Two dominant notes in my character--an original hatred of my native
country, and a brutal loathing of the religion I was brought up in. All
the aspects of my native country are violently disagreeable to me, and I
cannot think of the place I was born in without a sensation akin to
nausea. These feelings are inherent and inveterate in me. I am
instinctively averse from my own countrymen; they are at once remote and
repulsive; but with Frenchmen I am conscious of a sense of nearness; I
am one with them in their ideas and aspirations, and when I am with
them, I am alive with a keen and penetrating sense of intimacy. Shall I
explain this by atavism? Was there a French man or woman in my family
some half-dozen generations ago? I have not inquired. The English I
love, and with a love that is foolish--mad, limitless; I love them
better than the French, but I am not so near to them. Dear, sweet
Protestant England, the red tiles of the farmhouse, the elms, the great
hedgerows, and all the rich fields adorned with spreading trees, and
the weald and the wold, the very words are passionately beautiful
southern England, not the north,--there is something Celtic in the
north--southern England, with its quiet, steadfast faces--a smock frock
is to me one of the most delightful things in the world; it is so
absolutely English. The villages clustered round the greens, the spires
of the churches pointing between the elm trees.... This is congenial to
me; and this is Protestantism. England is Protestantism, Protestantism
is England. Protestantism is strong, clean, and westernly, Catholicism
is eunuch-like, dirty, and Oriental.... There is something even Chinese
about it. What made England great was Protestantism, and when she ceases
to be Protestant she will fall.... Look at the nations that have clung
to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brigands. The
Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs
limp in the incense silence of the Vatican. Let us be Protestant, and
revere Cromwell.
_Garçon, un bock_! I write to please myself, just as I order my dinner;
if my books sell I cannot help it--it is an accident.
But you live by writing.
Yes, but life is only an accident--art is eternal.
What I reproach Zola with is that he has no style; there is nothing you
won't find in Zola from Chateaubriand to the reporting in the _Figaro_.
He seeks immortality in an exact description of a linendraper's shop; if
the shop conferred immortality it should be upon the linendraper who
created the shop, and not on the novelist who described it.
And his last novel "l'Œuvre," how spun out, and for a franc a line in
the "Gil Blas." Not a single new or even exact observation. And that
terrible phrase repeated over and over again--"La Conquête de Paris."
What does it mean? I never knew anyone who thought of conquering Paris;
no one ever spoke of conquering Paris except, perhaps, two or three
provincials.
You must have rules in poetry, if it is only for the pleasure of
breaking them, just as you must have women dressed, if it is only for
the pleasure of undressing them.
* * * * *
Fancy, a banquet was given to Julien by his pupils! He made a speech in
favour of Lefebvre, and hoped that every one there would vote for
Lefebvre. Julien was very eloquent. He spoke of _Le grand art, le nu_,
and Lefebvre's unswerving fidelity to _le nu_...elegance, refinement, an
echo of ancient Greece: and then,--what do you think? when he had
exhausted all the reasons why the medal of honour should be accorded to
Lefebvre, he said, "I ask you to remember, gentlemen, that he has a wife
and eight children." Is it not monstrous?
But it is you who are monstrous, you who expect to fashion the whole
world in conformity with your æstheticisms...a vain dream, and if
realised it would result in an impossible world. A wife and children are
the basis of existence, and it is folly to cry out because an appeal to
such interests as these meet with response...it will be so till the
end of time.
And these great interests that are to continue to the end of time began
two years ago, when your pictures were not praised in the _Figaro_ as
much as you thought they should be.
Love--but not marriage. Marriage means a four-post bed and papa and
mamma between eleven and twelve. Love is aspiration: transparencies,
colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife--you know all about
her--who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and
her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream,
the _au delà_? But the women one has never seen before, that one will
never see again! The choice! the enervation of burning odours, the
baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark
with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and ruins, Spanish moonlight or
maybe Persepolis! The nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes--the whisper
of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal. This is love. There is
delusion, an _au delà_.
Good heavens! and the world still believes in education, in teaching
people the "grammar of art." Education should be confined to clerks, and
it drives even them to drink. Will the world learn that we never learn
anything that we did not know before? The artist, the poet, painter,
musician, and novelist go straight to the food they want, guided by an
unerring and ineffable instinct; to teach them is to destroy the nerve
of the artistic instinct. Art flees before the art school... "correct
drawing," "solid painting." Is it impossible to teach people, to force
it into their heads that there is no such thing as correct drawing, and
that if drawing were correct it would be wrong? Solid painting; good
heavens! Do they suppose that there is one sort of painting that is
better than all others, and that there is a receipt for making it as for
making chocolate! Art is not mathematics, it is individuality. It does
not matter how badly you paint, so long as you don't paint badly like
other people. Education destroys individuality. That great studio of
Julien's is a sphinx, and all the poor folk that go there for artistic
education are devoured. After two years they all paint and draw alike,
every one; that vile execution,--they call it execution,--_la pâte, la
peinture au premier coup_. I was over in England last year, and I saw
some portraits by a man called Richmond. They were horrible, but I liked
them because they weren't like painting. Stott and Sargent are clever
fellows enough; I like Stott the best. If they had remained at home and
hadn't been taught, they might have developed a personal art, but the
trail of the serpent is over all they do--that vile French painting,
_le morceau_, etc. Stott is getting over it by degrees. He exhibited a
nymph this year. I know what he meant; it was an interesting intention.
I liked his little landscapes better...simplified into nothing, into a
couple of primitive tints, wonderful clearness, light. But I doubt if he
will find a public to understand all that.
Democratic art! Art is the direct antithesis to democracy.... Athens! a
few thousand citizens who owned many thousand slaves, call that
democracy! No! what I am speaking of is modern democracy--the mass. The
mass can only appreciate simple and _naïve_ emotions, puerile
prettiness, above all conventionalities. See the Americans that come
over here; what do they admire? Is it Degas or Manet they admire? No,
Bouguereau and Lefebvre. What was most admired at the International
Exhibition?--The Dirty Boy. And if the medal of honour had been decided
by a _plébiscite_, the dirty boy would have had an overwhelming
majority. What is the literature of the people? The idiotic stories of
the _Petit Journal_. Don't talk of Shakespeare, Molière and the masters;
they are accepted on the authority of the centuries. If the people
could understand _Hamlet_, the people would not read the _Petit
Journal_; if the people could understand Michel Angelo, they would not
look at our Bouguereau or your Bouguereau, Sir F. Leighton. For the last
hundred years we have been going rapidly towards democracy, and what is
the result? The destruction of the handicrafts. That there are still
good pictures painted and good poems written proves nothing, there will
always be found men to sacrifice their lives for a picture or a poem.
But the decorative arts which are executed in collaboration, and depend
for support on the general taste of a large number, have ceased to
exist. Explain that if you can. I'll give you five thousand, ten
thousand francs to buy a beautiful clock that is not a copy and is not
ancient, and you can't do it. Such a thing does not exist. Look here, I
was going up the staircase of the Louvre the other day. They were
putting up a mosaic; it was horrible; every one knows it is horrible.
Well, I asked who had given the order for this mosaic, and I could not
find out; no one knew. An order is passed from bureau to bureau, and no
one is responsible; and it will be always so in a republic, and the more
republican you are the worse it will be.
The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the
plague that will sweep away and destroy civilisation; man will have to
rise against it sooner or later.... Capital, unpaid labour, wage-slaves,
and all the rest--stuff.... Look at these plates; they were painted by
machinery; they are abominable. Look at them. In old times plates were
painted by the hand, and the supply was necessarily limited to the
demand, and a china in which there was always something more or less
pretty, was turned out; but now thousands, millions of plates are made
more than we want, and there is a commercial crisis; the thing is
inevitable. I say the great and the reasonable revolution will be when
mankind rises in revolt, and smashes the machinery and restores the
handicrafts.
Goncourt is not an artist, notwithstanding all his affectation and
outcries; he is not an artist. _Il me fait l'effet_ of an old woman
shrieking after immortality and striving to beat down some fragment of
it with a broom. Once it was a duet, now it is a solo. They wrote
novels, history, plays, they collected _bric-à-brac_--they wrote about
their _bric-à-brac_; they painted in water-colours, they etched--they
wrote about their water-colours and etchings; they have made a will
settling that the _bric-à-brac_ is to be sold at their death, and the
proceeds applied to founding a prize for the best essay or novel, I
forget which it is. They wrote about the prize they are going to found;
they kept a diary, they wrote down everything they heard, felt, or saw,
_radotage de vieille femme_; nothing must escape, not the slightest
word; it might be that very word that might confer on them immortality;
everything they heard, or said, must be of value, of inestimable value.
A real artist does not trouble himself about immortality, about
everything he hears, feels and says; he treats ideas and sensations as
so much clay wherewith to create.
And then the famous collaboration; how it was talked about, written
about, prayed about; and when Jules died, what a subject for talk for
articles; it all went into pot. Hugo's vanity was Titanic, Goncourt's is
puerile.
And Daudet?
Oh, Daudet, _c'est de la bouillabaisse_.
Whistler, of all artists, is the least impressionist; the idea people
have of his being an impressionist only proves once again the absolute
inability of the public to understand the merits or the demerits of
artistic work. Whistler's art is classical; he thinks of nature, but he
does not see nature; he is guided by his mind, and not by his eyes; and
the best of it is he says so. He knows it well enough! Any one who knows
him must have heard him say, "Painting is absolutely scientific; it is
an exact science." And his work is in accord with his theory; he risks
nothing, all is brought down, arranged, balanced, and made one; his
pictures are thought out beforehand, they are mental conceptions. I
admire his work; I am showing how he is misunderstood, even by those who
think they understand. Does he ever seek a pose that is characteristic
of the model, a pose that the model repeats oftener than any
other?--Never. He advances the foot, puts the hand on the hip, etc.,
with a view to rendering his _idea_. Take his portrait of Duret. Did he
ever see Duret in dress clothes? Probably not. Did he ever see Duret
with a lady's opera cloak?--I am sure he never did. Is Duret in the
habit of going to the theatre with ladies? No, he is a _littérateur_ who
is always in men's society, rarely in ladies'. But these facts mattered
nothing to Whistler as they matter to Degas, or to Manet. Whistler took
Duret out of his environment, dressed him up, thought out a scheme--in a
word, painted his idea without concerning himself in the least with the
model. Mark you, I deny that I am urging any fault or flaw; I am merely
contending that Whistler's art is not modern art, but classic art--yes,
and severely classical, far more classical than Titian's or
Velasquez;--from an opposite pole as classical as Ingres. No Greek
dramatist ever sought the synthesis of things more uncompromisingly than
Whistler. And he is right. Art is not nature. Art is nature digested.
Zola and Goncourt cannot, or will not understand that the artistic
stomach must be allowed to do its work in its own mysterious fashion. If
a man is really an artist he will remember what is necessary, forget
what is useless; but if he takes notes he will interrupt his artistic
digestion, and the result will be a lot of little touches, inchoate and
wanting in the elegant rhythm of the synthesis.
I am sick of synthetical art; we want observation direct and unreasoned.
What I reproach Millet with is that it is always the same thing, the
same peasant, the same _sabot_, the same sentiment. You must admit that
it is somewhat stereotyped.
What does that matter; what is more stereotyped than Japanese art? But
that does not prevent it from being always beautiful.
People talk of Manet's originality; that is just what I can't see. What
he has got, and what you can't take away from him, is a magnificent
execution. A piece of still life by Manet is the most wonderful thing in
the world; vividness of colour, breadth, simplicity, and directness of
touch--marvellous!
French translation is the only translation; in England you still
continue to translate poetry into poetry, instead of into prose. We used
to do the same, but we have long ago renounced such follies. Either of
two things--if the translator is a good poet, he substitutes his verse
for that of the original;--I don't want his verse, I want the
original;--if he is a bad poet; he gives us bad verse, which is
intolerable. Where the original poet put an effect of cæsura, the
translator puts an effect of rhyme; where the original poet puts an
effect of rhyme, the translator puts an effect of cæsura. Take
Longfellow's "Dante." Does it give as good an idea of the original as
our prose translation? Is it as interesting reading? Take Bayard
Taylor's translation of "Goethe." Is it readable? Not to any one with an
ear for verse. Will any one say that Taylor's would be read if the
original did not exist? The fragment translated by Shelley is beautiful,
but then it is Shelley. Look at Swinburne's translations of Villon. They
are beautiful poems by Swinburne, that is all; he makes Villon speak of
a "splendid kissing mouth." Villon could not have done this unless he
had read Swinburne. "Heine," translated by James Thomson, is not
different from Thomson's original poems; "Heine," translated by Sir
Theodore Martin, is doggerel.
But in English blank verse you can translate quite as literally as you
could into prose?
I doubt it, but even so, the rhythm of the blank line would carry your
mind away from that of the original.
* * * * *
But if you don't know the original? The rhythm of the original can be
suggested in prose judiciously used; even if it isn't, your mind is at
least free, whereas the English rhythm must destroy the sensation of
something foreign. There is no translation except a word-for-word
translation. Baudelaire's translation of Poe, and Hugo's translation of
Shakespeare, are marvellous in this respect; a pun or joke that is
untranslatable is explained in a note.
* * * * *
But that is the way young ladies translate--word for word!
* * * * *
No; 'tis just what they don't do; they think they are translating word
for word, but they aren't. All the proper names, no matter how
unpronounceable, must be rigidly adhered to; you must never transpose
versts into kilometres, or roubles into francs;--I don't know what a
verst is or what a rouble is, but when I see the words I am in Russia.
Every proverb must be rendered literally, even if it doesn't make very
good sense: if it doesn't make sense at all, it must be explained in a
note. For example, there is a proverb in German: "_Quand le cheval est
sellé il faut le monter_;" in French there is a proverb: "_Quand le vin
est tiré il faut le boire_." Well, a translator who would translate
_quand le cheval_, etc., by _quand le vin_, etc., is an ass, and does
not know his business. In translation only a strictly classical language
should be used; no word of slang, or even word of modern origin should
be employed; the translator's aim should be never to dissipate the
illusion of an exotic. If I were translating the "Assommoir" into
English, I should strive after a strong, flexible, but colourless
language, something--what shall I say?--the style of a modern Addison.
* * * * *
What, don't you know the story about Mendès?--when _Chose_ wanted to
marry his sister? _Chose's_ mother, it appears, went to live with a
priest. The poor fellow was dreadfully cut up; he was broken-hearted;
and he went to Mendès, his heart swollen with grief, determined to make
a clean breast of it, let the worst come to the worst. After a great
deal of beating about the bush, and apologising, he got it out. You know
Mendès, you can see him smiling a little; and looking at _Chose_ with
that white cameo face of his he said,
"_Avec quel meillur homme voulez-vous que votre mère se mit? vous
n'avez donc, jeune homme, aucun sentiment religieux._"
Victor Hugo, he is a painter on porcelain; his verse is mere decoration,
long tendrils and flowers; and the same thing over and over again.
How to be happy!--not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the
_Nouvelle Athènes_, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the _bourgeois_
over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense
consciousness of life,--to live in a sleepy country side, to have a
garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every
evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out
to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the
tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-book coming from
church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant,
who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy;--and to think
there are people who would educate, who would draw these people out of
the calm satisfaction of their instincts, and give them passions! The
philanthropist is the Nero of modern times.
X