IV

So thoroughly has the spirit of realism fastened upon the artistic

effort of the present that temperaments least inclined toward interest

in the actual feel its influences, and show the effects of these. The

most recalcitrant illustrate this technically, however rigorously they

may preserve their point of view. They paint at least more

circumspectly, however they may think and feel. An historical painter

like Jean Paul Laurens, interested as he is in the memorable moments and

dramatic incidents of the past, and exhibiting as he does, first of all,

a sense of what is ideally forceful and heroic, is nevertheless clearly

concerned for the realistic value of his representation far more than a

generation ago he would have been. When Luminais paints a scene from

Gaulish legend, he is not quite, but nearly, as careful to make it

pictorially real as he is to have it dramatically effective. M. François

Flameng, expanding his book illustration into a mammoth canvas

commemorative of the Vendean insurrection, is almost daintily fastidious

about the naturalistic aspect of his abundant detail. M.

Benjamin-Constant's artificially conceived seraglio scenes are as

realistically rendered as is indicated by a recent caricature depicting

an astonished sneak-thief, foiled in an attempted rape of the jewels in

a sultana's diadem, painted with such deceptive illusoriness by M.

Benjamin-Constant's clever brush. The military painters, Detaille, De

Neuville, Berne-Bellecour, do not differ from Vernet more by painting

incidents instead of phases of warfare, by substituting the touch of

dramatic _genre_ for epic conceptions, than they do by the scrupulously

naturalistic rendering that in them supplants the old academic

symbolism. Their dragoons and _fantassins_ are not merely more real in

what they do, but in how they look. Vernet's look like tin soldiers by

comparison; certainly like soldiers _de convenance_. Aimé Morot

evidently used instantaneous photography, and his magnificent cavalry

charges suggest not only carnage, but Muybridge as well.

The great portrait-painters of the day--Carolus-Duran, Bonnat,

Ribot--are realists to the core. They are very far from being purely

portrait-painters of course, and their realism shows itself with

splendid distinction in other works. Few painters of the nude have

anything to their credit as fine as the figure M. Carolus-Duran

exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1889. Ribot's "Saint Sebastian" is

one of the most powerful pictures of modern French art. Bonnat's

"Christ" became at once famous. Each picture is painted with a vigor and

point of realistic detail that are peculiar to our own time; painted

to-day, Bonnat's fine and sculptural "Fellah Woman and Child," of the

Metropolitan Museum, would be accented in a dozen ways in which now it

is not. But it is perhaps in portraiture that the eminence of these

painters is most explicit. They are at the head of contemporary

portraitists, at all events. And their portraits are almost defiantly

real, void often of arrangement, and as little artificial as the very

frequently prosaic atmosphere appertaining to their sometimes very stark

subjects suggests. A portrait by Bonnat blinks nothing in the subject;

its aim and accomplishment are the rendering of the character in a vivid

fashion--including the reproduction of cobalt cravats and creased

trousers even--which would have mightily embarrassed Van Dyck or

Velasquez. Ribot reproduces Ribera often, but he deals with fewer

externals, fewer effects, taken in the widest sense. Carolus-Duran, the

"swell" portrait-painter of the day, artificial as he may be in the

quality of his mind, nevertheless seeks and attains, first of all, the

sense of an even exaggerated life-likeness in his charming sitters.

They are, first of all, people; the pictorial element takes care of

itself; sometimes even--so overmastering is the realistic tendency--the

plush of the chair, the silk of the robe, the cut of the coat, seems, to

an observer who thinks of the old traditions of Titian, of Raphael, of

Moroni, unduly emphasized, even for realism.

V

One element of modernity is a certain order of eclecticism. It is not

the eclecticism of the Bolognese painters, for example, illustrating the

really hopeless attempt to combine the supposed and superficial

excellences, always dissociated from the essence, of different points of

view. It is a free choice of attitude, rather, due to the release of the

individual from the thraldom of conformity that ruled even during the

romantic epoch. Hence a great deal of admirable work, of which one

hardly thinks whether it is realistic or not, side by side with the more

emphatic expressions of the realistic spirit. And this work is of all

degrees of realism, never, however, getting very far away from the

naturalistic basis on which more and more everyone is coming to insist

as the necessary and only solid pedestal of any flight of fancy. Baudry

is perhaps the nearest of the really great men to the Bolognese order

of eclecticism. I suppose he must be classed among the really great men,

so many painters of intelligence place him there, though I must myself

plead the laic privilege of a slight scepticism as to whether time will

approve their enthusiasm. He is certainly very effective, and in

certainly his own way, idle as it is to say that his drafts on the great

Italians are no greater than those of Raphael on the antique frescos. He

had a great love of color and a native instinct for it; with perhaps

more appreciation than invention, his imagination has something very

personal in the zealous enthusiasm with which he exercised it, though I

think it must be admitted that his reflections of Tiepolo, Titian,

Tintoretto and his attenuated expansions of Michael Angelo's condensed

grandiosity, recall the eclecticism of the Carracci far more than that

of Raphael. But his manner is the modern manner, and it is altogether

more effective, more "fetching," to use a modern term, than anything

purely academic can be. Élie Delaunay, another master of decoration, is,

on the other hand, as real as the most rigorous literalist could ask of

a painter of decorative works. Chartran, who has an individual charm

that both Baudry and Delaunay lack, inferior as he is to them in sweep

and power, is perhaps in this respect midway between the two. Clairin

is, like Mazerolles, a pure _fantaisiste_. Dubufe _fils_, whose at

least equally famous father ranks in a somewhat similar category with

Couture, shows a distinct advance upon him in reality of rendering, as

the term would be understood at present.

In other departments of painting the note of realism is naturally still

more universally apparent; but as in the work of the painters of

decoration it is often most noticeable as an undertone, indicating a

point of departure rather than an aim. Bonvin is a realist only as

Chardin, as Van der Meer of Delft, as Nicholas Maes were, before the

jargon of realism had been thought of. He is, first of all, an exquisite

artist, in love with the beautiful in reality, finding in it the

humblest material, and expressing it with the gentlest, sweetest,

æsthetic severity and composure imaginable. The most fastidious critic

needs but a touch of human feeling to convert any characterization of

this most refined and elevated of painters into pure panegyric. Vollon's

touch is felicity itself, and it is evident that he takes more pleasure

in exercising and exploiting it than in its successful imitation,

striking as its imitative quality is. Gervex and Duez are very much more

than impressionists, both in theory and practice. There is nothing

polemic in either. Painters extol in the heartiest way the color, the

creative coloration of Gervex's "Rolla," quite aside from its dramatic

force or its truth of aspect. Personal feeling is clearly the

inspiration of every work of Duez, not the demonstration of a theory of

treating light and atmosphere. The same may be said of Roll at his best,

as in his superb rendering of what may be called the modern painter's

conception of the myth of Europa. Compared with Paul Veronese's

admirable classic, that violates all the unities (which Veronese,

nevertheless, may readily be pardoned by all but literalists and

theorists for neglecting), this splendid nude girl in _plein air_,

flecked with splotches of sunlight filtered through a sieve of leafage,

with her realistic taurine companion, and their environment of

veridically rendered out-of-doors, may stand for an illustrative

definition of modernity; but what you feel most of all is Roll. It is

ten chances to one that he has never even been to Venice or thought of

Veronese. He has not always been so successful; as when in his "Work" he

earned Degas's acute comment: "A crowd is made with five persons, not

with fifty." ("Il y a cinquante figures, mais je ne vois pas la foule;

on fait une foule avec cinq, et non pas avec cinquante.") But he has

always been someone. Compare with him L'Hermitte, a painter who

illustrates sometimes the possibility of being an artificial realist.

His "Vintage" at the Metropolitan Museum, his "Harvesters" at the

Luxembourg, are excellently real and true in detail, but in idea and

general expression they might compete for the prix de Rome. The same is

measurably true of Lerolle, whose pictures are more sympathetic--sometimes

they are _very_ sympathetic--but on the whole display less power. But

in each instance the advocate _à outrance_ of realism may justly, I

think, maintain that a painter with a natural predisposition toward the

insipidity of the academic has been saved from it by the inherent sanity

and robustness of the realistic method. Jean Béraud, even, owes something

to the way in which his verisimilitude of method has reinforced his

artistic powers. His delightful Parisiennes--modistes' messengers crossing

wet glistening pavements against a background of gray mist accented with

poster-bedizened kiosks and regularly recurring horse-chestnut trees;

_élégantes_ at prayer, in somewhat distracted mood, on _prie-dieus_

in the vacant and vapid Paris churches; seated at café tables on the busy,

leisurely boulevards, or posing _tout bonnement_ for the reproduction

of the most fascinating feminine _ensemble_ in the world--owe their

charm (I may say again their "fetchingness") to the faithfulness with which

their portraitist has studied, and the fidelity with which he has

reproduced, their differing types, more than to any personal expression

of his own view of them. Fancy Béraud's masterpiece, the Salle

Graffard--that admirable characterization of crankdom embodied in a

socialist reunion--painted by an academic painter. How absolutely it would

lose its pith, its force, its significance, even its true distinction. And

his "Magdalen at the Pharisee's House," which is almost equally

impressive--far more impressive of course in a literary and, I think,

legitimate, sense--owes even its literary effectiveness to its significant

realism.

What the illustrators of the present day owe to the naturalistic method,

it is almost superfluous to point out. "Illustrators" in France are, in

general, painters as well, some of them very eminent painters. Daumier,

who passed in general for a contributor to illustrated journals, even

such journals as _Le Petit Journal pour Rire_, was not only a genius of

the first rank, but a painter of the first class. Monvel and Monténard

at present are masterly painters. But in their illustration as well as

in their painting, they show a notable change from the illustration of

the days of Daumier and Doré. The difference between the elegant (or

perhaps rather the handsome) drawings of Bida, an artist of the utmost

distinction, and that of the illustrators of the present day who are

comparable with him--their name is not legion--is a special attestation

of the influence of the realistic ideal in a sphere wherein, if

anywhere, one may say, realism reigns legitimately, but wherein also the

conventional is especially to be expected. One cannot indeed be quite

sure that the temptations of the conventional are resisted by the

ultra-realistic illustrators of our own time, Rossi, Beaumont, Albert

Lynch, Myrbach. They have certainly a very handy way of expressing

themselves; one would be justified in suspecting the labor-saving, the

art-sparing kodak, behind many of their most unimpeachable successes.

But the attitude taken is quite other than it used to be, and the change

that has come over French æsthetic activity in general can be noted in

very sharp definition by comparing a book illustrated twenty years ago

by Albert Lynch, with, for example, Maupassant's "Pierre et Jean," the

distinguished realism of whose text is adequately paralleled--and the

implied eulogy is by no means trivial--by the pictorical commentary, so

to speak, which this first of modern illustrators has supplied. And an

even more striking illustration of the evolution of realistic thought

and feeling, as well as of rendering, is furnished by the succession of

Forain to Grévin, as an illustrator of the follies of the day, the

characteristic traits of the Parisian seamy side, morally speaking.

Grévin is as conventional as Murger, in philosophy, and--though

infinitely cleverer--as "Mars" in drawing. Forain, with the pencil of a

realism truly Japanese, illustrates with sympathetic incisiveness the

pitiless pessimism of Flaubert, Goncourt, and Maupassant as well.