disowned this painter; but it is absolutely false to talk about a
change in popular opinion about him. Those who “laughed at” him
thirty-five years ago, laugh at him in precisely the same way now.
In my study of the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum I have
alluded to the angry protest of Gérôme and Gustave Moreau against
admitting the works of Manet and his friends into a State collection.
If the laughers are not so numerous, and if their laughter is not so
ringing as in the “Olympia” year, it is simply because the man is
absolutely done with. Only a few stragglers still talk nonsense about
Manet, men who have missed the connection of “the last train,” and some
greybeards in their dotage—the barricade warriors of the “Salon”—who
fancy they are still breathing the gunpowder smoke of 1863, and will
keep up to the day of their death, which cannot be far off, the happy,
exultant mood of the beer-evenings at the Café de Madrid. None among
the pillars of young and living art recognises Manet as his ancestor.
People know now that he was a discovery of Zola’s. The sharp turn in
the development of art in the last thirty years of the last century
was inaugurated, not by him, but by others. Courbet introduced realism
which has nowadays shrunk to nothing. Monet kindled “Free Light,” and
that was a very great service which, unfortunately, is also no longer
fully acknowledged, for the latest race of Parisian painters again
abandons joyful brightness and goes back to the gloomy, oppressive
tones of “the ’fifties.” Manet, however, found nothing and invented
nothing, and he owes the noise that was, for a period, heard about him
only to his relations with a devoted friend, who vindicated his own
tendency by that of the painter, and said of him all the good which he
thought of himself.
The change in taste from one generation to another is a general law
which I proved in the _Neue Freie Presse_ of 9th August 1896, and
afterwards developed and established in the Florence _Rivista Moderna_
(No. 3, of 1898, “_Le alternanze del gusto_”). I strongly believe
in the prevalence of this law; but if particular cases are followed
in detail, it is recognised that many an apparent change in the
appreciation of a work or an artist rests on an illusion of the senses.
To return to the subject of Manet. An awful din arose at the first
appearance of “Olympia.” Friends and foes waged wild battle with each
other. Each panted for the blood of the other. Twenty years later
the picture that had been so hotly contested was hung in the State
Museum, which roused fresh, but considerably weaker, opposition.
Finally, however, no one any longer protested against its presence in
the picture-gallery, and now a sophist might assert: “There, you see!
The picture which was once laughed at is, thirty years afterwards,
acknowledged as a classical work of art.”
Gently! That is by no means proved. The fight has ceased only because
it has become objectless. Who nowadays waxes warm against Manet? The
man, you know, is dead, not only as a human being, but also as an
artist. He no longer troubles any one. He no longer exercises any
bad influence. He no longer even poisons popular taste, for it is
sufficient to observe the visitors to the Luxembourg, to see that they
pass by the “Olympia” with laughter, and shrugging of the shoulders, or
else with astonishment and shakes of the head. If a belated corybant
raises a shout of “Hail, Manet!” he is merrily allowed to shout. It is
superfluous to shout him down, for nobody listens to him. The truth is
that the taste for Manet is not in the least changed. People find the
“Olympia” every whit as repulsive nowadays as it was thirty years ago;
but they no longer say so with a loud voice and with the veins about
their temples swollen, because, generally, people no longer stop before
its mouldy ugliness.
If you examine very carefully, you will generally find that the
various appraisements of particular works in a new generation do not
originate from later generations regarding it differently than did
contemporaries, but from their generally no longer viewing it with
the same eyes. Let us only bear in mind always that the vast majority
of mankind have no feeling of their own for artistic beauty. They act
as if they had some feeling only because they know that a feeling
for art is pronounced to be a mark of higher culture. We cannot rate
too highly the part played in art idiocy by sham culture, pose, and
self-deception—or, shall we say, more indulgently, by auto-suggestion?
Honest confession of obtuseness to art is hardly found in any but
the two poles of humanity—on the extreme summit and at the lowest
antipode. A man must be either a rustic lout or an overtopping genius
like Prince Bismarck, to confess that he can make nothing of the fine
arts. The culture-Philistine never has this courage. He always pretends
that he finds luxurious enjoyment in the contemplation of art. This
culture-Philistine always repeats what has been said to him; he admires
where the Baedeker-star prescribes admiration. And he is, in many
cases, not even dishonest. He persuades himself that he feels what he
regards it as his duty as an educated man to feel; and he really comes
to feel it in the end, thanks to this self-persuasion. All the effects
of art depend on suggestion, so far as they are not concerned with the
most absolutely primitive and undifferentiated sensual excitations. On
one who has a genuine feeling for art the work of art itself conveys
the suggestion, which is followed by feelings of pleasure. On the
average men, whose blunt nerves take no impression from the work of art
itself, the Baedeker-star—the label—exercises this suggestion. If a
work of art has once got the reputation of excellence, either because
it deserves it, or because it acquired it from a dishonest, busy, bold,
and swaggering clique, the next generation of Philistines in art does
not test it further, but takes it as something accepted. The clique can
then state triumphantly that the work they have puffed is a success.
But has it on that account acquired real success?
The number of free, strong men is extremely small, who have the
courage, desire, and ability to examine the veracity of traditional
labels; but there is a frightful devastation every time that such an
idol-destroyer and overthrower of altars breaks into the Temple of
Renown, which is guarded by that dragon, the Good Old Way. People are
then convinced about the quantity of plaster rubbish which has been
smuggled into proximity with real marble and gold-and-ivory work in the
semi-darkness of the sanctuary, and has enjoyed for hundreds, perhaps
for thousands of years, the same veneration as the wonder-working
revelations of genius.
But suppose we conceive in our mind’s eye the extremely rare case in
which a real masterpiece was misjudged at first, and, later on, was
greeted with acclamations. In this case the question, as a rule, is
not of lack of understanding, but of lack of sense of proportion. The
contemporary age which blames, and the succeeding age which praises,
are both right, _i.e._, they do not praise and blame the same thing,
and the divergent appraisement of the work is simply due to the fact
that contemporaries like to dwell on the faults and overlook the
excellencies, whilst latter generations neglect the faults and regard
only the excellencies. The contemporaries were biassed in severity,
their successors are biassed in indulgence. Ideal justice is not
of this world. But faults remain faults even in the ages that come
after, and excellencies, too, were excellencies even in the period of
their origin; and it is jugglery and forgery when people interpret
the change in appraisement as if a later generation had admired as a
merit that which an earlier generation had stigmatised as a fault. Just
one example to illustrate these propositions: Millet is said to have
passed for “a dauber and smearer.” Now, his contemporaries who blamed
him used no such harsh expression. They said only that Millet drew
incorrectly and painted carelessly, and those with a real feeling for
art notice exactly the same thing to-day, only they say it no longer,
unless the question is expressly put to them. On the other hand, his
contemporaries, too, noticed his deep moral earnestness, his warm
human feeling, the touching simplicity of his style, which we prize so
highly in Millet to-day. But they were not inclined to forgive him his
defects in execution on account of these intellectual merits, whilst we
take his weakness in form into the bargain on account of the feeling
it contains. These weaknesses, however, are there to-day precisely as
they were thirty years ago, and he who fails to see them is guilty of
presumption if he passes a verdict on pictures.
Taking them altogether, the works and artists that were overvalued
by contemporaries are far more numerous than those that were
underestimated at the beginning. And even in the extremely few cases
of the latter category, the injustice of contemporaries did not, as a
rule, take the form of violent opposition, but that of indifference.
Contemporaries did not gainsay their beauty; but it escaped their
attention, because this was claimed by other fashions and styles. No
work of plastic art that is nowadays accepted without dispute was
rejected, when it appeared, with such anger as certain products of the
“Secession” are at the present day.
That is natural. The conditions of art production were half a century
ago absolutely different to what they are now. The artist gave his
personality full scope, and sought to please only a few customers of
rank, without troubling himself about the people at large. To-day he
wants to excite a sensation at any price, and he looks, for this end,
not into himself, but about himself. By creating he is not satisfying
his impulse to give form and shape, but his hunger for success.
Vain _amour propre_, swaggering, conceited vanity and cunning
“pushfulness” are the motives that far too often guide the artist’s
brush or chisel. The coarse vulgarity of the means corresponds with the
coarse vulgarity of the motives and aims. One must make a sensation,
and that is attained most easily by a rowdy rebellion against taste,
truth, and healthy human intelligence. If he annoys his contemporaries,
the ruthless advertiser finds his account more surely than if he
praised them. Only he who startles dares hope to be noticed in our
present huge exhibitions with their three thousand numbers. That is
why the unscrupulous competitor works with the object of startling,
and only with that object. His natural allies are writers who seek by
aggressive criticism to satisfy the same hysterical impulse towards
sensation as he, and the snobs who hope to justify their claim to be
un-Philistine by pretending to discover and appreciate hidden beauties,
where the thick-headed majority of their fellow-men observe and condemn
only unblushing outrages on the sense of beauty.
The necessity for creating a sensation has arisen only in our times
of over-production in all fields of intellectual creation, and of
frightfully murderous competition for success. In the earlier days of
art it played hardly any part at all. On this account it is fallacious
to try to deduce from the, after all, extremely rare romances of
works, originally misjudged but afterwards recognised, in the past,
an argument in favour of certain creations of the present day, which
a large proportion of educated men rejects, not because they do not
understand, them, but because they understand them only too well.
Let men only have the quiet courage not to allow themselves to be put
out of countenance; they will carry their point even before posterity.
XVII
MY OWN OPINION
There is hardly anything which I hate so cordially as opportunistic
criticism, which, in respect of phenomena in art-production presented
in a noisy and pretentious way, affecting to signify modernity and
progress, does not honestly take a side, but with the cunning foresight
of the bat in the fable attempts to come to an understanding with
both the opposing armies, of the birds and of the mice. Criticism
that openly wears the uniform of a pronounced movement in art can be
put up with. The enemy of the movement fights the criticism and the
movement at the same time. It shares all the fates of its banner; it
is in the danger, and it may be in the victory. If the movement for
which it carries weapons succumbs, it gets the worst of it too, and
experiences the treatment accorded to the vanquished. It has to lay
down its weapons of criticism, falls into contempt, and has no longer
the possibility of devastating art life, of perplexing artists, and
oppressing those who enjoy art. Insufferable, on the other hand, are
the clever, the unprejudiced, the eclectics, the smooth civil sneerers
who praise, yet with faintness, who blame, yet with a saving clause,
who carry in their lips such well-known and rather good phrases as:
“Certainly, there is some exaggeration here, but the peculiar style
is not to be misjudged”: “It is certainly no finished creation, but
the work, nevertheless, contains some promise”: “This is not exactly
a work, you know, which one could recommend for imitation, yet there
is much to be learnt from it”: “It is the new wine in Goethe’s _Faust_
that is acting so absurdly, but still perhaps it will yield a good
vintage.” These people who talk so sweetly are those who really poison
the springs of public taste. Thanks to them, movements which ought to
stand without the pale of the law enjoy a sort of equal justification,
as it were, of the æsthetic, historico-artistic copyright. Their mask
of benevolence, justice, and toleration gains them the confidence of
the irresolute, who, left to their own feeling, would recognise, at
once, in certain works, either a gross impropriety of the shameless
sort, or an indubitable manifestation of insanity, yet through the
cheap phrases of opportunistic critics, become doubtful of themselves
and say: “If such sober-minded scholars as this and that critic
constantly find something to recognise in this stuff, I am perhaps
wrong to condemn it at once.”
Moderate feelings are much more widespread than extreme feelings.
They are the normal product of the nervous system in civilised
men; to the great majority of half-coloured, faded grey men subdued
colours only are sympathetic; violent and shrill colours may amuse
it; but, in its innermost being, it feels instinctively drawn only
to the lukewarm ones. It believes them; and on their information, on
their irresponsible recommendation, gives to the most openly rascally
art-firms the credit through which alone they can hold out for a while.
And these critical warpers of justice are not assailable. They always
play an imposing part, and are always right. If an objectionable
movement lasts—and there are aberrations which have held their ground
for at least a generation—then they triumph modestly, for they have
been among its first heralds and have “recognised at once the sound
kernel in the first strange shell.” If the imbecility is as such patent
to all, and disappears amidst the derisive laughter of the intelligent,
they triumph again, only somewhat more self-consciously, for they
have “not let themselves be dazzled by novelty, and have pointed out
its weaknesses, and worked strenuously at its defeat.” Thus every
adventure in art life, every campaign in criticism, be its issue what
it may, increases their esteem; and the longer they continue their
course, which is so mischievous to the community, the more blindly the
multitude yields to their leadership, and the greater devastation they
are guilty of through their dishonourable exercise of their office of
guardians in matters of art.
I well know how this opportunism in criticism arises. It is the result
of the co-operation of the basest and most despicable intellectual
qualities. I find its causes in the dull feeling for the beautiful
which renders weak and indistinct all reactions from artistic
influences, and suffers neither delight nor irritation to arise: in
the cowardly fear of man and pitiful adulation, which aims at injuring
no one and only thinks of keeping a retreat open for itself; finally
in common vanity, which prefers to please a crowd of gaping boobies
rather than the select few, and the flattering, though so cheap,
reputation of being “very intellectual,” to the responsibility of crude
performance of duty. The favourite word by which the opportunistic
critics compound with every artistic confidence trick is “development.”
If the clairvoyant monitor utters the cry of “decay and degeneracy,”
the opportunists reply, “buds of a new and splendid bloom.” They love
to appeal to the history of art. That is right. When the Masolinos and
Masaccios sprang up, the last pupils of Gaddi and Orcagna whimpered,
“Now there is an end of painting.” But what was at an end was Byzantine
art filled by Cimabue and Giotto with some fresh life, and what began
was the ever glorious _Cinquecento_. And much nearer to us: when
Delacroix emancipated himself from the colour rules of David’s pupils,
and broke out into a downright exultation of red and blue and purple;
when Corot, Rousseau, and Dupré set homely nature viewed with lyric
eyes in the place of Poussin’s classic landscape degenerated into
dial painting; then earnest voices likewise accused the innovators of
digging the grave of art, and yet we know nowadays that Delacroix and
Corot were by no means the wild anarchists which the Academicians held
them to be, and that an uninterrupted line of development extends from
David and Prudhon through Géricault to Delacroix, and from Nicholas
Poussin and Claude Lorrain through Joseph Vernet, and even through
Watteau to Corot—a line which was unnoticed by contemporaries, yet
one which we now see clearly. It is the dodge of an unscrupulous
attorney to quote these examples when treating of the art of a Puvis
de Chavannes, an Aman-Jean, the Præ-Raphaelites, _pointillistes_,
_vermicellistes_, and _pipists_. There are sure marks of recognition
by which the authorised can be distinguished from the unauthorised,
the true from the false, development from retrogression, and buds from
gall-nuts. A movement which, indeed, resolutely diverges from the taste
dominant at a given time, though striving to approach nature, need not,
but may, have a future; and he who does not suffer from stiffness in
the joints will not, as a matter of course and on principle, refuse
to follow it with benevolent curiosity. If, however, the new movement
departs from nature, one may confidently say “it leads to nothing.” If
an independent method which strives after personal expression reveals
itself in a revolutionary effort—however peculiarly, nay, perversely,
it might impress—the intelligent man will not condemn, but wait to
see if something living comes from the attempt. If the practised eye,
however, recognises, in the peculiarity, either a cunning imitation or
a cold-blooded, intentional oddity, then one may confidently pronounce
the death sentence, for it contains in itself no germs whatever of
development. The only two eternal sources of art are, and will be,
feeling for nature and personality. Fidelity to nature and honesty
produce living creations. Unnaturalness and affectation are marks of
decay. He who ever holds fast to these simple dicta will hardly ever
run the risk of mistaking a Will-o’-the-Wisp for a lighthouse, or what
is morally, if not practically, a more serious error, of treading under
foot an insignificant chrysalis with the living and beautiful butterfly
it enshrines.
Even of the manifestations of insanity of crack-brained painters,
of the hoaxes of tricky strugglers for success, and the whims of
childishly immature and childishly careless people living from hand
to mouth, who have sprung up in the last two or three decades, the
good man’s insinuating word of the “sound kernel,” of the “tendencies,
capable of development, to a new blossoming of art,” has been spoken
by the opportunistic of critics. Well, time has now given the answer
to these verdicts, at any rate in regard to some of the movements for
which those prophets so benevolently predicted a glorious future.
Fifteen or twenty years ago we saw in the Paris Salon, beside the
expressionless fabrications of the usual daubing artisans—the “Mother’s
Joys,” the “Young Lady at her Toilet,” the “Oyster with Lemons,” which
constitute the stock in trade of all exhibitions of pictures—only two
formulæ appear in hundreds of repetitions: the vulgarly realistic,
after the style, let us say—to mention a particular name—of Bastien
Lepage, that pupil of Cabanel who had degenerated into an apostle
of Courbet; and the pseudo-idealistic, after the model of Puvis de
Chavannes. Workmen with brutalised countenances and greasy blouses, and
unearthly figures in antiquated landscapes of chalky paleness, disputed
the visitor’s attention. A concreteness which did not spare us a single
finger-nail in mourning, struggled for supremacy with a careless
vagueness which styled itself “Abstraction” or “Synthesis” and produced
only questionably schematic types. Whole walls exhibited unbroken
rows of pictures which reminded us of the spectral ballet of the dead
nuns in “Robert the Devil.” Then we came to rooms where an unmixed
company of rag-pickers, and night-men exercising their calling, of
huzzies on the night-prowl, dung-carting stable-helps, and rapscallions
at loggerheads, were quite at home. One of these movements, _i.e._,
painting in faint colours, has hardly a representative left; the
other—the art of vulgarity, meanness, and ugliness—only a dwindling
few.
Here, then, we have two movements, to which “the intellectuals” have
promised a future. One of them is as dead as a door-nail and buried,
the other dying. He who did not let himself be cheated, or want to
cheat others, could predict this outcome with certainty. Debased
realism was a misunderstanding of the impulse towards truth displayed
by the Manet School. This School held itself bound in conscience to
record minutely even the unessential and the ugly accessories. Their
limited imitators sought only that which was ugly and unessential in
the world of phenomena. They thereby wandered far from the eternal aim
of art—to excite an emotion by a work of art; for the mere imitation
of a sight either actually indifferent or frankly repulsive can
never excite an emotion. It was, therefore, easy to recognise that
this tendency could not be lasting. The pseudo-idealism of Puvis
de Chavannes showed the other infallible mark of morbidity, viz.,
impersonality and dishonesty. He tried, by an artificial bleaching of
colours and a semi-transparent white-wash, to produce the effect of
old and faded frescoes, in which their age of several hundred years is
an element of æsthetic effect, by reason of the dim depictment of what
is remote, dead and gone, and unknown; by reason of the longing they
awake for what has for ever passed away and will never appear again.
It was imitation; it was an attempt to deceive. It was not the honest
revelation of personality, but its disguise in a strange, historical
costume. That had no future, and it could not last.
What justified the primitive naturalism of the pioneers, the convinced
fervent service of truth, this survives victoriously every change in
fashion, and, in fact, is developing strongly further. True naturalism,
which grows enthusiastic for the poetry of unpretentious sights, and
was the logical development of Rousseau’s return to nature, and of
Greuze’s village stories inspired by that return (the “Village Bride,”
the “Father’s Curse,” the “Son’s Punishment,” etc.), has held its
ground. On the other hand, loathsome painting, which is naturalism run
mad, has been finally conquered, and the spectral painting of Puvis is
about to follow it into oblivion.
These much-extolled tendencies have, then, no future in them. They were
not buds which were to develop into blossom and fruit. They were wild
suckers in which a generation of artists fruitlessly squandered its
best strength, and which are now withered and blown away by the wind.