagerness, too, with which the youth kneeling before the couch creeps up to the body that is offered him, is true and warm. Here is real life, even if in one of its lowest manifestations. But Messalina herself, though the protagonist of this tragedy of Cæsarean madness, is again entirely Moreau. With her stony repose in a situation with which it is so inconsistent, with her Assyrian fish-bladder-eyed profile, she resembles an idol in a Babylonian temple, and one wonders how the passion of the favoured one can endure the icy coldness gleaming from this idol.

His temperament indicated to him, from his earliest awakening to artistic impulse, the course of his education, just as it did, later, the choice of his material. As a youth in Italy he copied Pompeian mural paintings with fervour, and later revelled at the sight of the Quattrocentists. Here he recognised at first sight kindred souls; here, as it were, his blood spoke. He tries, by imitating them piously, to keep them for reminiscences later on. His mystic bent to the old, the obsolete, the risen as from a grave, is a trait connecting him with the Præ-Raphaelites, who were almost his contemporaries. With them he has in common, too, the uncommonly exact and accurate technique. He is a cold but unerring draughtsman. All his accessory work, his architecture, ornaments, implements, and clothing, are marvels of archæological learning or, when this fails, of invention and patiently, painfully achieved execution. His conscientiousness went so far that he painted perhaps twenty or more far advanced sketches of each detail of his large compositions ere he proceeded to the main work, and this, nevertheless, he often left unfinished, because he felt he had not done enough to satisfy his conscience.

Those empty, or merely vaguely filled-in spots instead of faces in big pictures, in which all besides—the patterns of the garment stuffs and carpets, the decorations on the splendid vases, the finery, weapons, capitals of the pillars—are precisely rendered as complete productions, give suddenly to the sympathetic an idea of the pains of this struggling spirit. Moreau shunned life, which was too stormy, noisy, and bustling for his morbid need of repose and quiet, but it did not cease to attract him as a mysterious riddle. He would gladly have understood it, comprehended it, and held it fast, but he had to admit to himself that he was powerless to reach it. A homunculus artificially generated in the retort, he can live only in his glass vessel, and must die if he ventures out of it; but through his prison walls he gazes at the great, broad, free nature, replete with tempestuous life, and in the cold of his glassy den he shudders with longing for this world, so near and yet beyond his reach. His longing is, however, never to be appeased; he will never feel the joys of the warm breath of life.

IX

EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE

How much better off are painters and art-lovers nowadays than in earlier times! Formerly, if you wanted to enjoy a picture you had to own it; if you wished to know a picture you were obliged to make a journey to it. If you liked an artist sufficiently to wish to surround yourself with his chief creations, or the whole of them, you had to have unlimited wealth and set up a gallery of your own. Copies are a mere aid to remembrance, and not a good one either. Executed by a dauber, they are worse than nothing; by a gifted artist, they give the copyist’s, not the original creator’s, personality. The older methods of multiplication also either furnish clumsy attempts at transmitting them, or they are peculiar, independent, artistic creations of another order than painting, which have their special beauty, but are unable to seize the most inward and subtle of the charms the painting possessed.

Since the latest developments of photography and the copying processes dependent on it, the case has been altered. If you would convince yourself of the almost marvellous perfection with which oil-paintings are transferred to paper nowadays, so that every stroke of the brush, however fine, every movement of the painter’s hand, every paste, every unevenness in the colour plane, every effect of the canvas, ground-coating, and varnish, is reproduced in a life-like way, and you have actually before your eyes the whole personal work of the artist, then look at the handsome folio entitled: _L’œuvre de E. Carrière, Texte de Gustave Geffroy_, that has been published in Paris by H. Piazza et Cie., and contains the copy of 150 paintings and sketches by Carrière, 75 of which have been printed on Bristol paper, and 75 incorporated in the text. They lack colour, I admit. Only when photography renders this too, will the last word of genuineness in copying be pronounced. Meanwhile, we must be contented that we find again in the photograph the tonality of the colours and the effects of light and shade in the original relatively graded in respect of each other. With Carrière, however, the absence of colour is really of little importance, for he painted chiefly from a grey and brown palette, which can be very accurately reproduced by means of photography.

A hundred and fifty Carrières! Who could pride himself on possessing such a treasure? One would have to be an American multi-millionaire to enjoy such an æsthetic satisfaction as that. Now it is within the reach of every well-to-do individual. The 150 reproductions comprise about the whole of the great artist’s life-work up to now. They disclose to every beholder, who is of good faith and possesses a sensibility for the beauties of painting, the key to the law of art which Carrière laid down for himself. They render it possible to follow the course of his development, which, at the beginning, is hesitating, then becomes decided and weighty, and carries the artist from the school to mastership, from tradition to uncompromising individuality.