not be the slave either of nature or the past. This is true, but as a
principle it is too limited. Although he himself lived up to it, he did
not go far enough beyond it to do truly significant work. He arrived at
the brilliancy of nature by a method distinctly different from nature's;
and while refusing to be dominated by the past, his temperament was such
that he fabricated an art much closer to antiquity than that of the Zaks
and the Rousseaus who servilely imitated it. He accomplished what he set
out to accomplish. His failure to give birth to great art was due to the
intellectual limitations of his ambitions. His place in modern painting,
however, is secure.
That great cycle of aesthetic endeavour which was set in motion by the
discovery of oil painting found its termination in Rubens. The cycle
which Delacroix and Turner ushered in was less extended. Being more
concrete in its aims, it took only five decades to reach completion in
the works of Renoir. The first cycle, born with fixed materials, was
based on an absolute and physiological law of composition which can
never radically change, and therefore permitted of an extensive
development and variation. Decadence naturally set in after its means
had lost their ability to inspire artists. The second cycle was one of
research, and during it artists were so narrowly focused on nature that
they lost sight of the foundation laid down during the first cycle. Had
their concentration not been rudely disturbed their data hunting would
have carried them hopelessly afield. Gauguin exposed the futility of the
meticulous imitation of nature's effects, and by so doing took a step
forward toward liberty of method. For this reason he is of importance.
Painters were rapidly becoming scientists. By turning men's minds away
from nature to broadly natural pictures Gauguin invited them once more
to become artists. He was the link which joined experimental research to
pure creation. The first cycle gave us an absolute composition: the
second furnished a scientific hypothesis for art: the third, of which
Cezanne was the primitive, combined the first two and thus opened the
door on an infinity of achievement. Gauguin prevented the second from
running into decadence by showing its uselessness as an isolated
procedure.
IX
DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE
The development of art itself is no more mechanical than the artistic
development of the individual: in both there are irregularities,
retrogressions, forward spurts, divagations. Renoir first appeared with
a rhythmic line-balance which first grew luminous, then voluminous,
until it blossomed forth into his full form and line and colour.
Sometimes he leapt ahead in one quality and deteriorated in another,
abandoned one for the glory of the other, and sacrificed continually
until by experience he knew his limitations. Then consciously, with all
the reins in hand, he progressed steadily to his highest point of
efficiency. Art in general also advances sporadically. Delacroix gave a
new freedom to subject and drawing, resuscitated composition and found a
new use for colour. He was the embryonic statement of the ends of modern
art. Courbet, ignoring colour, totally divorced subject-matter from
antiquity and liberated drawing from the accepted style. He carried art
forward, but not in a direct line. Daumier gave us a new conception of
form, but contented himself with Spanish colour: his art, though
fragmentary, was another step toward a unique vision. Then came Manet
who, forgetting composition, exalted the documentary freedom of Courbet
and began the study of light. He, also, was a continuation of the
modern art impulse, but in his struggle for the new he forgot the
foundations. The Impressionists accepted passively all that had come
before. They raised colour to an important place in painting and brought
it to the consideration of all artists by showing its potency in the
production of intense emotion. Renoir used their inspiration; reverted
to the past through Delacroix, Courbet and Daumier; combined all that
had preceded him; and in an incomparable flourish closed up the
possibilities of his experimental forerunners. In him was a
consummation. But there had to be a transition also, unless art was to
stand still. Gauguin, though he went so far back that he passed to a
time when composition did not exist, interpreted, but did not imitate,
nature. The Neo-Impressionists continued the impetus of Pissarro.
Cezanne unearthed secrets from nature which linked him to Impressionism,
and by applying them arbitrarily to classic organisations, became an
interpreter of the past as well as of the future.
At each step of this broad and prolific advance there were those
painters who, profiting by the teachings of the great, set themselves to
imitate and ornament the exteriors of their faintly-understood masters
and to emphasise the qualities of texture, _matiere_ and prettiness. So
rapid was the evolution of modern endeavour that nearly every painter
overlapped his seemingly remote predecessor. Edgar Degas was born more
than twenty years before the death of Delacroix. He was one of those
painters who, content to remain stagnant, employ the qualities which
have been handed down to them and breathe into old inspirations the
flame of individual idiosyncrasy. He was a man who impressed everyone by
the strength of his personality and by the power of his caustic wit. In
his youth he travelled in Italy and America and went to school, not for
artistic training, but merely as a concession to the conventions of the
day. He copied Holbein and Lawrence. In his earlier portraits there are
undeniable traces of the German master: the Lawrence influence exhibited
itself in his femininity more than in actual technical innovations. He
was an enthusiastic visitor to the Cafe Guerbois on the Avenue de Clichy
where, from 1865 until the war, Manet was the dominating figure, and
where the Impressionists and such men as Lhermitte, Cazin, Legros,
Whistler and Stevens came to discuss aesthetics.
Although never radically opposed to scholasticism, as were these other
men, Degas was nevertheless persuaded to share in a joint exhibition in
1867 with his revolutionary companions. But the ridicule of the public
disgusted him so thoroughly that he never exposed again. He shut himself
up in his studio, and there, isolated from his fellow painters and the
vulgar populace, worked out his own salvation. He instinctively hated
the brummagem show of popularity and put into his every subject this
disgust with life's hypocrisies. Even in his prancing ballet figures,
though they are in full light and amid joyous settings, one senses the
satire which led to the depiction of their apparent _sans-souci_. One
reads in them the sordid misery of their home life, the long trying
hours of muscular strain, and the deceit of their simulated smiles. His
synthetic figures--synthetic in that they were without details and
accidents of contour which would detract from the vision of the
whole--came to him direct and with little variation from Ingres--not the
Ingres of Stratonice but the Ingres of the drawings in the _Musee
Ingres_ at Montauban. His study of this master gave him a greater
insight into the academic construction of the human figure than any
school could have done. It permitted him to set forth a firmly drawn
body in any pose with equal ease. This facile mastery of action is one
of his greatest claims to popularity.
Gauguin held that nothing should be moving in a canvas, that all the
figures should be static, arrested in their pose, and calm. Degas
represented Gauguin's antithesis. He strove to catch his model in
flight. He immobilised their _elan_, and registered those
characteristics of a model which express action at its intensest dynamic
instant. In all his racecourse pictures the very horses have that
delicate balance of mincing tread that we first feel when we look at
their prototypes in life--that dainty and slight resiliency as of weight
on springs. Monet, on the one hand, caught the ephemeral effect of light
on nature: Degas, on the other, recorded the fleeting movement of
objects, that is, the _physical_ poise of a granted image, not the
_aesthetic_ poise which transmits itself to our subjectivities. He
surprised the actional segment which epitomises the entire cycle of
movement. Everything he touches becomes as charming and interesting as a
wellstaged scene. His sympathies with the Impressionist colour methods
and his manner of handling his material add to this charm and make
pleasurable, fresh and adventuresome what would otherwise be banal and
sometimes even ugly and devoid of interest. He paints the racehorse,
which Gericault first introduced into French art, and, by surrounding it
with a vernal spring atmosphere, violet hills and green and ochre
stubble, and by catching its instantaneous action, makes of it a picture
with a rich and colourful surface--a surface beside which a Gericault,
judged from the same illustrative standpoint, appears stiff and black.
Degas, in short, paints the kind of pictures which the general public
calls "artistic"--a word which, though loosely used, has come to have a
distinct connotation when applied to arts and crafts. Vases, plaques,
panels, screens, decorations, posters and book-plates are all "artistic"
provided they fulfil certain simple requirements. The bizarre exteriors
of German art have given great impetus to this qualitative adjective.
The word is used indeterminately, and its popular meaning has not been
defined. But in Degas we find it exemplified; and by studying him we may
discover its exact limitations. "Artistic" commonly refers to paintings
in which the exactitude of drawing is lost in a nonchalant
_sensibilite_, and in which the _matiere_ takes on a seductive interest
merely as a stuff or a substance, the love of which lies deep in the
most intellectual of men. The tactile sense will be found at the roots
of the average person's idea of an "artistic" work. This desire for
superficial and material beauty, as of a rare porcelain or of
scintillating old silk, is a part of the same physical sensuality which
makes some men choose rough-grained canvas, others the stone of the
lithographer, others the fluid brushing of a Whistler or a Velazquez.
The desire for texture is what led Degas to pastels. His pictures have
something more than an illustrative value; they are highly attractive as
_objets d'art_ as well. But while this attractiveness heightened the
popular value of his work, it indicated the inherent decadence of his
aims.
Nor was it the only sign of his retrogression. There is not even
pictorial finality in his work. He never painted subjects as such, but
used them only as bases for arabesques. Surface-covering was his forte,
and it is not remarkable that one so sensitive to objective action
should have been such a master of balance. He could never have achieved
such perfect balance had he not realised that a work of art must be done
coldly and consciously and without passion for the model, and that all
enthusiasm should come only from the progressing work itself. His
arrangements are wholly natural ones, and we feel that no studio posing
has gone into their making. In this naturalistic attitude he was
continuing the modern spirit of arbitrary subject selection found in
Courbet, Manet and Pissarro. But where these men painted with colour,
Degas only tinted his drawings. Consequently his colour, as well as
composition, was a reversion to a sterile past. Although we may admire
his Apres le Bain, La Toilette, the Trois Danseuses, Femme au Tub, La
Sortie du Bain, Torse de Femme S'Essuyant, Musiciens a l'Orchestre
for their verisimilitude and lightness of treatment, their _imprevu_ of
arrangement and balance and their charm of colour, we can never credit
their creator with even a slight genius, for all his pictures lack the
rich volumes of a Daumier and the order of a Renoir.
[Illustration: DANSEUSES A LEUR TOILETTE by DEGAS]
Degas was neither academic nor revolutionary. He struck a middle course
in which the scholastic and the heretical blent, and in blending
neutralised each other's characteristics. In his canvases he tells
inherently commonplace stories, but he does it with the force and the
graceful ease of one on whom all the visions of the world have made a
powerful impression. Life meant to him a pageant, neither moral nor
immoral, but real, and as such interesting. If in what he tells us there
seems a bit of the cynical indifference of a mind too fully
disillusioned, it never obtrudes itself. He himself might have been
surfeited and bitter, but his work contains only the barest hint of his
temperamental retrospection. His comprehension of life's tragedies did
not spoil his enjoyment in depicting them. Louis Legrand reveals the
metropolitan lust of mankind; Forain, its bestiality; Toulouse-Lautrec,
its viciousness. Each was prejudiced in some direction. Degas merely
goes behind the scenes and by stripping his characters of their
pretences shows them to us as they are, intimately and unsentimentally.
The other men in this circle of illustrators of which Degas was the
dominant figure had distinctly individual traits. In no sense were they
followers of one leader. Their preoccupation with illustration alone
held them together. Degas has given us well-balanced patterns with
fragilely lovely surfaces. He was little interested in the traits of his
models: he cared more for the picture than for individual character.
With Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec this mental attitude was reversed. In his
work are specific members of the _demi-monde_, marionettes who have all
the accentuated vices, vulgarities, fatigues and pretensions of their
trade. In their faces, moulded by unrestrained indulgences, joys and
sorrows, we can read their innermost hopes and aspirations. We can
reconstruct their entire day's activities. In order to study his
characters Lautrec went to the _milieu_ where gaiety was unchecked,
where the denizens of the under-world--those unreal beings who live like
fantastic flowers nourished by artificial light and colour--come to work
and play. He saw and set down the principals in the Bohemian music
halls, the _cafes-concerts_ and the _cirques_, and those daylight
moralists who come to relax viciously at night with all the
_laisser-aller_ of violent reaction. His search was for character; and
in these establishments character did not masquerade in the hypocritical
garb of pride and dignity. Passions were aired frankly, even proudly.
Lautrec had personal as well as artistic reasons for choosing this
sphere. He had an ardent, almost febrile, desire to live fully and
furiously. He was deformed; he had a man's head and body on a child's
legs--the result of incompetent bone-setting in his youth. His family was
a very old and noble one: his father was a sportsman, a lover of horses,
a sculptor in his leisure moments. All the pride of race and dignity of
class tumbled from its pedestal in this young artist. He had worked in
the schools of Bonnat and Cormon, had met and admired Forain, and had
finally been revealed to himself by Degas who led him to the theatre. He
drank much, one suspects, to forget his deformity, just as Van Gogh
drank to forget disease. He sought solace in the ephemeral, visionary
life of the cafes; and no action, no type, no expression escaped his
probing notice. He had many friends to whom he confided. "I am only half
a bottle," he would say. He adored women impersonally and romantically,
but in his own station of life they looked upon him askance.
Consequently he lived where money would always buy attention and where
good-fellowship was repaid with good-fellowship.
Lautrec was an indefatigable worker, but his pictures possess little of
the surface beauty of a Degas. Rather do they attest to a love of
exaggerated and uncommon form, as do Chinese paintings. But in him is
more order than in Degas. Compare Une Table au Moulin-Rouge with Degas's
Cafe-Concert. In the first the character in the physiques of the
principals harmonises with the character of the faces; and the female
figure's hair, hat and fur-trimmed coat indicate the artist's love for
grotesque and beautiful abstract form. There is more than balance here:
there is the rudiment of an instinctive composition which Degas never
had. Beside this picture the Cafe-Concert seems flat silhouette,
sprightly and entertaining, but far from profound. The nucleus of
composition can be found in all of Lautrec's best canvases, especially
those he painted after his return from Spain. Toward the end of his
life he worked, for the most part, with a full brush and rich colours.
Before this, however, pencil, chalk, lithographs and water-colours had
claimed him. His greatest fluency was in the use of separated hachures
of rich greyish colour on neutral backgrounds. This method of
application permitted him line as well as colour; and with his lines,
summary and economical though they were, he caught the animality of his
subjects with as sure a hand as Monet caught the light and Degas the
action.
Lautrec, with Cheret, revolutionised the poster art. There are few men
today in this field who do not owe much to him. His love of the
eccentricities of his model was an ideal gift for the poster-maker, and
he had himself sufficiently in hand not to be led into the grotesque. He
was a caricaturist in that he exaggerated characteristic traits, just as
Matisse did in his sculpture. He always noted fully the uncommon, and
his love of every manifestation of life gave him a wide range of
inspiration. Life was his great adventure; his art was merely his diary.
He is a historian of the theatre of his time and has left salient
portraits of Loie Fuller, Polaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Mounet-Sully, Yahne
and Anna Held. His types of the raptorial woman of the past--the kind
that today is found in the hidden corners of Les Halles, at the
fortifications and about the "Rue de la Joie"--are as real as the female
characters of Balzac, Daudet, Augier and Prevost. They live in his
pictures because one feels that they once were realities: his
caricaturisations of them, as of his clowns and dancers, only intensify
their intimate humanity. To some it may seem strange that Lautrec
should have liked Massys and Memling. But in the first he found
trenchant characterisation, especially in such things as Head of an Old
Man, The Courtesan and Portrait of a Canon. And he was temperamentally
akin to Memling in such arrangements as the latter's The Casting of the
Lots (a detail of Calvary) and Our Lord's Passion, at the Museum in
Turin.
That the illustrators of this group were decadent is borne out in their
subject-matter as well as in their methods. Since the earliest recorded
antiquity artists have been attracted to the moving, the glittering, the
brilliant; and the human occupation which embodies these three qualities
most obviously is dancing. The men who are in love with life and not art
and who paint and draw pictures merely to record their impressions, have
always been hypnotised by the colour, the grace, the fluent movement and
the rhythmic shiftings of dancers. These men, unable to analyse their
emotions, have dreamed only of depicting objectively their photographic
impressions of the dance. The artists who penetrated to the fundamental
causes of rhythm used the dance only arbitrarily, whereas the
superficial painters of the past saw in it merely the mosaic, the
pattern, the arabesque. They thought that in portraying the dance
literally they would arrive at its motive significance. But in this they
failed. Had they done their figures in clay or stone they would have
approached nearer their desire. But even this more masculine medium has,
with few exceptions, resulted in failure. The dancing girls in the
Grottoes of Mahavelipore were used only by those puissant masters of
form as friezes or shapes to fill in and ornament a vacant space. The
Tanagra figurines are a purely decorative endeavour. In Greece it was
not the men of Praxiteles's calibre, but the smaller talents like the
potters who used the dance in their designs. Even a man as slight as
Hokusai leaves it to a Toba Sojo to make his models caper. But the
feminine talent of Degas finds in the dance absolute and unordered
expression; and Lautrec and Legrand, both more robust than Degas, though
minor and ornamentally illustrative artists, are seduced into portraying
it often.
Louis Legrand was more of the "maker" of pictures than were his two
contemporaries. His nature leaned toward the heavy and boisterous Sodoma
rather than toward the Latin ideal of Tiepolo. This almost Teutonic
racial penchant in him explains why the bestiality of his subject-matter
is so often done in the manner of Goya, with broad black and white
masses, not with the suggested line and the attractive _matiere_ of his
master, Degas. There is much Teutonic blood in Spain, and Goya, while
being far the greater artist even in his slightest etchings, is the
nearest approach to Legrand in the treatment of themes. Goya paints
moral decay with disgust and genius, whereas Legrand, with his slight
gropings after order of a surface variety, glories in it as in a
pursuit, and paints it with a leer. The Spaniard uses it as a
temperamental means. The Frenchman, whose whole talent lies in a formula
of draughtsmanship, works toward its creation as an end. His shallowness
is at once apparent when we compare his Maitresse or his illustrations
for Edgar Allan Poe's tales with etchings like Donde Va Mama or Buen
Viaje. Psychologically he is intimately related to the _fin de siecle_
movement in England; and, although a better and more healthy workman, he
has a temperament singularly akin to that ineffectual Victorian
academician, Walter Sickert.
In J.-L. Forain we have a man of different stamp, one who, knowing his
ability for certain things, clings to them and does not attempt to
thrust himself into the rank of artist. By developing his small
potentialities to their highest actuality he has achieved as much as his
confreres have by extraneous tricks and appearances. And there is no
doubt that he comprehends art much better than they. His iconoclastic
and acidulous cynicism, his ability to wrench from behind the veil of
mundane hypocrisy the real motivation of an action, and his probing
analysis which cannot be imposed upon by pretence, have touched on many
sides of contemporary life--politics, extortion, courts, merchants, the
_beau monde_, prostitution, religion, the theatre and the tawdry
Bohemianism of Montparnasse. With a few straight and fluent strokes of
the pencil he builds up a type of the blustering _parvenu_ Jew, the
mercenary picture dealer, the childish and vain actor who is avid for
praise and obsessed with his vocation. Forain calls the actor a
"_M'as-tu-vu?_" and depicts him as with that phrase ever on his lips.
Baudelaire Chez les Mufles is one of the world's greatest monuments to
human hypocrisy. A chlorotic bourgeoise is standing in the centre of a
small gathering reciting Baudelaire's verses. Around her are grouped
types of self-satisfied and vicious masculinity, all pretending, like
the speaker herself, to be feeling deeply the hidden spirituality of the
poem. Some of the men have their heads raised high, others bowed low,
for purposes of concentration. The whole picture is rough-hewn as though
done with an axe in a square of clay. With the simplest means the artist
gives us the impression of rugged stone and, at the same time,
completion. The titles to his drawings are in the exact spirit of the
pictures themselves, succinct, brutal and penetrating. Forain is the
second greatest caricaturist the world has produced. He was not the
artist that Daumier was, but as a serious creator of types and as a
highly intelligent critic of contemporary shams, he is a master, even as
Daumier was a master of a realm far above him.