Ivory Apes and Peacocks Part 11

8th: That in the manner of rendering nature, the essential is sincerity and purity (more copy-book maxims for us!).

9th: That movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies (a truism in art well known to Watteau, Rembrandt, Turner, and latterly, to Claude Monet and the earlier group of Impressionists). And now for the milk in the cocoanut.

We fight, concludes the manifesto: 1st: Against the bituminous tints by which it is attempted to obtain the patina of tone upon modern pictures. (The chief objection against this statement is its absolute superfluousness. The Impressionists forty years ago attacked bituminous painting and finally drove it out; now it is coming back as a novelty. The Futurists are gazing backward.) 2d: Against the superficial and elementary archaism founded upon flat tints, which, by imitating the linear technique of the Egyptians, reduces painting to a powerless synthesis both childish and grotesque. 3d: Against the false claims of belonging to the future put forward by the Secessionists and the Independents, who have installed new academies no less trite and attached to routine than the preceding ones. 4th: We demand for ten years the total suppression of the nude in painting.

There are thirty-four pictures in the show, the catalogue of which is a curiosity. Boccioni's The Street Enters the Home has a note in the catalogue which points out that the painter does not limit himself to what he sees in the square frame of the window as would a simple photographer, but he also reproduces what he would see by looking out on every side from the balcony. Isn't this lucid? But you ought to see the jumble in the canvas caused by the painter casting aside the chief prerogative of an artist, the faculty of selection, or, rather, as Walter Pater puts it, the "tact of omission."

There is the motion of moonlight in one canvas and in No. 24, by Russolo, ent.i.tled Rebellion, there is an effort to delineate--better say express, as the art of delineation is here in abeyance--the collision of two forces, that of the revolutionary element made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism against the force of inertia and reactionary resistance of tradition. The angles are the vibratory waves of the former force in motion. The perspective of the houses is destroyed just as a boxer is bent double by receiving a blow in the wind (refined image!). As this picture is purely symbolical, it is not open to objections; but isn't it rather amusing?

Memory of a Night, by Russolo (No. 23), is "a fantastic impression produced not by line but by colour." An elongated insect or snail--is it a man or a gra.s.shopper?--is in the first plane; back of him is a girl's face with pleading eyes; an explosion of light in the background is evidently intended for an electric lamp; the rest is chaos.

The Milliner (No. 32) by Severini, the painter calls: "An arabesque of the movement produced by the twinkling colours and iridescence of the frills and furbelows on show; the electric light divides the scene into defined zones. A study of simultaneous penetration." The deathly grin of the modiste is about the only "simultaneous penetration" that I could see in the canvas.

As confused as is No. 27, The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico, by Severini, there are some vital bits, excellent modelling, striking detail, though as a whole, it is hard to unravel; the point d'appui is missing; the interest is nowhere focussed, though the dancer woman soon catches the eye. No doubt a crowded supper room in a Continental cafe, the white napery, variegated colours of the women's attire, the movement and blinding glare of the lights are a chaotic blur when you first open your eyes upon them; but the human eye with its almost infinite capacity for adaptation soon resolves disorder into order, formlessness into form. The trouble with the Futurist is that he catches the full force of the primal impression, then later loads it with his own subjective fancies. The outcome is bound to be a riddle.

I confess without hesitation there are several pictures in the exhibition which impressed me. Power is power, no matter the strange airs it may at times a.s.sume. Browning's Sordello, despite its numerous obscure pa.s.sages, is withal a work of high purpose, it always stirs the imagination. I found myself staring at Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli and wondering after all whether a conflict shouldn't be represented in a conflicting manner. Zola reproached both De Goncourt and Flaubert for their verbal artistry. "Vulgar happenings,"

he said, "should be presented in the bluntest fashion." And then he contradicted himself in practice by attempting to write like Hugo and Flaubert. Signor Carra, who probably witnessed the street row at the funeral of Galli between the students and the police, sets before us in all its vivacity or rhythm--or rhythms--the fight. It is a real fight. And while I quite agree with Edgar Degas, who said he could make a crowd out of four or five figures in a picture, it is no reflection on Carra's power to do the same with a dozen or more. A picture as full of movement and the clash of combatants as is the battle section of the Richard Strauss Symphony, A Hero's Life. Realism is the dominating factor in both works. The cane and club swinging sympathisers of the anarchist are certainly vital.

In what then consists the originality of the Futurists? Possibly their blatant claim to originality. The Primitives, Italian and Flemish, saw the universe with amazing clearness; their pictorial metaphysics was clarity itself; their mysticism was never muddy; all nature was settled, serene, and brilliantly silhouetted. But mark you! they, too, enjoyed depicting a half-dozen happenings on the same canvas. Fresh from a tour through the galleries of Holland, Belgium, and France, after a special study of the Primitives, I quite understand what the Futurists are after. They emulate the innocence of the eye characteristic of the early painters, but despite their strong will they cannot recover the blitheness and sweetness, the native wood-note wild, nor recapture their many careless moods. They weave the pattern closer, seeking to express in paint a psychology that is only possible in literature. And they endeavour to imitate music with its haunting suggestiveness, its thematic vagueness, its rhythmic swiftness and splendour of tonalities. In vain. No picture can spell many moods simultaneously, nor paint soul-states successively within one frame.

These painters have mistaken their vocation. They should have been musicians or writers, or handle the more satisfactory, if less subtle, cinematograph.

Will there ever be a new way of seeing as well as representing life, animate and inanimate? Who shall say? The Impressionists, working on hints from Watteau, Rembrandt, Turner, gave us a fresh view of the universe. Rhythm in art is no new thing. In the figures of El Greco as in the prancing horses of Gericault, rhythm informs every inch of the canvas. The Futurists are seeking a new synthesis, and their work is far from synthetic; it is decomposition--in the painter's sense of the word--carried to the point of distraction. Doubtless each man has a definite idea when he takes up his brush, but all the king's horses and all the king's men can't make out that idea when blazoned on the canvas. The Futurists may be for the future, but not for to-day's limited range of vision.

XV

IN THE WORKSHOP OF ZOLA

Taine once wrote: "When we know how an artist invents we can foresee his inventions." As to Zola, there is little need now for critical judgments on his work. He is definitely "placed"; we know him for what he is--a romancer of a violent idealistic type masquerading as an implacable realist; a lyric pessimist at the beginning of his literary career, a sonorous optimist at the close, with vague socialistic views as to the perfectibility of the human race. But he traversed distances before he finally found himself a field in which stirred and struggled all human animality. And he was more Zola when he wrote Therese Raquin than in his later trilogies and evangels. As an artist it is doubtful if he grew after 1880; repet.i.tion was his method of methods, or, as he once remarked to Edmond de Goncourt: "Firstly, I fix my nail, and then with a blow of the hammer I send it a centimetre deep into the brain of the public; then I knock it in as far again--and the hammer of which I make use is journalism." And a tremendous journalist to the end was Zola, despite his books and naturalistic theories.

Again, and from the diary of the same sublimated old gossip, Goncourt, Zola speaks: "After the rarefied a.n.a.lysis of a certain kind of sentiment, such as the work done by Flaubert in Madame Bovary; after the a.n.a.lysis of things, plastic and artistic, such as you have given us in your dainty, gemlike writing, there is no longer any room for the younger generation of writers; there is nothing left for them to do, ... there no longer remains a single type to portray. The only way of appealing to the public is by strong writing, powerful creations, and by the number of volumes given to the world." Theory-ridden Zola's polemical writings, like those of Richard Wagner's, must be set down to special pleading.

Certainly Zola gave the world a number of volumes, and, if the writing was not always "strong"--his style is usually mediocre--the subjects were often too strong for polite nostrils. As Henri Ma.s.sis, the author of an interesting book, How Zola Composed His Novels, says, "he founded his work on a theory which is the most singular of mistakes."

The "experimental" novel is now a thing as extinct as the dodo, yet what doughty battles were fought for its shapeless thesis. The truth is that Zola invented more than he observed. He was myopic, not a trained scrutiniser, and Huysmans, once a disciple, later an opponent of the "naturalistic" doc.u.ments, maliciously remarked that Zola went out carriage riding in the country, and then wrote La Terre.

Turgenieff declared that Zola could describe sweat on a human back, but never told us what the human thought. And in a memorable pa.s.sage, Huysmans couches his lance against the kind of realism Zola represented, admitting the service performed by that romancer: "We must, in short, follow the great highway so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a parallel path in the air, another road by which we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, to achieve thus a spiritualistic naturalism."

Mr. Ma.s.sis has had access to the ma.n.u.scripts of Zola deposited by his widow in the National Library, Paris. They number ninety volumes; the dossier alone of Germinal forms four volumes of five hundred pages.

Such industry seems fabulous. But, if it did not pa.s.s Zola through the long-envied portals of the Academy, it has won for his ashes such an honourable resting-place as the Pantheon. There is irony in the pranks of the Zeitgeist. Zola, snubbed at every attempt he made to become an Immortal (unlike his friend Daudet, he openly admitted his candidature, not sharing with the author of Sapho his sovereign contempt for the fauteuils of the Forty); Zola, in an hour becoming the most unpopular writer in France after his memorable J'accuse, a fugitive from his home, the defender of a seemingly hopeless cause; Zola dead, Dreyfus exonerated, and the powdered bones of Zola in the Pantheon, with the great men of his land. Few of his contemporaries who voted against his admission to the Academy will be his neighbours in the eternal sleep. His admission to the dead Immortals must be surely the occasion for much wagging of heads, for reams of plat.i.tudinous writing on the subject of fate and its whirligig caprice.

This stubborn, silent man of violent imagination, copious vocabulary, and a tenacity unparalleled in literature, knew that a page a day--a thousand words daily put on paper every day of the year--and for twenty years, would rear a huge edifice. He stuck to his desk each morning of his life from the time he sketched the Plan general; he made such terms with his publishers that he was enabled to live humbly, yet comfortably, in the beginning with his "dear ones," his wife and his mother. In return he wrote two volumes a year, and, with the exception of a few years, his production was as steady as water flowing from a hydrant. This comparison was once applied to herself by George Sand, Zola's only rival in the matter of quant.i.ty. But Madame Sand was an improviser; with notes she never bothered herself; in her letters to Flaubert she laughed over the human doc.u.ments of Zola, the elaborate note taking of Daudet, for she was blessed with an excellent memory and a huge capacity for scribbling. Not so Zola. Each book was a painful parturition, not the pain of a stylist like Flaubert, but the Sisyphus-like labor of getting his notes, his facts, his characters marshalled and moving to a conclusion. Like Anthony Trollope, when the last page of a book was finished he began another.

He was a workman, not a dilettante of letters.

In 1868 he had blocked out his formidable campaign. Differing with Balzac in not taking French society as a whole for a subject, he nevertheless owes, as do all French fiction writers since 1830--Stendhal alone excepted--his literary existence to Balzac; Balzac, from whom all blessings, all evils, flow in the domain of the novel; Balzac, realist, idealist, symbolist, naturalist, humourist, tragedian, comedian, aristocrat, bourgeois, poet, and cleric; Balzac, truly the Shakespeare of France. The Human Comedy attracted the synthetic brain of Zola as he often tells us (see L'Oeuvre, where Sandoz, the novelist, Zola himself, explains to Claude his scheme of a prose epic). But he was satisfied to take one family under the Second Empire, the Rougon-Macquarts--these names were not at first in the form we now know them. A friend and admirer of Flaubert, he followed, broadly speaking, his method of proceeding and work; though an admirer of the Goncourts, he did not favour their preference for the rare case or the chiselled epithet.

Every-day humanity described in every-day speech was Zola's ideal.

That he more than once achieved this ideal is not to be denied.

L'a.s.sommoir remains his masterpiece, while Germinal and L'Oeuvre will not be soon forgotten. L'Oeuvre is mentioned because its finished style is rather a novelty in Zola's vast vat of writing wherein sc.r.a.ps and fragments of Victor Hugo, of Chateaubriand, of the Goncourts, and of Flaubert boil in terrific confusion. Zola never had the patience, nor the time, nor perhaps the desire to develop an individual style. He built long rows of ugly houses, all looking the same, composed of mud, of stone, brick, sand, straw, and shining pebbles. Like a bird, he picked up his material for his nest where he could find it. His faculty of selection was ill-developed. Everything was tossed pell-mell into his cellar; nothing came amiss and order seldom reigns. His sentences, unlike Tolstoy's, for example, are not closely linked; to read Zola aloud is disconcerting. There is no music in his periods, his rhythms are sluggish, and he entirely fails in evoking with a few poignant phrases, as did the Goncourts, a scene, an incident. Never the illuminating word, never the phrase that spells the transfiguration of the spirit.

Among his contemporaries Tolstoy was the only one who matches him in the acc.u.mulation of details, but for the Russian every detail modulates into another, notwithstanding their enormous number. The story marches, the little facts, insignificant at first, range themselves into definite illuminations of the theme, just as a traveller afoot on a hot, dusty road misses the saliency of the landscape, but realises its perspective when he ascends a hill. There is always perspective in Tolstoy; in Zola it is rare. Yet he ma.s.ses his forces as would some sullen giant, confident in the end of victory through sheer bulk and weight. His power is gloomy, cruel, pitiless; but indubitable power he has.

After the rather dainty writing of his Contes a Ninon, Zola never reached such compression and clarity again until he wrote L'Attaque au Moulin, in Les Soirees de Medan. To be quite frank, he rewrote Flaubert and the Goncourts in many of his books. He was, using the phrase in its real sense, the "grand vulgariser" of those finished, though somewhat remote artists. To the Goncourts fame came slowly; it was by a process of elimination rather than through the voluntary offering of popular esteem. And it is not to be denied that Madame Bovary owed much of its early success to the fact that its author was prosecuted for an outrage against public morals--poor Emma Bovary whose life, as Henry James once confessed, might furnish a moral for a Sunday-school cla.s.s. Thus fashions in books wax and wane. Zola copied and "vulgarised" Charles de Mailly, Manette Salomon, Germinie Lacerteux (Charles Monselet saluted the book with the amiable t.i.tle "sculptured slime"), Madame Gervasais--for his Roman story---Soeur Philomene, all by Goncourt, and he literally founded his method on Madame Bovary and L'Education Sentimentale, particularly upon the latter, the greatest, and one is tempted to say the most genuine realistic novel ever written. Its grey colouring, its daylight atmosphere, its marvellous description of Fontainebleau, of masquerades, of dinners and duels in high and low life, its lifelike characters, were for Zola a treasure-trove. He took Rosanette, the most lifelike cocotte in fiction, and transformed her into Nana, into a symbol of destruction. Zola saw the world through melodramatic eyes.

Mr. Ma.s.sis has noted Zola's method of literary travail, the formation of his style, the labour of style, the art of writing, the pain of writing, and his infinitely painstaking manner of acc.u.mulating heaps of notes, and building his book from them. The Ma.s.sis study, the most complete of its kind, may interest the student, not alone of Zola, but of literature in general. Not, however, as a model, for Zola, with all his tiresome preparations, never constructed an ideal book--rather, to put it the other way, no one of his books reveals ideal construction.

The multiplicity of details, of descriptions weary the reader. A coa.r.s.e spirit his, he revelled in scenes of l.u.s.t, bloodshed, vileness, and cruelty.

His people, with a few exceptions, are but agitated silhouettes. You close your eyes after reading La Bete Humaine and think of Eugene Sue, a Sue of 1880. Yet a master of broad, symphonic descriptions. There is a certain resemblance to Richard Wagner; indeed, he patterned after Wagner in his use of the musical symbol: there is a leading motive in each of Zola's novels. And like Wagner he was a sentimental lover of mankind and a hater of all forms of injustice.

From the conception of the work, with its general notes on its nature, its movement, its physiology, its determination, its first sketches of the personages, the milieu--he was an ardent adherent of Taine in this particular--the occupations of the characters, the summary plan with the acc.u.mulated details, thence to the writing, the entire method is exposed in this ingenious and entertaining book of Ma.s.sis. He has no illusions about Zola's originality or the destiny of his works. Zola has long ceased to count in literary evolution.

But Emile Zola is in the Pantheon.

ZOLA AS BEST SELLER

The publication of the number of books sold by a young American novelist previous to his untimely taking off does not prove that a writer has to be alive to be a best seller. If that were the case, what about d.i.c.kens and Thackeray as exceptions? The publishers of d.i.c.kens say that their sales of his novels in 1910 were 25 per cent more than in 1909, and 750,000 copies were sold in 1911. In many instances a dead author is worth more than a live one. With Zola this is not precisely so, though his books still sell; the only interregnum being the time when the Dreyfus affair was agitating France. Then the source of Zola's income dried up like a rain pond in a desert. Later on he had his revenge.

The figures for the sale of Zola up to the end of 1911 are very instructive. His collected works number forty-eight volumes. Of the Rougon-Macquart series 1,964,000 have been sold; other novels, 764,000; essays and various works bring the total to 2,750,000, approximately. In a word, a few years hence Zola will easily pa.s.s 3,000,000. Nana still holds its own as the leader of the list, 215,000; La Terre, 162,000; L'a.s.sommoir, 162,000. This would seem to prove what the critics of the French novelist have a.s.serted: that books in which coa.r.s.e themes are treated with indescribable coa.r.s.eness have sold and continue to sell better than his finer work, L'Oeuvre, for example, which has only achieved 71,000. But L'a.s.sommoir is Zola at his best; besides, it is not such a vile book as La Terre. And then how about La Debacle, which has 229,000 copies to its credit? The answer is that patriotism played a greater role in the fortune of this work than did vulgar curiosity in the case of the others. Another popular book, Germinal, shows 132,000.

On the appearance of La Terre in 1887 (it was first published as a feuilleton in _Gil Blas_, from May 28 to September 15), five of Zola's disciples, Paul Bonnetain, J. H. Rosny, Lucien Descaves, Paul Margueritte, and Gustave Guiches, made a public protest which is rather comical if you remember that several of these writers have not turned out Sunday-school literature; Paul Margueritte in particular has in L'Or and an earlier work beaten his master at the game. But a reaction from Zola's naturalism was bound to come. As Remy de Gourmont wrote: "There has been no question of forming a party or issuing orders; no crusade was organised; it is individually that we have separated ourselves, horror stricken, from a literature the baseness of which made us sick." Havelock Ellis, otherwise an admirer of the genius of Emile Zola, has said that his soul "seems to have been starved at the centre and to have encamped at the sensory periphery."

Blunt George Saintsbury calls Zola the "naturalist Zeus, Jove the Dirt-Compeller," and adds that as Zola misses the two lasting qualities of literature, style, and artistic presentation of matter, he is doomed; for "the first he probably could not have attained, except in a few pa.s.sages, if he would; the second he has deliberately rejected, and so the mother of dead dogs awaits him sooner or later."

Yet Zola lives despite these predictions, as the above figures show, notwithstanding his loquacity in regard to themes that should be tacenda to every writer.

But in this matter of forbidden subjects Zola is regarded by the present generation as a trifle old-fashioned. When alive he was grouped with Aretino and the Marquis de Sade, or with Restif de la Bretonne. To-day Paris has not only Paul Margueritte, who when writing in conjunction with his brother Victor gave much promise, but also Octave Mirbeau. With Zola, the newer men a.s.sert that their work makes for morality, exposing as it does public and private abuses, an excuse as cla.s.sic as Aristophanes.

In 1893 the figures for the princ.i.p.al novels of Zola stood thus: Nana, 160,000; L'a.s.sommoir, 127,000; La Debacle, 143,000; Germinal, 88,000; La Terre, 100,000; La Bete Humaine, 83,000; the same number for Le Reve; Pot-Bouille, 82,000; whereas L'Oeuvre only counted 55,000; La Conquete de Pla.s.sans, 25,000; La Curee, 36,000, and La Joie de Vivre, 44,000. La Terre, then, the most unmentionable story of them all, has jumped since 1893 to the end of 1911 from 100,000 to 215,000, whereas L'Oeuvre moved only from 55,000 to 71,000 in fourteen years. But a Vulgarian can understand La Terre while L'Oeuvre would be absolutely undecipherable to him.

Zola always knew his market; even knew it after Dreyfus had intervened. Of the series called Les Trois Villes, Rome is the best seller, 121,000; and it is as profound a vilification of the Eternal City as was La Terre of the French peasants, as Pot-Bouille of the French bourgeois. Indeed, all Zola reads like the frenzied attack of a pessimist to whom his native land is a hideous nightmare and its inhabitants criminals or mad folk. His influence on a younger generation of writers, especially in America, has been baneful, and he has done much with his exuberant, rhapsodical style to further the moon-madness of socialism; of a belief in a coming earthly paradise, where no one will labour (except the captive millionaires) and from whose skies roasted pigeons will fall straightway into the mouths of its foolish inhabitants.

Zola as a money-maker need not be considered now; his gains were enormous; suffice to say that he was paid large sums for the serial rights. Nana, in _Voltaire_, brought 20,000 francs; Pot-Bouille, in _Gaulois_, 30,000 francs; Bonheur des Dames, La Joie de Vivre, Germinal, L'Oeuvre, La Terre, in _Gil Blas_, each 20,000 francs; L'Argent, in the same journal, 30,000 francs; Le Reve, in the _Revue Ill.u.s.tree_, 25,000 francs; La Bete Humaine, in _Vie Populaire_, 25,000 francs; La Debacle, in the same, 30,000 francs, and Docteur Pascal in _Revue Hebdomadaire_, 35,000 francs. That amounts to about 300,000 francs. Each novel cost from 20,000 to 25,000 francs for rights of reproduction, and to all this must be added about 500,000 francs for the theatrical works, making a total of 1,600,000 francs. And it was in 1894 that these figures were compiled by Antoine Laporte in his book on Naturalism, which contains a savage attack on Zolaism. Truly, then, Zola may be fairly called one of the best sellers among all authors, dead or living.

XVI

A STUDY OF DE MAUPa.s.sANT

In 1881 Turgenieff gave Tolstoy a book by a young Frenchman, telling him that he would find it amusing. This book was La Maison Tellier.

Tolstoy revolted at the theme, but could not deny the freshness and power of the author. He found Maupa.s.sant "deficient in the moral sense"; yet he was interested and followed the progress of Flaubert's pupil. When Une Vie appeared, the Russian novelist p.r.o.nounced it incomparably the best work of its author--perhaps the best French novel since Hugo's Les Miserables. He wrote this in an article ent.i.tled Guy de Maupa.s.sant and the Art of Fiction. It was doubtless the Norman's clear, robust vision that appealed to Tolstoy, who, at that period was undergoing a change of heart; else how could he call Les Miserables the greatest novel of France, he the writer of Anna Karenina--the antipodes of that windy apotheosis of vapid humanitarianism, the characteristic trait of Hugo's epic of pity and unreality.

But Maupa.s.sant affected Tolstoy as he had affected Turgenieff. Guy has told us of his first meeting with the latter, an artist superior to Tolstoy. "The first time I saw Turgenieff was at Gustave Flaubert's--a door opened; a giant came in, a giant with a silver head, as they would say in a fairy tale." This must have been in 1876, for in a letter dated January 24, 1877, Turgenieff writes: "Poor Maupa.s.sant is losing all his hair. He came to see me. He is as nice as ever, but very ugly just at present." In 1880 the young man published a volume of poetry, Des Vers. He was thirty years old (born August 5, 1850).

The literary apprenticeship of Guy to Gustave Flaubert is a thrice-told tale, and signifies only this: If the pupil had not been richly endowed all the lessons of Flaubert would have availed him little. Perhaps the anecdote has been overdone; Maupa.s.sant has related it in the preface to Pierre et Jean, and in the introduction to the George Sand-Flaubert correspondence--now at the head of the edition of Bouvard et Pecuchet. There are letters of Flaubert to his disciple full of his explosive good nature, big heart, irascibility and generous outpouring on the subject of his art. The thing that surprises a close student of this episode and its outcome is that Maupa.s.sant was in reality so unlike his master. And when I further insist that the younger man appropriated whole scenes from Flaubert for his longer stories, especially from L'Education Sentimentale, I feel that I am uttering a paradox.