Part 4

For the sake of clearness I will quote a concrete example. In collections, one not infrequently meets with a mediæval plane having the figure of a crouching lion with jaws open and a wild expression. It is easy to reproduce the psychic process through which this form arose. The joiner who uses the plane, and follows his own work reflectively, sees how the mouth of the plane, when applied, strikes the iron into the surface of the wood, and tears the splinters from it. What is more obvious than to think at the same time of jaws pouncing on the wood to flay and mangle it? The technical German expressions, _Hobelmaul_ and _Hobelwangen_ (plane-mouth and plane-cheeks) for the aperture in which the _Hobeleisen_ (plane-iron) is fixed, show that the association of ideas at once presented itself when the tool assumed the form familiar to us. The mediæval artist went further; he has logically developed the image of a rending and devouring mouth suggested by association of ideas. He has given it form; he has examined it with sufficient artistic intensity to embody materially the picture presented by the word, to raise it from the rhetorical to the plastic. But whilst the artist advanced from the mouth of the plane to a lion’s jaws, and from the latter to an entire lion crouching over the board as over a victim that he has attacked and torn down, and mangling it with raging delight, he has at the same time made use of anthropomorphism, has imputed to the plane will, passion, gruesome enjoyment, and turned the planing into the tool’s riotous satisfaction of bloodthirsty wild-beast instincts.

This plane in the shape of a crouching lion is the model of a good organic decoration. The construction is not injured; it does no damage to the under-surface of the plane, that it is the smooth-lying belly of the lion with drawn claws; it does not prejudice the working capacity of the iron, that it is let into a mouth of a slightly waving lip shape; it does not make it difficult to work, that the handle is shaped like a round lion’s head. A sense is communicated to the tool which it did not originally possess; it does not shave and smoothe, but lives, tears, devours, and finds its joy therein. Organic decoration is thus an infusing of soul into that which possessed no soul; and not only this, but also in a higher and nobler way, a submerging of oneself in the soul that the artist has inspired into that which was soulless. He must live in the being which his anthropomorphising association of ideas has excogitated. “What should I feel, how should I act, what movements should I make, what expression should I have, if I were this object, but thinking, willing, feeling—in short, living and conscious? How should I, for instance, as a plane which was really a beast of prey, dispose myself, if I had the board—my victim—under me, and began devouring it?” The organically decorative artist is, therefore, really the dramatiser of the inanimate, for he creates beings, bestows on them character, and makes them act according to the latter and the situation, and, if not speak, nevertheless imitate.

If an artist has, from some especially vivid intuition and active association of ideas, found and embodied an anthropomorphic likeness which is very strikingly clear, imitation seizes it and repeats it with slight individual changes, which are, now and then, spirited and happy, but, for the most part, make the original picture dull, nay, through stupidity or misunderstanding may degrade it to nonsense. Such is exactly the case with the material picture as with the word-picture. At first it is the new and peculiar discovery of a poetic mind, then it is repeated well or ill so often that it ends with being a characterless commonplace. Every cultivated language is made up of such commonplaces, and, in like manner, style is made up of repetitions and tones, which are the plastic equivalent of rhetorical phrases.

The psychic sources of style—in contradistinction to those or freely devised organic decoration, which style only repeats and vulgarises—originate in very mean domains of mind. They are thoughtlessness, or, to put it more clearly and briefly, stupidity and mental inertia in their special forms as imitativeness and detestation of novelty.

It is thoughtlessness when we imitate forms that are suited to a

## particular material in a quite different material, simply because we

are used to the sight of them. The far-famed Greek temple architecture is largely a result of this thoughtlessness: it slavishly imitates in stone the wooden architecture, the place of which it has taken; it retains the beams with projecting beam-heads and cross-braces that have neither object nor meaning in stone. To the same category belong the tablets, with manifold curled up and twisted edges, which the Renaissance and the Rococo executed in stone and wood, although they have no sense or justification except in sheet metal: the contemporary Moscow silver-work, which imitate painfully enough damask linen with Russo-Byzantine coloured embroidery, or cakes and black-bread in precious metals or enamel: the marble veils, lace garments, and knitted stockings of the North-Italian sculptors of the decadence, etc.

It is mental inertia when we mechanically persist in repeating forms which either are unfitted for a given object, or have lost all meaning. For two thousand years artists of all sorts have made a decorative use of acanthus leaves in countries where no human eye has ever had an acanthus leaf before it. The Middle Ages decorated with a whole menagerie of beasts from Asia and Africa, which they knew only from fables, foreign textures, and pictures. From imitation to imitation the outlines, which no comparison with the actual model corrected and restored to accuracy, became more inexact and grotesque. Thus arose acanthus capitals which are more like rough logs than the elegantly curled plant, and heraldic lions and leopards, in which no feature any longer reminds us of the great cats. This is then called improving upon the natural form, and people even discover a particular beauty in it: a striking proof of the ability of mankind to make a virtue out of necessity. For the so-called stylisation is conscious and intentional only in late conservative imitation. It arises, however, quite involuntarily through unintelligent imitation of a pattern that is incorrectly felt and grasped, because one has never known its living model. So, too, the whole mythology of the Greeks still haunts our present-day decoration, which mythology was to the Greek artists a part of their living feeling and religious conviction, whilst to-day it has lost all thought and feeling. What can Neptune’s trident, Orpheus’ lyre, the Sirens and the Centaur, the Sphynx and the Gorgon, signify to a son of this century? But whilst these bits of inherited form wander from one imitator to another, until they become hopelessly unrecognisable, they gain a beauty of another sort which they did not originally possess: the venerable spell of antiquity surrounds them, and this charm, in its turn, touches certain susceptibilities of the soul, the inclination to mystic, twilight conceptions of what is remote in time and place, the pleasurable feeling of comfortable persistance in that to which we are accustomed, the connection of the familiar and always known with the remembrance of all strong impressions, both happy and unhappy, of childhood and youth. This mystico-archaic and subjectively sentimental element, which occurs in every style handed down traditionally, furnishes it with fanatical devotees whom its original decorative value could never win. That is, if I may say so, the religious side of the feeling for, and appreciation of, style.

From the oppressive mass of material, which I must, for the most part, leave untouched, I am afraid I must deal with only one more question:—Is there a new style? Is the so-called “Secessionism” a style which characterises our time, or, perhaps, a fugitive moment of our time? He who has attentively observed the later exhibitions on this point will be bound to say “No” decisively. Household furniture and room decoration of the “secessionist” order are tortured into appearing new and original; but they are neither the one nor the other, but a patient, methodical eclecticism which aims at the influence of what is foreign and peculiar. We distinguish accurately that rooms built and painted in the secession style are patched together of Chinese motives, with an addition of Loie Fuller’s serpentine twistings, and that secessionist furniture imitates, in good wood and metal, the slenderness, knottiness, and pliancy of bamboos. The secession contains a very minute percentage of independent invention and a great many reminiscences of Eastern Asia. The West European style, which should ostensibly be the expression of the latest high European tendencies, is, in reality, Chinese and Japanese style, exaggerated by absurdity of form and assumed or real delirium.

IV

THE OLD FRENCH MASTERS

We must once more change our method of study. That is the immediate result of the Exhibition of Old French artists—painters, draughtsmen, enamellers, sculptors—which, in 1904, in the Pavilion de Marsan at the Louvre, brought together several hundred fascinating, and perhaps half a dozen overpowering works. With the proofs furnished by these masterpieces full of earnestness and beauty, a chapter in the history of French and European art will have to be rewritten—not, to be sure, altogether in the sense intended and proclaimed by those who prepared this exceedingly important arrangement.

Comparatively few mediæval French works of art have been preserved to us. The Hundred Years’ War, the devastations of the League, and the Great Revolution made a clean sweep of them with fiendish thoroughness. With the châteaux, abbeys, and monasteries, their contents so far as works of art were concerned also perished. What survived has up to now appeared to a pre-conceived idea scarcely native. One historian of art wrote after another, that, up to the period of the Renaissance, the plastic artists who worked in France came partly from the Low Countries, partly from Italy, but were only quite exceptionally, if at all, Frenchmen. From a geographical standpoint, we might speak of a French mediæval art; but from the nature and form of the work, on the other hand, we should admit only a Flemish or Italian, but no French art.

This view is no longer defensible. France, too, had, in the Middle Ages, her own artists and schools of art, and if she also offered hospitality to foreign talent, she was not dependent on it. The strong, creative genius that developed in Northern France from the prosaic semi-circular arch of the Byzantine style the pointed-arch poetry of the Gothic, knew also how to make use of the chisel and paint-brush as means of expression, and to satisfy by painting and carving its impulse for depicting form. The mediæval art of France is not inferior to any other. It must no longer be treated as a mere appendage of art development in the Low Countries and Lombardy.

To be sure, if the learned compilers of the Exhibition Catalogue—George Lafenestre, Henri Bouchot, Leopold Delisle and other academicians or directors of museums and libraries—claim to have discovered, in the pictures and statues, a particular French national feature which distinguishes them clearly from other contemporary works, they are led astray by patriotic prejudice. The works bear the stamp of a period, not of a people. Nothing is more like a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century French work of art than a Flemish or Italian, and _vice versâ_. It is noticeable that people have taken Bourdichon’s masterpiece, one of the gems of the collection—the portrait of the little Dauphin Charles Roland, to be a work of Memling; and of the most beautiful paintings of one and the same painter—des Moulins—have long ascribed one to Van der Goes, the other to Ghirlandajo.

No; the temperaments of the artists at this period were not differentiated nationally. They are, moreover, not so at the present day either, and if analogies are established between artists of the same origin, they may, in all cases, be naturally explained otherwise than by a common descent. The influence of strong personalities, who influence as prototypes, external successes, which form a current of fashion and incite to imitation, or simply a tenaciously held tradition of a school, in which in a long series of artist generations has grown up, suffice to impress on the art of a country through extensive epochs, a certain family physiognomy, which only a mystically inclined mind will be tempted to refer to race and blood.

Topographical and national classifications have in fact no inward spiritual justification in art, but at most a value of convenience, in so far as they render possible external groupings, which facilitate a survey. The whole art of Europe is one. It has developed from the Greek, the tradition of which has remained living through all the centuries, and has crept, from country to country, connecting inseparably all separate national developments with their common origin. The Greeks were the teachers of the Romans, and their inspirations and rules were carried down into the Christian catacombs, and from them blossomed the art of the Middle Ages.

Byzantine artists from the Roman empire of the East itself or from Italy, initiated, at the Court of Charlemagne, the barbarians of the Frankish kingdom in the mysteries of their craft, and carried the Promethean spark, however weakly it glimmered, from Attica to the banks of the Seine and Scheldt, where it did not expire, but, later on, was fanned again to bright flame by the fresh breeze of the Renaissance. The Eastern branch of Greek art withered into actual Byzantism, whose last off-shoots are the Russian icons of to-day. The Church in the East, to suit the fetish-loving views of her superstitious semi-barbarians, attributes to the picture the meaning and value of an idol, and opposes mistrustfully every deviation from the canon which, according to her conception, might weaken the power of the idol. In the West less credence was given to the picture’s magical virtue, its form obtained no dogmatic consecration, the Church allowed the artist freer movement, and thus development was possible, which broke through the stiff, lifeless rule of the school, and found its way back to the inexhaustible primitive source of Greek art itself, namely, nature.

The emancipation from the Byzantine system is not the work of Cimabue and Giotto, or of an individual at all, but an effort of almost all the artists of Western Europe at the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. The portrait of John II. (1310-64) in the Exhibition, which was painted about 1359, of course _in tempera_ on a gold ground, by Girard of Orleans, is of a marvellous realism, unchecked by the slightest restraint of any studied rule. The head in profile, turned towards the left, of the melancholy-looking man in the ’fifties with the long, well-formed nose, the scanty moustache and beard, and the long hair, gleams with warm life. Girard copied his model modestly and truly, without troubling himself about a golden profit, and he could put soul into the portrait of his king in the measure in which he himself felt the latter’s inward life.

The awakening of a feeling for nature in art is generally ascribed to the Flemings, particularly to the brothers Van Eyck. That, too, is arbitrary, as a glance at the works of the old Frenchmen, who flourished contemporaneously with the Van Eycks, or even before them, teaches us. The feeling for nature was always active in the few with bright eyes and joyous consciousness of life, who dedicated themselves to art from inner impulse. The themes to which the plastic arts had for many centuries to restrict themselves were certainly as unfavourable as possible to a healthy naturalism. The only subjects the painter dared to treat were illustrations of the Old and New Testament, legends of the saints, and the symbols of faith. Scenes of heaven and hell, Biblical miracles, and personification of the dogmas of the Church could assuredly no more be painted from the model than the Holy Ghost, or transubstantiation. And yet nature herself came to her rights in this fundamental representation of the supernatural and what lay outside of nature, for she does not allow herself now to be driven out, even by the violent methods of the pitch-fork spoken of by Horace in a famous verse. Without taking particular thought about it, or with a cunning conscious of its purpose, the artists fashioned their works most foreign to actual life out of elements of reality, and achieved them by nature, truth, and life. For this reason even the earliest miniatures of the manuscripts become a trustworthy source for the history of manners. Because the art-workers of limited capacity, who wrought servilely according to the tradition of their gild, reproduced accurately all the accessories—clothes, weapons, furniture, buildings, and scenery—as they actually saw them.

The little picture, “The Virgin and Child,” which is ascribed to Jean Malouel, and was painted about 1395, and can therefore have owed nothing to the Van Eycks, then in Dijon, and perhaps, too, elsewhere, certainly still quite obscure young people, is of such charming realism that one might rather class it as a _genre_ picture than as a sacred picture. The Virgin is making the Child a frock, and is just drawing the thread tight, with the needle turned in a correct horizontal direction, and the child Jesus is amusing Himself by putting His rosy little foot in His Mother’s red leather slipper, of enormous size to Him, which she has taken off and placed before her. There is no reason why we should not assume that Malouel—if it was he—gave his patron—perhaps the Duke of Burgundy—his (the artist’s) own dear wife and little son as a Holy Family.

In “The Death of the Virgin,” of the same school of Burgundy, but about a century later, the apostle, kneeling at the foot of the death-bed and reading his prayer-book devoutly, with a big pair of spectacles on his nose, is, in spite of the pathos of the moment, so natural as to be almost comic. “The Miracle of the Saint,” with his head in his hands, who is walking barefoot, by a pupil of Nicolas Froment—perhaps by the master himself—painted, about 1480, at Aix in Provence, attests the painter’s most naïve indifference to probability. In the middle of the street where the decapitated saint is walking, and the executioner, leaning on his sword, stands dumbfounded, kneel, in measured symmetry, to the right and left of the saint, the founder and his consort; he with four little sons, she with four little daughters in a row, like so many organ-pipes, behind them. The picture of the city is, however, so realistic that even to-day an old corner of Aix is recognisable in it, and the gazers running up or standing in knots and laying their heads together, or hurrying to the windows, are of everlasting human verity.

Exactly the same holds good of the altar decoration, ascribed to John of Orleans (circ. 1374), a wonderful sepia painting on white silk. The sections which depict the Scourging of Christ by two brutal fellows with hang-dog faces, the Carrying of the Cross, with the Mocking of Jesus by the rabble of Jerusalem, and the Entombment, with the Blessed Virgin kissing the corpse, show that striving after truth, which has hitherto been pronounced to be a peculiarity of the Dutch. In the “Martyrdom of a Holy Bishop”—most likely by Jean Malouel (circ. 1400)—the martyr, in mitre and pallium, gazes from a strongly barred prison window, near which an angel kneels, and through the bars of which the Saviour in person administers to him the viaticum. But the castle in the Lombard style—stone rafters and corbels with red tiled spaces—on to the ground-floor of which the oval window opens, may be regarded as an architectural design.

Nicolas Froment’s famous “Burning Thornbush” from Aix Cathedral (1475-6) is entirely fabulous in the middle. A soft, cloud-like, lumpy hill of rock supports a dense group of thick-stemmed trees, the tops of which unite in a kind of gigantic bird’s nest, wherein the Virgin and Child sit enthroned. But this miracle, with no measure of reality to gauge it, is framed in a deep landscape with great distances; in which white towns lie by mirroring waters, and thickly-leaved trees rise up from green hills to the bright sky, and in the foreground, beside an angel of Annunciation, sits, surrounded by his drove of wethers and his quaintly posed dog, the white-bearded shepherd with his legs crossed in the most natural posture you could conceive.

In the case of almost all the paintings in the Exhibition, and chiefly of the best of them, this proposition can be repeated. The painter loyally carries out the subject commissioned, treating it faithfully according to the traditional formula; but what is not covered by the formula he shapes with sovereign freedom and an honest joyous realism which is by no means the prerogative of the Dutch and Germans, as has been so long believed, but is to be met with, according to the evidence of this Exhibition, in the same measure in the French.

Sculpture might become crude in the earlier Middle Ages, but it did not cease to be fostered. Sculpture in stone or wood was the complement of building, that strongest expression of mediæval energy, ivory-carving, or the jewel of precious metal, the adornment of the altar or the state-rooms in the palace. Painting, on the other hand, after the collapse of the old world, went back to the adornment of books, and from this the great art of wall- and easel-painting was again developed only after the age of the Crusades. This, in many details, betrays its origin from miniature. For a long time it was nothing but an enlarged miniature. The works in the Exhibition show, at any rate up to the last third of the fifteenth century, all the features that distinguish the pictorial ornamentation of the manuscripts: the gold ground, the neat, nay, painful perfection, the gay, unqualified, almost glaring, colours, the equal clearness of objects in the furthest background and in the foreground, the puerile joy in innumerably repeated complicated decorations of the surface, the framing, with richly figured wreaths, ornamental borders, or picture margins. Even the standing formulæ of manuscript miniatures are repeated for centuries in the paintings, viz., the movements of all the personages at the Annunciation, Crucifixion, Entombment, and Ascension. Only towards the end of the fifteenth century does painting fully escape from the still clinging egg-shell of the miniature, and grow accustomed to a large, bold line, and a freedom of composition which finally reckons with considerations of distance, and prevails upon itself to neglect comparatively the subsidiary in favour of the essential. The glorious Master of Moulins has, it is clear, no longer the old inherited habit of feeling himself banished to a page in a book. He no longer shows the same somewhat mechanical respect to all work, principal and accessory. In the “Virgin and Child between the Founders,” and particularly in the “Nativity” with the twilight landscape in the background, and the fat poodle in front sitting on the kneeling cardinal’s mantle, the precedence of values is observed, and the painter reserves his piety and devotion for the noble parts.