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THE sun which rose from the depth of Lorrain's canvases, amid their severe architecture, was Watteau. An autumn sun, lighting up russet foliage. A profound sigh of nature, delivered from a corset of iron, and at the same time dying from having been so long compressed, and giving herself up to the desires of the poet with the concentrated and fiery heat of a flame which is burning out. In reality, they are still there, the severe architectures; the fête of the Regency installs itself in the great palaces; Saint-Simon and Montesquieu, iconoclasts, both belong, by birth and by activity, to the castes which guarded and cared for the icons; and the teaching of the school, until the end of the century and beyond it, will reign officially. Its aspects are controlled by the mind. When Poussin gave order to his ideas and his images, he could not purge his flesh of the memory of the forms and the nymphs whom Jean Goujon and Ronsard encountered in the woods. When Watteau came forth from the alleys to explore these woods, full of forms and of shadow, the will of Poussin and the harmony of Racine penetrated there with him.
THE sun which rose from the depth of Lorrain's canvases, amid their severe architecture, was Watteau. An autumn sun, lighting up russet foliage. A profound sigh of nature, delivered from a corset of iron, and at the same time dying from having been so long compressed, and giving herself up to the desires of the poet with the concentrated and fiery heat of a flame which is burning out. In reality, they are still there, the severe architectures; the fête of the Regency installs itself in the great palaces; Saint-Simon and Montesquieu, iconoclasts, both belong, by birth and by activity, to the castes which guarded and cared for the icons; and the teaching of the school, until the end of the century and beyond it, will reign officially. Its aspects are controlled by the mind. When Poussin gave order to his ideas and his images, he could not purge his flesh of the memory of the forms and the nymphs whom Jean Goujon and Ronsard encountered in the woods. When Watteau came forth from the alleys to explore these woods, full of forms and of shadow, the will of Poussin and the harmony of Racine penetrated there with him.
He
arrived, with the freedom of the senses and with a thirst for mystery, in a
world which had swept mystery from all its avenues and had forbidden the senses
to go beyond the limits of reason. He accepted the exterior of this world, so
as to keep intact his whole strength and his melancholy, and overturn their
spiritual intimacy in order to send blood coursing through the marble of the
statues, bathe the trees of the gardens with mist and light, and wring ardor
and tears from the costumed personages who, for fifty years, had been crossing
the stage, refusing to lend to it their dissimulated passion, and to borrow its
well-schooled tremors. He still wears the wig, but he will have no more to do
with pensions and offices. Instead, his lot is wretched poverty, a life of
wandering, consumption, and the tenacious presentiment of death. That was
enough to make him seek the shelter of the leaves, listen to music as it
circled round, and surprise, in words overheard by chance and fleeting forms,
the illusion of love and the flight of the hours.
What a
mystery is a great artist! Whether Watteau wished it or not, his sentimental
comedy in the eternity of nature is the image of existence of us all, seen by
an ardent nature across his bitter destiny. Here is the confronting, without
respite and with admirable love, of life, too short, and of the infinite
desired. Trembling soul, adoring soul—the burned-out pinks and the pale blues
quiver like his poor soul. He feels that he is going to die. Between two
flutters of an eyelid which mark the awakening of consciousness and the repose
which comes too soon, he expresses the happy appearances and the poignant
realities of the adventure to which he is condemned.
The
resigned pessimism of the Italian farce, the cruel reality which prowls through
the masquerade and masks itself with black velvet, came at their destined hour
to afford distraction to a dying aristocracy and to the profound man who hides
this death struggle under flowers. The whole century will feel it, Tiepolo,
Cimarosa, Guardi, and Longhi will reply, later on, to Watteau, from the center
of the fête; and from Spain herself, somber, ruined, and seeming almost dead,
comes the bantering laugh of Goya. But with Watteau, it is the prelude,
intimate, delicate, drunk with tenderness, wildly desirous of making the
illusion endure. He listens to the wind. He wanders and chats with the
comedians. Like them he embroiders upon any canvas. Never did subject have less
importance in itself. It is always the same, like the relationship of man and
woman with love and with death. Since that is so, how monotonous! The groups
posed on the moss, like leaves torn dying from the trees, or like ephemeral
butterflies, will be carried away by the breeze which hurries them on to the abyss,
with the forgetfulness and the phantoms, the plaint of the violoncellos, the
sigh of the flutes, the perfumes, and the sound from the jets of water. When
one isolates from its frame the talk of all these charming creatures, dressed
in satin, powdered, rouged, having nothing in life to do but make love and
music, everything expresses the joy of the instant seized on the wing. Here is
nothing but prattle, rockets, and cascades of laughter, and an intricate
cross-fire of gallantries and confessions. The round dance turns, the innocent
games are organized and, when the concert begins, the flute and the mandolin
scarcely cause voices to be lowered. Why does the ensemble give that sensation
so near to sadness? The spirit of the poet is present. Slow steps and swayings,
scattered words, necks that turn aside to seize a phrase of gallantry, throats
bending to escape or to offer themselves, inclined and laughing faces
resembling flowers only half open, all will pass, all will pass! How quickly a
society appears and disappears under the trees a hundred years old, which,
themselves, will die one day! Nothing is eternal but the sky, from which the
clouds will disappear. The costumed comedy reveals a terrible ennui with life;
it is only the song of the sonorous instruments which can cradle the despair of
those who have nothing to do but amuse themselves. Not one of us will arrest
the impalpable instant when love transfixed him, and he who comes to tell of it
with tones which penetrate one another and lines which continue one another,
still burns with a desire that he will never satisfy.
To tell
all this, he had therefore placed that which is most fugitive amid that which
is most durable among the things seen by our eyes—space and the great woods. He
died at Nogent, under the fog and the trees, quite near the water. He had
brought back from his Flemish country, and from a visit he had made to England,
the love of moist landscapes where the colors, in the multiplied prism of the
tiny suspended drops, take on their real depth and their splendor. Music and
trees, the whole of him is in them. The sonorous wave, rising from tense
strings, itself belongs to the life of the air, with the light vapor which sets
its azure haze around the scattered branches, the slender trunks which space
themselves or assemble in clusters near the edge of the deep forests, and the
luminous glades away toward the distance and the sky. The sound does not
interrupt the silence, but rather increases it. Barely, if at all, a whispered
echo reaches us from it. We do indeed see the fingers wandering upon the
strings; the laughter and the phrases exchanged are to be guessed from busts
leaning over or thrown back, and from fans that tap on hands—the actors in the
charming drama are at a distance from their painter, and scattered to the depth
of the clearings which flee toward the horizon, whose blue grows deeper, little
by little. And the genius of painting resolves into visual harmonies the sound
of the instruments which hovers above the murmurs of the voices. The green, the
red, or the orange of the costumes of comedy or of parade, and the dark and
silky spots made by the groups of people conversing, are mingled with the
diffused silver which trembles and unites the tips of the near-by leaves with
the sunny spaces which stretch away among the dark trunks.
One
suspects that he remained chaste, among these assemblies of lovers whom he sees
only from afar. One guesses it from his statues of nude women, from his mule
women themselves, from his groups of actresses and prattling ladies of high
birth who have no other concern than love and talk of love. His ardent
adoration of them always keeps him at a distance. He fears to hurt them, to
penetrate their mystery, to know them from too near by, to tear the aërial
veil which trembles between them and him. He caresses them only with his
wandering harmonies, stolen here and there—as would some bee from the north,
living in the damp forests, or under the lights of the fête—with the powdered
gold of the hair, with the rose of the bodices, with blued and milky haze, with
the flowered moss on which rest skirts and mantles of satin, with the nocturnal
phosphorescence given to jewels and velvets by the gleam of the moon and of
waving torches. It is the irised air which models the marble, which quivers
when it touches breasts or necks, and which carries the same poignant agitation
to the sprightly faces, to the fingers picking at the guitars, and to the
delicate, pure legs under the stockings of transparent silk. But he never approaches;
he is steeped in the breath of nature, and its ardor consumes him, but the
vision of nature which issues from him is as distant as an old dream. Observe
it in its detail. The vast structure of the forms, solid, turning, and
substantial, makes them appear to be on the plane of man; he builds his little
personages as great as his desire; he paints with the breadth, the fire, and
the freedom of Veronese, of Rubens, of Velasquez, or of Rembrandt. Move away
from the picture. The harmony moves away also; man and the woods are no more
than a passionate memory for this being who dies of phthisis, alone in his
room, embittered, in pain, hating every one who approaches him, but loving from
afar everything he has seen along his path, forgiving all for the pettiness of
their minds because of the power of their instincts, and because of the
splendor of the earth, peopled with leaves and waters.
This
man who had sent forth over the world swarms of Amors to scatter roses through
the azured mist that is touched with gold, who had seized in flight, from
perfumes and from smiles, all that is subtlest and most secret in the
confessions of low voices, and stolen all the transparent stones of rings and
necklaces, to mingle them with the blood of the skin and the light of the eyes,
had remained immersed through all his senses in the earthiest of existences.
One divines in him the wandering poet of the street who spends an hour watching
boxes nailed up, amuses himself at shop entrances with the coming and going of
buyers, or, covered with mud, goes on to the near-by storehouse, to see a nag
unharnessed there, soup being prepared, and straw being unloaded from carts, or
a troop of soldiers, dripping with mud and water. The nature he paints is by no
means "opera scenery." From the roots of the tree to the clouds in
the sky, it trembles with the life which runs through it. No one had ever
breathed with such intoxication the strong odor of the damp woods, listened
with so much surprise to the murmur of words in the silence of the great trees,
or discovered with so much enchantment the gay spots formed by lovers, and
people chatting among the dark trunks, and under the green shadow of the
leaves. The "opera scenery" is only a pretext calculated to bring
about the acceptance of the man who comes to break it down. In reality, he
reacts against everything which, at the time when he came into the world,
brought about the success of the preachers, the style of the artists, and the
fortune of the shopmen. The muzzled aristocracy which, in the preceding
century, had consented to discipline its original roughness, in order to give
to the state that façade, straight and bare, behind which politics and thought
expressed their desire to imprison the soul of France, had matured rapidly in
luxury, intrigue, and the exercises of the mind. Feeling itself about to die,
it unchained its instincts. And immediately, at the instant when it was about
to reach the height of an expansion of grace and of intelligence on the other
slope of which its decline was forecast, it found, to represent it, a great
artist who preferred to die in a charity hospital rather than live with it, but
who found it adorable from afar. The clear vision of La Rochefoucauld, the pain
of Pascal, and the bitterness of Molière excused in it two centuries of
hypocrisy and of baseness for the sake of that second when a man of their race
breathed its purest fragrance. And Montaigne recognized the aptitude of France
to unite, in the same artistic expression, the most intimate despair and the loftiest
elegance of the mind.
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