inclination to wander past the conquerors of the day to the shadows
in the back premises, into the remote and also, as to equipment,
significantly neglected halls of the Century Exhibition, to the
great vault in which is collected that which was to make plain
the development of French art from the Revolution to Carnot, the
grandson. What remains when the human being who gives dinners, haunts
antechambers, has cousins in the Ministry of the Fine Arts, whispers
malice in one’s ear, ceases to acknowledge greetings, and writes
flattering letters, has fallen to dust; when rivals and parasites have
disappeared; when the puffs of toadies, and the no less valuable ones
of envious men and poison-boilers, are hushed and forgotten?
Not much, and there lies the melancholy humour of such wanderings
through the realm of shadows. The only feature that always wounded
me somewhat in the “Divine Comedy,” is that Dante awards his curses
and execrations on the departed according to the rank they occupied
among the living. The invectives on the poor soul of a pope have
three stripes, those on a prince, two, and on a lord, one. That is an
inartistic forgetfulness of the frame chosen by Dante for his poem.
If he remained always mindful of his programme of death and hell, he
would not be able to distinguish crowns or purple mantles in the red
illumination of the under-world. The laughing and sighing philosophy of
Hamlet—alas, poor Yorick!—stands higher than the resentful fury of the
passionate Italian, who makes the hierarchy overstep the threshold of
the grave. It is perhaps the most profound usage of the French language
that they deprive the dead of the “Monsieur,” to which every living
man, with the exception of those criminally prosecuted and condemned,
has a claim. The dead has no longer a title—so much more sorry a fate
for him, if, when he was alive, he was nothing more than a title.
The practice is even here somewhat different from the pure theory. The
deceased is no longer “Excellency,” “Professor,” not even “Mr.” But
the usage of contemporaries to give him a title is still expressed in
the respectful tone in which they pronounce his now naked name, and
in which one possessed with a delicate sense of hearing perceives the
rustle of all the tinsel that surrounded him when alive. In this tone,
however, the name becomes familiar to the younger ones, who, without
thinking, continue this veneration, unconscious that their accent
expresses respect because the bearer of the name so pronounced was
once a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and an Academician. Thus,
my dear Schiller, are your confident words to be understood, you who
would never perceive the weft of vulgarity in the ways of man: “He
who has satisfied the best men of his time has lived for all time.”
Certainly, if by “best” we would understand the best placed, best paid,
invested with the best office, or the best decorated. He who during
his lifetime has belonged to those favoured by the grace of official
newspapers, who has been gauged by them and provided with a “full”
mark, will be recognised for all time as full without further test.
The Pantheon is the continuation of the minister’s official rooms, the
golden book of spiritual history an anthology from the Official Gazette
and the Army List, for the use of the children of later centuries. If
I must emphasise the essential: the appraisement even of the artist,
therefore of the most individual man that exists, is the outcome of
social, not individual, factors, or of the latter only when they are
socially successful, and, therefore, themselves become social factors.
There are, I admit, always proud—perhaps only haughty—natures with an
anarchistic, anti-social trait, who will not recognise any arrangement
or fixing of the community, not even its hierarchy of fame, and clench
their fists against laurel crowns just as they do against crowns.
Their rebellion, however, is seldom successful. I know of no case of a
bomb-thrower having destroyed a Pantheon.
But as we do not take ourselves tragically, do not begin our own
verdict with the threatening formula, “In the name of the Law,” and do
not exact any submission from others, we are always entitled to be of
our own opinion, and to let the dead influence us without prejudice,
untroubled by the distinctions of rank which were bestowed on them
in life, and were buried with them. Such a method of observation is
unhistorical, but subjectively fruitful; it leads to self-emancipation
from many superstitions.
The Century Exhibition of French painting was far from being complete;
it was incomparably more fragmentary than the Louvre Museum, which
is also not without gaps. But it afforded a general view of the art
development of the period represented, and it gave the independent man
the chance of correcting numerous opinions which had taken hold of him
from study and reading.
It began with the masters who created and flourished before the deluge
of 1789—Watteau, Greuze, Fragonard, Vigée-Lebrun. The three first
had, for two generations, sunk deeply in general estimation. Then the
force of fashion raised them up again to dizzy heights of fame. I do
not believe that they will maintain themselves there. It pleases the
reactionaries to glorify the _ancien régime_ at the expense of the
Revolution, and to this planned and deliberate toil belongs also the
unmeasured overestimate of eighteenth century art and artistic work.
But it is politics, not æsthetics—no taste for art, but a tendency. In
reality, the darlings of the age of the Pompadour and Louis XVI. were
petty masters, mere fillings of a particular frame, and, lifted out of
this, they lose their best qualities.
Watteau still holds his ground most easily, for he is an amiable teller
of stories that are agreeable if nothing of a more serious character
occupies one’s mind. He draws elegantly, although without pedantry; his
colouring is cheerful, and suits admirably his hushed, silken carpets,
coquettish Gobelins, and light lacquered furniture. He is the painter
of joyous days wherein life seems an eternal feast. Gracious spring
bedecks the earth, his men and women are all young and handsome, his
ladies wear entrancing toilettes and _coiffures_, and his gentlemen
silk doublets and lace shirt-frills. Even if they dress as shepherds,
they are laughingly addressed thus: “I know you, fair masque; you are
a marquis in disguise with your charming friend, the duchess.” Rosy
angels hover about them, and mingle familiarly in their pastimes. They
have nothing on earth to do except pay each other witty compliments
and play at love. I understand why American multi-millionaires pay any
price to be surrounded by Watteaus. It is really honourable to the
artists of our time that the Trust magnates have not yet succeeded in
finding or rearing painters who would flatter their egotism through
servile suggestions of a Watteau aspect of the world.
Fragonard appears in a secondary position besides Watteau. He is
drier, and with less “swing.” He is not really present in his heart at
the pastimes he paints. Watteau is himself a guest at his festivals;
Fragonard takes part in the _soirées_ only under a sealed order. The
former amuses himself, the latter amuses the person who gives him the
commission.
Greuze lives on the fame bestowed on him by the grateful Diderot. He
was enthusiastic for Diderot’s tearful _bourgeois_ tragedy, and Diderot
repaid him with enthusiasm for his painting; but we have no longer
any grounds, I suppose, for regarding him with Diderot’s eyes. When
he paints his eternal model of the “Broken Pitcher” in the Louvre,
and of his sundry counterparts of it in the Century Exhibition, he is
pitilessly pretty. When he sets great dramatic scenes in the Diderot
style on the stage—the “Village Betrothal,” the “Father’s Curse,”
etc.—he is depressingly melodramatic. His young maiden is marvellously
pretty and tame, and will always delight childlike spectators with the
charm of her blooming girlhood. He suffered himself to be infected
in Italy by Guido Reni’s sweetness, and only transplanted his soft
beauties, rolling their eyes, from paradise to the middle-class earth.
He is simply the Bouguereau of his age. That name comprises all
that can be said of him in praise or blame. Greuze is Bouguereau’s
superior in so far as he paints more vigorously, and forms his pretty
_ingénues_ of real flesh—not, like Bouguereau, of alabaster and
sugar-candy.
Beside the softness of Greuze, Madame Vigée-Lebrun seems a man and
a fighter. In a century of gallantry she alone was not gallant. She
painted women’s likenesses, and did not pay court to her models; but
she elevated them, and gave them meaning. Where the male painters of
the period saw only beauty-patches, she suspected she saw a soul. If
we look at these women with curiously poised heads, gazing boldly out
of their frames, they say proudly and calmly: “I am no trying-on hand;
I am no creature of luxury; I am no flesh for lust; I am a personage.”
At a distance of a hundred years Vigée-Lebrun is a forerunner of the
now innumerable American painters of emancipated womanhood. This brave
woman, who was beautiful, and did not overprize, nay, hardly prized her
beauty, was an asserter of women’s rights long before the word or the
thing was invented.
Prudhon was represented by a “Zephyr,” which has the same peculiarities
as his “Crucifixion” and “Crime and Punishment” in the Louvre. He
models a human body so that one must take one’s hat off to it. He has
the infallible feeling of the great Spaniards for the value of light
and shade; but what will always stand in the way of his being loved
and not merely respected is his hatred of colour. He confines himself
to a strict black and white style, which banishes all gladness and
discourages the most willing admiration.
And now the great deluge breaks in, and, like a sea-god David emerges
over the raging waves. It is really with him that the century begins,
for what preceded him was the art of the _ancien régime_ and of the
Trianon. He had at the Exhibition a “Distribution of the Colours,” an
“Ugolino,” some portraits; all of the most genuine David in choice
of subject as well as treatment. Everywhere the capricious “seeing
yellow” which seems to have been a peculiarity of his eye; everywhere
the grandly imposing, professorial infallibility of drawing which knows
no first trying, no anxious searching, no hot struggle with the never
quite attainable Nature. David compels with an imperious Medusa-glance
the ever-stirring, the ever-flowing, so that it becomes fixed, and
he can shackle the now immovable vision in brazen outlines. So his
human beings appear statues, or mimes, which maintain a pose, and his
most blameless anatomies acquire a tendency towards the artificial.
David’s mood is always uniformly high-pitched. Good-humoured people,
who would like to see the majestic man in shirt sleeves for once, lurk
in vain for him to unbutton himself. He never forsakes the decoration
and costume of high tragedy. At first he sought the drama in ancient
history or world-famed poetry. Afterwards, he found it in his immediate
surroundings. Fate vouchsafed him the favour of living in a time, the
pathos of which was mightier than that of Athens, Sparta, or Rome.
He satisfied his deepest longings when, in the “Sabine Women,” he
preached to the murderous factions among his people reconciliation
and brotherly love, and, in “The Distribution of the Colours” and the
“Coronation,” he made Napoleon the equal of the heroes of mythology. He
is, therefore, always genuine, even when he may seem to the superficial
gaze theatrical. It is the difference between a tone naturally
sustained during moments of life at high pressure, and declamation
learnt from a teacher of rhetoric.
His pupils, imitators, and rivals have, on the contrary, not succeeded
in avoiding declamation. Gérard, Gros, Riesener, and Drolling were,
consciously or unconsciously, the greatest flatterers that ever painted
portraits. Because David represented Napoleon in the character of an
Alexander of Macedon, or an ancient god of war, the others, the smaller
painters, in their portraits gave to even the ordinary men of the
period the deportment of Olympian gods. Only Gérard’s “Letitia,” who,
too, bore apotheosis most easily, is a good modest human being. All the
other women are Juno or Pallas Athene; all the men Mars or Achilles.
The contrast between the commonplace physiognomies and the magnificence
of their appearance is now and then so violent that one is led to
surmise that the painter wanted to make fun of his models. “Charles X.
in his Coronation Robes,” by Ingres, seems, for example, virtually a
parody of David’s “Coronation of Napoleon.”
Géricault stands an examination of his title to fame badly. He has
not so correct an eye for the figures of horses as was believed
before instantaneous photographs. His portraits of soldiers are
really more crude than powerful. Even the sketch for the “Raft of the
Medusa,” reveals evidence of straining after effect which our pious
admiration refused to notice in the colossal work in the Louvre. On
the other hand, the figure of Louis Leopold Boilly gained strangely
in the Century Exhibition. Up till then I knew only his “Arrival of
a Diligence at a Posting-house,” in the Louvre, and I did not rate
him very highly on account of the affected _atelier_ light of this
otherwise prettily studied little picture. Here he disclosed himself
as a great philosopher and satirist. One picture represents a popular
merry-making with wine _gratis_, another a free performance at the
Ambigu-Comique Theatre. There the crowd is fighting murderously over
a drink that can be had for nothing; half-grown hobbledehoys throttle
bestial greybeards; bullies claw hold of furies; dreadful feet trample
on faces and necks in the mad storming of the wine supplies, and the
victors in this struggle have their reward: they lie on the ground
bestially drunk. The scenes at the entrance of the theatre are not
quite so vulgar. There is a less dogged scramble for intellectual
enjoyment than for that of the palate. Yet here, too, the most brutal
lack of consideration and greedy selfishness triumph; here, too, the
strong man overmasters the weak; here, too, among beings who seem
to belie their human form, the law of the jungle holds good; and
here, too, poor people pay for a little doubtful pleasure with the
sufferings, dangers, and exertions of a storming of the Malakoff.
In the foreground of both pictures stands a group of well-dressed
persons who, half in pity, half in disgust, look at the disorderly
pushing of the rabble from a respectful distance. These rich people
have the _rôle_ of teaching the moral of the fable. They express
the sociological thought of the painter. Boilly deplores the low
moral condition of the masses, and reproaches the dominant class
with having degraded them to beasts, when it pretends to give them
a feast. He rejects with utter disdain the dogma of equality, yet
without haughtiness, for he has for the disinherited the somewhat
condescending, yet warm pity of a genuine patrician. These are
extremely modern—I might call them Toynbee-feelings—and they are
expressed with an exact, judicious brush that can conjure forth the
confused turmoil of a great, raging multitude, and, nevertheless,
remain faithful in all details. Boilly was decidedly a master.
The Century Exhibition also gave the opportunity for a discovery,
not only to me, but also to all who brought to it an open mind.
There is a painter, Trutat, of whom no one had ever heard anything.
Seekers who investigated the provincial newspaper of 1840-60 succeeded
in discovering one or two articles about him. That is all. He once
or twice exhibited in the “Salon,” but the “Salon” reports of the
time make no mention of him. He lived in the first half of the last
century, and died at the age of twenty-four. Before his picture—one
single picture—men were amazed, and women stood with moist eyes. It
is a double picture; in the foreground, a fair young man, pale with
sickness, with deep blue eyes and a proud, wild mane; his firm forehead
full of impatient dreams of joyous creations, fame, and happiness, yet,
in his hollow cheeks, faint shadows of death. Behind him, half obscured
in dusk, a woman’s profile, his mother’s head; a good Samaritan with
tender gaze, and lips closed in sadness, which once sang cradle-songs,
but have learnt silence in the sick-room. In its composition there
is a reminiscence of Ary Scheffer’s “St Augustin and St Monica,” in
the Louvre. But it is incomparably more profound, for Trutat depicts
himself, not saints whom the power of imagination has first to bring
before him. The painting is wonderful, firm and full as that of
Franz Hals—I deliberately utter this strong statement—so surely and
organically matured that one traces beneath the skin all the most
delicate muscles and bones. And add to this technique, of which one
does not discern how he could have acquired it in a fleeting morning of
life, the intensity of feeling which has raised the work to the rank
of those high creations in which a soul is revealed. The picture is
full as a swan’s song, of foreboding and love. The great youth does not
understand himself alone, without his mother—the dear mother must be
with him, if he goes out to the market among people. Shall she nurse
him? Shall she protect him? Can he dispense with her for a moment as
he must be taken away from her so soon? All this is in that mysterious
picture, and it was in it when Trutat, though he did not know it,
painted his own requiem. Only nobody then understood the riddle;
Trutat as little as the rest. He is another Regnault, only a still
more genuine one. And no one has made lamentation about him, although
his tragedy is more painful than Regnault’s. For the latter attained
immortality in the apotheosis of death in battle, whilst miserable
consumption slew Trutat ingloriously.
The Romantic fever begins to seize the century. The painters hasten to
hang round them the botanical box, and seek the blue flower. The first
to go forth into the moon-illumined, witching night was Chassériau!
Poor Chassériau! It would have better suited his bent to paint _salons_
with rich Empire-furniture, wherein respectably dressed citizens sit
with their wives and daughters, and pleasantly tell each other the
anecdotes of the day. His portrait of the two sisters in red shawls
and yellow plaited dresses shows this—a neat, pretty, _bourgeois_
painting, which denies itself all enthusiasm, and all soaring. But now
the tarantula stings him, and he occupies himself only with obsolete
subjects such as Orpheus, _châtelaines_, fairy-tale princesses with
black slaves, Macbeth and the three witches. The last picture is
particularly characteristic of him. The three witches have their white
beards and pointed noses, as prescribed by the romantic code; but
they are merely grotesque, but not in the least weird. We have the
impression that they have met in a peaceful country in order to gossip
about their neighbours, and make coffee. They publicly proffer the
knight, who should be Macbeth, a small bowl. The heath by night lacks
every trace of mood; the ugly old women every touch of the demoniac.
Chassériau painted, just as J. Fr. Kind—the [“Freischütz”] Kind—wrote
poetry.
I am afraid I must likewise be guilty of heresy in respect of another
great man; but Delacroix, too, fails to justify the idolatry people
have displayed and, to some extent, still display towards him. I do
not misjudge his joyous coloriture, although his harmonies are rather
loud than grand. I am not blind to the characteristic mobility of his
composition, although it is generally far more a stagey flourish than
assertion of strength in the service of a will conscious of what it is
aiming at. What excites in me, however, unconquerable opposition is
his phrasing. If any art demands intuition it is painting. Delacroix,
however, usually has not exercised intuition, but has clothed with the
cool work of his brain abstract thoughts in conventional forms. For
this, look at “Greece expiring on the Ruins of Missalonghi”—a picture
which was once of enormous influence and highly praised. On some
disordered masonry stands a young lady in the _bal masqué_ dress of a
Greek, who has no thought of giving up the ghost, but is playing a part
in robust health, and will change her dress, and have supper later. At
some distance behind her we catch sight of a young negro in the uniform
of a Janissary, climbing a rubbish heap, brandishing a flag with a
crescent on it, and a curved sabre. This slightly painted Turkish
warrior appears not to see the young Greek girl; at all events he does
nothing to her, and does not even threaten her. There is no association
between the two figures; the action is disconnected. At most the
Turk is interesting as an acrobat or banner-swinger. No murderous
propensities are noticeable in him. The countenance of the Greek lady
is pale and weary; but a rest in bed seems the only thing she needs.
It says much for the keenness of their Philhellenism that this picture
could move the people of the period. Delacroix had, however, no
intuition at all when he painted it; he only illustrated an unplastic,
insipid phrase.
His other paintings are mostly illustrations of a text. “Comedians and
Buffoons” were unmistakably suggested by Victor Hugo. Confused ideas
occur to him. Thus “The Good Samaritan” was not painted to the passage
in the Gospel, but to a story of chivalry; for the gentle benefactor
takes the sick man on his charger—he is a mounted Samaritan!—just as a
knight takes the noble lady he is carrying off.
Delacroix was a literary painter; we know that from his correspondence;
but without that, his pictures would betray it. He read much more in
books than in nature, and he supplied paintings that gave evidence
of education and much reading, in which the art-hating, blind-souled
Philistines of education delight royally. It may be that the confusion
of his portrayal and the loudness of his palette was felt by his
contemporaries as a deliverance from the coldness and precision of
David’s school. I suspect, however, his earliest admirers valued him
chiefly because he fed on the same books, plays, and newspapers as
themselves.
Ary Scheffer stands in the same spiritual plane as Delacroix, but lacks
the keenly joyous colour and the theatricality of his stage-setting.
Schubert’s songs and Schumann’s are music even without the lyric text,
and what music! I cannot imagine what Ary Scheffer’s pictures from
Shakespeare, Goethe, and Byron would be without the poets and their
poems. His picture in the Century Exhibition, “The Dead ride fast,” is,
if I exclude from my conception my remembrance of Bürger’s ballad, an
almost touching example of tastelessness. Leonora’s dishevelled hair,
blown by the wind into a stiff, horizontal position, is supposed, for
instance, to illustrate the swiftness of the ride—a notion which may
have seemed to Scheffer terrible, but is comic.