Furthermore, the qualities and defects of French painting--the
predominance in it of national over individual force and distinction,
its turn for style, the kind of ideas that inspire its substance, its
classic spirit in fine--are explained hardly less by its historic origin
than by the character of the French genius itself. French painting
really began in connoisseurship, one may say. It arose in appreciation,
that faculty in which the French have always been, and still are,
unrivalled. Its syntheses were based on elements already in combination.
It originated nothing. It was eclectic at the outset. Compared with the
slow and suave evolution of Italian art, in whose earliest dawn its
borrowed Byzantine painting served as a stimulus and suggestion to
original views of natural material rather than as a model for imitation
and modification, the painting that sprang into existence, Minerva-like,
in full armor, at Fontainebleau under Francis I, was of the essence of
artificiality. The court of France was far more splendid than, and
equally enlightened with, that of Florence. The monarch felt his title
to Mæcenasship as justified as that of the Medici. He created,
accordingly, French painting out of hand--I mean, at all events, the
French painting that stands at the beginning of the line of the present
tradition. He summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Rossi, Primaticcio,
and founded the famous Fontainebleau school. Of necessity it was
Italianate. It had no Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael behind it. Italian was
the best art going; French appreciation was educated and keen; its
choice between evolution and adoption was inevitable. It was very much
in the position in which American appreciation finds itself to-day. Like
our own painters, the French artists of the Renaissance found themselves
familiar with masterpieces wholly beyond their power to create, and
produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed the incomparable advantage
of arriving at their artistic apogee through natural stages of growth,
beginning with impulse and culminating in expertness.
The situation had its advantages as well as its drawbacks, certainly. It
saved French painting an immense amount of fumbling, of laborious
experimentation, of crudity, of failure. But it stamped it with an
essential artificiality from which it did not fully recover for over
two hundred years, until, insensibly, it had built up its own traditions
and gradually brought about its own inherent development. In a word,
French painting had an intellectual rather than an emotional origin. Its
first practitioners were men of culture rather than of feeling; they
were inspired by the artistic, the constructive, the fashioning, rather
than the poetic, spirit. And so evident is this inclination in even
contemporary French painting--and indeed in all French æsthetic
expression--that it cannot be ascribed wholly to the circumstances
mentioned. The circumstances themselves need an explanation, and find it
in the constitution itself of the French mind, which (owing, doubtless,
to other circumstances, but that is extraneous) is fundamentally less
imaginative and creative than co-ordinating and constructive.
Naturally thus, when the Italian influence wore itself out, and the
Fontainebleau school gave way to a more purely national art; when France
had definitely entered into her Italian heritage and had learned the
lessons that Holland and Flanders had to teach her as well; when, in
fine, the art of the modern world began, it was an art of grammar, of
rhetoric. Certainly up to the time of Géricault painting in general held
itself rather pedantically aloof from poetry. Claude, Chardin, what may
be called the illustrated _vers de société_ of the Louis Quinze
painters--of Watteau and Fragonard--even Prudhon, did little to change
the prevailing color and tone. Claude's art is, in manner, thoroughly
classic. His _personal_ influence was perhaps first felt by Corot. He
stands by himself, at any rate, quite apart. He was the first thoroughly
original French painter, if indeed one may not say he was the first
thoroughly original modern painter. He has been assigned to both the
French and Italian schools--to the latter by Gallophobist critics,
however, through a partisanship which in æsthetic matters is ridiculous;
there was in his day no Italian school for him to belong to. The truth
is that he passed a large part of his life in Italy and that his
landscape is Italianate. But more conspicuously still, it is
ideal--ideal in the sense intended by Goethe in saying, "There are no
landscapes in nature like those of Claude." There are not, indeed.
Nature has been transmuted by Claude's alchemy with lovelier results
than any other painter--save always Corot, shall I say?--has ever
achieved. Witness the pastorals at Madrid, in the Doria Gallery at Rome,
the "Dido and Æneas" at Dresden, the sweet and serene superiority of the
National Gallery canvases over the struggling competition manifest in
the Turners juxtaposed to them through the unlucky ambition of the great
English painter. Mr. Ruskin says that Claude could paint a small wave
very well, and acknowledges that he effected a revolution in art, which
revolution "consisted mainly in setting the sun in heavens." "Mainly" is
delightful, but Claude's excellence consists in his ability to paint
visions of loveliness, pictures of pure beauty, not in his skill in
observing the drawing of wavelets or his happy thought of painting
sunlight. Mr. George Moore observes ironically of Mr. Ruskin that his
grotesque depreciation of Mr. Whistler--"the lot of critics" being "to
be remembered by what they have failed to understand"--"will survive his
finest prose passage." I am not sure about Mr. Whistler. Contemporaries
are too near for a perfect critical perspective. But assuredly Mr.
Ruskin's failure to perceive Claude's point of view--to perceive that
Claude's aim and Stanfield's, say, were quite different; that Claude, in
fact, was at the opposite pole from the botanist and the geologist whom
Mr. Ruskin's "reverence for nature" would make of every landscape
painter--is a failure in appreciation than to have shown which it would
be better for him as a critic never to have been born. It seems hardly
fanciful to say that the depreciation of Claude by Mr. Ruskin, who is a
landscape painter himself, using the medium of words instead of
pigments, is, so to speak, professionally unjust.
"Go out, in the springtime, among the meadows that slope from the
shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains. There,
mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass
grows deep and free; and as you follow the winding mountain paths,
beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom--paths that
forever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping down in
scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here and there with
new-mown heaps, filling the air with fainter sweetness--look up toward
the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll silently
into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines."
Claude's landscape is not Swiss, but if it were it would awaken in the
beholder a very similar sensation to that aroused in the reader of this
famous passage. Claude indeed painted landscape in precisely this way.
He was perhaps the first--though priority in such matters is trivial
beside pre-eminence--who painted _effects_ instead of _things_. Light
and air were his material, not ponds and rocks and clouds and trees and
stretches of plain and mountain outlines. He first generalized the
phenomena of inanimate nature, and in this he remains still unsurpassed.
But, superficially, his scheme wore the classic aspect, and neither his
contemporaries nor his successors, for over two hundred years,
discovered the immense value of his point of view, and the puissant
charm of his way of rendering nature.
Poussin, however, was the incarnation of the classic spirit, and perhaps
the reason why a disinterested foreigner finds it difficult to
appreciate the French estimate of him is that no foreigner, however
disinterested, can quite appreciate the French appreciation of the
classic spirit in and for itself. But when one listens to expressions of
admiration for the one French "old master," as one may call Poussin
without invidiousness, it is impossible not to scent chauvinism, as one
scents it in the German panegyrics of Goethe, for example. He was a very
great painter, beyond doubt. And as there were great men before
Agamemnon there have been great painters since Raphael and Titian, even
since Rembrandt and Velasquez. He had a strenuous personality, moreover.
You know a Poussin at once when you see it. But to find the suggestion
of the infinite, the Shakespearian touch in his work seems to demand the
imaginativeness of M. Victor Cherbuliez. When Mr. Matthew Arnold
ventured to remark to Sainte-Beuve that he could not consider Lamartine
as a very important poet, Sainte-Beuve replied: "He was important to
us." Many critics, among them one severer than Sainte-Beuve, the late
Edmond Scherer, have given excellent reasons for Lamartine's absolute as
well as relative importance, and perhaps it is a failure in
appreciation on our part that is really responsible for our feeling that
Poussin is not quite the great master the French deem him. Assuredly he
might justifiably apply to himself the "Et-Ego-in-Arcadia" inscription
in one of his most famous paintings. And the specific service he
performed for French painting and the relative rank he occupies in it
ought not to obscure his purely personal qualities, which, if not
transcendent, are incontestably elevated and fine.
His qualities, however, are very thoroughly French qualities--poise,
rationality, science, the artistic dominating the poetic faculty, and
style quite outshining significance and suggestion. He learned all he
knew of art, he said, from the Bacchus Torso at Naples. But he was
eclectic rather than imitative, and certainly used the material he found
in the works of his artistic ancestors as freely and personally as
Raphael the frescos of the Baths of Titus, or Donatello the fragments of
antique sculpture. From his time on, indeed, French painting dropped its
Italian leading-strings. He might often suggest Raphael--and any painter
who suggests Raphael inevitably suffers for it--but always with an
individual, a native, a French difference, and he is as far removed in
spirit and essence from the Fontainebleau school as the French genius
itself is from the Italian which presided there. In Poussin, indeed,
the French genius first asserts itself in painting. And it asserts
itself splendidly in him.
We who ask to be moved as well as impressed, who demand satisfaction of
the susceptibility as well as--shall we say rather than?--interest of
the intelligence, may feel that for the qualities in which Poussin is
lacking those in which he is rich afford no compensation whatever. But I
confess that in the presence of even that portion of Poussin's
magnificent accomplishment which is spread before one in the Louvre, to
wish one's self in the Stanze of the Vatican or in the Sistine Chapel,
seems to me an unintelligent sacrifice of one's opportunities.