painting, manifold transitions and mixed forms are, of course, also
observable. If, perhaps, G. Poussin represents literary, Corot lyric,
Turner, at the time the formation of his cataract began, optical
landscape, in its theoretical purity, we see in Claude Lorrain a
revelling in light and a poetic mood penetrate the mytho-heroic
literary painting which he owes to his artistic training, and from
which, in spite of higher flights, he could never entirely free
himself; and Segantini is a good example of an originally lyrical
landscape that is always more strongly inclining to the optical;
for if at the beginning he loved to copy high mountains, at last he
busied himself only with fixing the wonder of light in thin air on the
mirroring ice and glacier snow.
Camille Pissarro was mainly, in separate periods of his artistic
development exclusively, an optical landscape painter. The attunement
with nature which is afforded by the meeting of mountain and wood,
water and reed, by the forms of trees and cliffs, the peculiarities of
plant-life, and the movements of open country, he evidently did not
feel and he cannot arouse. He was nothing, and he wanted to be nothing,
but a priest and poet of light. When light fell, what objects it
illumined and played on was a matter of such indifference to him that
this landscape painter painted city scenes just as often as those of
open country. Views of the Paris Boulevards, the Avenue de l’Opéra, the
Seine seen from the bridges, the streets and squares of Rouen, occupy
quite as large a space in his work as studies of the valley of the
Marne and the hills of Southern England. Thanks to the good school from
which he came, he never, like so many of his rivals, melts away into
formlessness. He could not refrain from drawing distinctly. It was the
movement of his bold and skilful hand that pervaded his will; but the
sole hero of his pictures, to whom he gave his love and attention, was
light.
After he had outgrown the formulæ of the Corot type of landscape, he
sought with persistent, hot endeavour to find a method that would
qualify him to draw into his picture as much light as possible, as
intense light as possible, even the whole sun. What he himself found
failed to satisfy him. When Seurat, who suffered undoubtedly from
eye troubles, came forward with his stippling, Pissarro at once took
possession of the new manner, and became a stippler even unconsciously.
Seurat, it is well known, taught that the painter, if he would give
truth and force to colour, must not mix the shade on his palette and
transfer it ready-made to the canvas, but must dissect it into its
primary colours, which are known from the spectrum, and insert them
in little dabs by one another, so as to leave it to the eye to put
them together again on the retina. This optical proceeding professes
to have been learnt by listening to nature, which also offers us only
as single colours what we feel as a synthesis of colour. The theory
is sheer nonsense. Nothing of the sort happens in nature. When we
see green grass we do not see yellow and blue grass which our eye
mixes into green, but we see a body proceed from the æther-vibrations
of the undulations, which call forth on the retina a sensation of
green; and to imitate this influence of the grass we have to employ
only one colour stuff from which atmospheric vibrations of similar
undulations proceed. Unscientific painters were, however, impressed by
the sham-scientific jabber of Seurat, who tried, in his wonted manner,
through a subsequently discovered theory, to convert a defect of sight
into an advantage; and they applied themselves the more zealously to
stippling as the innumerable specks really made bright a twinkling,
whirling impression, which superficially reminded one of the vibration
of hot air on a sunny plain at midsummer noon.
Only superficially. Pissarro soon discovered that stippling really
did not bring more light into his pictures, and he gave it up. He
resigned the Seurat method to rivals who rush after eccentricity
because they hope to astonish by it, and to whom a style of painting
was particularly suitable, which blurred the line with colour and
saved them that tedious drawing that always gave them the greatest
affliction. He himself, however, returned again to the honest style of
wielding the brush, which he had learnt of his great masters.
The stippling episode of his life, which he got over, throws light,
however, on the painful, fundamental mistake of Pissarro and his
companions. They wanted to paint light, and by that wanted something
impossible, for light is not to be represented by colours which do not
themselves emit light, and are neither phosphorescent nor fluorescent.
All that is attainable by colour is awakening the reminiscence of
light, and, by means of the memory-picture illuminating the brain,
to cheat our consciousness with the idea of a directly received
impression. The very great masters of optical landscape painting soon
acknowledge, or feel, that the brush can indeed conjure forth the
illusion of illumination, but is unable to paint light, and they turn
from a hopeless Sisyphus-task to create pictures of mist and dusk,
from which sunlight—a thing inimitable—is absolutely banished. The
most instructive example of this is James Whistler; but he who does
not possess the instinctive certainty of genius will not be conscious
of the limitations of human capacity, and ever rolls the round stone
unweariedly up the mountain.
Pissarro would have saved himself many hours of tragic quest, struggle,
and sense of powerlessness, had he known or recognised the primary fact
which Friedrich Hebbel seized in his theological but lucid epigram:
“He who the sun has created will ever remain quite another
Than the industrious wight who for us prospects shall paint.”
WHISTLER’S PSYCHOLOGY
“Do you think, prince, that Raphael would not have been the greatest
genius among painters if he had been unlucky enough to be born without
hands?” Lessing makes the painter Conti say to Prince Gonzaga. A
century and a half ago that seemed paradoxical, and was, probably on
that account, one of the most quoted maxims of Lessing’s. It has,
meanwhile, experienced the fate of many paradoxes, viz., become a
commonplace. Nowadays, every dabbler in psychology knows that not
arm and hand—_i.e._, execution—make the painter, but his optical
brain centres, _i.e._, his sensitiveness to impressions of sight, his
specific reactions on colour and form. One is a born painter—a painter
from organic necessity and natural bent preceding all education—only by
special development or susceptibility of this centre.
In painting, however, there are two elements to be kept
distinct—drawing and colour. Both these are traceable to the centres of
sight, but they correspond to different sensibilities. Optical centres,
which perceive with particular keenness and delicacy the distinctions
between intensities of light, are the real, organic hypothesis of the
talent for drawing; for what we perceive with the eye, without the
aid of the senses of touch and muscle, as outline or form, is purely
distinction of intensity in light. Optical centres, on the other hand,
which are particularly sensitive to the variations of undulations
of light, form the basis of the sense of colour and the talent for
colouring. As a rule the talents for drawing and colouring appear
coupled, even if one or the other preponderates, for highly developed
or particularly sensitive optical centres are naturally receptive
beyond the average of optical impression of every sort, of differences
both of intensity and of undulations of light. This is, however, not
always the case, and there are dry, sharp draughtsmen without sense of
colour, and some who revel in colour without the ability to grasp the
idea of form and render it plastically.
In a brain that is characterised by a special morphological or
functional development or sensitiveness of the optical centres, this
dominates all functions of the brain, especially memory and association
of ideas. The entire thinking faculty has an optical or visual
character; it stands in a dependent relation to sight. Memory clings
almost exclusively to reminiscent pictures of the sense of sight, and
association of ideas connects mainly pictures of this category. Every
perception of form calls up in the consciousness representations of
form. The fancy is “inwardly completely full of figures,” as Albert
Dürer quaintly and with wonderful intuition expresses it in his
“Diaries.” The world-picture of this brain, always disposed to intense
observation, is neither loud nor excited, but bright, flashing, and
radiant like a mosaic work of precious stones and enamel. All the inner
connections between the different domains of the brain are sharpened
towards the optic centres, and all the activities of the brain, all
emotions, all processes on the threshold of consciousness also release
central optical excitements.
Whistler’s life-work reveals more than that of any other artist
in our times the deep, organic primitiveness of his genius as a
painter. We can observe in him, as in a school text, the psychology
of the born painter. His signature is at once a fine example of the
association of ideas on the part of a visionary. It consists, as
everybody knows who has seen Whistler’s works, of a butterfly with
evenly outstretched wings. People have insisted on seeing heaven
knows what symbol in this, and have consequently sought the wildest
and remotest explanations of it. If any one asked the master for an
explanation, he laughed, and made a mysterious gesture of refusal. It
gave him vast entertainment to see his admirers tormenting themselves
with profound attempts at interpreting it. They just had no eyes;
they could not see. The butterfly is nothing but the first letter of
Whistler’s name—a big W. A Gothic, ornamental W with the two side
lines bellied out and a bar in the middle reminds one strikingly of a
soaring butterfly with its cylindrical body between its outstretched
wings. The definite association of ideas from similarity of form made
Whistler, as he painted the W of his signature, think of a butterfly,
and he henceforward formed this picture that was fuller in expression,
disregarding the original letter, which seemed to him balder and more
meaningless. The butterfly came to the front more and more as the W
went further and further back, and it is possible that at last Whistler
himself forgot the point from which he started.
Whistler was, when he liked, in the front rank as a designer of
forms. From the severe, painfully upright school of Gleyre he went
forth a master of drawing, as of the outline of corporeality of three
dimensions seen stereoscopically. One glance at his wonderfully plastic
portraits, especially of his first period, teaches this irrefutably;
but, on the whole, as his individuality made itself felt, he neglected
form and became more engrossed in colour. In the second half of his
life the outlines of subjects hardly any longer interested him at
all; he only dwelt on their appearances in colour, on the harmony
or discord of their tones. That means that his optical centres were
much more sensitive to the differences of undulations than to those
of the intensity of light. From this there necessarily resulted a
contradiction between him and the average individuals which was not
to be got over, since it originated in differences in the constitution
of the brain. He who has not Whistler’s special hyper-sensitiveness
to colour is simply unable to see things as the latter saw them. He
can just as little imagine the impressions that Whistler feels through
his sense of sight as perhaps those which are supplied to a hound by
his nose. When the blissfully but painfully supersensitive appreciator
of colour and the dull seer of outline, _i.e._, the perceiver of
light, sought to explain themselves to each other, inexplicable
misunderstandings were bound to arise, which make his celebrated
law-suit with Ruskin an excruciatingly comic jest. Ruskin appreciated
only draughtsmanship, his mind never went beyond contour. For him
a picture was a writing that should express thoughts and feelings
in the most concrete form. He demanded that it should be a definite
communication, reducible to plain words, as of a narrative, a record
of travel, or a treatise on natural science. A picture that differed
from an exact representation, just as music differs from articulate
speech—a picture that attempted to convey only a general, not a
concrete stimulation of the sight-centre sensitive to colour, and the
pleasurable feeling accompanying and emphasising it, not only was to
him necessarily incomprehensible, but, as he was a dogmatist of strong
feelings, seemed to him an impertinence—nay, a profligacy and personal
insult. Ruskin’s criticism of a “Nocturne in Black and Gold” was a new
version of the fable of the stork and the fox who invited each other
in turn to dinner, improved to the point of libel. It was childish of
Whistler to bring an action against the angry-minded art-inquisitor who
required, as the first duty of a painter, the accuracy of a geologist,
botanist, or engineer. He should not have expected justice from judges
who saw and felt, not like himself, but like Ruskin. Judge Huddleston
was of good faith when, in the immortal trial—which Whistler himself
has preserved for posterity in his charming book, “The Gentle Art
of Making Enemies”—he exchanged with the artist remarks like these:
“Which part of the picture, then, really represents the bridge? Do
you mean to say that this is the proper representation of a bridge?”
(The question referred to “Battersea Bridge by Moonlight.”) “I had no
intention of giving an exact copy of the bridge.” “Do these daubs of
colour on it represent human beings?” “They represent what you please.”
“Is that thing under there a boat?” “It is a consolation to me that you
recognise it. My whole object was only to produce a definite harmony
of colours.” He could hear this harmony of colours: Ruskin and Judge
Huddleston could not. It was utterly futile to try to make them feel it.
His peculiarity of giving his pictures fine and pretentious names,
such as “Black and Gold,” “Blue and Silver,” “Ivory and Gold,” “Purple
and Gold” is also generally misunderstood. People read “Silver and
Blue,” and saw indistinctly intricate brush-strokes of blue with
elevations in dead white, representing, by way of indication, the high
seas by night and in a mist. People hurried to the picture labelled
“Ivory and Gold,” expecting to gaze at something like an ancient
chryselephantine marvel, or a Florentine masterpiece of splendour
belonging to the days of the Medici, and what did they find? The
lightly executed sketch of a woman in a yellow and white harmony, in
which one looked in vain for the costly materials promised by the
title. Not Philistines alone have shaken their heads over this, and
evil-disposed critics have talked of hoaxing, foppery, and American
bluff. They have wronged the artist bitterly. He was absolutely honest;
his optical hyper-sensitiveness felt the colour with so heightened an
appreciation of tone that he really saw gold, silver, and purple, where
a less susceptible sense could only see dull yellow, deadened white,
undecided reddish-brown. In all probability, it was long before he
realised that others failed to observe, in the appearance of the actual
things and his pictures of them, the rare metals and precious stones,
the pearls and ivory, which gleamed from them to him. The common
phrase, which is a precipitate of the universal thought and feeling,
speaks of sun-gold and moon-silver. Sun and moon consequently make
such a strong optical impression on even the average man that he thinks
of gold and silver with the accompanying higher notes of ideas of
splendour and magnificence. In Whistler’s consciousness, however, these
ideas began to be felt with gentle excitations, as whitish foam on dark
waves in the night, or a woman’s pale complexion in cream-coloured
raiment yielded them. These delicate charms affected his sensitiveness
just as the force of the sun or moon affects others. In maniacal
excitation, of which the acutest form is madness, the brain of the
sick person becomes so supersensitive that it reacts on the ordinary
impressions of the senses just as on intolerably violent irritations.
Moreover, certain poisons, of which hashish is the best known, derange
the central nervous system into a condition of supersensitiveness,
in which the person poisoned feels himself inundated with floods of
light, and sees a blinding brightness everywhere. The sensitiveness to
which only illness or poison raises the average brain, was from nature
the peculiarity of Whistler’s sight-centres. He was conscious that
in certain respects he had more than others, and he felt as superior
to them as the Indian hunter does to a pale face of the towns on a
game-beast’s track, which the latter does not notice at all, whilst
it gives the former a thousand clear indications. As an artist he
was amiably modest, as a man amusingly arrogant. He did not flatter
himself on his work, but on his finer organisation, _i.e._, that he was
kneaded out of better dough than the majority.
His supersensitiveness is expressed not only in his revel of colour;
it is also curiously and graphically revealed in the impressions
which he feels of the appearance of women, and which he conveys in
his best portraits of women with an intensity no longer restrained
within physiological bounds, but positively touching on the morbid.
The intensity with which he feels young, high-bred, nervous women has
quite an uncanny effect on me. I think of his “Lady Meux,” and other
capricious femininities, which were exhibited, in the last fifteen
years, in the Paris _salons_ and in London. He plants his model before
us in some wonderful position. One stands with its back towards us,
but turns its head, as if in a sudden caprice, to us. Another shows
us its full face, and looks fascinatingly at us with pinched mouth
and impenetrable eyes that think troublous thoughts. These perverted,
whimsical beauties wear remarkable and personal toilettes which, except
the face and often the hands, reveal not a finger’s breadth of skin,
yet, in spite of the interposition of silk and lace, cry out for the
fig leaf. They are bundles of sick nerves that, from the crowns of
their heads to the tips of their fingers, seem to thrill with Sadic
excitement. It is as though they wanted to entice men to wild attempts,
and at the same time held their claws ready to tear, with a loud cry
of pleasure, the flesh of the daring ones. Everything madly Mænadic,
or inexorably Sphinx-like, that Ibsen was incapable of incarnating
convincingly in his Hedda Gabler speaks distinctly from Whistler’s
female portraits.
They have become typical—typical for copying painters who exaggerate
his neurotic women into the pornographic; typical for hysterical women,
to whom they suggest poses and psychological states. Félicien Rops
perhaps owes him nothing, although often enough his female demons seem
Whistler-portraits divested of clothing; he has, from analogous organic
hypotheses, independently attained to analogous conceptions of woman;
but Zorn’s, Boldini’s, Alexander’s women point to Whistler’s demoniacs.
The woman of a given epoch likes to form herself on the ideal which
the art and poetry of the time give of the “interesting” woman. Thus
Whistler, by means of his female portraits, became an educator of
the æsthetically superfine woman of the present day; but Whistler,
as an educator of woman, is to me incomparably less sympathetic than
Whistler, the delicate appreciator and symphonist of colour.
VIII
GUSTAVE MOREAU
The house in which Gustave Moreau spent the seventy-seven years of his
life (1826-98) has been turned into a museum which contains nearly all
his life’s work, according to the catalogue 1132 items, from the copies
and sketches of his youth, through the great finished paintings, down
to the promising sketches, unfulfilled promises, of his old age. This
collection falls little short of being complete. Perhaps, with the
sole exception of the incomparably less interesting Wierz, there is no
contemporary artist less often met with in public and private galleries
than Gustave Moreau. He never sold his pictures, for he was lucky
enough not to be obliged to do so; and, in the time of his maturity,
he did not exhibit, for he shunned contact with men who were strange
and unfamiliar to him. He who wishes to get to know him must, then, not
shirk a pilgrimage to his house, which he inherited from his parents,
inhabited by himself, and left as an unencumbered legacy to his native
town. And the journey will be found worth the trouble, for Gustave
Moreau is a curious phenomenon, affecting to melancholy and depressing,
at least for men enamoured with life and action, but nevertheless full
of mysterious, strangely pathetic allurement, even for those who prefer
to breathe in air and sunshine under a bright sky.
Gustave Moreau stands apart from the mighty procession of French
art in the nineteenth century, which was headed by the classic
cohort, continued by the powerful band of the knights and squires of
romanticism, and then unrolled itself before our eyes, in the legion of
the bourgeois National Guard of Philistine academic routine-art, in the
blouse-wearing troop of Realists, and, lastly, in the vacillating and
oscillating sun-flower groups of Symbolism. He is not to be classed in
this line of development. He went his way alone, deaf to the strains
of the world of which he heard only those with which he himself was
in harmony from the beginning. He had some few kindred spirits among
contemporary painters, but he did not know them, and they did not
know him either, and they exercised no influence on each other, but
grew up independently of one another from the same conditions of like
temperaments and peculiar moods that in the middle decades of the
nineteenth century dominated narrow, exclusive circles, without being
characteristic of this or any other time. For these temperaments
are purely subjective, and accord with the external only so far
as civilisation, when it has reached a certain grade of intensity
and artificiality, always produces men with widely preponderating
development of fancy, who are continually looking into their inner
selves, and cannot withdraw their eyes from the fascinating spectacle
of the wonderful events being enacted therein.
Moreau was just such a visionary. Remote from life, remote from
actuality, he ever remained engrossed in his dream, and his noble art
served him to retain his apparently multifarious, but, in reality,
little changing dream-pictures. His museum is, then, a world by itself,
with which the objective outer world has no more in common than have
dreams and ravings with pictures of the actual which serve them as
a stimulus, and furnish them with the elements of their subjective
combinations.