Is it necessary to say that I did not find a manager to produce my play? A
printer was more attainable, and the correction of proofs amused me for a
while. I wrote another play; and when the hieing after theatrical managers
began to lose its attractiveness my thoughts reverted to France, which
always haunted me; and which now possessed me as if with the sweet and
magnetic influence of home.
How important my absence from Paris seemed to me; and how Paris rushed into
my eyes!--Paris--public ball-rooms, _cafés_, the models in the studio
and the young girls painting, and Marshall, Alice, and Julien.
Marshall!--my thoughts pointed at him through the intervening streets and
the endless procession of people coming and going.
"M. Marshall, is he at home?" "M. Marshall left here some months ago." "Do
you know his address?" "I'll ask my husband." "Do you know M. Marshall's
address!" "Yes, he's gone to live in the Rue de Douai." "What number?" "I
think it is fifty-four." "Thanks." "Coachman, wake up; drive me to the Rue
de Douai."
But Marshall was not to be found at the Rue de Douai; and he had left no
address. There was nothing for it but to go to the studio; I should be able
to obtain news of him there,--perhaps find him. But when I pulled aside the
curtain, the accustomed piece of slim nakedness did not greet my eyes; only
the blue apron of an old woman enveloped in a cloud of dust. "The gentlemen
are not here to-day, the studio is closed; I am sweeping up." "Oh, and
where is M. Julien?" "I cannot say, sir: perhaps at the _café_, or
perhaps he is gone to the country." This was not very encouraging, and now,
my enthusiasm thoroughly damped, I strolled along _le Passage_,
looking at the fans, the bangles and the litter of cheap trinkets that each
window was filled with. On the left at the corner of the Boulevard was our
_café_. As I came forward the waiter moved one of the tin tables, and
then I saw the fat Provençal. But just as if he had seen me yesterday he
said, "_Tiens! c'est vous; une deme tasse? oui ... garçon, une deme
tasse._" Presently the conversation turned on Marshall; they had not
seen much of him lately. "_Il parait qu'il est plus amoureux que
jamais,_" Julien replied sardonically.
I found my friend in large furnished apartments on the ground floor in the
Rue Duphot. The walls were stretched with blue silk, there were large
mirrors and great gilt cornices. Passing into the bedroom I found the young
god wallowing in the finest of fine linen--in a great Louis XV. bed, and
there were cupids above him. "Holloa! what, you back again, Dayne? we
thought we weren't going to see you again."
"It's nearly one o'clock: get up. What's the news?"
"To-day is the opening of the exposition of the Impressionists. We'll have
a bit of breakfast round the corner, at Durant's, and we'll go on there. I
hear that Bedlam is nothing to it; there is a canvas there twenty feet
square and in three tints: pale yellow for the sunlight, brown for the
shadows, and all the rest is sky-blue. There is, I am told, a lady walking
in the foreground with a ring-tailed monkey, and the tail is said to be
three yards long."
And so we went to jeer a group of enthusiasts that willingly forfeit all
delights of the world in the hope of realising a new aestheticism; we went
insolent with patent leather shoes and bright kid gloves and armed with all
the jargon of the school. "_Cette jambe ne porte pas;_" "_la nature
ne se fait pas comme ça;_" "_on dessine par les masses; combien de
têtes?_" "_Sept et demi._" "_Si j'avais un morceau de craie je
mettrais celle-là dans un bocal, c'est un foetus,_" etc.; in a word, all
that the journals of culture are pleased to term an artistic education. And
then the boisterous laughter, exaggerated in the hope of giving as much
pain as possible.
The history of Impressionist art is simple. In the beginning of this
century the tradition of French art--the tradition of Boucher, Fragonard,
and Watteau--had been completely lost; having produced genius, their art
died. Ingres is the sublime flower of the classic art which succeeded the
art of the palace and the boudoir: further than Ingres it was impossible to
go, and his art died. Then the Turners and Constables came to France, and
they begot Troyon, and Troyon begot Millet, Courbet, Corot, and Rousseau,
and these in turn begot Degas, Pissarro, Madame Morizot, and Guillaumin.
Degas is a pupil of Ingres, but he applies the marvellous acuteness of
drawing he learned from his master to delineating the humblest aspects of
modern life. Degas draws not by the masses, but by the character;--his
subjects are shop-girls, ballet-girls, and washerwomen, but the qualities
that endow them with immortality are precisely those which eternalise the
virgins and saints of Leonardo da Vinci in the minds of men. You see the
fat, vulgar woman in the long cloak trying on a hat in front of the
pier-glass. So marvellously well are the lines of her face observed and
rendered that you can tell exactly what her position in life is; you know
what the furniture of her rooms is like; you know what she would say to you
if she were to speak. She is as typical of the nineteenth century as
Fragonard's ladies are of the Court of Louis XV. To the right you see a
picture of two shop-girls with bonnets in their hands. So accurately are
the habitual movements of the heads and the hands observed that you at once
realise the years of bonnet-showing and servile words that these women have
lived through. We have seen Degas do this before--it is a welcome
repetition of a familiar note, but it is not until we turn to the set of
nude figures that we find the great artist revealing any new phase of his
talent. The first, in an attitude which suggests the kneeling Venus, washes
her thighs in a tin bath. The second, a back view, full of the
malformations of forty years, of children, of hard work, stands gripping
her flanks with both hands. The naked woman has become impossible in modern
art; it required Degas' genius to infuse new life into the worn-out theme.
Cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the middle ages, and with
cynicism Degas has rendered the nude again an artistic possibility. What
Mr. Horsley or the British matron would say it is difficult to guess.
Perhaps the hideousness depicted by M. Degas would frighten them more than
the sensuality which they condemn in Sir Frederick Leighton. But, be this
as it may, it is certain that the great, fat, short-legged creature, who in
her humble and touching ugliness passes a chemise over her lumpy shoulders,
is a triumph of art. Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible;
Velasquez knew this when he painted his dwarfs.
Pissarro exhibited a group of girls gathering apples in a garden--sad greys
and violets beautifully harmonised. The figures seem to move as in a dream:
we are on the thither side of life, in a world of quiet colour and happy
aspiration. Those apples will never fall from the branches, those baskets
that the stooping girls are filling will never be filled: that garden is
the garden of the peace that life has not for giving, but which the painter
has set in an eternal dream of violet and grey.
Madame Morizot exhibited a series of delicate fancies. Here are two young
girls; the sweet atmosphere folds them as with a veil; they are all summer;
their dreams are limitless, their days are fading, and their ideas follow
the flight of the white butterflies through the standard roses. Take note,
too, of the stand of fans; what delicious fancies are there--willows,
balconies, gardens, and terraces.
Then, contrasting with these distant tendernesses, there was the vigorous
painting of Guillaumin. There life is rendered in violent and colourful
brutality. The ladies fishing in the park, with the violet of the skies and
the green of the trees descending upon them, is a _chef d'oeuvre_.
Nature seems to be closing about them like a tomb; and that
hillside,--sunset flooding the skies with yellow and the earth with blue
shadow,--is another piece of painting that will one day find a place in one
of the public galleries; and the same can be said of the portrait of the
woman on a background of chintz flowers.
We could but utter coarse gibes and exclaim, "What could have induced him
to paint such things? surely he must have seen that it was absurd. I wonder
if the Impressionists are in earnest or if it is only _une blague qu'on
nous fait?_" Then we stood and screamed at Monet, that most exquisite
painter of blonde light. We stood before the "Turkeys," and seriously we
wondered if "it was serious work,"--that _chef d'oeuvre!_ the high
grass that the turkeys are gobbling is flooded with sunlight so swift and
intense that for a moment the illusion is complete. "Just look at the
house! why, the turkeys couldn't walk in at the door. The perspective is
all wrong." Then followed other remarks of an educational kind; and when we
came to those piercingly personal visions of railway stations by the same
painter,--those rapid sensations of steel and vapour,--our laughter knew no
bounds. "I say, Marshall, just look at this wheel; he dipped his brush into
cadmium yellow and whisked it round, that's all." Nor did we understand any
more Renoir's rich sensualities of tone; nor did the mastery with which he
achieves an absence of shadow appeal to us. You see colour and light in his
pictures as you do in nature, and the child's criticism of a portrait--"Why
is one side of the face black?" is answered. There was a half length nude
figure of a girl. How the round fresh breasts palpitate in the light! such
a glorious glow of whiteness was attained never before. But we saw nothing
except that the eyes were out of drawing.
For art was not for us then as it is now,--a mere emotion, right or wrong
only in proportion to its intensity; we believed then in the grammar of
art, perspective, anatomy, and _la jambe qui porte_; and we found all
this in Julien's studio.
A year passed; a year of art and dissipation--one part art, two parts
dissipation. We mounted and descended at pleasure the rounds of society's
ladder. One evening we would spend at Constant's, Rue de la Gaieté, in the
company of thieves and housebreakers; on the following evening we were
dining with a duchess or a princess in the Champs Elysées. And we prided
ourselves vastly on our versatility in using with equal facility the
language of the "fence's" parlour, and that of the literary salon; on being
able to appear as much at home in one as in the other. Delighted at our
prowess, we often whispered, "The princess, I swear, would not believe her
eyes if she saw us now;" and then in terrible slang we shouted a
benediction on some "crib" that was going to be broken into that evening.
And we thought there was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la
Gaieté, returning home to dress, and presenting our spotless selves to the
_élite_. And we succeeded very well, as indeed all young men do who
waltz perfectly and avoid making love to the wrong woman.
But the excitement of climbing up and down the social ladder did not stave
off our craving for art; and there came about this time a very decisive
event in our lives. Marshall's last and really _grande passion_ had
come to a violent termination, and monetary difficulties forced him to turn
his thoughts to painting as a means of livelihood. This decided me. I asked
him to come and live with me, and to be as near our studio as possible, I
took an _appartement_ in the Passage des Panoramas. It was not
pleasant that your window should open, not to the sky, but to an unclean
prospect of glass roofing; nor was it agreeable to get up at seven in the
morning; and ten hours of work daily are trying to the resolution even of
the best intentioned. But we had sworn to forego all pleasures for the sake
of art--table d'hôtes in the Rue Maubeuge, French and foreign duchesses in
the Champs Elysées, thieves in the Rue de la Gaieté.
I was entering therefore on a duel with Marshall for supremacy in an art
for which, as has already been said, I possessed no qualifications. It will
readily be understood how a mind like mine, so keenly alive to all
impulses, and so unsupported by any moral convictions, would suffer in so
keen a contest waged under such unequal and cruel conditions. It was in
truth a year of great passion and great despair. Defeat is bitter when it
comes swiftly and conclusively, but when defeat falls by inches like the
fatal pendulum in the pit, the agony is a little out of reach of words to
define. It was even so. I remember the first day of my martyrdom. The
clocks were striking eight; we chose our places, got into position. After
the first hour, I compared my drawing with Marshall's. He had, it is true,
caught the movement of the figure better than I, but the character and the
quality of his work was miserable. That of mine was not. I have said I
possessed no artistic facility, but I did not say faculty, my drawing was
never common; it was individual in feeling, it was refined. I possessed all
the rarer qualities, but not that primary power without which all is
valueless;--I mean the talent of the boy who can knock off a clever
caricature of his schoolmaster or make a _life-like_ sketch of his
favourite horse on the barn door with a piece of chalk.
The following week Marshall made a great deal of progress; I thought the
model did not suit me, and hoped for better luck next time. That time never
came, and at the end of the first month I was left toiling hopelessly in
the distance. Marshall's mind, though shallow, was bright, and he
understood with strange ease all that was told him, and was able to put
into immediate practice the methods of work inculcated by the professors.
In fact, he showed himself singularly capable of education; little could be
drawn out, but a great deal could be put in (using the word in its modern,
not in its original sense). He showed himself intensely anxious to learn
and to accept all that was said: the ideas and feelings of others ran into
him like water into a bottle whose neck is suddenly stooped below the
surface of the stream. He was an ideal pupil. It was Marshall here, it was
Marshall there, and soon the studio was little but an agitation in praise
of him, and his work, and anxious speculation arose as to the medals he
would obtain. I continued the struggle for nine months. I was in the studio
at eight in the morning; I measured my drawing; I plumbed it throughout; I
sketched in, having regard to _la jambe qui porte_; I modelled _par
les masses_. During breakfast I considered how I should work during the
afternoon; at night I lay awake thinking of what I might do to attain a
better result. But my efforts availed me nothing; it was like one who,
falling, stretches his arms for help and grasps the yielding air. How
terrible are the languors and yearnings of impotence! how wearing! what an
aching void they leave in the heart! And all this I suffered until the
burden of unachieved desire grew intolerable.
I laid down my charcoal and said, "I will never draw or paint again." That
vow I have kept.
Surrender brought relief, but my life seemed at an end. I looked upon a
blank space of years desolate as a grey and sailless sea. "What shall I
do?" I asked myself, and my heart was weary and hopeless. Literature? my
heart did not answer the question at once. I was too broken and overcome by
the shock of failure; failure precise and stern, admitting of no
equivocation. I strove to read: but it was impossible to sit at home almost
within earshot of the studio, and with all the memories of defeat still
ringing their knells in my heart. Marshall's success clamoured loudly from
without; every day, almost every hour of the day, I heard of the medals
which he would carry off; of what Lefevre thought of his drawing this week,
of Boulanger's opinion of his talent. I do not wish to excuse my conduct,
but I cannot help saying that Marshall showed me neither consideration nor
pity; he did not even seem to understand that I was suffering, that my
nerves had been terribly shaken, and he flaunted his superiority
relentlessly in my face--his good looks, his talents, his popularity. I did
not know then how little these studio successes really meant.
Vanity? no, it was not his vanity that maddened me; to me vanity is rarely
displeasing, sometimes it is singularly attractive; but by a certain
insistence and aggressiveness in the details of life he allowed me to feel
that I was only a means for the moment, a serviceable thing enough, but one
that would be very soon discarded and passed over. This was intolerable. I
broke up my establishment. By so doing I involved my friend in grave and
cruel difficulties; by this action I imperilled his future prospects. It
was a dastardly action; but his presence had grown unbearable; yes,
unbearable in the fullest acceptation of the word, and in ridding myself of
him I felt as if a world of misery were being lifted from me.