evocations of a country west of the sun and east of the moon, these
graceful creatures of Watteau, the rich brocade of Chopin's harmonies,
the exquisite pictures of Keats, the youthful joy in far-away
countries of Stevenson, all, all are so many stigmata of their
terrible affliction. They sought by the magic of their art to create a
realm of enchantment, a realm wherein their ailing bodies and wounded
spirits might find peace and solace. This is the secret of Watteau,
says Mauclair, which was not yielded up in the eighteenth century, not
even to his followers, Pater, Lancret, Boucher, Fragonard, whose pagan
gaiety and artificial spirit is far removed from the veiled melancholy
of Watteau. As we see Chopin, a slender man, morbid, sickly, strike
the martial chord in an unparalleled manner, Chopin the timid, the
composer of the Heroic Polonaise, so Watteau, morbid, sickly, timid,
slender, composes that masterpiece of delicate and decorative
joyousness, The Embarkment for Cythera, which hangs in the Louvre (a
gorgeous sketch, the final version, is at Potsdam in the collection of
the German Emperor). In these works we find the aura of consumption.
None of Watteau's contemporaries fathomed the meaning of his art: not
Count de Caylus, not his successors, who all recognised the masterly
draughtsman, the marvellous colourist, the composer of pastoral
ballets, of matchless _fêtes galantes_, of conversations, of
miniatures depicting camp life, and fanciful decorations in the true
style of his times. But the melancholy poet that was in the man, his
lyric pessimism, and his unassuaged thirst for the infinite--these
things they did not see. Caylus, who has left the only data of value,
speaks of Watteau's hatred of life, his aversion at times from the
human face, his restlessness that caused him to seek new
abodes--Chopin was always dissatisfied with his lodgings and always
changing them. The painter made friends in plenty, only to break with
them because of some fancied slight. Chopin was of umbrageous nature,
Liszt tells us. Watteau never married, and never, as far as is known,
had a love affair. He is an inspired painter of women. (Perhaps,
because of his celibacy.) He loved to depict them in delicious poses,
under waving trees in romantic parks or in the nude. A gallant artist,
he was not a gallant man. He had the genius of friendship but not the
talent for insuring its continuity. Like Arthur Rimbaud, he suffered
from the nostalgia of the open road. He disappeared frequently. His
whereabouts was a mystery to his friends. He did not care for money or
for honours. He was elected without volition on his part as a member
of the Academy. Yet he did not use this powerful lever to further his
welfare. Silent, a man of continent speech, he never convinced his
friends that his art was chaste; yet he never painted an indelicate
stroke. His personages, all disillusionised, vaguely suffer, make love
without desire--disillusioned souls all. L'Indifférent, that young man
in the Louvre who treads the earth with such light disdain, with such
an airy expression of sweetness and _ennui_, that picture, Mauclair
remarks, is the soul of Watteau. And, perhaps, spills his secret.
Mauclair does not like the coupling of Watteau's name with those of
Boucher, Pater, Lancret, De Troy, Coypel, or Vanloo. They imitated him
as to externals; the spirit of him they could not ensnare. If Watteau
stemmed artistically from Rubens, from Ruysdael, from Titian (or
Tiepolo, as Kenyon Cox acutely hints) he is the father of a great
school, the true French school, though his stock is Flemish. Turner
knew him; so did Bonington. Delacroix understood him. So did Chardin,
himself a solitary in his century. Without Watteau's initiative
Monticelli might not be the Monticelli we know, while Claude Monet,
Manet, Renoir are the genuine flowering of his experiments in the
division of tones and the composition of luminous skies.
Mauclair smiles at Caylus for speaking of Watteau's mannerisms, the
mannerisms that proclaim his originality. Only your academic,
colourless painter lacks personal style and always paints like
somebody he is not. Watteau's art is peculiarly personal. Its
peculiarity--apart from its brilliancy and vivacity--is, as Mauclair
remarks, "the contrast of cheerful colour and morbid expression."
_Morbidezza_ is the precise phrase; _morbidezza_ may be found in
Chopin's art, in the very feverish moments when he seems brimming over
with high spirits. Watteau was not a consumptive of the Pole's type.
He did not alternate between ecstasy and languor. He was cold,
self-contained, suspicious, and inveterately hid the state of his
health. He might have been cured, but he never reached Italy, and that
far-off dream and his longing to realise it may have been the basis of
his last manner--those excursions into a gorgeous dreamland. He
yearned for an impossible region. His visions on canvas are the
shadowy sketches of this secret desire that burned him up. It may have
been consumption--and Mauclair makes out a strong case--and it may
have been the expression of a rare poetic temperament. Watteau was a
poet of excessive sensibility as well as the contriver of dainty
masques and ballets.
In literature one man at least has understood him, Walter Pater.
Readers of his Imaginary Portraits need not be reminded of A Prince of
Court Painters, that imaginative reconstruction of an almost obscure
personality. "His words as he spoke of them [the paintings of Rubens]
seemed full of a kind of rich sunset with some moving glory within
it." This was the Watteau who is summed by Pater (a distant kinsman,
perhaps, of the Pater Watteau tutored) as a man who had been "a sick
man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world,
that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all." Camille
Mauclair eloquently ends his study with the confession that the mere
utterance of Watteau's name "suffices to evoke in men's minds a memory
of the melancholy that was his, arrayed in garments of azure and rose.
Ah! crepuscular Psyche, whose smile is akin to tears!"
XIII. GAUGUIN AND TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
I - GAUGUIN
The key-note to the character of Paul Gauguin, painter and sculptor,
may be found in his declaration that in art there are only
revolutionists or plagiarists. A brave speech. And a proud man who
uttered it; for unless he wished to avoid its implications he must
needs prove his sincerity. In the short, adventurous, crowded life
vouchsafed him, Paul Gauguin proved himself indeed a revolutionary
painter. His maxim was the result of hard-won experiences. He was born
at Paris June 7, 1848--a stormy year for France; he died at Dominique
May 9, 1904. His father was a native of Brittany, while on his
mother's side he was Peruvian. This mixed blood may account for his
wandering proclivities and his love for exotic colouring and manners.
To further accentuate the rebellious instincts of the youth his
maternal grandmother was that Flora Tristan, friend of the anarchistic
thinker Proudhon. She was a socialist later and a prime mover in the
Workman's Union; she allied herself with Père Enfantin and helped him
to found his religion, "Mapa," of which he was the god, Ma, and she
the goddess, Pa. Enfantin's career and end may be recalled by students
of St. Simon and the socialistic movements of those times. Paul's
father, Clovis Gauguin, wrote in 1848 the political chronicle on the
_National_, but previous to the _coup d'etat_ he left for Lima, there
to found a journal. He died of an aneurism in the Straits of Magellan,
a malady that was to carry off his son. After four years in Lima the
younger Gauguin returned to France. In 1856 a Peruvian grand-uncle
died at the extraordinary age of one hundred and thirteen. His name
was Don Pio de Tristan, and he was reported very rich. But Paul got
none of this wealth, and at fourteen he was a cabin-boy, feeble of
health but extremely curious about life. He saw much of life and
strange lands in the years that followed, and he developed into a
powerfully built young sailor and no doubt stored his brain with
sumptuous images of tropical scenery which reappeared in his canvases.
He traversed the globe several times. He married and took a position
in a bank. On Sundays he painted. His hand had itched for years to
reproduce the landscapes he had seen. He made friends with Degas,
Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, Guillaumin, and Manet. He called
himself an amateur and a "Sunday painter," but as he was received on
terms of equality with these famous artists it may be presumed that,
autodidact as he was, his versatile talent--for it literally was
versatile--did not escape their scrutiny. He submitted himself to
various influences; he imitated the Impressionists, became a
Neo-Impressionist of the most extravagant sort; went sketching with
Cézanne and Van Gogh, that unfortunate Dutchman, and finally announced
to his friends and family that "henceforward I shall paint every day."
He gave up his bank, and Charles Morice has said that his life became
one of misery, solitude, and herculean labours.
He painted in Brittany, Provence, at Martinique, in the Marquesas and
Tahiti. He had parted with the Impressionists and sought for a new
_æsthetik_ of art; to achieve this he broke away not only from
tradition, even the tradition of the Impressionists, but from Europe
and its civilisation. To this half-savage temperament devoured by the
nostalgia of the tropics the pictures of his contemporaries bore the
fatal stamp of the obvious, of the thrice done and used up. France,
Holland, Spain, Italy--what corner was there left in these countries
that had not been painted thousands of times and by great masters! The
South Seas, Japan, China--anywhere away from the conventional studio
landscape, studio models, poses, grimaces! At Pont-Aven in 1888,
between trips made to Martinique and Provence, Gauguin had attained
mastery of himself; Cézanne had taught him simplicity; Degas, his
avowed admirer, had shown him the potency of the line; Renoir's warm
colouring had spurred him to a still richer palette; and Manet had
given him sound advice. A copy of the Olympe, by Gauguin, finished
about this time, is said to be a masterpiece. But with Degas he was
closer than the others. A natural-born writer, his criticisms of the
modern French school are pregnant with wit and just observation. What
was nicknamed the School of Pont-Aven was the outcome of Gauguin's
imperious personality. A decorative impulse, a largeness of style, and
a belief that everything in daily life should be beautiful and
characteristic sent the painters to modelling, to ceramics and
decoration. Armand Seguin, Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Filiger,
Serusier, Bonnard, Vuillard, Chamaillard, Verkade, O'Conor, Durio,
Maufra, Ranson, Mayol, Roy, and others are to-day happy to call
themselves associates of Paul Gauguin in this little movement in which
the idolatry of the line and the harmonies of the arabesque were
pursued with joyous fanaticism.
Gauguin in an eloquent letter tells of his intercourse with Vincent
Van Gogh, who went mad and killed himself, not, however, before
attempting the life of his master. Mauclair has said of Van Gogh that
he "left to the world some violent and strange works, in which
Impressionism appears to have reached the limit of its audacity. Their
value lies in their naïve frankness and in the undauntable
determination which tried to fix without trickery the sincerest
feelings. Amid many faulty and clumsy works Van Gogh has also left
some really beautiful canvases." Before Gauguin went to Tahiti his
Breton peasants were almost as monstrous as his later Polynesian
types. His representations of trees also seem monstrous. His endeavour
was to get beyond the other side of good and evil in art and create a
new synthesis, and thus it came to pass that the ugly and the formless
reign oft in his work--the ugly and formless according to the old
order of envisaging the world.
In 1891 and 1892, at Tahiti, Gauguin painted many
pictures--masterpieces his friends and disciples call them--which were
later shown at an exhibition held in the Durand-Ruel Galleries. Paris
shuddered or went into ecstasy over these blazing transcriptions of
the tropics; over these massive men and women, nude savages who stared
with such sinister magnetism from the frames. The violent
deformations, the intensity of vision, the explosive hues--a novel
gamut of rich tones--and the strangeness of the subject-matter caused
a nine days' gossip; yet the exhibition was not a great success.
Gauguin was too new, too startling, too original for his generation;
he is yet for the majority, though he may be the Paint God of the
twentieth century. Cut to the heart by his failure to make a dazzling
reputation, also make a little money--for he was always a poor man--he
left Paris forever in 1895. He was sick and his life among the
Marquisians did not improve his health. He took the part of the
natives against the whites and was denounced as a moral castaway. In
1904 he wrote Charles Morice: "I am a savage." But a savage of talent.
In reality he was a cultivated man, an attractive man, and a billiard
player and a fencer. Paint was his passion. If you live by the pen you
may perish by the pen. The same is too often the case with the palette
and brush hero.
Though Paul Gauguin failed in his search for a synthesis of the ugly
and the beautiful, he was nevertheless a bold initiator, one who
shipwrecked himself in his efforts to fully express his art. With all
his realism he was a symbolist, a master of decoration. A not too
sympathetic commentator has written of him: "Paul Gauguin's robust
talent found its first motives in Breton landscapes, in which the
method of colour spots may be found employed with delicacy and placed
at the service of a rather heavy but very interesting harmony. Then
the artist spent a long time in Tahiti, whence he returned with a
completely transformed manner. He brought back from those regions some
landscapes treated in intentionally clumsy and almost wild fashion.
The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad, flat
tints on canvas that has the texture of tapestry. Many of these works
are made repulsive by their aspect of multicoloured, crude, and
barbarous imagery. Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental
qualities, the lovely values, the ornamental taste, and the impression
of primitive animalism. On the whole, Paul Gauguin has a beautiful,
artistic temperament which, in its aversion to virtuosity, has perhaps
not sufficiently understood that the fear of formulas, if exaggerated,
may lead to other formulas, to a false ignorance which is as dangerous
as false knowledge."
All of which is true; yet Paul Gauguin was a painter who had something
new to say, and he said it in a very personal fashion.
II - TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
I once attended at Paris an exhibition devoted to the work of the late
Count Toulouse-Lautrec. There the perverse genius of an unhappy man
who owes allegiance to no one but Degas and the Japanese was seen at
its best. His astonishing qualities of invention, draughtsmanship, and
a diabolic ingenuity in sounding the sinister music of decayed souls
have never been before assembled under one roof. Power there is and a
saturnine hatred of his wretched sitters. Toulouse-Lautrec had not the
impersonal vision of Zola nor the repressed and disenchanting irony of
Degas. He loathed the crew of repulsive night birds that he pencilled
and painted in old Montmartre before the foreign invasion destroyed
its native and spontaneous wickedness. Now a resort for easily
bamboozled English and Americans, the earlier Montmartre was a rich
mine for painter-explorers. Raffaelli went there and so did Renoir;
but the former was impartially impressionistic; the latter, ever
ravished by a stray shaft of sunshine flecking the faces of the
dancers, set it all down in charming tints. Not so Toulouse-Lautrec.
Combined with a chronic pessimism, he exhibited a divination of
character that, if he had lived and worked hard, might have placed him
not far below Degas. He is savant. He has a line that proclaims the
master. And unlike Aubrey Beardsley, his affinity to the Japanese
never seduced him into the exercise of the decorative abnormal which
sometimes distinguished the efforts of the Englishman. We see the
Moulin Rouge with its hosts of deadly parasites, La Goulue and her
vile retainers. The brutality here is one of contempt, as a blow
struck full in the face. Vice has never before been so harshly
arraigned. This art makes of Hogarth a pleasing preacher, so drastic
is it, so deliberately searching in its insults. And never the
faintest exaggeration or burlesque. These brigands and cut-throats,
pimps and pickpurses are set before us without bravado, without the
genteel glaze of the timid painter, without an attempt to call a
prostitute a _cocotte_. Indeed, persons are called by their true names
in these hasty sketches of Lautrec's, and so clearly sounded are the
names that sometimes you are compelled to close your ears and eyes.
His models, with their cavernous glance, their emaciated figures, and
vicious expression, are a commentary on atelier life in those days and
regions. Toulouse-Lautrec is like a page from Ecclesiastes.
XIV. LITERATURE AND ART
I - CONCERNING CRITICS
The annual rotation of the earth brings to us at least once during its
period the threadbare, thriceworn, stale, flat, and academic
discussion of critic and artist. We believe comparisons of creator and
critic are unprofitable, being for the most part a confounding of
intellectual substances. The painter paints, the composer makes music,
the sculptor models, and the poet sings. Like the industrious crow the
critic hops after these sowers of beauty, content to peck up in the
furrows the chance grains dropped by genius. This, at least, is the
popular notion. Balzac, and later Disraeli, asked: "After all, what
are the critics? Men who have failed in literature and art." And
Mascagni, notwithstanding the laurels he wore after his first success,
cried aloud in agony that a critic was _compositore mancato_. These be
pleasing quotations for them whose early opus has failed to score. The
trouble is that every one is a critic, your gallery-god as well as the
most stately practitioner of the art severe. Balzac was an excellent
critic when he saluted Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme as a
masterpiece; as was Emerson when he wrote to Walt Whitman. What the
mid-century critics of the United States, what Sainte-Beuve, master
critic of France, did not see, Balzac and Emerson saw and, better
still, spoke out. In his light-hearted fashion Oscar Wilde asserted
that the critic was also a creator--apart from his literary worth--and
we confess that we know of cases where the critic has created the
artist. But that a serious doubt can be entertained as to the relative
value of creator and critic is hardly worth denying.
Consider the painters. Time and time again you read or hear the
indignant denunciation of some artist whose canvas has been ripped-up
in print. If the offender happens to be a man who doesn't paint, then
he is called an ignoramus; if he paints or etches, or even sketches in
crayon, he is well within the Balzac definition--poor, miserable
imbecile, he is only jealous of work that he could never have
achieved. As for literary critics, it may be set down once and for all
that they are "suspect." They write; ergo, they must be unjust. The
dilemma has branching horns. Is there no midway spot, no safety ground
for that weary Ishmael the professional critic to escape being gored?
Naturally any expression of personal feeling on his part is set down
to mental arrogance. He is permitted like the wind to move over the
face of the waters, but he must remain unseen. We have always thought
that the enthusiastic Dublin man in the theatre gallery was after a
critic when he cried aloud at the sight of a toppling companion:
"Don't waste him. Kill a fiddler with him!" It seems more in
consonance with the Celtic character; besides, the Irish are
music-lovers.
If one could draw up the list of critical and creative men in art the
scale would not tip evenly. The number of painters who have written of
their art is not large, though what they have said is always pregnant.
Critics outnumber them--though the battle is really a matter of
quality, not quantity. There is Da Vinci. For his complete writings
some of us would sacrifice miles of gawky pale and florid mediæval
paintings. What we have of him is wisdom, and like true wisdom is
prophetic. Then there is that immortal gossip Vasari, a very biassed
critic and not too nice to his contemporaries. He need not indulge in
what is called the woad argument; we sha'n't go back to the early
Britons for our authorities. Let us come to Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose
Discourses are invaluable--and also to be taken well salted; he was
encrusted with fine old English prejudices. One of his magnificent
sayings and one appreciated by the entire artistic tribe was his
ejaculation: "Damn paint!" Raphael Mengs wrote. We wish that Velasquez
had. What William Blake said of great artists threw much light on
William Blake. Ingres uttered things, principally in a rage, about his
contemporaries. Delacroix was a thinker. He literally anticipated
Chevreul's discoveries in the law of simultaneous contrasts of colour.
Furthermore, he wrote profoundly of his art. He appreciated Chopin
before many critics and musicians--which would have been an impossible
thing for Ingres, though he played the violin--and he was kind to the
younger men.
Need we say that Degas is a great wit, though not a writer; a wit and
a critic? Rousseau, the landscapist, made notes, and Corot is often
quoted. If Millet had never written another sentence but "There is no
isolated truth," he would still have been a critic. Constable with his
"A good thing is never done twice"; and Alfred Stevens's definition of
art, "Nature seen through the prism of an emotion," forestalled Zola's
pompous pronouncement in The Experimental Novel. To jump over the
stile to literature, Wordsworth wrote critical prefaces, and Shelley,
too; Poe was a critic; and what of Coleridge, who called painting "a
middle quality between a thought and a thing--the union of that which
is nature with that which is exclusively human"? There are plenty of
examples on the side of the angels. Whistler! What a critic, wielding
a finely chased rapier! Thomas Couture wrote and discoursed much of
his art. Sick man as he was, I heard him talk of art at his country
home, Villiers-le-Bel, on the Northern Railway, near Paris. This was
in 1878. William M. Hunt's talks on art were fruitful. So are John
Lafarge's. The discreet Gigoux of Balzac notoriety has an entertaining
book to his credit; while Rodin is often coaxed into utterances about
his and other men's work. There are many French, English, and American
artists who write and paint with equal facility. In New York, Kenyon
Cox is an instance. But the chiefest among all the painters alive and
dead, one who shines and will continue to shine when his canvases are
faded--and they are fading--is Eugène Fromentin, whose Maîtres
d'autrefois is a classic of criticism. Since his day two critics, who
are also painters, have essayed both crafts, George Clausen and D.S.
MacColl.
Professor Clausen is a temperate critic, MacColl a brilliant,
revolutionary one. The critical temper in either man is not dogmatic.
Seurat, the French Neo-Impressionist, has defended his theories;
indeed, the number of talented Frenchmen who paint well and write with
style as well as substance is amazing. Rossetti would no longer be a
rare bird in these days of piping painters, musicians who are poets,
and sculptors who are painters. The unfortunate critic occasionally
writes a play or an opera (particularly in Paris), but as a rule he is
content to echo that old German who desperately exclaimed: "Even if I
am nothing else, I am at least a contemporary."