Part 8

Claude Monet, the classic of impressionism, is not to be reproached with any incapacity. His execution never betrays him. He says what he wants to say to the last dot on the “i,” and if what he has said fails to satisfy, it is not because he lacked words, but solely because he had no more to say. Monet is a tippler, a drunkard so far as light is concerned. He cannot pass by any lively brilliant illumination without turning in for a painting-bout. Form, however, is to him a matter of indifference; it has no physiognomy for him, nor does it arouse in him any association of ideas. He neglects it absolutely. He does not draw or compose. In his pictures everything is without form, as in nature herself, unless we regard her with pre-existing thoughts of arrangement and meaning—in short, under the optical and logical categories. But he has not his peer in arresting the fugitive magic of sportive rays, their motes, their refractions on surfaces of every kind, on fixed bodies, liquids, and gases. His “Railway Station,” with its wide opening towards the railway line, the bluish clouds of smoke and steam from the puffing locomotive transfused with light, the shimmering vapour under the framework of the iron roof, is unsurpassable as a rendering of absolutely meaningless effects of light. Pictures of this sort will become expressive only when the photography of natural colours is so perfected as to admit of instantaneous copies. Equally remarkable as painting, and more valuable as higher art, is his “Interior of a Room,” with a shadowy boy and plants in the foreground, and a shining floor flooded with blue from daylight pouring in like a cataract through the window in the background. More valuable artistically, because this interior of great elegance, this outline of a child, and this blue, fairy-tale tone of the flood of light, are capable of awakening mood, _i.e._, will have an effect not only on the senses but also on the soul; will stimulate not only the optic centres of perception, but also the higher centres of conception and judgment. “Breakfast in the Open Air,” and two landscapes and marine pieces, are painted after the same rule as the two panels I have described.

Gueuneutte’s “Morning Porridge” draws its inspiration from Raffaelli, Degas’s “Dancers and their Mothers” from Manet. I put Degas, however, above Manet, for he draws more lightly and smoothly than the latter, and when he has to depose to ugly reality under the witness’s oath of his naturalistic conscience, he does it, not in an angry and provoking way like Manet, but with the divine gift of humour.

Monet’s joy in light becomes with P. M. Renoir an affectation. He has not the simple love of truth of his comrade. He falls into exaggeration which betrays conscious purpose and straining after originality. His two “Young Girls” at a piano of the colour of cranberry syrup; his nude figure of a woman, on whose skin lights and shadows play so unfortunately that she looks as if beaten black and blue, in places even as if studded with the corpse-stains of putrescence in the second degree; the “Girl in the Swing,” and particularly the “Ball at the Moulin de la Galette,” seek rather to disconcert than to convince us by their unwonted tones. These pictures have historical importance as ancestors. From their jests of colour are descended the jokes of Besnard, from their rain of sunlight through shadowing foliage comes the piebaldness of a Zorn and particularly of a Max Lieberman, who make an eruption of yellow and reddish spots fall on their bodies. Renoir’s “Girl Reading” finally is a simple aberration. He who tolerates such stumps of hands in a picture that is not meant for a mere sketch is either without capacity or without conscience—the one as bad as the other.

Pissarro is the triumph of seeing without thought. He seizes all the marvels of transformation which the light of various periods of the year and hours of the day accomplishes on objects over which it skims, with the same certainty as Monet, but he imagines even less over it than does the latter. With him the impressions which he feels from the outer world do not generally pierce beyond the back of his eyes. He is a remarkable instance of the sharpest sight with the retina in conjunction with absolute soul-blindness.

The panegyrists of impressionism assert that it was not well represented in the Caillebotte collection. That is a pretext of perplexed swaggerers who can now be nailed fast, and who should in shame and confusion crowd here, where it is easy to test their wild exaggerations. Impressionism has never produced confessed more characteristic works than those gathered in the Caillebotte room. It has never been more straightforward than in Manet’s “Olympia” and Degas’s “Theatre Mothers,” never more bright than in Monet’s “Breakfast in the Open Air” and Pissarro’s landscape, never was it in a higher degree lightening-sight and instantaneous painting than in Monet’s “Railway Station.” Every verdict on impressionism based on this room is an adequately grounded verdict, against which the attempted higher appeal to I know not what unknown works must be rejected.

The painters who entered on the new movement are interesting as men, because they aimed at much, and at what was comparatively great. They are, from an artistic standpoint, uninteresting, because they achieved little. It is the old tragedy of the will, to which the strength plays traitor; of the mind, which subjectively and _in posse_ brings about the highest, but objectively produces nothing, because it fails in realisation. The Manets and Monets, the Renoirs and Pissarros, wanted to create a new art by returning to the old truth. It gives them a right to reckon themselves as belonging to the family of the illustrious heroes of the Renaissance, who emancipated themselves from the traditions of the Byzantine School, as the former did from the sham-classic rule of a Couture, a Cabanel, or a Baudry. The man affected by a Cimabue and a Giotto will not be unmoved in the presence of Manet and Monet, especially of Monet, for he performed a creative act. He said: “Let there be light,” and “there was light” in painting. The miracle of Genesis is still being wrought to-day, and only in Gustave Moreau and the Præ-Raphaelites has the Logos proved itself powerless.

After paying them this tribute of recognition we will also take leave of them. They have pointed out paths, but they have not walked in them. In place of intricate Chinese signs, they have invented a free, brilliantly progressive alphabet, but in this script they had nothing to say. Their art is merely optical—neither emotional nor ideal. They were commonplace—nay, to some extent—unbeautiful souls. That is why, despite their honest passion for truth, and despite their precious medium of sunshine, they have not been able to produce genuine art-work.

They have meanwhile not lived in vain. Their influence has been fruitful. At first it indeed generally did harm. All bunglers flew to imitating them, and the impudent rabble of both worlds alleged they understood their teaching thus: “Drawing is superstition, and the more repulsive a hide looks, so much more beautiful and especially more modern it is.” But after this scum of the artistic rabble those who had a vocation came over to the new movement, and showed what it could achieve in consecrated hands. With the open air Roll became the master he is; impressionism brought a Brangwyn to maturity; truth—the beautiful truth, not the repulsive, vulgar truth—found its triumphs in a Whistler and a Sargent. The weaknesses and mistakes of the forerunners have furnished despicable parasites with the transitory reputation, among the weak-minded, for genius, which will quickly disappear before the recognition of their wretchedness. Their lofty views, and, to some extent, the means of expression suggested by them, have, however, equipped men of illustrious talent, who permanently enrich mankind’s property in works of beauty.

ALFRED SISLEY

Alfred Sisley was one of the most renowned amongst that group of realists to which I alluded in my foregoing appreciation of the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum. He, too, like his companions—Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Renouard—was a rebel against traditions, and a preacher of new gospels. He also denied old idols with fine disdain, and preached doctrines that seemed to him to embrace in themselves the whole truth. He managed, indeed, to collect a few convinced disciples, but, on the other hand, hardly any congregation about his altar or pulpit; and this was due simply to the sobriety and uncongeniality of his dogmas, which failed to satisfy the cravings for æsthetic devotion of the faithful.

Sisley was a landscape painter. He was purely this, to the exclusion of every admixture. He never introduced a human figure, and, so far as I remember, only one of an animal, into his paintings. The only life that moved and stirred in them was that of atmosphere: the play of lights, of their refractions, of their coloured dust, of their vanishing in shadows and darkness of various depths. Even the vegetable world, though one of the most important elements in academical landscape painting, he treated slightingly. He had no respect for the attractive individuality of a tree. It interested him at most as an object in his field of view, which catches and diverts the beams of the sun in a particular way. He saw nothing of the marvels of colour and form of the minute life, that is displayed in a piece of turf, a bush, or underwood, and reveals to the thoughtful and experienced eye the whole nature-tragedy of the struggle for existence: the despairing striving in the various plants for air and light, or moisture and shade; the victorious domination of one or several species; the meek supplication for mercy of single scattered flowers or plants; the defeat and flight of families unable to maintain their position against superior antagonists; the intrusion of bold strangers demanding for themselves a place among the old settlers; the confederacies of friendly groups that reside together and trust each other; the single combats of enemies seeking to throttle and uproot one another. He who has never gazed deeply into nature perhaps regards all these pictures of combat and triumph as mere phrases, corresponding to nothing real. The biologist of plants knows better, to be sure, and many a landscape painter too; so did the first English Præ-Raphaelites especially. However unbearable their vagaries and perversions may be—on these I will not enter now—this one thing must be said in their praise: they understand and love plant-life. For them every grass and herb, to say nothing of those lords, the trees, has a physiognomy, a personal mystery, which they know how to unriddle, and reveal, or, at any rate, indicate. Of all this Sisley knows nothing. For him a grassy mead is a plain of colours with gradations, starred with varied patches; always a mere study of light and nothing else; never an expression of events of life.

Here lies the limitation of his capacity. In my book, “Paradoxes,” I have tried to classify painters according to the rank of that segment of the central nerve-system, in which their talent is rooted. By this method I arrived at a distinction between painters who feel joy only in colours and their harmonies, and others who, besides delighting in colour, often even without this, have a developed sense of the proportion of things in space, therefore, of forms, reciprocal distances, movements so far as these latter can be indicated by means of the painter’s fixed process: those, in short, who know how to elicit from visible phenomena an invisible, emotional significance, and to represent them so that they express, in a natural way, psychical processes and feelings, without becoming falsified through the intentional introduction of arbitrary features foreign to them. Now, Sisley is an instructive instance of those painters who are painters only through their retina and lowest centres of perception, viz., their feeling for colour, and the vivid sensation of enjoyment it affords them.

Sisley has the most delicate sense for the lightest gradations and depths of colour. If I may use an image from an adjacent intellectual domain, he does optically what an ear would do acoustically which was capable of feeling purely all the tones of a chromatic divided, perhaps, into sixty-fourths. This faculty gives him his rank as an artist, but it was also the torturing demon of his life; for he wanted to reproduce with equal clearness what he saw so distinctly. That is, however, impossible by the medium of oil-painting. Let it never be forgotten that the colours an artist uses are very different from the natural appearances which they wish to recall. All painting is a translation that falls short of the original text, and even the most refined palette only permits a vulgar groping after the subtle play of colour in the reality. It is sheer convention, to which our eyes are artificially trained, that we recognise in definite play of colours, human flesh, an evening sky, foliage, or mirroring water. In all cases we have, at most, approximations before us, and even a man’s countenance by Franz Hals reproduces the true coloration of the skin on a human face, as little as perhaps the well-known _scherzo_ in the second movement of the Pastoral reproduces the true note of the golden oriole. Sisley, overlooked, like the majority indeed of impressionists, and like many very juvenile stipplers and black and white artists, this technical main condition—if you like, this main defect—of all painting with media as at present known; and he obstinately insisted on overcoming a difficulty that is, as a matter of fact, insuperable. The whole labour of his life is a struggle with the resistance of matter, intensely pathetic, but, nevertheless, finally only irritating, because its utter hopelessness is admitted. He tries to square the circle, which, as may be proved to him, is not feasible, and he aimlessly dissipates his energies in this futile effort. He is bent on arresting the most fugitive vanishing, the gentlest swaying of a ray of light, and, as it were, the fourth decimal place of a fraction of colour, and on fixing it on the canvas. And as he cannot conjure forth this feat from his colour-tubes, in spite of the most learned and complicated mixing, he tries to reach his goal by newly invented tricks of the brush. Thus he gets to dotting and spotting. Innumerable minute touches with the brush are to leave behind a chaos of colour-dots, from which the eye may come to discern, or, at any rate, get an inkling of, the play of colour in the actual object. This method is extremely laborious and risky. It postulates great patience and ability to emphasise in the minute work the firm lines of the drawing. For if one loses sight of these lines, or cannot make them ring out clearly from the colour gamut disseminated equally over the whole canvas, the picture dissolves into a shapeless daub. Sisley himself is often wrecked on this rock. By his method, however, in a few happy moments, he obtains, to be sure, effects which would scarcely be deemed possible. Then we may enjoy in his pictures a real dance of sun-motes in transfulgent air.

A single picture of Sisley’s even the connoisseur easily passes by. It is insignificant. Even a whole row of pictures which represent different themes will hardly make a great impression. At most, certain delicacies of tone, a certain far-sighted clearness of atmosphere, make an impression. If, on the other hand, you see near one another panels which depict the same subjects at different hours of the day or seasons of the year, under different lights and conditions of weather, you grasp in astonishment the meaning of this artist. The subject is the same, but so altered as to be hardly recognisable. People marvel at the power with which Sisley can arrest strangely changing aspects, and gain some faint idea of the difficulty which the exposition of observations calls for, observations which are generally out of reach of any but the most acute feeling and the most painful attention. Sisley has openly admitted that his skill is unintelligible without the key afforded by comparison. That was why he exhibited, as a rule, at least two—usually many more—treatments of the same subject. Thus in the _Salon_ in the Champs de Mars in 1898, he showed a beach, “Lady’s Cove,” in two lights; and, in 1896, Moret Church, in transparent pale lilac just before sunset, and also in softly-veiled slate-grey in rainy weather. I remember a row of studies of the same village church, which ran through all the divisions of the spectrum, one after another, and, on each succeeding panel, was a revelation the more dazzling in proportion as one already knew its form in all its details. Sisley has hardly ever had his equal in transposing a piece into different keys.

Admiration for the almost morbidly exaggerated sensitiveness to the slightest differences in tones of colour, and sympathetic feeling for the artist’s despair at the inadequacy of a technique, gross, after all, as the medium of the most delicate intentions—these are the impressions which one feels at even the most friendly consideration of Sisley’s most successful works. Dreaming and longing, reminiscence and presentiment, on the other hand, they never inspire, for they are absolutely lacking in all psychic, emotional, and imaginative sense.

From the example of Sisley, we recognise the accuracy of the maxim which, when put nakedly, sounds almost provokingly paradoxical, and yet is literally correct, viz., that landscape painting, or, at any rate, a certain kind of landscape painting, is the most literary of all species of plastic art, the one from which the least is received, and into which the most is put. Landscape painting seems to reproduce nature herself, and therefore necessarily to be as objective as a land surveyor’s plan, or even as a photograph. It is, as a matter of fact, incomparably more subjective than portrait, historical, or _genre_ painting, for there is throughout, not nature over again, but the features of nature which have excited the attention of the painter, and aroused in him a mood. It therefore discloses to us, more than any other kind of painting, the soul of the painter, the peculiarity of his mode of feeling, the bent of his dreams, and the object of his longing. If every work of art is a confession on the part of the artist, landscape painting is a particularly complete and honest acknowledgment. It is a portrait of the artist, which he himself has painted, transcribing all the wrinkles of his soul.

Nature in herself is absolutely expressionless. The feeling of the person who contemplates her first adds expression, just as his senses translate the movements of the atmosphere and matter, which are, in themselves, devoid of colour and sound to the perceptible values of colours and tones. The contemplation of nature awakens in us associations of ideas, and these we project into nature. Therefore we find, again, in this latter the whole range of emotion and thought of our consciousness, and nature, therefore, influences every one who contemplates her correspondingly to his education and mental habits.

Landscape painting is, then, also a continuous illustration of the literature of its time. It is anti-classical in the Renaissance and Late Renaissance up to Poussin; Ossianic and Rousseauesque in the eighteenth century, and, in Corot, is Lamartinish. It would, of course, be going too far to point out here what the relations are between each individual great landscape painter and the writings of his contemporaries; and how certain notable exceptions from the rule of parallelism between landscape painting and the fashion of the day in literature—Salvator Rosa, Ruysdael, and Turner (just to mention only three)—are to be explained. It is, meanwhile, not to be disputed that the landscape painter approaches nature with a soul filled with the literary spirit of his time, and puts into her what he has retained from his reading. A painting, then, awakens also in the mind of the spectator an echo of all the poetic melodies that have enthralled him, and it is the soft echo of these thousands of poetic voices in our soul, to which we listen when we enjoy a landscape painting.

We listen, however, in vain before a picture of Sisley’s; all is still in our soul. This is because the painter has regarded nature from a wholly unliterary standpoint. She awakens in him no associations of ideas, therefore his pictures awaken none in us. He has seen the play of colour, found his delight in it, and has taken no further thought, but has merely striven to reproduce it accurately. We follow his efforts with curiosity, and approve the results if they are successful. But in this appraisement, humour and imaginative power have no part.

Is such landscape painting art, or a clever trick? The question is worth careful consideration.

CAMILLE PISSARRO

One of the most interesting artists in our times was this Pissarro, born at St Thomas in the Danish Antilles, though of a Dutch Jewish family of Spanish extraction settled in Curaçoa, who died in Paris in 1903 at the age of seventy-three. He was a born painter, of the class whose sense of form hardly exceeds the average, whose remarkably fine perception of colour, however, reacting very strongly on every optical irritation, makes the excitement of the retina the source for them of profound feelings of pleasure or the contrary, and fixes their idea and thought, to a certain extent polarises it according to colour.

It is sufficient to say few words as to his outer life. Impelled by his bent for painting, he came to Paris at the age of twenty, and had the good fortune to be taken as a pupil by old Corot. He saw Th. Rousseau and Millet working with his master, and he lived during the most susceptible years of youth amongst such originals, in the most glorious Barbizon period. His natural tendency directed him imperiously to landscape painting. This, then, is the substance of his whole life as an artist. Incited by Millet’s example, in his young days he put peasants in his fields and meadows, but they were always mere accessories in the landscape, and arrested the eye less than the ground and plants. He had then also sufficient knowledge of himself to abandon, at an early stage, human figures, for he realised that there was more life in the tiniest sod of his turf than in his conscientious but insignificant villagers. In the high school, in which it was his privilege to learn, he acquired that certainty and force which distinguished him up to his old age. When, however, he had mastered Corot’s brilliant technique and Rousseau’s draughtsmanship and composition, he ceased to be an imitative disciple, and with full deliberation, went his own ways, which for a time lay far from Corot’s goal, but at last, by a wonderfully circuitous route, brought him back to it once more. Not long did he try modestly and laudably, with a good young man’s carefully moderated works, in the _Salon_ for certificates of industry and good marks from the academical masters. At once he joined the hot-headed set; he exhibited, from 1864 onwards, only in the “Salon of the Rejected” and with the “Independents,” and became one of the most prominent men in the group of impressionists.