IV
But quite aside from the group of poetic painters which stamped its impress so deeply upon the romantic movement at the outset, that to this day it is Delacroix and Millet, Decamps and Corot whom we think of when we think of the movement itself, the cla.s.sic tradition was preserved all through the period of greatest stress and least conformity by painters of great distinction, who, working under the romantic inspiration and more or less according to what may be called romantic methods, nevertheless possessed the cla.s.sic temperament in so eminent a degree that to us their work seems hardly less academic than that of the Revolution and the Empire. Not only Ingres, but Delaroche and Ary Scheffer, painted beside Gericault and Delacroix. Ary Scheffer was an eloquent partisan of romanticism, yet his "Dante and Beatrice" and his "Temptation of Christ" are admirable only from the academic point of view. Delaroche"s "Hemicycle" and his many historical tableaux are surely in the cla.s.sic vein, however free they may seem in subject and treatment by contrast with the works of David and Ingres. They leave us equally cold, at all events, and in the same way--for the same reason.
They betray the painter"s preoccupation with art rather than with nature. They do, in truth, differ widely from the works which they succeeded, but the difference is not temperamental. They suggest the French phrase, _plus ca change, plus c"est la meme chose_. Gerome, for example, feels the exhilaration of the free air of romanticism fanning his enthusiasm. He does not confine himself, as, born a decade or two earlier, certainly he would have done, to cla.s.sic subject. He follows Decamps and Marilhat to the Orient, which he paints with the utmost freedom, so far as the choice of theme is concerned--descending even to the _danse du ventre_ of a Turkish cafe. He paints historical pictures with a realism unknown before his day. He is almost equally famous in the higher cla.s.s of _genre_ subjects. But throughout everything he does it is easy to perceive the academic point of view, the cla.s.sic temperament. David a.s.suredly would never have chosen one of Gerome"s themes; but had he chosen it, he would have treated it in much the same way. Allowance made for the difference in time, in general feeling of the aesthetic environment, the change in ideas as to what was fit subject for representation and fitting manner of treating the same subject, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Ingres would have sincerely applauded Gerome"s "Cleopatra" issuing from the carpet roll before Caesar. And if he failed to perceive the n.o.ble dramatic power in such a work as the "Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant," his failure would nowadays, at least among intelligent amateurs, be ascribed to an intolerance which it is one of the chief merits of the romantic movement to have adjudged absurd.
It is a source of really aesthetic satisfaction to see everything that is attempted as well done as it is in the works of such painters as Bouguereau and Cabanel. Of course the feeling that denies them large importance is a legitimate one. The very excellence of their technic, its perfect adaptedness to the motive it expresses, is, considering the insignificance of the motive, subject for criticism; inevitably it partakes of the futility of its subject-matter. Of course the personal value of the man, the mind, behind any plastic expression is, in a sense, the measure of the expression itself. If it be a mind interested in "pouncet-box" covers, in the pictorial setting forth of themes whose ill.u.s.tration most intimately appeals to the less cultivated and more rudimentary appreciation of fine art--as indisputably the Madonnas and Charities and Oresteses and Bacchus Triumphs of M. Bouguereau do--one may very well dispense himself from the duty of admiring its productions. Life is short, and more important things, things of more significant import, demand attention. The grounds on which the works of Bouguereau and Cabanel are admired are certainly insufficient. But they are experts in their sphere. What they do could hardly be better done.
If they appeal to a _bourgeois_, a philistine ideal of beauty, of interest, they do it with a perfection that is pleasing in itself. No one else does it half so well. To minds to which they appeal at all, they appeal with the force of finality; for these they create as well as ill.u.s.trate the type of what is admirable and lovely. It is as easy to account for their popularity as it is to perceive its transitory quality. But not only is it a mark of limitation to refuse all interest to such a work as, for example, M. Cabanel"s "Birth of Venus," in the painting of which a vast deal of technical expertness is enjoyably evident, and which in every respect of motive and execution is far above similar things done elsewhere than in France; it is a still greater error to confound such painters as M. Cabanel and M. Bouguereau with other painters whose cla.s.sic temperament has been subjected to the universal romantic influence equally with theirs, but whose production is as different from theirs as is that of the thorough and pure romanticists, the truly poetic painters.
The instinct of simplification is an intelligent and sound one. Its satisfaction is a necessary preliminary to efficient action of any kind, and indeed the basis of all fruitful philosophy. But in criticism this instinct can only be satisfied intelligently and soundly by a consideration of everything appealing to consideration, and not at all by heated and wilful, or superior and supercilious, exclusions.
Catholicity of appreciation is the secret of critical felicity. To follow the line of least resistance, not to take into account those elements of a problem, those characteristics of a subject, to which, superficially and at first thought, one is insensitive, is to dispense one"s self from a great deal of particularly disagreeable industry, but the result is only transitorily agreeable to the sincere intelligence.
It is in criticism, I think, though no doubt in criticism alone, preferable to lose one"s self in a maze of perplexity--distressing as this is to the critic who appreciates the indispensability of clairvoyance in criticism--rather than to reach swiftly and simply a conclusion which candor would have foreseen as the inevitable and unjudicial result of following one"s own likes and whims, and one"s contentment with which must be alloyed with a haunting sense of insecurity. In criticism it is perhaps better to keep balancing counter-considerations than to determine brutally by excluding a whole set of them because of the difficulty of a.s.signing them their true weight. In this way, at least, one preserves the att.i.tude of poise, and poise is perhaps the one essential element of criticism. In a word, that catholicity of sensitiveness which may be called mere impressionism, behind which there is no body of doctrine at all, is more truly critical than intolerant depreciation or unreflecting enthusiasm. "The main thing to do," says Mr. Arnold, in a significant pa.s.sage, "is to get one"s self out of the way and let humanity judge."
It is temptingly simple to deny all importance to painters who are not poetic painters. And the temptation is especially seductive when the prosaic painters are paralleled by such a distinguished succession of their truly poetic brethren as are the painters of the romantic epoch who are possessed of the cla.s.sic temperament. But real criticism immediately suggests that prose has its place in painting as in literature. In literature we do not insist even that the poets be poetic. Poetic is not the epithet that would be applied, for instance, to French cla.s.sic verse or the English verse of the eighteenth century, compared with the poetry, French or English, which we mean when we speak of poetry. Yet no one would think of denying the value of Dryden or even of Boileau. No one would even insist that, distinctly prosaic as are the qualities of Boileau--and I should say his was a crucial instance--he would have done better to abjure verse. And painting, in a wide sense, is just as legitimately the expression of ideas in form and color as literature is the expression of ideas in words. It is perfectly plain that Meissonier was not especially enamoured of beauty, as Corot, as Troyon, as Decamps was. But nothing could be less critical than to deny Meissouier"s importance and the legitimate interest he has for every educated and intelligent person, in spite of his literalness and his insensitiveness to the element of beauty, and indeed to any truly pictorial significance whatever in the wide range of subjects that he essayed, with, in an honorable sense, such distinguished success.
Especially in America, I think, where of recent years we have shown an Athenian sensitiveness to new impressions, the direct descendants of the cla.s.sic period of French painting have suffered from the popularity of the Fontainebleau group. Their legitimate attachment to art, instead of the Fontainebleau absorption in nature, has given them a false reputation of artificiality. But the prose element in art has its justification as well as the poetic, and it is witness of a narrow culture to fail in appreciation of its admirable accomplishment. The academic wing of the French romantic painting is marked precisely by a breadth of culture that is itself a source of agreeable and elevated interest. The neo-Grec painters are thoroughly educated. They lack the picturesque and unexpected note of their poetic brethren--they lack the moving and interpreting, the elevating and exquisite touch of these; nay, they lack the penetrating distinction that radiates even from rusticity itself when it is inspired and transfigured as it appears in such works as those of Millet and Rousseau. But their distinction is not less real for being the distinction of cultivation rather than altogether native and absolute. It is perhaps even more marked, more pervasive, more directly a.s.sociated with the painter"s aim and effect.
One feels that they are familiar with the philosophy of art, its history and practice, that they are articulate and eclectic, that for being less personal and powerful their horizon is less limited, their purely intellectual range, at all events, and in many cases their aesthetic interest, wider. They have more the cultivated man"s bent for experimentation, for variety. They care more scrupulously for perfection, for form. With a far inferior sense of reality and far less felicity in dealing with it, their sapient skill in dealing with the abstractions of art is more salient. To be blind to their successful handling of line and ma.s.s and movement, is to neglect a source of refined pleasure. To lament their lack of poetry is to miss their admirable rhetoric; to regret their imperfect feeling for decorativeness is to miss their delightful decorum.
V
As one has, however, so often occasion to note in France--where in every field of intellectual effort the influence of schools and groups and movements is so great that almost every individuality, no matter how strenuous, falls naturally and intimately into a.s.sociation with some one of them--there is every now and then an exception that escapes these categories and stands quite by itself. In modern painting such exceptions, and widely different from each other as the poles, are Couture and Puvis de Chavannes. Better than in either the true romanticists with the cla.s.sic strain, or the academic romanticists with the cla.s.sic temperament, the blending of the cla.s.sic and romantic inspirations is ill.u.s.trated in Couture. The two are in him, indeed, actually fused. In Puvis de Chavannes they appear in a wholly novel combination; his cla.s.sicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of mysticism, and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does _not_ exist--in the converse of Gautier"s phrase. His distinction is wholly personal. He lives evidently on an exceedingly high plane--dwells habitually in the delectable uplands of the intellect. The fact that his work is almost wholly decorative is not at all accidental. His talent, his genius if one chooses, requires large s.p.a.ces, vast dimensions. There has been a great deal of rather profitless discussion as to whether he expressly imitates the _primitifs_ or reproduces them sympathetically.
But really he does neither; he deals with their subjects occasionally, but always in a completely modern, as well as a thoroughly personal, way. His color is as original as his general treatment and composition.
He had no schooling, in the ecole des Beaux Arts sense. A brief period in Henri Scheffer"s studio, three months under Couture, after he had begun life in an altogether different field of effort, yielded him all the explicit instruction he ever had. His real study was done in Italy, in the presence of the old masters of Florence. With this equipment he revolutionized modern decoration, established, at any rate, a new convention for it. His convention is a little definite, a little bald.
One may discuss it apart from his own handling of it, even. It is a shade too express, too confident, too little careless both of tradition and of the typical qualities that secure permanence. In other hands one can easily imagine how insipid it might become. It has too little body, its scheme is too timorous, too vaporous to be handled by another. Puvis de Chavannes will probably have few successful imitators. But one must immediately add that if he does not found a school, his own work is, perhaps for that reason, at all events in spite of it, among the most important of the day. Quite unperturbed by current discussions, which are certainly of the noisiest by which the current of artistic development was ever deflected, he has kept on his way, and has finally won all suffrages for an aesthetic expression that is really antagonistic to the general aesthetic spirit of his time.
Puvis de Chavannes is, perhaps, the most interesting figure in French painting to-day. Couture is little more than a name. It is curious to consider why. Twenty years ago he was still an important figure. He had been an unusually successful teacher. Many American painters of distinction, especially, were at one time his pupils--Hunt, La Farge, George Butler. He theorized as much, as well--perhaps even better than--he painted. His "Entretiens d"atelier" are as good in their way as his "Baptism of the Prince Imperial." He had a very distinguished talent, but he was too distinctly clever--clever to the point of sophistication. In this respect he was distinctly a man of the nineteenth century. His great work, "Romains de la Decadence," created as fine an effect at the Centenary Exhibition of the Paris World"s Fair in 1889 as it does in the Louvre, whence it was then transferred, but it was distinctly a decorative effect--the effect of a fine panel in the general ma.s.s of color and design; it made a fine centre. It remains his greatest performance, the performance upon which chiefly his fame will depend, though as painting it lacks the quality and breadth of "Le Fauconnier," perhaps the most interesting of his works to painters themselves, and of the "Day-Dreams" of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its permanent interest perhaps will be the historical one, due to the definiteness with which it a.s.signs Couture his position in the evolution of French painting. It shows, as everything of Couture shows, the absence of any pictorial feeling so profound and personal as to make an impression strong enough to endure indefinitely. And it has not, on the other hand, the interest of reality--that faithful and enthusiastic rendering of the external world which gives importance to and fixes the character of the French painting of the present day.
Had Regnault lived, he would have more adequately--or should I say more plausibly?--marked the transition from romanticism to realism.
Temperamentally he was clearly a thorough romanticist--far more so, for instance, than his friend Fortuny, whose intellectual reserve is always conspicuous. He essayed the most vehement kind of subjects, even in the cla.s.sical field, where he treated them with truly romantic truculence.
He was himself always, moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature as a fairy-story teller. In this sense he was more romantic than the romanticists. His "Automedon," his portrait of General Prim, even his "Salome," are wilful in a degree that is either superb or superficial, as one looks at them; but at any rate they are romantic _a outrance_. At the same time it was unmistakably the aspect of things rather than their significance, rather than his view of them, that appealed to him. He was farther away from the cla.s.sic inspiration than any other romanticist of his fellows; and at the same time he cared for the external world more on its own account and less for its suggestions, than any painter of equal force before Courbet and Bastien-Lepage. The very fact that he was not, intellectually speaking, wholly _dans son a.s.siette_, as the French say, shows that he was a genius of a transitional moment. One"s final thought of him is that he died young, and one thinks so not so much because of the dramatic tragedy of his taking off by possibly the last Prussian bullet fired in the war of 1870-71, as because of the essentially experimental character of his painting. Undoubtedly he would have done great things. And undoubtedly they would have been different from those that he did; probably in the direction--already indicated in his most dignified performance--of giving more consistency, more vivid definiteness, more reality, even, to his already striking conceptions.
III
REALISTIC PAINTING
I
To an intelligence fully and acutely alive, its own time must, I think, be more interesting than any other. The sentimental, the scholastic, the speculative temperament may look before or after with longing or regret; but that sanity of mind which is practical and productive must find its most agreeable sensations in the data to which it is intimately and inexorably related. The light upon Greek literature and art for which we study Greek history, the light upon Roman history for which we study Latin literature and art, are admirable to us in very exact proportion as we study them for our ends. To every man and every nation that really breathes, true vitality of soul depends upon saying to one"s self, with an emotion of equivalent intensity to the emotion of patriotism celebrated in Scott"s familiar lines, This is my own, my native era and environment. Culture is impossible apart from cosmopolitanism, but self-respect is more indispensable even than culture. French art alone at the present time possesses absolute self-respect. It possesses this quality in an eminent, in even an excessive degree; but it possesses it, and in virtue of it is endued with a preservative quality that saves it from the emptiness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism. It has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence of the primitive and inchoate known in England and among ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism. It has escaped also that almost abject worship of cla.s.sic models which Winckelmann and Canova made universal in Germany and Italy--not to speak of its echoes elsewhere. It has always stood on its own feet, and, however lacking in the higher qualities of imaginative initiative, on the one hand, and however addicted to the academic and the traditional on the other, has always both respected its aesthetic heritage and contributed something of its own thereto.
Why should not one feel the same quick interest, the same instinctive pride in his time as in his country? Is not sympathy with what is modern, instant, actual, and apposite a fair parallel of patriotism?
Neglect of other times in the "heir of all the ages" is a.n.a.logous to chauvinism, and indicative of as ill-judged an att.i.tude as that of provincial blindness to other contemporary points of view and systems of philosophy than one"s own. Culture is equally hostile to both, and in art culture is as important a factor as it is in less special fields of activity and endeavor. But in art, as elsewhere, culture is a means to an actual, present end, and the pre-Raphaelite sentiment that dictates mere reproduction of what was once a genuine expression is as sterile as servile imitation of exotic modes of thought, dress, and demeanor is universally felt to be. The past--the antique, the renaissance, the cla.s.sic, and romantic ideals are to be used, not adopted; in the spirit of Goethe, at once the most original of modern men and the most saturated with culture, exhibited in his famous saying: "Nothing do I call my own which having inherited I have not reconquered for myself."
It would indeed be a singular thing were the field of aesthetics the only one uninvaded by the scientific spirit of the time. The one force especially characteristic of our era is, I suppose, the scientific spirit. It is at any rate everywhere manifest, and it possesses the best intellects of the century. _A priori_ one may argue about its hostility, essential or other, to the artistic, the constructive spirit; but to do so is at the most to beat the air, to waste one"s breath, to Ruskinize, in a word. Interest in life and the world, instead of speculation or self-expression, is the "note" of the day. The individual has withered terribly. He is supplanted by the type. Materialism has its positive gospel; it is not at all the formulated expression of Goethe"s "spirit that denies." Nature has acquired new dignity. She cannot be studied too closely, nor too long. The secret of the universe is now pursued through observation, as formerly it was through fasting and prayer. Nothing is sacred nowadays because everything receives respect. If absolute beauty is now smiled at as a chimera, it is because beauty is perceived everywhere. Whatever is may not be right--the maxim has too much of an _ex cathedra_ sound--but whatever is is interesting. Our att.i.tude is at once humbler and more curious. The sense of the immensity, the immeasurableness of things, is more intimate and profound. What one may do is more modestly conceived; what might be done, more justly appreciated. There is less confidence and more aspiration. The artist"s eye is "on the object" in more concentrated gaze than ever heretofore.
If his sentiment, his poetry, is no longer "inevitable," as Wordsworth complained Goethe"s was not, it is more reverent, at any rate more circ.u.mspect. If he is less exalted he is more receptive--he is more alive to impressions for being less of a philosopher. If he scouts authority, if even he accepts somewhat weakly the thraldom of dissent from traditional standards and canons, it is because he is convinced that the material with which he has to deal is superior to all canons and standards. If he esteems truth more than beauty, it is because what he thinks truth is more beautiful in his eyes than the stereotyped beauty he is adjured to attain. In any case, the distinction of the realistic painters--like that of the realists in literature, where, also, it need not be said, France has been in the lead--is measurably to have got rid of solecisms; to have made, indeed, obvious solecisms, and solecisms of conception as well as of execution, a little ridiculous. It is, to be sure, equally ridiculous to subject romantic productions to realistic standards, to blind one"s self to the sentiment that saturates such romantic works as Scott"s and Dumas"s, or Gericault"s and Diaz"s, and is wholly apposite to its own time and point of view. The great difficulty with a principle is that it is universal, and that when we deal with facts of any kind whatever, universality is an impossible ideal. Scott and Gericault are, nowadays, in what we have come to deem essentials, distinctly old-fashioned. It might be well to try and imitate them, if imitation had any salt in it, which it has not; or if it were possible to do what they did with their different inspiration, which it is not. Mr. Stevenson is, I think, an example of the danger of essaying this latter in literature, just as a dozen eminent painters of less talent--for no one has so much talent as Mr. Stevenson--are examples in painting. But there are a thousand things, not only in the technic of the romanticists but in their whole att.i.tude toward their art and their material, that are nowadays impossible to sincere and spontaneous artists. Details which have no importance whatever in the _ensemble_ of the romantic artist are essential to the realist. Art does not stand still. Its canons change. There is a constant evolution in its standards, its requirements. A conventional background is no more an error in French cla.s.sic painting than in tapestry; a perfunctory scheme of pure chiaro-oscuro is no blemish in one of Diaz"s splendid forest landscapes; such phenomena in a work of Raffaelli or Pointelin would jar, because, measured by the standards to which modern men must, through the very force of evolution itself, subscribe, they can but appear solecisms. In a different set of circ.u.mstances, under a different inspiration, and with a different artistic att.i.tude, solecisms they certainly are not. But, as Thackeray makes Ethel Newcome say, "We belong to our belongings." Our circ.u.mstances, inspiration, artistic att.i.tude, are involuntary and possess us as our other belongings do.
In Gautier"s saying, for instance, "I am a man for whom the visible world exists," which I have quoted as expressing the key-note of the romantic epoch, it is to be noted that the visible world is taken as a spectacle simply--significant, suggestive or merely stimulant, in accordance with individual bent. Gautier and the romanticists generally had little concern for its structure. To many of them it was indeed rather a canvas than a spectacle even--just as to many, if not to most, of the realists it is its structure rather than its significance that altogether appeals; the romanticists in general sketched their ideas and impressions upon it, as the naturalists have in the main studied its aspects and const.i.tution, careless of the import of these, pictorially or otherwise. Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import?
Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your ama.s.sing of "doc.u.ments" turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet"s "Cantonniers," Manet"s "Bar," or Bastien-Lepage"s "Joan of Arc," perhaps. But what is indisputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to the present general aesthetic att.i.tude and inspiration, and must share not only the romanticists" impatience with academic formulae and conventions, but the realists" devotion to life and the world as they actually exist. The future may be different, but we are living in the present, and what is important is, after all, to live. It is also so difficult that not to take the line of least resistance is fatuity.
II
It is at least an approximation to ascribe the primacy of realism to Courbet, though ascriptions of the kind are at best approximations. Not only was he the first, or among the first, to feel the interest and importance of the actual world as it is and for what it is rather than for what it suggests, but his feeling in this direction is intenser than that of anyone else. Manet was preoccupied with the values of objects and s.p.a.ces. Bastien-Lepage, while painting these with the most scrupulous fidelity, was nevertheless always attentive to the significance and import of what he painted. Courbet was a pure pantheist. He was possessed by the material, the physical, the actual.
He never varies it a hair"s-breadth. He never lifts it a fraction of a degree. But by his very absorption in it he dignifies it immensely. He ill.u.s.trates magnificently its possibilities. He brings out into the plainest possible view its inherent, integral, aesthetic quality, independent of any extraneity. No painter ever succeeded so well with so little art, one is tempted to say. Beside his, the love of nature which we ascribe to the ordinary realist is a superficial emotion. He had the _sentiment_ of reality in the highest degree; he had it intensely. If he did not represent nature with the searching subtlety of later painters, he is certainly the forerunner of naturalism. He has absolutely no ideality. He is blind to all intimations of immortality, all unearthly voices.
Yet it would be wholly an error to suppose him a mere literalist. No one is farther removed from the painstaking, grubbing imitators of detail so justly denounced and ridiculed by Mr. Whistler. He has the generalizing faculty in very distinguished degree, and in very large measure. Every trait of his talent, indeed, is large, manly; but for a certain qualification--which must be made--one might add, Olympian. This qualification perhaps may be not unfairly described as earthiness--never an agreeable trait, and one to which probably is due the depreciation of Courbet that is so popular even among appreciative critics. It is easy to characterize Courbet as brutal and material, but what is easy is generally not exact. What one glibly stigmatizes as brutality and grossness may, after all, be something of a particularly strong savor, enjoyed by the painter himself with a gusto too sterling and instinctive to be justifiably neglected, much less contemned. The first thing to do in estimating an artist"s accomplishment, which is to place one"s self at his point of view, is, in Courbet"s case, unusually difficult. We are all dreamers, more or less--in more or less desultory fashion--and can all appreciate that prismatic turn of what is real and actual into a position wherein it catches glints of the imagination. The imagination is a universal touchstone. The sense of reality is a special, an individual faculty. When one is poetizing in an amateur, a dilettante way, as most of us poetize, a picture of Courbet, which seems to flaunt and challenge the imagination in virtue of its defiant reality, its insistence on the value and significance of the prosaic and the actual, appears coa.r.s.e and crude. It is not, however. It is very far from that.
It is rather elemental than elementary--in itself a prodigious distinction. No modern painter has felt more intensely and reproduced more vigorously the sap that runs through and vivifies the various forms of natural phenomena. To censure his shortcomings, to regret his imaginative incompleteness, is to miss him altogether.
It is easy to say he had all the coa.r.s.eness without the sentiment of the French peasantry, whence he sprang; that his political radicalism attests a lack of the serenity of spirit indispensable to the sincere artist; that he had no conception of the beautiful, the exquisite--the fact remains that he triumphs over all his deficiencies, and in very splendid fashion. He is, in truth, of all the realists for whom he discovered the way, and set the pace, as it were, one of the two naturalistic painters who have shown in any high degree the supreme artistic faculty--that of generalization. However impressive Manet"s picture may be; however brilliant Monet"s endeavor to reproduce sunlight may seem; however refined and elegant Degas"s delicate selection of pictorial material--for broad and masterful generalization, for enduing what he painted with an interest deeper than its surface and underlying its aspect, Courbet has but one rival among realistic painters. I mean, of course, Bastien-Lepage.
There is an important difference between the two. In Courbet the sentiment of reality dominates the realism of the technic; in Bastien-Lepage the technic is realistically carried infinitely farther, but the sentiment quite transcends realism. Imagine Courbet essaying a "Jeanne d"Arc!" Bastien-Lepage painting Courbet"s "Cantonniers" would not have stopped, as Courbet has done, with expressing their vitality, their actual interest, but at the same time that he represented them in far greater technical completeness he would also have occupied himself with their psychology. He is indeed quite as distinctly a psychologist as he is a painter. His favorite problem, aside from that of technical perfection, which perhaps equally haunted him, is the rendering of that resigned, bewildered, semi-hypnotic, vaguely and yet intensely longing spiritual expression to be noted by those who have the eyes to see it in the faces and att.i.tudes now of the peasant laborer, now of the city pariah. All his peasant women are potentially Jeannes d"Arc--"Les Foins," "Tired," "Pet.i.te Fauvette," for example. The "note" is still more evident in the "London Bootblack" and the "London Flower-girl," in which the outcast "East End" spiritlessness of the British capital is caught and fixed with a Zola-like veracity and vigor. Such a phase as this is not so much pictorial or poetic, as psychological.
Bastien-Lepage"s happiness in rendering it is a proof of the exceeding quickness and sureness of his observation; but his preoccupation with it is equally strong proof of his interest in the things of the mind as well as in those of the senses. This is his great distinction, I think.
He beats the realist on his own ground (except perhaps Monet and his followers--I remember no attempt of his to paint sunlight), but he is imaginative as well. He is not, on the other hand, to be in anywise a.s.sociated with the romanticists. Degas"s acid characterization of him, as "the Bouguereau of the modern movement," is only just, if we remember what very radical and fundamental changes the "modern movement" implies in general att.i.tude as well as in special expression. I should be inclined, rather, to apply the a.n.a.logy to M. Dagnan-Bouveret, though here, too, with many reserves looking mainly to the difference between true and vapid sentiment.
It is interesting to note, however, the almost exclusively intellectual character of this imaginative side of Bastien-Lepage. He does not view his material with any apparent sympathy, such as one notes, or at all events divines, in Millet. Both were French peasants; but whereas Millet"s interest in his fellows is instinctive and absorbing, Bastien-Lepage"s is curious and detached. If his pictures ever succeed in moving us, it is impersonally, in virtue of the camera-like scrutiny he brings to bear on his subject, and the effectiveness with which he renders it, and of the reflections which we inst.i.tute of ourselves, and which he fails to stimulate by even the faintest trace of a loving touch or the betrayal of any sympathetic losing of himself in his theme. You feel just the least intimation of the _doctrinaire_, the systematic aloofness of the spectator. In moral att.i.tude as well as in technical expression he no more a.s.similates the various phases of his material, to reproduce them afterward in new and original combination, than he expresses the essence of landscape in general, as the Fontainebleau painters do even in their most photographic moments. Both his figures and his landscapes are clearly portraits--typical and not merely individual, to be sure, but somehow not exactly creations. His skies are the least successful portions of his pictures, I think; one must generalize easily to make skies effective, and perhaps it is not fanciful to note the frequency of high horizons in his work.
The fact remains that Bastien-Lepage stands at the head of the modern movement in many ways. His friend, M. Andre Theuriet, has shown, in a brochure published some years ago, that he was himself as interesting as his pictures. He took his art very seriously, and spoke of it with a dignity rather uncommon in the atmosphere of the studios, where there is apt to be more enthusiasm than reflection. I recall vividly the impatience with which he once spoke to me of painting "to show what you can do." His own standard was always the particular ideal he had formed, never within the reach of his ascertained powers. And whatever he did, one may say, ill.u.s.trates the sincerity and elevation of this remark, whether one"s mood incline one to care most for this psychological side--undoubtedly the more nearly unique side--of his work, or for such exquisite things as his "Forge" or the portrait of Mme Sarah Bernhardt.
Incontestably he has the true tradition, and stands in the line of the great painters. And he owes his permanent place among them not less to his perception that painting has a moral and significant, as well as a representative and decorative sanction, than to his perfect harmony with his own time in his way of ill.u.s.trating this--to his happy fusion of aspect admirably rendered with profound and stimulating suggestion.
III
Of the realistic landscape painters, the strict impressionists apart, none is more eminent than M. Cazin, whose work is full of interest, and if at times it leaves one a little cold, this is perhaps an affair of the beholder"s temperament rather than of M. Cazin"s. He is a thoroughly original painter, and, what is more at the present day, an imaginative one. He sees in his own way the nature that we all see, and paints it not literally but personally. But his landscapes invariably attest, above all, an attentive study of the phenomena of light and air, and their truthfulness is the more marked for the personality they ill.u.s.trate. The impression they make is of a very clairvoyant and enthusiastic observation exercised by an artist who takes more pleasure in appreciation than in expression, whose pleasure in his expression is subordinate to his interest in the external world, and in large measure confined to the delight every artist has in technical felicity when he can attain it. Their skies are beautifully observed--graduated in value with delicate verisimilitude from the horizon up, and wind-swept, or drenched with mist, or ringing clear, as the motive may dictate. All objects take their places with a precision that, nevertheless, is in nowise pedantic, and is perfectly free. Cazin"s palette is, moreover, a thoroughly individual one. It is very pure, and if its range is not great, it is at any rate not grayed into insipidity and ineffectualness, but is as positive as if it were more vivid. A distinct air of elegance, a true sense of style, is noteworthy in many of his pictures; not only in the important ones, but occasionally when the theme is so slight as to need hardly any composition whatever--the mere placing of a tree, its outline, its relation to a bank or a roadway, are often unmistakably distinguished. Cazin is not exclusively a landscape painter, and though the landscape element in all his works is a dominant one, even in his "Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert," and his "Judith Setting out for Holofernes"s Camp" (in which latter one can hardly identify the heroine at all), the fact that he is not a landscape painter, pure and simple, like Harpignies and Pointelin, perhaps accounts for his inferiority to them in landscape sentiment. In France it is generally a.s.sumed that to devote one"s self exclusively to any one branch of painting is to betray limitations, and there are few painters who would not resent being called landscapists. Something, perhaps, is lost in this way. It witnesses a greater pride in accomplishment than in instinctive bent.
But however that may be, Cazin never penetrates to the sentiment of nature that one feels in such a work as Harpignies"s "Moonrise," for example, or in almost any of Pointelin"s grave and impressive landscapes. Hardly less truthful, I should say, though perhaps less intimately and elaborately real (a romanticist would say less superficially real) than Cazin"s, the work of both these painters is more pictorial. They have a quicker sense for the beautiful, I think.
They feel very certainly much more deeply the suggestiveness of a scene.
They are not so _debonnaires_ in the presence of their problems. In a sense, for that reason, they understand them better. There is very little feeling of the desert, the illimitable s.p.a.ce, where, according to Balzac, G.o.d is and man is not, in the "Hagar and Ishmael;" indeed there seems to have been no attempt on the part of the painter to express any.
True as his sand-heap is, you feel somehow that there may be a kitchen-garden or the entrance to a coal-mine on the other side of it, or a little farther along. And the landscape of the "Judith," fine as its sweep is, and admirable as are the cool tone and clear distance of the picture, might really be that of the "south meadow" of some particular "farm" or other.
The contrast which Guillaumet presents to Fromentin affords a very striking ill.u.s.tration of the growth of the realistic spirit in recent years. Fromentin is so admirable a painter that I can hardly fancy any appreciative person wishing him different. His devoted admirer and biographer, M. Louis Gonse, admits, and indeed expressly records, Fromentin"s own lament over the insufficiency of his studies. Fond as he was of horses, for instance, he does not know them as a draughtsman with the science of such a conventional painter in many other respects as Schreyer. But it is not in the slightly amateurish nature of his technical equipment--realized perfectly by himself, of course, as the first critic of the technic of painting among all who have ventured upon the subject--that his painting differs from Guillaumet"s. It is his whole point of view. His Africa is that of the critic, the _litterateur_, the _raffine_. Guillaumet"s is Africa itself. You feel before Guillaumet"s Luxembourg canvases, as in looking over the slightest of his vivid memoranda, that you are getting in an acute and concentrated form the sensations which the actual scenes and types rendered by the painter would stimulate in you, supposing, of course, that you were sufficiently sensitive. Fromentin, in comparison, is occupied in picture-making--giving you a beautifully colored and highly intelligent pictorial report as against Guillaumet"s actual reproduction. There is no question as to which of the two painters has the greater personal interest; but it is just as certain that for abiding value and enduring charm personal interest must either be extremely great or else yield to the interest inherent in the material dealt with, an interest that Guillaumet brings out with a felicity and a puissance that are wholly extraordinary, and that nowadays meet with a readier and more sympathetic recognition that even such delicate personal charm as that of Fromentin.
IV
So thoroughly has the spirit of realism fastened upon the artistic effort of the present that temperaments least inclined toward interest in the actual feel its influences, and show the effects of these. The most recalcitrant ill.u.s.trate this technically, however rigorously they may preserve their point of view. They paint at least more circ.u.mspectly, however they may think and feel. An historical painter like Jean Paul Laurens, interested as he is in the memorable moments and dramatic incidents of the past, and exhibiting as he does, first of all, a sense of what is ideally forceful and heroic, is nevertheless clearly concerned for the realistic value of his representation far more than a generation ago he would have been. When Luminais paints a scene from Gaulish legend, he is not quite, but nearly, as careful to make it pictorially real as he is to have it dramatically effective. M. Francois Flameng, expanding his book ill.u.s.tration into a mammoth canvas commemorative of the Vendean insurrection, is almost daintily fastidious about the naturalistic aspect of his abundant detail. M.
Benjamin-Constant"s artificially conceived seraglio scenes are as realistically rendered as is indicated by a recent caricature depicting an astonished sneak-thief, foiled in an attempted rape of the jewels in a sultana"s diadem, painted with such deceptive illusoriness by M.
Benjamin-Constant"s clever brush. The military painters, Detaille, De Neuville, Berne-Bellecour, do not differ from Vernet more by painting incidents instead of phases of warfare, by subst.i.tuting the touch of dramatic _genre_ for epic conceptions, than they do by the scrupulously naturalistic rendering that in them supplants the old academic symbolism. Their dragoons and _fanta.s.sins_ are not merely more real in what they do, but in how they look. Vernet"s look like tin soldiers by comparison; certainly like soldiers _de convenance_. Aime Morot evidently used instantaneous photography, and his magnificent cavalry charges suggest not only carnage, but Muybridge as well.
The great portrait-painters of the day--Carolus-Duran, Bonnat, Ribot--are realists to the core. They are very far from being purely portrait-painters of course, and their realism shows itself with splendid distinction in other works. Few painters of the nude have anything to their credit as fine as the figure M. Carolus-Duran exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1889. Ribot"s "Saint Sebastian" is one of the most powerful pictures of modern French art. Bonnat"s "Christ" became at once famous. Each picture is painted with a vigor and point of realistic detail that are peculiar to our own time; painted to-day, Bonnat"s fine and sculptural "Fellah Woman and Child," of the Metropolitan Museum, would be accented in a dozen ways in which now it is not. But it is perhaps in portraiture that the eminence of these painters is most explicit. They are at the head of contemporary portraitists, at all events. And their portraits are almost defiantly real, void often of arrangement, and as little artificial as the very frequently prosaic atmosphere appertaining to their sometimes very stark subjects suggests. A portrait by Bonnat blinks nothing in the subject; its aim and accomplishment are the rendering of the character in a vivid fashion--including the reproduction of cobalt cravats and creased trousers even--which would have mightily embarra.s.sed Van Dyck or Velasquez. Ribot reproduces Ribera often, but he deals with fewer externals, fewer effects, taken in the widest sense. Carolus-Duran, the "swell" portrait-painter of the day, artificial as he may be in the quality of his mind, nevertheless seeks and attains, first of all, the sense of an even exaggerated life-likeness in his charming sitters.
They are, first of all, people; the pictorial element takes care of itself; sometimes even--so overmastering is the realistic tendency--the plush of the chair, the silk of the robe, the cut of the coat, seems, to an observer who thinks of the old traditions of t.i.tian, of Raphael, of Moroni, unduly emphasized, even for realism.
V
One element of modernity is a certain order of eclecticism. It is not the eclecticism of the Bolognese painters, for example, ill.u.s.trating the really hopeless attempt to combine the supposed and superficial excellences, always dissociated from the essence, of different points of view. It is a free choice of att.i.tude, rather, due to the release of the individual from the thraldom of conformity that ruled even during the romantic epoch. Hence a great deal of admirable work, of which one hardly thinks whether it is realistic or not, side by side with the more emphatic expressions of the realistic spirit. And this work is of all degrees of realism, never, however, getting very far away from the naturalistic basis on which more and more everyone is coming to insist as the necessary and only solid pedestal of any flight of fancy. Baudry is perhaps the nearest of the really great men to the Bolognese order of eclecticism. I suppose he must be cla.s.sed among the really great men, so many painters of intelligence place him there, though I must myself plead the laic privilege of a slight scepticism as to whether time will approve their enthusiasm. He is certainly very effective, and in certainly his own way, idle as it is to say that his drafts on the great Italians are no greater than those of Raphael on the antique frescos. He had a great love of color and a native instinct for it; with perhaps more appreciation than invention, his imagination has something very personal in the zealous enthusiasm with which he exercised it, though I think it must be admitted that his reflections of Tiepolo, t.i.tian, Tintoretto and his attenuated expansions of Michael Angelo"s condensed grandiosity, recall the eclecticism of the Carracci far more than that of Raphael. But his manner is the modern manner, and it is altogether more effective, more "fetching," to use a modern term, than anything purely academic can be. elie Delaunay, another master of decoration, is, on the other hand, as real as the most rigorous literalist could ask of a painter of decorative works. Chartran, who has an individual charm that both Baudry and Delaunay lack, inferior as he is to them in sweep and power, is perhaps in this respect midway between the two. Clairin is, like Mazerolles, a pure _fantaisiste_. Dubufe _fils_, whose at least equally famous father ranks in a somewhat similar category with Couture, shows a distinct advance upon him in reality of rendering, as the term would be understood at present.
In other departments of painting the note of realism is naturally still more universally apparent; but as in the work of the painters of decoration it is often most noticeable as an undertone, indicating a point of departure rather than an aim. Bonvin is a realist only as Chardin, as Van der Meer of Delft, as Nicholas Maes were, before the jargon of realism had been thought of. He is, first of all, an exquisite artist, in love with the beautiful in reality, finding in it the humblest material, and expressing it with the gentlest, sweetest, aesthetic severity and composure imaginable. The most fastidious critic needs but a touch of human feeling to convert any characterization of this most refined and elevated of painters into pure panegyric. Vollon"s touch is felicity itself, and it is evident that he takes more pleasure in exercising and exploiting it than in its successful imitation, striking as its imitative quality is. Gervex and Duez are very much more than impressionists, both in theory and practice. There is nothing polemic in either. Painters extol in the heartiest way the color, the creative coloration of Gervex"s "Rolla," quite aside from its dramatic force or its truth of aspect. Personal feeling is clearly the inspiration of every work of Duez, not the demonstration of a theory of treating light and atmosphere. The same may be said of Roll at his best, as in his superb rendering of what may be called the modern painter"s conception of the myth of Europa. Compared with Paul Veronese"s admirable cla.s.sic, that violates all the unities (which Veronese, nevertheless, may readily be pardoned by all but literalists and theorists for neglecting), this splendid nude girl in _plein air_, flecked with splotches of sunlight filtered through a sieve of leaf.a.ge, with her realistic taurine companion, and their environment of veridically rendered out-of-doors, may stand for an ill.u.s.trative definition of modernity; but what you feel most of all is Roll. It is ten chances to one that he has never even been to Venice or thought of Veronese. He has not always been so successful; as when in his "Work" he earned Degas"s acute comment: "A crowd is made with five persons, not with fifty." ("Il y a cinquante figures, mais je ne vois pas la foule; on fait une foule avec cinq, et non pas avec cinquante.") But he has always been someone. Compare with him L"Hermitte, a painter who ill.u.s.trates sometimes the possibility of being an artificial realist.