petrified with dumb despair, her arms limp, her one hand lying in the
other, yet without any convulsion, and powerless, her knees through
a very slight bend betraying her trembling, her feet instinctively
somewhat turned inwards, so as to give a broader support to the body,
and to protect the almost crippled figure from falling down. The whole
is such a frightfully expressive picture of a poor human creature
who has, as it were, received a blow on the head, and in her crushed
condition is not strong enough even for sobbing and wringing her hands,
that it strikes the spectator with a cold shudder. Observe, the old
woman wears the garments of the poor Walloons, heavy, stiff gowns and
neckerchiefs, the hard angles and folds of which can express only very
roughly and indistinctly the soft play of the weakly-quivering muscles.
What penetrating keenness of observation does it need to recognise in
an entirely self-contained form shrouded in uncouth, shapeless clothes,
without gestures or play of features, and to imitate, without the
slightest exaggeration, yet overpoweringly, the tenderest lines which,
even in such unfavourable conditions of material, express clearly and
dramatically all that is passing in this almost impenetrably veiled
human soul. This little figure, no larger than the decoration of a
clock, is a great monument, and, like every real work of art, it points
far beyond the limits of itself. It reveals much more to the power of
imagination than it manifests to the eye. This is actually proved in
this very case; for Meunier has a group which supplements the work
described: the same old woman, and before her, lying outstretched on
the ground, the corpse of him whom she is bewailing. We might think
that this more complete work would be more deeply affecting than the
fragmentary one. The contrary, however, is the case. The corpse,
although modelled so exquisitely, leaves us cold; it does not realise
the conception we have formed of it. We had expected to feel a horror
at the sight of it, at which the blood would congeal in our veins. We
are astonished and disappointed at seeing lying there only an unknown
man who does not concern us. When we look at the old woman petrified by
grief we think of the corpse which is not exhibited to us; we see it
with our spiritual eyes in the horror of the old woman, we share the
feelings of the old woman, the unseen corpse is that of a relation of
our own, the dead man himself is dear to us, we ourselves have suffered
the loss of him. On the other hand, the completed group makes any
co-operative exertion of our imaginative powers superfluous.
The corpse lies there visible; it distracts our attention from the
old woman; we feel less keenly her emotion; the incident no longer
occurs in the Holy of Holies of our soul, but in a forecourt, in a
place of inspection. We could, in imagination, endow the corpse with
the features of a dear relative, and feel sorrow for the dead man:
inspection teaches us that the corpse is a stranger to us, and we
have no grounds for shedding tears over it. The two works, placed in
juxta-position, fully bear out the old dictum, that a work of art is
more powerfully effective in proportion as it more strongly excites our
imaginative faculties to creative co-operation.
A series of works brings before us the life of the coal-miners.
Some of them come to daylight after their shift is ended. They are
tired, but cheerful. About their wearied countenances there seems to
quiver a reflection of the hearth-fire which awaits them familiarly
in their poor homes. Here is a miner at his work. In a painful,
half-recumbent position he handles the mattock in the narrow gallery
under the seam from which he is dislodging the coal. Here another
is sitting inactive, with his spade and lamp, with only a pair of
trousers on, the upper part of his body naked, without a particle
of fat on his muscles steeled by toil. Here a worker at a smelting
furnace, likewise sitting—a reminiscence of the famous “Les Foins”
of Bastien Lepage, which is at present in the Luxembourg. Like this
peasant lass, Meunier’s labourer is completely bestialised; he stares
vacantly before him, with a jaw open like that of an animal; his hand,
unused to inactivity, hangs down heavily. It is a shocking picture of
the degradation of man through a one-sided exertion of the muscles; a
forcible harangue in favour of the eight hours’ day, which would leave
more time for the human working machine, not only, as his opponents
assert, to visit the public-house, but also for spiritual life.
Meunier rises to the height of the Vedic hymns when he turns towards
the countryman and his heroic deeds in nourishing mankind. In the
relief, “The Harvest,” a band of reapers—four men and two women—are
grappling with the ripe corn. One seizes violently the stalks, the
second, bending forward, makes a wide stroke with his sickle, a woman
binds into sheaves the ears that have been mown. In the background, one
longing for rest looks at the position of the sun, and another, _rapido
fessus aestu_ (fatigued by the scorching summer heat), to use Vergil’s
words, wipes the sweat from his brow. There is the note of the Eclogues
about this work. Over it floats the consecration of the lofty act with
which the rooted son of the soil, the ploughman—the creator and bearer
of all civilisation—gains the bread of mankind out of the earth. A
single figure, “June,” is also created from this emotion. It is the
realisation in free sculpture of a _motif_ from the relief. A reaper,
stripped to the waist, emaciated by the heavy toil of harvesting,
exhausted by his day’s work, leans upon his scythe and glances, shading
his eyes with his hand, at the sun—“I would it were bedtime and all was
over.” One would like to press the hand of this brave, good fellow,
or at any rate that of the artist who has represented him to us so
faithfully and straightforwardly.
All Meunier’s works have not this delicacy; many are weak, some
absolute failures. As an instance of such I point to “The Puddlers,”
though it has been particularly admired by some critics. Three
iron-founders stand at the open stoke-hole of the puddle-furnace, and
feed it with mighty pieces for melting. From the opening issue steam
and smoke, which curl round the three men wielding rakes and tongs, and
eddy upwards. Meunier has tried to represent this steam in sculpture.
He has given it a concrete form, necessarily the same corporeality as
the bodies, tools, blocks of metal, the flaming furnace; for sculpture
possesses no means of differentiating the thickness of matter, when
it abandons the mere engraved line or the make-shift of various
perforations. The result is, that instead of smoke there is an amazing
image which partly reminds us of an untrimmed dab of plaster, partly
of a weather-beaten stalactite. Meunier was originally a painter, and
took to sculpture only late in life. His “Puddlers” are formed with
the technique of a painter, from which the artist did not immediately
emancipate himself. Another relief, “The Bricklayers,” is absolutely
a mistake. Two men are standing in the loam-pit and handing up the
bricks to their mates above. They do this with theatrical gestures,
as if a conquered king were handing over his crown to his conqueror.
The contrast between the bombastic movement and its vulgar purpose is
so grotesque that the picture has an irresistibly comic effect. Here
Meunier is, for the only occasion in all the works of his with which I
am acquainted, insincere and affected. I have looked for a long time
at this deplorable work, and it made me thoughtful. How heavy is the
responsibility of the critic! Supposing I knew nothing of Meunier and
only saw this work, I should find it hard to resist the impulse to
abuse him in the sharpest terms, for it unites the two worst faults
that can be found in a work of art: it is at the same time inanely
futile and obtrusively pretentious. So far I should be acting within
the scope of my perfect rights. But am I certain that I was not
allowing myself to be carried away by my own natural propensity to
generalise, and to condemn not only the work, but also its author, to
call him a bungler and a botcher? Such a verdict would, apparently,
be well-grounded and, in fact, revoltingly false. Works such as “The
Bricklayers” are a warning to the critic; they admonish him to be
conscientious. Their teaching is that every comprehensive verdict on an
artist must presuppose a knowledge of his whole life’s work, and that
no single work can offer sufficient basis for the general appreciation
of its author, especially of his depreciation.
In his figures of the miners and iron-founders, Meunier showed sympathy
with the lot of the proletariate; in his portrayals of the countryman’s
life, reverence for the civilising work of the man who ploughs the
soil. But he reveals in certain other works of similar subjects beauty
which prevents us from wishing for one moment for those Invalides of
Olympus, the unchangeable troop of academic sculpture. The “Blacksmith”
wielding his hammer, the “Harbour-Workers,” the more than life-sized
“Smith,” are discoveries which are tantamount to revelations.
Especially this smith in his working garb, with his stiff leather
apron, leggings, and the foot coverings that are intended to protect
him from the sparks. Leaning on the tongs that are almost the height
of a man, he rests his hand on his hips and waits until it is his turn
to attack the work. There is a proud tranquillity, and a reserve of
ready strength in him that carry us away. This artisan is every whit
as handsome in his way as an antique statue in a toga of ample fold,
or a noble nudity, or a knight in romantic armour. His body possesses
the elegance which perfect fitness confers, his movement the energetic
restraint that the workman, thrifty in exerting himself, acquires
through being in the habit of avoiding every prodigal expenditure of
his strength. Meunier trains our eyes to appreciate the æsthetic
charm of this phenomenon of our own days, which great art has hitherto
stupidly passed by.
Of what expressive poetry Meunier is capable we recognise with
admiration in a statue of an animal, the mine-horse—one of those
unfortunate nags which are brought to the mine as foals, in order to
draw the coal waggons to the galleries, and who are condemned to spend
the whole of their lives in the bowels of the earth, far from the
sun. The animal’s head droops, its lips are flabby, eyes half-closed,
ears sunken, flanks fallen in; the whole wretchedness of an innocent
creature condemned to night and woe is embodied in this shivering
beast. The mine-nag has certainly no sense of its disconsolate fate;
it does not miss the sun, or long for green pastures. It does not envy
its luckier brothers who can skip in the fresh grass beneath the blue
sky. Meunier has all these feelings for it; he infuses them into the
animal’s stupid soul; but doubly amazing is the power with which he
himself can express through a coarse animal body humanly lofty tragedy.
What had already become clear to me when I saw Meunier’s works
separately in the _salon_ at the Champs de Mars, deepened itself within
me, at the sight of the whole collection of them, into a certain
conviction that Meunier is, perhaps unconsciously, a pupil of Millet’s.
He learnt from him to look with reverence on the homely men who with
holy zeal, without gazing to the left or right, with body and soul
in their work, wrest the works of civilisation from the forces of
nature. He improves Millet’s peasants and artisans into the plastic
and monumental. It is the same simplicity, almost crudeness; the same
contempt of pose, the same extreme energy of activity, and the same
deep, inward life as in the master who painted the “Angelus.” And what
makes the most vivid impression on us in Meunier, as in Millet, is the
ardent piety with which the sight of true and earnestly working people
fills him—people who rise high in their apparently humble, yet fruitful
and, through its connection with the corporate life of mankind,
especially significant labour. An artist, however, who discloses to us
such outlooks on the path of civilisation, and such insight into the
human soul, has some claim to a place near the acknowledged masters.
III
THE QUESTION OF STYLE
A history of style—I mean of style in general, not of one particular
style—has, so far as I am aware, never been written. That I can
understand. It would be a gigantic task, even exceeding the power of an
encyclopædist. It would have to show from what spiritual peculiarities
of the artist; from what necessities and intuitions of the time; from
what requirements of the material, and from what compulsion on the part
of the technique, the style develops, and it would have to measure
the whole range of individual and national psychology, of customs, of
material and of technology. The individual, however, whose powers do
not suffice for an exhaustive and systematic exposition of the genesis
and mutation of styles, can constantly register partial observations,
and throw light on sections of this wide province.
Every human activity is excited by a need. We fabricate weapons,
implements, shelter, and clothing, because we need them. In the
earliest stages of human artistic skill, purpose and material alone
control the productions of the human hand; style, so far as we can
speak of such a thing, is purely constructive. It makes us recognise
the influence of a small number of bio-mechanical and psychological
laws—laws that have hardly varied during all the thousands of years in
the history of human morals. These laws are those of the least effort
and of selfishness. By virtue of the law of least effort we choose the
most promising material, _i.e._, at which we have most conveniently to
hand, which can be worked in the easiest way, or is most durable, and
for that reason, more especially saves us the too frequent repetition
of the effort. We choose the form to which the material employed
adapts itself most readily. The problem which the constructive element
in style has to solve is this: given a determined task which should
be performed by an artistic expedient, how will this object be most
readily, and yet most perfectly, attained with the material available?
The law of selfishness alters the natural course of the law of least
effort, and often operates quite in opposition to it. The possessor
of an object wishes to be remarked; he will distinguish himself from
others, be admired and envied by them, whereby he will gain influence
over their minds. He will therefore demand that for the object not the
most easily procured material, but the rarest, and that which can
be furnished only with the utmost difficulty, be employed, that the
form require not the least, but greatest possible amount of labour. He
will likewise wish the workmen to sacrifice the elegance of economy,
not to represent what is alone real and necessary with the smallest
expenditure of material, but, on the contrary, to lavish material, and
make it quite visible and quite striking; to add to the Useful and
Essential, also the Superfluous, so as to suggest the notion of wealth.
The idea of elegance will alter its meaning. It will no longer signify
the greatest suitability and perfect appropriateness, but, in the first
place, costliness of material, difficulty of work, wastefulness—in a
word, luxury.
The law of selfishness bursts the narrow frame of construction, and
adds to style its second element, decoration. This, too, is still
under the law of least expenditure of force; this, too, is still
primarily subordinate to construction, _i.e._, utility, but it strives
to render itself independent of the constructive element, and to
become its own object. The history of each particular style shows this
conflict between the constructive and decorative elements. At first
construction rules alone; next, decoration, called forth by the _amour
propre_ of the fabricator or possessor, joins it, but very timidly and
very modestly. It obsequiously gets out of the way of construction,
and contents itself with corners where the constructive element has
nothing to do. But gradually it gets bolder, steps from its holes and
corners, confronts construction, compels it to give way and take less
comfortable by-paths, and finally subjects the constructive element
entirely to its will and caprice, so that, in the decadent period of a
style, a useful object becomes wholly unserviceable for its original
purpose, and is only an excuse for decoration, which self-gloriously
gives itself airs.
There is another contrast between construction and decoration. The
constructive is the social element in the product of human labour;
the decorative the individual one. I do not think that this dictum
needs an elaborate explanation; it seems clear enough to me. In
construction expression is given to a need which is, at a given time
and in a given place, shared by many or all; it answers not only a
condition, but a demand of the community. Decoration is—at any rate
originally—the outcome of individual taste and individual imaginative
power. Construction is a thing necessitated, and therefore _banal_;
decoration is superfluous, and therefore charming. The former appeals
to the understanding; the latter is fantastic and sentimental. The
human consciousness is, however, so arranged that—for its gain? for its
loss? (I have treated this question so often and so thoroughly in other
places that I may here leave it undiscussed)—it derives its feelings of
pleasure and aversion incomparably more from its sensuous than from
its intellectual life. Wherefore, for practical purpose in style, only
those who are most highly developed intellectually have appreciation;
on the other hand, for what is pleasing, all whose nervous system is
susceptible to pleasurable feelings.
An individual decorative invention becomes style by the imitation
of others, which can be slavish or free. A single work, a single
artist, will never be felt as a phenomenon of style. There is the same
difference between originality and style as between the picture of
a certain person and the composite or average photograph of Galton.
The feature of family likeness that runs through the works of one
period and one place, however, like that which all members of a
blood-relationship exhibit, is explained most simply through descent
from a common ancestor.
Decoration is either organic or transferred. The former is the
outgrowth of construction, and gives it a new meaning, unites to
the idea of its purpose a simile that can be correct or false,
pleasant or silly; the latter is added externally, and only aims
at the beautification of the surface, without adopting living and
necessary relations to the structure and destination of the object.
Surface decoration may be pretty and rich, but it is always something
subordinate, and always speaks of poor imagination and slight inventive
power. Organic decoration is alone the outcome of a creative gift for
art.
The psychical mechanism, which produces organic decoration, is
always the same; it is the co-operation of association of ideas
and anthropomorphism. I know very well that this latter is only a
particular instance of the former; but I cite the really identical,
nevertheless, as two apparently different ideas, so as not to become
vague through too wide generalisation.
For the sake of clearness I will quote a concrete example. In
collections, one not infrequently meets with a mediæval plane having
the figure of a crouching lion with jaws open and a wild expression. It
is easy to reproduce the psychic process through which this form arose.
The joiner who uses the plane, and follows his own work reflectively,
sees how the mouth of the plane, when applied, strikes the iron into
the surface of the wood, and tears the splinters from it. What is more
obvious than to think at the same time of jaws pouncing on the wood to
flay and mangle it? The technical German expressions, _Hobelmaul_ and
_Hobelwangen_ (plane-mouth and plane-cheeks) for the aperture in which
the _Hobeleisen_ (plane-iron) is fixed, show that the association of
ideas at once presented itself when the tool assumed the form familiar
to us. The mediæval artist went further; he has logically developed
the image of a rending and devouring mouth suggested by association
of ideas. He has given it form; he has examined it with sufficient
artistic intensity to embody materially the picture presented by the
word, to raise it from the rhetorical to the plastic. But whilst the
artist advanced from the mouth of the plane to a lion’s jaws, and
from the latter to an entire lion crouching over the board as over a
victim that he has attacked and torn down, and mangling it with raging
delight, he has at the same time made use of anthropomorphism, has
imputed to the plane will, passion, gruesome enjoyment, and turned the
planing into the tool’s riotous satisfaction of bloodthirsty wild-beast
instincts.
This plane in the shape of a crouching lion is the model of a good
organic decoration. The construction is not injured; it does no damage
to the under-surface of the plane, that it is the smooth-lying belly of
the lion with drawn claws; it does not prejudice the working capacity
of the iron, that it is let into a mouth of a slightly waving lip
shape; it does not make it difficult to work, that the handle is shaped
like a round lion’s head. A sense is communicated to the tool which it
did not originally possess; it does not shave and smoothe, but lives,
tears, devours, and finds its joy therein. Organic decoration is thus
an infusing of soul into that which possessed no soul; and not only
this, but also in a higher and nobler way, a submerging of oneself in
the soul that the artist has inspired into that which was soulless.
He must live in the being which his anthropomorphising association of
ideas has excogitated. “What should I feel, how should I act, what
movements should I make, what expression should I have, if I were this
object, but thinking, willing, feeling—in short, living and conscious?
How should I, for instance, as a plane which was really a beast of
prey, dispose myself, if I had the board—my victim—under me, and began
devouring it?” The organically decorative artist is, therefore, really
the dramatiser of the inanimate, for he creates beings, bestows on
them character, and makes them act according to the latter and the
situation, and, if not speak, nevertheless imitate.
If an artist has, from some especially vivid intuition and active
association of ideas, found and embodied an anthropomorphic likeness
which is very strikingly clear, imitation seizes it and repeats it with
slight individual changes, which are, now and then, spirited and happy,
but, for the most part, make the original picture dull, nay, through
stupidity or misunderstanding may degrade it to nonsense. Such is
exactly the case with the material picture as with the word-picture. At
first it is the new and peculiar discovery of a poetic mind, then it is
repeated well or ill so often that it ends with being a characterless
commonplace. Every cultivated language is made up of such commonplaces,
and, in like manner, style is made up of repetitions and tones, which
are the plastic equivalent of rhetorical phrases.
The psychic sources of style—in contradistinction to those or
freely devised organic decoration, which style only repeats and
vulgarises—originate in very mean domains of mind. They are
thoughtlessness, or, to put it more clearly and briefly, stupidity and
mental inertia in their special forms as imitativeness and detestation
of novelty.