Promenades of an Impressionist Part 9

This is what Camille Mauclair said of him at the time of his debut:

"An admirably skilful etcher, a draughtsman of keen vision, and a painter of curious character, who has in many ways forestalled the artists of to-day. Louis Legrand also shows to what extent Manet and Degas have revolutionised the art of ill.u.s.tration, in freeing the painters from obsolete laws and guiding them toward truth and frank psychological study. Legrand is full of them without resembling them.

We must not forget that besides the technical innovation [division of tones, study of complementary colours] impressionism has brought us novelty of composition, realism of character, and great liberty in the choice of subjects. From this point of view Rops himself, in spite of his symbolist tendencies, could not be cla.s.sed with any other group if it were not that any kind of cla.s.sification in art is useless and inaccurate. However that may be, Louis Legrand has signed some volumes with the most seductive qualities."

Gustave Kahn, the symbolist poet who was introduced to the English reading world in one of the most eloquent pages of George Moore, thinks that Legrand is frankly a symbolist. We side with Mauclair in not trying to pin this etcher down to any particular formula. He is anything he happens to will at the moment, symbolist, poet, and also shockingly frank at times. Take the plate with a pun for a t.i.tle, Le paing quotidien ("paing" is slang for "poing," a blow from the fist, and may also mean the daily bread). A masculine brute is with clinched fist about to give his unfortunate partner her daily drubbing. He is well dressed. His silk hat is shiny, his mustache curled in the true Adolphe fashion. His face is vile. The woman cries aloud and protects herself with her hands. In Marthe Baraquin, by Rosny senior, you will find the material for this picture, though Legrand found it years ago in the streets. Unpleasant, truly, yet a more potent sermon on man's cruelty to woman than may be found in a dozen preachments, fictions, or the excited outpourings at a feminist congress. Legrand presents the facts of the case without comment, except the irony--such dismal irony!--of the t.i.tle. In this he is the true pupil of Rops.

However, he does not revel long among such dreary slices of life. The Poe ill.u.s.trations are grotesque and shuddering, but after all make believe. The plate of The Black Cat piles horror on horror's head (literally, for the demon cat perches on the head of the corpse) and is, all said, pictorial melodrama. The Berenice ill.u.s.tration is, we confess, a little too much for the nerves, simply because in a masterly manner Legrand has exposed the most dreadful moment of the story (untold by Poe, who could be an artist in his tact of omission).

The dental smile of the cataleptic Berenice as her necrophilic cousin bends over the coffin is a testimony to a needle that in this instance matches Goya's and Rops's in its evocation of the horrific. We turn with relief to the ballet-girl series. The impression gained from this alb.u.m is that Legrand sympathises with, nay loves, his subject. Degas, the greater and more objective artist, nevertheless allows to sift through his lines an inextinguishable hatred of these girls who labour so long for so little; and Degas did hate them, as he hated all that was ugly in daily life, though he set forth this ugliness, this mediocrity, this hatred in terms of beautiful art. Legrand sees the ugliness, but he also sees the humanity of the _ballateuse_. She is a woman who is brought up to her profession with malice aforethought by her parents. These parents are usually noted for their cupidity. We need not read the witty history of the Cardinal family to discover this repellent fact. Legrand sketches the dancer from the moment when her mother brings her, a child, to undergo the ordeal of the first lesson.

The tender tot stands hesitating in the doorway; one hand while holding the door open seems to grasp it as the last barrier of defence that stands between her and the strange new world. She is attired in the cla.s.sical figurante's costume. Behind, evidently pushing her forward, is the grim guardian, a bony, forbidding female. Although you do not see them, it is an easy feat to imagine the roomful of girls and dancing master all staring at the new-comer. The expression on the child's face betrays it; instinctively, like the generality of embarra.s.sed little girls, her hand clasps her head. In less than a minute she will weep.

Another plate, L'ami des Danseuses, is charged with humanity. The violinist who plays for the ballet rehearsals sits resting, and facing him are two young dancers, also sitting, but stooping to relieve their strained spines and the tendons of their muscular legs. The old fellow is giving advice from the fulness of a life that has been not too easy. The girls are all attention. It is a genre bit of distinction.

Upon the technical virtuosity in which this etcher excels we shall not dwell. Some of his single figures are marvels. The economy of line, the ma.s.sing of lights and darks, the vitality he infuses into a woman who walks, a man who works in the fields, a child at its mother's breast, are not easily dealt with in a brief study. We prefer to note his more general qualities. His humour, whether in delineating a stupid soldier about to be exploited by camp followers, or in his Animales, is unforced. It can be Rabelaisian and it can be a record of simple animal life, as in the example with the above t.i.tle. A cow stands on a gra.s.sy sh.o.r.e; near by a stolid peasant girl sits slicing bread and eating it. Cow and girl, gra.s.s and sky and water are woven into one natural pattern. The humour inheres in several sly touches.

It is a comical Millet. Very Millet-like too is the large picture, Beau Soir, in which a field labourer bends over to kiss his wife, who has a child at her breast. A cow nuzzles her ap.r.o.n, the fourth member of this happy group. The Son of the Carpenter is another peasant study, but the transposition of the Holy Family to our century. A slight nimbus about the mother's head is the only indication that this is not a humble household somewhere in France. Maternal Joy, Mater Inviolata are specimens of a sane, lovely art which celebrate the joys, dolors, and exaltations of motherhood. We prefer this side of the art of Legrand to his studies of sinister jail-birds, _hetairai_, noctambules, high kickers, and private bars, the horrors of Parisian night life. Whatever he touches he vivifies. His leaping, audacious line is like the narrative prose of a Maupa.s.sant or a Joseph Conrad.

Every stroke tells.

His symbolical pictures please us least. They doubtless signify no end of profound things, yet to us they seem both exotic and puerile. We go back to the tiny dancers, tired to sleepiness, who sit on a sofa waiting to be called. Poor babies! Or to the plate ent.i.tled Douleur.

Or to the portraits of sweet English misses--as did Constantin Guys, Legrand has caught the precise English note--or any of the children pieces. If he knows the psychology of pa.s.sion, knows the most intimate detail of the daily life of _les filles_, Legrand is master too of the psychology of child life. This will endear him to English and American lovers of art, though it is only one of his many endowments. His wit keeps him from extremes, though some of his plates are not for puritans; his vivid sympathies prevent him from falling into the sterile eccentricities of so many of his contemporaries; if he is cynical he is by the same taken soft-hearted. His superb handling of his material, with a synthetic vision superadded, sets apart Louis Legrand in a profession which to-day is filled with farceurs and fakers and with too few artists by the grace of G.o.d.

GUYS, THE ILl.u.s.tRATOR

Pract.i.tioners of the n.o.ble art of ill.u.s.tration are, as we know, modest men, but no matter the degree of their modesty they are all distanced by the record in shyness still maintained by Constantin Guys. This artist was once a living protest against Goethe's a.s.sertion that only fools are modest, and the monument recently erected to his memory in Paris is provocation enough to bring him ferrying across the Styx to enter a disclaimer in the very teeth of his admirers. So set in his anonymity was he that Charles Baudelaire, his critical discoverer, was forced to write a long essay about his work and only refer to the artist as C.G. The poet relates that once when Thackeray spoke to Guys in a London newspaper office and congratulated him on his bold sketches in the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_, the fiery little man resented the praise as an outrage. Nor was this humility a pose. His life long he was morbidly nervous, as was Meryon, as was Cezanne; but he was neither half mad, like the great etcher, nor a cen.o.bite, as was the painter of Aix. Few have lived in the thick of life as did Guys.

To employ the phrase of Turgenieff, life, like gra.s.s, grew over his head. In the Crimean camps, on the Parisian boulevards, in London parks, Guys strolled, crayon in hand, a true reporter of things seen and an ardent lover of horses, soldiers, pretty women, and the mob.

Baudelaire called him the soldier-artist. He resembled in his restless wanderings Poe's man of the mult.i.tude, and at the end of a long life he still drew, as did Hokusai.

Who was he? Where did he receive his artistic training? Baudelaire did not tell, nor Theophile Gautier. He went through the Crimean campaign; he lived in the East, in London and Paris. Not so long ago the art critic Roger Marx, while stopping at Flushing, Holland, discovered his baptismal certificate, which reads thus: "Ernestus Adolphus Hyacinthus Constantinus Guys, born at Flushing December 3, 1805, of Elizabeth Betin and Francois Lazare Guys, Commissary of the French Marine." The baptism occurred January 26, 1806, and revealed the fact that he had for G.o.dfather an uncle who held a diplomatic position. Guys told his friends that his full family name was Guys de Sainte-Helene--which may have been an amiable weakness of the same order as that of Barbey d'Aurevilly and of Villiers de l'Isle Adam, both of whom boasted n.o.ble parentage. However, Guys was little given to talk of any sort. He was loquacious only with his pencil, and from being absolutely forgotten after the downfall of the Second Empire to-day every sc.r.a.p of his work is being collected, even fought for, by French and German collectors.

Yet when the Nadar collection was dispersed, June, 1909, in Paris, his aquarelles went for a few francs. Felix Feneon and several others now own complete sets. In New York there are a few specimens in the possession of private collectors, though the Lenox Library, as a rule rich in such prints, has only reproductions to show.

The essay of Charles Baudelaire, ent.i.tled Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, to be found in Volume III of his collected works (L'Art Romantique), remains thus far the standard reference study concerning Guys, though deficient in biographical details. Other critical studies are by Camille Mauclair, Roger Marx, Richard m.u.t.h.e.r, and George Grappe; and recently Elizabeth Luther Cary in a too short but admirably succinct article characterised the Guys method in this fashion: "He defined his forms sharply and delicately, and used within his bounding line the subtlest variation of light and shade. His workmanship everywhere is of the most elusive character, and he is a master of the art of reticence." Miss Cary further speaks of his "gentle gusto of line in motion, which lately has captivated us in the paintings of the Spaniard Sorolla, and long ago gave Botticelli and Carlo Crivelli the particular distinction they had in common."

Mauclair mentions "the most animated water-colour drawings of Guys, his curious vision of nervous elegance and expressive skill," and names it the impressionism of 1845, while Dr. m.u.t.h.e.r christened him the Verlaine of the crayon because, like Verlaine, he spent his life between the almshouse and a hospital, so said the German critic.

Furthermore, m.u.t.h.e.r believes it was no mere chance that made of Baudelaire his admirer; in both the decadent predominated--which is getting the cart before the horse. Rops, too, is recalled by Guys, who depicted the gay grisette of the faubourgs as well as the nocturnal pierreuse of the fortifications. "Guys exercised on Gavarni an influence which brought into being his Invalides du sentiment, his Lorettes vielles, and his Fourberies de femmes."

It is not quite fair to compare Guys with Rops, or indeed with either Gavarni or Daumier. These were the giants of French ill.u.s.tration at that epoch. Guys was more the skirmisher, the sharpshooter, the reporter of the moment, than a creative master of his art. The street or the battle-field was his atelier; speed and grace and fidelity his chief claims to fame. He never practised his art within the walls of academies; the material he so vividly dealt with was the stuff of life. The very absence of school in his ill.u.s.trations is their chief charm; a man of genius this, self-taught, and a dangerous precedent for fumblers or those of less executive ability. From the huge ma.s.s of his work being unearthed from year to year he may be said to have lived crayon in hand. He is the first of a long line of newspaper ill.u.s.trators. His profession was soldiering, and legend has it that he accompanied Byron to Missolonghi. The official career of his father enabled the youth to see much of the world--Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, and perhaps India. On returning to France he became an officer of dragoons and for some time led the life of a dandy and man about town. With his memory, of which extraordinary tales are told, he must have stored up countless films of impressions, all of which were utilised years later.

In 1845 we find him installed at Paris, though no longer in the army.

Then it was he began to design. He became contributor to many periodicals, among the rest the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_ and _Punch_.

For the former journal he went to the Crimean war as accredited art correspondent. The portfolio containing the Crimean set is now most sought for by his admirers. He is said to have originated the expression "taken on the spot," in the t.i.tle of one of his instantaneous sketches. Few draughtsmen could boast his sure eye and manual dexterity. The Balaklava ill.u.s.tration is as striking in its way as Tennyson's lines, though containing less of poetic heroism and more ugly realism. Like the trained reporter that he was, Guys followed a battle, recording the salient incidents of the engagement, not overemphasising the ghastliness of the carnage, as did Callot or Goya or Raffet, but telling the truth as he saw it, with a phlegm more British and German than French. Though he had no Dutch blood in his veins, he was, like Huysmans, more the man of Amsterdam than the man of Paris. He noted the changing and shocking scenes of hospital life, and sympathy without sentimentality drops from his pen. He is drily humorous as he shows us some plumaged General peac.o.c.king on foot, or swelling with Napoleonic pride as he caracoles by on his horse. And such horses! Without a hint of the photographic realism of a Muybridge and his successors, Guys evokes vital horses and riders, those seen by the normal vision. The witching movement of beautiful Arabian steeds has not had many such sympathetic interpreters.

In Turkey he depicted episodes of daily life, of the courts of the Sublime Porte itself, of the fete of Baram, which closes the fast of Ramadan. His Turkish women are not all houris, but they bear the stamp of close study. They are pretty, indolent, brainless creatures. In his most hurried crayons, pen-and-ink sketches, and aquarelles Guys is ever interesting. He has a magnetic touch that arrests attention and atones for technical shortcomings. Abbreviation is his watchword; his drawings are a species of shorthand notations made at red-hot tempo, yet catching the soul of a situation. He repeats himself continually, but, as M. Grappe says, is never monotonous. In love with movement, with picturesque ma.s.sing, and broad simple colour schemes, he naturally gravitated to battle-fields. In Europe society out of doors became his mania. Rotten Row, in the Bois, at Brighton or at Baden-Baden, the sinuous fugues of his pencil reveal to succeeding generations how the great world once enjoyed itself or bored itself to death. No wonder Thackeray admired Guys. They were kindred spirits; both recognised and portrayed the sn.o.b mundane.

As he grew older Guys became an apparition in the life of Paris. The smash-up of the Empire destroyed the beloved world he knew so well.

Poor, his princ.i.p.al pleasure was in memory; if he couldn't actually enjoy the luxury of the rich he could reproduce its images on his drawing-pad. The whilom dandy and friend of Baudelaire went about dressed in a shabby military frock-coat. He had no longer a nodding acquaintance with the fashionable lions of Napoleon the Little's reign, yet he abated not his haughty strut, his glacial politeness to all comers, nor his daily promenade in the Bois. A Barmecide feast this watching the pleasures of others more favoured, though Guys did not waste the fruits of his observation. At sixty-five he began to go down-hill. His habits had never been those of a prudent citizen, and as his earning powers grew less some imp of the perverse entered his all too solitary life. With this change of habits came a change of theme. Henceforth he drew _filles_, the outcasts, the scamps and convicts and the poor wretches of the night. He is now a forerunner of Toulouse-Lautrec and an entire school. This side of his career probably caused Dr. m.u.t.h.e.r to compare him with Paul Verlaine.

Absinthe, the green fairy of so many poets and artists, was no stranger to Guys.

In 1885, after dining with Nadar, his most faithful friend, Guys was run over in the Rue du Havre and had his legs crushed. He was taken to the Maison Dubois, where he lived eight years longer, dying at the venerable age of eighty-seven, though far from being a venerable person. Astonishing vitality! He did not begin to draw, that is, for a living, until past forty. His method of work was simplicity itself, declare those who watched him at work. He seemingly improvised his aquarelles; his colour, sober, delicate, was broadly washed in; his line, graceful and modulated, does not suggest the swiftness of his execution. He could be rank and vulgar, and he was gentle as a refined child that sees the spectacle of life for the first time. The bitterness of Baudelaire's flowers of evil he escaped until he was in senile decadence. In the press of active life he registered the shock of conflicting arms, the shallow pride of existence and the mere joy of living, all in a sane manner that will ever endear him to lovers of art.

George Moore tells the following anecdote of Degas: Somebody was saying he did not like Daumier, and Degas preserved silence for a long while. "If you were to show Raphael," he said at last, "a Daumier, he would admire it; he would take off his hat; but if you were to show him a Cabanel, he would say with a sigh, 'That is my fault.'"

If you could show Raphael a croquis by Constantin Guys he would probably look the other way, but Degas would certainly admire and buy the drawing.

XI. IMPRESSIONISM

I - MONET

The impressionists claim as their common ancestors Claude Lorraine, Watteau, Turner, Monticelli. Watteau, Latour, Largilliere, Fragonard, Saint-Aubin, Moreau, and Eisen are their sponsors in the matters of design, subject, realism, study of life, new conceptions of beauty and portraiture. Mythology, allegory, historic themes, the neo-Greek and the academic are under the ban--above all, the so-called "grand style." Impressionism has actually elevated genre painting to the position occupied by those vast, empty, pompous, frigid, smoky, cla.s.sic pieces of the early nineteenth century. However, it must not be forgotten that modern impressionism is only a new technique, a new method of execution--we say new, though that is not exactly the case.

The home of impressionism is in the East; it may be found in the vivid patterns woven in Persia or in old j.a.pan. In its latest avatar it is the expression of contemporaneous reality. Therein lies its true power. The artist who turns his face only to the past--his work will never be anything but an echo. To depict the faces and things and pen the manners of the present is the task of great painters and novelists. Actualists alone count in the future. The mills of the antique grind swiftly--like the rich, they will be always with us--but they only grind out imitations; and from pseudo-cla.s.sic marbles and pseudo-"beautiful" pictures may Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies, deliver us.

That able and sympathetic writer D.S. MacColl has tersely summed up in his Vision of the Century the difference between the old and new manner of seeing things. "The old vision had beaten out three separate acts--the determination of the edges and limits of things, the shadings and the modellings of the s.p.a.ces in between with black and white, and the tintings of those s.p.a.ces with their local colour. The new vision that had been growing up among the landscape painters simplifies as well as complicates the old. For purposes of a.n.a.lysis it sees the world as a mosaic of patches of colour, such and such a hue, such and such a tone, such and such a shape... The new a.n.a.lysis looked first for colour and for a different colour in each patch of shade or light. The old painting followed the old vision by its three processes of drawing the contours, modelling the chiaroscura in dead colour, and finally in colouring this black-and-white preparation. The new a.n.a.lysis left the contours to be determined by the junction, more or less fused, of the colour patches, instead of rigidly defining them as they are known to be defined when seen near at hand or felt... 'Local colour' in light or shade becomes different not only in tone but in hue."

To the layman who asked, "What is impressionism?" Mauclair has given the most succinct answer in his book L'Impressionisme: "In nature," he declares, "no colour exists by itself. The colouring of the object is pure illusion; the only creative source of colour is the sunlight, which envelops all things and reveals them, according to the hours, with infinite modifications... The idea of distance, of perspective, of volume is given us by darker or lighter colours; this is the sense of values; a value is the degree of light or dark intensity which permits our eyes to comprehend that one object is further or nearer than another. And as painting is not and cannot be the imitation of nature, but merely her artificial interpretation, since it has only at its disposal two out of three dimensions, the values are the only means that remain for expressing depth on a flat surface. Colour is therefore the procreatrix of design... Colours vary with the intensity of light... Local colour is an error; a leaf is not green, a tree trunk is not brown... According to the time of day, _i. e._, according to the greater or smaller inclination of the rays (scientifically called the angle of incidence), the green of the leaf and the brown of the tree are modified... The composition of the atmosphere... is the real subject of the picture... Shadow is not absence of light, but light of a different quality and of a different value. Shadow is not part of the landscape where light ceases, but where it is subordinated to a light which appears to us more intense. In the shadow the rays of the spectrum vibrate with a different speed. Painting should therefore try to discover here, as in the light parts, the play of the atoms of solar light, instead of representing shadows with ready-made tones composed of bitumen and black... In a picture representing an interior the source of light [windows] may not be indicated; the light circulating, circling around the picture, will then be composed of the _reflections_ of rays whose source is invisible, and all the objects, acting as mirrors for these reflections, will consequently influence each other. Their colours will affect each other even if the surfaces be dull. A red vase placed upon a blue carpet will lead to a very subtle but mathematically exact exchange between this blue and this red; and this exchange of luminous waves will create between the two colours a tone of reflections composed of both. These composite reflections will form a scale of tones complementary of the two princ.i.p.al colours.

"The painter will have to paint with only the seven colours of the solar spectrum and discard all the others;... he will, furthermore, instead of composing mixtures on his palette, place upon his canvas touches of none but the seven colours juxtaposed [Claude Monet has added black and white] and leave the individual rays of each of these colours to blend at a certain distance, so as to act like sunlight upon the eye of the beholder." This is called _dissociation_ of tones; and here is a new convention; why banish all save the spectrum? We paint nature, not the solar spectrum.

Claude Monet has been thus far the most successful pract.i.tioner of impressionism; this by reason of his extraordinary a.n.a.lytical power of vision and native genius rather than the researches of Helmholtz, Chevreul, and Rood. They gave him his scientific formulas after he had worked out the problems. He studied Turner in London, 1870; then his manner changed. He had been a devoted pupil of Eugene Boudin and could paint the discreet, pearly gray seascapes of his master. But Turner and Watteau and Monticelli modified his style, changed his way of envisaging the landscape. Not Edouard Manet but Claude Monet was the initiator of the impressionistic movement in France, and after witnessing the rout and confusion that followed in its wake one is tempted to misquote Nietzsche (who said that the first and only Christian died on the cross) and boldly a.s.sert that there has been but one impressionist; his name, Monet. "He has arrived at painting by means of the infinitely varied juxtaposition of a quant.i.ty of colour spots which dissociate the tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of objects through the arabesque of their vibrations." How his landscapes shimmer with the heat of a summer day! Truly, you can say of these pictures that "the dawn comes up like thunder." How his fogs, wet and clinging, seem to be the first real fogs that ever made misty a canvas! What hot July nights, with few large stars, has Monet not painted! His series of hayricks, cathedrals, the Thames are precious notations of contemporary life; they state facts in terms of exquisite artistic value; they resume an epoch. It is therefore no surprise to learn that in 1874 Monet gave the name (so variously abused) to the entire movement when he exhibited a water piece on the Boulevard des Capucines ent.i.tled Impression: Soleil Levant. That t.i.tle became a catchword usually employed in a derisive manner. Monet earlier had resented the intrusion of a man with a name so like his, but succ.u.mbed to the influence of Monet. One thing can no longer be controverted--Claude Monet is the greatest landscape and marine painter of the second half of the last century. Perhaps time may alter this limit clause.

What Turgenieff most condemned in his great contemporary, Dostoevsky--if the gentle Russian giant ever condemned any one--was Feodor Mikhailovitch's taste for "psychological mole runs"; an inveterate burrowing into the dark places of humanity's soul. Now, if there is a dark spot in a highly lighted subject it is the question, Who was the first impressionist? According to Charles de Kay, Whistler once told him that he, James the b.u.t.terfly, began the movement; which is a capital and characteristic anecdote, especially if one recalls Whistler's boast made to a young etcher as to the initiative of Corot.

Whistler practically said: "Before Corot was, I am!" And he adduced certain canvases painted with the misty-edged trees long before--but why continue? Whistler didn't start Corot--apart from the chronological difficulties in the way--any more than Courbet and Manet started Whistler; yet both these painters played important roles in the American master's art. So let us accept Mauclair's dictum as to Claude Monet's priority in the field of impressionism. Certainly he attained his marked style before he met Manet. Later he modified his own paint to show his sympathy with the new school. Monet went to Watteau, Constable, Monticelli for his ideas, and in London, about 1870, he studied Turner with an interest that finally bordered on worship. And why not? In Turner, at the National Gallery, you may find the principles of impressionism carried to extravagant lengths, and years before Monet. Consider Rain, Steam and Speed--the Great Western Railway, that vision of a locomotive dashing across a bridge in chromatic chaos. Or the Sea Piece in the James Orrock collection--a welter of crosshatchings in variegated hues wherein any school of impressionism from Watteau's Embarkment to Monet's latest manner or the _pointillisme_ of Signac and Seurat may be recognised. And there is a water-colour of Turner's in the National Gallery called Honfleur, which has antic.i.p.ated many traits of Boudin and the Manet we know when he had not forgotten Eugene Boudin's influence.

Let us enjoy our Monet without too many "mole runs." As De Kay pointed out, it was not necessary for Monet to go to London to see Constables.

In the Louvre he could gaze upon them at leisure, also upon Bonington; not to mention the Venetians and such a Dutchman as Vermeer. It is therefore doubly interesting to study the Monets at Durand-Ruel's.

There are twenty-seven, and they range as far back as 1872, Promenade a Trouville, and come down to the Charing Cross Bridge, 1904, and the two Waterloo Bridge effects, 1903. It is a wide range in sentiment and technique. The Mills in Holland of 1874 is as cool and composed as Boudin. Sincerity and beauty are in the picture--for we do not agree with those who see in Monet only an unemotional recorder of variations in light and tone. He can compose a background as well as any of his contemporaries, and an important fact is overlooked when Monet is jumbled indiscriminately with a lot of inferior men. Monet knew how to _draw_ before he handled pigment. Some lansdcape painters do not; many impressionists trust to G.o.d and their palette-knife; so the big men are sufferers. Monet, it may be noted, essayed many keys; his compositions are not nearly so monotonous as has been a.s.serted. What does often exhaust the optic nerve is the violent impinging thereon of his lights. He has an eagle eye, we have not. Wagner had the faculty of attention developed to such an extraordinary pitch that with our more normal and weaker nerves he soon exhausts us in his flights. Too much Monet is like too much Wagner or too much sunshine.

The breezy effect with the poplars painted flat is an example very unlike Monet. The church of Varengeville at Dieppe (1880) is a cla.s.sic specimen; so is the Pourville beach (1882). What delicate greens in the Spring (1885)! What fine distance, an ocean view, in the Pourville picture! Or, if you care for subdued harmonies, there is the ice floe at Vetheuil (1881).

The London pictures tell of the older artist--not so vigorous, a vein of tenderness beginning to show instead of his youthful blazing optimism. Claude Monet must have had a happy life--he is still a robust man painting daily in the fields, leading the glorious life of a landscapist, one of the few romantic professions in this prosaic age. Not so vain, so irritable as either Manet or Whistler, Monet's nerves have never prompted him to extravagances. Backbiters declare that Monet is suffering from an optical degeneration--poor, overworked word! Monet sees better, sees more keenly than his fellow-men. What a misfortune! Ibsen and Wagner suffered, too, from superior brains. If Monet ever suffered seriously from a danger to his art it was--success. He was abused in the beginning, but not as severely as Manet. But success perched on Monet's palette. His pictures never seem to suggest any time but high noon, in spirit, at least. And he is never sad. Yet, is there anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of sadness?

In his very valuable contribution to the history of the cause, Theodore Duret, the biographer and friend of Whistler and Manet has in his Les Peintres Impressionistes held the scales very much in favour of Manet's priority in the field over Monet. It is true that in 1863 Manet had drawn upon his head the thunderous wrath of Paris by exhibiting his Dejeuner sur l'Herbe and Olympe--by no means a representative effort of the painter's genius, despite its diabolic cleverness. (It reveals a profound study of t.i.tian, Cranach, and Goya.) But his vision was in reality synthetic, not a.n.a.lytic; he was a primitive; he belongs to the family of Velasquez, Ribera, Goya. He studied Hals--and with what glorious results in Le Bon Bock! He manipulated paint like an "old master" and did astounding things with the higher tones of the colour scale. He was not an impressionist until he met Monet. Then in audacity he outstripped his a.s.sociates.

Discouraged by critical attacks, his courage had been revived by Charles Baudelaire, who fought for Richard Wagner as well as for Poe and Manet. To the painter the poet scornfully wrote: "You complain about attacks? But are you the first to endure them? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by derision. And in order not to make you too proud, I must tell you that they are models, each in his own way, and in a very rich world, while you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art." Sinister and disquieting that last phrase, and for those who see in impressionism the decadence of painting (because of the predominance given to the parts over the whole) it is a phrase prophetic.

Manet is a cla.s.sic. His genuine power--technically speaking--lies in the broad, sabre-like strokes of his brush and not in the niggling _taches_ of the impressionists--of which the _reuctio ad absurdum_ is pointillisme. He lays on his pigments in sweeping slashes and his divisions are large. His significance for us does not alone reside in his consummate mastery of form and colour, but in his forthright expression of the life that hummed about him. He is as actual as Hals.

Study that Boy With the Sword at the Metropolitan Museum--is there anything superficial about it? It is Spanish, the Spain of Velasquez, in its beautiful thin, clear, flat painting, its sober handling of values. The truth is that Manet dearly loved a fight, and being _chef d'ecole_, he naturally drifted to the impressionists' camp. And it is significant that Duret did not give this virile spirit a place in his new volume, confining the estimate of his genius to the preface.

Mauclair, on the contrary, includes Manet's name in his more comprehensive and more scientific study, as he also includes the name of Edgar Degas--Degas, who is a latter-day Ingres, plus colour and a new psychology.

The t.i.tle of impressionism has been a misleading one. If Degas is an impressionist, pray what then is Monet? p.i.s.sarro, Sisley, Cezanne are impressionists, and in America there is no impropriety in attaching this handle to the works of Twachtmann, J. Alden Weir, W.L. Metcalf, Childe Ha.s.sam, Robert Henri, Robert Reid, Ernest Lawson, Paul Cornoyer, Colin Campbell Cooper, Prendergast, Luks, and Glackens. But Manet, Degas! It would have been a happier invention to have called the 1877 group independents; independent they were, each man pursuing his own rainbow. We may note an identical confusion in the mind of the public regarding the Barbizon school. Never was a group composed of such dissimilar spirits. Yet people talk about Millet _and_ Breton, Corot _and_ Daubigny, Rousseau _and_ Dupre. They still say Goethe _and_ Schiller, Beethoven _and_ Mozart, Byron _and_ Sh.e.l.ley. It is the result of mental inertia, this coupling of such widely disparate temperaments.

Nevertheless, divided tones and "screaming" palette do not always a picture make; mediocrity loves to mask itself behind artistic innovations. For the world at large impressionism spells improvisation--an easy-going, slatternly, down-at-the-heel process, facile as well as fact.i.tious. Albert Wolff must have thought these things when he sat for his portrait to Manet. His surprise was great when the artist demanded as many sittings as would have done the painstaking Bonnat. Whistler shocked Ruskin when he confessed to having painted a nocturne in two days, but with a lifetime experience in each stroke of the brush. Whistler was a swift worker, and while he claimed the honour of being the originator of impressionism--didn't he "originate" Velasquez?--he really belongs to the preceding generation.

He was impressionistic, if you will, yet not an impressionist. He was j.a.panese and Spanish, never Watteau, Monticelli, Turner, or Monet.