That beautiful phrase of the poet on his crucified hero--_I never saw a
tree, before this, enabled to sustain all that was generous_--has an
oddly close parallel, which I am tempted to record here: a phrase, not
less beautiful, used by a modern Frenchman, also of a dead man and a
tree. It occurs in a letter written by François Bonvin on the death of
his brother, Léon, the painter of flowers. Léon Bonvin's work is little
known and there is little of it, but those who possess examples treasure
them like black pearls. François Bonvin, who is represented in the
National Gallery, in the modern French and Dutch room, by a scene of
cattle painted with great decision and confidence and breadth, and who
died in 1888, was the son of a policeman at Vaugiraud, on the outskirts
of Paris: an old soldier who divided his time between protecting the
property of the market gardeners and constructing rockeries for poor
people's windows. Another, and the youngest son, was Léon, who after a
shy and lonely boyhood and youth, under the tyranny of his father, which
was mitigated by rambles in the neighbouring forest of Meudon, gathering
flowers and painting them under his brother's encouragement with a
felicity and fidelity that have not been surpassed, fell, when still
quite young, into the hands of a shrewish vulgar wife, and with her
opened a tavern. No couple could be more ill-assorted than this gentle
creature, full of poetry and feeling, whose one ambition was to set
exquisitely on paper the blossoms which gave him pleasure, and the
noisy, bustling, angry woman whom he had married.
The union and the commercial venture were alike disastrous; unhappiness
was accompanied by poverty, and after a short period of depression the
unfortunate artist, early one morning, in his thirty-third year,
wandered into the forest of Meudon, where the world had once spread so
happily before his eyes, and hanged himself.
All this happened in the middle years of the last century, when the same
revival of nature-worship was inspiring painters in France as had, fifty
years earlier, flushed Wordsworth's poetry, and such famous and more
fortunate contemporaries of Léon Bonvin as Corot and Rousseau and Millet
and Daubigny and Jacque and Dupré were painting in the forest of
Fontainebleau. Theirs to succeed; poor Léon found life too hard, and was
dead when still far from his prime.
And what of the notable phrase? It is one that I know I shall never
forget, one that will remain indissolubly linked to the name of Bonvin,
whether it is Léon who inspired it or François who penned it and who had
been so useful in providing his brother with the materials for his one
absorbing pleasure and had always exhorted him to "do everything from
nature." Writing to some one of influence in Paris, François told the
story of his brother's death. In a postscript he added the information
that the weight of Léon's body had broken a branch of the tree. Then
came the words: "This is the only damage he ever did."
Could there be a more beautiful epitaph or a more poignant commentary on
a world askew?