French Art Part 3

His "Vintage" at the Metropolitan Museum, his "Harvesters" at the Luxembourg, are excellently real and true in detail, but in idea and general expression they might compete for the prix de Rome. The same is measurably true of Lerolle, whose pictures are more sympathetic--sometimes they are _very_ sympathetic--but on the whole display less power. But in each instance the advocate _a outrance_ of realism may justly, I think, maintain that a painter with a natural predisposition toward the insipidity of the academic has been saved from it by the inherent sanity and robustness of the realistic method. Jean Beraud, even, owes something to the way in which his verisimilitude of method has reinforced his artistic powers. His delightful Parisiennes--modistes' messengers crossing wet glistening pavements against a background of gray mist accented with poster-bedizened kiosks and regularly recurring horse-chestnut trees; _elegantes_ at prayer, in somewhat distracted mood, on _prie-dieus_ in the vacant and vapid Paris churches; seated at cafe tables on the busy, leisurely boulevards, or posing _tout bonnement_ for the reproduction of the most fascinating feminine _ensemble_ in the world--owe their charm (I may say again their "fetchingness") to the faithfulness with which their portraitist has studied, and the fidelity with which he has reproduced, their differing types, more than to any personal expression of his own view of them. Fancy Beraud's masterpiece, the Salle Graffard--that admirable characterization of crankdom embodied in a socialist reunion--painted by an academic painter. How absolutely it would lose its pith, its force, its significance, even its true distinction. And his "Magdalen at the Pharisee's House," which is almost equally impressive--far more impressive of course in a literary and, I think, legitimate, sense--owes even its literary effectiveness to its significant realism.

What the ill.u.s.trators of the present day owe to the naturalistic method, it is almost superfluous to point out. "Ill.u.s.trators" in France are, in general, painters as well, some of them very eminent painters. Daumier, who pa.s.sed in general for a contributor to ill.u.s.trated journals, even such journals as _Le Pet.i.t Journal pour Rire_, was not only a genius of the first rank, but a painter of the first cla.s.s. Monvel and Montenard at present are masterly painters. But in their ill.u.s.tration as well as in their painting, they show a notable change from the ill.u.s.tration of the days of Daumier and Dore. The difference between the elegant (or perhaps rather the handsome) drawings of Bida, an artist of the utmost distinction, and that of the ill.u.s.trators of the present day who are comparable with him--their name is not legion--is a special attestation of the influence of the realistic ideal in a sphere wherein, if anywhere, one may say, realism reigns legitimately, but wherein also the conventional is especially to be expected. One cannot indeed be quite sure that the temptations of the conventional are resisted by the ultra-realistic ill.u.s.trators of our own time, Rossi, Beaumont, Albert Lynch, Myrbach. They have certainly a very handy way of expressing themselves; one would be justified in suspecting the labor-saving, the art-sparing kodak, behind many of their most unimpeachable successes.

But the att.i.tude taken is quite other than it used to be, and the change that has come over French aesthetic activity in general can be noted in very sharp definition by comparing a book ill.u.s.trated twenty years ago by Albert Lynch, with, for example, Maupa.s.sant's "Pierre et Jean," the distinguished realism of whose text is adequately paralleled--and the implied eulogy is by no means trivial--by the pictorical commentary, so to speak, which this first of modern ill.u.s.trators has supplied. And an even more striking ill.u.s.tration of the evolution of realistic thought and feeling, as well as of rendering, is furnished by the succession of Forain to Grevin, as an ill.u.s.trator of the follies of the day, the characteristic traits of the Parisian seamy side, morally speaking.

Grevin is as conventional as Murger, in philosophy, and--though infinitely cleverer--as "Mars" in drawing. Forain, with the pencil of a realism truly j.a.panese, ill.u.s.trates with sympathetic incisiveness the pitiless pessimism of Flaubert, Goncourt, and Maupa.s.sant as well.

VI

But to go back a little and consider the puissant individualities, the great men who have really given its direction to and, as it were, set the pace of, the realistic movement, and for whom, in order more conveniently to consider impressionism pure and simple by itself, I have ventured to disturb the chronological sequence of evolution in French painting--a sequence that, even if one care more for ideas than for chronology, it is more temerarious to vary from in things French than in any others. To go back in a word to Manet; the painter of whom M. Henri Houssaye has remarked: "Manet sowed, M. Bastien-Lepage has reaped."

Manet was certainly one of the most noteworthy painters that France or any other country has produced. His is the great, the very rare, merit of having conceived a new point of view. That he did not ill.u.s.trate this in its completeness, that he was a sign-post, as Albert Wolff very aptly said, rather an exemplar, is nothing. He was totally unheralded, and he was in his way superb. No one before him had essayed--no one before him had ever thought of--the immense project of breaking, not relatively but absolutely, with the conventional. Looking for the first time at one of his pictures, one says that customary notions, ordinary brushes, traditional processes of even the highest authenticity, have been thrown to the winds. Hence, indeed, the scandal which he caused from the first and which went on increasing, until, owing to the acceptance, with modifications, of his point of view by the most virile and vigorous painters of the day, he became, as he has become, in a sense the head of the corner. Manet's great distinction is to have discovered that the sense of reality is achieved with a thousand-fold greater intensity by getting as near as possible to the _actual_, rather than resting content with the _relative_, value of every detail. Everyone who has painted since Manet has either followed him in this effort or has appeared jejune.

Take as an ill.u.s.tration of the contrary practice such a masterpiece in its way as Gerome's "eminence Grise." In this picture, skilfully and satisfactorily composed, the relative values of all the colors are admirably, even beautifully, observed. The correspondence of the gamut of values to that of the light and dark scale of such an actual scene is perfect. Before Manet, one could have said that this is all that is required or can be secured, arguing that exact _imitation_ of local tints and general tone is impossible, owing to the difference between nature's highest light and lowest dark, and the potentialities of the palette. In other words, one might have said, that inasmuch as you can squeeze absolute white and absolute black out of no tubes, the thing to do is first to determine the scale of your picture and then make every note in it bear the same relation to every other that the corresponding note in nature bears to its fellows in its own corresponding but different scale. This is what Gerome has done in the "eminence Grise"--a scene, it will be remembered, on a staircase in a palace interior. Manet inquires what would happen to this house of cards sh.o.r.ed up into verisimilitude by mere _correspondence_, if Gerome had been asked to cut a window in his staircase and admit the light of out-of-doors into his correspondent but artificial scene. The whole thing would have to be done over again. The scale of the picture running from the highest palette white to the lowest palette dark, and yet the key of an actual interior scene being much nearer middle-tint than the tint of an actual out-of-doors scene, it would be impossible to paint with any verisimilitude the illumination of a window from the outside, the resources of the palette having already been exhausted, every object having been given a local value solely with relation, so far as truth of representation is concerned, to the values of every other object, and no effort being made to get the precise value of the object as it would appear under a.n.a.logous circ.u.mstances in nature.

It may be replied, and I confess I think with excellent reason, that Gerome's picture has no window in it, and therefore that to ask of him to paint a picture as he would if he were painting a different picture, is pedantry. The old masters are still admirable, though they only observed a correspondence to the actual scale of natural values, and were not concerned with imitation of it. But it is to be observed that, successful as their practice is, it is successful in virtue of the unconscious co-operation of the beholder's imagination. And nowadays not only is the exercise of the imagination become for better or worse a little old-fas.h.i.+oned, but the one thing that is insisted on as a starting-point and basis, at the very least, is the sense of reality.

And it is impossible to exaggerate the way in which the sense of reality has been intensified by Manet's insistence upon getting as near as possible to the individual values of objects as they are seen in nature--in spite of his abandonment of the practice of painting on a parallel scale. Things now drop into their true place, look as they really do, and count as they count in nature, because the painter is no longer content with giving us change for nature, but tries his best to give us nature itself. Perspective acquires its actual significance, solids have substance and bulk as well as surfaces, distance is perceived as it is in nature, by the actual interposition of atmosphere, chiaro-oscuro is abolished--the ways in which reality is secured being in fact legion the moment real instead of relative values are studied.

Something is lost, very likely--an artist cannot be so intensely preoccupied with reality as, since Manet, it has been inc.u.mbent on painters to be, without missing a whole range of qualities that are so precious as rightly perhaps to be considered indispensable. Until reality becomes in its turn an effect unconsciously attained, the painter's imagination will be held more or less in abeyance. And perhaps we are justified in thinking that nothing can quite atone for its absence. Meantime, however, it must be acknowledged that Manet first gave us this sense of reality in a measure comparable with that which successively Balzac, Flaubert, Zola gave to the readers of their books--a sense of actuality and vividness beside which the traditionary practice seemed absolutely fanciful and mechanical.

Applying Manet's method, his invention, his discovery, to the painting of out-of-doors, the _plein air_ school immediately began to produce landscapes of astonis.h.i.+ng reality by confining their effort to those values which it is in the power of pigments to imitate. The possible scale of mere correspondence being of course from one to one hundred, they secured greater truth by painting between twenty and eighty, we may say. Hence the grayness of the most successful French landscapes of the present day--those of Bastien-Lepage's backgrounds, of Cazin's pictures.

Sunlight being unpaintable, they confined themselves to the representation of what they could represent. In the interest of truth, of reality, they narrowed the gamut of their modulations, they attempted less, upheld by the certainty of accomplis.h.i.+ng more. For a time French landscape was pitched in a minor key. Suddenly Claude Monet appeared.

Impressionism, as it is now understood, and as Manet had not succeeded in popularizing it, won instant recognition. Monet's discovery was that light is the most important factor in the painting of out-of-doors. He pushed up the key of landscape painting to the highest power. He attacked the fascinating, but of course demonstrably insolvable, problem of painting sunlight, not illusorily, as Fortuny had done by relying on contrasts of light and dark correspondent in scale, but positively and realistically. He realized as nearly as possible the effect of sunlight--that is to say, he did as well and no better in this respect than Fortuny had done--but he created a much greater illusion of a sunlit landscape than anyone had ever done before him, by painting those parts of his picture not in sunlight with the exact truth that in painting objects in shadow the palette can compa.s.s.

Nothing is more simple. Take a landscape with a cloudy sky, which means diffused light in the old sense of the term, and observe the effect upon it of a sudden burst of sunlight. What is the effect where considerable portions of the scene are suddenly thrown into marked shadow, as well as others illuminated with intense light? Is the absolute value of the parts in shadow lowered or raised? Raised, of course, by reflected light. Formerly, to get the contrast between sunlight and shadow in proper scale, the painter would have painted the shadows darker than they were before the sun appeared. Relatively they are darker, since their value, though heightened, is raised infinitely less than the value of the parts in sunlight. Absolutely, their value is raised considerably. If, therefore, they are painted lighter than they were before the sun appeared, they in themselves seem truer. The part of Monet's picture that is in shadow is measurably true, far truer than it would have been if painted under the old theory of correspondence, and had been unnaturally darkened to express the relation of contrast between shadow and sunlight. Scale has been lost. What has been gained?

Simply truth of impressionistic effect. Why? Because we know and judge and appreciate and feel the measure of truth with which objects in shadow are represented; we are insensibly more familiar with them in nature than with objects directly sun-illuminated, the value as well as the definition of which are far vaguer to us on account of their blending and infinite heightening by a luminosity absolutely overpowering. In a word, in sunlit landscapes objects in shadow are what customarily and unconsciously we see and note and know, and the illusion is greater if the relation between them and the objects in sunlight, whose value habitually we do not note, be neglected or falsified. Add to this source of illusion the success of Monet in giving a juster value to the sunlit half of his picture than had even been systematically attempted before his time, and his astonis.h.i.+ng _trompe-l'oeil_ is, I think, explained. Each part is truer than ever before, and unless one have a specially developed sense of _ensemble_ in this very special matter of values in and affected by sunlight, one gets from Monet an impression of actuality so much greater than he has ever got before, that he may be pardoned for feeling, and even for enthusiastically proclaiming, that in Monet realism finds its apogee. To sum up: The first realists painted _relative_ values; Manet and his derivatives painted _absolute_ values, but in a wisely limited gamut; Monet paints _absolute values in a very wide range, plus sunlight, as nearly as he can get it_--as nearly as pigment can be got to represent it. Perforce he loses scale, and therefore artistic completeness, but he secures an incomparably vivid effect of reality, of nature--and of nature in her gayest, most inspiring manifestation, illuminated directly and indirectly, and everywhere vibrant and palpitating with the light of all our physical seeing.

Monet is so subtle in his own way, so superbly successful within his own limits, that it is time wasted to quarrel with the convention-steeped philistine who refuses to comprehend even his point of view, who judges the pictures he sees by the pictures he has seen. He has not only discovered a new way of looking at nature, but he has justified it in a thousand particulars. Concentrated as his attention has been upon the effects of light and atmosphere, he has reproduced an infinity of nature's moods that are charming in proportion to their transitoriness, and whose fleeting beauties he has caught and permanently fixed.

Rousseau made the most careful studies, and then combined them in his studio. Courbet made his sketch, more or less perfect, face to face with his subject, and elaborated it afterward away from it. Corot painted his picture from nature, but put the Corot into it in his studio. Monet's practice is in comparison drastically thorough. After thirty minutes, he says--why thirty instead of forty or twenty, I do not know; these mysteries are Eleusinian to the mere amateur--the light changes; he must stop and return the next day at the same hour. The result is immensely real, and in Monet's hands immensely varied. One may say as much, having regard to their differing degrees of success, of p.i.s.saro, who influenced him, and of Caillebotte, Renoir, Sisley, and the rest of the impressionists who followed him.

He is himself the prominent representative of the school, however, and the fact that one representative of it is enough to consider, is eloquent of profound criticism of it. For decorative purposes a hole in one's wall, an additional window through which one may only look satisfactorily during a period of thirty minutes, has its drawbacks. A walk in the country or in a city park is after all preferable to anyone who can really appreciate a Monet--that is, anyone who can feel the illusion of nature which it is his sole aim to produce. After all, what one asks of art is something different from imitative illusion. Its essence is illusion, I think, but illusion taken in a different sense from optical illusion--_trompe-l'oeil_. Its function is to make dreams seem real, not to recall reality. Monet is enduringly admirable mainly to the painter who envies and endeavors to imitate his wonderful power of technical expression--the thing that occupies most the conscious attention of the true painter. To others he must remain a little unsatisfactory, because he is not only not a dreamer, but because he does nothing with his material except to show it as it is--a great service surely, but largely excluding the exercise of that architectonic faculty, personally directed, which is the very life of every truly aesthetic production.

VII

In fine, the impressionist has his own conventions; no school can escape them, from the very nature of the case and the definition of the term.

The conventions of the impressionists, indeed, are particularly salient.

Can anyone doubt it who sees an exhibition of their works? In the same number of cla.s.sic, or romantic, or merely realistic pictures, is there anything quite equalling the monotony that strikes one in a display of canva.s.ses by Claude Monet and his fellows and followers? But the defect of impressionism is not mainly its technical conventionality. It is, as I think everyone except its thick-and-thin advocates must feel, that pursued _a outrance_ it lacks a seriousness commensurate with its claims--that it exhibits indeed a kind of undertone of frivolity that is all the nearer to the absolutely comic for the earnestness, so to speak, of its unconsciousness. The reason is, partly no doubt, to be ascribed to its _debonnaire_ self-satisfaction, its disposition to "lightly run amuck at an august thing," the traditions of centuries namely, to its b.u.mptiousness, in a word. But chiefly, I think, the reason is to be found in its lack of anything properly to be called a philosophy. This is surely a fatal flaw in any system, because it involves a contradiction in terms; and to say that to have no philosophy is the philosophy of the impressionists, is merely a word-juggling bit of question-begging. A theory of technic is not a philosophy, however systematic it may be. It is a mechanical, not an intellectual, point of view. It is not a way of looking at things, but of rendering them. It expresses no idea and sees no relations; its claims on one's interest are exhausted when once its right to its method is admitted. The remark once made of a typically literal person--that he cared so much for facts that he disliked to think they had any relations--is intimately applicable to the whole impressionist school. Technically, of course, the impressionist's relations are extremely just--not exquisite, but exquisitely just. But merely to get just values is not to occupy one's self with values ideally, emotionally, personally. It is merely to record facts. Certainly any impressionist rendering of the light and shade and color relations of objects seems eloquent beside any traditional and conventional rendering of them; but it is because each object is so carefully observed, so truly painted, that its relation to every other is spontaneously satisfactory; and this is a very different thing from the result of truly pictorial rendering with its constructive appeal, its sense of _ensemble_, its presentation of an idea by means of the convergence and interdependence of objects focussed to a common and central effect. To this impressionism is absolutely insensitive. It is the acme of detachment, of indifference.

Turgenieff, according to Mr. George Moore, complained of Zola's Gervaise Coupeau, that Zola explained how she felt, never what she thought.

"Qu'est que ca me fait si elle suait sous les bras, ou au milieu du dos?" he asked, with most pertinent penetration. He is quite right.

Really we only care for facts when they explain truths. The desultory agglomeration of never so definitely rendered details necessarily leaves the civilized appreciation cold. What distinguishes the civilized from the savage appreciation is the pa.s.sion for order. The tendency to order, said Senancour, should form "an essential part of our inclinations, of our instinct, like the tendencies to self-preservation and to reproduction." The two latter tendencies the savage possesses as completely as the civilized man, but he does not share the civilized man's instinct for correlation. And in this sense, I think, a certain savagery is justly to be ascribed to the impressionist. His productions have many attractions and many merits--merits and attractions that the traditional painting has not. But they are really only by a kind of automatic inadvertence, pictures. They are not truly pictorial.

And a picture should be something more than even pictorial. To be permanently attaching it should give at least a hint of the painter's philosophy--his point of view, his att.i.tude toward his material. In the great pictures you can not only discover this att.i.tude, but the att.i.tude of the painter toward life and the world in general. Everyone has as distinct an idea of the philosophy of Raphael as of the qualities of his designs. The impressionist not only does not show you what he thinks, he does not even show you how he feels, except by betraying a fondness for violets and diffused light, and by exhibiting the temper of the radical and the rioter. The order of a blithe, idyllic landscape by Corot, of one of Delacroix's pieces of concentric coloration, of an example of Ingres's purity of outline, shows not only temperament, but the position of the painter in regard to the whole intellectual world so far as he touches it at all. What does a canvas of Claude Monet show in this respect? It is more truthful but not less impersonal than a photograph.

Degas is the only other painter usually cla.s.sed with the impressionists, of whom this may not be said. But Degas is hardly an impressionist at all. He is one of the most personal painters, if not the most personal painter, of the day. He is as original as Puvis de Chavannes. What allies him with the impressionists is his fondness for fleeting aspects, his caring for nothing beyond aspect--for the look of things and their transitory look. He is an enthusiastic admirer of Ingres--who, one would say, is the ant.i.thesis of impressionism. He never paints from nature. His studies are made with the utmost care, but they are arranged, composed, combined by his own sense of what is pictorial--by, at any rate, his own idea of the effects he wishes to create. He cares absolutely nothing for what ordinarily we understand by the real, the actual, so far as its reality is concerned; he sees nothing else, to be sure, and is probably very sceptical about anything but colors and shapes and their decorative arrangement; but he sees what he likes in reality and follows this out with an inerrancy so scrupulous, and even affectionate, as to convey the idea that in his result he himself counts for almost nothing. This at least may be said of him, that he shows what, given genius, can be got out of the impressionist method artistically and practically employed to the end of ill.u.s.trating a personal point of view. A mere amateur can hardly distinguish between a Caillebotte and a Sisley, for example, but everyone identifies a Degas as immediately and as certainly as he does a Whistler. His work is perfectly sincere and admirably intelligent. It has neither the pose nor the irresponsibility of the impressionists. His artistic apotheosis of the ballet-girl is merely the result of his happy discovery of something delightfully, and in a very true sense naturally, decorative in material that is in the highest degree artificial. His impulse is as genuine and spontaneous as if the substance upon which it is exercised were not the acme of the exotic, and already arranged with the most elaborate conventionality. Nothing indeed could be more opposed to the elementary crudity of impressionism than his distinction and refinement, which may be said to be carried to a really _fin de siecle_ degree.

VIII

Whatever the painting of the future is to be, it is certain not to be the painting of Monet. For the present, no doubt, Monet is the last word in painting. To belittle him is not only whimsical, but ridiculous. He has plainly worked a revolution in his art. He has taken it out of the vicious circle of conformity to, departure from, and return to abstractions and the so-called ideal. No one hereafter who attempts the representation of nature--and for as far ahead as we can see with any confidence, the representation of nature, the pantheistic ideal if one chooses, will increasingly intrench itself as the painter's true aim--no one who seriously attempts to realize this aim of now universal appeal will be able to dispense with Monet's aid. He must perforce follow the lines laid down for him by this astonis.h.i.+ng naturalist. Any other course must result in solecism, and if anything future is certain, it is certain that the future will be not only inhospitable to, but absolutely intolerant of, solecism. Henceforth the basis of things is bound to be solid and not superficial, real and not fantastic. But--whether the future is to commit itself wholly to prose, or is to preserve in new conditions the essence of the poetry that, in one form or another, has persisted since plastic art began--for the superstructure to be erected on the sound basis of just values and true impressions it is justifiably easy to predict a greater interest and a more real dignity than any such preoccupation with the basis of technic as Monet's can possibly have.

And though, even as one says it, one has the feeling that the future is pregnant with some genius who will out-Monet Monet, and that painting will in some now inconceivable way have to submit hereafter to a still more rigorous standard than it does at present--I have heard the claims of binocular vision urged--at the same time the true "child of nature"

may console himself with the reflection that accuracy and competence are but the accidents, at most the necessary phenomena, of what really and essentially const.i.tutes fine art of any kind--namely, the expression of a personal conception of what is not only true but beautiful as well. In France less than anywhere else is it likely that even such a powerful force as modern realism will long dominate the constructive, the architectonic faculty, which is part of the very fibre of the French genius. The exposition and ill.u.s.tration of a theory believed in with a fervency to be found only among a people with whom the intelligence is the chief element and object of experiment and exercise, are a natural concomitant of mental energy and activity. But no theory holds them long in bondage. At the least, it speedily gives place to another formulation of the mutinous freedom its very acceptance creates. And the conformity that each of them in succession imposes on mediocrity is always varied and relieved by the frequent incarnations in masterful personalities of the natural national traits--of which, I think, the architectonic spirit is one of the most conspicuous. Painting will again become creative, constructive, personally expressive. Its basis having been established as scientifically impeccable, its superstructure will exhibit the taste, the elegance, the imaginative freedom, exhibited within the limits of a cultivated sense of propriety, that are an integral part of the French painter's patrimony.

IV

CLa.s.sIC SCULPTURE

I

French sculpture naturally follows very much the same course as French painting. Its beginnings, however, are Gothic, and the Renaissance emanc.i.p.ated rather than created it. Italy, over which the Gothic wave pa.s.sed with less disturbing effect than anywhere else, and where the Pisans were doing pure sculpture when everywhere farther north sculpture was mainly decorative and rigidly architectural, had a potent influence. But the modern phases of French sculpture have a closer relations.h.i.+p with the Chartres Cathedral than modern French painting has with its earliest practice; and Claux s.l.u.ters, the Burgundian Fleming who modelled the wonderful Moses Well and the tombs of Jean Sans Peur and Phillippe le Hardi at Dijon, among his other anachronistic masterpieces, exerted considerably greater influence upon his successors than the Touraine school of painting and the Clouets did upon theirs.

These works are a curious compromise between the Gothic and the modern spirits. s.l.u.ters was plainly a modern temperament working with Gothic material and amid Gothic ideas. In itself his sculpture is hardly decorative, as we apply the epithet to modern work. It is just off the line of rigidity, of insistence in every detail of its right and t.i.tle to individuality apart from every other sculptured detail. The prophets in the niches of the beautiful Dijon Well, the monks under the arcades of the beautiful Burgundian tombs, have little relation with each other as elements of a decorative sculptural composition. They are in the same style, that is all. Each of them is in interest quite independent of the other. Compared with one of the Pisans' pulpits they form a congeries rather than a composition. Compared with Goujon's "Fountain of the Innocents" their motive is not decorative at all. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah a.s.serts his individuality in a way the more sociable prophets of the Sistine Chapel would hesitate to do. They have a little the air of hermits--of artistic anchorites, one may say.

They are Gothic, too, not only in being thus sculpturally undecorative and uncomposed, but in being beautifully subordinate to the architecture which it is their unmistakable ancillary function to decorate in the most delightful way imaginable--in being in a word architecturally decorative. The marriage of the two arts is, Gothically, not on equal terms. It never occurred, of course, to the Gothic architect that it should be. His _ensemble_ was always one of which the chief, the overwhelming, one may almost say the sole, interest is structural. He even imposed the condition that the sculpture which decorated his structure should be itself architecturally structural. One figure of the portals of Chartres is almost as like another as one pillar of the interior is like its fellows; for the reason--eminently satisfactory to the architect--that it discharges an identical function.

Emanc.i.p.ation from this thraldom of the architect is s.l.u.ters's great distinction, however. He is modern in this sense, without going so far--without going anything like so far--as the modern sculptor who divorces his work from that of the architect with whom he is called upon to combine to the end of an _ensemble_ that shall be equally agreeable to the sense satisfied by form and that satisfied by structure. His figures, subordinate as they are to the general architectural purpose and function of what they decorate, are not only not purely structural in their expression, stiff as they still are from the point of view of absolutely free sculpture; they are, moreover, not merely unrelated to each other in any essential sense, such as that in which the figures of the Pisans and of Goujon are related; they are on the contrary each and all wonderfully accentuated and individualized. Every ecclesiastic on the Dijon tombs is a character study. Every figure on the Well has a psychologic as well as a sculptural interest. Poised between Gothic tradition and modern feeling, between a reverend and august aesthetic conventionality and the dawn of free activity, s.l.u.ters is one of the most interesting and stimulating figures in the whole history of sculpture. And the force of his characterizations, the vividness of his conceptions, and the combined power and delicacy of his modelling give him the added importance of one of the heroes of his art in any time or country. There is something extremely Flemish in his sense of personality. A similar interest in humanity as such, in the individual apart from the type, is noticeable in the pictures of the Van Eycks, of Memling, of Quentin Matsys, and Roger Van der Weyden, wherein all idea of beauty, of composition, of universal appeal is subordinated as it is in no other art--in that of Holland no more than in that of Italy--to the representation in the most definite, precise, and powerful way of some intensely human personality. There is the same extraordinary concreteness in one of Matsys's apostles and one of s.l.u.ters's prophets.

Michel Colombe, the pupil of Claux and Anthoniet and the sculptor of the monument of Francois II., Duke of Brittany, at Nantes, the relief of "St. George and the Dragon" for the Chateau of Gaillon, now in the Louvre, and the Fontaine de Beaune, at Tours, and Jean Juste, whose n.o.ble masterpiece, the Tomb of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, is the finest ornament of the Cathedral of St. Denis, bridge the distance and mark the transition to Goujon, Cousin, and Germain Pilon far more suavely than the school of Fontainebleau did the change from that of Tours to Poussin. Cousin, though the monument of Admiral Chabot is a truly marvellous work, witnessing a practical sculptor's hand, is really to be cla.s.sed among painters. And Germain Pilon's compromise with Italian decorativeness, graceful and fertile sculptor as his many works show him to have been, resulted in a lack of personal force that has caused him to be thought on the one hand "seriously injured by the b.a.s.t.a.r.d sentiment proper to the school of Fontainebleau," as Mrs.

Pattison somewhat sternly remarks, and on the other to be reprehended by Germain Brice in 1718, for evincing _quelque reste du got gothique_--some reminiscence of Gothic taste. Jean Goujon is really the first modern French sculptor.

II

He remains, too, one of the very finest, even in a compet.i.tion constantly growing more exacting since his day. He had a very particular talent, and it was exhibited in manifold ways. He is as fine in relief as in the round. His decorative quality is as eminent as his purely sculptural side. Compared with his Italian contemporaries he is at once full of feeling and severe. He has nothing of Pilon's chameleon-like imitativeness. He does not, on the other hand, break with the traditions of the best models known to him--and, undoubtedly he knew the best. His works cover and line the Louvre, and anyone who visits Paris may get a perfect conception of his genius--certainly anyone who in addition visits Rouen and beholds the lovely tracery of his earliest sculpture on the portal of St. Maclou. He was eminently the sculptor of an educated cla.s.s, and appealed to a cultivated appreciation. Coming as he did at the acme of the French Renaissance, when France was borrowing with intelligent selection whatever it considered valuable from Italy, he pleased the dilettanti. There is something distinctly "swell" in his work. He does not perhaps express any overmastering personal feeling, nor does he stamp the impress of French national character on his work with any particular emphasis. He is too well-bred and too cultivated, he has too much _aplomb_. But his works show both more personal feeling and more national character than the works of his contemporaries elsewhere.

For line he has a very intimate instinct, and of ma.s.s, in the sculptor's as well as the painter's sense, he has a native comprehension. Compare his "Diana" of the Louvre with Cellini's in the adjoining room from the point of view of pure sculpture. Goujon's group is superb in every way.

Cellini's figure is tormented and distorted by an impulse of decadent though decorative aestheticism. Goujon's caryatides and figures of the Innocents Fountain are equally sculptural in their way--by no means arabesques, as is so much of Renaissance relief, and the modern relief that imitates it. Everything in fine that Goujon did is unified with the rest of his work and identifiable by the mark of style.

III

What do we mean by style? Something, at all events, very different from manner, in spite of Mr. Hamerton's insistence upon the contrary. Is the quality in virtue of which--as Mr. Dobson paraphrases Gautier--

"The bust outlives the throne, The coin Tiberius"

the specific personality of the artist who carved the bust or chiselled the coin that have thus outlived all personality connected with them?

Not that personality is not of the essence of enduring art. It is, on the contrary, the condition of any vital art whatever. But what gives the object, once personally conceived and expressed, its currency, its universality, its eternal interest--speaking to strangers with familiar vividness, and to posterity as to contemporaries--is something aside from its personal feeling. And it is this something and not specific personality that style is. Style is the invisible wind through whose influence "the lion on the flag" of the Persian poet "moves and marches." The lion of personality may be painted never so deftly, with never so much expression, individual feeling, picturesqueness, energy, charm; it will not move and march save through the rhythmic, waving influence of style.

Nor is style necessarily the grand style, as Arnold seems to imply, in calling it "a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it." Perhaps the most explicit examples of pure style owe their production to spiritual coolness; and, in any event, the word "peculiar" in a definition begs the question. Buffon is at once juster and more definite in saying: "Style is nothing other than the order and movement which we put into our thoughts." It is singular that this simple and lucid utterance of Buffon should have been so little noticed by those who have written in English on style. In general English writers have apparently misconceived, in very curious fas.h.i.+on, Buffon's other remark, "le style c'est l'homme;" by which aphorism Buffon merely meant that a man's individual manner depends on his temperament, his character, and which he, of course, was very far from suspecting would ever be taken for a definition.

Following Buffon's idea of "order and movement," we may say, perhaps, that style results from the preservation in every part of some sense of the form of the whole. It implies a sense of relations as well as of statement. It is not mere expression of a thought in a manner peculiar to the artist (in words, color, marble, what not), but it is such expression penetrated with both reminiscence and antic.i.p.ation. It is, indeed, on the contrary, very nearly the reverse of what we mean by expression, which is mainly a matter of personal energy. Style means correctness, precision, that feeling for the _ensemble_ on which an inharmonious detail jars. Expression results from a sense of the value of the detail. If Walt Whitman, for example, were what his admirers'

defective sense of style fancies him, he would be expressive. If French academic art had as little expression as its censors a.s.sert, it would still ill.u.s.trate style--the quality which modifies the native and apposite form of the concrete individual thing with reference to what has preceded and what is to follow it; the quality, in a word, whose effort is to harmonize the object with its environment. When this environment is heightened, and universal instead of logical and particular, we have the "grand style;" but we have the grand style generally in poetry, and to be sure of style at all prose--such prose as Goujon's, which in no wise emulates Michael Angelo's poetry--may justifiably neglect in some degree the specific personality that tends to make it poetic and individual.

IV