Part 21

It is not to be gainsaid that such changes have occurred, but they are much rarer than those would like to make us believe who, from instances of pretended later conversions of originally rebellious taste on the part of contemporaries, hope to succeed in proving that the ugly is beautiful and the beautiful is ugly.

The names which were most often cited to prove the incompetency of contemporary judgment on works of art of modern tendency are most unfortunately chosen. Millet, Rousseau, and Corot were looked upon by their contemporaries as smearers and daubers; Manet was laughed to scorn, Böcklin pronounced a fool, his friends advised Hans Thoma to change his name, etc., etc. In order not to go to too great length I will now leave Thoma and Böcklin out of the discussion. But the others! That Rousseau and, especially, Corot passed for smearers and daubers among their contemporaries is simply not true; on the contrary, justice was at once done to them for their technique. Even their most unscrupulous opponents admitted that they were draughtsmen and colourists. What they were reproached with was only the alleged intellectual insignificance of their work. People remained under the influence of classical landscape with ancient buildings or ruins, and a decoration of ideal figures such as Poussin brought into fashion, and Claude Lorrain cultivated. A landscape without nymphs or shepherds in Arcadian dress, without temples or figures of Hermes, seemed empty, insignificant, ignoble. The majority had as yet no taste for the witchery of mood in wood and field. Why, Corot himself was not clear about what was new and determinative in his own art, for in some of his grandest pictures Dryads dance, beneath young-leaved trees immersed in the mists of springtide, the most correct sham-classic square dance. It was only in his last period that he renounced this ancient magic. Rousseau had broken away from tradition more resolutely, and was on that account less esteemed than Corot by contemporaries whose education had been perverted by precedent. But the worst that was said against the two did not go beyond the assertion that they were “vulgar.”

The case of Manet is, of course, different. People have roughly disowned this painter; but it is absolutely false to talk about a change in popular opinion about him. Those who “laughed at” him thirty-five years ago, laugh at him in precisely the same way now. In my study of the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum I have alluded to the angry protest of Gérôme and Gustave Moreau against admitting the works of Manet and his friends into a State collection. If the laughers are not so numerous, and if their laughter is not so ringing as in the “Olympia” year, it is simply because the man is absolutely done with. Only a few stragglers still talk nonsense about Manet, men who have missed the connection of “the last train,” and some greybeards in their dotage—the barricade warriors of the “Salon”—who fancy they are still breathing the gunpowder smoke of 1863, and will keep up to the day of their death, which cannot be far off, the happy, exultant mood of the beer-evenings at the Café de Madrid. None among the pillars of young and living art recognises Manet as his ancestor. People know now that he was a discovery of Zola’s. The sharp turn in the development of art in the last thirty years of the last century was inaugurated, not by him, but by others. Courbet introduced realism which has nowadays shrunk to nothing. Monet kindled “Free Light,” and that was a very great service which, unfortunately, is also no longer fully acknowledged, for the latest race of Parisian painters again abandons joyful brightness and goes back to the gloomy, oppressive tones of “the ’fifties.” Manet, however, found nothing and invented nothing, and he owes the noise that was, for a period, heard about him only to his relations with a devoted friend, who vindicated his own tendency by that of the painter, and said of him all the good which he thought of himself.

The change in taste from one generation to another is a general law which I proved in the _Neue Freie Presse_ of 9th August 1896, and afterwards developed and established in the Florence _Rivista Moderna_ (No. 3, of 1898, “_Le alternanze del gusto_”). I strongly believe in the prevalence of this law; but if particular cases are followed in detail, it is recognised that many an apparent change in the appreciation of a work or an artist rests on an illusion of the senses.

To return to the subject of Manet. An awful din arose at the first appearance of “Olympia.” Friends and foes waged wild battle with each other. Each panted for the blood of the other. Twenty years later the picture that had been so hotly contested was hung in the State Museum, which roused fresh, but considerably weaker, opposition. Finally, however, no one any longer protested against its presence in the picture-gallery, and now a sophist might assert: “There, you see! The picture which was once laughed at is, thirty years afterwards, acknowledged as a classical work of art.”

Gently! That is by no means proved. The fight has ceased only because it has become objectless. Who nowadays waxes warm against Manet? The man, you know, is dead, not only as a human being, but also as an artist. He no longer troubles any one. He no longer exercises any bad influence. He no longer even poisons popular taste, for it is sufficient to observe the visitors to the Luxembourg, to see that they pass by the “Olympia” with laughter, and shrugging of the shoulders, or else with astonishment and shakes of the head. If a belated corybant raises a shout of “Hail, Manet!” he is merrily allowed to shout. It is superfluous to shout him down, for nobody listens to him. The truth is that the taste for Manet is not in the least changed. People find the “Olympia” every whit as repulsive nowadays as it was thirty years ago; but they no longer say so with a loud voice and with the veins about their temples swollen, because, generally, people no longer stop before its mouldy ugliness.

If you examine very carefully, you will generally find that the various appraisements of particular works in a new generation do not originate from later generations regarding it differently than did contemporaries, but from their generally no longer viewing it with the same eyes. Let us only bear in mind always that the vast majority of mankind have no feeling of their own for artistic beauty. They act as if they had some feeling only because they know that a feeling for art is pronounced to be a mark of higher culture. We cannot rate too highly the part played in art idiocy by sham culture, pose, and self-deception—or, shall we say, more indulgently, by auto-suggestion? Honest confession of obtuseness to art is hardly found in any but the two poles of humanity—on the extreme summit and at the lowest antipode. A man must be either a rustic lout or an overtopping genius like Prince Bismarck, to confess that he can make nothing of the fine arts. The culture-Philistine never has this courage. He always pretends that he finds luxurious enjoyment in the contemplation of art. This culture-Philistine always repeats what has been said to him; he admires where the Baedeker-star prescribes admiration. And he is, in many cases, not even dishonest. He persuades himself that he feels what he regards it as his duty as an educated man to feel; and he really comes to feel it in the end, thanks to this self-persuasion. All the effects of art depend on suggestion, so far as they are not concerned with the most absolutely primitive and undifferentiated sensual excitations. On one who has a genuine feeling for art the work of art itself conveys the suggestion, which is followed by feelings of pleasure. On the average men, whose blunt nerves take no impression from the work of art itself, the Baedeker-star—the label—exercises this suggestion. If a work of art has once got the reputation of excellence, either because it deserves it, or because it acquired it from a dishonest, busy, bold, and swaggering clique, the next generation of Philistines in art does not test it further, but takes it as something accepted. The clique can then state triumphantly that the work they have puffed is a success. But has it on that account acquired real success?

The number of free, strong men is extremely small, who have the courage, desire, and ability to examine the veracity of traditional labels; but there is a frightful devastation every time that such an idol-destroyer and overthrower of altars breaks into the Temple of Renown, which is guarded by that dragon, the Good Old Way. People are then convinced about the quantity of plaster rubbish which has been smuggled into proximity with real marble and gold-and-ivory work in the semi-darkness of the sanctuary, and has enjoyed for hundreds, perhaps for thousands of years, the same veneration as the wonder-working revelations of genius.

But suppose we conceive in our mind’s eye the extremely rare case in which a real masterpiece was misjudged at first, and, later on, was greeted with acclamations. In this case the question, as a rule, is not of lack of understanding, but of lack of sense of proportion. The contemporary age which blames, and the succeeding age which praises, are both right, _i.e._, they do not praise and blame the same thing, and the divergent appraisement of the work is simply due to the fact that contemporaries like to dwell on the faults and overlook the excellencies, whilst latter generations neglect the faults and regard only the excellencies. The contemporaries were biassed in severity, their successors are biassed in indulgence. Ideal justice is not of this world. But faults remain faults even in the ages that come after, and excellencies, too, were excellencies even in the period of their origin; and it is jugglery and forgery when people interpret the change in appraisement as if a later generation had admired as a merit that which an earlier generation had stigmatised as a fault. Just one example to illustrate these propositions: Millet is said to have passed for “a dauber and smearer.” Now, his contemporaries who blamed him used no such harsh expression. They said only that Millet drew incorrectly and painted carelessly, and those with a real feeling for art notice exactly the same thing to-day, only they say it no longer, unless the question is expressly put to them. On the other hand, his contemporaries, too, noticed his deep moral earnestness, his warm human feeling, the touching simplicity of his style, which we prize so highly in Millet to-day. But they were not inclined to forgive him his defects in execution on account of these intellectual merits, whilst we take his weakness in form into the bargain on account of the feeling it contains. These weaknesses, however, are there to-day precisely as they were thirty years ago, and he who fails to see them is guilty of presumption if he passes a verdict on pictures.

Taking them altogether, the works and artists that were overvalued by contemporaries are far more numerous than those that were underestimated at the beginning. And even in the extremely few cases of the latter category, the injustice of contemporaries did not, as a rule, take the form of violent opposition, but that of indifference. Contemporaries did not gainsay their beauty; but it escaped their attention, because this was claimed by other fashions and styles. No work of plastic art that is nowadays accepted without dispute was rejected, when it appeared, with such anger as certain products of the “Secession” are at the present day.

That is natural. The conditions of art production were half a century ago absolutely different to what they are now. The artist gave his personality full scope, and sought to please only a few customers of rank, without troubling himself about the people at large. To-day he wants to excite a sensation at any price, and he looks, for this end, not into himself, but about himself. By creating he is not satisfying his impulse to give form and shape, but his hunger for success.

Vain _amour propre_, swaggering, conceited vanity and cunning “pushfulness” are the motives that far too often guide the artist’s brush or chisel. The coarse vulgarity of the means corresponds with the coarse vulgarity of the motives and aims. One must make a sensation, and that is attained most easily by a rowdy rebellion against taste, truth, and healthy human intelligence. If he annoys his contemporaries, the ruthless advertiser finds his account more surely than if he praised them. Only he who startles dares hope to be noticed in our present huge exhibitions with their three thousand numbers. That is why the unscrupulous competitor works with the object of startling, and only with that object. His natural allies are writers who seek by aggressive criticism to satisfy the same hysterical impulse towards sensation as he, and the snobs who hope to justify their claim to be un-Philistine by pretending to discover and appreciate hidden beauties, where the thick-headed majority of their fellow-men observe and condemn only unblushing outrages on the sense of beauty.

The necessity for creating a sensation has arisen only in our times of over-production in all fields of intellectual creation, and of frightfully murderous competition for success. In the earlier days of art it played hardly any part at all. On this account it is fallacious to try to deduce from the, after all, extremely rare romances of works, originally misjudged but afterwards recognised, in the past, an argument in favour of certain creations of the present day, which a large proportion of educated men rejects, not because they do not understand, them, but because they understand them only too well.

Let men only have the quiet courage not to allow themselves to be put out of countenance; they will carry their point even before posterity.

XVII

MY OWN OPINION

There is hardly anything which I hate so cordially as opportunistic criticism, which, in respect of phenomena in art-production presented in a noisy and pretentious way, affecting to signify modernity and progress, does not honestly take a side, but with the cunning foresight of the bat in the fable attempts to come to an understanding with both the opposing armies, of the birds and of the mice. Criticism that openly wears the uniform of a pronounced movement in art can be put up with. The enemy of the movement fights the criticism and the movement at the same time. It shares all the fates of its banner; it is in the danger, and it may be in the victory. If the movement for which it carries weapons succumbs, it gets the worst of it too, and experiences the treatment accorded to the vanquished. It has to lay down its weapons of criticism, falls into contempt, and has no longer the possibility of devastating art life, of perplexing artists, and oppressing those who enjoy art. Insufferable, on the other hand, are the clever, the unprejudiced, the eclectics, the smooth civil sneerers who praise, yet with faintness, who blame, yet with a saving clause, who carry in their lips such well-known and rather good phrases as: “Certainly, there is some exaggeration here, but the peculiar style is not to be misjudged”: “It is certainly no finished creation, but the work, nevertheless, contains some promise”: “This is not exactly a work, you know, which one could recommend for imitation, yet there is much to be learnt from it”: “It is the new wine in Goethe’s _Faust_ that is acting so absurdly, but still perhaps it will yield a good vintage.” These people who talk so sweetly are those who really poison the springs of public taste. Thanks to them, movements which ought to stand without the pale of the law enjoy a sort of equal justification, as it were, of the æsthetic, historico-artistic copyright. Their mask of benevolence, justice, and toleration gains them the confidence of the irresolute, who, left to their own feeling, would recognise, at once, in certain works, either a gross impropriety of the shameless sort, or an indubitable manifestation of insanity, yet through the cheap phrases of opportunistic critics, become doubtful of themselves and say: “If such sober-minded scholars as this and that critic constantly find something to recognise in this stuff, I am perhaps wrong to condemn it at once.”

Moderate feelings are much more widespread than extreme feelings. They are the normal product of the nervous system in civilised men; to the great majority of half-coloured, faded grey men subdued colours only are sympathetic; violent and shrill colours may amuse it; but, in its innermost being, it feels instinctively drawn only to the lukewarm ones. It believes them; and on their information, on their irresponsible recommendation, gives to the most openly rascally art-firms the credit through which alone they can hold out for a while.

And these critical warpers of justice are not assailable. They always play an imposing part, and are always right. If an objectionable movement lasts—and there are aberrations which have held their ground for at least a generation—then they triumph modestly, for they have been among its first heralds and have “recognised at once the sound kernel in the first strange shell.” If the imbecility is as such patent to all, and disappears amidst the derisive laughter of the intelligent, they triumph again, only somewhat more self-consciously, for they have “not let themselves be dazzled by novelty, and have pointed out its weaknesses, and worked strenuously at its defeat.” Thus every adventure in art life, every campaign in criticism, be its issue what it may, increases their esteem; and the longer they continue their course, which is so mischievous to the community, the more blindly the multitude yields to their leadership, and the greater devastation they are guilty of through their dishonourable exercise of their office of guardians in matters of art.

I well know how this opportunism in criticism arises. It is the result of the co-operation of the basest and most despicable intellectual qualities. I find its causes in the dull feeling for the beautiful which renders weak and indistinct all reactions from artistic influences, and suffers neither delight nor irritation to arise: in the cowardly fear of man and pitiful adulation, which aims at injuring no one and only thinks of keeping a retreat open for itself; finally in common vanity, which prefers to please a crowd of gaping boobies rather than the select few, and the flattering, though so cheap, reputation of being “very intellectual,” to the responsibility of crude performance of duty. The favourite word by which the opportunistic critics compound with every artistic confidence trick is “development.” If the clairvoyant monitor utters the cry of “decay and degeneracy,” the opportunists reply, “buds of a new and splendid bloom.” They love to appeal to the history of art. That is right. When the Masolinos and Masaccios sprang up, the last pupils of Gaddi and Orcagna whimpered, “Now there is an end of painting.” But what was at an end was Byzantine art filled by Cimabue and Giotto with some fresh life, and what began was the ever glorious _Cinquecento_. And much nearer to us: when Delacroix emancipated himself from the colour rules of David’s pupils, and broke out into a downright exultation of red and blue and purple; when Corot, Rousseau, and Dupré set homely nature viewed with lyric eyes in the place of Poussin’s classic landscape degenerated into dial painting; then earnest voices likewise accused the innovators of digging the grave of art, and yet we know nowadays that Delacroix and Corot were by no means the wild anarchists which the Academicians held them to be, and that an uninterrupted line of development extends from David and Prudhon through Géricault to Delacroix, and from Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain through Joseph Vernet, and even through Watteau to Corot—a line which was unnoticed by contemporaries, yet one which we now see clearly. It is the dodge of an unscrupulous attorney to quote these examples when treating of the art of a Puvis de Chavannes, an Aman-Jean, the Præ-Raphaelites, _pointillistes_, _vermicellistes_, and _pipists_. There are sure marks of recognition by which the authorised can be distinguished from the unauthorised, the true from the false, development from retrogression, and buds from gall-nuts. A movement which, indeed, resolutely diverges from the taste dominant at a given time, though striving to approach nature, need not, but may, have a future; and he who does not suffer from stiffness in the joints will not, as a matter of course and on principle, refuse to follow it with benevolent curiosity. If, however, the new movement departs from nature, one may confidently say “it leads to nothing.” If an independent method which strives after personal expression reveals itself in a revolutionary effort—however peculiarly, nay, perversely, it might impress—the intelligent man will not condemn, but wait to see if something living comes from the attempt. If the practised eye, however, recognises, in the peculiarity, either a cunning imitation or a cold-blooded, intentional oddity, then one may confidently pronounce the death sentence, for it contains in itself no germs whatever of development. The only two eternal sources of art are, and will be, feeling for nature and personality. Fidelity to nature and honesty produce living creations. Unnaturalness and affectation are marks of decay. He who ever holds fast to these simple dicta will hardly ever run the risk of mistaking a Will-o’-the-Wisp for a lighthouse, or what is morally, if not practically, a more serious error, of treading under foot an insignificant chrysalis with the living and beautiful butterfly it enshrines.

Even of the manifestations of insanity of crack-brained painters, of the hoaxes of tricky strugglers for success, and the whims of childishly immature and childishly careless people living from hand to mouth, who have sprung up in the last two or three decades, the good man’s insinuating word of the “sound kernel,” of the “tendencies, capable of development, to a new blossoming of art,” has been spoken by the opportunistic of critics. Well, time has now given the answer to these verdicts, at any rate in regard to some of the movements for which those prophets so benevolently predicted a glorious future. Fifteen or twenty years ago we saw in the Paris Salon, beside the expressionless fabrications of the usual daubing artisans—the “Mother’s Joys,” the “Young Lady at her Toilet,” the “Oyster with Lemons,” which constitute the stock in trade of all exhibitions of pictures—only two formulæ appear in hundreds of repetitions: the vulgarly realistic, after the style, let us say—to mention a particular name—of Bastien Lepage, that pupil of Cabanel who had degenerated into an apostle of Courbet; and the pseudo-idealistic, after the model of Puvis de Chavannes. Workmen with brutalised countenances and greasy blouses, and unearthly figures in antiquated landscapes of chalky paleness, disputed the visitor’s attention. A concreteness which did not spare us a single finger-nail in mourning, struggled for supremacy with a careless vagueness which styled itself “Abstraction” or “Synthesis” and produced only questionably schematic types. Whole walls exhibited unbroken rows of pictures which reminded us of the spectral ballet of the dead nuns in “Robert the Devil.” Then we came to rooms where an unmixed company of rag-pickers, and night-men exercising their calling, of huzzies on the night-prowl, dung-carting stable-helps, and rapscallions at loggerheads, were quite at home. One of these movements, _i.e._, painting in faint colours, has hardly a representative left; the other—the art of vulgarity, meanness, and ugliness—only a dwindling few.