COROT

The sun sinks more and more behind the horizon. Bam! he throws his

last ray, a streak of gold and purple which fringes the flying

clouds. There, now it has entirely disappeared. Bien! bien! twilight

commences. Heavens, how charming it is! There is now in the sky only

the soft vaporous color of pale citron--the last reflection of the

sun which plunges into the dark blue of the night, going from green

tones to a pale turquoise of an unheard-of fineness and a fluid

delicacy quite indescribable.... The fields lose their color, the

trees form but gray or brown masses.... the dark waters reflect the

bland tones of the sky. We are losing sight of things--but one still

feels that everything is there--everything is vague, confused, and

Nature grows drowsy. The fresh evening air sighs among the leaves--

the birds, these voices of the flowers, are saying their evening

prayer.

--_Corot's Letter to Graham_

[Illustration: Corot]

Most young artists begin by working for microscopic effects, trying

to portray every detail, to see every leaf, stem and branch and

reveal them in the picture.

The ability to draw carefully and finish painstakingly is very

necessary, but the great artist must forget how to draw before he

paints a great picture; just as every strong writer must put the

grammar upon the shelf before he writes well. I once heard William

Dean Howells say that any good, bright High-School girl of sixteen

could pass a far better examination in rhetoric than he could--and

the admission did Mr. Howells no discredit.

"Would you advise me to take a course in elocution?" once asked a

young man with oratorical ambitions of Henry Ward Beecher.

"Yes, by all means. Study elocution very carefully, but you will

have to forget it all before you ever become an orator," was the

answer.

Corot began as a child by drawing very rude, crude, uncertain

pictures, just such pictures as any schoolboy can draw. Next he

began to "complete" his sketches, and work with infinite pains. If

he sketched a house he showed whether the roof was shingled or made

of straw or tile; his trees revealed the texture of the bark and

showed the shape of the leaf, and every flower contained its pistil

and stamens, and told the man knew his botany. Two of his pictures

done in Rome in his twenty-ninth year, "The Colosseum" and "The

Forum," now in the Louvre, are good pictures--complete in detail,

painstaking, accurate, hard and tight in technique. They are bomb-

proof--beyond criticism--absolutely safe. Have a care, Corot! Keep

where you are and you will become an irreproachable painter. That is

to say, you will paint just like a hundred other French painters.

There will be a market for your wares, the critics will approve, and

at the Salon your work will never be either enskyed nor consigned to

the catacombs. Society will court you, fair ladies will smile and

encourage. You will be a success; your name will be safely

pigeonholed among the unobjectionable ones, and before your wind-

combed shock of hair has turned to silver, you will be supplanted by

a new crop of fashion's favorites.

It is a fact worth noting that the two greatest landscape-painters

of all time were city-born and city-bred. Turner was born in London,

the son of a barber, and Fate held him so in leash that he never got

beyond the sound of Bow Bells until he was a man grown. Corot was

born in Paris, and his first outdoor sketch, made at twenty-two, was

done amidst the din and jostle of the quays of the Seine.

Five strong men made up the Barbizon School, and of these, three

were reared in Paris--Paris the frivolous, Paris the pleasure-

loving. Corot, Rousseau and Daubigny were children of the

Metropolis.

I state these facts in the interests of truth, and also to ease

conscience, for I am aware that I have glorified the country boy in

pages gone before, as if God were kind to him alone.

Turner made over a million dollars by the work of his hands

(reinforced by head and heart); and left a discard of nineteen

thousand sketches to the British Nation. Was ever such an example of

concentration, energy and industry known in the history of art?

Corot, six feet one, weight two hundred, ruddy, simple, guileless,

singing softly to himself as he walked, in peasant blouse, and

sabot-shod, used to come up to Paris, his birthplace, two or three

times a year, and the gamins would follow him on the streets, making

remarks irrelevant and comments uncomplimentary, just as they might

follow old Joshua Whitcomb on Broadway in New York.

British grandees often dress like farmers, for pride may manifest

itself in simplicity, but the disinterested pose of Camille Corot,

if pose it was, fitted him as the feathers fit a wild duck. If pose

is natural it surely is not pose: and Corot, the simplest man in the

world, was regarded by the many as a man of mannerisms. His work was

so quiet and modest that the art world refused to regard it

seriously. Corot was as unpretentious as Walt Whitman and just as

free from vanity.

During the War of the Rebellion, Whitman bankrupted himself in purse

and body by caring for the stricken soldiers. At the siege of Paris,

Corot could have kept outside the barriers, but safety for himself

he would not accept. He remained in the city, refused every comfort

that he could not divide with others, spent all the money he had in

caring for the wounded, nursed the sick by night and day, listened

to the confessions of the dying, and closed the eyes of the dead. To

everybody, especially the simple folk, the plain, the unpretentious,

the unknown, he was "Papa Corot," and everywhere did the stalwart

old man of seventy-five carry hope, good-cheer and a courage that

never faltered.

Corot, like Whitman, had the happiness to have no history.

Corot used paint just as if no one had ever painted before, and

Whitman wrote as if he were the first man who had ever expressed

himself in verse--precedent stood for naught. Each had all the time

there was; they were never in a hurry; they loafed and invited their

souls; they loved all women so well that they never could make

choice of one; both were ridiculed and hooted and misunderstood;

recognition came to neither until they were about to depart; and yet

in spite of the continual rejection of their work, and the stupidity

that would not see, and the ribaldry of those who could not

comprehend, they continued serenely on their way, unruffled, kind--

making no apologies nor explanations--unresentful, with malice

toward none, and charity for all.

The world is still divided as to whether Walt Whitman was simply a

coarse and careless writer, without either skill, style or insight;

or one with such a subtle, spiritual vision, such a penetration into

the heart of things, that few comparatively can follow him.

During forty years of Corot's career the critics said, when they

deigned to mention Corot at all, "There are two worlds, God's World

and Corot's World." He was regarded as a harmless lunatic, who saw

things differently from others, and so they indulged him, and at the

Salon hung his pictures in the "Catacombs" with many a sly joke at

his expense. The expression, "Corot Nature," is with us yet.

But now the idea has gradually gained ground that Camille Corot

looked for beauty and found it--that he painted what he saw, and

that he saw things that the average man, through incapacity, never

sees at all. Science has taught us that there are sounds so subtle

that our coarse senses can not recognize them, and there are

thousands of tints, combinations and variations in color that the

unaided or uneducated eye can not detect.

If Corot saw more than we, why denounce Corot? And so Corot has

gradually and very slowly come into recognition as one who had power

plus--it was we who were weak, we who were faulty, not he. The

stones that were cast at him have been gathered up and cemented into

a monument to his memory.

The father of Camille Corot was a peasant who drifted over to Paris

to make his fortune. He was active, acute, intelligent and

economical--and when a Frenchman is economical his economy is of a

kind that makes the Connecticut brand look like extravagance.

This young man became a clerk in a drygoods-store that had a

millinery attachment, as most French drygoods-stores have. He was

precise, accurate, had a fair education, and always wore a white

cravat. In the millinery department of this store was employed,

among many others, a Swiss girl who had come up to Paris on her own

account to get a knowledge of millinery and dressmaking. When this

was gained she intended to go back to Switzerland, the land of

liberty and Swiss cheese, and there live out her life in her native

village making finery for the villagers for a consideration.

She did not go back to Switzerland, because she very shortly married

the precise young drygoods-clerk who wore the white cravat.

The Swiss are the most competent people on this globe of ours, which

is round like an orange and slightly flattened at the poles. There

is less illiteracy, less pauperism, less drunkenness, more general

intelligence, more freedom in Switzerland than in any other country

on earth. This has been so for two hundred years: and the reason,

some say, is that she has no standing army and no navy. She is

surrounded by big nations that are so jealous of her that they will

not allow each other to molest her. She is not big enough to fight

them. Being too little to declare war, she makes a virtue of

necessity and so just minds her own business. That is the only way

an individual can succeed--mind your own business--and it is also

the best policy with a nation.

The way the Swiss think things out with their heads and materialize

them with their hands is very wonderful. In all the Swiss schools

the pupils draw, sew, carve wood and make things. Pestalozzi was

Swiss, and Froebel was more Swiss than German. Manual Training and

the Kindergarten are Swiss ideas. All of our progress in the line of

pedagogy that the years have brought has consisted in carrying

Kindergarten Ideas into the Little Red Schoolhouse, and elsewhere.

The world is debtor to the Swiss--the carmine of their ideas has

tinted the whole thought-fabric of civilization.

The Swiss know how.

Skilled workmen from Switzerland are in demand everywhere.

That Swiss girl in the Paris shop was a skilled needlewoman, and the

good taste and talent she showed in her work was a joy to her

employers. There are hints that they tried to discourage her

marriage with the clerk in the white cravat. What a loss to the art

world if they had succeeded! But love is stronger than business

ambition, and so the milliner married the young clerk, and they had

a very modest little nest to which they flew when the day's work was

done.

In a year a domestic emergency made it advisable for the young woman

to stay at home, but she kept right along with her sewing. Some of

the customers hunted her up and wanted her to do work for them.

When the stress of the little exigency was safely passed, the young

mother found she could make more by working at home for special

customers. A girl was hired to help her, then two--three.

The rooms downstairs were secured, and a show-window put in. This

was at the corner of the Rue du Bac and the Pont Royal, within sight

of the Louvre. It is an easy place to find, and you had better take

a look at the site the next time you are in Paris--it is sacred

soil.

Corot has told us much about his mother--a Frenchman is apt to

regard his father simply as a necessary though often inconvenient

appendage, possibly absorbing the idea from the maternal side of the

house--but his mother is his solace, comforter and friend. The

mother of Corot was intelligent, industrious, tactful; sturdy in

body and strong in mind.

In due course of time she built up a paying business, bought the

house in which they lived, and laid by a goodly dot for her son and

two daughters. And all the time Corot pere wore the white cravat, a

precise smile for customers and an austere look for his family. He

held his old position as floorwalker and gave respectability to his

good-wife's Millinery and Dressmaking Establishment.

The father's ambition for Camille was that he should become a model

floorwalker, treading in the father's footsteps; and so, while yet a

child, the boy was put to work in a drygoods-store, with the idea of

discipline strong in mind.

And for this discipline, in after-years Corot was grateful. It gave

him the habit of putting things away, keeping accurate accounts,

systematizing his work; and throughout his forty years or more of

artistic life, it was his proud boast that he reached his studio

every morning at three minutes before eight.

Young Corot's mother had quite a little skill as a draftsman. In her

business she drew designs for patterns, and if the prospective

customer lacked imagination, she could draw a sketch of the garment

as it would look when completed.

Savage tribes make pictures long before they acquire an alphabet; so

do all children make pictures before they learn to read. The

evolution of the child mirrors the evolution of the race. Camille

made pictures just as all boys do, and his mother encouraged him in

this, and supplied him copies.

When he was set to work in the drygoods-store he made sketches under

the counter and often ornamented bundles with needless hieroglyphics.

But these things did not necessarily mean that he was to be a great

artist--thousands of drygoods-clerks have sketched and been drygoods-

clerks to the end of their days. But good drygoods-clerks should not

sketch too much or too well, else they will not rise in their career

and some day have charge of a Department.

Camille Corot did not get along at haberdashery--his heart was not

in it. He was not quite so bad as a certain budding, artistic genius

I once knew, who clerked in a grocery-store, and when a woman came

in and ordered a dozen eggs and a half-bushel of potatoes, the

genius counted out a dozen potatoes, and sent the customer a half-

bushel of eggs.

Then there was that absent-minded young drug-clerk who, when a

stranger entered and inquired for the proprietor, answered, "He's

out just at present, but we have something that is just as good."

Corot hadn't the ability to make folks think they needed something

they did not want--they only got what they wanted, after much

careful diplomacy and insistence. These things were a great cross to

Corot pere, and the dulness of the boy made the good father grow old

before his time--so the father alleged. Were the woes of parents

written in books, the world would not be big enough to contain the

books. Camille Corot was a failure--he was big, fat, lazy, and

tantalizingly good-natured. He haunted the Louvre, and stood open-

mouthed before the pictures of Claude Lorraine until the attendants

requested him to move on. His mother knew something of art, and they

used to discuss all the new pictures together. The father protested:

he declared that the mother was encouraging the boy in his

vacillation and dreaminess.

Camille lost his position. His father got him another place, and

after a month they laid him off for two weeks, and then sent him a

note not to come back. He hung around home, played the violin, and

sang for his mother's sewing-girls while they worked. The girls all

loved him--if the mother went out and left him in charge of the

shop, he gave all hands a play-spell until it was time for Madame to

return. His good nature was invincible. He laughed at the bonnets in

the windows, slyly sketched the customers who came to try on the

frivolities, and even made irrelevant remarks to his mother about

the petite fortune she was deriving from catering to dead-serious

nabobs who discussed flounces, bows, stays, and beribboned gewgaws

as though they were Eternal Verities.

"Mamma is a sculptor who improves upon Nature," one day Camille said

to the girls." If a woman hasn't a good form Madame Corot can supply

her such amorous proportions that lovers will straightway fall at

her feet." But such jocular remarks were never made to the father--

in his presence Camille was subdued and suspiciously respectful. The

father had "disciplined" him--but had done nothing else.

Camille had a companion in Achille Michallon, son of the sculptor,

Claude Michallon. Young Michallon modeled in clay and painted fairly

well, and it was he who, no doubt, fired the mind of young Corot to

follow an artistic career, to which Corot the elder was very much

opposed.

So matters drifted and Camille Corot, aged twenty-six, was a flat

failure, just as he had been for ten years. He hadn't self-reliance

enough to push out for himself, nor enough will to swing his parents

into his way of thinking. He was as submissive as a child; and would

not and could not do anything until he had gotten permission--thus

much for discipline.

Finally, in desperation, his father said: "Camille, you are of an

age when you should be at the head of a business; but since you

refuse to avail yourself of your opportunities and become a

merchant, why, then, I'll settle upon you the sum of three hundred

dollars a year for life and you can follow your own inclinations.

But depend upon it, you shall have no more than I have named. I am

done--now go and do what you want."

The words are authentic, being taken down from Corot's own lips; and

they sound singularly like that remark made to Alfred Tennyson by

his grandfather, "Here is a guinea for your poem, and depend upon

it, this is the first and last money you will ever receive for

poetry."

Camille was so delighted to hear his father's decision that he burst

into tears and embraced the austere and stern-faced parent in the

white cravat.

Straightway he would begin his artistic career, and having so

announced his intention to the sewing-girls in an impromptu operatic

aria, he took easel and paints and went down on the towpath to paint

his first outdoor picture.

Soon the girls came trooping after, in order to see Monsieur Camille

at his work. One girl, Mademoiselle Rose, stayed longer than the

rest. Corot told of the incident in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight--a

lapse of thirty years--and added: "I have not married--Mademoiselle

Rose has not married--she is alive yet, and only last week was here

to see me. Ah! what changes have taken place--I have that first

picture I painted yet--it is the same picture and still shows the

hour and the season, but Mademoiselle Rose and I, where are we?"

Turner and Corot trace back to the same artistic ancestor. It was

Claude who first fired the heart of the barber's boy, and it was

Claude who diluted the zeal of Camille Corot for ribbons and

haberdashery.

Turner stipulated in his will that a certain picture of his should

hang on the walls of the National Gallery by the side of a "Claude

Lorraine"; and today in the Louvre you can see, side by side, a

"Corot" and a "Claude." These men are strangely akin; yet, so far as

I know, Corot never heard of Turner. However, he was powerfully

influenced by Constable, the English painter, who was of the same

age as Turner, and for a time, his one bitter rival.

Claude had been dead a hundred years before Constable, Turner or

Corot was born. But time is an illusion; all souls are of one age,

and in spirit these men were contemporaries and brothers. Claude,

Corot and Turner never married--they were wedded to art. Constable

ripened fast; he got his reward of golden guineas, and society

caught him in its silken mesh. Success came faster than he was able

to endure it, and he fell a victim to fatty degeneration of the

cerebrum, and died of an acute attack of self-complacency.

It was about the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty-two that Constable

gave an exhibition of his work in Paris--a somewhat daring thing for

an Englishman to do. Paris had then, and has yet, about the same

estimate of English art that the English have now of ours--although

it is quite in order to explain in parentheses that three Americans,

Whistler, Sargent and Abbey, have recently called a halt on English

ribaldry as applied to American artists.

But John Constable's exhibit in Paris met with favor--the work was

singularly like the work of Claude Lorraine, the critics said. And

it was, for Constable had copied Claude conscientiously. Corot saw

the Englishman's pictures, realized that they were just such

pictures as he would like to paint, and so fell down and worshiped

them. For a year he dropped Claude and painted just like Constable.

There was a time when Turner and Constable painted just alike, for

they had the same master; but there came a day when Turner shoved

out from shore, and no man since has been able to follow him.

And no one can copy Corot. The work that he did after he attained

freedom and swung away from Claude and Constable has an illusive,

intangible, subtle and spiritual quality that no imitator can ever

catch on his canvas. Corot could not even copy his own pictures--his

work is born of the spirit. His effects are something beyond skill

of hand, something beyond mere knowledge of technique. You can copy

a Claude and you can copy a Constable, for the pictures have well-

defined outline and the forms are tangible. Claude was the first

painter who showed the shimmering sunlight on the leaves, the

upturned foliage of the silver poplar, the yellow willows bending

beneath the breeze, the sweep of the clouds across the sky, the play

of the waves across the seashore, the glistening dewdrops on the

grass, the soft stealing mists of twilight.

Constable did all this, too, and he did it as well as Claude, but no

better. He never got beyond the stage of microscopic portrayal; if

he painted a dewdrop he painted it, and his blades of grass, swaying

lily-stems, and spider-webs are the genuine articles.

Corot painted in this minute way for many years, but gradually he

evolved a daring quality and gave us the effect of dewdrops, the

spider-threads, the foliage, the tall lilies, without painting them

at all--he gives you the feeling, that is all, stirs the imagination

until the beholder, if his heart be in tune, sees things that only

the spiritual eye beholds.

The pale, silvery tones of Corot, the shadowy boundaries that

separate the visible from the invisible, can never be imitated

without the Master's penetration into the heart of Nature. He knew

things he could never explain, and he held secrets he could not

impart. Before his pictures we can only stand silent--he disarms

criticism and strikes the quibbler dumb. Before a Corot you had

better give way, and let its beauty caress your soul. His colors are

thin and very simple--there is no challenge in his work, as there is

in the work of Turner. Greens and grays predominate, and the plain

drab tones are blithe, airy, gracious, graceful and piquant as a

beautiful young Quaker woman clothed in the garb of simplicity and

humility--but a woman still. Corot coquettes with color--with pale

lilac, silver gray, and diaphanous green. He poetizes everything he

touches--quiet ponds, clumps of bushes, whitewashed cottages, simple

swards, yellow cows, blowsy peasants, woodland openings, stretching

meadows and winding streams--they are all full of divine suggestion

and joyous expectancy. Something is just going to happen--somebody

is coming, some one we love--you can almost detect a faint perfume,

long remembered, never to be forgotten. A Corot is a tryst with all

that you most admire and love best--it speaks of youth, joyous,

hopeful, expectant youth. The flavor is Grecian, and if the Greeks

had left us any paintings they would all have been just like

Corot's.

The bubbling, boyish good-cheer that Corot possessed is well shown

in a letter he once wrote to Stevens Graham. This letter was

written, without doubt, in that fine intoxication which comes after

work well done; and no greater joy ever comes to a mortal in life

than this.

George Moore tells somewhere of catching Corot in one of these moods

of rapture: the Master was standing alone on a log in the woods,

like a dancing faun, leading an imaginary orchestra with silent but

tremendous gusto. At other times, when Corot captured certain

effects in a picture, he would rush across the fields to where there

was a peasant plowing, and seizing the astonished man, would lead

him over and stand him before the canvas crying: "Look at that! Ah,

now, look at that! What did I tell you! You thought I never could

catch it--Oho, aha, ohe, tralala, la, la, la, loo!"

This willingness to let the unrestrained spirit romp was strong in

Corot--and it is to be recommended. How much finer it is to go out

into the woods and lift up your voice in song, and be a child, than

to fight inclination and waste good God-given energy endeavoring to

be proper--whatever that may be!

Corot never wrote anything finer than that letter to his friend

Graham, and, like all really good things, it was written with no

weather-eye on futurity. The thought that it might be published

never came to him, for if it had, he would probably have produced

something not worth publishing. It was scribbled off with a pencil,

hot from the heart, out of doors, immediately after having done a

particularly choice bit of work. Every one who writes of Corot

quotes this letter, and there are various translations of it. It can

not be translated literally, because the language in which it was

written is effervescent, flashing, in motion like a cascade. It

defies all grammar, forgets rhetoric, and simply makes you feel. I

have just as good a right to translate this letter as anybody, and

while I will add nothing that the spirit of the text does not

justify, I will omit a few things, and follow my own taste in the

matter of paragraphing.

So here is the letter:

A landscapist's day is divine. You are jealous of the moments, and

so are up at three o'clock--long before the sun sets you the

example.

You go out into the silence and sit under a tree, and watch and

watch and wait and wait.

It is very dark--the nightingales have gone to bed, all the

mysterious noises of night's forenoon have ceased--the crickets are

asleep, the tree-toad has found a nest--even the stars have slunk

away.

You wait.

There is scarcely anything to be seen at first--only dark, spectral

shapes that stand out against the blue-black of the sky.

Nature is behind a veil, upon which some masses of form are vaguely

sketched. The damp, sweet smell of the incense of Spring is in the

air--you breathe deeply--a sense of religious emotion sweeps over

you--you close your eyes an instant in a prayer of thankfulness that

you are alive.

You do not keep your eyes closed long, though--something is about to

happen--you grow expectant, you wait, you listen, you hold your

breath--everything trembles with a delight that is half-pain, under

the invigorating caress of the coming day.

You breathe fast, and then you hold your breath and listen.

You wait.

You peer.

You listen.

Bing! A ray of pale yellow light shoots from horizon to zenith. The

dawn does not come all at once: it steals upon you by leaps and

subtle strides like deploying pickets.

Bing! Another ray, and the first one is suffusing itself across an

arc of the purple sky.

Bing, Bing! The east is all aglow.

The little flowers at your feet are waking in joyful mood.

The chirrup of birds is heard. How they do sing! When did they

begin? You forgot them in watching the rays of light.

The flowers are each one drinking its drop of quivering dew.

The leaves feel the cool breath of the morning, and are moving to

and fro in the invigorating air.

The flowers are saying their morning prayers, accompanied by the

matin-song of the birds.

Amoretti, with gauzy wings, are perching on the tall blades of grass

that spring from the meadows, and the tall stems of the poppies and

field-lilies are swaying, swaying, swaying a minuet motion fanned by

the kiss of the gentle breeze.

Oh, how beautiful it all is! How good God is to send it! How

beautiful! how beautiful!

But merciful easel! I am forgetting to paint--this exhibition is for

me, and I'm failing to improve it. My palette--the brushes--there!

there!

We can see nothing--but you feel the landscape is there--quick now,

a cottage away over yonder is pushing out of the white mist. To

thine easel--go!

Oh! it's all there behind the translucent gauze--I know it--I know

it--I know it!

Now the white mist lifts like a curtain--it rises and rises and

rises.

Bam! the sun is risen.

I see the river, like a stretch of silver ribbon; it weaves in and

out and stretches away, away, away.

The masses of the trees, of the meads, the meadows--the poplars, the

leaning willows, are all revealed by the mist that is reeling and

rolling up the hillside.