Woman's nature is more facile and fluent than man's. Women do things
more easily than men, but they do not penetrate below the surface, and
if they attempt to do so the attempt is but a clumsy masquerade in
unbecoming costume. In their own costume they have succeeded as
queens, courtesans, and actresses, but in the higher arts, in
painting, in music, and literature, their achievements are slight
indeed--best when confined to the arrangements of themes invented by
men--amiable transpositions suitable to boudoirs and fans.
I have heard that some women hold that the mission of their sex
extends beyond the boudoir and the nursery. It is certainly not within
my province to discuss so important a question, but I think it is
clear that all that is best in woman's art is done within the limits I
have mentioned. This conclusion is well-nigh forced upon us when we
consider what would mean the withdrawal of all that women have done in
art. The world would certainly be the poorer by some half-dozen
charming novels, by a few charming poems and sketches in oil and
water-colour; but it cannot be maintained, at least not seriously,
that if these charming triflings were withdrawn there would remain any
gap in the world's art to be filled up. Women have created nothing,
they have carried the art of men across their fans charmingly, with
exquisite taste, delicacy, and subtlety of feeling, and they have
hideously and most mournfully parodied the art of men. George Eliot is
one in whom sex seems to have hesitated, and this unfortunate
hesitation was afterwards intensified by unhappy circumstances. She
was one of those women who so entirely mistook her vocation as to
attempt to think, and really if she had assumed the dress and the
duties of a policeman, her failure could hardly have been more
complete. Jane Austen, on the contrary, adventured in no such dismal
masquerade; she was a nice maiden lady, gifted with a bright clear
intelligence, diversified with the charms of light wit and fancy, and
as she was content to be in art what she was in nature, her books
live, while those of her ponderous rival are being very rapidly
forgotten. "Romola" and "Daniel Deronda" are dead beyond hope of
resurrection; "The Mill on the Floss", being more feminine, still
lives, even though its destiny is to be forgotten when "Pride and
Prejudice" is remembered.
Sex is as important an element in a work of art as it is in life; all
art that lives is full of sex. There is sex in "Pride and Prejudice";
"Jane Eyre" and "Aurora Leigh" are full of sex; "Romola", "Daniel
Deronda", and "Adam Bede" are sexless, and therefore lifeless. There
is very little sex in George Sand's works, and they, too, have gone
the way of sexless things. When I say that all art that lives is full
of sex, I do not mean that the artist must have led a profligate life;
I mean, indeed, the very opposite. George Sand's life was notoriously
profligate, and her books tell the tale. I mean by sex that
concentrated essence of life which the great artist jealously reserves
for his art, and through which it pulsates. Shelley deserted his wife,
but his thoughts never wandered far from Mary. Dante, according to
recent discoveries, led a profligate life, while adoring Beatrice
through interminable cantos. So profligacy is clearly not the word I
want. I think that gallantry expresses my meaning better.
The great artist and Don Juan are irreparably antagonistic; one cannot
contain the other. Notwithstanding all the novels that have been
written to prove the contrary, it is certain that woman occupies but a
small place in the life of an artist. She is never more than a charm,
a relaxation, in his life; and even when he strains her to his bosom,
oceans are between them. Profligate, I am afraid, history proves the
artist sometimes to have been, but his profligacy is only ephemeral
and circumstantial; what is abiding in him is chastity of mind, though
not always of body; his whole mind is given to his art, and all vague
philanderings and sentimental musings are unknown to him; the women he
knows and perceives are only food for it, and have no share in his
mental life. And it is just because man can raise himself above the
sentimental cravings of natural affection that his art is so
infinitely higher than woman's art. "Man's love is from man's life a
thing apart"--you know the quotation from Byron, "Tis woman's whole
existence." The natural affections fill a woman's whole life, and her
art is only so much sighing and gossiping about them. Very delightful
and charming gossiping it often is--full of a sweetness and tenderness
which we could not well spare, but always without force or dignity.
In her art woman is always in evening dress: there are flowers in her
hair, and her fan waves to and fro, and she wishes to sigh in the ear
of him who sits beside her. Her mental nudeness is parallel with her
low bodice, it is that and nothing more. She will make no sacrifice
for her art; she will not tell the truth about herself as frankly as
Jean-Jacques, nor will she observe life from the outside with the
grave impersonal vision of Flaubert. In music women have done nothing,
and in painting their achievement has been almost as slight. It is
only in the inferior art--the art of acting--that women approach men.
In that art it is not certain that they do not stand even higher.
Whatever women have done in painting has been done in France. England
produces countless thousands of lady artists; twenty Englishwomen
paint for one Frenchwoman, but we have not yet succeeded in producing
two that compare with Madame Lebrun and Madame Berthe Morisot. The
only two Englishwomen who have in painting come prominently before the
public are Angelica Kauffman and Lady Butler. The first-named had the
good fortune to live in the great age, and though her work is
individually feeble, it is stamped with the charm of the tradition out
of which it grew and was fashioned. Moreover, she was content to
remain a woman in her art. She imitated Sir Joshua Reynolds to the
best of her ability, and did all in her power to induce him to marry
her. How she could have shown more wisdom it is difficult to see. Lady
Butler was not so fortunate, either in the date of her birth, in her
selection of a master, or her manner of imitating him. Angelica
imitated as a woman should. She carried the art of Sir Joshua across
her fan; she arranged and adorned it with ribbons and sighs, and was
content with such modest achievement.
Lady Butler, however, thought she could do more than to sentimentalise
with De Neuville's soldiers. She adopted his method, and from this
same standpoint tried to do better; her attitude towards him was the
same as Rosa Bonheur's towards Troyon; and the failure of Lady Butler
was even greater than Rosa Bonheur's. But perhaps the best instance I
could select to show how impossible it is for women to do more than to
accept the themes invented by men, and to decorate and arrange them
according to their pretty feminine fancies, is the collection of Lady
Waterford's drawings now on exhibition at Lady Brownlow's house in
Carlton House Terrace.
Lady Waterford for many years--for more than a quarter of a
century--has been spoken of as the one amateur of genius; and the
greatest artists vied with each other as to which should pay the most
extravagant homage to her talent. Mr. Watts seems to have distanced
all competitors in praise of her, for in a letter of his quoted in the
memoir prefixed to the catalogue, he says that she has exceeded all
the great Venetian masters. It was nice of Mr. Watts to write such a
letter; it was very foolish of Lady Brownlow to print it in the
catalogue, for it serves no purpose except to draw attention to the
obvious deficiencies of originality in Lady Waterford's drawings.
Nearly all of them are remarkable for facile grouping; and the colour
is rich, somewhat heavy, but generally harmonious; the drawing is
painfully conventional; it would be impossible to find a hand, an arm,
a face that has been tenderly observed and rendered with any personal
feeling or passion.
The cartoons are not better than any mediocre student of the
Beaux-Arts could do--insipid parodies of the Venetian--whom she
excels, according to Mr. Watts. When Lady Waterford attempted no more
than a decorative ring of children dancing in a richly coloured
landscape, or a group of harvesters seen against a rich decorative
sky, such a design as might be brought across a fan, her talent is
seen to best advantage; it is a fluent and facile talent, strangely
unoriginal, but always sustained by taste acquired by long study of
the Venetians, and by a superficial understanding of their genius.
Many times superior to Lady Waterford is Miss Armstrong--a lady in
whose drawings of children we perceive just that light tenderness and
fanciful imagination which is not of our sex. Perhaps memory betrays
me; it is a long while since I have seen Miss Armstrong's pastels, but
my impression is that Miss Armstrong stands easily at the head of
English lady artists--above Mrs. Swynnerton, whose resolute and
distinguished talent was never more abundantly and strikingly
manifested than in her picture entitled "Midsummer", now hanging in
the New Gallery. "Midsummer" is a fine piece of intellectual painting,
but it proceeds merely from the brain; there is hardly anything of the
painter's nature in it; there are no surprising admissions in it; the
painter never stood back abashed and asked herself if she should have
confessed so much, if she should have told the world so much of what
was passing in her intimate soul and flesh.
Impersonality in art really means mediocrity. If you have nothing to
tell about yourself, or if courage be lacking in you to tell the
truth, you are not an artist. Are women without souls, or is it that
they dare not reveal their souls unadorned with the laces and ribbons
of convention? Their memoirs are a tissue of lies, suppressions, and
half-truths. George Sand must fain suppress all mention of her Italian
journey with Musset, a true account of which would have been an
immortal story; but of hypocritical hare-hearted allusions Rousseau
and Casanova were not made; in their memoirs women never get further
than some slight fingering of laces; and in their novels they are too
subject to their own natures to attain the perfect and complete
realisation of self, which the so-called impersonal method alone
affords. Women astonish us as much by their want of originality as
they do by their extraordinary powers of assimilation. I am thinking
now of the ladies who marry painters, and who, after a few years of
married life, exhibit work identical in execution with that of their
illustrious husbands--Mrs. E. M. Ward, Madame Fantin-Latour, Mrs.
Swan, Mrs. Alma-Tadema. How interesting these households must be!
Immediately after breakfast husband and wife sit down at their easels.
"Let me mix a tone for you, dear," "I think I would put that up a
little higher," etc. In a word, what Manet used to call _la peinture à
quatre mains_.
Nevertheless, among these well-intentioned ladies we find one artist
of rare excellence--I mean Madame Lebrun. We all know her beautiful
portrait of a woman walking forward, her hands in a muff. Seeing the
engraving from a distance we might take it for a Romney; but when we
approach, the quality of the painting visible through the engraving
tells us that it belongs to the French school. In design the portrait
is strangely like a Romney; it is full of all that brightness and
grace, and that feminine refinement, which is a distinguishing
characteristic of his genius, and which was especially impressed on my
memory by the portrait of the lady in the white dress walking forward,
her hands in front of her, the slight fingers pressed one against the
other, exhibited this year in the exhibition of Old Masters in the
Academy.
But if we deny that the portrait of the lady with the muff affords
testimony as to the sex of the painter, we must admit that none but a
woman could have conceived the portrait which Madame Lebrun painted of
herself and her little daughter. The painting may be somewhat dry and
hard, it certainly betrays none of the fluid nervous tendernesses and
graces of the female temperament; but surely none but a woman and a
mother could have designed that original and expressive composition;
it was a mother who found instinctively that touching and expressive
movement--the mother's arms circled about her little daughter's
waist, the little girl leaning forward, her face resting on her
mother's shoulder. Never before did artist epitomise in a gesture all
the familiar affection and simple persuasive happiness of home; the
very atmosphere of an embrace is in this picture. And in this picture
the painter reveals herself to us in one of the intimate moments of
her daily life, the tender, wistful moment when a mother receives her
growing girl in her arms, the adolescent girl having run she knows not
why to her mother. These two portraits, both in the Louvre, are, I
regret to say, the only pictures of Madame Lebrun that I am acquainted
with. But I doubt if my admiration would be increased by a wider
knowledge of her work. She seems to have said everything she had to
say in these two pictures.
Madame Lebrun painted well, but she invented nothing, she failed to
make her own of any special manner of seeing and rendering things; she
failed to create a style. Only one woman did this, and that woman is
Madame Morisot, and her pictures are the only pictures painted by a
woman that could not be destroyed without creating a blank, a hiatus
in the history of art. True that the hiatus would be slight--
insignificant if you will--but the insignificant is sometimes
dear to us; and though nightingales, thrushes, and skylarks were to
sing in King's Bench Walk, I should miss the individual chirp of the
pretty sparrow.
Madame Morisot's note is perhaps as insignificant as a sparrow's, but
it is as unique and as individual a note. She has created a style, and
has done so by investing her art with all her femininity; her art is
no dull parody of ours: it is all womanhood--sweet and gracious,
tender and wistful womanhood. Her first pictures were painted under
the influence of Corot, and two of these early works were hung in the
exhibition of her works held the other day at Goupil's, Boulevard
Montmartre. The more important was, I remember, a view of Paris seen
from a suburb--a green railing and two loitering nursemaids in the
foreground, the middle of the picture filled with the city faintly
seen and faintly glittering in the hour of the sun's decline, between
four and six. It was no disagreeable or ridiculous parody of Corot; it
was Corot feminised, Corot reflected in a woman's soul, a woman's love
of man's genius, a lake-reflected moon. But Corot's influence did not
endure. Through her sister's marriage Madame Morisot came in contact
with Manet, and she was quick to recognise him as being the greatest
artist that France had produced since Delacroix.
Henceforth she never faltered in her allegiance to the genius of her
great brother-in-law. True, that she attempted no more than to carry
his art across her fan; but how adorably she did this! She got from
him that handling out of which the colour flows joyous and bright as
well-water, the handling that was necessary for the realisation of
that dream of hers, a light world afloat in an irradiation--light
trembling upon the shallows of artificial water, where swans and
aquatic birds are plunging, and light skiffs are moored; light turning
the summer trees to blue; light sleeping a soft and lucid sleep in the
underwoods; light illumining the green summer of leaves where the
diamond rain is still dripping; light transforming into jewellery the
happy flight of bees and butterflies. Her swans are not diagrams drawn
upon the water, their whiteness appears and disappears in the
trembling of the light; and the underwood, how warm and quiet it is,
and penetrated with the life of the summer; and the yellow-painted
skiff, how happy and how real! Colours, tints of faint green and mauve
passed lightly, a few branches indicated. Truly, the art of Manet
_transporté en éventail_.
A brush that writes rather than paints, that writes exquisite notes in
the sweet seduction of a perfect epistolary style, notes written in a
boudoir, notes of invitation, sometimes confessions of love, the whole
feminine heart trembling as a hurt bird trembles in a man's hand. And
here are yachts and blue water, the water full of the blueness of the
sky; and the confusion of masts and rigging is perfectly indicated
without tiresome explanation! The colour is deep and rich, for the
values have been truly observed; and the pink house on the left is an
exquisite note. No deep solutions, an art afloat and adrift upon the
canvas, as a woman's life floats on the surface of life. "My
sister-in-law would not have existed without me," I remember Manet
saying to me in one of the long days we spent together in the Rue
d'Amsterdam. True, indeed, that she would not have existed without
him; and yet she has something that he has not--the charm of an
exquisite feminine fancy, the charm of her sex. Madame Morisot is the
eighteenth century quick with the nineteenth; she is the nineteenth
turning her eyes regretfully looking back on the eighteenth.
Chaplin parodied the eighteenth century; in Madame Morisot something
of its gracious spirit naturally resides; she is eighteenth century
especially in her drawings; they are fluent and flowing; nowhere do we
detect a measurement taken, they are free of tricks--that is to say of
ignorance assuming airs of learning. That red chalk drawing of a naked
girl, how simple, loose, and unaffected, how purged of the odious
erudition of the modern studio. And her precious and natural
remembrance of the great century, with all its love of youth and the
beauties of youthful lines, is especially noticeable in the red chalk
drawing of the girl wearing a bonnet, the veil falling and hiding her
beautiful eyes. As I stood lost in admiration of this drawing, I heard
a rough voice behind me: "C'est bien beau, n'est pas?" It was Claude
Monet. "Yes, isn't it superb?" I answered. "I wonder how much they'll
sell it for." "I'll soon find out that," said Monet, and turning to
the attendant he asked the question.
"Pour vous, sept cents cinquante francs."
"C'est bien; il est à moi."
This anecdote will give a better idea of the value of Berthe Morisot
than seventy columns of mine or any other man's criticism.