Part 6

The Romantic fever begins to seize the century. The painters hasten to hang round them the botanical box, and seek the blue flower. The first to go forth into the moon-illumined, witching night was Chassériau! Poor Chassériau! It would have better suited his bent to paint _salons_ with rich Empire-furniture, wherein respectably dressed citizens sit with their wives and daughters, and pleasantly tell each other the anecdotes of the day. His portrait of the two sisters in red shawls and yellow plaited dresses shows this—a neat, pretty, _bourgeois_ painting, which denies itself all enthusiasm, and all soaring. But now the tarantula stings him, and he occupies himself only with obsolete subjects such as Orpheus, _châtelaines_, fairy-tale princesses with black slaves, Macbeth and the three witches. The last picture is

## particularly characteristic of him. The three witches have their white

beards and pointed noses, as prescribed by the romantic code; but they are merely grotesque, but not in the least weird. We have the impression that they have met in a peaceful country in order to gossip about their neighbours, and make coffee. They publicly proffer the knight, who should be Macbeth, a small bowl. The heath by night lacks every trace of mood; the ugly old women every touch of the demoniac. Chassériau painted, just as J. Fr. Kind—the [“Freischütz”] Kind—wrote poetry.

I am afraid I must likewise be guilty of heresy in respect of another great man; but Delacroix, too, fails to justify the idolatry people have displayed and, to some extent, still display towards him. I do not misjudge his joyous coloriture, although his harmonies are rather loud than grand. I am not blind to the characteristic mobility of his composition, although it is generally far more a stagey flourish than assertion of strength in the service of a will conscious of what it is aiming at. What excites in me, however, unconquerable opposition is his phrasing. If any art demands intuition it is painting. Delacroix, however, usually has not exercised intuition, but has clothed with the cool work of his brain abstract thoughts in conventional forms. For this, look at “Greece expiring on the Ruins of Missalonghi”—a picture which was once of enormous influence and highly praised. On some disordered masonry stands a young lady in the _bal masqué_ dress of a Greek, who has no thought of giving up the ghost, but is playing a part in robust health, and will change her dress, and have supper later. At some distance behind her we catch sight of a young negro in the uniform of a Janissary, climbing a rubbish heap, brandishing a flag with a crescent on it, and a curved sabre. This slightly painted Turkish warrior appears not to see the young Greek girl; at all events he does nothing to her, and does not even threaten her. There is no association between the two figures; the action is disconnected. At most the Turk is interesting as an acrobat or banner-swinger. No murderous propensities are noticeable in him. The countenance of the Greek lady is pale and weary; but a rest in bed seems the only thing she needs. It says much for the keenness of their Philhellenism that this picture could move the people of the period. Delacroix had, however, no intuition at all when he painted it; he only illustrated an unplastic, insipid phrase.

His other paintings are mostly illustrations of a text. “Comedians and Buffoons” were unmistakably suggested by Victor Hugo. Confused ideas occur to him. Thus “The Good Samaritan” was not painted to the passage in the Gospel, but to a story of chivalry; for the gentle benefactor takes the sick man on his charger—he is a mounted Samaritan!—just as a knight takes the noble lady he is carrying off.

Delacroix was a literary painter; we know that from his correspondence; but without that, his pictures would betray it. He read much more in books than in nature, and he supplied paintings that gave evidence of education and much reading, in which the art-hating, blind-souled Philistines of education delight royally. It may be that the confusion of his portrayal and the loudness of his palette was felt by his contemporaries as a deliverance from the coldness and precision of David’s school. I suspect, however, his earliest admirers valued him chiefly because he fed on the same books, plays, and newspapers as themselves.

Ary Scheffer stands in the same spiritual plane as Delacroix, but lacks the keenly joyous colour and the theatricality of his stage-setting. Schubert’s songs and Schumann’s are music even without the lyric text, and what music! I cannot imagine what Ary Scheffer’s pictures from Shakespeare, Goethe, and Byron would be without the poets and their poems. His picture in the Century Exhibition, “The Dead ride fast,” is, if I exclude from my conception my remembrance of Bürger’s ballad, an almost touching example of tastelessness. Leonora’s dishevelled hair, blown by the wind into a stiff, horizontal position, is supposed, for instance, to illustrate the swiftness of the ride—a notion which may have seemed to Scheffer terrible, but is comic.

Horace Vernet had a “Mazeppa,” of course a big modern battle, and several likenesses. He is as popular as on the first day, and will always remain so as long as children play with tin soldiers and the picture sheets of Epinal—the French Neu-Ruppin—find a ready sale. How he dazzles! He does so to a degree which deserves admiration. From a distance his pictures appear to be something; one must look at them quite closely to see that they are nothing, absolutely nothing. The colossal canvas is apparently full of men: thousands of soldiers march, encamp, storm, fight; but, as a matter of fact, not a single figure is painted; the whole pomp of war and victory is composed of little stencilled gingerbread men, without any bones in their bodies, and with scarcely the remotest resemblance to human beings. Could Horace Vernet draw? Had he really any other conception of the human form than that of an inflated india-rubber figure? In Paris and Versailles I have seen many paintings by him, but I cannot yet answer these questions. Horace Vernet is the fourth of a dynasty of painters: the first, Antoine, was great at little figures on sedan-chair panels; the second, Joseph, painted the well-known series of French harbours; the third, Carle, is a master in depicting horses; Horace, the fourth, is the weakest of them all, incomparably inferior in ability to his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He alone, however, has attained fame, and his renown throws his ancestors into the shade. The wheel of fortune now and then plays immoral jokes of this sort, perhaps in order to teach its own futility.

Daumier was known to me and, I suppose, most people, only as a draughtsman. We learnt now to prize him as a painter of high rank. His numerous paintings are illustrations to “Don Quixote,” romantic merry-Andrews, street-singers, Molière’s _Malade Imaginaire_, and a crowded group of lawyers in cap and gown. His manner is the same in oil as in lead-pencil and crayon-drawing: his lines of movement broad and firm, the outlines blunted, and now and again rubbed; all his figures mysteriously surrounded in mist, yet all so clearly and faultlessly represented that one is never led to suspect that their mysteriousness is a trick to hide carelessness or lack of skill. Even his oil-painting is really caricature, but discreet caricature. The nobler method instils into him self-respect, and preserves him from caricature; he just marks roguishly the burlesque features, but does not diverge from reality. Thus his lawyers are portraits, but they look so maliciously intelligent, so inexorably penetrating, that we can doubt of this or that head whether it is a likeness or a caricature. Let us say this: the model will take it for a caricature, but his friends will regard it as a portrait. Daumier is a solitary; he is akin to none of his contemporaries, yet an example of the migration of souls; for in him Hogarth comes to life again, but a Hogarth who for his part would be animated by a spark of Rembrandt’s spirit.

Suddenly another solitary appears in the ranks of the allied men of school and tradition, viz., Millet. Precipitation would infer: the romantic is overcome; a new generation with new modes of feeling arises; the nerves of the century begin to vibrate according to a new rhythm. That is sheer nonsense; nothing has been overcome. The romantic masters still form romantic pupils, the crowd still feels in the traditional way; the range of themes and the fashion of treating them remain what they have been for a generation, but amidst the dependent, the docile ones, the imitator forms for himself, by the law of elective affinity, a divergent group—the group of the forest-folk of Barbizon—and amidst this group steps forth an individual man who forgets the master’s _atelier_, who, in painting, thinks of neither the _salon_ nor the art-dealers, who looks not into books and newspapers nor on prototypes, but out into the world, and on that account falls completely out of the century.

If we follow up the development of art in the Exhibition, we may easily fall into the error of thinking that with Millet one epoch closes and another begins. Such was not the case in reality. The contemporaries who appreciated Millet were a diminishing few. Official art despised him. There were no distinctions for him on the part of the State. The critical phrase-makers knew nothing of him or mocked him horribly. The rich connoisseurs passed him by. A very small congregation of moderately well-off admirers, whose valuation appraised their most honest admiration at 1,000 francs at most, bought his pictures at prices which just made it possible for him to live in Barbizon in wooden shoes and a blouse, and to bring up his numerous family on potatoes and bacon. But as he was a personality he succeeded—though only after his death. He made a school, like every one who has something to teach. He gained influence on the views of the creators, the critics, and the public. People began to understand his speech, nay, to feel that what he said was beautiful. But to this day there is no Millet epoch in French art, and his fame is really an optical delusion. His works did not bring him into the mouth of the masses, but the caprice of a millionaire. On the day when it occurred to M. Chauchard to pay 600,000 francs for Millet’s “Angelus,” snobs of both worlds took off their hats and murmured in a voice hushed with reverence: “That must be a great painter.” As we see, the world’s fame is but a question of money. Many more men are able to reckon than are able to feel the beauty of art, and, to the vast majority, its price is the infallible, the one key to the understanding of a work.

I must say that the millionaire who acted as Millet’s herald of fame, had no sense of proportion. If the work of an artist is to be measured by a gauge, the figures of which represent gold coins, Millet does not reach the altitude of 600,000 francs, unless we estimate at least thirty of his contemporaries equally high. In technique, Millet follows the Dutch; a David Teniers without humour and without aim at humour. His landscape, never the essential with him, is poorer than that of Rousseau and François, not to speak of Corot. His greatness lies in his personality, in his simplicity, in his avoidance of pose, in the pious earnestness with which he follows the daily toil of the field labourer. That is no new note in art, but it is the manifestation of an individuality. Many are his superiors purely as painters. But souls cannot be compared and measured: they are incommensurable.

Courbet follows on Millet. Those mad on systematising have classed the two together as pioneers of Naturalism. What blindness to the essential! If anything does connect them—according to the Hegelian method—it is their very antithesis. Millet—let us think of the “Man with the Mattock,” “The Gleaners,” even “The Pig-Killing,” and the two pictures in the Century Exhibition: the field-labourer, who, his day’s work ended, is putting on his coat, and the mother feeding her little child with pap, as well as “The Angelus”—Millet indicates, in heavy painting and little-pleasing colours, in people whose coarse externals do not attract a spirituality that ennobles them and makes us forget their soil-stained smock-frocks and their hard features. Courbet, on the other hand, draws faultlessly, and is master of every knack of the trade; but, with his rich means, he never gets above the spiritual stage of photography, and he knows not how to open to us the smallest corner of the moral and spiritual being of his men and women.

But, strangely enough, this same Courbet, who never conceives human beings except as soulless forms, can put a soul into nature and her lower-conditioned life. His justly famed “Sea-Waves” breathes a dramatic will-power. His “Roes in the Wood” are spirited. Ancient, mysterious wisdom appears to possess even his trees. Animals and plants, sea and land, speak in Courbet; man alone is dumb. He is a pantheist who excludes only man from the All-Divine. That is pessimism rooted in the most profound unconsciousness, which hints at serious organic disturbance.

Rosa Bonheur, represented by a wonderful “Team of Oxen before a Hay Waggon,” is in this respect akin to Courbet. She, too, is an eloquent advocate of the beauty and profound feeling of the brute; but, more logical than Courbet, she confines herself to representing animals, and does not meddle with human beings. Man fails to interest her; she takes no heed of his indifferent appearance. The animal alone attracts her attention. A Rudyard Kipling of the brush, she has painted all her life the “Jungle-Book,” that tells of the wise and good and honest beasts, and the cunning men. Sir Edwin Landseer was also an animal-painter, but of quite another sort than Rosa Bonheur. When Landseer wanted to flatter the beasts, he gave them human qualities. Rosa Bonheur would have felt she was insulting her dear animals, if she had painted a picture like the “Diogenes” in the National Gallery in London. The humanising of animals seems to her like degrading their special animal beauty. Her love of animals was morbid; it was, however, a deep and powerful emotion that made of her a great artist.

Our wandering through the Century Exhibition led us finally past the great landscape-men, the founders of modern landscape-painting, to Manet and Monet, Renoir and Degas, with whom a new century of art begins. In a later section on the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum, I shall study closely the authors of the Open Air Movement. The fight against the children of classicism and romance was furious, and “free-light” was victorious in the degree in which it deserved victory. But even in those days of turmoil there were idyllists who remained undisturbed by the tumult, and did not notice it. Gustave Moreau painted his colour stories from a palette of gold and precious stones, from a palette of Limosin and the glass-painters of Gothic cathedrals, as if there had never existed an “Olympia” of Manet or a “Funeral Procession of Ornans,” of Courbet. The high importance of Moreau, to whom I return in a special study, lies in the fact that he teaches us the feebleness of all classification of art development into epochs. True artists are not subject to time, and move side by side without influencing reciprocally their orbits. They are not subject to Newton’s law of gravitation.

The Century Exhibition taught us something more. It sharpened our sight for distinguishing between the literary painters and the painters proper. The former, as a rule, find fame quicker than the latter, but their fame affects posterity as a bad jest. They are illustrators of the time, and what it brings, that is the worthless, art-destroying “actuality.” Every attempt to put painting at the service of contemporary thought, to demand of it philosophical collaboration in the development of political, moral, and social doctrines, is a sin against an art whose essence directs it to the eternal aspects of the phenomenal world. Only those are genuine painter temperaments which can follow reflectively the play of light on surfaces in motion, and tell us what feelings this play awakens in them. All symbolism, all allegory, all graphic accompaniment of poetry, is weak. Only what has been really seen has permanence, even if it is reproduced with little skill. You cannot paint from hearsay, only from the impressions which the eye takes in, and the soul delivers. It is astonishing that so primitive a biological truth should be so difficult to grasp.

VI

THE SCHOOL OF 1830

Thomy Thiéry was a rich man of the formerly French, but afterwards English, island of Mauritius, who lived and died in Paris, and left his art collection, consisting of paintings, Barye bronzes, and some Gobelins, to the Louvre. Thomy Thiéry was a man of a single passion and a single thought; he loved only the Barbizon School and some of its artistic contemporaries who, in his opinion, stood in an elective affinity to it; but he loved them with unshaken fidelity and constant self-sacrifice. And in contrast to other more eclectic amateurs, he did not perform his heroic deeds of an undaunted purchaser in auction rooms and art-shops, but carried his money to the studios of the living and struggling as long as he was able, and appeared on the market as an ordinary collector only when the brush had slipped from the hand of the creators. In this way his gallery got the warmth and unity of an organic being, and besides its beauty, gave joy through the idea that it was not the result of _parvenu_ vanity, or of that cruel fancy that takes satisfaction in a work without troubling about the originator, but that a grateful patronage, which not only wishes to purchase art treasures, but also to lighten and beautify the artist’s earthly pilgrimage, had created it. As a legacy to the Louvre, the collection has from a fraction become an integral section that methodically dovetails into its place in the frame of this incomparable museum, in which the history of art is made to live before our gaze in select examples. The management has added the pictures which it formerly possessed of Thomy Thiéry’s favourites, so that the three halls of the collection now afford a good survey of the fruitful movement, which, about 1830, took place in French painting, and diverted it from the degraded classicism then dominant into the path pursued at present.

The School of Barbizon! A convenient, but, for that very reason, a meaningless, expression. The men comprised in this commonplace designation have not much in common. In age not far apart, they were bound to each other by personal friendship, and partly inhabitants of that Fontainebleau wood, in which some of them experienced Nature’s revelation. They were, however, very different in temperament, genius, and impulse, and they strove for personal ideals with dissimilar modes of expression. Only one peculiarity belongs in like degree to all, viz., the burning longing with which they yearned to get out of the stupid hole-in-the-wall of the academic studio that had become to them a goal into freedom and life.

Without punning, the free air and freedom meant to them the same thing. Landscape furnished them with the means of renewing their acquaintance with Nature. Under a completely Faust-like impulse, they struggled out of the _atelier_, where, “in reek and decay, only the skeletons of brutes and dead men’s bones” surrounded them, “into the far country.” Their appearance about the time of the July Revolution was the Easter-morning walk after brooding in the Gothic studio.

The David tradition held painting in thrall. The master’s greatest pupil, Baron Gros, and, with him, the gifted Géricault, sought to overcome the stiff mummifiedness and dryness of forms, the staginess of subject of this art, which found its triumph in the “Rape of the Sabine Women” and the “Coronation at Notre Dame.” But Géricault, misjudged and undervalued, died early a conquered man, and Gros, going astray in uncertain sounding of himself, returned, after his short revolt, to the tin and paste formulary of his first epoch, recognised in alarm its hollowness, and, by voluntary death in the Seine, got rid of the pains of the sceptic who has lost his faith and his ideal. The then young generation, warned and shaken by the tragedy of this seeker who found nothing, broke with the dominant rule, and sat down at the feet of Nature, to learn from her.

The country is the great master-workshop. There Nature speaks her most eloquent language of form. There she finds the tones that awaken the loudest echo in the soul of the genuine born painter. The creation of a pictorial artist is, like each of the higher mental activities, very complicated; the most opposed organs of the brain have a variously graded and mixed share in it. The vivid reception and rendition of a phenomenon at rest, of the expressive line of one in motion, is an exercise of the motor centres. In the representation of man, or what pertains to man, which is, directly or indirectly, through the awakening of anthropomorphic ideas, to seize on our minds, trains of thought, reason, and judgment play a part by the side of the emotions growing out of the unconscious. But the real and essential element in painting is neither the motorial production of the drawing, nor the travail of thought in the composition, but is ever the giving of light and colour. Now what counts in landscape is the effect of light and colour. Here the painter stands before the magic changes of lights and the alluring colour-mysteries of Nature, which excite him most keenly; for they stimulate his optical centre, of which the extraordinary development and particular susceptibility of light is the psycho-physical basis and preliminary condition of the primitive, impulsive gift of painting. Ever when men of talent feel the stiffened traditions of the schools to be intolerable, and want to follow their own inward impulse, they flee to the country in order, in its free light, to wash themselves clean from the dust of the schools, and bathe into health their limbs, aching from constrained positions. There is profound instruction in the fact that to Giotto, in his effort completely to burst the fetters of Byzantinism, which his master, Cimabue, had already strongly shaken, it first occurred to introduce into his work the elements of landscape. His picture in the Louvre of St Francis of Assisi is a touchingly _naïve_ example of this.

It was Corot who first uttered in the French painting of the nineteenth century the creative words, “Let there be light.” Of course, he did not discover day, for there were masters before him in whose pictures the sun shone. We find in Ruysdael the keen, chilly clearness of a northern sky. Claude Lorrain gives warm, tender evening tones of the south, which have the effect of luxurious warm baths. From him, Turner directly traces his descent, who overheats Claude’s pleasant tepidity to a glow, and raises his gentle clearness to a blinding splendour of radiancy. But no one before Corot has understood, like him, how to fill pictures with such discreet yet penetrating, delicate yet glowing light. It is no melodramatic, no Bengal or concocted light, no light of strange, exceptional occasions, of confusing colours, no vulgar, pompous, excessively brilliant light, but a restfully even, inexhaustibly rich, cheerful light that fills the soul with joy and hope.