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There, then, is French idealism in its most concrete, but also in its most spiritual, expression. To attain this expression, it is useless to spurn as unworthy the desire for matter and the possession of it. To prevent its irresistible rejuvenation, it is useless for this form to hurl itself upon matter, closing its soul and its heart to its loftiest precepts. It is, however, these two simultaneous and parallel movements to which, at the moment when Delacroix and Corot became mature, but also at the moment when scientific civilization affirms itself, the writers and the artists will yield. In England, for example, the protest of the painters against science and its industrial aspects will, under the influence of Ruskin, assume an abstract and literary character, which will cause it to misunderstand and forget painting. In France, the century is fortunately too strong in its painting to stumble in its path. At most, when we approach the final development of what is claimed to be French symbolism, so stammering, so poor, and so submerged under the plastic power of the century, a fragile work will appear, the supreme flower of a culture which no longer possesses anything living or human, and lacks the faculty of revelation and the power of renewal: like so many men of the tragic periods when the mind oscillates between two faiths. Odilon Redon will have every quality of a great painter—and of a great man, nothing. The others accept life and do not go seeking the mystery outside of it, aware that knowledge thrusts back its frontiers and extends it. Corot, who maintains, high and pure, the flame of the spirit in the matter regained and solicited by the spirit, was very glad, I imagine, to make use of the railway in order to reach his painting-ground more quickly. Courbet will not be wrong when he laughs heavily if people talk to him about the soul: but just the same, there will be more "soul" in a square centimeter of the most materialistic of Courbet 's paintings than in all the works of the English pre-Raphaelites, of Gustave Moreau, and of Boecklin, put together. When Puvis gathered inspiration from Greek and mediaeval legends of the ideal world, as he did, he was not frightened at the sight of telegraph poles.
There, then, is French idealism in its most concrete, but also in its most spiritual, expression. To attain this expression, it is useless to spurn as unworthy the desire for matter and the possession of it. To prevent its irresistible rejuvenation, it is useless for this form to hurl itself upon matter, closing its soul and its heart to its loftiest precepts. It is, however, these two simultaneous and parallel movements to which, at the moment when Delacroix and Corot became mature, but also at the moment when scientific civilization affirms itself, the writers and the artists will yield. In England, for example, the protest of the painters against science and its industrial aspects will, under the influence of Ruskin, assume an abstract and literary character, which will cause it to misunderstand and forget painting. In France, the century is fortunately too strong in its painting to stumble in its path. At most, when we approach the final development of what is claimed to be French symbolism, so stammering, so poor, and so submerged under the plastic power of the century, a fragile work will appear, the supreme flower of a culture which no longer possesses anything living or human, and lacks the faculty of revelation and the power of renewal: like so many men of the tragic periods when the mind oscillates between two faiths. Odilon Redon will have every quality of a great painter—and of a great man, nothing. The others accept life and do not go seeking the mystery outside of it, aware that knowledge thrusts back its frontiers and extends it. Corot, who maintains, high and pure, the flame of the spirit in the matter regained and solicited by the spirit, was very glad, I imagine, to make use of the railway in order to reach his painting-ground more quickly. Courbet will not be wrong when he laughs heavily if people talk to him about the soul: but just the same, there will be more "soul" in a square centimeter of the most materialistic of Courbet 's paintings than in all the works of the English pre-Raphaelites, of Gustave Moreau, and of Boecklin, put together. When Puvis gathered inspiration from Greek and mediaeval legends of the ideal world, as he did, he was not frightened at the sight of telegraph poles.
And so
Puvis, amid the current which sends painting to the positivist philosophy of
the time, and soon to science itself, to ask for a technique after having asked
for moral support, Puvis remains the only one who with a sufficient plastic
intelligence maintains French idealism in his means and in his results. To tell
the truth, he is far less of a painter than Corot, who unites him, through
Poussin, with French tradition. His master, Delacroix, did not transmit to him
the sense of pathos and the sense of the mystical in painting, doubtless
because that sense is the most personal and the most living of all. Movement
and harmony do not flow as a unit and from within; in his painting, the unity
of the work is external and of the will; his high culture, alone, among the
elements of his vision, creates solidarity, one that is sufficient to satisfy
taste, but insufficient to subjugate it. But there is not, in the whole work, a
suspicion of literary or symbolical intention foreign to the sentiments which
the language of plastics is capable of expressing. And if the instinct of the
painter is less vast than his mind, his feeling for decoration lends him a
moral force which the Gothic men of Italy seemed to have exhausted.
He
could not concern himself long with Courbet, his elder by a few years, and
whose effort at its beginnings, when he left the atelier of Delacroix,
interested him, and always commanded his respect. This somewhat beastlike power
must even have revealed to him, by contrast, the secret of his desire. Another
painter besides, of the same age as Courbet, revealed to him, at the decisive
hour, the great decorative style. Fiery, sensual, intoxicated with love and
with painting, the creole Chassériau, celebrated when twenty years old and
lacking only, perhaps, a longer life in order to become the greatest painter of
his century, was in the very center of the whirlwind in which the wild lyricism
of Delacroix and the determined style of Ingres were clashing, influencing all
the artists, shaking Chassériau himself and tossing him about without respite,
until his death, which came when he had attained the age of Raphael and of
Watteau. A life too short, especially if one thinks of its grandiose ambitions,
the frescoes in which human forms marry their undulations, like those of rivers
or of flowers swaying, with the flowers themselves, with the rivers, with the
seaweed, with the branches, with the vines, and with the sheaves, the French
poem of Goujon, of Poussin, of Girardon, and of Watteau, unfolding under the
burning shadow of the tropical forest, and under the romantic frenzy of death
and voluptuousness. A life too frail, a health too precarious for the
unforeseen robustness of a plastic intelligence capable of forcing upon the
intoxication of his century structural discipline and the heroic grace of the
Greco-Latin genius. A life too passionate, perhaps, from which there escaped a
fire which returned upon it, and burned it, and permitted to surge up from its
fallen ashes the immense splendor of those corollas which grow on some flaming
rock, and which one perceives from a long distance, strange, hallucinating, and
solitary. When he disappeared, a few ardent compositions, full of the meaning
of the great natural symbols—broad flanks, splendor of arms and of knees, the
tinkling of jewels and medals, women like some great fruits of the tropics,
heavy, ripe, swelling with odorous sap, and giant trees with the wide expanse
of their trunks, and their branches like twisting flames—had, at all events,
outlined the reconciliation, possible only in a spiritual organism as new and
strong as his own, between the two hostile masters in whom the century might
have found its decorative expression. Ingres, indeed, from the time of his
return from Rome had, with his misunderstanding of reflections, his local
tones, his unbroken backgrounds, and his linear rhythms, initiated a type of
mural painting which neither he nor his pupils ever brought to realization.
Delacroix was too much of a painter, too much of a musician, too much enamored
of subtle shades and of lightninglike passages, to subordinate his great epic
frescoes to the solemn unity and the austere tone of the walls.
Puvis
de Chavannes, with far less genius, but perhaps with more patience and, in any
case, with more time than Chassériau had, at least attempted the miracle which
no one, since Giotto, has wrought completely. With a little more of sensual
intoxication in the color, which is held in too close subjection to the
bareness of the stone, a little more of plenitude of life, and of accent, in
the grand lines which attempted to bring form and gesture back to the simplest
architectural rhythm, he would, through the synthesis of his landscapes and
through the pale perfection of his well-controlled harmonies, have touched the
highest accord to be attained between painting with its life and the monument
with its idea. The noble spirit is practically alone on its peak, where a few pale
flowers are strewn and where the sounds of the world become tenuous before they
reach him. This ruddy Burgundian, sensual but an aristocrat, who loved women,
the country, and good wine, ever rises to imaginary constructions which
summarize our universe in majestic forms and chastened melodies. There is no
surrender to the sensation of the moment. Everything is masterly evocation of
the spiritual aspects of the event and of the place. The moon rises at its hour
to lend its glow to the saint who watches over the sleeping roofs. The sea is
dead for the poor man whom it feeds, and the shore discloses to him only the
anaemic flowers of hope and of memory. When he wills it, all the departed or
dying civilizations rise from the oceans they have ransacked, in order to
tender their submission to the modern world. The angels fly in a heaven
conquered by the industry of men. Let us accept everything, in order to
understand everything, he seems to say, and let us spread our two great wings
above the miserable quarrels of doubt and of negation. . . The trees, isolated
and straight, with their open leaves, the bare plains, the calm rivers, the
foam and the azure of the sea, the skies which dawn or evening slowly
illuminate or darken, the motionless herds waiting for night, and the groups
dispersed by labor, games, study, and war, have the grandeur of a prayer
offered by an unbeliever to universal life, to thank it for loving him. It is
Renan between the Church and atheism, the double and serene protest, of a
nature somewhat too voluntarily spiritual, against excessive literary
abstraction, and against encroaching sensualism. He has not the faith, but he
understands it, and he expresses it. And then he has a noble vision of things,
which is also a faith. And the intellectual epic of France, with its calm
harmonies, its measured architecture, and its limpid idealism, is unrolled on
all these walls between lines of white muses bearing the sword and the lyre,
and somber laurel woods.
At the
other extremity of the universal movement which sweeps French painting onward
toward the renewal of its means, Courbet accepts the name of
"realist." which is given him in derision. He shouts the word like a
challenge, with his drawling voice. Every time that people speak of the ideal,
or of imagination, or of beauty, or of poetry, or of mystery, he shrugs his
heavy shoulders, picks up his brush and paints a manure heap. He is right.
Only, he is too right. He has almost no general culture, he has known no
fervent apprenticeship under a master of his profession. At the Louvre, he
copies those in whom he finds the direct qualities, which are the only ones he
understands, and which he seeks to carry further than they—the Venetians, the
Flemings, and the Spaniards. Anarchistic and self-taught, he of course founds a
School, which is to say, a religion. He calls himself the free man, free from
the prejudice of aesthetic education, even while he himself is in search of
culture and of government. And he reproduces the faults and the blemishes of
cultures and governments in their decay. He copies the pictures of the masters
as faithfully as he thinks to copy nature, and carries over into his art the
blackened backgrounds of the canvases in the museum, their opaque shadows, and
all the foreign substances that age and dirt have deposited on their surface.
By good
fortune, his craftsmanship is tremendous. He copies the splendor of flesh, the
great gray skies, the brooks under the leaves, the vast trees, the foggy sea
and its breaking waves, with as much application, exactitude, and force as he
does the bitumen and the rancid oil of the masterpieces which he ill
understands. He does not compose, he does not transpose; with black, white,
blood, a little gold and clay, his trowel plasters the object under his broad
eyes, those of a somnolent, sensual animal ruminating slowly, with a few
obscure ideas, and with powerful sensations. He has a gluttonous delight in
mixing his thick paste, and the stories he builds up are rudimentary —a country
burial, drinkers around a table, stone breakers, or women sifting wheat—which
leave a remembrance, dull, very tenacious, however, and sometimes very moving.
He believes himself to be bringing romanticism to a brutal close, and he
uncompromisingly preserves its antithesis, by opposing blacks and whites, a
process easy to conceive and difficult to execute, but with which he plays with
a grandiose breadth, as no one had since Frans Hals. Sometimes he thereby
reaches depths which extend in veiled and heavy sonorities to the center of the
eternal and simple feelings of the heart, like the lowest and purest notes
wherein the violoncello and the human voice unite their passion. He knows how
to make a drama, direct, present, and of a bare and somber gravity, with the
handkerchief which a widow's hand holds to her face as she weeps, and which
makes a white spot against her black veil. He knows how to unite there with
great livid clouds, a low gray cliff, a few powerful reds, and a few mortuary
emblems which carry into the mournful provincial gathering the sumptuous echo
of the mystic symbols and of the death-feasts of love and of memory. He does
not do this purposely, I should say. He copies. But perhaps, on that day, he
writes—with nothing but dark garments, a little white linen, a few women
weeping and with bowed heads, some ordinary spectators, a grave digger, a grave
in the clay, and a sad and leaden landscape—the most powerful epic of the
family in the history of painting.
Such is
the man, knowing no fine distinctions, almost coarse, though he has strange
flashes, and—his portraits of Proud'hon, of Berlioz, of Baudelaire, and of
Vallès are witness to this—though he is attracted toward the mind, like a big
woodland insect that flies in, with a buzz of wings, through the open window
into lighted rooms. Such is this magnificent painter. Everything that is
animal, close to the earth, and the earth itself, in its torpid and obscure
life, he recounts with a single and certain power which will not stir. A joy
that is sensual and vulgar, but a thousand times stronger than grace, stronger
than taste, and stronger than the sense of shame, weighs upon the work, often
reaching a point of stifling the air in it till it cannot be breathed, and
sometimes deadening the very paint and rendering it crude, heavy, and with no
more reflection than comes from lead. The leaves of the trees are almost always
without a tremor, and the trunks without nourishing humidity, but around their
thick-set robustness heavy shadows are spread, in which the heat of the day collects
over the motionless springs and the little sleeping beasts. The oxen plunge
into the burning grasses, their eyes half closed, beautiful women stretched on
the ground have big folds of moist flesh at their wrists and at their white
necks which disappear into the opening of the bodice, and powerful legs under
the dress which is sometimes turned up to the knee. When the woman is quite
nude, he is uplifted by a kind of massive and radiant lyricism. He pursues her
firm curves and the light and shadow, to make of them a single block, solid and
full as a living marble. The splendid bellies and the hard breasts breathe in
it, between the white arms and the loosened red hair, with the calm of a
mountain plain stretched out in slumber. Other creatures of love seek, under
the dense boughs, the water known to the creatures of the woods, in which to
soak their skin, whose fat luster placidly attracts the eye of the male. The
poem of matter marches on, heavy and slow as a plow. Courbet will drive it
along to the end of his one broad furrow, whose dark gleam is like that of a
damp and heated soil. In his passing, he will have mowed down the whole
romanticist Illusion which had been lived through by two or three great
painters, but which sinks to earth as soon as they die, because it was not
supported by a sufficient mass of reality. The reality which he brings to
replace it will go down with him, because it did not take sufficient account of
Illusion, and when he has exhausted his reality, art disappears.
The
prisoner of another Illusion, the materialist Illusion, Courbet constantly
confused realism of language—which belongs to all the masters capable of
remodeling the world in their minds in order to project it beyond them as its
living symbol—with the realism of the subject. And in order not to become the
slave of the Ideal, he became "the slave of the model." [Th.
Sylvestre, loc. cit.]
This
atheist, with an asceticism which, to be sure, troubled him but little, because
it was natural, interdicted transposition, which liberates the creative genius
and causes it to enter the plane of the universe. He did not know that reality
resides far more in the nature of the artist than in the nature of his subject.
He did not know that life resides not only in the epoch, but also in the
faculty of incorporating with memory, with the imagination, and with knowledge,
the characteristics of the epoch. He did not know that life is not in the
object alone, but in all the sensible relationships of all the objects among
themselves, and in their intuitive relationships with him who contemplates
them. He did not know that it is from this precisely that painting derives its
lyrical character, or, as Baudelaire calls it, its "supernatural
character." But by that very ignorance, he assured the fecundity of the
future.
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