But quite aside from the group of poetic painters which stamped its
impress so deeply upon the romantic movement at the outset, that to this
day it is Delacroix and Millet, Decamps and Corot whom we think of when
we think of the movement itself, the classic tradition was preserved all
through the period of greatest stress and least conformity by painters
of great distinction, who, working under the romantic inspiration and
more or less according to what may be called romantic methods,
nevertheless possessed the classic temperament in so eminent a degree
that to us their work seems hardly less academic than that of the
Revolution and the Empire. Not only Ingres, but Delaroche and Ary
Scheffer, painted beside Géricault and Delacroix. Ary Scheffer was an
eloquent partisan of romanticism, yet his "Dante and Beatrice" and his
"Temptation of Christ" are admirable only from the academic point of
view. Delaroche's "Hemicycle" and his many historical tableaux are
surely in the classic vein, however free they may seem in subject and
treatment by contrast with the works of David and Ingres. They leave us
equally cold, at all events, and in the same way--for the same reason.
They betray the painter's preoccupation with art rather than with
nature. They do, in truth, differ widely from the works which they
succeeded, but the difference is not temperamental. They suggest the
French phrase, _plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose_. Gérôme, for
example, feels the exhilaration of the free air of romanticism fanning
his enthusiasm. He does not confine himself, as, born a decade or two
earlier, certainly he would have done, to classic subject. He follows
Decamps and Marilhat to the Orient, which he paints with the utmost
freedom, so far as the choice of theme is concerned--descending even to
the _danse du ventre_ of a Turkish café. He paints historical pictures
with a realism unknown before his day. He is almost equally famous in
the higher class of _genre_ subjects. But throughout everything he does
it is easy to perceive the academic point of view, the classic
temperament. David assuredly would never have chosen one of Gérôme's
themes; but had he chosen it, he would have treated it in much the same
way. Allowance made for the difference in time, in general feeling of
the æsthetic environment, the change in ideas as to what was fit subject
for representation and fitting manner of treating the same subject, it
is hardly an exaggeration to say that Ingres would have sincerely
applauded Gérôme's "Cleopatra" issuing from the carpet roll before
Cæsar. And if he failed to perceive the noble dramatic power in such a
work as the "Ave, Cæsar, morituri te salutant," his failure would
nowadays, at least among intelligent amateurs, be ascribed to an
intolerance which it is one of the chief merits of the romantic movement
to have adjudged absurd.
It is a source of really æsthetic satisfaction to see everything that is
attempted as well done as it is in the works of such painters as
Bouguereau and Cabanel. Of course the feeling that denies them large
importance is a legitimate one. The very excellence of their technic,
its perfect adaptedness to the motive it expresses, is, considering the
insignificance of the motive, subject for criticism; inevitably it
partakes of the futility of its subject-matter. Of course the personal
value of the man, the mind, behind any plastic expression is, in a
sense, the measure of the expression itself. If it be a mind interested
in "pouncet-box" covers, in the pictorial setting forth of themes whose
illustration most intimately appeals to the less cultivated and more
rudimentary appreciation of fine art--as indisputably the Madonnas and
Charities and Oresteses and Bacchus Triumphs of M. Bouguereau do--one
may very well dispense himself from the duty of admiring its
productions. Life is short, and more important things, things of more
significant import, demand attention. The grounds on which the works of
Bouguereau and Cabanel are admired are certainly insufficient. But they
are experts in their sphere. What they do could hardly be better done.
If they appeal to a _bourgeois_, a philistine ideal of beauty, of
interest, they do it with a perfection that is pleasing in itself. No
one else does it half so well. To minds to which they appeal at all,
they appeal with the force of finality; for these they create as well as
illustrate the type of what is admirable and lovely. It is as easy to
account for their popularity as it is to perceive its transitory
quality. But not only is it a mark of limitation to refuse all interest
to such a work as, for example, M. Cabanel's "Birth of Venus," in the
painting of which a vast deal of technical expertness is enjoyably
evident, and which in every respect of motive and execution is far above
similar things done elsewhere than in France; it is a still greater
error to confound such painters as M. Cabanel and M. Bouguereau with
other painters whose classic temperament has been subjected to the
universal romantic influence equally with theirs, but whose production
is as different from theirs as is that of the thorough and pure
romanticists, the truly poetic painters.
The instinct of simplification is an intelligent and sound one. Its
satisfaction is a necessary preliminary to efficient action of any kind,
and indeed the basis of all fruitful philosophy. But in criticism this
instinct can only be satisfied intelligently and soundly by a
consideration of everything appealing to consideration, and not at all
by heated and wilful, or superior and supercilious, exclusions.
Catholicity of appreciation is the secret of critical felicity. To
follow the line of least resistance, not to take into account those
elements of a problem, those characteristics of a subject, to which,
superficially and at first thought, one is insensitive, is to dispense
one's self from a great deal of particularly disagreeable industry, but
the result is only transitorily agreeable to the sincere intelligence.
It is in criticism, I think, though no doubt in criticism alone,
preferable to lose one's self in a maze of perplexity--distressing as
this is to the critic who appreciates the indispensability of
clairvoyance in criticism--rather than to reach swiftly and simply a
conclusion which candor would have foreseen as the inevitable and
unjudicial result of following one's own likes and whims, and one's
contentment with which must be alloyed with a haunting sense of
insecurity. In criticism it is perhaps better to keep balancing
counter-considerations than to determine brutally by excluding a whole
set of them because of the difficulty of assigning them their true
weight. In this way, at least, one preserves the attitude of poise, and
poise is perhaps the one essential element of criticism. In a word, that
catholicity of sensitiveness which may be called mere impressionism,
behind which there is no body of doctrine at all, is more truly critical
than intolerant depreciation or unreflecting enthusiasm. "The main thing
to do," says Mr. Arnold, in a significant passage, "is to get one's self
out of the way and let humanity judge."
It is temptingly simple to deny all importance to painters who are not
poetic painters. And the temptation is especially seductive when the
prosaic painters are paralleled by such a distinguished succession of
their truly poetic brethren as are the painters of the romantic epoch
who are possessed of the classic temperament. But real criticism
immediately suggests that prose has its place in painting as in
literature. In literature we do not insist even that the poets be
poetic. Poetic is not the epithet that would be applied, for instance,
to French classic verse or the English verse of the eighteenth century,
compared with the poetry, French or English, which we mean when we speak
of poetry. Yet no one would think of denying the value of Dryden or even
of Boileau. No one would even insist that, distinctly prosaic as are the
qualities of Boileau--and I should say his was a crucial instance--he
would have done better to abjure verse. And painting, in a wide sense,
is just as legitimately the expression of ideas in form and color as
literature is the expression of ideas in words. It is perfectly plain
that Meissonier was not especially enamoured of beauty, as Corot, as
Troyon, as Decamps was. But nothing could be less critical than to deny
Meissouier's importance and the legitimate interest he has for every
educated and intelligent person, in spite of his literalness and his
insensitiveness to the element of beauty, and indeed to any truly
pictorial significance whatever in the wide range of subjects that he
essayed, with, in an honorable sense, such distinguished success.
Especially in America, I think, where of recent years we have shown an
Athenian sensitiveness to new impressions, the direct descendants of the
classic period of French painting have suffered from the popularity of
the Fontainebleau group. Their legitimate attachment to art, instead of
the Fontainebleau absorption in nature, has given them a false
reputation of artificiality. But the prose element in art has its
justification as well as the poetic, and it is witness of a narrow
culture to fail in appreciation of its admirable accomplishment. The
academic wing of the French romantic painting is marked precisely by a
breadth of culture that is itself a source of agreeable and elevated
interest. The neo-Grec painters are thoroughly educated. They lack the
picturesque and unexpected note of their poetic brethren--they lack the
moving and interpreting, the elevating and exquisite touch of these;
nay, they lack the penetrating distinction that radiates even from
rusticity itself when it is inspired and transfigured as it appears in
such works as those of Millet and Rousseau. But their distinction is not
less real for being the distinction of cultivation rather than
altogether native and absolute. It is perhaps even more marked, more
pervasive, more directly associated with the painter's aim and effect.
One feels that they are familiar with the philosophy of art, its history
and practice, that they are articulate and eclectic, that for being less
personal and powerful their horizon is less limited, their purely
intellectual range, at all events, and in many cases their æsthetic
interest, wider. They have more the cultivated man's bent for
experimentation, for variety. They care more scrupulously for
perfection, for form. With a far inferior sense of reality and far less
felicity in dealing with it, their sapient skill in dealing with the
abstractions of art is more salient. To be blind to their successful
handling of line and mass and movement, is to neglect a source of
refined pleasure. To lament their lack of poetry is to miss their
admirable rhetoric; to regret their imperfect feeling for decorativeness
is to miss their delightful decorum.
V
As one has, however, so often occasion to note in France--where in every
field of intellectual effort the influence of schools and groups and
movements is so great that almost every individuality, no matter how
strenuous, falls naturally and intimately into association with some one
of them--there is every now and then an exception that escapes these
categories and stands quite by itself. In modern painting such
exceptions, and widely different from each other as the poles, are
Couture and Puvis de Chavannes. Better than in either the true
romanticists with the classic strain, or the academic romanticists with
the classic temperament, the blending of the classic and romantic
inspirations is illustrated in Couture. The two are in him, indeed,
actually fused. In Puvis de Chavannes they appear in a wholly novel
combination; his classicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism
unreal beyond the verge of mysticism, and so preoccupied with visions
that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does _not_
exist--in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly
personal. He lives evidently on an exceedingly high plane--dwells
habitually in the delectable uplands of the intellect. The fact that his
work is almost wholly decorative is not at all accidental. His talent,
his genius if one chooses, requires large spaces, vast dimensions. There
has been a great deal of rather profitless discussion as to whether he
expressly imitates the _primitifs_ or reproduces them sympathetically.
But really he does neither; he deals with their subjects occasionally,
but always in a completely modern, as well as a thoroughly personal,
way. His color is as original as his general treatment and composition.
He had no schooling, in the École des Beaux Arts sense. A brief period
in Henri Scheffer's studio, three months under Couture, after he had
begun life in an altogether different field of effort, yielded him all
the explicit instruction he ever had. His real study was done in Italy,
in the presence of the old masters of Florence. With this equipment he
revolutionized modern decoration, established, at any rate, a new
convention for it. His convention is a little definite, a little bald.
One may discuss it apart from his own handling of it, even. It is a
shade too express, too confident, too little careless both of tradition
and of the typical qualities that secure permanence. In other hands one
can easily imagine how insipid it might become. It has too little body,
its scheme is too timorous, too vaporous to be handled by another. Puvis
de Chavannes will probably have few successful imitators. But one must
immediately add that if he does not found a school, his own work is,
perhaps for that reason, at all events in spite of it, among the most
important of the day. Quite unperturbed by current discussions, which
are certainly of the noisiest by which the current of artistic
development was ever deflected, he has kept on his way, and has finally
won all suffrages for an æsthetic expression that is really antagonistic
to the general æsthetic spirit of his time.
Puvis de Chavannes is, perhaps, the most interesting figure in French
painting to-day. Couture is little more than a name. It is curious to
consider why. Twenty years ago he was still an important figure. He had
been an unusually successful teacher. Many American painters of
distinction, especially, were at one time his pupils--Hunt, La Farge,
George Butler. He theorized as much, as well--perhaps even better
than--he painted. His "Entretiens d'atelier" are as good in their way as
his "Baptism of the Prince Imperial." He had a very distinguished
talent, but he was too distinctly clever--clever to the point of
sophistication. In this respect he was distinctly a man of the
nineteenth century. His great work, "Romains de la Décadence," created
as fine an effect at the Centenary Exhibition of the Paris World's Fair
in 1889 as it does in the Louvre, whence it was then transferred, but it
was distinctly a decorative effect--the effect of a fine panel in the
general mass of color and design; it made a fine centre. It remains his
greatest performance, the performance upon which chiefly his fame will
depend, though as painting it lacks the quality and breadth of "Le
Fauconnier," perhaps the most interesting of his works to painters
themselves, and of the "Day-Dreams" of the New York Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Its permanent interest perhaps will be the historical one, due
to the definiteness with which it assigns Couture his position in the
evolution of French painting. It shows, as everything of Couture shows,
the absence of any pictorial feeling so profound and personal as to make
an impression strong enough to endure indefinitely. And it has not, on
the other hand, the interest of reality--that faithful and enthusiastic
rendering of the external world which gives importance to and fixes the
character of the French painting of the present day.
Had Regnault lived, he would have more adequately--or should I say more
plausibly?--marked the transition from romanticism to realism.
Temperamentally he was clearly a thorough romanticist--far more so, for
instance, than his friend Fortuny, whose intellectual reserve is always
conspicuous. He essayed the most vehement kind of subjects, even in the
classical field, where he treated them with truly romantic truculence.
He was himself always, moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature
as a fairy-story teller. In this sense he was more romantic than the
romanticists. His "Automedon," his portrait of General Prim, even his
"Salome," are wilful in a degree that is either superb or superficial,
as one looks at them; but at any rate they are romantic _à outrance_. At
the same time it was unmistakably the aspect of things rather than their
significance, rather than his view of them, that appealed to him. He was
farther away from the classic inspiration than any other romanticist of
his fellows; and at the same time he cared for the external world more
on its own account and less for its suggestions, than any painter of
equal force before Courbet and Bastien-Lepage. The very fact that he was
not, intellectually speaking, wholly _dans son assiette_, as the French
say, shows that he was a genius of a transitional moment. One's final
thought of him is that he died young, and one thinks so not so much
because of the dramatic tragedy of his taking off by possibly the last
Prussian bullet fired in the war of 1870-71, as because of the
essentially experimental character of his painting. Undoubtedly he would
have done great things. And undoubtedly they would have been different
from those that he did; probably in the direction--already indicated in
his most dignified performance--of giving more consistency, more vivid
definiteness, more reality, even, to his already striking conceptions.