Ivory Apes and Peacocks Part 5

But as an actor Wedekind is not distinguished, though versatile. I've only seen him in two roles, as Karl Hetman in his play of Hidalla (now renamed after the leading role), and as Ernest Scholtz in The Marquis of Keith. As Jack the Ripper in The Box of Pandora I am glad to say that I have not viewed him, though he is said to be a gruesome figure during the few minutes that he is in the scene. His mimetic methods recalled to me the simplicity of Antoine--who is not a great actor, yet, somehow or other, an impressive one. Naturally, Wedekind is the poet speaking his own lines, acting his own creations, and there is, for that reason, an intimate note in his interpretations, an indescribable sympathy, and an underscoring of his meanings that even a much superior actor might miss. He is so absolutely unconventional in his bearing and speech as to seem amateurish, yet he secures with his naturalism some poignant effects. I shan't soon forget his Karl Hetman, the visionary reformer.

Wedekind, like Heine, has the faculty of a cynical, a consuming self-irony. He is said to be admirable in Der Kammersanger. It must not be forgotten that he has, because of a witty lampoon in the publication Simplicissimus, done his "little bit" as they say in penitentiary social circles. These few months in prison furnished him with scenic opportunities; there is more than one of his plays with a prison set. And how he does lay out the "system." He, like Baudelaire, Flaubert, and De Maupa.s.sant, was summoned before the bar of justice for outraging public morals by the publication of his play, The Box of Pandora, the sequel to Erdgeist. He had to withdraw the book and expunge certain offensive pa.s.sages, but he escaped fine and imprisonment, as did his publisher, Bruno Ca.s.sirer. He rewrote the play, the second act of which had been originally printed in French, the third in English, and its republication was permitted by the sensitive authorities of Berlin.

If a critic can't become famous because of his wisdom he may nevertheless attain a sort of immortality, or what we call that elusive thing, by writing himself down an a.s.s. The history of critical literature would reveal many such. Think of such an accomplished pract.i.tioner as the late M. Brunetiere, writing as he did of Flaubert and Baudelaire. And that monument to critical inept.i.tude, Degeneration, by Max Nordau. A more modern instance is the judgment of Julius Hart in the publication, _Tag_ (1901), concerning our dramatist. He wrote: "In German literature to-day there is nothing as vile as the art of Frank Wedekind." Fearing this sparkling gem of criticism might escape the notice of posterity, Wedekind printed it as a sort of motto to his beautiful poetic play (1902), Such Is Life.

However, the truth is that our poet is often disconcerting. His swift transition from mood to mood disturbs the spectator, especially when one mood is lofty, the next shocking. He has also been called "the clown of the German stage," and not without reason, for his mental acrobatics, his grand and lofty tumblings from sheer transcendentalism to the raw realism, his elliptical style, are incomprehensible even to the best trained of audiences. As Alfred Kerr rightfully puts it, you must learn to see anew in the theatre of Wedekind. All of which is correct, yet we respectfully submit that the theatre, like a picture, has its optics: its foreground, middle distance, background, and foreshortening. Destroy the perspective and the stage is transformed into something that resembles staring post-Impressionist posters. The gentle arts of development, of characterisation, of the conduct of a play may not be flouted with impunity. The author more than the auditor is the loser. Wedekind works too often in bold, bright primary colours; only in some of his pieces is the modulation artistic, the character-drawing summary without being harsh. His climaxes usually go off like pistol-shots. Fruhlings Erwachen (1891), the touching tale of Spring's Awakening in the heart of an innocent girl of fourteen, a child, Gretchen, doomed to tragic ending, set all Germany by the ears when it was first put on in the Kammerspielhaus, Berlin, by Director Reinhardt at the end of 1906. During fifteen years two editions had been sold, and the work was virtually unknown till its stage presentation. Mr. Shaw is right in saying that if you wish to make swift propaganda seek the theatre, not the pulpit, nor the book. With the majority Wedekind's name was anathema. A certain minority called him the new Messiah, that was to lead youth into the promised land of freedom. For a dramatist all is grist that makes revolve the sails of his advertising mill, and as there is nothing as lucrative as notoriety, Wedekind must have been happy.

He is a hard hitter and dearly loves a fight--a Hibernian trait--and his pen was soon transformed into a club, with which he rained blows on the ribs of his adversaries. That he was a fanatical moralist was something not even the broadest-minded among them suspected; they only knew that he meddled with a subject that was. .h.i.therto considered tacenda, and with dire results. Nowadays the thesis of Spring's Awakening is not so novel. In England Mr. H. G. Wells was considerably exercised over the problem when he wrote in The New Machiavelli such a startling sentence as "Mult.i.tudes of us are trying to run this complex, modern community on a basis of 'hush,' without explaining to our children or discussing with them anything about love or marriage."

I find in Spring's Awakening a certain delicate poetic texture that the poet never succeeded in recapturing. His maiden is a dewy creature; she is also the saddest little wretch that was ever wept over in modern fiction. Her cry when she confesses the worst to her dazed mother is of a poignancy. As for the boys, they are interesting.

Evidently, the piece is an authentic doc.u.ment, but early as it was composed it displayed the princ.i.p.al characteristics of its author: Freakishness, an abnormal sense of the grotesque--witness that unearthly last scene, which must be taken as an hallucination--and its swift movement; also a vivid sense of caricature--consider the trial scene in the school; but created by a young poet of potential gifts.

The seduction scene is well managed at the Kammerspielhaus. We are not shown the room, but a curtain slightly divided allows the voices of the youthful lovers to be overheard. A truly moving effect is thereby produced. Since the performance of this play, the world all over has seen a great light. Aside from the prefaces of Mr. Shaw on the subject of children and their education, plays, pamphlets, even legislation have dealt with the theme. A reaction was bound to follow, and we do not hear so much now about "s.e.x initiation" and coeducation. Suffice it to say that Frank Wedekind was the first man to put the question plumply before us in dramatic shape.

A favourite one-act piece is Der Kammersanger (1899), which might be translated as The Wagner Singer, for therein is laid bare the soul of the Wagnerian tenor, Gerardo, whose one week visit to a certain city results in both comedy and tragedy. He has concluded a brilliantly successful Gastspiel, singing several of the Wagnerian roles, and when the curtain rises we see him getting his trunks in order, his room at the hotel filled with flowers and letters. He must sing Tristan the next night in Brussels, and has but an hour to spare before his train departs. If he misses it his contract will be void, and in Europe that means business, tenor or no tenor. He sends the servant to pack his costumes, s.n.a.t.c.hes up the score of Tristan, and as he hums it, he is aware that some one is lurking behind one of the window-curtains. It is a young miss, presumably English--she says: "Oh, yes"--and she confesses her infatuation. Vain as is our handsome singer he has no time for idle flirtations. He preaches a tonic sermon, the girl weeps, promises to be good, promises to study the music of Wagner instead of his tenors, and leaves with a paternal kiss on her brow. The comedy is excellent, though you dimly recall a little play ent.i.tled: Frederic Lemaitre. It is a partial variation on that theme. But what follows is of darker hue. An old opera composer has sneaked by the guard at the door and begs with tears in his eyes that the singer will listen to his music. He is met with an angry refusal. Gradually, after he has explained his struggles of a half-century, he, the friend of Wagner, to secure a hearing of his work, the tenor, who is both brutal and generous, consents, though he is pressed for time. Then the tragedy of ill luck is unfolded. The poor musician doesn't know where to begin, fumbles in his score, while the tenor, who has just caught another woman behind a screen, a piano teacher--here we begin to graze the edge of burlesque--grows impatient, finally interrupts the composer, and in scathing terms tells him what "art" really means to the world at large and how useless has been his sacrifice to that idol "art"

with a capital "A." I don't know when I ever enjoyed the exposition of the musical temperament. The Concert, by Bahr, is mere trifling in comparison, all sawdust and simian gestures. We are a luxury for the bourgeois, the tenor tells his listener, who do not care for the music or words we sing. If they realised the meanings of Walkure they would fly the opera-house. We singers, he continues, are slaves, not to our "art," but to the public; we have no private life.

He dismisses the old man.

Then a knock at the door, a fresh interruption. This time it is surely serious. A young, lovely society woman enters. She has been his love for the week, the understanding being that the affair is to terminate as it began, brusquely, without arriere-pensee. But she loves Gerardo.

She clamours to be taken to Brussels. She will desert husband, children, social position, she will ruin her future to be with the man she adores. She is mad with the despair of parting. He is inexorable.

He gently reminds her of their agreement. His contract does not permit him to travel in company with ladies, nor may he scandalise the community in which he resides. Tenors, too, must be circ.u.mspect.

She swears she will kill herself. He smiles and bids her remember her family. She does shoot herself, and he sends for a policeman, remembering that an arrest by superior force will but temporarily abrogate his contract. No policeman is found by the distracted hotel servants, and, exclaiming: "To-morrow evening I must sing Tristan in Brussels," the conscientious artist hurries away to his train, leaving the lifeless body of his admirer on the sofa. Played by a versatile actor, this piece ought to make a success in America, though the biting irony of the dialogue and the cold selfishness of the hero might not be "sympathetic" to our sentiment-loving audiences. The poet has protested in print against the alteration of the end of this little piece, _i. e._, one acting version made the impa.s.sioned lady only a pretended suicide, which quite spoils the motivation.

Ibsen must have felt sick when such an artist as Duse asked him to let her make Nora in Doll's House return to her family. But he is said to have consented. Wedekind consented, because he was ill, but he made his protest, and justly so.

The Marquis of Keith is a larger canvas. It is a modern rogues'

comedy. Barry Lyndon is hardly more entertaining. The marquis is the son of an humble tutor in the house of a count whose son later figures as Ernest Scholtz. The marquis is a swindler in the grand manner. He is a Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, for he has lived in the United States, but instead of a lively sketch is a full-length portrait painted by a master. You like him despite his scampishness. He is witty. He has a heart--for his own woes--and seems intensely interested in all the women he loves and swindles. He goes to Munich, where he invents a huge scheme for an exhibition palace and fools several worthy and wealthy brewers, but not the powerful Consul Casimir, the one man necessary to his comprehensive operation. When his unhappy wife tells him there is no bread in the house for the next day, he retorts: "Very well, then we shall dine at the Hotel Continental." Nothing depresses his mercurial spirits. He borrows from Peter to pay Paul, and an hour later borrows from Paul to pay himself.

His boyhood friend he simply plunders. This Ernest, in reality the Graf von Trautenau, is an idealist of the type that Wedekind is fond of delineating. He would save the world from itself, rescue it from the mora.s.s of materialism, but he relapses into a pathological mysticism which ends in a sanitarium for nervous troubles. The marquis is a Mephisto; he is not without a trace of idealism; altogether a baffling nature, Faust-like, and as chock-full of humour as an egg is full of meat. He goes to smash. His plans are checkmated. His beloved deserts him for the enemy. His wife commits suicide. His life threatened, and his liberty precarious, he takes ten thousand marks from Consul Casimir, whose name he has forged in a telegram, and with a grin starts for pastures new. Will he shoot himself? No! After all, life is very much like shooting the chutes. The curtain falls. This stirring and technically excellent comedy has never been a favourite in Germany. Perhaps its cynicism is too cra.s.s. It achieved only a few performances in Berlin to the accompaniment of catcalls, hisses, and derisive laughter. I wonder why? It is entertaining, with all its revelation of a rascally mean soul and its shady episodes.

s.p.a.ce, I am sorry to say, forbids me from further exposition of such strong little pieces as Musik, a heart-breaking drama of a betrayed girl studying singing who goes to jail while the real offender, the man, remains at liberty (1907), or of Die Zensur, with its discussion of art and religion--the poet intrudes--and its terrible cry at the close: "Oh, G.o.d! why art thou so unfathomable?" Or of the so-called Lulu tragedy (Erdgeist and The Box of Pandora) of which I like the first act of the former and the second act of the latter--you are reminded at this point of the gambling scene in Sardou's Fernande--but as I do not care to sup on such unmitigated horrors, I prefer to let my readers judge for themselves from the printed plays.

Karl Hetman is an absorbing play in which a man loses the world but remains captain of his soul; actually he ends his life rather than exhibit himself as motley to the mult.i.tude. As a foil for the idealist Hetman--who is a sort of inverted Nietzsche; also a self-portrait in part of the dramatist--there is the self-seeking scamp Launhart who succeeds with the very ideas which Hetman couldn't make viable, ideas in fact which brought about his disaster. They are two finely contrasted portraits, and what a grimace of disgust is aroused when Launhart tells the woman who loves Hetman: "O f.a.n.n.y, f.a.n.n.y, a living rascal is better for your welfare than the greatest of dead prophets."

What Dead-Sea-fruit wisdom! The pathos of distance doesn't appeal to the contemporary soul of Wedekind. He writes for the young, that is, for to-morrow.

The caprice, the bizarre, the morbid in Wedekind are more than redeemed by his rich humanity. He loves his fellow man even when he castigates him. He is very emotional, also pragmatic. The second act of his Franziska, a Karnevalgroteske, was given at the Dresden Pressfestival, February 7, 1913, with the t.i.tle of Matrimony in the Year 2000, the author and his wife appearing in the leading roles with brilliant success. It contains in solution the leading motives from all his plays and his philosophy of life. It is fantastic, as fantastic as Strindberg's Dream Play, but amusing. In 1914 his biblical drama, Simson (Samson), was produced with mixed success.

Translated Wedekind would lose his native wood-note wild, and doubtless much of his dynamic force--for on the English stage he would be emasculated. And I wonder who would have the courage to produce his works.

Musik, for example, if played in its entirety might create a profound impression. It is pathetically moving and the part of the unhappy girl, who is half crazy because of her pa.s.sion for her singing-master, is a role for an accomplished actress. If the public can endure Brieux's Damaged Goods, why not Musik? The latter is a typical case and is excellent drama; the French play is neither. For me all the man is summed up in the cry of one of his characters in Erdgeist: "Who gives me back my faith in mankind, will give me back my life." An idealist, surely.

The last time I saw him was at the Richard Strauss festival in Stuttgart, October, 1912. He had changed but little and still reminded me of both David Belasco and an Irish Catholic priest. In his eyes there lurked the "dancing-madness" of which Robert Louis Stevenson writes. A latter-day pagan, with touches of the perverse, the grotesque, and the poetic; thus seems to me Frank Wedekind.

VII

THE MAGIC VERMEER

I

Who owns the thirty-fifth canvas by Jan Vermeer of Delft? And are there more than thirty-five works by this master of cool, clear daylight? I have seen nearly all the pictures attributed to the too little known Dutchman, and as far as was in my power I have read all the critical writings by such experts as Havard, Obreen, Bredius, Hofstede de Groot (Jan Vermeer van Delft en Carel Fabritius, 1907), Doctor Bode, Wauters, a.r.s.ene Alexandre, G. Geoffroy, Burger, Taine, John Smith, Gustave Vanzype, and several others.

Doctor A. Bredius has printed an article ent.i.tled: A Pseudo-Vermeer in the Berlin gallery, which I have not been able to procure, but then the same worthy authority has contested the authenticity of the portrait of a young man in the Brussels Museum. It is not signed, this beautiful head, and at one time it was in the English collections of Humphry Ward and Peter Norton, and later in the Collection Otlet at Brussels. Smith catalogued it as a Rembrandt; indeed, it had the false signature of the great master. Much later it was accredited to Jan Victoors, a Rembrandt pupil, and to Nicolas Maes, and under this name was sold in Paris in 1900. A. J. Wauters finally declared it a Vermeer, though neither Bredius nor Hofstede de Groot are of his opinion. And now we hear the question: Who owns the thirty-fifth Vermeer, Vermeer of the magical blue and yellow?

First let us ask: Who was Jan Vermeer, or Van der Meer? "What songs did the sirens sing?" puzzled good old Sir Thomas Browne, and we know far more about William Shakespeare or Sappho or Memling than we do of the enigmatic man from Delft who died a double death in 1675; not only the death of the body, but the death of the spirit, of his immortal art. For several centuries he was not accorded the paternity of his own pictures. To Terburg, Pieter de Hooch, Nicolas Maes, Metsu they were credited. Even the glorious Letter Reader of the Dresden gallery has been attributed to De Hooch, and by no less an authority than Charles Blanc. Fromentin, of all men, does not mention his name in his always admirable book on the art of the Low Countries; no doubt one cause for his neglect.

This is precisely what we know of Jan Vermeer of Delft, in which city--oddly enough--there is not a single canvas of his. In 1632 he was born there. In 1653 he married Catherine Bolnes; he was just twenty-one years old. His admission to the corporation of painters as a master occurred the same year, as the books attest. In 1662 he was elected dean of the corporation, and again in 1670. In 1675 he died, in his forty-third year, and at the apogee of his powers.

When he became a member of the corporation of painters at Delft he could not pay in full the initiation fee, six florins, and he gave on account one florin ten cents--the entry in the books attests this astounding fact. He was poor, but he had youth and genius, and he loved.

He had also eight or ten children and lived happily--as do most people without a history--on the Oude Langendyck, where he became at least a local celebrity, according to a mention of him in the Journal des Voyages, by Balthazar de Moncouys (published 1665). Moncouys also recorded another interesting fact. "At Delft I saw the painter Vermeer," he writes, "but none of his works were at his atelier; at a baker's I saw a figure--for which was paid six hundred livres." At a bakeshop! Vermeer, then, literally painted for his bread.

In 1696, twenty years after his death, certain of his works (forty in the catalogue) brought only 100 florins, pictures that to-day are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in 1719 the superb Milk Girl, now in the Rijks Museum, formerly from the Six Collection, was sold for 126 florins (it brought $100,000 when Mr. Six sold it to the museum), while at the same sale the mediocre Gerard Dou fetched 6,000 florins for a canvas. Even nowadays the public has not been converted to the idea of the greatness of Vermeer. Go any time of the day into the Mauritshuis at The Hague and you will always discover a crowd before that clumsy, stupid bull with the wooden legs, by no means Paul Potter's masterpiece, while the gem of The Hague gallery, the View of Delft, with its rich pate, its flowing rhythms, its clear daylight, seldom draws a large audience. And I do not doubt that only the propinquity of Rembrandt's Young Saskia to Vermeer's Merry Company (otherwise known as The Courtesan) in the Dresden gallery attracts an otherwise indifferent public.

In 1696 there were 21 pictures of Vermeer sold at public auction in Amsterdam. Of these 21 the experts claim to have discovered 16. But the bother of the question is that 100 other pictures were also sold at the same time; furthermore, the sale is said to have taken place after the death of a venerable mediocrity, also named Vermeer, but hailing from Haarlem. (He died in 1691.) This confusion of names may have had something to do with the obscuring of the great Vermeer. But he had no vogue in 1696, as the prices at the sale prove only too well.

Vanzype gives the list, and its importance in any research of the Vermeer pictures is paramount. Here are the 21 canvases that are extant, and the prices paid: No. 1--A young woman weighing gold, 155 florins; 2--A milk girl, 175 florins; 3--The portrait of the painter in his studio, 45 florins; 4--A young woman playing the guitar, 70 florins; 5--A gentleman in his chamber, 95 florins; 6--A young lady playing the clavecin, with a gentleman who listens, 30 florins; 7--A young woman taking a letter from her servant, 70 florins; 8--A servant who has drunk too much asleep at a table, 62 florins; 9--A merry company, 73 florins; 10--A young lady and a gentleman making music, 81 florins; 11--A soldier with a laughing girl, 44 florins; 12--A young lacemaker, 28 florins; 13--View of Delft, 200 florins; 14--A house at Delft, 72 florins; 15--A view of some houses, 48 florins; 16--A young woman writing, 63 florins; 17--A young woman, 30 florins; 18--Young woman at a clavecin, 42 florins; 19--A portrait in antique costume, 36 florins; 20 and 21--Two pendants, 34 florins.

The subsequent history of these pictures, while too copious for transcription here, may be skeletonised. This may answer the question posed at the beginning of this little story. Gustave Vanzype asks: What has become of the young woman weighing gold, which reappeared at a sale in the year 1701, which Burger thought he had found in the canvas, The Weigher of Gold. And the Intoxicated Servant? The latter is in the Altman collection; the former at Philadelphia, in Mr.

Widener's gallery. But let us see how the wise doctors of paint dispute among themselves. How many Vermeers are there in existence, that is, known to the world, for there may be others, for all we know, hidden in the cabinets of collectors or sporting other names? Burger, who called Vermeer the Sphinx among artists, has generously attributed to him 76 pictures. This was in 1866, and since then a more savant authority has reduced the number to 40. Havard admits 56. The Vermeer of Haarlem was to blame for this swollen catalogue. Bredius and De Groot have attenuated the list. The Morgan Vermeer in the Metropolitan Museum, a Vermeer of first-cla.s.s quality, is not in some of the catalogues, nor is the Woman Weighing Pearls, now in the possession of P. A. B. Widener, of Philadelphia, to be found accredited to Vermeer in Smith's Catalogue Raisonne. But not much weight can be attached to the opinions of the earlier critics of Vermeer. For them he was either practically unknown or else an imitator of Terburg, De Hooch, or Mieris, he whose work is never tight, hard, or slippery.

The following list of thirty-four admittedly genuine Vermeers may clear up the mystery of the 1696 sale at Amsterdam. Remember that the authenticity of these works is no longer contested.

In Holland at The Hague there are four Vermeers: The Toilette of Diana, the Head of a Young Girl, An Allegory of the New Testament, and the View of Delft. At the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam, there are four: The Milk Girl, The Reader, The Letter, and A Street in Delft. (This latter is the House in Delft, which sold for seventy-two florins in 1696.) In Great Britain in the Coats collection at Castle Skalmorlie (Scotland) there is Christ at the House of Martha and Mary. In the National Gallery, a young woman standing in front of her clavecin. In the Beit collection, London, a young woman at her clavecin. Collection Salting, London, The Pianist. Windsor Castle, The Music Lesson. Beit collection, A Young Woman Writing. In the Joseph collection, A Soldier and a Laughing Girl. And the Sleeping Servant, formerly of the Kann collection, Paris, then in London, and later sold to Mr. Altman. In Germany we find the following: At the Berlin Museum, The Pearl Collar.

The Drop of Wine, in the same museum, Berlin. The Coquette, Brunswick Museum. The Lady and Her Servant, in the private collection of James Simon, Berlin. The Merry Company and The Reader in the Dresden gallery. The Geographer at the Window, in the Stadel Inst.i.tute, Frankfort. In France, The Astronomer of the A. de Rothschild collection at Paris, and the little Lacemaker, in the Louvre Gallery.

In Belgium, there was at Brussels the portrait of a girl, which was formerly in the Arenberg gallery. When I tried to see it I was told that it had been sold to some one in Germany. Its type, judging from the head of a girl at The Hague, is not unlike The Geographer, in the collection of Viscount Du Bus de Gisegnies, Brussels. A Young Girl, collection of Jonkheer de Grez, Brussels. This last was discovered by Doctor Bredius in 1906, and is at the present writing in New York at the gallery of Mr. Knoedler.

In Austria-Hungary there are two n.o.ble Vermeers; one in the private gallery of Count Czernin, the portrait of the painter, the other in the Museum of Budapest, the portrait of a woman, the latter as solidly modelled as any Hals I ever viewed. The Czernin Vermeer is the only one in Vienna (the other Vermeer in this gallery is by Renesse). It is a masterpiece. In it he grazes perfection.

The United States is, considering the brevity of the list, well off in Vermeers. There is at Philadelphia the Mandoliniste of John G. Johnson (without doubt, as M. Vanzype points out, the Young Woman Playing the Guitar of the 1696 sale). At Boston Mrs. John Gardner owns The Concert. At the Metropolitan Museum there is the Woman with the Jug (Marquand); and the Morgan Letter Writer; H. C. Frick boasts The Singing Lesson (probably known at the 1696 sale as A Gentleman and Young Lady Making Music).

So the importance of the 1696 catalogue is indisputable. And now, after wading through this dry forest of figures and dates and haphazard or dogmatic attributions, we are at the fatal number, thirty-four--only thirty-four authentic Vermeers in existence. Some one must be mistaken. Who owns the thirty-fifth Vermeer? I again ask.

II

The works attributed only to our master in the list compiled by M.

Vanzype are but six: Portrait of a Man, at the Brussels Museum; View of Delft, in the collection of Michel Van Gelder, at Uccle, Brussels; The Lesson, at the National Gallery, London; the Sleeping Servant, Widener collection, Philadelphia--another version, according to Burger-Th.o.r.e; Portrait of a Young Man, in the same collection; two interiors, collection Werner Dahl at Dusseldorf and collection Matavansky at Vienna, respectively. There is also to be accounted a small landscape in the Dresden gallery, a Distant View of Haarlem (probably by Vermeer of Haarlem), the Morgan and the Widener Vermeers.

To deny the authenticity of either of these compositions would be to fly into the face of Vermeer himself. I have enjoyed the privilege and pleasure of viewing the Widener Vermeers, and I believe that the Sleeping Servant--she may not be intoxicated, a jug on the table being the only evidence; certainly her features are placid enough; besides, Vermeer did not indulge in paintings of low life as did Teniers, Ostrade, or Jan Steen--is about the same period as The Merry Company, in the Dresden gallery, that is, if paint, texture, and arrangement of still-life be any criterion. As for the Woman Weighing Gold, it is superb Vermeer.

There is little danger nowadays of any other painter being saddled with the name of Vermeer. It is usually the other way around, as we have seen. As was the case with Diaz and Monticelli, so has it been with Vermeer and De Hooch, Vermeer and Terburg (or Ter Borch). I have the highest admiration for the vivacious and veracious work of these two other men--possibly a.s.sociates of Vermeer. Their surfaces are impeccably rendered. The woman playing a ba.s.s viol in the Berlin gallery and a certain interior in the National Gallery display the art of representation raised to the highest pitch; realism can go no further.

The psychology of a painter's household is revealed in the Count Czernin example (l'Atelier du Peintre). An artist sits with his back to us and on his canvas he broiders the image of his good wife. Again the miracle is repeated, "Let there be light!" Here is not only the subtle equilibrium between man and the things that surround him, but the things themselves--flesh-tints, drapery, garbs, polished floor, chairs, table, and wall tapestry--are saturated with light; absorbed by the inert matter which nevertheless vibrates and, like the flesh-tones, remains puissant and individual.

Humanity is the central and sounding note of his art. He is neither a pantheist in his wors.h.i.+p of suns.h.i.+ne, nor is he a mystic in his pursuit of shadows. He is always virile, always tender, never trivial, nor coa.r.s.e--an aristocrat of art.

In the Dresden Merry Company, and a large canvas it is--he comes to grips with Rembrandt in the matter of the distribution of lights and shades. The cavalier at the left of the picture--facing it--with the cynical smile, is marvellously depicted. There is a certain shadow on his wide-margined collar which also touches the lower part of his face--but now we are nearing the region of transcendental virtuosity.