I
M. André Lhote is not only a first-rate painter, he is a capable writer
as well; so when, some weeks ago, he began to tell us what was wrong
with modern art, and how to put it right, naturally we pricked up our
ears. We were not disappointed. M. Lhote had several good things to
say, and he said them clearly; the thing, however, which he said most
emphatically of all was that he, André Lhote, besides being a painter
and a writer, is a Frenchman. He has a natural taste for order and a
superstitious belief in authority. That is why he recommends to
the reverent study of the young of all nations, David--David the
Schoolmaster! _Merci_, we have our own Professor Tonks.
Not that I would compare David, who was a first-rate practitioner and
something of an artist, with the great Agrippa of the Slade. But from
David even we have little or nothing to learn. For one thing, art cannot
be taught; for another, if it could be, a dry doctrinaire is not the man
to teach it. Very justly M. Lhote compares the Bouchers and Fragonards
of the eighteenth century with the Impressionists: alike they were
charming, a little drunk and disorderly. But when he asserts that it was
David who rescued painting from their agreeable frivolity he must be
prepared for contradiction: some people will have it that it was rather
the pupil Ingres. David, they will say, was little better than a politic
pedagogue, who, observing that with the Revolution classical virtues and
classical costumes had come into fashion, that Brutus, the tyrannicide,
and Aristides, called "the just," were the heroes of the hour, suited
his manners to his company and gave the public an art worthy of highly
self-conscious liberals. The timely discoveries made at Herculaneum and
Pompeii, they will argue, stood him in good stead. From these he learnt
just how citizens and citizen-soldiers should be drawn; and he drew
them: with the result that the next generation of Frenchmen were
sighing:
Qui nous délivrera des Grecs et des Romains?
Whoever may have rescued European painting from the charming disorder of
the age of reason, there can be no question as to who saved it from the
riot of impressionism. That was the doing of the Post-Impressionists
headed by Cézanne. Forms and colours must be so organized as to compose
coherent and self-supporting wholes; that is the central conviction
which has inspired the art of the last twenty years. Order: that has
been the watchword; but order imposed from within. And order so imposed,
order imposed by the artist's inmost sense of what a work of art should
be, is something altogether different from the order obtained by
submission to a theory of painting. One springs from a personal
conviction; the other is enjoined by authority. Modern artists tend to
feel strongly the necessity for the former, and, if they be Frenchmen,
to believe intellectually in the propriety of the latter.
Look at a picture by Cézanne or by Picasso. What could be more orderly?
Cubism is nothing but the extreme manifestation of this passion for
order, for the complete organization of forms and colours. The artist
has subordinated his predilections and prejudices, his peculiar way of
seeing and feeling, his whims, his fancies and his eccentricities, to
a dominant sense of design. Yet the picture is personal. In the first
place a picture must be an organic whole, but that whole may be made up
of anything that happens to possess the artist's mind. Now, look at a
picture by Baudry or Poynter and you will see the last word in painting
by precept. The virtuous apprentice has stuck to the rules. He has done
all that his teacher bade him do. And he has done nothing else. David
ought to be pleased. Pray, M. Lhote, give him top marks.
Post-Impressionism, which reaffirmed the artist's latent sense of order
and reawoke a passion to create objects complete in themselves, left the
painter in full possession of his individuality. Now individualism is
the breath of every artist's life, and a thing of which no Frenchman,
in his heart, can quite approve. So, if an artist happens also to be a
Frenchman--and the combination is admirably common--what is he to do?
Why, look one way and row the other; which is what M. Lhote does. He
paints delightfully personal and impenitent pictures, and preaches
artistic Cæsarism and David, "the saviour of society." All the week he
is a French artist, traditional as all real artists must be, but
never denying, when it comes to practice, that tradition is merely an
indispensable means to self-expression; and on Sundays, I dare say, he
goes, like Cézanne, to lean on M. le Curé, who leans on Rome, while his
_concierge_ receives the pure gospel of Syndicalism, which, also, is
based on absolute truths, immutable, and above criticism.
It is notorious that you may with impunity call a placable Frenchman
"butor," "scélérat," "coquin fieffé," "sale chameau," "député" even, or
"sénateur"; but two things you may not do: you may not call him "espèce
d'individu," and you may not say "vous n'êtes pas logique." It is as
unpardonable to call a Frenchman "illogique" as to shout after the
Venetian who has almost capsized your gondola "mal educato" M. Lhote is
"logique" all right: but "logical" in France has a peculiar meaning. It
means that you accept the consequences of your generalizations without
bothering about any little discrepancies that may occur between those
consequences and the facts ascertained by experience; it does not mean
that your high _a priori_ generalizations are themselves to be tested by
the nasty, searching instrument of reason. Thus it comes about that the
second master to whom M. Lhote would put this wild and wilful age of
ours to school is that mysterious trinity of painters which goes by the
name of "Le Nain."
I can quite understand M. Lhote's liking for the brothers Le Nain,
because I share it. Their simple, honest vision and frank statement are
peculiarly sympathetic to the generation that swears by Cézanne. Here
are men of good faith who feel things directly, and say not a word more
than they feel. With a little ingenuity and disingenuousness one might
make a _douanier_ of them. They are scrupulous, sincere, and born
painters. But they are not orderly. They are not organizers of form and
colour. No: they are not. On the contrary, these good fellows had the
most elementary notions of composition. They seem hardly to have guessed
that what one sees is but a transitory and incoherent fragment out of
which it is the business of art to draw permanence and unity. They set
down what they saw, and it is a bit of good luck if what they saw turns
out to have somewhat the air of a whole. Yet M. Lhote, preaching his
crusade against disorder, picks out the Le Nain and sets them up as an
example. What is the meaning of this?
M. Lhote himself supplies the answer. It is not order so much as
authority that he is after; and authority is good wherever found and
by whomsoever exercised. "Look," says he, "at Le Nain's peasants. The
painter represents them to us in the most ordinary attitude. It is the
poetry of everyday duties accepted without revolt. Le Nain's personages
are engaged in being independent as little as possible." No Bolshevism
here: and what a lesson for us all! Let painters submit themselves lowly
and reverently to David, and seventeenth-century peasants to their
feudal superiors. Not that I have the least reason for supposing M.
Lhote to be in politics an aristocrat: probably he is a better democrat
than I am. It is the [Greek: _kratos_], the rule, he cares for. Do as
you are told by Louis XIV, or Lenin, or David: only be sure that it
is as you are told. M. Lhote, of course, does nothing of the sort. He
respects the tradition, he takes tips from Watteau or Ingres or Cézanne,
but orders he takes from no man. He is an artist, you see.
In many ways this respect for authority has served French art well.
It is the source of that traditionalism, that tradition of high
seriousness, craftsmanship, and good taste, which, even in the darkest
days of early Victorianism, saved French painting from falling into the
pit of stale vulgarity out of which English has hardly yet crawled.
French revolutions in painting are fruitful, English barren--let the
Pre-Raphaelite movement be my witness. The harvest sown by Turner and
Constable was garnered abroad. Revolutions depart from tradition. Yes,
but they depart as a tree departs from the earth. They grow out of
it; and in England there is no soil. On the other hand, it is French
conventionality--for that is what this taste for discipline comes
to--which holds down French painting, as a whole, below Italian. There
are journeys a Frenchman dare not take because, before he reached their
end, he would be confronted by one of those bogeys before which the
stoutest French heart quails--"C'est inadmissible," "C'est convenu," "La
patrie en danger." One day he may be called upon to break bounds, to
renounce the national tradition, deny the preeminence of his country,
question the sufficiency of Poussin and the perfection of Racine, or
conceive it possible that some person or thing should be more noble,
reverend, and touching than his mother. On that day the Frenchman will
turn back. "C'est inadmissible."
France, the greatest country on earth, is singularly poor in the
greatest characters--great ones she has galore. Her standard of
civilization, of intellectual and spiritual activity, is higher than
that of any other nation; yet an absence of vast, outstanding figures
is one of the most obvious facts in her history. Her literature is to
English what her painting is to Italian. Her genius is enterprising
without being particularly bold or original, and though it has brought
so much to perfection it has discovered comparatively little. Assuredly
France is the intellectual capital of the world, since, compared with
hers, all other post-Renaissance civilizations have an air distinctly
provincial. Yet, face to face with the rest of the world, France is
provincial herself. Here is a puzzle: a solution of which, if it is to
be attempted at all, must be attempted in another chapter.