Part 7

Corot’s light sheds its rays from a hopeful soul. It is luminous optimism in visible form. Some years ago, a Corot Exhibition took place in the Galliera Museum, and those who arranged it contrived to collect about the whole of the master’s life-work. I looked attentively at one point: it contained hardly a single evening, not a single autumn note or muttering of a storm, but only morning and spring and blue sky. That is characteristic of this child of the sun. In Corot the elements of beauty are nearly always the same: pleasant hill-countries, winding paths that lead to weird distances and invite our yearning to fare thither; at a curve of the road gleaming water mirroring silver cloudlets; in the foreground delicately-leaved trees; around and over everything the wondrous air thrilling with light, animated with a thin haze of mist, in which, bewitched by the feeling of spring, by an association of ideas, we fancy we can hear the soft bell-notes of invisible church towers, the twitter of pairing birds engaged in building their nests, and the buzz of early beetles. Some of the Corots in the Thiéry rooms, _e.g._, the view of the Coliseum, are youthful productions, and do not yet show the dreamily soft, as it were, inspired style and silver glow of his maturity. They are still somewhat dry and hard, yet, even in these more prosaic pictures, the heart-quickening light falls from heaven—Corot’s incomparable strength.

Corot did not belong to the forestmen of Barbizon, but he was the founder of their religion of light. Th. Rousseau shares with him the silkiness, and approaches him in the down-like delicacy of his young foliage. Daubigny has more temperament; he is sturdier, more manly, perhaps I should say: more like a peasant. What raises him to the rank of master is the depth of his pictures, and his gift of working out his subjects in almost stereoscopic relief, in all planes—in the fore-, middle-, and background. His “Skiff” is, therefore, an excellent example. The mast of the vessel stands absolutely free. We see how air is encompassing it on all sides. Dupré shares in equal degree the praise of his two friends. That is not quite just, for he has by no means so much personality as they. He does not feel originally, but imitatively. Nature moves him first through the eyes of his companions in art. He imitates alternately the softness of Corot’s foliage and his silvery mistiness, Rousseau’s smoothness and insinuating harmony of colour, and Daubigny’s tree-poetry, but I look in vain for the feature that distinguishes him from the others.

The delicate, and at the same time reverential love with which the Barbizon-men treat the individual tree, Troyon expends on domestic animals. As to the former the tree, so long as it does not melt in the haze of distance, is never merely part of the scheme, but a distinct, living being, possessing a physiognomy of its own, of which they render a strongly individualised likeness; so the latter regards animals with the understanding of a shepherd, who is known to recognise by their countenances all the sheep of a numerous flock. He will correctly depict the physiognomy of animals, without any propensity to giving them the look of human beings, through which animal painters only too easily become, without intending it, comic.

Millet is the continuation and consummation of the great landscape painters of 1830. We are not conscious of this if we regard him only by himself; but it is at once forced on us if we see him in the Thiéry Collection in connection with his comrades. Millet is also, fundamentally, a landscape painter, only his landscapes are animated by men; but not by men who are accessories, as is the case with Corot, but by men who are a part of the landscape, its most important and essential part, precisely as the trees and clouds are, but more dignified and spiritual than trees or clouds. With him man grows together with his rural environment, is himself a bit of nature in the midst of nature, and it is not easy to decide whether he is degrading man, or is elevating the earth with all that on it creeps and flies, when he puts them on the same level. Millet discerns in nature an all-living element that can take manifold bodily forms and be expressed in a variety of ways, but is one and the same in all different forms. This grand pantheistic feature uplifts his pictures from _genre_ to high, spiritual art. And since nature is never comic, so Millet’s peasants—themselves a bit of nature—never affect us comically, but always pathetically, even when they are as sturdy, clumsy, and simple as David Teniers’s boors. In one picture in the collection, “Maternal Foresight,” Millet has apparently a humorous intention: a peasant woman is assisting her very small youngster at the doorstep of her house in a little necessity. Even here I cannot find anything to laugh at, unless from kindly sympathy for the hop-o’-my-thumb and his tender mother. It is just a glance at life, and at such no one who feels a reverence for the sanctity of life ever laughs.

The devotees of the great Pan—Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny, Millet, and their followers of the second rank, gain in significance side by side. Their contemporary, Delacroix, loses beside them. What I felt at the Century Exhibition of French art, I feel even more strongly in the Thiéry rooms at the Louvre. I am afraid Delacroix is one whose trial must be revised. Perhaps we shall then be obliged to confirm the unfavourable verdict that the adherents of the Classical movement passed on him at his appearance, although on quite different grounds.

Delacroix was not in love with life; he did not seek and find nature; he followed in her footsteps only in books. He was essentially an illustrator; apart from Victor Hugo he is not to be thought of. The Romantics performed a duty of gratitude when, with fanatical violence, they carried him triumphantly through his detractors. He is their henchman with the brush; he fights with them and for them. They only act according to the rules of chivalry when they protect him. His magic colouring is not to be contested, although it is often gaudy and theatrical. But out of his “Hamlet with the Gravediggers,” his “Medea,” his “Bride of Abydos,” his “Abduction of Rebecca” (“Ivanhoe”), a dreary waste stares us in the face, which would be hardly bearable if we did not happen to know the poems from which Delacroix drew his subjects. We must put life into his dead pictures by what we remember of our reading. Delacroix stops at the externals. We have to add soul and passion.

After the men of 1830 came, on the one side, the neat painters of the Empire, of whom Meissonier is the best type; on the other, the naturalists with Courbet, the impressionists with Manet and Monet; and so the development went on to the confused struggles of this moment. That period of the July Revolution was felt by its contemporaries as an age of storm and stress in art. On us later-born children it has the effect of halcyon days, the full, rapturous life and sunny joys of which the present generation longs for in vain.

VII

THE TRIUMPH OF A REVOLUTION

THE REALISTS

In the last years of the Empire and the first of the Republic, great things occurred on the sacred hill of Montmartre, on the summit of which the Church of the Sacred Heart had not yet supplanted the Muses and Graces. A group of painters, diminishing in number, yet brave as lions, and pugnacious, arose in defence and attack against the official art of the _Académie_, the _École des Beaux Arts_, and the _Salon_, which was still an institution of the State. Their palette was a battle-shield, their brush a lethal weapon for cutting and thrusting, their easel a barricade. Uproar was what they painted, and plunder and carnage were the subjects of their conversation in endless beer and tobacco sessions. They wanted to massacre the old idols in oil-painting, and the tyrants of the plastic arts now become twaddlers. No more painting by tinker, plumber, or chimney-sweep! No soot in place of air! No Dutch dolls in tin armour, with volunteer firemen’s brass helmets on their gingerbread heads! On the contrary, an honest rendering of phenomena of light and colour from actual observation, sincerity, open air, and impression.

The first to gather with fury and wild gesticulation around the daring preachers of the new gospel were literary men and journalists. They did not understand anything about painting, and would not have been capable of distinguishing a varnished oleograph for a cab-drivers’ public house from a real Leonardo; whether a picture was blackened or saturated by sunlight, whether a human figure was clumsily conventional or felt and understood with truth to nature, that was to them quite as indifferent as the colour of the Empress of China’s dressing-gown. They had, however, the feeling that this movement in art was, in some way or other, connected with thought of general subversion, and attacked the government. They thought they heard the naked women in Eduard Manet’s “Down with Napoleon” shriek. The gleaming, noonday lights of Claude Monet seemed to them a cry for vengeance for the _coup d’état_. They understood Pissarro’s landscapes as illustrating Victor Hugo’s _Châtiments_, and Renoir’s dancing _grisettes_ clearly pronounced a crushing verdict on the Mexican Expedition. All the enemies of the Empire regarded open air as an item of their political programme. To be a true republican one must swear allegiance to realism. Thus Gambetta and Zola became fanatics of the new movement, not on æsthetic principles—such did not exist for either—but from a tendency to opposition.

We should be wrong to laugh at a Radical mob orator and an anarchist novelist being fervent advocates of a school of painting from party interests. It arises out of a quite correct feeling. “All is in all.” A close relationship unites all the phenomena of one time, and the most opposed forms may express a single fundamental mood. About 1868 realism meant quite as much a revolt against a bit of authority as republicanism did. Were not a luxuriant beard and a soft hat in 1848 proof positive of revolutionary sentiments? And about 1895 were not a tail-coat and a flowing neck-tie the acknowledgment of belief in blank verse and Maeterlinck?

From the first moment, then, realism had the honours of the opposition press and the support of those politicians, the majority of whom, later on, were to play the principal parts in the revolt of the Commune. The artists, to be sure, despised it at first, as long as it gained no _Salon_ distinctions and had no market. For a long time—for some decades—it had none. The public regarded the works of the new movement only as expressions of unconscious or intentional artistic humour. It laughed at them as it did at the saucy caricatures in the comic papers. There was perhaps only one individual who, a generation ago, took the Manets and Monets, the Renoirs and Pissarros seriously, and was prepared to manifest his belief in them by ready money—the only genuine martyrdom in our days—and this seer, prophet, and confessor was Caillebotte. He bought their pictures; not at a big price, it is true, for we must not expect the superhuman from mere mortals, but he bought them; he poured out his red gold for them, and this sacrifice probably preserved the life of realism, or, at any rate, of its teachers.

Caillebotte himself painted, but only for himself, and that was praiseworthy; but what was more important, he had acquired a handsome fortune by commerce, and spent the major portion of his fine income on open-air pictures. He did not exhaust his enthusiasm by that. When he died, he bequeathed the most striking pieces—“the pearls,” he called them—of his collection to the French State, on the condition that it left them together and accommodated them with a room in a Paris museum.

The Department of Fine Arts at first made difficulties; but finally, it resolved to accept the bequest. The Luxembourg Museum was enlarged by an additional building, and a small room in the new wing now accommodates the pictures left by Caillebotte, amongst which he also smuggled in two from his own brush. Thus the Revolutionaries attained the honours of a State museum. This triumph crowns an adventurous campaign which, after apparently fatal defeats at first, led from victory to victory, and from conquest to conquest. For a decade and a half the art of the Manets and Monets has dominated painting. Only in the works of a few obstinate old fogies is their spirit untraceable, at any rate on the Continent; for in England, to be sure, they have not succeeded in gaining the slightest influence on the Præ-Raphaelite movement. On the other hand, in countries without old and uninterrupted art traditions of their own, for which the history of painting begins at the moment in which they themselves first co-operate actively in it, therefore especially in North America and Scandinavia, there is, as a rule, no other art. When the painters in these countries awoke to art, that was the newest thing, _le dernier cri_ of realism, and they took to this latest fashion, just as, in new colonies, negro ladies, who yesterday knew no other aid to their dusky loveliness than an apron of plaited grass and a few glass beads, insist that their toilet, or, at any rate, portions of it, shall be quite up to date.

But the victory in lands barbaric so far as art is concerned, and the apotheosis in the Luxembourg Museum, do not spell the end of the battle or the conclusion of peace. Realism had even recently to fight hard battles of persecution. Whilst the crowd pressed into the Caillebotte room, which was opened in 1897, and, it must be admitted, gave expression to very mixed feelings, certain masters of the Art School, the narrow Academician, Gérôme, at their head, sent to the Minister concerned a fiercely angry warning against the desecration of the Museum’s hallowed rooms by the admission of rubbish which they characterised as “scandalous daubs,” the “offspring of utter incompetency or lunacy.”

The warning was wrongly timed. In 1897 it came too early, or too late. Too late, because Manet and Monet have apparently held their own against Gérôme and Gustave Moreau, and protests are futile against facts, or what are regarded as such at a given period. Too early, for people then still stood—and probably they stand now—at an insufficient distance from the movement now called impressionist to regard it from the perspective of history, and to assign it its proper place in the development of painting. That moment will come, most likely very soon. Then the protest of the Academicians will be superfluous, for even the æsthetic boors will repeat the verdict, then become a commonplace, that realism had its justification; that, besides transient harm, it was the author of permanent utility; and that, after a half-miraculous progress not uncommon in the history of art, the new men, who themselves could do little or nothing at all, taught more competent successors something precious.

The Caillebotte room will help to bring about a correct estimate of the revolutionists of “the ’sixties.” Gérôme ought to have rejoiced at the opening of that room, for it really, for the first time, sets a legend in the light of history. For twenty years everybody has thought he had a right to chatter about realism, though few have really seen the documentary monuments of it, because up to now they were never conveniently accessible as a whole. The prototypical works of the Naturalist School were mostly shown cursorily in rare and little noticed exhibitions. Then they hung in their authors’ studios, or in some private collections. He who had not lived in Paris for thirty years, and observed with close attention all the details of the art movement, or did not undertake troublesome journeys of exploration and discovery, could speak of them only from untrustworthy imitations, or from absolutely worthless hearsay. Now, at last, the material can be seen by all. Whoever is capable of receiving his own impressions can procure them.

Extravagant enthusiasm for the pioneers of the “Open Air” movement will now be quite as little excusable as its condemnation without mitigating circumstances. The former will, in face of the Caillebotte room, be recognised at the first glance as sheer weak-mindedness, the latter as lack of understanding. That is the great service of this room in the Museum: it adduces all that can be said on behalf of realism, and shows at the same time, inexorably, its limitations.

I should like beforehand to exclude Raffaelli from the painters that appear in this collection. He is not a labourer from the first hour. Even later on, when he joined the movement, he was no orthodox believer. People, from their superficial knowledge, jumbled him up with the realists, because he was at first always, as the latter were often, a pessimistic confessor of the truth. His peculiar temperament decided his choice of sad subjects. In his outlook on life he was wont to dwell, with self-torturing choice, on depressing sights: on the sick in lazar-houses; on the homeless tramps in the moats about the Paris forts; on poor, human wrecks that float through the street-current of the great city. He told the story of these men with heart-breaking accuracy. He depicted them in mean, miserable, mud-tints; in the dust-grey of unswept, suburban streets; the sickly lime-white and dung-brown of neglected house-walls; the washed-out greenish-blue of worn-out cotton blouses. In this mood was painted his “Convalescents in the Hospital Yard,” with its livid faces beneath the white skull-caps, and emaciated bodies in blue dressing-gowns, on the dank, moss-covered stone benches, in front of the sullen lazar-house. This picture, like all of Raffaelli’s, makes up for the unpleasantness of its story by the severe honesty of its drawing; and in the street picture, “Behind Notre Dame,” the astonishingly effective employment of the gay red kerchief of a workwoman in the foreground, amidst the subdued tones of a murky Paris day in uncertain weather, shows what a clever and faithful colourist this painter is, who so long painted obstinately from a degraded palette. Nowadays, he has, in the main, overcome his depression of spirits, and in his soul a bright sunshine laughs, the rays of which are discernible in all his later works.

The real originator of the new tendency was Eduard Manet. Of his three pictures in the Caillebotte room, one, the “Olympia,” is a masterpiece. It had already long been the property of the Luxembourg collection, and amongst the academic works of that Museum it seemed so strange that it forced expressions of repugnance from most visitors. After this comes an insipid brown lady in a mantilla, and the important “Balcony.” “Olympia” is a faded, decayed lady of the class which people in Paris are accustomed to describe as “the old guard.” The person, whose hair is dressed for a _soirée_, but who is entirely without clothing, lies outstretched on a bed, displaying her charms, which might convert Don Juan himself to the monastic rule of chastity. By the couch stands a pretty negress, busied with her mistress. The “Balcony” shows two ladies with a gentleman friend, and a man-servant in the background. The two pictures display Manet’s purpose and method. There is nothing of impressionism and open air to be remarked in the “Olympia.” The scene is a closed room filled with diffused rays of chamber-light. The figures of the two women are accurately painted, indeed in a painfully and curiously dry style. In vain would one look for the smartness and bold dashing on of colour that are now held to be the characteristics of impressionism. It is all painfully and laboriously measured, without swing or freedom, without mastery over the model or the tone. The picture is revolutionary only in its straightforwardness. When it appeared, the academic masters painted prettily. When they had to represent nudity, they painted a sort of conventional rose-coloured jelly, without bones or physiognomy, smooth, ordinary, and superficially pleasing as a china doll, inartistic, and unspeakably tedious. In his “Olympia,” Manet rebelled against this prettiness in painting that so falsifies nature. He chose the most repulsive model he could find, and reproduced it with literal exactness in all its repulsive truth. He showed that there is female flesh not altogether too old that is not composed of snow and rose leaves. He taught his truth brutally and unwisely, with churlish violation of good taste and gallantry, but with ardour and conviction. The “Balcony” already announces the joyous tidings of open air. The two women are bathed in full daylight, which cruelly misuses their faces. Here, too, Manet wears the blinkers that narrow his artistic horizon. He wishes to oppose sunny brightness to the brown broth which was given out in the masters’ studios as the only colour whereby one could find salvation. He therefore lavishes his light, which overcomes and disperses the darkness; but he forgets that sunshine influences local colours; that it gives them various effects, according to their illuminative power; that it envelops and blends them, however opposite they may be, in one single underlying harmony of silver or gold tone, and with no more misgiving than a saucy child, he lays on the canvas the true colours of things unaltered and unbalanced. I do not doubt that the grey-green of the window-shutters and the arsenical green of the obliquely crossed iron bars of the balcony are painted with the very trade colours which the house-painters actually use for these objects. Of course, this truth in detail produces the greatest artistic untruth in the whole, and the picture that was to be the Whitsun sermon of holy “Open Air,” becomes, through Manet’s inadequacy, a speech for the prosecution of the sun.