French Art.
by W. C. Brownell.
I
CLa.s.sIC PAINTING
I
More than that of any other modern people French art is a national expression. It epitomizes very definitely the national aesthetic judgment and feeling, and if its manifestations are even more varied than are elsewhere to be met with, they share a certain character that is very salient. Of almost any French picture or statue of any modern epoch one"s first thought is that it is French. The national quite overshadows the personal quality. In the field of the fine arts, as in nearly every other in which the French genius shows itself, the results are evident of an intellectual co-operation which insures the development of a common standard and tends to subordinate idiosyncrasy. The fine arts, as well as every other department of mental activity, reveal the effect of that social instinct which is so much more powerful in France than it is anywhere else, or has ever been elsewhere, except possibly in the case of the Athenian republic. Add to this influence that of the intellectual as distinguished from the sensuous instinct, and one has, I think, the key to this salient characteristic of French art which strikes one so sharply and always as so plainly French. As one walks through the French rooms at the Louvre, through the galleries of the Luxembourg, through the unending rooms of the _Salon_ he is impressed by the splendid competence everywhere displayed, the high standard of culture universally attested, by the overwhelming evidence that France stands at the head of the modern world aesthetically--but not less, I think, does one feel the absence of imagination, opportunity, of spirituality, of poetry in a word. The French themselves feel something of this. At the great Exposition of 1889 no pictures were so much admired by them as the English, in which appeared, even to an excessive degree, just the qualities in which French art is lacking, and which less than those of any other school showed traces of the now all but universal influence of French art. The most distinct and durable impression left by any exhibition of French pictures is that the French aesthetic genius is at once admirably artistic and extremely little poetic.
It is a corollary of the predominance of the intellectual over the sensuous instinct that the true should be preferred to the beautiful, and some French critics are so far from denying this preference of French art that they express pride in it, and, indeed, defend it in a way that makes one feel slightly amateurish and fanciful in thinking of beauty apart from truth. A walk through the Louvre, however, suffices to restore one"s confidence in his own convictions. The French rooms, at least until modern periods are reached, are a demonstration that in the sphere of aesthetics science does not produce the greatest artists--that something other than intelligent interest and technical accomplishment are requisite to that end, and that system is fatal to spontaneity. M.
Eugene Veron is the mouthpiece of his countrymen in a.s.serting absolute beauty to be an abstraction, but the practice of the ma.s.s of French painters is, by comparison with that of the great Italians and Dutchmen, eloquent of the lack of poetry that results from a scepticism of abstractions. The French cla.s.sic painters--and the cla.s.sic-spirit, in spite of every force that the modern world brings to its destruction, persists wonderfully in France--show little absorption, little delight in their subject. Contrasted with the great names in painting they are eclectic and traditional, too purely expert. They are too cultivated to invent. Selection has taken the place of discovery in their inspiration.
They are addicted to the rational and the regulated. Their substance is never sentimental and incommunicable. Their works have a distinctly professional air. They distrust what cannot be expressed; what can only be suggested does not seem to them worth the trouble of trying to conceive. Beside the world of mystery and the wealth of emotion forming an imaginative penumbra around such a design as Raphael"s Vision of Ezekiel, for instance, Poussin"s treatment of essentially the same subject is a diagram.
On the other hand, qualities intimately a.s.sociated with these defects are quite as noticeable in the old French rooms of the Louvre.
Clearness, compactness, measure, and balance are evident in nearly every canvas. Everywhere is the air of reserve, of intellectual good-breeding, of avoidance of extravagance. That French painting is at the head of contemporary painting, as far and away incontestably it is, is due to the fact that it alone has kept alive the traditions of art which, elsewhere than in France, have given place to other and more material ideals. From the first its pract.i.tioners have been artists rather than poets, have possessed, that is to say, the constructive rather than the creative, the organizing rather than the imaginative temperament, but they have rarely been perfunctory and never common. French painting in its preference of truth to beauty, of intelligence to the beatific vision, of form to color, in a word, has nevertheless, and perhaps _a fortiori_, always been the expression of ideas. These ideas almost invariably have been expressed in rigorous form--form which at times fringes the lifelessness of symbolism. But even less frequently, I think, than other peoples have the French exhibited in their painting that contentment with painting in itself that is the dry rot of art.
With all their addiction to truth and form they have followed this ideal so systematically that they have never suffered it to become mechanical, merely _formal_--as is so often the case elsewhere (in England and among ourselves, everyone will have remarked) in instances where form has been mainly considered and where sentiment happens to be lacking. Even when care for form is so excessive as to imply an absence of character, the form itself is apt to be so distinguished as itself to supply the element of character, and character consequently particularly refined and immaterial. And one quality is always present: elegance is always evidently aimed at and measurably achieved. Native or foreign, real or fact.i.tious as the inspiration of French cla.s.sicism may be, the sense of style and of that perfection of style which we know as elegance is invariably noticeable in its productions. So that, we may say, from Poussin to Puvis de Chavannes, from Clouet to Meissonier, _taste_--a refined and cultivated sense of what is sound, estimable, competent, reserved, satisfactory, up to the mark, and above all, elegant and distinguished--has been at once the arbiter and the stimulus of excellence in French painting. It is this which has made the France of the past three centuries, and especially the France of to-day--as we get farther and farther away from the great art epochs--both in amount and general excellence of artistic activity, comparable only with the Italy of the Renaissance and the Greece of antiquity.
Moreover, it is an error to a.s.sume, because form in French painting appeals to us more strikingly than substance, that French painting is lacking in substance. In its perfection form appeals to every appreciation; it is in art, one may say, the one universal language. But just in proportion as form in a work of art approaches perfection, or universality, just in that proportion does the substance which it clothes, which it expresses, seem unimportant to those to whom this substance is foreign. Some critics have even fancied, for example, that Greek architecture and sculpture--the only Greek art we know anything about--were chiefly concerned with form, and that the ideas behind their perfection of form were very simple and elementary ideas, not at all comparable in complexity and elaborateness with those that confuse and distinguish the modern world. When one comes to French art it is still more difficult for us to realize that the ideas underlying its expression are ideas of import, validity, and attachment. The truth is largely that French ideas are not our ideas; not that the French who--except possibly the ancient Greeks and the modern Germans--of all peoples in the world are, as one may say, addicted to ideas, are lacking in them. Technical excellence is simply the inseparable accompaniment, the outward expression of the kind of aesthetic ideas the French are enamoured of. Their substance is not our substance, but while it is perfectly legitimate for us to criticise their substance it is idle to maintain that they are lacking in substance. If we call a painting by Poussin pure style, a composition of David merely the perfection of convention, one of M. Rochegrosse"s dramatic canva.s.ses the rhetoric of technic and that only, we miss something. We miss the idea, the substance, behind these varying expressions. These are not the less real for being foreign to us. They are less spiritual and more material, less poetic and spontaneous, more schooled and traditional than we like to see a.s.sociated with such adequacy of expression, but they are not for that reason more mechanical. They are ideas and substance that lend themselves to technical expression a thousand times more readily than do ours. They are, in fact, exquisitely adapted to technical expression.
The substance and ideas which we desire fully expressed in color, form, or words are, indeed, very exactly in proportion to our esteem of them, inexpressible. We like hints of the unutterable, suggestions of significance that is mysterious and import that is incalculable. The light that "never was on sea or land" is the illumination we seek. The "Heaven," not the atmosphere that "lies about us" in our mature age as "in our infancy," is what appeals most strongly to our subordination of the intellect and the senses to the imagination and the soul. Nothing with us very deeply impresses the mind if it does not arouse the emotions. Naturally, thus, we are predisposed insensibly to infer from French articulateness the absence of substance, to a.s.sume from the triumphant facility and felicity of French expression a certain insignificance of what is expressed. Inferences and a.s.sumptions based on temperament, however, almost invariably have the vice of superficiality, and it takes no very prolonged study of French art for candor and intelligence to perceive that if its substance is weak on the sentimental, the emotional, the poetic, the spiritual side, it is exceptionally strong in rhetorical, artistic, cultivated, aesthetically elevated ideas, as well as in that technical excellence which alone, owing to our own inexpertness, first strikes and longest impresses us.
When we have no ideas to express, in a word, we rarely save our emptiness by any appearance of clever expression. When a Frenchman expresses ideas for which we do not care, with which we are temperamentally out of sympathy, we a.s.sume that his expression is equally empty. Matthew Arnold cites a pa.s.sage from Mr. Palgrave, and comments significantly on it, in this sense. "The style," exclaims Mr.
Palgrave, "which has filled London with the dead monotony of Gower or Harley Streets, or the pale commonplace of Belgravia, Tyburnia, and Kensington; which has pierced Paris and Madrid with the feeble frivolities of the Rue Rivoli and the Strada de Toledo." Upon which Arnold observes that "the architecture of the Rue Rivoli expresses show, splendor, pleasure, unworthy things, perhaps, to express alone and for their own sakes, but it expresses them; whereas, the architecture of Gower Street and Belgravia merely expresses the impotence of the architect to express anything."
And in characterizing the turn for poetry in French painting as comparatively inferior, it will be understood at once, I hope, that I am comparing it with the imaginativeness of the great Italians and Dutchmen, and with Rubens and Holbein and Turner, and not a.s.serting the supremacy in elevated sentiment over Claude and Corot, Chardin, and Cazin, of the Royal Academy, or the New York Society of American Artists. And so far as an absolute rather than a comparative standard may be applied in matters so much too vast for any hope of adequate treatment according to either method, we ought never to forget that in criticising French painting, as well as other things French, we are measuring it by an ideal that now and then we may appreciate better than Frenchmen, but rarely ill.u.s.trate as well.
II
Furthermore, the qualities and defects of French painting--the predominance in it of national over individual force and distinction, its turn for style, the kind of ideas that inspire its substance, its cla.s.sic spirit in fine--are explained hardly less by its historic origin than by the character of the French genius itself. French painting really began in connoisseurship, one may say. It arose in appreciation, that faculty in which the French have always been, and still are, unrivalled. Its syntheses were based on elements already in combination.
It originated nothing. It was eclectic at the outset. Compared with the slow and suave evolution of Italian art, in whose earliest dawn its borrowed Byzantine painting served as a stimulus and suggestion to original views of natural material rather than as a model for imitation and modification, the painting that sprang into existence, Minerva-like, in full armor, at Fontainebleau under Francis I, was of the essence of artificiality. The court of France was far more splendid than, and equally enlightened with, that of Florence. The monarch felt his t.i.tle to Maecena.s.ship as justified as that of the Medici. He created, accordingly, French painting out of hand--I mean, at all events, the French painting that stands at the beginning of the line of the present tradition. He summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Rossi, Primaticcio, and founded the famous Fontainebleau school. Of necessity it was Italianate. It had no Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael behind it. Italian was the best art going; French appreciation was educated and keen; its choice between evolution and adoption was inevitable. It was very much in the position in which American appreciation finds itself to-day. Like our own painters, the French artists of the Renaissance found themselves familiar with masterpieces wholly beyond their power to create, and produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed the incomparable advantage of arriving at their artistic apogee through natural stages of growth, beginning with impulse and culminating in expertness.
The situation had its advantages as well as its drawbacks, certainly. It saved French painting an immense amount of fumbling, of laborious experimentation, of crudity, of failure. But it stamped it with an essential artificiality from which it did not fully recover for over two hundred years, until, insensibly, it had built up its own traditions and gradually brought about its own inherent development. In a word, French painting had an intellectual rather than an emotional origin. Its first pract.i.tioners were men of culture rather than of feeling; they were inspired by the artistic, the constructive, the fashioning, rather than the poetic, spirit. And so evident is this inclination in even contemporary French painting--and indeed in all French aesthetic expression--that it cannot be ascribed wholly to the circ.u.mstances mentioned. The circ.u.mstances themselves need an explanation, and find it in the const.i.tution itself of the French mind, which (owing, doubtless, to other circ.u.mstances, but that is extraneous) is fundamentally less imaginative and creative than co-ordinating and constructive.
Naturally thus, when the Italian influence wore itself out, and the Fontainebleau school gave way to a more purely national art; when France had definitely entered into her Italian heritage and had learned the lessons that Holland and Flanders had to teach her as well; when, in fine, the art of the modern world began, it was an art of grammar, of rhetoric. Certainly up to the time of Gericault painting in general held itself rather pedantically aloof from poetry. Claude, Chardin, what may be called the ill.u.s.trated _vers de societe_ of the Louis Quinze painters--of Watteau and Fragonard--even Prudhon, did little to change the prevailing color and tone. Claude"s art is, in manner, thoroughly cla.s.sic. His _personal_ influence was perhaps first felt by Corot. He stands by himself, at any rate, quite apart. He was the first thoroughly original French painter, if indeed one may not say he was the first thoroughly original modern painter. He has been a.s.signed to both the French and Italian schools--to the latter by Gallophobist critics, however, through a partisanship which in aesthetic matters is ridiculous; there was in his day no Italian school for him to belong to. The truth is that he pa.s.sed a large part of his life in Italy and that his landscape is Italianate. But more conspicuously still, it is ideal--ideal in the sense intended by Goethe in saying, "There are no landscapes in nature like those of Claude." There are not, indeed.
Nature has been trans.m.u.ted by Claude"s alchemy with lovelier results than any other painter--save always Corot, shall I say?--has ever achieved. Witness the pastorals at Madrid, in the Doria Gallery at Rome, the "Dido and aeneas" at Dresden, the sweet and serene superiority of the National Gallery canvases over the struggling compet.i.tion manifest in the Turners juxtaposed to them through the unlucky ambition of the great English painter. Mr. Ruskin says that Claude could paint a small wave very well, and acknowledges that he effected a revolution in art, which revolution "consisted mainly in setting the sun in heavens." "Mainly" is delightful, but Claude"s excellence consists in his ability to paint visions of loveliness, pictures of pure beauty, not in his skill in observing the drawing of wavelets or his happy thought of painting sunlight. Mr. George Moore observes ironically of Mr. Ruskin that his grotesque depreciation of Mr. Whistler--"the lot of critics" being "to be remembered by what they have failed to understand"--"will survive his finest prose pa.s.sage." I am not sure about Mr. Whistler. Contemporaries are too near for a perfect critical perspective. But a.s.suredly Mr.
Ruskin"s failure to perceive Claude"s point of view--to perceive that Claude"s aim and Stanfield"s, say, were quite different; that Claude, in fact, was at the opposite pole from the botanist and the geologist whom Mr. Ruskin"s "reverence for nature" would make of every landscape painter--is a failure in appreciation than to have shown which it would be better for him as a critic never to have been born. It seems hardly fanciful to say that the depreciation of Claude by Mr. Ruskin, who is a landscape painter himself, using the medium of words instead of pigments, is, so to speak, professionally unjust.
"Go out, in the springtime, among the meadows that slope from the sh.o.r.es of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains. There, mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the gra.s.s grows deep and free; and as you follow the winding mountain paths, beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom--paths that forever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping down in scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here and there with new-mown heaps, filling the air with fainter sweetness--look up toward the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll silently into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines."
Claude"s landscape is not Swiss, but if it were it would awaken in the beholder a very similar sensation to that aroused in the reader of this famous pa.s.sage. Claude indeed painted landscape in precisely this way.
He was perhaps the first--though priority in such matters is trivial beside pre-eminence--who painted _effects_ instead of _things_. Light and air were his material, not ponds and rocks and clouds and trees and stretches of plain and mountain outlines. He first generalized the phenomena of inanimate nature, and in this he remains still unsurpa.s.sed.
But, superficially, his scheme wore the cla.s.sic aspect, and neither his contemporaries nor his successors, for over two hundred years, discovered the immense value of his point of view, and the puissant charm of his way of rendering nature.
Poussin, however, was the incarnation of the cla.s.sic spirit, and perhaps the reason why a disinterested foreigner finds it difficult to appreciate the French estimate of him is that no foreigner, however disinterested, can quite appreciate the French appreciation of the cla.s.sic spirit in and for itself. But when one listens to expressions of admiration for the one French "old master," as one may call Poussin without invidiousness, it is impossible not to scent chauvinism, as one scents it in the German panegyrics of Goethe, for example. He was a very great painter, beyond doubt. And as there were great men before Agamemnon there have been great painters since Raphael and t.i.tian, even since Rembrandt and Velasquez. He had a strenuous personality, moreover.
You know a Poussin at once when you see it. But to find the suggestion of the infinite, the Shakespearian touch in his work seems to demand the imaginativeness of M. Victor Cherbuliez. When Mr. Matthew Arnold ventured to remark to Sainte-Beuve that he could not consider Lamartine as a very important poet, Sainte-Beuve replied: "He was important to us." Many critics, among them one severer than Sainte-Beuve, the late Edmond Scherer, have given excellent reasons for Lamartine"s absolute as well as relative importance, and perhaps it is a failure in appreciation on our part that is really responsible for our feeling that Poussin is not quite the great master the French deem him. a.s.suredly he might justifiably apply to himself the "Et-Ego-in-Arcadia" inscription in one of his most famous paintings. And the specific service he performed for French painting and the relative rank he occupies in it ought not to obscure his purely personal qualities, which, if not transcendent, are incontestably elevated and fine.
His qualities, however, are very thoroughly French qualities--poise, rationality, science, the artistic dominating the poetic faculty, and style quite outshining significance and suggestion. He learned all he knew of art, he said, from the Bacchus Torso at Naples. But he was eclectic rather than imitative, and certainly used the material he found in the works of his artistic ancestors as freely and personally as Raphael the frescos of the Baths of t.i.tus, or Donatello the fragments of antique sculpture. From his time on, indeed, French painting dropped its Italian leading-strings. He might often suggest Raphael--and any painter who suggests Raphael inevitably suffers for it--but always with an individual, a native, a French difference, and he is as far removed in spirit and essence from the Fontainebleau school as the French genius itself is from the Italian which presided there. In Poussin, indeed, the French genius first a.s.serts itself in painting. And it a.s.serts itself splendidly in him.
We who ask to be moved as well as impressed, who demand satisfaction of the susceptibility as well as--shall we say rather than?--interest of the intelligence, may feel that for the qualities in which Poussin is lacking those in which he is rich afford no compensation whatever. But I confess that in the presence of even that portion of Poussin"s magnificent accomplishment which is spread before one in the Louvre, to wish one"s self in the Stanze of the Vatican or in the Sistine Chapel, seems to me an unintelligent sacrifice of one"s opportunities.
III
It is a sure mark of narrowness and defective powers of perception to fail to discover the point of view even of what one disesteems. We talk of Poussin, of Louis Quatorze art--as of its revival under David and its continuance in Ingres--of, in general, modern cla.s.sic art as if it were an art of convention merely; whereas, conventional as it is, its conventionality is--or was, certainly, in the seventeenth century--very far from being pure formulary. It was genuinely expressive of a certain order of ideas intelligently held, a certain set of principles sincerely believed in, a view of art as positive and genuine as the revolt against the tyrannous system into which it developed. We are simply out of sympathy with its aim, its ideal; perhaps, too, for that most frivolous of all reasons because we have grown tired of it.
But the business of intelligent criticism is to be in touch with everything. "Tout comprendre, c"est tout pardonner," as the French ethical maxim has it, may be modified into the true motto of aesthetic criticism, "Tout comprendre, c"est tout justifier." Of course, by "criticism" one does not mean pedagogy, as so many people constantly imagine, nor does justifying everything include bad drawing. But as Lebrun, for example, is not nowadays held up as a model to young painters, and is not to be accused of bad drawing, why do we so entirely dispense ourselves from comprehending him at all? Lebrun is, perhaps, not a painter of enough personal importance to repay attentive consideration, and historic importance does not greatly concern criticism. But we pa.s.s him by on the ground of his conventionality, without remembering that what appears conventional to us was in his case not only sincerity but aggressive enthusiasm. If there ever was a painter who exercised what creative and imaginative faculty he had with an absolute gusto, Lebrun did so. He interested his contemporaries immensely; no painter ever ruled more unrivalled. He fails to interest us because we have another point of view. We believe in our point of view and disbelieve in his as a matter of course; and it would be self-contradictory to say, in the interests of critical catholicity, that in our opinion his may be as sound as our own. But to say that he has no point of view whatever--to say, in general, that modern cla.s.sic art is perfunctory and mere formulary--is to be guilty of what has always been the inherent vice of protestantism in all fields of mental activity.
Nowhere has protestantism exhibited this defect more palpably than in the course of evolution of schools of painting. Pre-Raphaelitism is perhaps the only exception, and pre-Raphaelitism was a violent and emotional counter-revolution rather than a movement characterized by catholicity of critical appreciation. Literary criticism is certainly full of similar intolerance; though when Gautier talks about Racine, or Zola about "Mes Haines," or Mr. Howells about Scott, the polemic temper, the temper most opposed to the critical, is very generally recognized.
And in spite of their admirable accomplishment in various branches of literature, these writers will never quite recover from the misfortune of having preoccupied themselves as critics with the defects instead of the qualities of what is cla.s.sic. Yet the protestantism of the successive schools of painting against the errors of their predecessors has something even more cra.s.s about it. Contemporary painters and critics thoroughly alive, and fully in the contemporary aesthetic current, so far from appreciating modern cla.s.sic art sympathetically, are apt to admire the old masters themselves mainly on technical grounds, and not at all to enter into their general aesthetic att.i.tude.
The feeling of contemporary painters and critics (except, of course, historical critics) for Raphael"s genius is the opposite of cordial. We are out of touch with the "Disputa," with angels and prophets seated on clouds, with halos and wings, with such inconsistencies as the "Doge praying" in a picture of the marriage of St. Catherine, with the mystic marriage itself. Raphael"s grace of line and suave s.p.a.ce-filling shapes are mainly what we think of; the rest we call convention. We are become literal and exacting, addicted to the pedantry of the prescriptive, if not of the prosaic.
Take such a picture as M. Edouard Detaille"s "Le Reve," which won him so much applause a few years ago. M. Detaille is an irreproachable realist, and may do what he likes in the way of the materially impossible with impunity. Sleeping soldiers, without a gaiter-b.u.t.ton lacking, bivouacking on the ground amid stacked arms whose bayonets would p.r.i.c.k; above them in the heavens the clash of contending ghostly armies--wraiths born of the sleepers" dreams. That we are in touch with.
No one would object to it except under penalty of being scouted as pitiably literal. Yet the scheme is as thoroughly conventional--that is to say, it is as closely based on hypothesis universally a.s.sumed for the moment--as Lebrun"s "Triumph of Alexander." The latter is as much a true expression of an ideal as Detaille"s picture. It is an ideal now become more conventional, undoubtedly, but it is as clearly an ideal and as clearly genuine. The only point I wish to make is, that Lebrun"s painting--Louis Quatorze painting--is not the perfunctory thing we are apt to a.s.sume it to be. That is not the same thing, I hope, as maintaining that M. Bouguereau is significant rather than insipid.
Lebrun was a.s.suredly not a strikingly original painter. His crowds of warriors bear a much closer resemblance to Raphael"s "Battle of Constantine and Maxentius" than the "Transfiguration" of the Vatican does to Giotto"s, aside from the important circ.u.mstance that the difference in the latter instance shows development, while the former ill.u.s.trates mainly an enfeebled variation. But there is unquestionably something of Lebrun in Lebrun"s work--something typical of the age whose artistic spirit he so completely expressed.
To perceive that Louis Quatorze art is not all convention it is only necessary to remember that Lesueur is to be bracketed with Lebrun. All the sympathy which the Anglo-Saxon temperament withholds from the histrionism of Lebrun is instinctively accorded to his gentle and graceful contemporary, who has been called--_faute de mieux_, of course--the French Raphael. Really Lesueur is as nearly conventional as Lebrun. He has at any rate far less force; and even if we may maintain that he had a more individual point of view, his works are a.s.suredly more monotonous to the scrutinizing sense. It is impossible to recall any one of the famous San Bruno series with any particularity, or, except in subject, to distinguish these in the memory from the sweet and soft "St. Scholastica" in the _Salon Carre_. With more sapience and less sensitiveness, Bouguereau is Lesueur"s true successor, to say which is certainly not to affirm a very salient originality of the older painter.
He had a great deal of very exquisite feeling for what is refined and elevated, but clearly it is a moral rather than an aesthetic delicacy that he exhibits, and aesthetically he exercises his sweeter and more sympathetic sensibility within the same rigid limits which circ.u.mscribe that of Lebrun. He has, indeed, less invention, less imagination, less sense of composition, less wealth of detail, less elaborateness, no greater concentration or sense of effect; and though his color is more agreeable, perhaps, in hue, it gets its tone through the absence of variety rather than through juxtapositions and balances. The truth is, that both equally ill.u.s.trate the cla.s.sic spirit, the spirit of their age _par excellence_ and of French painting in general, in a supreme degree, though the conformability of the one is positive and of the other pa.s.sive, so to say; and that neither ill.u.s.trates quite the subserviency to the conventional which we, who have undoubtedly just as many conventions of our own, are wont to ascribe to them, and to Lebrun in particular.
IV
Fanciful as the Louis Quinze art seems, by contrast with that of Louis Quatorze, it, too, is essentially cla.s.sic. It is free enough--no one, I think, would deny that--but it is very far from individual in any important sense. It has, to be sure, more personal feeling than that of Lesueur or Lebrun. The artist"s susceptibility seems to come to the surface for the first time. Watteau, Fragonard--Fragonard especially, the exquisite and impudent--are as gay, as spontaneous, as careless, as vivacious as Boldini. Boucher"s G.o.ddesses and cherubs, disporting themselves in graceful abandonment on happily disposed clouds, outlined in c.u.mulus ma.s.ses against unvarying azure, are as unrestrained and independent of prescription as Monticelli"s figures. Lancret, Pater, Nattier, and Van Loo--the very names suggest not merely freedom but a sportive and abandoned license. But in what a narrow round they move!
How their imaginativeness is limited by their artificiality! What a talent, what a genius they have for artificiality. It is the era _par excellence_ of dilettantism, and nothing is less romantic than dilettantism. Their evident feeling--and evidently genuine feeling--is feeling for the fact.i.tious, for the manufactured, for what the French call the _confectionne_. Their romantic quality is to that of the modern Fontainebleau group as the exquisite _vers de societe_ of Mr. Austin Dobson, say, is to the turbulent yet profound romanticism of Heine or Burns. Every picture painted by them would go as well on a fan as in a frame. All their material is traditional. They simply handle it as _enfants terribles_. Intellectually speaking, they are painters of a silver age. Of ideas they have almost none. They are as barren of invention in any large sense as if they were imitators instead of, in a sense, the originators of a new phase. Their originality is arrived at rather through exclusion than discovery. They simply drop pedantry and exult in irresponsibility. They are hardly even a school.
Yet they have, one and all, in greater or less degree, that distinct quality of charm which is eternally incompatible with routine. They are as little constructive as the age itself, as anything that we mean when we use the epithet Louis Quinze. Of everything thus indicated one predicates at once unconsciousness, the momentum of antecedent thought modified by the ease born of habit; the carelessness due to having one"s thinking done for one and the license of proceeding fancifully, whimsically, even freakishly, once the lines and limits of one"s action have been settled by more laborious, more conscientious philosophy than in such circ.u.mstances one feels disposed to frame for one"s self. There is no break with the Louis Quatorze things, not a symptom of revolt; only, after them the deluge! But out of this very condition of things, and out of this att.i.tude of mind, arises a new art, or rather a new phase of art, essentially cla.s.sic, as I said, but nevertheless imbued with a character of its own, and this character distinctly charming.
Wherein does the charm consist? In two qualities, I think, one of which has not hitherto appeared in French painting, or, indeed, in any art whatever, namely, what we understand by cleverness as a distinct element in treatment--and color. Color is very prominent nowadays in all writing about art, though recently it has given place, in the fashion of the day, to "values" and the realistic representation of natural objects as the painter"s proper aim. What precisely is meant by color would be difficult, perhaps, to define. A warmer general tone than is achieved by painters mainly occupied with line and ma.s.s is possibly what is oftenest meant by amateurs who profess themselves fond of color. At all events, the Louis Quinze painters, especially Watteau, Fragonard, and Pater--and Boucher has a great deal of the same feeling--were sensitive to that vibration of atmosphere that blends local hues into the _ensemble_ that produces tone. The _ensemble_ of their tints is what we mean by color.
Since the Venetians _this_ note had not appeared. They const.i.tute, thus, a sort of romantic interregnum--still very cla.s.sic, from an intellectual point of view--between the cla.s.sicism of Lebrun and the still greater severity of David. Nothing in the evolution of French painting is more interesting than this reverberation of Tintoretto and Tiepolo.
By cleverness, as exhibited by the Louis Quinze painters, I do not mean mere technical ability, but something more inclusive, something relating quite as much to att.i.tude of mind as to dexterity of treatment. They conceive as cleverly as they execute. There is a sense of confidence and capability in the way they view, as well as in the way they handle, their light material. They know it thoroughly, and are thoroughly at one with it. And they exploit it with a serene air of satisfaction, as if it were the only material in the world worth handling. Indeed, it is exquisitely adapted to their talent. So little significance has it that one may say it exists merely to be cleverly dealt with, to be represented, distributed, compared, and generally utilized solely with reference to the display of the artist"s jaunty skill. It is, one may say, merely the raw material for the production of an effect, and an effect demanding only what we mean by cleverness; no knowledge and love of nature, no prolonged study, no acquaintance with the antique, for example, no philosophy whatever--unless poco-curantism be called a philosophy, which eminently it is not. To be adequate to the requirements--rarely very exacting in any case--made of one, never to show stupidity, to have a great deal of taste and an instinctive feeling for what is elegant and refined, to abhor pedantry and take gayety at once lightly and seriously, and beyond this to take no thought, is to be clever; and in this sense the Louis Quinze painters are the first, as they certainly are the typical, clever artists.
In Louis Quinze art the subject is more than effaced to give free swing to technical cleverness; it is itself contributory to such cleverness, and really a part of it. The artists evidently look on life, as they paint their pictures, as the web whereon to sketch exhibitions of skill in the composition of sensation-provoking combinations--combinations, thus, provoking sensations of the lightest and least substantial kind.
When you stand before one of Fragonard"s bewitching models, modishly modified into a great--or rather a little--lady, you not only note the color--full of tone on the one hand and of variety on the other, besides exhibiting the happiest selective quality in warm and yet delicate hues and tints; you not only, furthermore, observe the clever touch just poised between suggestion and expression, coquettishly suppressing a detail here, and emphasizing a characteristic there; you feel, in addition, that the entire object floats airily in an atmosphere of cleverness; that it is but a bit, an example, a miniature type of an environment wholly attuned to the note of cleverness--of competence, facility, grace, elegance, and other abstract but not at all abstruse qualities, quite unrelated to what, in any profound sense, at least, is concrete and vitally significant. Artificiality so permeated the Louis Quinze epoch, indeed, that one may say that nature itself was artificial--that is to say, all the nature Louis Quinze painters had to paint; at least all they could have been called upon to think of painting. What a distinction is, after all, theirs! To have created out of nothing, or next to nothing, something charming, and enduringly charming; something of a truly cla.s.sic inspiration without dependence at bottom on the real and the actual; something as little indebted to facts and things as a fairy tale, and withal marked by such qualities as color and cleverness in so eminent a degree.
The Louis Quinze painters may be said, indeed, to have had the romantic temperament with the cla.s.sic inspiration. They have audacity rather than freedom, license modified by strict limitation to the lines within which it is exercised. But there can be no doubt that this limitation is more conspicuous in their charmingly irresponsible works than is, essentially speaking, their irresponsibility itself. They never give their imagination free play. Sportive and spontaneous as it appears, it is equally clear that its activities are bounded by conservatory confines.
Watteau, born on the Flemish border, is almost an exception. Temperament in him seems constantly on the verge of conquering tradition and environment. Now and then he seems to be on the point of emanc.i.p.ation, and one expects to come upon some work in which he has expressed himself and attested his ideality. But one is as constantly disappointed. His color and his cleverness are always admirable and winning, but his import is perversely--almost bewitchingly--slight. What was he thinking of? one asks, before his delightful canvases; and one"s conclusion inevitably is, certainly as near nothing at all as can be consistent with so much charm and so much real power. As to Watteau, one"s last thought is of what he would have been in a different aesthetic atmosphere, in an atmosphere that would have stimulated his really romantic temperament to extra-traditional flights, instead of confining it within the inexorable boundaries of cla.s.sic custom; an atmosphere favorable to the free exercise of his adorable fancy, instead of rigorously insistent on conforming this, so far as might be, to customary canons, and, at any rate, restricting its exercise to material _a la mode_. A little landscape in the La Caze collection in the Louvre, whose romantic and truly poetic feeling agreeably pierces through its elegance, is eloquent of such reflections.
V
With Greuze and Chardin we are supposed to get into so different a sphere of thought and feeling that the change has been called a "return to nature"--that "return to nature" of which we hear so much in histories of literature as well as of the plastic arts. The notion is not quite sound. Chardin is a painter who seems to me, at least, to stand quite apart, quite alone, in the development of French painting, whereas there could not be a more marked instance of the inherence of the cla.s.sic spirit in the French aesthetic nature than is furnished by Greuze. The first French painter of _genre_, in the full modern sense of the term, the first true interpreter of scenes from humble life--of lowly incident and familiar situations, of broken jars and paternal curses, and buxom girls and precocious children--he certainly is. There is certainly nothing _regence_ about him. But the beginning and end of Greuze"s art is convention. He is less imaginative, less romantic, less real than the painting his replaced. That was at least a mirror of the ideals, the spirit, the society, of the day. A Louis Quinze fan is a genuine and spontaneous product of a free and elastic aesthetic impulse beside one of his stereotyped sentimentalities.
The truth is, Greuze is as sentimental as a bullfinch, but he has hardly a natural note in his gamut. Nature is not only never his model, she is never his inspiration. He is distinctively a literary painter; but this description is not minute enough. His conventions are those not merely of the _litterateur_, but of the extremely conventional _litterateur_.
An artless plat.i.tude is really more artificial than a clever paradox; it doesn"t even cast a side-light on the natural material with which it deals. Greuze"s _genre_ is really a _genre_ of his own--his own and that of kindred spirits since. It is as systematic and detached as the art of Poussin. The forms it embodies merely have more natural, more familiar a.s.sociations. But compare one of his compositions with those of the little Dutch and Flemish masters, for truth, feeling, nature handled after her own suggestions, instead of within limits and on lines imposed upon her from without. By the side of Van Ostade or Brauer, for example, one of Greuze"s bits of humble life seems like an academic composition, quite out of touch with its subject, and, except for its art, absolutely lifeless and insipid.