Part 13

Beside this allegory, Puvis opens five windows on his world of dreams. Naked shepherds observe, in a southern night, the course of the stars, and are themselves observed by a young woman who is creeping out of a lowly leafy hut. A man in a sort of Roman dress looks thoughtfully at some bee-hives, whilst peasants in the distance are busy working in the fields. A greybeard is sitting by the sea, from which a steep cliff emerges. On its summit a man is chained almost in the attitude of the Crucified. The shadow of an approaching vulture falls on him. Maidens emerging from the sea hover round him with disconsolate gestures. We must necessarily recognise Prometheus and the Oceanides in the scene. Another old man, who is blind, receives laurel branches from two young beauties. A haughty dame stretches her arm with magic gestures over a mysterious abyss that has engulfed mighty marble buildings, pillars, and woodwork. Behind the woman stands a youth with a torch and book in his hand. I have described in brief what one actually sees. Puvis means the star-gazers for Chaldæan shepherds; the Roman for Vergil; the greybeard in front of the Prometheus-rocks for Æschylus; the blind man for Homer receiving the laurels from the hands of the Iliad and Odyssey personified; the enchantress for history conjuring up the past. We are to read still more into it. The Chaldæans signify astronomy; Vergil bucolic poetry, Æschylus dramatic, Homer epic; the conjurer up of the dead and ruined, Clio. Thus we have before us five polished planes of the prism of man’s spiritual activity, five domains of the Muses—a fitting decoration for a library. These abstractions are painted in an abstract style. The human beings are schematic drawings as if taken from statues for illustrating an academic canon. They live psychically only through their artificial gestures—not through their mask—visages without mien of glance. The landscapes are geometrical combinations of rocks which a Cyclopean stone-mason has hewn in ancient style; of mountains whose ridge stretches in architectural lines; of evenly-coloured masses of deep-blue sea, pale-green sky, and sap-green grass country. The land is called Utopia, and is inhabited by Outis: in English, Nowhere and Nobody. The indigo, emerald, and turquoise tone is pleasant to the eye, especially as Puvis has here, contrary to his murderous habit, not massacred the living colours. But nothing except the harmony of colours appeals to me in these pictures. It is not painting: it is writing. It does not presuppose in me any feeling for art, but only a decent, classical education. It taps on my school satchel. Before these five Puvis de Chavannes pictures, I think of a highly-educated Japanese, learned in all the wisdom of his country, with the most delicate feelings for line and harmony of colours; an appreciator of Hokusai and the other great masters of Japan: he will receive no impression at all from Puvis’s works; he will look upon the figures as phantoms, the scenes as so much childishness; he will not have an inkling what these forms, remotely resembling human beings, are doing, or what they mean. For he is not acquainted with the Greek and Latin classics, and without this hypothesis the works of Puvis are dead symbols, incomprehensible to any one unprovided with the special key, and without the natural constraining power of plain human truth and beauty. The provoking over-estimation of his work by corybantic critics justified every severity against Puvis de Chavannes in his lifetime. Now his appreciation no longer requires polemical pricks, and we can say that his Géneviève cycle secures him a permanent place in the history of art; that his great allegorical frescoes are cold, dead, sprawling, pretentious subtleties; and that neither his drawing nor his colour sanctify him as a master and model. His importance consists in this, _i.e._, that in his time the longing for beauty took him as a cloak for a passionate confession. The Puvis cult was, in the main, a reaction against Realism. By the exaggeration with which he was honoured may be measured the greatness of the disgust which his contemporaries felt for naturalistic art.

XI

BRIGHT AND DARK PAINTING

CHARLES COTTET

A generation ago opposition arose against gloomy painting. Down with the twilight cellar painting! Down with the studio sauce! Hurrah for the open air! Long live free light! With this war-song a brave, hot-blooded band stormed art academies and studios of masters, and, shouting for joy, planted their silver and violet banner on the posts they had taken. For two whole decades the art exhibitions presented a cheerful, festive aspect. It was always Sunday. The glow of a southern noon rested over whole walls. From the hundreds and thousands of canvases, big and little, streamed the gleaming sunlight in its full glory. Men, beasts, things, landscapes—all swam in luminous splendour which, at most, patches of violet shadow subdued timidly. Nature seemed to know no other conditions of light than those of Capri in July. About the turn of the century this suddenly began to change. In some pictures the light went out. Certain painters again discovered the darkness of evening, of leaden-clouded winter’s day, of thickets, of rooms. On some palettes the eternal white and violet was replaced by the old brown, black, and olive-green of our fathers. The phenomenon became, year by year, more marked. To-day the change is accomplished. Free light is thrown away after the old moons. Painting has grown sick of noonday. There is an atmosphere of twilight in all the pictures. The young painters—the victors of the day—use as much asphalt, mummy, and umber, as did the old ones thirty years ago. Whole ranges of walls in the Paris _salons_ lie as in deep shadow, and we may go through several rooms before finding a creature represented as “breathing in rosy light.”

What satires these _salons_ are on the consequential, high-stepping, deep-thinking drivel of professorial and other chatterers, who, to hide their dearth of thoughts, turn out new words, discover in our days a

## particular “charm” in painting as in other arts, and prove by _a_ + _b_

the necessary, logically offered expression of new spiritual needs of the present generation.

Now what has become of the “charm” that calculatingly demanded “free light” and nothing else? And how is it, then, with the spiritual needs of the present generation, to which free light and nothing else corresponded? And how does it stand with the new way, in which favoured artists have taught us to contemplate and to feel nature? Was the “charm” four or five years ago inclined to brilliancy, and is it changed during the night to an insatiable longing for gloom? Did white and violet correspond five years ago to the spiritual needs of the present generation, and does this generation now need black, brown, or olive-green tones? Have we just as quickly again unlearnt to contemplate and feel nature in sun-gold and violet, as favoured artists have taught us to do?

Living art goes her way according to her own laws and impulses, and leaves in the lurch the babbling empty heads, with their pretentious threshing of phrases, who tramp after her, expounding and talking wisely interpretations and clever chatter. Not by a particular “incentive” of the period, not from its alleged spiritual needs and currents of thought, are the changes of art creation to be explained, but solely by the psychology of the artists, by their very human, very weakly prosaic needs, by the material and moral conditions under which they are nowadays condemned to work.

The _salons_, the art exhibitions, are in our time the annual marts of success for painters. In these they have to seek fame and its train-bearer—payment in cash. In these they must strive amongst a thousand or two thousand competitors to astonish at any price. By special beauty or special nobility? This means will be chosen by the very fewest. Firstly, not one in a thousand has it in his power. In the second place, even an artist not in the front rank has enough Philistine contempt to be convinced that nobility and beauty are the last things for which the crowd has a taste. His hunger for success—a fitting form of his instinct for self-preservation—gives the artist sense and understanding of the psychology of the multitude, whose elementary law is that it is obtuse to that which is common and reacts on what is uncommon. The artist who works with an eye to exhibiting where his work will be one of two thousand, has only one endeavour, viz., to be as different as possible from these, and by this means possibly to make a striking impression amongst them. The contrary is the greatest difference possible. That is the polar line, the angle of 180 degrees. Logic, which unconsciously proceeds geometrically, brings the artist to this. He also looks sharply at what the others are doing; puts himself to trouble to find out what they have in common, and in what respect they resemble each other; and when he has discovered this, or thinks he has done so, he proceeds to do the exact reverse.

If he has properly recognised the predominating element and has hit the exact opposite, the victory is gained with a weight that overthrows all before it. Professional associates, critics, and public stand in front of something new. The novelty-hating majority feels the disturbance in their lazy mental habits as an insult and discomfort, and sets up a yell. The minority of unsatisfied gainsayers, morbid bread-hunters, vain coxcombs, and enthusiasts longing for the glorious Unknown and Unprecedented, passionately take side for the novelty. This serves as an excuse for a conflict of those eternal conservative and radical tendencies, whose battle may be seen throughout the whole history of human development; and the artist who unchains these tempests sees himself honoured as one of the embodiments of contemporary thought, as a power in civilisation. Only quite exceptionally is a cool analyst found to say with smiling tranquillity amidst the bluster of the war of minds: “Dear children, don’t excite yourselves like that; the word ‘new’ is no verdict. To be different does not necessarily mean to be better. An old tendency may contain beauty in itself; a new one may, of course, do so too, but not necessarily. He who grows excited on behalf of the old, simply because it is old, is commonplace. He who grows excited for the sake of something new, merely because it is new, is commonplace with a negative prefix. Only wait a little while. In a short space of time the new will have become old, and you will recognise that there was no grounds for raising a noise about it. The man of the new thing, whom you hail as the bringer of a new salvation, is no better than the ancients; but he is right, for he wishes to be noticed, to inherit from the ancients, and that is wholly justified from his selfish standpoint.”

The would-be aristocrats of intelligence—the “intellectuals”—would find a speech like this intolerably homely. It is not in the least “deep.” It is not at all applicable to the mystic inclinations of vaporous brains. It discovers no single unsurmised and astounding relation between phenomena that have nothing in common with each other; but I believe it is literally true.

The “Impressionists” of the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg painted brightly when the _salon_ was correspondingly dark. The one light picture among the dark paintings acted like a window that opens in the gloomy wall to the sunny air. When the other painters saw that the multitude flew towards this bright point, like moths after the flame of a taper, they hastened to paint also in bright colours. “Free light” was discovered. It corresponded to no mood of the period. Free light is joyous and satisfied. The spirit of the age was, during its predominance in painting, pessimistic and sick with longing as it had hardly ever been in the past. Nor was it a new way of seeing and feeling nature. Turner, Corot, Claude Lorrain, Ostade, Salvator Rosa himself had seen and felt nature quite as brightly as Manet and Monet had done. The truth is that the “Impressionists” were turbulent young people who got angry at vegetating in obscurity whilst Gudin and Schnetz, Signol and Müller, Pils, Cabanel, Dubufe, and Robert Fleury had all the honours and successes; and that impelled by envious loathing of these celebrities of that day, they found, as it were, in a negative chemo-tropical way, the exact reverse of their dark style.

Five years ago the same incident was played off exactly in the opposite direction. Everybody was painting in a bright style. The Schnetz and Cabanel, Delaunay and Cogniet of the day were called Puvis de Chavannes and Roll, Besnard and Cazin. Then, again, some young people got angry about their being unknown and unheeded, and they entered, consciously and of set purpose, into opposition against the celebrities of the day. Charles Cottet exhibited a black picture which, in the middle of a blinding white exhibition wall, struck just as glaringly as did, thirty years ago, the bright picture in the middle of the black wall. Cottet had hit the bull’s eye. He instantly created a school, and to-day the _salons_ look once more as they did thirty years ago, to be once more flooded with free light, probably, some twenty or thirty years hence. It is an orbit without beginning or end, an eternal beginning over again, and only posing fools seek, in this monotonous, periodical return of the same effects under the influence of the same causes, to ferret out connections with definite phenomena of the times.

Charles Cottet is developing into the undisputed leader of the young race of painters. He deserves the recognition accorded to him, yet it is a serious matter that he provokes to imitation; for what in him is uncouth, though justifiable, independence, will become with the imitators a manner that may rapidly pass into intolerable aberration. Cottet loves dark harmonies of colour. He paints night, closed rooms illumined by artificial light, candle and fire effects; unlike Rembrandt, whose glooms are delicate and transparent, whose men and things are particularly self-luminous in sunless space; and unlike his pupil, Schalcken, who treats flames and their reflections roughly after the manner of a blacksmith, without mystery or harmony. Cottet paints it apparently more from joy in darkness than joy in light, for with him darkness is generally the principal thing, and the sources of light are there chiefly to call attention to the sinister stir and movement in the unillumined dusk. His imitators do not see the intense life of his shadows. They only see his black, brown, and dark-green palette, and dimly brush away at it again as in the worst days before the dawn of “free light.”

Painting goes out into the night, and will remain there a while. Then once more a cheerful and free artist will come, and discover light for an astonished and enraptured world, and he will be deified or damned as a revolutionist just as Monet was thirty-five years ago when he did the same, and as Cottet was five years ago when he did the reverse. And thus it will ever be so long as in the human apparatus of thought a change of impression will relax conscious feeling, and art creation will have to serve, not only the utterance of strong impulses of emotion and the relaxation of the nervous system, but also the ambition or vanity of the artist, which means, I suppose, to the end of time.

Cottet’s execution is somewhat brutal. He works in the style of Ribot, who was himself a curious mixture of reminiscences of Franz Hals, Ribera, and Velasquez, with an admixture of personal self-will. He lays great, dark, almost dirty spots on the canvas, and treats human skin with boorish coarseness—I might almost say, with the curry-comb. But what truth and energy in all the movements! How economically and yet how exhaustively he can reveal the thoughts and feelings of his subject. There is little in the whole of modern painting so pathetic as his three-panelled picture, “Sea Folk,” that now adorns the Luxembourg Museum. In the middle, the parting meal of the Jack Tars before starting, round the village table fifteen people, strapping young men with their womenfolk—mothers, wives, and sweethearts. Through the open window dark-green night looks in; from the petroleum lamp there gleams a sharp streak of yellow light; the men sit close to each other in silence; forebodings and the sadness of leave-taking exalt them and raise the souls of these horny-handed toilers to the regions of poetic thought and dreams. On the right, the boat that is conveying the sailors to their ship; some are rowing or steering, the rest are in a reverie. All go carelessly to meet their fate, which perhaps will mean merely prosaic seaman’s work on a voyage without any adventures, but perhaps even heroic tragedies of struggle and destruction. On the left, the women remaining behind, who watch from the shore the departing men, their lovers, their bread-winners, with sorrowful love and prayer in their looks, their mien, their hands, and their attitudes.

Possibly this profound picture moves me so much only because it illustrates completely what I meant when I described the social mission of art in the future in these words: “In a work of art which is to attract the people, the people must find themselves again, but just as formerly the priest and king did: magnified and ennobled. The work of art must show them their own likeness, though a beautified one. It must raise the people in their own eyes, teach them to respect themselves.... Works which can show the dignity and beauty of the occupations of the multitude, which are a sanctification of labour, an apotheosis of the tragedies and idyls, of all the sweet and bitter stirrings of emotion in the common life—these works, I believe, constitute the type of the art work of the future.”

Cottet’s triptych is one of these works. It renders my abstract deductions concrete. He is a great painter who can extract with so sure a hand from the stone of everyday life all the gold of beauty it contains.

Cottet gets his suggestions for the most part from Brittany. Almost all his works, in any case his most famous ones, tell of Breton nature and the life of the Breton people. His “Midsummer Fire” is very affecting. The holiday fire is kindled beneath the clear sky of a midsummer night; around it assemble the Bretons, ever faithful to their traditions. The smoke ascends vertically; the flames glow on the countenances gazing on them. Old women and children they are, for the most part, who celebrate the solstice according to ancient custom; there are hardly one or two men among the devout multitude. The sterner sex, the middle-aged, laugh at the superstition; but the grandmothers foster the custom of their ancestors, and entwine it into the earliest childhood of their grandchildren as a dear remembrance that grows up with all the joys and sorrows of their infant years. Thus what is old is retained and is handed down from generation to generation. Cottet has expressively illustrated this rule of folk-lore, not because he intended it, but because he was true. Far and wide, as far as the eye can reach, other fires are burning, and mirroring themselves in the sea, and you can guess that, even around the furthest, which are hardly visible in the night, the villagers are making a circle, just as round the flame in the foreground. One single note hovers over the whole of this landscape; one single feeling dominates the soul of all this population. Each one of these old women whose glances are submerged in the holy flame feels herself at this instant a unit of the whole race inhabiting the hereditary granite soil, and part and parcel of her forefathers who have long rested beneath the sod. Thus a real work of art, without straying into literature, points far beyond its own boundaries.

The “National Fête at Camaret” is celebrated so earnestly by the Breton peasants that, in spite of the bright paper lamps on the tree, it has the effect of a church solemnity. In “The Old Breton Nag,” Cottet has translated from bronze into less severe painting one of the never-to-be-forgotten coal-mine horses of Constantin Meunier. “Mourning by the Sea” is one of his masterpieces. Grandmother, mother, and daughter are sitting together on a stone bench on the shore. They are all three wearing widow’s weeds. They are speechless and motionless, abandoned to their thoughts, which abide with their dead. The sea, which has swallowed their husbands, and to which they turn their backs, lurks behind them in insidious calm behind two storms that depopulate the coast, and leave behind the granite cliffs only old and young widows and children, who, in turn, also will be trained for the sea—the merciless sea, on which the poor devoted fishermen and sailors seek their living and find their death. The existence of a population, its truceless fight with hostile nature, is comprised in the black figures of these three modern Niobes. To-day, too, as in its beginnings, true art is myth-making.

To this series of pictures from Breton peasant life belongs also an “Early Mass in Winter,” which at present hangs in the “Little Palace,” at Paris. In the early dawn, beneath heavy clouds, a few Breton peasant women, of whom we get a back view, are proceeding across the flat, damp heath to an insignificant village church. They wear the round mantle with a hood, which is usual in that country. On first glancing at these short, broad, black figures without human form, which look like wobbling, tightly-filled coal-sacks, I could not help laughing aloud. But I observed in the mien of other observers composedness, piety, and admiration. These evidently saw in the picture only the walk to church, not the clumsy sacks, always a proof how powerfully Cottet can conjure up a mood.

Once or twice Cottet has in some measure proved faithless to his usual dark style of painting, and allowed himself to revel in colour. Thus in his portrayal of a family of Breton fisherfolk, when the corpse of a baby is laid on its bier. The dead child lies in its little open coffin, around which four tapers are burning. On both sides of the bier the seven or eight relatives stand grouped: the parents, aunts, little brothers and sisters express, each in his or her way, their grief, which, in the case of the still unconscious children only, sinks to the level of mere curiosity. From the coffin proceed two vividly red ribbons which stream across the bier down to the ground. Flowers of a similar furious red are strewn over the bier. These shrill values do not produce exactly a fine and harmonious effect in the dark-toned general atmosphere with the opposite warm yellow spots of the taper-flames. Moreover, the composition here is also not a happy one. It is an error to make the pale little corpse of the child the centre of a large picture. Death does not attract the eyes, but repels them. It does not endure the rivalry of life unless it can compel attention perhaps by means of special melodramatic circumstances or symbolical value. The glance turns naturally to the living, feeling,

## acting human beings, and thus the centre of the picture, which should