Promenades of an Impressionist Part 14

MUSEUMS OF BRUSSELS

Considering its size and significance, Brussels has more than its share of museums. At the beginning of the Rue de la Regence, near the Place Royale, stands the imposing Royal Museum of old paintings and sculpture. The Museum of Modern Art is around the corner and adjoins the National Library, which is said to harbour over six hundred thousand volumes. In the gallery of old art the effect of the sculptors' hall, which is in the centre and utilises the entire height of the building, is n.o.ble. The best sculpture therein is by Rodin and Meunier; the remainder is generally academic or simply bad. Rodin's Thinker, in bronze, is a repet.i.tion of the original. After the wreathed prettiness of the conventional school--neither Greek nor Gothic--and the writhing diablerie of Rodin imitators the simplicity and directness of Constantin Meunier is refreshing. He was a man whose imagination became inflamed at the sight of suffering and injustice.

He is closer to Millet than to his friend Rodin, but he lacks the sweetness and strength of Millet. Selecting the Belgian workman--the miner, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, the proletarian, in a word--for his theme, Meunier observed closely and reproduced his vision in terms of rugged beauty. The sentiment is evidently socialistic. Like Prince Kropotkin and the brothers Reclus, the Belgian sculptor revolts against the cruelty of man to man. He shows us the miner crouched in a pitiful manner finding a pocket of coal; men naked to the waist, their torsos bulging with muscles, their small heads on bull necks, are puddlers; other groups patiently haul heavy carts--labour not in its heroic aspect, but as it is in reality, is the core of Meunier's art. That he is "literary" at times may not be denied, but power he has.

The early Flemish school of the fifteenth century is strongly represented in several of the galleries up-stairs. And Rogier de la Pasture, otherwise known as Rogier van der Weyden, is shown in five pictures, and at his best. The Chevalier with the Arrow, a bust portrait, will be familiar to those who have visited the Rijks Museum, where a copy hangs. The robe is black, the hat, conical, is brown, the background blue-green. The silhouette is vigorously modelled, the expression one of dignity, the glance penetrating, severe. What characterisation! The Christ is a small panel surpa.s.singly rich in colour and charged with profound pity. The body lies in the arms of the Mother, Magdalen and John on either side. The sun is setting. The subject was a favourite of Weyden; there is a triptych in Berlin and a panel at The Hague. This Brussels picture has evidently been shorn of its wings. There are replicas of the Virgin and Child (No. 650 in the catalogue) at Berlin, Ca.s.sel, and Frankfort, also in the recently dispersed collection of Rudolph Kann. Another striking tableau is the head of a woman who weeps. The minutest tear is not missing.

Hubert and Jan Van Eyck's Adam and Eve are the wings (volets) from the grand composition in the Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent. They are gigantic figures, nude, neither graceful nor attractive, but magnificently painted. These portraits (they don't look as if they had been finished in paradise) of our first parents rather favour the evolutionary theory of development. Eve is unlovely, her limbs lanky, her bust mediaeval, her flanks Flemish. In her right hand she holds the fatal apple. Adam's head is full of character; it is Christ-like; his torso ugly, his legs wooden. Yet how superior to the copies which are now attached to the original picture at Ghent. There the figures are clothed, clumsy, and meaningless.

Dierick Bouts's Justice of Emperor Otho III is a striking picture. The subject has that touch of repulsive cruelty which was a sign of the times. Hans Memling's Martyrdom of St. Sebastian is another treasure; with his portraits of a man, of Guillaume Morel and of Barbara de Vlandenberg making an immortal quartet. The head of the man is the favourite in reproduction. Morel is portrayed as in prayer, his hands clasped, his expression rapt. A landscape is seen at the back. The Virgin Surrounded by Virgins, by an unknown master of the fifteenth century (school of Bruges), is one of the most amazing pictures in the collection. It has a nuance of the Byzantine and of the hieratic, but the portraits are enchanting in their crystalline quality. Quentin Matsys' Legend of St. Anne is much admired, though for sincerity we prefer The Pa.s.sion of the Master of Oultremont. Gerard David's Adoration of the Magi is no longer attributed to him. It was always in doubt: now the name has been removed, though the picture has much of his mellowness. Dr. Scheuring, the old man with the shaved upper lip, beard, and hair over his forehead, by Lucas Cranach, and Jean Gossaert's Chevalier of the Golden Fleece, are masterly portraits. Van Cleve, Van Orlay, Key--perhaps a portrait of the b.l.o.o.d.y Duke of Alva--also one of himself, Coello's Maria of Austria, are among the sterling specimens in this gallery.

We need not expect to find duplicated here the Rubens of Antwerp. The most imposing example is the Adoration of the Magi, while his portraits of the Archduke Albert and his Archd.u.c.h.ess, Isabella, are perhaps the best extant. The Calvary is a splendid canvas, full of movement and containing several members of the well-known Rubens family. Such devotion is touching. You find yourself looking for Isabella Brandt and Helena Fourment among the angels that hover in the sky above the martyred St. Lieven. The four negro heads, the Woman Taken in Adultery, a Susanna (less concerned about her predicament than any we have encountered), a curious and powerful portrait of Theophrastus Paracelsus (Browning's hero), with a dozen others, make a goodly showing for the Antwerp master. Otho Vaenius (Octave Van Veen), one of the teachers of Rubens, is hung here. There are nearly a dozen Van Dycks, of prime quality all. The Crucifixion, the portrait of an unknown gentleman wearing a huge ruff and the winning portrait of a Flemish sculptor, Francesco Duquesnoy, (on a stand), give you an excellent notion of his range, though better Van Dycks are in France and England.

The portrait of an old man, by Rembrandt, is beginning to fade, but that of an old woman is a superior Rembrandt. Of Frans Hals there are two fine specimens; one, a portrait of Willem van Heythusen, is a small picture, the figure sitting, the legs crossed (booted and spurred) and the figure leaning lazily back. On his head a black felt hat with a broad upturned brim. The expression of the bearded man is serious. The only Jan Vermeer is one of the best portraits by that singularly gifted painter we recall. It is called The Man with the Hat. Dr. Bredius in 1905 considered the picture by Jean Victor, but it has been p.r.o.nounced Vermeer by equal authorities. It was once a part of the collection of Humphry Ward. The man sits, his hand holding a glove resting negligently over the back of a chair. He faces the spectator, on his head a long, pointed black hat with a wide brim. His collar is white. A shadow covers the face above the eyes. These are rather melancholy, inexpressive; the flesh tints are anaemic, almost morbid. We are far away from the Vermeer of the Milkmaid and the Letter. There is something disquieting in this portrait, but it is a masterpiece of paint and character.

The Old Lady Dreaming, by N. Maes, and the Jan Steen (The Operator) are good though not remarkable examples. Jacob Jordaenses flood the various galleries; Rubens run to seed as far as quality, yet exhibiting enormous muscularity, is the trait of this gross painter.

The King Drinks--his kings are always drinking or blind drunk--his nudes, which look like the contents of the butcher shops in Brussels, attract throngs, for the anecdote is writ large across the wall, and you don't have to run to read. Panoramas would be a better t.i.tle for these robust compositions. David Teniers's La Kermesse is the most important work he ever finished. It is in good preservation. Amsterdam has not its superior. There is an ordinary El Greco, a poor Goya, and a Ribera downstairs. The French art is not enlivening.

Philip Champaigne's self-portrait is familiar: it has been reproduced frequently. Jean Baptiste Huysmans, a landscape with animals; he is said to be an ancestor of the late Joris Karel Huysmans. The Mors (Antonio Moro) is of value. But the lodestone of the collection is the Primitives.

The pictures in the modern gallery are largely Belgian, some French, and a few Dutch and English. It is not a collection of artistic significance. In the black-and-white room may be seen a few original drawings of Rops.

The Musee Wiertz is worth visiting only as a chamber of horrors. When Wiertz is not morbid and repulsive he is of the vasty inane, a man of genius gone daft, obsessed by the mighty shades of Rubens and Michael Angelo. Wiertz was born in 1806 and died in 1865. The Belgian Government, in order to make some sort of reparation for its neglect of the painter during his troubled and unhappy lifetime, acquired his country residence and made it a repository of his art. The pictures are of a scale truly heroic. The painter pitted himself against Rubens and Michael Angelo. He said: "I, too, am a great painter!" And there is no denying his power. His tones recall the _pate_ of Rubens without its warmth and splendour. When Wiertz was content to keep within bounds his portraits and feminine nudes are not without beauty. He was fanciful rather than poetic, and the picture of Napoleon in h.e.l.l enduring the reproaches of his victims (why should they be there?) is startling. Startling, too, are the tricks played on your nerves by the peepholes. You see a woman crazed by hunger about to cook one of her murdered children; beheaded men, men crushed by superior power, the harnessed body of Patroclus, Polyphemus devouring the companions of Ulysses, and other monstrous conceptions, are all painted with reference to the ills of the poor. Anton Joseph was a socialist in sentiment. If his executive ability had been on a par with his ideas, and if those ideas had been less extravagant, the world would have had one more great painter; but his nervous system was flawed and he died a melancholic, a victim to misplaced ideals. He wished to revive the heroic age at a time of easel pictures. He, the half genius, saw himself outwitted by the sleek paint of Alfred Stevens. Born out of his due time, a dreamer of dreams, Wiertz is a sad example of the futility of looking backward in art.

BRUGES THE BEAUTIFUL

On the way up from Brussels to Bruges it is well to alight at Ghent for a few hours. There are attractions enough to keep one for several days, but as our objective was St. Bavon (St. Bavo, or Sint Baafs) we did not stay more than the allotted time. And an adventurous time it was. The Ostend express landed its pa.s.sengers at the St. Pierre station and that meant the loss of half an hour. The Cathedral is reached by the tramway, and there we found that as an office was about to be sung no one would be allowed in the ambulatory until after its completion. It was pouring live Belgian rain without; already the choristers in surplices were filing into the choir. Not a moment to be spared! The sacristan was a practical man. He hustled us into a side chapel, locked the heavy doors, and left us in company with the great picture of the brothers Hubert and Jan Van Eyck. A monk knelt in prayer outside, the rain clouds made the lighting obscure. We were hemmed in, but by angels and ministers of grace. The chanting began.

Atmosphere was not needed in this large and gloomy edifice, only more light. Gradually the picture began to burn through the artificial dusk, gradually its glories became more perceptible. Begun by Hubert in 1420 and finished by Jan in 1432, its pristine splendour has vanished; and the loss of the wings--the Adam and Eve are in Brussels, the remaining volets in the Berlin Museum--is irreparable despite the copies. But this Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, with its jewelled figures of the Christ, of St. John the Baptist, St. Cecilia, and the central panel with its mystical symbolism, painted in sumptuous tones, the lamb on the altar, the prophets and ecclesiastics in worship, the singing angels, is truly an angelic composition.

The rain had ceased. A shaft of sunshine pierced the rosy gla.s.s windows and fell upon the hieratic figure of the bearded Christ, which glowed supernally. In the chancel the Psalms had died away and the only sound was that of sandals shuffling over marble floors. The man turned the lock. It was a return to the world as if one had partic.i.p.ated in a sacred ceremony.

Bruges is invariably called Bruges-la-Morte, but it is far from being dead, or even desperately melancholy. Delft, in Holland, after nine o'clock at night, is quieter than Bruges. Bruges the Dead? No, Bruges the Beautiful is nearer the truth. After reading Rodenbach's morbid romance of Bruges-la-Morte we felt sure that a stay in Bruges would be like a holiday in a cemetery. Our experience dispelled this unpleasant illusion. Bruges is in daylight a bustling and in certain spots a noisy place. Its inhabitants are not lugubrious of visage, but wideawake, practical people, close at a bargain, curious like all Belgians, and on fete days given to much feasting. Bruges is infinitely more interesting than Brussels. It is real, while modern Brussels is only mock-turtle. And Bruges is more picturesque, the food is as well flavoured, there are several resorts where ripe old Burgundy may be had at not an extravagant price, and the townsfolk are less grasping, more hearty than in Brussels.

The city is nicknamed a Northern Venice, but of Venice there is naught, except the sc.u.m on the ca.n.a.l waters. The secular odour of Bruges was not unpleasant in October; in August it may have been. We know that the glory of the city hath departed, but there remain the Memlings, the Gerard Davids, at least one Van Eyck, not to mention several magnificent old churches.

Let us stroll to the Beguinage. Reproductions of Memling and Van Eyck are in almost every window. The cafes on the square, where stands the Belfry of Longfellow's poem, are overflowing with people at table. It is Friday, and to-morrow will be market day; with perhaps a fair or a procession thrown in. You reach the Cathedral of St. Sauveur (Sint Salvator), erected in the tenth century, though the foundations date back to the seventh. The narrow lane-like street winds around the rear of the church. Presently another church is discerned with a tower that must be nearly four hundred feet high, built, you learn, some time between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. Notre Dame contains the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy, a lovely white marble statue of the Virgin and Child ascribed with justice to Michael Angelo, and a fine bow-window. We pa.s.s the Hospital of St. Jean, turn up an alley full of cobblestones and children, and finally see the ca.n.a.l that pa.s.ses the houses of the Beguinage. The view is of exceeding charm. The spire of Notre Dame and the apsis may be seen up (or is it down?) stream. A bridge cuts the river precisely where it should; weeping willows to the left lend an elegiac note to the ensemble, and there is a gabled house to the right which seems to have entered the scene so as to give an artist the exact balance for his composition. Nature and the handicraft of man paint pictures all over Bruges.

We enter the enclosure with the little houses of the beguines, or lay sisterhood. There is nothing particular to see, except a man under a tree admiring his daubed canvas, near by a dog sleeps. The sense of peace is profound. Even Antwerp seems a creation of yesterday compared with the brooding calm of Bruges, while Brussels is as noisy as a boiler shop. The Minnewater (Lac d'Amour) is another pretty stretch, and so we spent the entire day through shy alleys, down crooked streets, twisting every few feet and forming deceptive vistas innumerable, leading tired legs into churches, out of museums, up tower steps.

That first hard stroll told us how little we could know of Bruges in a day, a week or a month. Bag and baggage we moved up from Brussels and wished that the clock and the calendar could be set back several centuries. At twilight the unusual happened: the Sandman appeared with his hour-gla.s.s and beckoned to bed. There is no night in Bruges for the visitor within the gates; there is only slumber. Perhaps that is why the c.o.c.kneys call it Bruges the Dead. The old horse that drags the hotel bus was stamping its hoofs in the court-yard; the wall of St.

Jacques, eaten away by the years, faced us. The sun, somewhere, was trying to rub its sleepy eyes, the odour of omelet was in the air, and all was well. This is the home-like side of its life. It may still harbour artists who lead a mystic, ecstatic existence, but we met none of them. Poetic images are aroused at dusk along the banks of ca.n.a.ls, bathed in spectral light. Here Georges Rodenbach, that poet of delicate images, placed his hero, a man who had lost a beloved wife.

He saw her wraith-like form in the mist and at the end went mad.

The Memlings hang in a chamber at the Hospital St. Jean; the Cha.s.se of St. Ursula is a reliquary, Gothic in design. They consist of a dozen tiny panels painted in exquisite fashion, with all the bright clarity and precision of a miniaturist, coupled with a solidity of form and lyric elegance of expression. They represent the side of Memling's art which might be compared to the illuminators of ma.n.u.scripts or to the artificers in gold and precious stones. There is a jewelled quality in this ill.u.s.tration of the pious life and martyrdom of St. Ursula at Cologne. But it is not the greatest Memling, to our thinking. A portrait of Martin van Nieuwenhoven, the donator of the diptych, La Vierge aux Pommes, is as superb a Memling as one could wish for. The little hairs are a sign of clever, minute brush. It is the modelling, the rich manipulation of tones (yes, values were known in those barbarous times), the graceful fall of the hair treated quite as much en ma.s.se as with microscopic finish; the almost miraculous painting of the folded hands, and the general expression of pious reverie, that count most. The ductile, glowing colours make this a portrait to be compared to any of the master's we have studied at London, Berlin, Dresden, Lubeck, Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels. But Bruges is the natural frame for his exalted genius.

If the Van Eycks were really the first to use oil-colour--a fable, it is said--Memling, who followed them, taught many great Italian painters the quality and expressiveness of beautiful paint. There is the portrait of Sybilla Sambetha, the serious girl with the lace veil.

Did any of the later Dutch conjurers in paint attain such transparency? The Mystic Marriage of St. Catharine, a triptych with its wings representing the beheading of St. John the Baptist--the Salome is quite melancholy--and St. John at Patmos, is one of the world pictures. The Adoration of the Magi, with its wings, The Nativity, and Presentation in the Temple, is equally touching. For me Memling's Descent from the Cross sounds deeper music than Rubens--which is operatic in comparison. The Virgin type of Van Eyck is less insipid than the Italian; there is no pagan dissonance, as in the conception of Botticelli. Faith blazed more fiercely in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of these Primitive artists. They felt Christ's Pa.s.sion and the sorrow of the Holy Mother more poignantly than did the Italians of the golden renaissance. We have always held a brief for the Art for Art theory. The artist must think first of his material and its technical manipulation; but after that, if his pulse beat to spiritual rhythms then his work may attain the heights. It is not painting that is the lost art, but faith. Men like the Van Eycks, Rogier van der Weyden, Memling, and Gerard David were princes of their craft and saw their religion with eyes undimmed by doubt.

James Weak has destroyed the legend that Hans Memling painted his St.

Ursula for the benefit of St. Jean's Hospital as a recompense for treatment while sick there. He was a burgher living comfortably at Bruges. The museum is a short distance from the hospital. Its Van Eyck (Jan), La Vierge et l'Enfant--known as the Donator because of the portrait of George van der Paele--is its chief treasure, though there is the portrait of Jan's wife; Gerard David's Judgment of King Cambyses, and the savage execution companion picture; Memling's triptych, St. Christopher bearing the Christ Child, and David's masterpiece, The Baptism of Christ. Holbein never painted a head with greater verisimilitude than Van Eyck's rendering of the Donator. What an eye! What handling, missing not a wrinkle, a fold of the aged skin, the veins in the senile temples, or the thin soft hair above the ears!

What synthesis! There are no niggling details, breadth is not lost in this mult.i.tude of closely observed and recorded facts. The large eyes gaze devoutly at the vision of the Child, and if neither Virgin nor Son is comely there is character delineated. The accessories must fill the latter-day painter avid of surface loveliness with consuming envy.

But it is time for sleep. The Brugeois c.o.c.ks have crowed, the sun is setting, and eyelids are lowering. Lucky you are if your dreams evoke the brilliant colours, the magical shapes of the Primitives of Bruges the Beautiful.

THE MOREAU MUSEUM

Out of the beaten track of sight-seers, and not noticed with particular favour by the guide-books, the museum founded by Gustave Moreau at 14 Rue de la Rochefoucauld in Paris, is known only to a comparatively few artists and amateurs. You seldom hear Americans speak of this rare collection, it is never written about in the magazines. In September, 1897, Moreau made a will leaving his house and its contents to the State. He died in 1898 (not in 1902, as Bryan's dictionary has it), and in 1902 President Loubet authorised the Minister of Public Instruction to accept this rich legacy in the name of the republic. The artist was not known to stranger countries; indeed he was little known to his fellow-countrymen. Huysmans had cried him up in a revolutionary article; but to be praised by Huysmans was not always a certificate of fame. That critic was more successful in attracting public attention to Degas and Rops; and Moreau, a born eclectic, though without any intention of carrying water on both shoulders, was regarded suspiciously by his a.s.sociates at the Beaux-Arts, while the new men he praised, Courbet, Manet, Whistler, Monet, would hold no commerce with him. To this day opinion is divided as to his merits, he being called a _pasticheur_ or else a great painter-poet. Huysmans saw straight into the heart of the enigma--Gustave Moreau is poet and painter, a highly endowed man who had the pictorial vision in an unusual degree; whose brush responded to the ardent brain that directed it, the skilled hand that manipulated it; always responded, we say, except in the creation of life. His paintings are, strictly speaking, magnificent still-life. No vital current animates their airless, gorgeous, and sometimes cadaverous surfaces.

Like his friend Gustave Flaubert, with whom he had so much in common (at least on the Salammbo side of that writer), Moreau was born to affluence. His father was a government architect; he went early to the ecole des Beaux-Arts, and also studied under Picot. In 1852 he had a Pieta in the Salon (he was born April 6,1826), and followed it the next season with a Darius and a large canvas depicting an episode from the Song of Songs. The latter was purchased for the Dijon Museum. At the Universal Exhibition of 1855 he showed a monster work, The Athenians and the Minotaur. He withdrew from the public until 1864, when his Oedipus and the Sphinx set Paris talking. He exhibited until 1880 various canvases ill.u.s.trative of his studies in cla.s.sic literatures and received sundry medals. He was elected a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1888, replacing Boulanger. He was decorated in 1875 with the Legion of Honour and made _officier_ in 1883. When a member of the Inst.i.tute he had few friends, and as professor at the Beaux-Arts he disturbed the authorities by his warm praise of the Primitives. Altogether a career meagre in exciting incident, though singularly rich and significant on the intimate side.

A first visit to the museum proved startling. We had seen and admired the fifteen water-colours at the Luxembourg, among them the famous Apparition, but for the enormous number of pictures, oil, water-colour, pastels, drawings, cartons, studies, we were unprepared.

The bulky catalogue registers 1,132 pieces, and remember that while there are some unfinished canvases the amount of work executed--it is true during half a century--is nevertheless a testimony to Moreau's muscular and nervous energy, poetic conception, and intensity of concentration. Even his unfinished pictures are carried to a state of elaboration that would madden many modern improvisers in colour. Apart from sheer execution, there is a mult.i.tude of visions that must have been struggled for as Jacob wrestled with the Angel, for Moreau's was not a facile mind. He brooded over his dreams, he saw them before he gave them shape. He was familiar with all the Asiatic mythologies, and for him the pantheon of Christian saints must have been bone of his bone. The Oriental fantasy, the Buddhistic ideas, the fluent knowledge of Persian, Indian, and Byzantine histories, customs, and costumes sets us to wondering if this artist wasn't too cultured ever to be spontaneous. He recalls Prester John and his composite faiths.

There was besides the profound artistic erudition another stumbling-block to simplicity of style and unity of conception. Moreau began by imitating both Delacroix and Ingres. Now, such a precedure is manifestly dangerous. Huysmans speaks with contempt of promiscuity in the admiration of art. You can't admire Manet and Bastien-Lepage--"le Grevin de cabaret, le Siraudin de banlieue," he names the gentle Bastien; nor ought you to admire Manet and Moreau, we may add. And Huysmans did precisely what he preached against. Moreau was a man of wide intellectual interests. Devoid of the creative energy that can eject an individual style at one jet, as a volcano casts forth a rock, he attempted to aid nature by the process of an exquisite selection.

His taste was trained, his range wide--too wide, one is tempted to add; and thus by a conscious act of the will he originated an art that recalls an antique chryselephantine statue, a being rigid with precious gems, pasted with strange colours, something with mineral eyes without the breath of life--contemporary life--yet charged with its author's magnetism, bearing a charmed existence, that might come from a cold, black magic; monstrous, withal possessing a strange feverish beauty, as Flaubert's Salammbo is beautiful, in a remote, exotic way.

However, it is not fair to deny Moreau human sympathies. There are many of his paintings and drawings, notably the latter, that show him as possessing heart. His handling of his medium though heavy is never timid, and at times is masterly. Delacroix inspired many of his landscape backgrounds, as Ingres gave him the proportions of his female figures. You continually encounter variations of Ingres, the sweet, serene line, the tapering feet and hands. Some critics have discerned the toe forms of Perugino; but such mechanical measurements strain our notion of eclecticism. Certainly Moreau studied Bellini, Mantegna, and Da Vinci without ever attaining the freedom and distinction of any of them. His colour, too, is often hard and cold, though not in the sumptuous surfaces of his fabrics; there Venetian splendour is apparent. He can be fiery and insipid, metallic and morbid; his Orientalism is at times transposed from the work of his old friend the painter Cha.s.seriau into the key of a brilliant, if pompous rhetoric.

THE MOREAU MUSEUM

This herculean attempt at rea.s.sembling many styles in a unique style that would best express a certain frozen symbolism was the amiable mania his life long of Moreau. He compelled the spirits to come to his bidding. The moment you cross the threshold of his house the spell begins to work. It is dissipated by the daylight of Paris, but while you are under the roof of the museum you can't escape it. Nor is it as with Rossetti, a mystic opiate, or with Wiertz, a madman's delirious fancy. Moreau was a philosophic poet, and though he disclaimed being a "literary" painter, it is literature that is the mainspring of his elevated and decorative art. Open at random the catalogue full of quotations from the painter's pen and you encounter such t.i.tles as Leda and the Swan, treated with poetic restraint; Jupiter and Semele, Tyrtaeus Singing During the Combat, St. Elizabeth and the Miracle of the Roses, Lucretia and Tarquin, Pasiphae, the Triumph of Alexander, Salome, Dante and Virgil, Bathsheba, Jason and the Golden Fleece. All literatures were ransacked for themes. This painter suffered from the nostalgia of the ideal. When a subject coincided with his technical expression the result approximates perfection. Consider the Salome, so marvellously paraphrased in prose by Huysmans. The aquarelle in the Luxembourg is more plastic, more jewelled than the oil; Moreau often failed in the working-out of his ideas. Yet, never in art has a hallucination been thus set before us with such uncompromising reality. The sombre, luxurious _decor_, the voluptuous silhouette of the dancing girl, the hieratic pose of the Tetrarch, even the aureoled head of John, are forgotten in the contemplation of Salome, who is become cataleptic at sight of the apparition. Arrested her att.i.tude her flesh crisps with fear. Her face is contracted into a mask of death. The lascivious dance seems suspended in midair. To have painted so impossible a picture bears witness to the extraordinary quality of Moreau's complex art. Nor is the Salome his masterpiece. In the realm of the decorator he must be placed high. His genius is Byzantine.

Jupiter and Semele, with its colossal and acrian architectures, its gigantic figure of the G.o.d, from whose august head emanate spokes of light, is Byzantine of a wild luxuriousness in pattern and fancy.

Moreau excels in representing cataracts of nude women, ivory-toned of flesh, exquisite in proportion, set off by radiant jewels and wonder-breeding brocades. His skies are in violent ignition, or else as soft as Lydian airs. What could be more grandiose than the Triumph of Alexander (No. 70 in the catalogue)? Not John Martin or Piranesi excelled the Frenchman in bizarre architectural backgrounds. And the Chimeras, what a Baudelairian imagination! Baudelaire of the bitter heart! All luxury, all sin, all that is the shame and the glory of mankind is here, as in a tapestry dulled by the smoke of dreams; but as in his most sanguinary combats not a sound, not a motion comes from this canvas. When the slaves, lovely females, are thrown to the fish to fatten them for some Roman patrician's banquet, we admire the beauty of colour, the clear static style, the solidity of the architecture, but we are unmoved. If there is such a thing as disinterested art it is the claustral art of Moreau--which can be both perverse and majestic.

His versatility amazes. He did not always paint the same picture. The Christ Between Two Thieves is academic, yet attracts because the expression of the converted thief is remarkable. The Three Magi and Moses Within Sight of the Promised Land do not give one the fullest sense of satisfaction, as do The Daughters of Thespus or The Rape of Europa; yet they suggest what might be termed a tragic sort of decoration. Moreau is a painter who could have ill.u.s.trated Marlowe's fatuous line, "Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia," and superbly; or, "See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament." He is an exotic blossom on the stem of French art. He saw ivory, apes, and peac.o.c.ks, purple, gold, and the heavens aflame with a mystic message. He never translated that message, for his was an art of silence; but the painter of The Maiden with the Head of Orpheus, of Salome, of Jason and Medea, of Jupiter and Semele, will never fail to win the admiration and homage of those art lovers who yearn for dreams of vanished ages, who long to escape the commonplaces of the present.

Gustave Moreau will be their poet-painter by predilection.

Once in the streets of prosaic Paris he is as unreal as Rossetti or the Pre-Raphaelites (though their superior as one who could make palpable his visions). In the Louvre--where the _Salon Carre_ is little changed--Manet's Olympe, with her every-day seductiveness, resolves the phantasies of Moreau into thin air. Here is reality for you, familiar as it may be. It is wonderful how long it took French critics to discover that Manet was _un peintre de race_. He is very French in the French gallery where he now hangs. He shows the lineage of David, one of whose declamatory portraits with beady eyes hangs near by. He is simpler than David in his methods--Mr. C.S. Ricketts critically described David as possessing the mind of a policeman--and as a painter more greatly endowed. But Goya also peeps out from the Olympe. After seeing the Maja desnuda at the Prado you realise that Manet's trip to Madrid was not without important results. Between the n.o.ble lady who was the d.u.c.h.ess of Alba and the ign.o.ble girl called Olympe there is only the difference between the respective handlings of Goya and Manet.