the bitter psychology of Edgar Degas. His nudes are pagan, child women
full of life's joy, animal, sinuous, unreasoning. His _genre_ tableaux
are personal enough, though in the most commonplace themes, such as
Déjeuner and The Box--both have been exhibited in New York--the
luminous envelope, the gorgeous riot of opposed tones, the delicious
dissonances literally transfigure the themes. In his second manner his
affinities to Claude Monet and impressionism are more marked. His
landscapes are more atmospheric, division of tones inevitably
practised. Everything swims in aerial tones. His portraits, once his
only means of subsistence, are the personification of frankness. The
touch is broad, flowing. Without doubt, as Theodore Duret asserts,
Renoir is the first of the impressionistic portrait painters; the
first to apply unflinchingly the methods of Manet and Monet to the
human face--for Manet, while painting in clear tones (what magic there
is in his gold!), in portraiture seldom employed the hatchings of
colours, except in his landscapes, and only since 1870, when he had
come under the influence of Monet's theories. Mauclair points out that
fifteen years before _pointillisme_ (the system of dots, like eruptive
small-pox, instead of the touches of Monet) was invented, Renoir in
his portrait of Sisley used the stipplings. He painted Richard Wagner
at Palermo in 1882. In his third manner--an arbitrary
classification--he combines the two earlier techniques, painting with
the palette-knife and in divided tones. Flowers, barbaric designs for
rugs, the fantastic, vibrating waters, these appear among that long
and varied series of canvases in which we see Paris enjoying itself at
Bougival, dancing on the heights of Montmartre, strolling among the
trees at Armenonville; Paris quivering with holiday joys, Paris in
outdoor humour--and not a discordant or vicious note in all this
psychology of love and sport. The lively man who in shirt sleeves
dances with the jolly, plump salesgirl, the sunlight dripping through
the vivid green of the tree leaves, lending dazzling edges to
profiles, tips of noses, or fingers, is not the sullen _ouvrier_ of
Zola or Toulouse-Lautrec--nor are the girls kin to Huysmans's Soeurs
Vatard or the "human document" of Degas. Renoir's philosophy is not
profound; for him life is not a curse or a kiss, as we used to say in
the old Swinburne days. He is a painter of joyous surfaces and he is
an incorrigible optimist. He is also a poet. The poet of air,
sunshine, and beautiful women--can we ever forget his Jeanne Samary? A
pantheist, withal a poet and a direct descendant in the line of
Watteau, Boucher, Monticelli, with an individual touch of mundane
grace and elegance.
Mme. Charpentier it was who cleverly engineered the portrait of
herself and children and the portrait of Jeanne Samary into the 1879
Salon. The authorities did not dare to refuse two such distinguished
women. Renoir's prospects became brighter. He married. He made money.
Patrons began to appear, and in 1904, at the autumn Salon, he was
given a special _salle_, and homage was done him by the young men. No
sweeter gift can come to a French painter than the unbidden admiration
of the rising artistic generation. Renoir appreciated his honours; he
had worked laboriously, had known poverty and its attendant
bedfellows, and had won the race run in the heat and dust of his
younger years. In 1904, describing the autumn exhibition, I wrote: "In
the Renoir _salle_ a few of the better things of this luscious brush
were to be found, paintings of his middle period, that first won him
favour. For example, Sur la Terrasse, with its audacious crimson, like
the imperious challenge of a trumpet; La Loge and its gorgeous
fabrics; a Baigneuse in a light-green scheme; the quaint head of
Jeanne Samary--a rival portrait to Besnard's faun-like Réjane--and a
lot of Renoir's later experimentings, as fugitive as music; exploding
bouquets of iridescence; swirling panels, depicting scenes from
Tannhäuser; a flower garden composed of buds and blossoms in colour
scales that begin at a bass-emerald and ascend to an altitudinous
green where green is no longer green but an opaline reverberation. We
know how exquisitely Renoir moulds his female heads, building up, cell
by cell, the entire mask. The simple gestures of daily life have been
recorded by Renoir for the past forty years with a fidelity and a
vitality that shames the anæmic imaginings and puling pessimisms of
his younger contemporaries. What versatility, what undaunted desire to
conquer new problems! He has in turn painted landscapes as full of
distinction as Monet's. The nervous vivacity of his brush, his love of
rendered surfaces, of melting Boucher-like heads, and of a dazzling
Watteau colour synthesis have endeared him to the discriminating." He
may be deficient in spiritual elevation--as were Manet, Monet, and the
other Impressionists; but as they were primarily interested in
problems of lighting, in painting the sun and driving the old mud gods
of academic art from their thrones, it is not strange that the new men
became so enamoured of the coloured appearances of life that they left
out the ghosts of the ideal (that dusty, battered phrase) and
proclaimed themselves rank sun-worshippers. The generation that
succeeded them is endeavouring to restore the balance between
unblushing pantheism and the earlier mysticism. But wherever a Renoir
hangs there will be eyes to feast upon his opulent and sonorous colour
music.
III - MANET
In the autumn of 1865 Théodore Duret, the Parisian critic, found
himself in the city of Madrid after a tour of Portugal on horseback. A
new hotel on the Puerta del Sol was, he wrote in his life of Manet, a
veritable haven after roughing it in the adjacent kingdom. At the
mid-day breakfast he ate as if he had never encountered good cooking
in his life. Presently his attention was attracted by the behaviour of
a stranger who sat next to him. The unknown was a Frenchman who abused
the food, the service, and the country. He was so irritable when he
noticed Duret enjoying the very _plats_ he had passed that he turned
on him and demanded if insult was meant. The horrible cuisine, he
explained, made him sick, and he could not understand the appetite of
Duret. Good-naturedly Duret explained he had just arrived from
Portugal and that the breakfast was a veritable feast. "And I have
just arrived from Paris," he answered, and gave his name, Edouard
Manet. He added that he had been so persecuted that he suspected his
neighbour of some evil pleasantry. The pair became friends, and went
to look at the pictures of Velasquez at the Prado. Fresh from Paris,
Manet was still smarting from the attacks made on him after the
hanging of his Olympia in the Salon of 1865. Little wonder his nerves
were on edge. A dozen days later, after he had studied Velasquez,
Goya, and El Greco, Manet, in company with Duret, returned to Paris.
It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
About eight years ago Duret's definitive biography of Manet appeared,
Histoire de Edouard Manet et de Son Oeuvre. No one was better
qualified to write of the dead painter than Théodore Duret. A critic
of perspicacity, his enthusiasm was kindled during the birth throes of
impressionism and has never been quenched. Only a few years ago, after
a tribute to Whistler, he wrote of Manet in the introduction to his
volume on Impressionism, and while no one may deny his estimate, yet
through zeal for the name of his dead friend he attributed to him the
discoveries of the impressionists. Manet was their leader; he would
have been a leader of men in any art epoch; but he did not invent the
fulminating palette of Monet, and, in reality, he joined the
insurgents after they had waged their earlier battles. His
"impressionistic" painting, so called, did not date until later;
before that he had fought for his own independence, and his method was
different from that of Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne and the rest.
Nevertheless, because of his notoriety--fame is hardly the word--he
may be fairly called the leader of the school.
As a rule he was not an irascible man, if the unpleasant nature of the
attacks upon him is taken into consideration. With the exception of
Richard Wagner and Ibsen, I know of no artist who was vilified during
his lifetime as was Manet. A gentleman, he was the reverse of the
bohemian. Duret writes of him that he was shocked at the attempt to
make of him a monster. He did not desire to become _chef d'école_, nor
did he set up as an eccentric. When he gave his special exhibition his
catalogue contained a modest declaration of the right of the artist to
his personal vision. He did not pretend to have created a new school,
and he asked the public to judge his work as that of a sincere
painter; but even that mild pronunciamento was received with jeers.
The press, with a few exceptions, was against him, and so were nearly
all the artists of influence. Zola's aggressive articles only made the
situation worse. Who was this Zola but a writer of doubtful taste and
sensational style! The whole crowd of realists, naturalists, and
impressionists--the Batignolles school was the mocking title given the
latter--were dumped into the common vat of infamy and critical vitriol
poured over them.
The main facts of Manet's career may be soon disposed of. His mother
was Eugénie Désirée Fournier; she was the goddaughter of Charles
Bernadotte, King of Sweden. Her father, a prefect at Pau, had rendered
services to Bernadotte which the latter did not forget. When she
married, in 1831, Auguste Manet, a distinguished judge of the Seine
tribunal, Bernadotte made her many valuable presents and a dowry. Her
three sons were Edouard, Eugène, and Gustave. They inherited from
their rich grandfather, Fournier. Edouard was born at Paris, Rue
Bonaparte, January 23, 1832. His brother Eugène became a doctor of
medicine and later married one of the most gifted of women painters,
Berthe Morisot, who died in 1895, after winning the praise of the most
critical pens in all Europe. Edouard was intended for the bar, but he
threw up his studies and swore he would become a painter. Then he was
sent abroad. He visited South America and other countries, and kept
his eyes wide open, as his sea-pieces proved. After his mother became
a widow he married, in 1863, Susanne Leenhoff, of Delft, Holland. She
was one of the early admirers of Schumann in Paris and played the A
minor piano concerto with orchestra there, and, it is said, with
success. She was an admirer of her husband's genius, and during all
the turmoil of his existence she was a friend and counsellor.
The young couple lived with the elder Mme. Manet in the Rue de
Saint-Pétersbourg, and their weekly reception became a rallying centre
for not only _les Jeunes_, but also for such men as Gambetta, Emile
Ollivier, Clemenceau, Antonin Proust, De Banville, Baudelaire,
Duranty--with whom Manet fought a duel over a trifle--Zola, Mallarmé,
Abbé Hurel, Monet, and the impressionistic group. Edouard entertained
great devotion for his mother. She saw two of her sons die, Edouard in
1883 (April 30) and Gustave in 1884. (He was an advocate and took
Clemenceau's place as municipal councillor when the latter was elected
Deputy.) Mme. Manet died in 1885. The painter was stricken with
locomotor ataxia, brought on by protracted toil, in 1881. For nearly
three years he suffered, and after the amputation of a leg he
succumbed. His obsequies were almost of national significance. His
widow lived until 1906.
_Manet et manebit_ was the motto of the artist. He lived to paint and
he painted much after his paralytic seizure. He was a brilliant
raconteur, and, as Degas said, was at one time as well known in Paris
as Garibaldi, red shirt and all. The truth is, Manet, after being
forced with his back to the wall, became the active combatant in the
duel with press and public. He was unhappy if people on the boulevard
did not turn to look at him. "The most notorious painter in Paris" was
a description which he finally grew to enjoy. It may not be denied
that he painted several pictures as a direct challenge to the world,
but a painter of offensive pictures he never was. The execrated
Picnic, proscribed by the jury of the Salon in 1861, was shown in the
Salon des Refusés (in company with works by Bracquemond, Cazin,
Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, J.P. Laurens, Legros, Pissarro,
Vollon, Whistler--the mildest-mannered crew of pirates that ever
attempted to scuttle the bark of art), and a howl arose. What was this
shocking canvas like? A group of people at a picnic, several nudes
among them. In vain it was pointed out to the modest Parisians (who at
the time revelled in the Odalisque of Ingres, in Cabanel, Gérôme,
Bouguereau, and other delineators of the chaste) that in the Louvre
the Concert of Giorgione depicted just such a scene; but the mixture
of dressed and undressed was appalling, and Manet became a man marked
for vengeance. Perhaps the exceeding brilliancy of his paint and his
unconventional manner of putting it on his canvas had as much to do
with the obloquy as his theme. And then he would paint the life around
him instead of producing _pastiches_ of old masters or sickly
evocations of an unreal past.
He finished Olympia the year of his marriage, and refused to exhibit
it; Baudelaire insisted to the contrary. It was shown at the Salon of
1865 (where Monet exhibited for the first time) and became the scandal
of the day. Again the painter was bombarded with invectives. This
awful nude, to be sure, was no more unclothed than is Cabanel's Venus,
but the latter is pretty and painted with soap-suds and
sentimentality. The Venus of Titian is not a whit more exposed than
the slim, bony, young woman who has just awakened in time to receive a
bouquet at the hands of her negress, while a black cat looks on this
matutinal proceeding as a matter of course. The silhouette has the
firmness of Holbein; the meagre girl recalls a Cranach. It is not the
greatest of Manet; one could say, despite the bravura of the
performances, that the painter was indulging in an ironic joke. It was
a paint pot flung in the face of Paris. Olympia figured at the 1887
exhibition in the Pavilion Manet. An American (the late William M.
Laffan) tried to buy her. John Sargent intervened, and a number of the
painter's friends, headed by Claude Monet, subscribed a purse of
twenty thousand francs. In 1890 Monet and Camille Pelletan presented
to M. Fallières, then Minister of Instruction, the picture for the
Luxembourg, and in 1907 (January 6), thanks to the prompt action of
Clemenceau, one of Manet's earliest admirers, the hated Olympia was
hung in the Louvre. The admission was a shock, even at that late day
when the din of the battle had passed. When in 1884 there was held at
the École des Beaux-Arts a memorial exposition of Manet's works,
Edmond About wrote that the place ought to be fumigated, and Gérôme
"brandished his little cane" with indignation. Why all the excitement
in official circles? Only this: Manet was a great painter, the
greatest painter in France during the latter half of the nineteenth
century. Beautiful paint always provokes hatred. Manet won. Nothing
succeeds like the success which follows death. (Our only fear nowadays
is that his imitators won't die. Second-rate Manet is as bad as
second-rate Bouguereau.) If he began by patterning after Hals,
Velasquez, and Goya, he ended quite Edouard Manet; above all, he gave
his generation a new vision. There will be always the battle of
methods. As Mr. MacColl says: "Painting is continually swaying between
the _chiaroscuro_ reading of the world which gives it depth and the
colour reading which reduces it to flatness. Manet takes all that the
modern inquisition of shadows will give to strike his compromise near
the singing colours of the Japanese mosaic."
What a wit this Parisian painter possessed! Duret tells of a passage
at arms between Manet and Alfred Stevens at the period when the
former's Le Bon Bock met for a wonder with a favourable reception at
the Salon of 1873. This portrait of the engraver Belot smoking a pipe,
his fingers encircling a glass, caused Stevens to remark that the man
in the picture "drank the beer of Haarlem." The _mot_ nettled Manet,
whose admiration for Frans Hals is unmistakably visible in this
magnificent portrait. He waited his chance for revenge, and it came
when Stevens exhibited a picture in the Rue Lafitte portraying a young
woman of fashion in street dress standing before a portière which she
seems about to push aside in order to enter another room. Manet
studied the composition for a while, and noting a feather duster
elaborately painted which lies on the floor beside the lady,
exclaimed: "Tiens! elle a done un rendezvous avec le valet de
chambre?"
XII. A NEW STUDY OF WATTEAU
New biographical details concerning Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721)
may never be forthcoming, though theories of his enigmatic personality
and fascinating art will always find exponents. Our knowledge of
Watteau is confined to a few authorities: the notes in D'Argenville's
Abrégé de la Vie des Plus Fameux Peintres; Catalogue Raisonné, by
Gersaint; Julienne's introduction to the Life of Watteau by Count de
Caylus--discovered by the Goncourts and published in their brilliant
study of eighteenth-century art. Since then have appeared monographs,
études, and articles by Cellier, Mollet, Hanover, Dohme, Müntz,
Séailles, Claude Phillips, Charles Blanc, Virgile Joez, F. Staley,
Téodor de Wyzewa, and Camille Mauclair. Mauclair is the latest and one
of the most interesting commentators, his principal contribution being
De Watteau à Whistler, a chapter of which has been afterward expanded
into a compact little study entitled Watteau and translated from the
French text by Mme. Simon Bussy, the wife of that intimate painter of
twilight and poetic reverie, Simon Bussy, to whom the book is
dedicated.
It is the thesis put forth and cleverly maintained by Mauclair that
interests us more than his succinct notation of the painter's life. It
is not so novel as it is just and moderate in its application. The
pathologic theory of genius has been overworked. In literature
nowadays "psychiatrists" rush in where critics fear to tread. Mahomet
was an epilept; so was Napoleon. Flaubert died of epilepsy, said his
friends; nevertheless, René Dumesnil has proved that his sudden
decease was caused not by apoplexy but by hystero-neurasthenia. Eye
strain played hob with the happiness of Carlyle, and an apostle of
sweetness and light declared that Ibsen was a "degenerate"--Ibsen, who
led the humdrum exterior life of a healthy _bourgeois_. Lombroso has
demonstrated--to his own satisfaction--that Dante's mystic
illumination was due to some brand of mental disorder. In fact, this
self-styled psychologist mapped anew the topography of the human
spirit. Few have escaped his fine-tooth-comb criticism except
mediocrity. Painters, poets, patriots, musicians, scientists,
philosophers, novelists, statesmen, dramatists, all who ever
participated in the Seven Arts, were damned as lunatics, decadents,
criminals, and fools. It was a convenient inferno in which to dump the
men who succeeded in the field wherein you were a failure. The height
of the paradox was achieved when a silly nomenclature was devised to
meet every vacillation of the human temperament. If you feared to
cross the street you suffered from agoraphobia; if you didn't fear to
cross the street, that too was a very bad sign. If you painted like
Monet, paralysis of the optical centre had set in--but why continue?
It is a pity that this theory of genius has been so thoroughly
discredited, for it is a field which promises many harvestings; there
is mad genius as there are stupid folk. Besides, normality doesn't
mean the commonplace. A normal man is a superior man. The degenerate
man is the fellow of low instincts, rickety health, and a drunkard,
criminal, or idiot. The comical part of the craze--which was
short-lived, yet finds adherents among the half-baked in culture and
the ignorant--is that it deliberately twisted the truth, making men of
fine brain and high-strung temperament seem crazy or depraved, when
the reverse is usually the case. Since the advent of Lombroso
"brainstorms" are the possession of the privileged. Naturally your
grocer, tailor, or politician may display many of the above symptoms,
but no one studies them. They are not "geniuses."
All this to assure you that when Camille Mauclair assumes that the
malady from which Antoine Watteau died was also a determining factor
in his art, the French critic is not aping some modern men of science
who denounce the writings of Dostoïevsky because he suffered from
epileptic fits. But there is a happy mean in this effort to correlate
mind and body. If we are what we think or what we eat--and it is not
necessary to subscribe to such a belief--then the sickness of the body
is reflected in the soul, or vice versa. Byron was a healthy man
naturally, when he didn't dissipate, and Byron's poems are full of
magnificent energy, though seldom in the key of optimism. The revolt,
the passion, the scorn, were they all the result of his health? Or of
his liver? Or of his soul? Goethe, the imperial the myriad-minded
Goethe, the apostle of culture, the model European man of the
nineteenth century--what of him? Serenity he is said to have attained,
yet from the summit of eighty years he confessed to four weeks of
happiness in a long lifetime. Nor was he with all his superb manhood
free from neurotic disorders, neurotic and erotic. Shelley? Ah! he is
a pronounced case for the specialists. Any man who could eat dry
bread, drink water, and write such angelic poetry must have been quite
mad. Admitted. Would there were more Shelleys. Browning is a fair
specimen of genius and normality; as his wife illustrated an unstable
nervous temperament allied to genius. George Borrow was a rover, a
difficult man to keep as a friend, happy only when thinking of the
gipsies and quarrelling when with them. Would Baudelaire's magic verse
and prose sound its faint, acrid, sinister music if the French poet
had led a sensible life? Cruel question of the dilettante for whom the
world, all its splendor, all its art, is but a spectacle. It is
needless to continue, the list is too large; too large and too
contradictory. The Variations of Genius would be as profound and as
vast a book as Lord Acton's projected History of Human Thought. The
truth is that genius is the sacrificial goat of humanity; through some
inexplicable transposition genius bears the burdens of mankind;
afflicted by the burden of the flesh intensified many times, burdened
with the affliction of the spirit, raised to a pitch abnormal, the
unhappy man of genius is stoned because he staggers beneath the load
of his sensitive temperament or wavers from the straight and narrow
path usually blocked by bores too thick-headed and too obese to
realise the flower-fringed abysses on either side of the road. And
having sent genius in general among the goats, let us turn to
consumptive genius in particular.
Watteau was a consumptive; he died of the disease. A consumptive
genius! It is a hard saying. People of average health whose pulse-beat
is normal in _tempo_ luckily never realise the febrile velocity with
which flows the blood in the veins of a sick man of genius. But there
is a paradox in the case of Watteau, as there was in the case of
Chopin, of Keats, of Robert Louis Stevenson. The painter of
Valenciennes gave little sign of his malady on his joyous lyrical
canvases. Keats sang of faëry landscapes and Chopin's was a virile
spirit; the most cheerful writer under the sun was Stevenson, who even
in his Pulvis et Umbra conjured up images of hope after a most
pitiless arraignment of the universe and man. And here is the paradox.
This quartet of genius suffered from and were slain by consumption.
(Stevenson died directly of brain congestion; he was, however, a
victim to lung trouble.) That the poets turn their sorrow into song is
an axiom. Yet these men met death, or what is worse, met life, with
defiance or impassible fronts. And the world which loves the lilting
rhythms of Chopin's mazourkas seldom cares to peep behind the screen
of notes for the anguish ambushed there. Watteau has painted the
gayest scenes of pastoral elegance in a land out of time, a No-Man's
Land of blue skies, beautiful women, gallant men, and lovely
landscapes, while his life was haunted by thoughts of death.