It is at least an approximation to ascribe the primacy of realism to
Courbet, though ascriptions of the kind are at best approximations. Not
only was he the first, or among the first, to feel the interest and
importance of the actual world as it is and for what it is rather than
for what it suggests, but his feeling in this direction is intenser than
that of anyone else. Manet was preoccupied with the values of objects
and spaces. Bastien-Lepage, while painting these with the most
scrupulous fidelity, was nevertheless always attentive to the
significance and import of what he painted. Courbet was a pure
pantheist. He was possessed by the material, the physical, the actual.
He never varies it a hair's-breadth. He never lifts it a fraction of a
degree. But by his very absorption in it he dignifies it immensely. He
illustrates magnificently its possibilities. He brings out into the
plainest possible view its inherent, integral, æsthetic quality,
independent of any extraneity. No painter ever succeeded so well with so
little art, one is tempted to say. Beside his, the love of nature which
we ascribe to the ordinary realist is a superficial emotion. He had the
_sentiment_ of reality in the highest degree; he had it intensely. If he
did not represent nature with the searching subtlety of later painters,
he is certainly the forerunner of naturalism. He has absolutely no
ideality. He is blind to all intimations of immortality, all unearthly
voices.
Yet it would be wholly an error to suppose him a mere literalist. No one
is farther removed from the painstaking, grubbing imitators of detail so
justly denounced and ridiculed by Mr. Whistler. He has the generalizing
faculty in very distinguished degree, and in very large measure. Every
trait of his talent, indeed, is large, manly; but for a certain
qualification--which must be made--one might add, Olympian. This
qualification perhaps may be not unfairly described as earthiness--never
an agreeable trait, and one to which probably is due the depreciation of
Courbet that is so popular even among appreciative critics. It is easy
to characterize Courbet as brutal and material, but what is easy is
generally not exact. What one glibly stigmatizes as brutality and
grossness may, after all, be something of a particularly strong savor,
enjoyed by the painter himself with a gusto too sterling and instinctive
to be justifiably neglected, much less contemned. The first thing to do
in estimating an artist's accomplishment, which is to place one's self
at his point of view, is, in Courbet's case, unusually difficult. We are
all dreamers, more or less--in more or less desultory fashion--and can
all appreciate that prismatic turn of what is real and actual into a
position wherein it catches glints of the imagination. The imagination
is a universal touchstone. The sense of reality is a special, an
individual faculty. When one is poetizing in an amateur, a dilettante
way, as most of us poetize, a picture of Courbet, which seems to flaunt
and challenge the imagination in virtue of its defiant reality, its
insistence on the value and significance of the prosaic and the actual,
appears coarse and crude. It is not, however. It is very far from that.
It is rather elemental than elementary--in itself a prodigious
distinction. No modern painter has felt more intensely and reproduced
more vigorously the sap that runs through and vivifies the various forms
of natural phenomena. To censure his shortcomings, to regret his
imaginative incompleteness, is to miss him altogether.
It is easy to say he had all the coarseness without the sentiment of the
French peasantry, whence he sprang; that his political radicalism
attests a lack of the serenity of spirit indispensable to the sincere
artist; that he had no conception of the beautiful, the exquisite--the
fact remains that he triumphs over all his deficiencies, and in very
splendid fashion. He is, in truth, of all the realists for whom he
discovered the way, and set the pace, as it were, one of the two
naturalistic painters who have shown in any high degree the supreme
artistic faculty--that of generalization. However impressive Manet's
picture may be; however brilliant Monet's endeavor to reproduce sunlight
may seem; however refined and elegant Degas's delicate selection of
pictorial material--for broad and masterful generalization, for enduing
what he painted with an interest deeper than its surface and underlying
its aspect, Courbet has but one rival among realistic painters. I mean,
of course, Bastien-Lepage.
There is an important difference between the two. In Courbet the
sentiment of reality dominates the realism of the technic; in
Bastien-Lepage the technic is realistically carried infinitely farther,
but the sentiment quite transcends realism. Imagine Courbet essaying a
"Jeanne d'Arc!" Bastien-Lepage painting Courbet's "Cantonniers" would
not have stopped, as Courbet has done, with expressing their vitality,
their actual interest, but at the same time that he represented them in
far greater technical completeness he would also have occupied himself
with their psychology. He is indeed quite as distinctly a psychologist
as he is a painter. His favorite problem, aside from that of technical
perfection, which perhaps equally haunted him, is the rendering of that
resigned, bewildered, semi-hypnotic, vaguely and yet intensely longing
spiritual expression to be noted by those who have the eyes to see it in
the faces and attitudes now of the peasant laborer, now of the city
pariah. All his peasant women are potentially Jeannes d'Arc--"Les
Foins," "Tired," "Petite Fauvette," for example. The "note" is still
more evident in the "London Bootblack" and the "London Flower-girl," in
which the outcast "East End" spiritlessness of the British capital is
caught and fixed with a Zola-like veracity and vigor. Such a phase as
this is not so much pictorial or poetic, as psychological.
Bastien-Lepage's happiness in rendering it is a proof of the exceeding
quickness and sureness of his observation; but his preoccupation with it
is equally strong proof of his interest in the things of the mind as
well as in those of the senses. This is his great distinction, I think.
He beats the realist on his own ground (except perhaps Monet and his
followers--I remember no attempt of his to paint sunlight), but he is
imaginative as well. He is not, on the other hand, to be in anywise
associated with the romanticists. Degas's acid characterization of him,
as "the Bouguereau of the modern movement," is only just, if we remember
what very radical and fundamental changes the "modern movement" implies
in general attitude as well as in special expression. I should be
inclined, rather, to apply the analogy to M. Dagnan-Bouveret, though
here, too, with many reserves looking mainly to the difference between
true and vapid sentiment.
It is interesting to note, however, the almost exclusively intellectual
character of this imaginative side of Bastien-Lepage. He does not view
his material with any apparent sympathy, such as one notes, or at all
events divines, in Millet. Both were French peasants; but whereas
Millet's interest in his fellows is instinctive and absorbing,
Bastien-Lepage's is curious and detached. If his pictures ever succeed
in moving us, it is impersonally, in virtue of the camera-like scrutiny
he brings to bear on his subject, and the effectiveness with which he
renders it, and of the reflections which we institute of ourselves, and
which he fails to stimulate by even the faintest trace of a loving touch
or the betrayal of any sympathetic losing of himself in his theme. You
feel just the least intimation of the _doctrinaire_, the systematic
aloofness of the spectator. In moral attitude as well as in technical
expression he no more assimilates the various phases of his material, to
reproduce them afterward in new and original combination, than he
expresses the essence of landscape in general, as the Fontainebleau
painters do even in their most photographic moments. Both his figures
and his landscapes are clearly portraits--typical and not merely
individual, to be sure, but somehow not exactly creations. His skies are
the least successful portions of his pictures, I think; one must
generalize easily to make skies effective, and perhaps it is not
fanciful to note the frequency of high horizons in his work.
The fact remains that Bastien-Lepage stands at the head of the modern
movement in many ways. His friend, M. André Theuriet, has shown, in a
brochure published some years ago, that he was himself as interesting as
his pictures. He took his art very seriously, and spoke of it with a
dignity rather uncommon in the atmosphere of the studios, where there is
apt to be more enthusiasm than reflection. I recall vividly the
impatience with which he once spoke to me of painting "to show what you
can do." His own standard was always the particular ideal he had formed,
never within the reach of his ascertained powers. And whatever he did,
one may say, illustrates the sincerity and elevation of this remark,
whether one's mood incline one to care most for this psychological
side--undoubtedly the more nearly unique side--of his work, or for such
exquisite things as his "Forge" or the portrait of Mme Sarah Bernhardt.
Incontestably he has the true tradition, and stands in the line of the
great painters. And he owes his permanent place among them not less to
his perception that painting has a moral and significant, as well as a
representative and decorative sanction, than to his perfect harmony with
his own time in his way of illustrating this--to his happy fusion of
aspect admirably rendered with profound and stimulating suggestion.