Part 20

For nearly two decades he sought, strove, and created in solemn loneliness. Only the patron whom he luckily found at the right time glanced over his shoulders when at work with bated breath. His reverential admiration expressed itself in a convincing manner by the helpful gesture of the open hand. Some intimate comrades were allowed to witness the lofty drama of an exquisite development. His studio, however, was far removed from the noise of the market. The heat of praise and the icy breath of blame brought no disturbance into the even climate in which his talent was powerfully developing. Quiet and collected, he worked on until he saw his inner vision realised before him. Then he said: “It is good”; and allowed a great Sabbath to follow the hard days of creation. Absolutely unknown to wider circles, in 1892 he stepped before the public for the first time in the Champs de Mars with a rich exhibition. An hour after the doors of the “Salon” were open, he was famous. In the history of modern art, never before had such an impressive revelation been observed. There was no hesitation, no vacillation. Artists, critics, connoisseurs made pilgrimage, as if guided by the shepherds’ star in the bodeful procession of the three kings of the East to Carriès’ glass cases and pedestals, bent their knees, and brought incense and myrrh. His countrymen shouted for joy: “France has one great painter more.” Thoughtful persons looked at one another and said softly: “The world is by one beauty richer.”

All asked: “Who is the man?” for they insisted, in their amazement, that nobody knew him. And then they found out that Jean Carriès was a finished artist, a man of thirty-seven, who lived in the provinces, and had, up to that time, sought nothing but the satisfaction of himself. He had not wasted the tiniest little spark of his Promethean strength in the vulgar melodrama of fighting for success. His tragedies were the great struggle with the resistance of material, and doubt of himself, and they had been played in secret in his soul. And now was pressed upon him that for which candidates strive convulsively, and how often fruitlessly! The Champs de Mars Society elected him with acclamation to full membership, and dispensed him from the probationary period is associate. The State asked for specimens to serve as models for its museums, and tied the red ribbon to the buttonhole of his blouse. What was purchasable was bought up by the ladies of Arc de Triomphe quarter during the first days of the “Salon.” A rich American lady, Mrs Winnareta Singer, commissioned him to carry out the model of his fantastic “door.” The artists fêted him by a banquet in his honour—a homage which at that time was not lavished as was the case afterwards. Mdlle. Luise Breslau painted his portrait, which is now exhibited in his room in the midst of his works, and showed his admirers a still youngish man of noble beauty, with a Lucius Verus head, the Cæsarean nobility of which was not in the least injured by a careless slouched hat. I do not know whether Mdlle. Breslau has flattered her model or has been honest, for I never saw Carriès himself; but in the picture he appears, as one would like to fancy him, every inch a gentleman, on whom his careless working-dress has the effect of a disguise which does not for a second deceive as to the rank of the wearer. A delicate, slender figure; wonderfully active, inspired hands; deep, searching eyes that seem to sight and fix a dream-picture hovering away; soft, narrow cheeks, on which uneasy shadows play, under the short beard; a thoughtful, white forehead over which an abundance of light brown curls falls. How many women may have indulged in dreams before this likeness, for it fascinates even men!

The homage received had no intoxicating effect on him; the activity of the Press concerning him did not infect him with the smallest beginnings of conceit. He withdrew from the curiosity of the world by quietly returning to his provincial nest, where, day and night, he stoked his flaming furnace, and mixed his acids and metallic salts; suffered under frequent disappointments, and enjoyed rare delights in the success of a firing or a coloured enamel. In the ensuing year one looked in vain for him in the “Salon,” and not quite two years after his unparalleled triumph that came like a bomb, men learnt that he had died.

His life had ended artistically. Carriès disappeared ere his locks grew scanty or grey. Beautifully and noiselessly, like another Euphorion, he soared away from the admiration of his contemporaries in the full lustre of his fame; and his works, through his early death, experienced the enhanced value of the Sibylline books. We may call him happy, for in this room we feel that he had given his best when he died. With a longer life he might have gone astray, for there is no lack of short openings to false paths. Very likely he would have repeated himself many times, and that would have detracted from the dainty charm of rarity which, besides their noble beauty, is peculiar to his works.

He unites in himself two different and equally perfect artists: the sculptor and the art-potter. Each tilled a tiny field; but with what intensity! And what harvests they conjured out of it! As sculptor, curiously enough, the whole human figure in its Olympian nudity failed to interest him. He has not on a single occasion sought to represent the body’s Paradisaic beauty. He confines himself, apparently on principle, to head and hands; but these are surpassed by nothing, and equalled only by little, that all the centuries since the Renaissance have produced. I pass respectfully, yet without deeper feeling, by his busts of Velasquez and Franz Hals. They are merely exercises of his hand, perhaps only pastimes. They seem theatrical by reason of the accentuation of the costume. In their countenances the absence of the model is too evident. But beside them the busts of Gustave Courbet, of Jules Breton, especially of Carriès himself, operate with unequalled authority. They live before us; they think, and they reveal themselves. In looking at them we involuntarily call to mind the old stories of the earthen statues which a magician filled with the breath of life in order that they might serve him.

The same impression, only intensified and deepened, is felt before the busts of the “Young Girl with the Drooping Head,” the “Dutch Wife,” and the “Dutch Maiden.” This young Dutch girl is particularly adorable. I do not consider I am exaggerating when I say she ranks as a sister, though in a different technique, with the “Mona Lisa.” The maiden’s innocent eyes, which have no presentiment of the passionate secrets of Gioconda; the graceful, reposeful countenance, that seems wondering blissfully over her own blooming youth and the loveliness of the world, charm us like the miracle of a spring day. Similar joy streams from his sleeping and waking little children. The softness of this baby flesh, the delicate texture of this plump, warm, satin skin, are unattainable. Carriès discovered a new technique for the life of the outer skin, the results of which, in his hands, are amazing. He gives a delicate, perpendicular creasing to the membrane of the lips, and marks it off from the skin of the face in a discreet but firm line, so that it imparts the illusion of seeing swelling lip-red framed in mother-of-pearl. The mouths of his women are weirdly seductive. It would really not surprise me if semi-fools and lunatics were to pounce upon these ravishing lips with eager kisses.

Even when Carriès is not idealising, but is reproducing portraits true to nature, he imparts to them an inwardness which seems unfathomable, like that of a deep soul. For this let any one only look at the “Bust of an Unknown Lady” and “Mother Callamand”—the former a cold, proud patrician, perhaps the Clara Vere de Vere, in whom Tennyson admires “that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere”; the latter a splendid old nun, probably an abbess, a sturdy, peasant woman who is conscious of her high rank in the convent, and in whose broad face goodness and severity, healthy power and enthusiastic spirituality, are mingled. This gift of filling the subject with inward life is the strongest element in Carriès’ genius. In a series of works which were exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon, and are, unfortunately, not to be found in the room of the Little Palace, this cropped up overpoweringly. There were fabulous animals, monsters, which a luxuriant imagination had invented—toads, frogs, lizards of gigantic size, in positions humanly conceived, the female reposing on the breast of the male, whose eyes are closing in rapture, and delicately embraced by his paws. One might think they would have a grotesque effect; by no means. Their anthropomorphism brought them in danger of derision; but the genius of Carriès was here directly revealed. The quasi-human, emotional life manifested in their attitudes made them pathetic. The toads’ legs were not seen; their mouths and goggle eyes were not seen. People saw only the unmistakable trait of love, and were moved by this exhibition of the primitive feeling—the same in man and beast—which holds the world together.

Perhaps it is in accordance with this gift of spiritualisation that Carriès never worked with marble, rarely with bronze, but, as a rule, and preferably, with potter’s clay. Stone and metal, however painfully correctly they render, with every stroke of the thumb and impression of the finger, the clay model, seem to him too hard for the inexpressible tenderness which he wants to express. Only one material satisfies him—the one which possesses the softness of flesh and of nerve-plasm. He can knead only clay so that it retains his lightest vibrations. There is something about his busts of burnt clay that reminds me of phonographic cylinders. There is soul-melody inscribed in them in invisible lines, and, set in our mood, they again begin to give forth sounds, and to repeat the mood of him who composed them.

The ability with trembling fingers to coax emotions into soft clay and to render them plastic seems to be something divine. It did not satisfy Carriès. Anybody else would have found the limits of his genius enviably wide; to him they appeared narrow, and he tried to pass beyond them. He wanted to create monumental pieces of sculpture, and he constructed his “Martyrdom of St Fidelis” and his astounding “Gate.” The “Martyrdom” is a group, composed of the kneeling martyr in monastic habit and the executioner behind him, raising his armed fist to deal the murderous blow. In the details the artist is here, too, distinctly Carriès, _i.e._, the executioner is of superb cruelty—a fine specimen of the family of brutalised legionaries or torturers who, in mediæval _relievi_ of the Way of the Cross, scourge Christ at the pillar and nail Him to the Cross. Taken as a whole, the master’s art is a failure; the group has no line. The drama cannot be seen from any side, that is, the gesture of the executioner, with its menace of death, and the countenance of the martyr who is awaiting his last trial, cannot be comprehended at once in a single glance.

If this group is weak, the “Gate” is a complete failure. He imagined a gateway with a depressed keel-arch top, divided by an intervening pillar into two gates. The pillars are covered with grotesque masks and mythical animals from top to bottom. The arch of the gate is formed by a dragon, in the gaping jaws of which stands a noble lady. The separate masks and monsters scintillate with spirit, fancy, and humour. In richness and variety of invention, and in depth of humour, I unhesitatingly place these heads far above Germain Pilon’s Pont Neuf masks. The contrast, too, between the fearless maiden standing in the animal’s jaws, full of quiet self-confidence, and the hideous beast, is of pregnant symbolism. The work is, nevertheless, an aberration, as a whole. The masks and monsters have no organic connection with the gate, either constructively, or in accordance with the meaning. They are simply stuck on. And the gateway itself is an insoluble riddle. Where should it lead to? To a lunatic asylum, a museum of caricatures, or a carnival ballroom? Or should it mean “the abstract door,” the door pure and simple, without the purpose of an entrance into a building? The poor, great artist consecrated years of his life to this prodigy, and never saw that he had wasted them.

The decorator amused himself in devising unheard-of enamels. He modelled vessels of smooth, supple plant-forms—calabashes, melons, cucumbers, mamillaria-cactuses, bulging or fallen in, smoothly swelling, or warty and shrivelled, whimsically dinted like a thin copper-plate, wantonly hammered, or lumpy and swollen. And over these whimsicalities, which show an incredible mastery of the material, he poured glazes which look so fat and moist that they seem to flow still, viscous and languid. Many are purple, like half-curdled blood; others white and rich, like fresh cream; and others like coloured fruit juices; but many a time we think we see thick matter and brains in frightful discharges; and on some vases the enamel imitates the lichens which overrun the bark of trees in spots, grooves, and bands. And when Carriès has done enough with these glazes, which remind us of opalescent life-saps, he tries diversity in glazes of gold, silver, coral, and precious stones, which change his stoneware phials into splendid vessels from a treasury of the Thousand and One Nights.

As a sculptor in clay Jean Carriès stands as high as Della Robbia; in details—in forming lips and cheeks—far higher than the latter; and, as a decorator, no one can be compared with him, not even Bernhard de Palissy—to mention a name by which his rank may be estimated. Carriès is not a man of to-day, and fashion lies far below the height on which he works. The wretched æsthetic-babbling coteries of the period cannot get hold of him, or make use of him for the senseless but furiously bellowed catchwords peculiar to the polemics of the day. He is not a modernist, not a classic, not an impressionist; he is not this, he is not that, but, he is, quite simply, himself. He works up what he has learnt in his own person; he invents his own, and always gives himself. He creates from his own soul, without looking to right or left. In him there is no school, no tendency, and no straining, but only feeling, personality, and the service of beauty. Yet it is through these great artistic natures, which belong to no time, that the line of development in art proceeds, and not through the pitiful _homunculi_, whom Faust caricatures artificially engender in advertisement-retorts.

XVI

WORKS OF ART AND ART CRITICISMS

During the last years the relation of public opinion to works of art has been repeatedly discussed, and on each occasion with great warmth.

The discussion, in the main, is concerned with two questions which are independent even if they are connected with each other, viz.: Has the public a right to judge a work of art, or must it renounce its own opinion and simply bow before the verdict of specialists? Have not all, or, at any rate, many, works of art that have subsequently gained undisputed recognition by the world, been strongly opposed and rashly rejected on their first appearance in public?

In 1899 intellectual Berlin was excited about a pertinent question. Professor Franz Stuck, the Munich painter, had obtained a commission for a wall-painting for the German House of Parliament. When the artist sent in his sketch, there came a shriek of most unpleasant astonishment from the judging committee of the Reichstag, and a member, Dr Lieber, expressed in public session, in very strong language, his absolutely unmixed feelings in respect of the work.

The Munich friends of the insulted artist, to their credit, made common cause for him. They published an armour-clad protest, in which they characterised the members as “laymen unable to judge,” and reproached them with impertinence because they “thought they understood everything better than learned specialists did.”

I expressed my views then in the _Deutsche Revue_ of this opposition between specialists and laymen in plastic art, and I ask permission to repeat here in brief the essential part of my arguments.

Who are the experts? From the general drift of the objection on the part of the Munich artists it was to be concluded that they must be the practising artists, the critics, perhaps also the professors of art-history. Let him who does not belong to these three sacrosanct categories steal weeping away from the confederation of experts. And even among the critics there is probably a selection to be made. The critic who praises the artist is to him undoubtedly an expert; the critic who blames him shows himself incontestably as a _bourgeois_, and in intelligence stands almost as low as a common University professor who does not teach art-history.

All this is foolish talk. In matters of art, if, indeed, any one can, only an individual—never a category—can lay claim to the rank of expert. Is, perhaps, the practising artist the expert? He is not so necessarily. There are people whose vocation in life, or, speaking more correctly, whose usual occupation, is painting, but whose painting is a continuous insult to art. One may be a professional painter, and yet a pitiful dauber, and commit such impudent sins against good taste that every non-expert must recognise this at the first glance, and be provoked at it. Or is the critic the expert? It would be a good joke to assert that.

Nearly every verdict on a work or an artist committed to paper by a professional critic is opposed by another verdict, also by a professional critic which says the exact contrary. Which of the two critics is an expert? Which of the two has a right to demand that people should bow before his verdict, because he habitually makes phrases about works of art in public? What proof of capacity do the papers as a rule demand of the _beaux esprits_ to whom they entrust art criticism? He who has observed dozens of times how ambitious young newspaper-writers, on their first report of an opening of an Exhibition, or after forming a coffee-house acquaintance with an artist thirsting for advertisement, suddenly discover in their minds a gift for art criticism, and have subsequently cultivated this with brazen self-consciousness; he will feel highly amused when people try to crack up art-critics as experts, simply because they exercise this function. Even professors of the history of art, even directors of museums, are not, by reason of their office, experts in the sense of possessing very profound understanding of art. The academic study of art-history lays the chief stress on the facts belonging to the history of life and morals, which need have nothing in common with the understanding of art. One may make in archives the most beautiful discoveries for the biography of Leonardo, and not feel a single one of his pictures. And as regards superintendents of museums, it is possible to relate the funniest anecdotes about their fallibility, and oppose to them simple connoisseurs, also “non-experts,” who have formed splendid private collections.

The truth is there are no experts in questions of art, as there are, perhaps, in questions of technique. Expert knowledge presupposes the existence of fixed rules, of a canon. There can be no talk of this in the fine arts. The only element of painting that, at least to a certain point—to the point where the individual conception and, with it, really artistic interest first begins—is under objective rules, is drawing, both from its figure as well as its perspective side. This element can be taught, learnt, and faithfully measured, for nature furnishes the scales. On the other hand, the colour element in painting is subject to absolutely no canon, but at best to subjective feeling, at worst to a fashion of the period. Every artificial colour is a convention; for, as I have argued more particularly in my studies of Sisley and Pissarro, none can truly reproduce the real colours of natural phenomena, and it is wholly a consequence of education and habit, when the polychrome of oil-painting or water-colour more easily excites in us the illusion of colouristic truth than the monochrome of the two-colour or of black and white art. One decade paints in dark, another in bright colours. One school likes powerful, another subdued harmonies of colour. Præ-Raphaelites imitate the tone of old frescoes and faded Gobelins. Puvis de Chavannes took the colour out of his pictures by a transparent white-wash, pale as the moon. Besnard, on the contrary, discharges fireworks, without caring in the least if the mad tumults of colour that he loved are possible or not in nature. Carrière envelops his figures in a dense mist. Cottet has, very recently, brought into fashion the black and dark shadings which go right back from Ribot and Prudhon to Velasquez and Ribera. Who is right? Who is wrong? Here everything is feeling, and consequently subjectivity. Of drawing, one can in all cases say (and by photography irrefutably prove), it is correct, or it is wrong. Colour does not admit of a similar verdict. All that can be said of it is: “I like it,” or “I don’t like it.”

For beauty in art, in the present condition of the perception theory, the physiology and psychology of pleasurable feelings, there is no other standard than subjective feeling. This is dependent on the greater or the less sensitiveness of the nervous system, on its perceptivity of slight qualitative and quantitative differences in the excitation of the senses, and, therefore, on an essentially congenital constitution of the organism. The gift of receiving strong impressions from works of art can be developed by practice, by the frequent and attentive study of works of art of different kinds; but it cannot be attained artificially by any effort or any amount of study.

What, then, mean the expressions expert and layman, when applied to æsthetic verdicts? The classes of society, in which preponderating occupation with intellectual problems, continued through several generations, has refined the nervous system and rendered it more sensitive, produce, as a rule, individuals with a feeling for art. These live in large towns, in the centres of art life, they travel, and visit numerous collections, and thus their feeling for art is developed into a wide understanding of it, that studies works of art from the historical standpoint. These are the real experts, so far as there can be any talk of such in æsthetic questions. But these classes of society, these individuals are only to the very smallest extent painters or professional critics, _i.e._, critics writing for the public. To wish to exclude them, on that account, from the expert class is ludicrous presumption of certain persons who, by their own authority, confer this title on themselves. The educated public—the intellectual _élite_—has not the least reason for allowing their opinion on works of art to be dictated to them by painters who may well be daubers or crack-brained fools, or by critics who may be ignorant phrase-mongers.

So much for the first question as to the fitness of the so-called layman for criticising works of art.

The second question, as to the changes in public opinion about certain works and their authors, is considerably more complex.