But to go back a little and consider the puissant individualities, the
great men who have really given its direction to and, as it were, set
the pace of, the realistic movement, and for whom, in order more
conveniently to consider impressionism pure and simple by itself, I have
ventured to disturb the chronological sequence of evolution in French
painting--a sequence that, even if one care more for ideas than for
chronology, it is more temerarious to vary from in things French than in
any others. To go back in a word to Manet; the painter of whom M. Henri
Houssaye has remarked: "Manet sowed, M. Bastien-Lepage has reaped."
Manet was certainly one of the most noteworthy painters that France or
any other country has produced. His is the great, the very rare, merit
of having conceived a new point of view. That he did not illustrate this
in its completeness, that he was a sign-post, as Albert Wolff very aptly
said, rather an exemplar, is nothing. He was totally unheralded, and he
was in his way superb. No one before him had essayed--no one before him
had ever thought of--the immense project of breaking, not relatively but
absolutely, with the conventional. Looking for the first time at one of
his pictures, one says that customary notions, ordinary brushes,
traditional processes of even the highest authenticity, have been thrown
to the winds. Hence, indeed, the scandal which he caused from the first
and which went on increasing, until, owing to the acceptance, with
modifications, of his point of view by the most virile and vigorous
painters of the day, he became, as he has become, in a sense the head of
the corner. Manet's great distinction is to have discovered that the
sense of reality is achieved with a thousand-fold greater intensity by
getting as near as possible to the _actual_, rather than resting content
with the _relative_, value of every detail. Everyone who has painted
since Manet has either followed him in this effort or has appeared
jejune.
Take as an illustration of the contrary practice such a masterpiece in
its way as Gérôme's "Éminence Grise." In this picture, skilfully and
satisfactorily composed, the relative values of all the colors are
admirably, even beautifully, observed. The correspondence of the gamut
of values to that of the light and dark scale of such an actual scene is
perfect. Before Manet, one could have said that this is all that is
required or can be secured, arguing that exact _imitation_ of local
tints and general tone is impossible, owing to the difference between
nature's highest light and lowest dark, and the potentialities of the
palette. In other words, one might have said, that inasmuch as you can
squeeze absolute white and absolute black out of no tubes, the thing to
do is first to determine the scale of your picture and then make every
note in it bear the same relation to every other that the corresponding
note in nature bears to its fellows in its own corresponding but
different scale. This is what Gérôme has done in the "Éminence Grise"--a
scene, it will be remembered, on a staircase in a palace interior. Manet
inquires what would happen to this house of cards shored up into
verisimilitude by mere _correspondence_, if Gérôme had been asked to cut
a window in his staircase and admit the light of out-of-doors into his
correspondent but artificial scene. The whole thing would have to be
done over again. The scale of the picture running from the highest
palette white to the lowest palette dark, and yet the key of an actual
interior scene being much nearer middle-tint than the tint of an actual
out-of-doors scene, it would be impossible to paint with any
verisimilitude the illumination of a window from the outside, the
resources of the palette having already been exhausted, every object
having been given a local value solely with relation, so far as truth of
representation is concerned, to the values of every other object, and no
effort being made to get the precise value of the object as it would
appear under analogous circumstances in nature.
It may be replied, and I confess I think with excellent reason, that
Gérôme's picture has no window in it, and therefore that to ask of him
to paint a picture as he would if he were painting a different picture,
is pedantry. The old masters are still admirable, though they only
observed a correspondence to the actual scale of natural values, and
were not concerned with imitation of it. But it is to be observed that,
successful as their practice is, it is successful in virtue of the
unconscious co-operation of the beholder's imagination. And nowadays not
only is the exercise of the imagination become for better or worse a
little old-fashioned, but the one thing that is insisted on as a
starting-point and basis, at the very least, is the sense of reality.
And it is impossible to exaggerate the way in which the sense of reality
has been intensified by Manet's insistence upon getting as near as
possible to the individual values of objects as they are seen in
nature--in spite of his abandonment of the practice of painting on a
parallel scale. Things now drop into their true place, look as they
really do, and count as they count in nature, because the painter is no
longer content with giving us change for nature, but tries his best to
give us nature itself. Perspective acquires its actual significance,
solids have substance and bulk as well as surfaces, distance is
perceived as it is in nature, by the actual interposition of atmosphere,
chiaro-oscuro is abolished--the ways in which reality is secured being
in fact legion the moment real instead of relative values are studied.
Something is lost, very likely--an artist cannot be so intensely
preoccupied with reality as, since Manet, it has been incumbent on
painters to be, without missing a whole range of qualities that are so
precious as rightly perhaps to be considered indispensable. Until
reality becomes in its turn an effect unconsciously attained, the
painter's imagination will be held more or less in abeyance. And perhaps
we are justified in thinking that nothing can quite atone for its
absence. Meantime, however, it must be acknowledged that Manet first
gave us this sense of reality in a measure comparable with that which
successively Balzac, Flaubert, Zola gave to the readers of their
books--a sense of actuality and vividness beside which the traditionary
practice seemed absolutely fanciful and mechanical.
Applying Manet's method, his invention, his discovery, to the painting
of out-of-doors, the _plein air_ school immediately began to produce
landscapes of astonishing reality by confining their effort to those
values which it is in the power of pigments to imitate. The possible
scale of mere correspondence being of course from one to one hundred,
they secured greater truth by painting between twenty and eighty, we may
say. Hence the grayness of the most successful French landscapes of the
present day--those of Bastien-Lepage's backgrounds, of Cazin's pictures.
Sunlight being unpaintable, they confined themselves to the
representation of what they could represent. In the interest of truth,
of reality, they narrowed the gamut of their modulations, they attempted
less, upheld by the certainty of accomplishing more. For a time French
landscape was pitched in a minor key. Suddenly Claude Monet appeared.
Impressionism, as it is now understood, and as Manet had not succeeded
in popularizing it, won instant recognition. Monet's discovery was that
light is the most important factor in the painting of out-of-doors. He
pushed up the key of landscape painting to the highest power. He
attacked the fascinating, but of course demonstrably insolvable, problem
of painting sunlight, not illusorily, as Fortuny had done by relying on
contrasts of light and dark correspondent in scale, but positively and
realistically. He realized as nearly as possible the effect of
sunlight--that is to say, he did as well and no better in this respect
than Fortuny had done--but he created a much greater illusion of a
sunlit landscape than anyone had ever done before him, by painting those
parts of his picture not in sunlight with the exact truth that in
painting objects in shadow the palette can compass.
Nothing is more simple. Take a landscape with a cloudy sky, which means
diffused light in the old sense of the term, and observe the effect upon
it of a sudden burst of sunlight. What is the effect where considerable
portions of the scene are suddenly thrown into marked shadow, as well as
others illuminated with intense light? Is the absolute value of the
parts in shadow lowered or raised? Raised, of course, by reflected
light. Formerly, to get the contrast between sunlight and shadow in
proper scale, the painter would have painted the shadows darker than
they were before the sun appeared. Relatively they are darker, since
their value, though heightened, is raised infinitely less than the value
of the parts in sunlight. Absolutely, their value is raised
considerably. If, therefore, they are painted lighter than they were
before the sun appeared, they in themselves seem truer. The part of
Monet's picture that is in shadow is measurably true, far truer than it
would have been if painted under the old theory of correspondence, and
had been unnaturally darkened to express the relation of contrast
between shadow and sunlight. Scale has been lost. What has been gained?
Simply truth of impressionistic effect. Why? Because we know and judge
and appreciate and feel the measure of truth with which objects in
shadow are represented; we are insensibly more familiar with them in
nature than with objects directly sun-illuminated, the value as well as
the definition of which are far vaguer to us on account of their
blending and infinite heightening by a luminosity absolutely
overpowering. In a word, in sunlit landscapes objects in shadow are what
customarily and unconsciously we see and note and know, and the illusion
is greater if the relation between them and the objects in sunlight,
whose value habitually we do not note, be neglected or falsified. Add to
this source of illusion the success of Monet in giving a juster value to
the sunlit half of his picture than had even been systematically
attempted before his time, and his astonishing _trompe-l'oeil_ is, I
think, explained. Each part is truer than ever before, and unless one
have a specially developed sense of _ensemble_ in this very special
matter of values in and affected by sunlight, one gets from Monet an
impression of actuality so much greater than he has ever got before,
that he may be pardoned for feeling, and even for enthusiastically
proclaiming, that in Monet realism finds its apogee. To sum up: The
first realists painted _relative_ values; Manet and his derivatives
painted _absolute_ values, but in a wisely limited gamut; Monet paints
_absolute values in a very wide range, plus sunlight, as nearly as he
can get it_--as nearly as pigment can be got to represent it. Perforce
he loses scale, and therefore artistic completeness, but he secures an
incomparably vivid effect of reality, of nature--and of nature in her
gayest, most inspiring manifestation, illuminated directly and
indirectly, and everywhere vibrant and palpitating with the light of all
our physical seeing.
Monet is so subtle in his own way, so superbly successful within his own
limits, that it is time wasted to quarrel with the convention-steeped
philistine who refuses to comprehend even his point of view, who judges
the pictures he sees by the pictures he has seen. He has not only
discovered a new way of looking at nature, but he has justified it in a
thousand particulars. Concentrated as his attention has been upon the
effects of light and atmosphere, he has reproduced an infinity of
nature's moods that are charming in proportion to their transitoriness,
and whose fleeting beauties he has caught and permanently fixed.
Rousseau made the most careful studies, and then combined them in his
studio. Courbet made his sketch, more or less perfect, face to face with
his subject, and elaborated it afterward away from it. Corot painted his
picture from nature, but put the Corot into it in his studio. Monet's
practice is in comparison drastically thorough. After thirty minutes, he
says--why thirty instead of forty or twenty, I do not know; these
mysteries are Eleusinian to the mere amateur--the light changes; he
must stop and return the next day at the same hour. The result is
immensely real, and in Monet's hands immensely varied. One may say as
much, having regard to their differing degrees of success, of Pissaro,
who influenced him, and of Caillebotte, Renoir, Sisley, and the rest of
the impressionists who followed him.
He is himself the prominent representative of the school, however, and
the fact that one representative of it is enough to consider, is
eloquent of profound criticism of it. For decorative purposes a hole in
one's wall, an additional window through which one may only look
satisfactorily during a period of thirty minutes, has its drawbacks. A
walk in the country or in a city park is after all preferable to anyone
who can really appreciate a Monet--that is, anyone who can feel the
illusion of nature which it is his sole aim to produce. After all, what
one asks of art is something different from imitative illusion. Its
essence is illusion, I think, but illusion taken in a different sense
from optical illusion--_trompe-l'oeil_. Its function is to make dreams
seem real, not to recall reality. Monet is enduringly admirable mainly
to the painter who envies and endeavors to imitate his wonderful power
of technical expression--the thing that occupies most the conscious
attention of the true painter. To others he must remain a little
unsatisfactory, because he is not only not a dreamer, but because he
does nothing with his material except to show it as it is--a great
service surely, but largely excluding the exercise of that architectonic
faculty, personally directed, which is the very life of every truly
æsthetic production.