In The Heart Of The Vosges And Other Sketches Part 8

The father of the so-called French Raphael, writes his biographer, was not even a Giovanni Santi. Joseph Ingres, in the words of M. Mommeja, was _un pet.i.t ornemaniste_, a fabricator of knick-knacks, turning out models in clay, busts in plaster, miniatures and other trifles for sale at country fairs. Who can say, this humble craftsman may yet have had much to do with his son's aspirations?

An inferior artist can appraise his masters. From the humble artificer and purveyor of bagatelles the youth not only imbibed a pa.s.sion for art and technical knowledge: he inherited the next best thing to a calling, in other words, a love of music. From the palette throughout his long life Ingres would turn with never-abated enthusiasm to his adored violin.

The learned monograph above-named gives a succinct and judicial account of the painter's career. The second writer mentioned tells the story of his inner life; one, indeed, of perpetual and universal interest.

For to this st.u.r.dy young bourgeois early came a crisis. He found himself suddenly at the parting of the ways, on the one hand beckoning Conscience, on the other ambition in the flattering shape of Destiny. To which voice would he hearken? Would love and plighted troth overrule that insistent siren song, Vocation? Would he yield, as have done thousands of well-intentioned men and women before him, to self-interest and worldly wisdom? The problem to be solved by this brilliantly endowed artist just twenty-six--how many a historic parallel does it recall!

What three words can convey so much pathos, heroism and generosity as "il gran riffiuto?"--the great renunciation. Does the French language contain a more touching record than that of the great Navarre's farewell to his Huguenot brethren? What bitter tears shed Jeanne d'Albret's son ere he could bring himself to sacrifice conscience on the altar of expediency and a great career!

At the age of twenty we find Dominique Ingres studying in Paris under David, then in his apogee.

The son of an obscure provincial, however promising, would hardly be overwhelmed with hospitalities; all the more welcome came the friendliness of an honourable magistrate and his wife, by name Forestier. During five years the young man had lived on terms of closest intimacy with these good folks, under his eyes growing up their only daughter.

Alas! poor Julie. Mighty, says Goethe, is the G.o.d of propinquity. On Dominique's part attachment seems to have come insensibly, as a matter of course and despite the precariousness of his position. M. Forestier encouraged the young man's advances. To Julie love for the brilliant winner of the Prix de Rome became an absorption, her very life. Not particularly endowed by Nature--we have her portrait in M. Mommeja's volume--she described her own physiognomy as "not at all remarkable, but expressive of candour and goodness of heart." For Julie, as we shall see, turned her love-story into a little novel, only unearthed the other day by M. Lapauze.

The Prix de Rome meant, of course, a call to Rome, the worthy magistrate exacting from his prospective son-in-law a promise that in twelve months' time he would return. During that interval correspondence went on apace not only between the affianced lovers, but between M. Forestier and Ingres, the former taking affectionate and not uncritical interest in the other's projects. For Ingres was before all things a projector, antic.i.p.ating by decades the achievements of his later years. The glow of enthusiasm, the fever of creativeness were at its height. Italy possessed Ingres' entire being when the crisis came.

After delays, excuses, pleadings, Julie's father lost patience. He would brook no further tergiversations. Ingres must choose between Italy and Paris; in other words, so the artist interpreted it, between art and marriage, a proud destiny or self-extinction.

Never had a young artist more completely fallen under the spell of Italy. The recall seemed a death-blow. "On my knees," he wrote to Julie, whom he really loved, "I implore you not to ask this. It is impossible for me to quit immediately a land so full of marvel."

But the practical M. Forestier would not give way. Ingres' persistence looked like folly, even madness in his eyes. The young man was with difficulty living from hand to mouth, portraits and small orders barely keeping the wolf from the door. The return home and marriage would ensure his future materially and socially, and up to a certain point render him independent of malevolent criticism. For already Ingres was fiercely attacked by Parisian authorities on art: he had become important enough to be a target. After cruellest heart-searching and prolonged self-reproach, _il gran riffiuto_ was made, youthful pa.s.sion, worldly advantages--and plighted faith--were cast to the winds.

Henceforth he would live for his palette only, defying poverty, detraction and fiercely antagonistic opinion; if failing in allegiance to others, at least remaining staunch to his first, best, highest self, his genius.

Julie, the third imperishable Julie of French romance, never married.

Let us hope that the writing of her artless little autobiography called a novel brought consolation. Did she ever forgive the recalcitrant? Her story, _Emma, ou la fiancee,_ ends with the aphorism: "Without the scrupulous fulfilment of the given word, there can be neither happiness nor inner peace."

Did that backsliding in early life disturb the great painter's stormy but dazzling career? Who can say? We learn that Ingres was twice, and, according to accredited reports, happily, married. His first wife, a humbly-born maiden from his native province, died in 1849, leaving the septuagenarian so desolate, helpless and stricken that kindly interveners set to work and re-married him. The second Mme. Ingres, although thirty years his junior, gave him, his biographer tells us, "that domestic peace and happiness of which for a brief s.p.a.ce he had been deprived." Heaped with honours, named by Napoleon III. Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, Senator, Member of the Inst.i.tut, Ingres died in 1869. Within a year of ninety, he was Dominique Ingres to the last, undertaking new works with the enthusiasm and vitality of t.i.tian.

A few days before his death he gave a musical party, favourite works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven being performed by skilled amateurs. His funeral was a veritable apotheosis, disciples, admirers and detractors swelling the enormous cortege.

Those who, like myself, have times without number contemplated the master's _opus magnum_ in the Louvre, and have studied his art as represented in the provincial museums, will quit the Musee Ingres with mixed feelings. It must occur to many that, perhaps, after all, _il gran riffiuto_ of opposite kind might have better served art and the artist's fame. Had he returned to France--and to Julie--at the stipulated period, the following eighteen years being spent not on Italian but on native soil, how different the result! Then of his work he could have said, as did Chantecler of his song--

"Mon chant Qui n'est pas de ces chants qu'on chante en cherchant Mais qu'on recoit du sol natal comme une seve."

Would not most of us willingly give Ingres' greatest cla.s.sical and historic canvases for one or two portraits, say that of Bertin, or, better still, for a group like that of the Stamiti family? What a portrait gallery he would have bequeathed, how would he have made the men and women of his time live again before us!

[Footnote: Both are reproduced, with many other works, in M.

Mommeja's volume.]

Ingres, the artist, ever felt sure of himself. Did the lover look back, regretting the broken word, the wrong done to another? We do not know.

His life was throughout upright, austere, free from blot; born and bred a Catholic, he had doubtless Huguenot blood in his veins, many of his most striking characteristics pointed to this inference.

A word more concerning Montauban itself. The stronghold of reform, that defied all Richelieu's attempts to take it, is to this day essentially a Protestant town. Half of its inhabitants have remained faithful to the faith of their ancestors. Tourists will note the abundance of cypress trees marking Huguenot graves, the capital of Tarn and Garonne is a veritable Calvinistic _Campo Santo_. After the Revocation, many families fled hence to England, their descendants to this day loving and reverencing the country which gave them a home.

Montauban, as we should expect, has raised a splendid monument to its one great citizen.

Since writing these lines, an Ingres exhibition has been opened in the Georges Pet.i.t Gallery, Paris. Apropos of this event, the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ (May 15, 1911) contains a striking paper by the art-critic, M.

de Sizeraine. Some of the conclusions here arrived at are startling.

Certain authorities on art are said to regard the great Montalbanais as a victim of daltonism--in other words, colour-blind!

In company of the mere amateur, this authority turns with relief from the master's historical and allegorical pieces to his wonderfully speaking portraits. Here, he says, all is simple, nothing is commonplace, nothing is unexpected, and yet nothing resembles what we have seen elsewhere; we find no embellishment, no stultification. He adds: "In art, as in literature, works which survive are perhaps those in which the artist or writer has put the most of himself, not those in which he has had most faith. The "Voeu de Louis XIII," the "Thetis" of Ingres, we may compare to Voltaire's _Henriade_ and to the _Franciade_ of Ronsard, all belong to the category of the _opus magnum_ that has failed, and of which its creator is proud."

With the following charming simile the essay closes--

"Posterity is a great lady, she pa.s.ses, reviews the _opus magnum, la grande machine_ disdainfully, satirically; all seems lost, the artist condemned. But by chance she catches sight of a neglected picture turned to the wall in a corner or pa.s.sage, some happy inspiration that has cost its author little pains, but in which he has not striven beyond his powers, and in which he has put the best of himself. The _grande dame_ catches it up, holds it to the light. 'Ha! here is something pretty!'

she cries. And the artist's fame is a.s.sured."

Has not Victor Hugo focused the same truth in a line--

"Ici-bas, le joli c'est le necessaire!"

And our own Keats also--

"For 'tis the eternal law, That first in beauty should be first in might."

X

MY PYRENEAN VALLEY AT LAST

Osse, la bien aimee Toi, du vallon Le choix, la fille ainee Le vrai fleuron!

C'est sur toi qu'est fixee Dans son amour, La premiere pensee Du roi du jour Comme a sa fiancee L'amant accourt.

Xavier Navarrot.

Between Toulouse and Tarbes the scenery is quite unlike that of the Gard and the Aude. Instead of the interminable vineyards round about Aigues-Mortes and Carca.s.sonne, we gaze here upon a varied landscape.

Following the Garonne with the refrain of Nadaud's famous song in our minds--

"Si la Garonne avait voulu,"--

we traverse a vast plain or low vale rich in many-coloured crops: buckwheat, sweeps of creamy blossom, dark-green rye, bluish-green Indian corn with silvery flower-head, and purple clover, and here and there a patch of vine are mingled together before us; in the far distance the Pyrenees, as yet mere purple clouds against the horizon.

We soon note a peculiarity of this region--vines trained to trees, a method in vogue a hundred years ago. "Here," wrote Arthur Young, when riding from Toulouse to St. Martory on his way to Luchon, "for the first time I see rows of maples with vines trained in festoons from tree to tree"; and farther on he adds, "medlars, plums, cherries, maples in every hedge with vines trained." The straggling vine-branches have a curious effect, but the brightness of the leaf.a.ge is pleasant to the eye. No matter how it grows, to my thinking the vine is a lovely thing.

The rich plain pa.s.sed, we reach the slopes of the Pyrenees, their wooded sides presenting a strange, even grotesque, appearance, owing to the mathematical regularity with which the woods are cut, portions being close shaven, others left intact in close juxtaposition, solid phalanxes of trees and clearings at right angles. The fancy conjures up a Brobdingnagian wheat-field partially cut in the green stage. Sad havoc is thus made of once beautiful scenes, richly-wooded slopes having lost half their foliage.

A hundred years ago Lourdes was a mere mountain fortress, a State prison to which unhappy persons were consigned by _lettres de cachet_.

Apologists of the Ancien Regime a.s.sert, in the first place, that these Bastilles were comfortable, even luxurious retreats; in the second, that _lettres de cachet_ were useful and necessary; in the third, that neither Bastilles nor _lettres de cachet_ were resorted to on the eve of the Revolution. Let us hear what Arthur Young has to say on the subject. "I take the road to Lourdes," he writes in August 1787, "where is a castle on a rock, garrisoned for the mere purpose of keeping State prisoners, sent hither by _lettres de cachet_. Seven or eight are known to be here at present; thirty have been here at a time; and many for life--torn by the relentless hand of jealous tyranny from the bosom of domestic comfort, from wives, children, friends, and hurried, for crimes unknown to themselves, most probably for virtues, to languish in this detested abode, and die of despair. Oh liberty, liberty!"

Great is the contrast between the lovely entourage of this notorious place and the triviality and vulgar nature of its commerce. The one long, winding street may be described as a vast bazaar, more suited to Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims than to holders of railway tickets and contemporaries of the Eiffel Tower.

A brisk trade is done here, the place wearing the aspect of a huge fair.

Rosaries, crosses, votive tablets, ornamental cans for holding the miraculous waters, drinking-cups, candles, photographs, images, medals are sold by millions. The traffic in these wares goes on all day long, the poorest "pilgrim" taking away souvenirs.

The Lourdes of theology begins where the Lourdes of bartering ends. As we quit the long street of bazaars and brand-new hotels, the first glimpse gives us an insight into its life and meaning, makes us feel that we ought to have been living two or three hundred years ago. We glance back at the railway station, wondering whether a halt were wise, whether indeed the gibbet, wheel, and stake were not really prepared for heretics like ourselves!

The votive church built on the outer side of the rock from which flows the miraculous fountain is a basilica of sumptuous proportions, representing an outlay of many millions of francs. Its portico, with horse-shoe staircase in marble, spans the opening of the green hills, behind which lie grotto and spring. We are reminded of the enormous church now crowning the height of Montmartre at Paris; here, as there and at Chartres, is a complete underground church of vast proportions.

The whole structure is very handsome, the grey and white building-stone standing out against verdant hills and dark rocks. A beautifully laid-out little garden with a statue of the miracle-working Virgin lies between church and town.