Promenades of an Impressionist Part 10

MacColl has pointed out the weakness of the scientific side of impressionism. Its values are strictly aesthetic; attempts to paint on a purely scientific basis have proved both monotonous and ludicrous.

The experiments of the neo-impressionists (the 1885 group), of Signac, Seurat, were not very convincing. Van Rhysselberge, one of the few painters to-day who practise _pointillisme_, or the system of dots, is a gifted artist; so is Anquetin. The feminine group is headed by the name of Berthe Morisot (the wife of Eugene Manet, a brother of Edouard and the great granddaughter of Fragonard), a pupil of Manet, the most individual woman painter that ever lived; and Mary Ca.s.satt, a pupil of Degas, though more closely allied to the open-air school in her methods. Miss Ca.s.satt possesses a distinguished talent. As a school impressionism has run down to a thin rill in a waste of sand. It is more technical than personal, and while it was lucky to have such an exponent as Claude Monet, there is every reason to believe that Monet's impressionism is largely the result of a peculiar penetrating vision. He has been imitated, and Maufra and Moret are carrying on his tradition--yet there is but one Monet.

We know that the spectral palette is a mild delusion and sometimes a dangerous snare, that impressionism is in the remotest a.n.a.lysis but a new convention supplanting an old. Painters will never go back to the muddy palette of the past. The trick has been turned. The egg of Columbus has been once more stood on end. Claude Monet has taught us the "innocence of the eye," has shown us how to paint air that circulates, water that sparkles. The sun was the centre of the impressionistic attack, the "splendid, silent sun." A higher pitch in key colour has been attained, shadows have been endowed with vital hues. (And Leonardo da Vinci, wonderful landscapist, centuries ago wrote learnedly of coloured shadows; every new discovery is only a rediscovery.) The "dim, religious light" of the studio has been banished; the average palette is lighter, is more brilliant. And Rembrandt is still worshipped; Raphael is still on his pedestal, and the millionaire on the street continues to buy Bouguereau. The amateur who honestly wishes to purge his vision of encrusted painted prejudices we warn not to go too close to an impressionistic canvas--any more than he would go near a red-hot stove or a keg of gunpowder. And let him forget those toothsome critical terms, decomposition, recomposition. His eyes, if permitted, will act for themselves; there is no denying that the principles of impressionism soundly applied, especially to landscape, catch the fleeting, many-hued charm of nature. It is a system of coloured stenography--in the hands of a master. Woe betide the fumbler!

II - RENOIR

The secret of success is never to be satisfied; that is, never to be satisfied with your work or your success. And this idea seems to have animated Auguste Renoir during his long, honourable career of painter.

In common with several members of the impressionistic group to which he belonged, he suffered from hunger, neglect, obloquy; but when prosperity did at last appear he did not succ.u.mb to the most dangerous enemy that besets the artist. He fought success as he conquered failure, and his continual dissatisfaction with himself, the true critical spirit, has led him to many fields--he has been portraitist, genre painter, landscapist, delineator of nudes, a marine painter and a master of still-life. This versatility, amazing and incontrovertible, has perhaps clouded the real worth of Renoir for the public. Even after acknowledging his indubitable gifts, the usual critical doubting Thomas grudgingly remarks that if Renoir could not draw like Degas, paint land and water like Monet or figures like Manet, he was a naturally endowed colourist. How great a colourist he was may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum, where his big canvas, La Famille Charpentier, is now hung.

Charpentier was the publisher of Zola, Goncourt, Flaubert, and of the newer realists. He was a man of taste, who cultivated friendships with distinguished artists and writers. Some disappointment was experienced at the recent public sale of his collection in Paris. The _clou_ of the sale was undoubtedly the portrait of his wife and two children. It was sold for the surprising sum of 84,000 francs to M. Durand-Ruel, who acted in behalf of the Metropolitan Museum. Another canvas by Renoir fetched 14,050 francs. A _sanguine_ of Puvis de Chavannes brought 2,050 francs, and 4,700 francs was paid for a Cezanne picture.

The Charpentier Family, originally ent.i.tled Portrait de Madame Charpentier et Ses Filles, was painted in 1878, first exhibited at the Salon of 1879, and there we saw and admired it. The pa.s.sage of the years has tempered the glistening brilliancies and audacious chromatic modulations to a suave harmony that is absolutely fascinating. The background is j.a.panese. Mme. Charpentier is seated on a canopy surrounded by furniture, flowers; under foot a carpet with arabesque designs. She throws one arm carelessly over some rich stuff; the hand is painted with masterly precision. The other arm has dropped in her lap. She is an interesting woman of that fine maternal type so often encountered in real France--though not in French fiction, alas! Her gaze is upon her children, two adorable little girls. A superb dog, a St. Bernard, with head resting on paws, looks at you with watchful eyes. One of the girls sits upon his s.h.a.ggy hide. The mother is in black, a mellow reception robe, tulle and lace. White and blue are the contrasting tones of the girls--the blue is tender. A chair is at the side of a lacquer table, upon which are flowers. Renoir flowers, dewy, blushing. You exclaim: "How charming!" It is normal French painting, not the painting of the schools with their false ideal of pseudo-Greek beauty, but the intimate, clear, refined, and logical style of a man who does not possess the genius of Manet, Degas, or Monet, but is nevertheless an artist of copiousness, charm, and originality. Charm; yes, that is the word. There is a voluptuous magnetism in his colour that draws you to him whether you approve of his capricious designs or not. The museum paid $18,480 for the Charpentier portrait, and in 1877, after an exposition in the rue Le Peletier, sixteen of his paintings, many of them masterpieces, netted the mortifying sum of 2,005 francs.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born at Limoges, February 25, 1840. His father was a poor tailor with five children who went to Paris hoping to better his condition. At the age of twelve the boy was painting on porcelain--his father had picked up some rudiments of the art at Limoges. Auguste did so well, displayed such energy and taste, that he soon fell to decorating blinds, and saved, in the course of four years, enough money to enable him to enter the atelier of Gleyre.

There he met Sisley, Bazille--afterward shot in the Franco-Prussian war--and Claude Monet. They became friends and later allies in the conflict with the Parisian picture public. Renoir made his first offering to the Salon in 1863. It was refused. It was a romantic bit--a nude lady reclining on a bed listening to the plucked music of a guitar. It seems that the guitarist, and not the lady, was the cause of offence. It is a convention that a thousand living beings may look at an undressed female in a picture, but no painted man may be allowed to occupy with her the same apartment. In 1864 Renoir tried again--after all, the Salon, like our own academy, is a market-place--and was admitted. He sent in an Esmeralda dancing. Both these canvases were destroyed by the painter when he began to use his eyes. In 1868 his Lise betrayed direct observation of nature, influenced by Courbet. Until 1873 he sent pictures to the Salon; that year he was shut out with considerable unanimity, for his offering happened to be an Algerian subject, a Parisian woman dressed in Oriental costume, and--horrors!--the shadows were coloured. He was become an impressionist. He had listened, or rather looked at the baleful pyrotechnics of Monet, and so he joined the secessionists, though not disdaining to contribute annually to the Salon. In 1874 his L'allee Cavaliere au Bois de Boulogne was rejected, an act that was evidently inspired by a desire to sacrifice Renoir because of the artistic "crimes" of Edouard Manet. Otherwise how explain why this easily comprehended composition, with its attractive figures, daring hues, and brilliant technique, came to have the door of the Salon closed upon it?

The historic exposition at Nadar's photographic studio, on the Boulevard des Capucines, of the impressionists, saw Renoir in company with Monet, Sisley, and the others. His La Danseuse and La Loge were received with laughter by the discerning critics. Wasn't this the exhibition of which Albert Wolff wrote that some lunatics were showing their wares, which they called pictures, etc.? (No, it was in 1875.) From 1868 to 1877 Renoir closely studied nature and his landscapes took on those violet tones which gave him the nickname of Monsieur Violette. Previously he had employed the usual clear green with the yellow touches in the shadows of conventional _paysagistes_. But p.i.s.sarro, Monet, Sisley, and Renoir had discovered each for himself that the light and shade in the open air vary according to the hours, the seasons, the atmospheric conditions. Monet and p.i.s.sarro in painting snow and frost effects under the sun did not hesitate to put blue tones in the shadows. Sisley was fond of rose tones, Renoir saw violet in the shadows. He enraged his spectators quite as much as did Monet with his purple turkeys. His striking Avant le bain was sold for one hundred and forty francs in 1875. Any one who has been lucky enough to see it at Durand-Ruel's will cry out at the stupidity which did not recognise a masterly bit of painting with its glowing, nacreous flesh tints, its admirable modelling, its pervading air of vitality. Renoir was never a difficult painter; that is, in the sense of Monet or Manet or Gauguin. He offended the eyes of 1875, no doubt, but there was in him during his first period much of Boucher; his female nudes are, as Camille Mauclair writes, of the eighteenth century; his technique is Boucher-like: "fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy laid on with the palette-knife with precise strokes around the princ.i.p.al values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the opposition of the shadows; vivacious att.i.tudes and decorative convention."

Vivacious, happy, lyrical, Renoir's work has thus far shown no hint of 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 Dejeuner 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 a.s.serts, 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 cla.s.sification--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 doc.u.ment" 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 Terra.s.se, 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 Rejane--and a lot of Renoir's later experimentings, as fugitive as music; exploding bouquets of iridescence; swirling panels, depicting scenes from Tannhauser; a flower garden composed of buds and blossoms in colour scales that begin at a ba.s.s-emerald and ascend to an alt.i.tudinous 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 anaemic 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 G.o.ds 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 Theodore 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 pa.s.sed 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 appet.i.te 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 Theodore 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, p.i.s.sarro, Sisley, Cezanne 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'ecole_, 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 p.r.o.nunciamento 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 t.i.tle 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 Eugenie Desiree Fournier; she was the G.o.ddaughter 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, Eugene, and Gustave. They inherited from their rich grandfather, Fournier. Edouard was born at Paris, Rue Bonaparte, January 23, 1832. His brother Eugene 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-Petersbourg, 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, Mallarme, Abbe 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 munic.i.p.al 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 succ.u.mbed. 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 Refuses (in company with works by Bracquemond, Cazin, Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, J.P. Laurens, Legros, p.i.s.sarro, 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, Gerome, 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 t.i.tian 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. Fallieres, 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 pa.s.sed. When in 1884 there was held at the ecole des Beaux-Arts a memorial exposition of Manet's works, Edmond About wrote that the place ought to be fumigated, and Gerome "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 j.a.panese mosaic."

What a wit this Parisian painter possessed! Duret tells of a pa.s.sage 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 gla.s.s, 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 portiere 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 Abrege de la Vie des Plus Fameux Peintres; Catalogue Raisonne, 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, etudes, and articles by Cellier, Mollet, Hanover, Dohme, Muntz, Seailles, Claude Phillips, Charles Blanc, Virgile Joez, F. Staley, Teodor de Wyzewa, and Camille Mauclair. Mauclair is the latest and one of the most interesting commentators, his princ.i.p.al contribution being De Watteau a Whistler, a chapter of which has been afterward expanded into a compact little study ent.i.tled 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, Rene 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 partic.i.p.ated in the Seven Arts, were d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.sure you that when Camille Mauclair a.s.sumes 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 Dostoevsky 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 pa.s.sion, 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. Sh.e.l.ley? Ah! he is a p.r.o.nounced 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 Sh.e.l.leys. Browning is a fair specimen of genius and normality; as his wife ill.u.s.trated 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 faery 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 impa.s.sible 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.

The riddle is solved by Mauclar: These flights into the azure, these 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 _fetes 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 una.s.suaged 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'Indifferent, 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 t.i.tian (or Tiepolo, as Kenyon c.o.x 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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