It is a sure mark of narrowness and defective powers of perception to
fail to discover the point of view even of what one disesteems. We talk
of Poussin, of Louis Quatorze art--as of its revival under David and its
continuance in Ingres--of, in general, modern classic art as if it were
an art of convention merely; whereas, conventional as it is, its
conventionality is--or was, certainly, in the seventeenth century--very
far from being pure formulary. It was genuinely expressive of a certain
order of ideas intelligently held, a certain set of principles
sincerely believed in, a view of art as positive and genuine as the
revolt against the tyrannous system into which it developed. We are
simply out of sympathy with its aim, its ideal; perhaps, too, for that
most frivolous of all reasons because we have grown tired of it.
But the business of intelligent criticism is to be in touch with
everything. "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner," as the French
ethical maxim has it, may be modified into the true motto of æsthetic
criticism, "Tout comprendre, c'est tout justifier." Of course, by
"criticism" one does not mean pedagogy, as so many people constantly
imagine, nor does justifying everything include bad drawing. But as
Lebrun, for example, is not nowadays held up as a model to young
painters, and is not to be accused of bad drawing, why do we so entirely
dispense ourselves from comprehending him at all? Lebrun is, perhaps,
not a painter of enough personal importance to repay attentive
consideration, and historic importance does not greatly concern
criticism. But we pass him by on the ground of his conventionality,
without remembering that what appears conventional to us was in his case
not only sincerity but aggressive enthusiasm. If there ever was a
painter who exercised what creative and imaginative faculty he had with
an absolute gusto, Lebrun did so. He interested his contemporaries
immensely; no painter ever ruled more unrivalled. He fails to interest
us because we have another point of view. We believe in our point of
view and disbelieve in his as a matter of course; and it would be
self-contradictory to say, in the interests of critical catholicity,
that in our opinion his may be as sound as our own. But to say that he
has no point of view whatever--to say, in general, that modern classic
art is perfunctory and mere formulary--is to be guilty of what has
always been the inherent vice of protestantism in all fields of mental
activity.
Nowhere has protestantism exhibited this defect more palpably than in
the course of evolution of schools of painting. Pre-Raphaelitism is
perhaps the only exception, and pre-Raphaelitism was a violent and
emotional counter-revolution rather than a movement characterized by
catholicity of critical appreciation. Literary criticism is certainly
full of similar intolerance; though when Gautier talks about Racine, or
Zola about "Mes Haines," or Mr. Howells about Scott, the polemic temper,
the temper most opposed to the critical, is very generally recognized.
And in spite of their admirable accomplishment in various branches of
literature, these writers will never quite recover from the misfortune
of having preoccupied themselves as critics with the defects instead of
the qualities of what is classic. Yet the protestantism of the
successive schools of painting against the errors of their predecessors
has something even more crass about it. Contemporary painters and
critics thoroughly alive, and fully in the contemporary æsthetic
current, so far from appreciating modern classic art sympathetically,
are apt to admire the old masters themselves mainly on technical
grounds, and not at all to enter into their general æsthetic attitude.
The feeling of contemporary painters and critics (except, of course,
historical critics) for Raphael's genius is the opposite of cordial. We
are out of touch with the "Disputa," with angels and prophets seated on
clouds, with halos and wings, with such inconsistencies as the "Doge
praying" in a picture of the marriage of St. Catherine, with the mystic
marriage itself. Raphael's grace of line and suave space-filling shapes
are mainly what we think of; the rest we call convention. We are become
literal and exacting, addicted to the pedantry of the prescriptive, if
not of the prosaic.
Take such a picture as M. Edouard Detaille's "Le Rêve," which won him so
much applause a few years ago. M. Detaille is an irreproachable realist,
and may do what he likes in the way of the materially impossible with
impunity. Sleeping soldiers, without a gaiter-button lacking,
bivouacking on the ground amid stacked arms whose bayonets would prick;
above them in the heavens the clash of contending ghostly
armies--wraiths born of the sleepers' dreams. That we are in touch with.
No one would object to it except under penalty of being scouted as
pitiably literal. Yet the scheme is as thoroughly conventional--that is
to say, it is as closely based on hypothesis universally assumed for the
moment--as Lebrun's "Triumph of Alexander." The latter is as much a true
expression of an ideal as Detaille's picture. It is an ideal now become
more conventional, undoubtedly, but it is as clearly an ideal and as
clearly genuine. The only point I wish to make is, that Lebrun's
painting--Louis Quatorze painting--is not the perfunctory thing we are
apt to assume it to be. That is not the same thing, I hope, as
maintaining that M. Bouguereau is significant rather than insipid.
Lebrun was assuredly not a strikingly original painter. His crowds of
warriors bear a much closer resemblance to Raphael's "Battle of
Constantine and Maxentius" than the "Transfiguration" of the Vatican
does to Giotto's, aside from the important circumstance that the
difference in the latter instance shows development, while the former
illustrates mainly an enfeebled variation. But there is unquestionably
something of Lebrun in Lebrun's work--something typical of the age whose
artistic spirit he so completely expressed.
To perceive that Louis Quatorze art is not all convention it is only
necessary to remember that Lesueur is to be bracketed with Lebrun. All
the sympathy which the Anglo-Saxon temperament withholds from the
histrionism of Lebrun is instinctively accorded to his gentle and
graceful contemporary, who has been called--_faute de mieux_, of
course--the French Raphael. Really Lesueur is as nearly conventional as
Lebrun. He has at any rate far less force; and even if we may maintain
that he had a more individual point of view, his works are assuredly
more monotonous to the scrutinizing sense. It is impossible to recall
any one of the famous San Bruno series with any particularity, or,
except in subject, to distinguish these in the memory from the sweet and
soft "St. Scholastica" in the _Salon Carré_. With more sapience and less
sensitiveness, Bouguereau is Lesueur's true successor, to say which is
certainly not to affirm a very salient originality of the older painter.
He had a great deal of very exquisite feeling for what is refined and
elevated, but clearly it is a moral rather than an æsthetic delicacy
that he exhibits, and æsthetically he exercises his sweeter and more
sympathetic sensibility within the same rigid limits which circumscribe
that of Lebrun. He has, indeed, less invention, less imagination, less
sense of composition, less wealth of detail, less elaborateness, no
greater concentration or sense of effect; and though his color is more
agreeable, perhaps, in hue, it gets its tone through the absence of
variety rather than through juxtapositions and balances. The truth is,
that both equally illustrate the classic spirit, the spirit of their age
_par excellence_ and of French painting in general, in a supreme degree,
though the conformability of the one is positive and of the other
passive, so to say; and that neither illustrates quite the subserviency
to the conventional which we, who have undoubtedly just as many
conventions of our own, are wont to ascribe to them, and to Lebrun in
particular.