Part 17

He has insisted on trying his hand at monumental decoration also. The fruit of his effort is a gigantic picture which he entitles “Life’s Joys.” He has evidently thought of Watteau, probably of the latter’s “Embarcation to Cythera.” It is the same blissful landscape with roses, trees, and water that seems, in the haze of the distance, to continue interminably until it reaches Paradise. It is the same air which the rain of blossom renders coloured and almost opaque. It is the same spring sky which we might hail with shouts of joy. The men and women, however, who give life to this Eden, are different to Watteau’s. In Roll, everything is marvellously austere and hard. His women in the foreground are naked, and partly lie in Michael Angelesque attitudes on the grass, partly sit there overpoweringly monumental. Loving couples, walking and dancing, behave as if they were possessed by wild, brutal lust. Something like a tragic current is traceable amidst this idyll. We exclaim in alarm: “Here, this very day, there will yet be murder or manslaughter?” And with the object of destroying still more the ideal note of May, Roll puts, in the midst of this fairy-tale splendour, three realistic musicians, whose clothes were bought at _la Belle Jardinière_, who will certainly, after every dance, go round with a plate and collect from their audience. Where will the nude ladies take money from to throw to them? How much more charmingly and wittily does Watteau begin his theme! Only a marble statue of a woman renounces the advantages of elegant toilettes. Winged Cupids flit about the young couples, and translate, as it were, into lyrical, rhymed verses the naturalistic prose of the gallantry exhibited. The men do not rage in brutal eagerness, but pay delicate and discreet court to their ladies. And above all things, Watteau’s infallible taste warns him against telling his stories at excessive length. As brevity is the soul of wit, so moderate compass is a great advantage in an Anacreontic scene. This should be elegant and pleasant; but the monstrous excludes elegance and pleasantness. Roll’s Titans and Cyclopses are not suitable for masquerading as Arcadian shepherds.

Lucien Simon, a painter who has been an imitator of Cottet, puts himself forward now, by an impetuous movement, into rank with him. “The Evening Gossip” unites the family round the table lamp, which lights up a number of richly animated faces with curious lights that play and flicker. “Nuns Collecting”—one old and one young nun try by gentle yet tenacious and irrefusable pressure to overcome the resistance of a well-to-do and apparently somewhat niggardly country lady, and to determine her to open her well-guarded purse. In a “Ball-room in Brittany” peasant couples, in the dress of the Celtic province, under smoking lamps emitting a yellow light, spin round, with heavy stampings, to a bagpipe tune which drives the blood into the simple dancers’ browned cheeks, and kindles sparks in their eyes. All this is stumped in broadly and luxuriously without petty dwelling on the less essential, yet with a sure feeling for what is characteristic in appearance and movement, and in a harmony of dark colours, which is as far remote from the bright tone of the style of painting in vogue the day before yesterday as a Guido Reni is from a Franz Hals, but affirms its own justification as self-consciously as the particular note struck by a Hennar and Gustave Moreau among the moderns, of a Velasquez and Rembrandt among the greatest ancients.

Up to now, his most important creation is his “Mass in Brittany,” a work of an exquisite nature. The young and old peasants and seamen who hear High Mass standing in the bare village church, are truly and lovingly individualised head by head. Proudly renouncing pleasing externals, L. Simon has made up his mind to produce his effects only by the noblest means, viz., by characterising with accuracy these manifold types, and by the depth and fulness of the spiritual life of these pious folk here gathered together. Offence has been taken at the broadness of his execution, which already bordered on superficiality, and on the coarseness of his colour, which put one now and then in mind of the bill-poster’s newer art. He has laboured conscientiously on himself, and diminished the defects of his qualities without weakening the latter. He still continues to paint with large strokes in fresco style, but he pays attention to the solid building of his figures. He is still pronounced and unaffected in his colouring, but he avoids letting power degenerate into coarseness, and expressiveness into shrillness. Thus Lucien Simon rises slowly and steadily, though unerringly, to the lofty peaks of pre-eminence.

Jean Veber is quite a peculiar phenomenon which has not yet been deservedly appreciated. On one characteristic ground: because he never understood how to be solemn; because he seems not to take himself or his art seriously. He began as a caricature draughtsman for Boulevard papers, and only when his vocation for this peculiar province was well established, did he exhibit oil-paintings. But he was already labelled, and people continue to regard him merely as a comic draughtsman. The public refuses to allow a double renown to a single talent. Its admiration, you know, costs nothing, but it is, nevertheless, scanty with it, as if it were bringing a sacrifice obtainable only with difficulty. That is a royal trait in the sovereign mob. It is niggardly with its distinctions in order to enhance their value. The splendid Daumier also had to suffer from this coyness on the part of the public. For a long time nothing was thought of his easel pictures, and it was really the Universal Exhibition of 1900 that first revealed to posterity the fact that Daumier of the “Charivari” was one of the most important French painters of the nineteenth century. The caricaturist of our days is, as it were, the journalist among plastic artists, and we know that it is very hard for journalists to succeed with poetical creations, however brilliant. The older humorists among the painters fared better. The Dutch painters could make rough fun of the life of the populace without injuring their reputation as artists by so doing. Hogarth attained high recognition, although his clumsy, Philistine, moralising painting ranks below the works of many caricaturists of to-day. Cruikshank, however, whom I rank, without hesitation, above Hogarth, occupies, in popular estimation, a lower rank, because he put his pencil at the service of the Press.

Jean Veber is the descendant in the direct line of the younger David Teniers, the Adriaen Brouwers, and the Höllen-Breughels. From them he derives his full style of painting, his deep, rich colours, his great sureness and luxuriance of execution, his clear composition and florid imagination. He differs, however, from them in the quality of his fancy which delights in symbols replete with philosophical references; frequently in Saadic spectacles of cruelty and lust, and very often in lubricities of the Félicien Rops kind. This is the effect of the hundred and fifty to three hundred years which separate him from his more innocent spiritual ancestors.

Of the pictures he has exhibited, some are unforgettable, when one has seen them. The “Triumphal Procession” of a gigantic crowned goose through the streets of a mighty city, amid the loud applause of a populace raving mad with loyalty. The “Struggle for Gold” of a number of awful cripples tearing each other to pieces in their mad struggles for a few gold pieces that have fallen in the street; the “Sight of Terror” of a man reeling home at night, apparently after a long drinking-bout, in whose eyes the houses and monuments take weird, living physiognomies, are most impressive utterances of the misanthropic pessimism, the satiric bitterness, and the humour of Veber, also, to be sure, of his predilection for the weird, the ghostly, and the horrible.

These qualities are repeated in almost all his works up to now. The greatest and most pretentious, “The Machine,” offends through the daring symbolism by which he illustrates the murderous power of woman over the sensual man. On the other hand, “Sunday Morning” is a bit of life observed with exquisite humour: a barber’s shop in the village, with a soaped victim under the nimble but not too considerate hands of the beard-shaver’s wife, whilst some other customers, of unspeakable comicality in looks, bearing, and dress, smoking, dreaming, staring, or chattering, wait their turn on the bench by the wall. “The Hermit and the Female Faun” is a scarcely orthodox, but keenly witty modernisation of the old theme, the temptation of a saint, which these square-toes of painters for the past five hundred years have cherished with predilection, since it permits them to present quite heathen sights with a hypocritically contrite air. “The Three Good Friends” are of refreshing cheeriness. The ugliness of these contented louts is touching. The painter, by way of exception, exhibits them without malice, rather sympathetically, with a plea for extenuating circumstances. But generally, his wit belongs, in the main, to the species of evil-speaking. We laugh over the malice with which a sharp-tongued observer characterises our fellow-creatures, but we feel quite well that it is not the better man in us that laughs. Jean Veber loves to mock at mankind in goblin fashion. He sees men perpendicularly pushed together like a telescope, horizontally drawn out as short, square gnomes with pumpkin faces, who, pleased with themselves and unconscious of their grotesque ugliness, strut about as if they were so many Apollos and Dianas. Thus Jaurès appears with mouth agape and flourishing gestures on the rostrum of the Chamber, at the foot of which breaks a flood of blustering deputies in stormy session. So in a parody of Rubens’ “Kermes”—itself of the nature of a parody—villagers resembling sacks amuse themselves with feasting and drinking and amorous tendernesses which are calculated to disgust us with love itself. A grandly rigged-out, inexpressibly laughing lady in a low-cut dress between two greybeards paying their dreadful court at an exquisitely appointed supper-table; a physician at the foot of the bed gazing with devotion at the tongue, put out quite a yard, of a rich, fat lady-patient; a short, stout woman in a fashionable tailor’s _salon_, whom the slenderest of the show-room girls is trying, with “cake-walk” movements, to fit with a dress like an umbrella-cover, are amusing in their stupidity and ugliness. On the other hand, I cannot follow Jean Veber further when, in “Family Joys,” he tries to make the newborn child ridiculous—a shapeless bit of sprawling flesh, red as a crab, which the midwife has brought from the bed of the exhausted mother at the back of the room, and is exhibiting in triumph to the gaping family. He should keep his sacrilegious hand off the sanctity of this event.

The happy combination of a faultless dexterity with an arrogant, creative humour, in which I would only like to see a trifle less admixture of gall, renders Jean Veber’s an artistic physiognomy that is far more interesting than many an idol to whom altars are raised.

Emile Wéry, a young and fortunate man of talent, began his career with a great success. His view of an Amsterdam canal made a sensation, and gained the great prize at the “Salon.” Perhaps a little stupefied by this triumph, he kept for a while to the style of his prize picture, so that there was reason to fear he would early stiffen into a manner. He painted, for instance, an attractive triptych, which presents Venice to us in her three characteristic decorations: the narrow _Calle_, the slender _Rio_, and the splendid _Canal_. But what we cannot anyhow fancy absent from a view of Venice—the southern sky, the gleaming sun, and the warm tints of her old stones and tiles: these are here altogether lacking. It is all grey, northern grey. It is the same tone as in the prize picture of Amsterdam. As Faust found Helen in every woman, so Wéry then found apparently Dutch water-towns in every town, and Amsterdam herself in Venice. People think they are flattering the city on the Amstel, when they call it the Venice of the North. Wéry reversed the compliment: to him Venice was the Amsterdam of the South. How true it is that we see not with the eyes but with the soul!

The South, combined with his youthful impulses to development, was to save him from the danger of mannerism. Though he had seen Venice with his Amsterdam eyes, and found in the azure and gold of the city of lagunes the leaden waters and mist of the north, further south, in the light, he bathed his eyes clean from the muddiness of higher latitudes. In “Sicily” a girl’s brown head, with red cloth in the midst of a cluster of dark green-leaved branches with ripe oranges, flashes and glows the whole noon of the magic island, which this vigorous woman—a golden fruit among golden fruits—is to personify. But even after his return home he still remained drunk with the light of Italy. In a new picture, “The Little Ones,” we are once more in a harbour on the North Sea, at a place where Wéry’s talent takes its root. Flaxen-haired youngsters are playing round a boat; one of these, a little chap in wide, flapping trousers, is droll enough to eat. Water, sky, and river-bank are wedded in silver sheen, and over the whole reposes a happy sense of comfort, in which the artist’s cheerful heart is disclosed. He has happily got over his first crisis. Now his artistic career lies smooth and sunny before him.

Anders Zorn.—This Swede is a virtuoso of amazing skill. He delights in marvellous effects of light, in surprises, in fixing fugitive views. His pictures are snap-shots pitched on the canvas with an almost mechanically smart brush. He is a concert painter possessing talent. He is one of the great corruptors of young artists nowadays. It is so fascinating, by a few wild, staggering, nimble strokes of the brush, to conjure up a human figure or a scene. But this method leads to the worst superficiality, and attracts most the lazy fellows who wish to save themselves the trouble of learning properly the principles of drawing and painting. Zorn did not make the thing easy for himself. He honestly and industriously acquired a thorough mastery of technique before turning to execute his dazzling little pieces. He may allow himself to storm and rage over the canvas, for accuracy has become automatic in him. In spite of this haste, every line is on the right spot, and though people often regret that he only hints instead of stopping and deepening, nevertheless it is continually said: “The man knows how to build up a figure or a group.” His imitators, however, have caught only his daubing, and with them superficiality is but a bold excuse for ignorance of drawing.

Ignacio Zuloaga.—Spain can at the present time boast of a number of painters who might call out to their greatest predecessors among their countrymen the proud _anch’io_. What characterises them is a peculiar, almost mad energy in drawing, which appears in all details, in the living and the dead, not only in the mien and attitudes of men, but in the sharp profile of every leaf and blade of grass, in the bold relief of every stone, in the aggressive self-consciousness of every being as of every thing. This energy is not to be learnt. One has it or one has it not. There are foreign painters in plenty, whom Spain has bewitched, and who their whole life long recount nothing but bull-fights and processions, shepherds and gipsies, _cigarreras_ and _manolas_; but no one who knows the genuine Spaniards will confuse these with the foreign imitators. There is, for instance, the excellent Jules Worms. He has been exhibiting Spanish scenes uninterruptedly for forty years. They are always nicely painted, prettily conceived, and pleasantly executed. As contributions to knowledge of the nation they are not without value. They have gained him all official honours, and he passes for an undisputed master of his particular province. And yet how un-Spanish is this life-long Spanishness of Worms and all his rivals and imitators! It is as smooth, licked, tricked up, entertaining, and banal as the railway novel of an inquisitive but superficial globe-trotter. It is a conventional comic-opera Spanishness, a theatre decoration for scenery, with groups of costumes for living figures. It lacks the power, the stern virility which distinguishes the Spanish painters, even those of the second rank, and gives them a family likeness to their great ancestors, Valdes, Velasquez, and Ribera.

The most typical of these modern Spaniards is Ignacio Zuloaga, and the most typical, perhaps, of his pictures are the three sketches from Spanish folk-life, which were exhibited a few years ago in the “Salon.” An Andalusian, young, thin, and delicate, with a little crumpled face of apish ugliness, with a supple body that seems to whirl, stands in front of a poor mirror, and powders her face with coarse rice-powder, as though she were sticking on a comic Pierrot-mask, whilst her sparkling eyes testify that she wants to make herself thoroughly beautiful for the bull-fight. Then we see her in loud, bright ribbons, with the inimitably draped mantilla over her head and shoulders, passing quickly through the street, greeted by two old connoisseurs with highly-spiced endearment. On the third occasion she or her sister goes with a diabolically piquant young gipsy girl, whose insolent laugh discovers gleaming wolf’s teeth and turns up the sharply-curved nose, rapidly over the ground, probably to keep a Sabbath, from the expression of both grimaces. This is warm life such as not often glows on painted canvas. Zuloaga has felt his Andalusian wild creatures to his finger-tips, and renders them with all their _garbo_ and _salero_—the German _Schneid_ and _Mumm_, and the French _montant_ and _mousseux_ are weak translations of this expression. The pictures seem to be painted, not with mineral colours and oil, but with sulphuric acid and lunar-caustic. These ladies are young witches, of whom you would imagine that by touch they must give an electric shock like a torpedo-fish, that, if they open their mouths, red mice will jump out, and that it must be more natural for them to ride through the air on a broomstick than to make use of their legs in the usual way. In the piquant ugliness of their faces, made up with a thick layer of rice-powder, in the gorgeous Sunday array, in their attitudes and movements, in the gipsy-girl’s bestially insolent grinning and winking, in the lustful glances and laughter of the men, there is a fulness of hot life, an insolent sensuality such as is only met with in Brangwyn’s youthful works. One often heard the name of Goya pronounced before these pictures. It is indeed the same temperament, but another outlook on life, another art. Zuloaga has much of the cutting virtuosity of his great countryman; but he is no embittered critic of the world, rather a laughing Sunday’s child who enjoys life with all his senses.

And, above all, his pictures are patterns of a domestic art which, through its unreserved sincerity, is at the same time an universal art. For it reaches so deeply that it penetrates beyond the special type to humanity in general.

XIII

AUGUSTE RODIN

Rodin’s place in present-day art is a peculiar one. Auguste Rodin has been raised to the dignity of a test for decadent ways of feeling. We admittedly call “tests” or proof-objects the objects (for the most part, the shell-armour of diatoms or the scales of butterflies’ wings) on which the magnifying power and exactness of analysis of microscopes is tested. By Rodin the fanatics and snobs of insane tendencies test the genuineness and power of symbolico-mystic sentiment. What do you think of Rodin? Do you admire him? Good: then you need further only adore Besnard and rave about Félicien Rops, and you can claim to be numbered with the newest, without respect to the colour of your hair or opportunist baldness. You do not admire Rodin? Then sneak whimpering from our league. You are no decadent. No beauty with her hair combed in the Botticelli style will love you; Mallarmé will not write poems, nor will Nietzsche philosophise for you. Nobody will invite you even to a Black Mass. Go to the Philistines; you belong to the narrow-minded community, which is a herd of ruminants.

It would be intelligible if the provocations of the shriekers, who, after the manner of howling dervishes, dance and rave round Rodin, were to induce men to take a violent part against this very man. Justice, however, demands that people should suppress their natural tendency to make him responsible for the ear-piercing din of his drummers and trumpeters. After all, he cannot help a horde of swindlers and silly people making a vulgar disturbance about him and his works. If we are to judge him, we must try to forget that critical offenders, by invoking his name, continually outrage the sense of æsthetic decorum and artistic conscience. Rodin is, in fact, not the originator of this shameless proceeding, but the victim of the æsthetic Catiline conspirators who have got possession of him, and are pushing him on before them, so that it looks from a distance as if he was their leader. Rodin is not the least _cabotin_. He is of a modest, homely nature, but no strong character; and he has not been able to stand against the suggestions of those whose interest it is to eulogise him, who have for so long chattered his poor head full of their most brain-firing, æsthetic doctrines, and most profound interpretations of his alleged purposes, until he has lost his own personality, and makes the most desperate efforts to become like the picture which his critical Corybantes present of him to the open-mouthed gapers.

What has raised Rodin to an article of faith among the degenerates is three peculiarities. First, the choice of his materials, which appeal to the mysticism and sensual psychopathy of his body-guard of degenerates; secondly, his technique, which deviates from tradition in childish, would-be-original whims; and thirdly, his mistaking the natural limitations of his art, which he wants to make say things for which sculpture possesses no means of expression. These traits are proved by a short review of his principal works.