have existed, side by side with men of observation and action, thinkers
and dreamers who turn away from actualities, and build up around them a
world of ideas which their excessively developed power of imagination
could fashion, and endow with romantic life according to their own
inclination and necessities. Thus arose all symbols, mythologies,
fables, and superstitions that were enshrined in folk-lore, traditions,
and, more especially, in all arts. Civilisation brings with it, by
this means, besides its recognition of nature, a world of shadows
invented by men freely—even if according to fixed psychological
laws—like a ghostly double, the astral body of the real world; and
our prescriptive education, which comprises in itself more æsthetic
than positively scientific ingredients, renders us all double citizens
of the real and the imaginary world. The majority of us chiefly live
in the former, and visit the latter only in rare moments, which to
some mean only recreation, but to others consecration and exaltation.
A small minority, however, renounce their citizenship of the actual
world and withdraw wholly to the world of imagination, which has been
conjured up by the artistic fancy of mankind in thousands of years of
creative activity.
Moreau was a citizen of the shadow-world, wherein he spent, an eternal
Phæacian Sunday, and he never grew weary of lingering over its
beauties. We learn by his representations to know it thoroughly in all
its parts. Its landscapes are curiously jagged rocks which seem to
be formed of corals; chalk plains with moon-glimmering reflections;
mountain steeps in cumulous clouds; lakes and seas of oil, opalescent
or charged with indigo. The animals that people this hypnotising
paradise are unicorns with silvery coats, amazing dragons that are
too curly to inspire fear, milk-white flying-horses, seven-headed
hydras standing bolt upright on the tips of their tails, Stymphalian
birds with women’s faces, sphinxes, chimæras, and phœnixes. Even the
flamingos, which come nearest to the terrestrial fauna, are here with
the tips of their wings dipped, as it were, in blood, immeasurably
more oddly pathetic than we know them. The flora exhibits (besides
monumental marvels of Peru, which remind one of the rose windows in
Gothic cathedrals) a “mystic blossom,” a somewhat calla-like creation
that sprouts forth from a luminous rock in the blue, mirroring mere,
and on its slender summit, between great high leaves, bears the Blessed
Virgin surrounded by a dazzling halo. The spiritual beings that move
amidst these marvellous animals and plants, are gods, heroes, and
poets: Tyrtæus, Orpheus, Hesiod, Sappho, Jason, Helena, Odysseus,
Penelope, Pasiphae, Hercules, Dejanira, Œdipus, Jupiter, Apollo, the
Muses, Semele, Leda, Europa, Prometheus, the Oceanides, Moses, Buddha,
Jesus Christ, the Good Samaritan; the acts or, more correctly, the
states in which these gods, demigods, and genii are represented are
taken from all mythologies and theogonies. Every mysticism that has
at any time or place arisen, like a silver haze, from the chaotic
brain of man, has found admittance into Moreau’s soul and flows up
and down in it in changing pictures. As to orthodoxy of any sort or
kind, he is quite unconcerned. His mind, when stirred, clings with the
same delicacy to the saint of every origin, and he kneels, like the
large-hearted heathen of antiquity, at the threshold of the most varied
realms of divinity. The Pallas Athene in the hall of the king’s palace
at Ithaca, who enjoys the massacre of the suitors, is formed after the
same type as the Blessed Virgin of the “mystic blossom”; hovering in
long, trailing, white garments, radiant with a halo, ecstatic in look
and mien and the clasping of her hands. The statues of the Chaldæan
gods in the triumph of Alexander the Great imitate hieratic repose,
and the Eastern posture of the Buddha-Amina statues. Prometheus on the
Caucasian peak, palpitating beneath the vulture’s beak, is allied by a
family likeness to Christ scourged at the pillar. Jason on the poop of
the _Argo_, and the fair man among the “Three Magi from the East,” are
cast in the same mould. Moses, looking down from the frontier hill on
the blue plains of Canaan, and the great Pan, gazing at the spectacle
of the procession of the spheres, seem brothers. Jupiter, with Semele
on his bosom melting away with its heat, has the unapproachable
sublimity of the canonical, the orthodox God the Father. For Moreau
there are no dead religions; with a humble shyness and feelings of awe,
he approaches all that has ever been reverenced by man.
Moreau’s transcendental imaginations necessarily reveal themselves to
the senses in other colours, as in other forms than those familiar
to us by experience. An eerie light fills his pictures with the
shimmering radiance of mother-of-pearl. The rarest, and, therefore, as
jewels, the most treasured exceptional forms of the planetary world
are the material of which everything in these pictures consists;
the buildings are of gold and precious stones; there is a twinkle
of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds everywhere. Moreau’s amazing art
produces from his palette of oil-colours effects that lie far outside
its technique; they are huge Limoges plates with rivers of transparent
enamel; paintings on glass with sun-illumined, jewel-like fragments
of colour; Byzantine mosaics of bits of _lapis lazuli_, jasper, and
cornelian. With this palette certain Quattrocentists such as Mantegna,
certain Flemish artists as Van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, as
also Holbein, have in their pictures produced a small number of
beauty-spots. No one prior to Moreau has painted big pictures entirely
with it.
The first impression received from the Moreau Museum is that of
having entered an enchanted castle, which has about it something of
the treasure cave of the mountain sprites, something of the palace of
the Elf-queen, as we know them from the “Thousand and One Nights,”
and German folk-stories. And if we have tarried longer, and our eyes
have grown accustomed to the ripple of pearls and precious stones, of
enamel and gold, we are astonished at the strange, weird stiffness and
stillness of all these splendid creatures, and really feel we are
surrounded by ghosts and spectres that have assumed only in pretence
the guise of men.
Moreau formed his views on Baudelaire’s rules. In the rooms of his
museum we fancy we are looking at a series of book-illustrations for
the _Fleurs-du-mal_.
“Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.”
“I hate the movement which displaces the lines, and never do I weep
and never laugh” would, as an inscription above the entrance, most
fittingly convey in words the main feature of Moreau’s art. For nearly
all his pictures, but most of all for the “Triumph of Alexander the
Great,” “Penelope’s Suitors,” and the “Daughters of Thespius,” the
verses of the _Paris Dream_ would suit as a deliberate description.
“J’avais banni de ces spectacles
Le vègétal irregulier
. . . . .
Babel d’escaliers et d’arcades,
C’était un palais infini,
Plein de bassins et de cascades
Tombant dans l’or mat ou bruni.
. . . . .
C’étaient des pierres inouies
. . . . .
Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles
Planait....
Un silence d’éternité.”
This _silence d’éternité_ is the characteristic of Moreau’s art. Here
nothing moves; all is as stiff as Lot’s wife after she was turned into
a pillar of salt, as the men in the fairy-tale after the wizard has, by
a wave of his magic wand, made the warm life stagnate in their veins.
Moreau succeeds in reversing Pygmalion’s miracle. His brush takes the
life out of every human body he paints, and turns it into a statue.
In none of his figures do we feel that he painted from a model. They
all give the impression of being copies from statuary, and we are, for
instance, not surprised that his manifestly unfinished “Moses Looking
at the Promised Land” has a long bearded head as white as marble on
an almost flesh-coloured body. We assume that Moreau has here simply
reproduced the natural colour of his stone prototype. Among all his
thousand works, one alone has really struck me as having something like
a stir of passion traceable, viz., his “Messalina.” The abominable
empress, slave of her animal passions, is ascending the dirty couch
at a den in the Suburra. The young vulgarian whom she has beckoned to
her clasps her waist with both arms; the attendant torch-bearer of the
crowned slut turns her head away from the repulsive sight. One can
very well understand the movement of this slave who is ashamed of her
mistress, but has only to obey and hold her tongue. The eagerness,
too, with which the youth kneeling before the couch creeps up to
the body that is offered him, is true and warm. Here is real life,
even if in one of its lowest manifestations. But Messalina herself,
though the protagonist of this tragedy of Cæsarean madness, is again
entirely Moreau. With her stony repose in a situation with which it
is so inconsistent, with her Assyrian fish-bladder-eyed profile, she
resembles an idol in a Babylonian temple, and one wonders how the
passion of the favoured one can endure the icy coldness gleaming from
this idol.
His temperament indicated to him, from his earliest awakening to
artistic impulse, the course of his education, just as it did, later,
the choice of his material. As a youth in Italy he copied Pompeian
mural paintings with fervour, and later revelled at the sight of the
Quattrocentists. Here he recognised at first sight kindred souls; here,
as it were, his blood spoke. He tries, by imitating them piously, to
keep them for reminiscences later on. His mystic bent to the old, the
obsolete, the risen as from a grave, is a trait connecting him with
the Præ-Raphaelites, who were almost his contemporaries. With them
he has in common, too, the uncommonly exact and accurate technique.
He is a cold but unerring draughtsman. All his accessory work, his
architecture, ornaments, implements, and clothing, are marvels of
archæological learning or, when this fails, of invention and patiently,
painfully achieved execution. His conscientiousness went so far that
he painted perhaps twenty or more far advanced sketches of each detail
of his large compositions ere he proceeded to the main work, and this,
nevertheless, he often left unfinished, because he felt he had not done
enough to satisfy his conscience.
Those empty, or merely vaguely filled-in spots instead of faces in
big pictures, in which all besides—the patterns of the garment stuffs
and carpets, the decorations on the splendid vases, the finery,
weapons, capitals of the pillars—are precisely rendered as complete
productions, give suddenly to the sympathetic an idea of the pains of
this struggling spirit. Moreau shunned life, which was too stormy,
noisy, and bustling for his morbid need of repose and quiet, but it did
not cease to attract him as a mysterious riddle. He would gladly have
understood it, comprehended it, and held it fast, but he had to admit
to himself that he was powerless to reach it. A homunculus artificially
generated in the retort, he can live only in his glass vessel, and must
die if he ventures out of it; but through his prison walls he gazes at
the great, broad, free nature, replete with tempestuous life, and in
the cold of his glassy den he shudders with longing for this world, so
near and yet beyond his reach. His longing is, however, never to be
appeased; he will never feel the joys of the warm breath of life.
IX
EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE
How much better off are painters and art-lovers nowadays than in
earlier times! Formerly, if you wanted to enjoy a picture you had to
own it; if you wished to know a picture you were obliged to make a
journey to it. If you liked an artist sufficiently to wish to surround
yourself with his chief creations, or the whole of them, you had to
have unlimited wealth and set up a gallery of your own. Copies are
a mere aid to remembrance, and not a good one either. Executed by a
dauber, they are worse than nothing; by a gifted artist, they give the
copyist’s, not the original creator’s, personality. The older methods
of multiplication also either furnish clumsy attempts at transmitting
them, or they are peculiar, independent, artistic creations of another
order than painting, which have their special beauty, but are unable to
seize the most inward and subtle of the charms the painting possessed.
Since the latest developments of photography and the copying processes
dependent on it, the case has been altered. If you would convince
yourself of the almost marvellous perfection with which oil-paintings
are transferred to paper nowadays, so that every stroke of the brush,
however fine, every movement of the painter’s hand, every paste,
every unevenness in the colour plane, every effect of the canvas,
ground-coating, and varnish, is reproduced in a life-like way, and you
have actually before your eyes the whole personal work of the artist,
then look at the handsome folio entitled: _L’œuvre de E. Carrière,
Texte de Gustave Geffroy_, that has been published in Paris by H.
Piazza et Cie., and contains the copy of 150 paintings and sketches
by Carrière, 75 of which have been printed on Bristol paper, and
75 incorporated in the text. They lack colour, I admit. Only when
photography renders this too, will the last word of genuineness in
copying be pronounced. Meanwhile, we must be contented that we find
again in the photograph the tonality of the colours and the effects
of light and shade in the original relatively graded in respect
of each other. With Carrière, however, the absence of colour is
really of little importance, for he painted chiefly from a grey and
brown palette, which can be very accurately reproduced by means of
photography.
A hundred and fifty Carrières! Who could pride himself on possessing
such a treasure? One would have to be an American multi-millionaire
to enjoy such an æsthetic satisfaction as that. Now it is within
the reach of every well-to-do individual. The 150 reproductions
comprise about the whole of the great artist’s life-work up to now.
They disclose to every beholder, who is of good faith and possesses a
sensibility for the beauties of painting, the key to the law of art
which Carrière laid down for himself. They render it possible to follow
the course of his development, which, at the beginning, is hesitating,
then becomes decided and weighty, and carries the artist from the
school to mastership, from tradition to uncompromising individuality.
Eugène Carrière was born on 17th January 1849, in the village of
Gournay (Seine-et-Marne). His father was a Fleming from the north of
France; his mother an Alsatian. His appearance corresponds to this
probably pure Germanic origin. He is a big, broad man with strong
bones and portly stoutness; white-skinned, blue-eyed, and fair-haired;
slow of speech, thoughtful and reserved in his movements; dreamy when
listening, unintrusive when silent, raising his voice little when
saying modest, sensible words about things which he understands. He
was still a child when his parents settled in the mother’s home. He
grew up in Strassburg, and was intended for an artisan. When he was
eighteen he went to St Quentin, and had an opportunity of seeing the La
Tours in the museum there. His talent was kindled by this unsurpassed,
perhaps unequalled master. The beautiful crayon faces of La Tour
taught him to feel the velvety splendour of youthful human skin, and
meditate on the mystery of the artistic creation of plastic effects
through merely intensifying or subduing the play of light. He began to
draw and paint eagerly, and aroused sufficient belief in his vocation
to be sent to Paris to the Academy of Art. What it offered him was
practically nothing. Drawing copies of plaster models chilled him;
even the professional life-model in the prescribed studied attitudes
seemed to him futile and absurd. What meaning for him had this comedy
of gladiatorial positions, ostentatious muscular development, clownish
distortions expressive of no natural feeling or rational purpose, in
which no human being would, if left to himself, indulge, and which,
often enough, the body can assume and retain only by the artificial
help of rests and props? What he longed for was life, warm life, such
as pulsates in men of strong feelings, and is expressed by them in a
straightforward, convincing way by looks and gestures.
The depression produced in him in the pupil-rooms in the _École des
Beaux Arts_ made him doubt himself. Luckily for him, amidst his general
ill-luck, this spiritual crisis of his coincided with the great
crisis of his country. The war broke out, and Carrière hastened as a
volunteer to the front. He did his duty bravely in several battles
and engagements, was taken prisoner at Sedan, and, as such, reached
Dresden. The months of his imprisonment proved decidedly fruitful to
him, for he spent his days in the picture gallery, and was shown by
the Rubens pictures there, the ways which, up to that time, he had not
clearly seen.
After the war was over, he resumed his orthodox studies at the
Academy, and became a pupil of Cabanel. It exhibits a good testimony
of the power of resistance in his nature that this most inaccurate
portrait-painter of the Empire could not influence him, although
he had for five years his misleading example before his eyes. In
1876 Carrière competed for the _prix de Rome_. He did not get it.
That might have been predicted to him; the prize is the reward of
the meritorious industry of the pupil, which flatters the teacher’s
_amour propre_. Carrière had then, however, emancipated himself from
tutelage as an artist. He felt nowise humiliated or cast down by the
failure of his purpose. With brave heart he drew from the occurrence
the only true moral, viz., that not the approval of teachers, _i.e._,
of those who have succeeded, but the satisfaction of his artistic
conscience must henceforward be the goal of his efforts. He renounced
official recognition, and that was wise, for it preserved him from the
pain of disillusion. From 1877 he exhibited annually in the _Salon_,
but it was not before 1884 that the prize judges awarded him an
“honourable mention,” which can hardly, however, be called a reward.
A year afterwards, he received the medal of the third class, which
is “the last kindness,” but at the same time the Baschkirtsew prize
of 500 francs, which is awarded, not by the prize-committee, but by
the Society of Artists by universal suffrage. In 1887 the Jury rose
to the medal of the second class, and, at the Universal Exhibition
of 1889, to an insignificant silver medal. With this the series of
distinctions vouchsafed to him by the masters of his guild closes.
His later honours—the ribbon and rosette of the Legion of Honour,
the room reserved for his works at the Universal Exhibition of 1900,
the purchase of his “Maternal Love” for the Luxembourg Museum, the
commission to paint twelve bays in the Banqueting Hall of the Paris
Hotel de Ville—were forced for him from the public authorities by
independent opinion. They were the scanty revenue of fame, which the
lonely man found when he ceased to seek it. It is characteristic of
Carrière that of all the nonsense of medals and decorations there is
not a word to be found in the monumental work dedicated to him. They
were formerly regarded in France as the great events in the life of
an artist. Carrière’s proud independence does not admit that they
have any meaning at all, or deserve the most casual mention. The book
enumerates all his works, even rough drawings, unfinished sketches,
attempts at lithography. These are the deeds and events of his life.
There is no room in the book for official certificates of industry
and his elevation in the _Tchin_.[3] Moreover, Carrière was one of
the co-founders of the Salon of the Champ de Mars in 1890, which on
principle repudiated the system of rewarding meritorious youths by
testing and directing superior officers, and rebelled against turning
artists into an hierarchy by means of conventional marks of rank.
Carrière has formed a manner of his own, which he discovered by
himself, and asserted it victoriously despite of all kinds of
opposition. Every layman sees at the first glance that his pictures
are full of grey vapour. A sometimes transparent, at other times thick
mist envelops his figures, and makes their different parts stand out
with unequal distinctness. “A whim,” exclaims superficiality; “a
dodge to astonish,” grumbles the _blasé_ man-of-the-world, who thinks
himself cunning. It is neither the one nor the other. The origin of
the curious exhalation hovering about his figures is to be sought in
his own need for representing the æther in which all planetary life is
displayed. His sense of truth took umbrage at the painting in vogue,
even that of the masters, which sets beings and objects in space,
without giving any suggestion that it is not empty, but filled with
a gas possessing optical and kinetic qualities. It is all very well
trying, by established toning of the local colours, and blurring of
the contour lines, to make the fact perceptible that the figures are
surrounded by air; but these customary means of expression failed to
satisfy Carrière, and he is not the only one they left dissatisfied.
A whole generation of painters, about 1870, had the annoying feeling
that air did not get its rights in art, and made obstinate efforts to
find a formula for announcing the presence of air with an emphasis
that could not be neglected. Sisley, Monet, Pissarro, thought to solve
the problem by refraction and iridescent radiation which would render
apparent in the painting the visible motion of the air, its vibration
under definite relations of illumination and heat. The object is only
very imperfectly attained. The attempt is justified, and deserves
respect. Carrière sets about the matter differently, in a more direct
and _naïve_ way. The decomposition of white light into its spectrum,
as the dotters and stipplers practise it, proves, I admit, that the
rays of light move in a material medium, as they would otherwise have
no reason for resolving themselves into their component parts; but,
in order to infer air from the prismatic colours, a man must be a
physicist, and it requires a labour of thought that has nothing in
common with an immediate impression of the senses, such as must, first
and foremost, proceed from an optical work of art. Carrière, then,
found even the impressionist rule too learned. He preferred simply to
exaggerate, and, as it were, to make palpable, the properties of air,
which is neither absolutely colourless nor absolutely transparent. Thus
arose the thin grey air in which his figures are bathed, ranging from
the most delicate mist to the thickest smoke, but always transparent.
Directly he found his method or manner, it became alive in his hands.
In that his peculiarity consists, and in that he shows himself a great
artist by the grace of God. Smoke is to him a medium of expression
of amazing range. He employs it almost as the engraver on copper of
mezzotint does the “burr.” It is a layer of veils which he diminishes
or increases as the effect proposed demands. Here he withdraws the
covering. There he suffers it partly or entirely to remain, and by
such means obtains, by the most natural and, apparently, the least
troublesome way, a recession of the non-essential, an amazing relief
of the essential, a clearness in the expression of his thought, such
as not one of his contemporary painters possesses. At the first
glance at a picture of Carrière, one is very forcibly directed to
what was important to the painter. One positively cannot wander into
what is unimportant, or be diverted from the main thing. It sounds
paradoxical, but is literally true: Carrière understood how to make
vapour the medium of the highest clearness, to make mystery the gate of
an unreserved revelation. That, I admit, his imitators cannot discern
in him. It is easy to daub smoke in a picture, but that is not all.
Vapour must not be an excuse for bungling draughtsmanship; it must not
mercifully cover defects in form. In order not to favour any fraud, it
makes a masterly accuracy in modelling a primary condition. To permit
oneself such noble economies and condensations one must be as accurate
a draughtsman as Carrière. The veiling of the greater part is only,
then, admissible, when the lesser left unveiled is perfect.