Part 4

“Yesterday I went to take a bath. I had to go three or four hundred steps through streets full of merchants. In a passage a Jew was selling silks, pearls and corals; in front of his shop, not two yards wide, were three Arabs――an old man, another of middle age, the third about seventeen. There they were, seated, attentive, calm, wishing to buy, consulting together, making scarcely a gesture with their hands, always kept at full length, but sitting quietly, never hurrying, reflecting enormously, and keeping all the while under their burnouses the softest, gentlest attitudes. The youngest was superb――so handsome that mama was struck with it. ‘They are like beautiful statues,’ said she. I could not understand the scene and the relations that united these three Arabs. It was clear they were come to buy; they had come down from the higher part of the town. They were poor, for the youngest was in rags, and the burnouses of the others, though not in rags, were very much worn; but they took such pains in counting the little pieces of false coral that it was clear the Jew was selling dear to these big children a thing of no value. The one of middle age was counting on the table, with his flat hand by groups of five, the little pieces of coral which he chose as he counted them; thus adding each time five pieces to the heap that he drew towards him.

“What strikes one is this simple colouring, these magnificent folds, and then this serious childishness.

“I was not able to wait till the end of the scene. It was cold and draughty in this passage, which brought me back to the fact of my poor crazy legs. I long for the time when I shall be a man again; what lovely things I shall see, and perhaps I shall do!”

April 23rd (to the same): “Now I take myself by the ear and drag myself to the letter-paper, and all the needful things. Nothing is wanting, neither the thousand things I have to say, nor above all the tender affection that I keep in store for you.

“Emile says that you are coming, and soon: don’t be alarmed, you will not melt in the hot sun. There are cool places in the garden, where one can stretch oneself, with a magnificent landscape at one’s feet. We have only had the heat since yesterday; you will see how good you will find it, your muscles will relax, and you will go back quite young. We will make some excursions together if I am up to it. Any way there are plenty all round us to tempt you to make some.

“You have heard from Emile that I went to Blidah. I bore the little journey very well at first, but I was tired afterwards. I am going to begin to rest, and go slowly, in order that I may go farther. I have scarcely done anything till now, for I don’t feel myself up to remaining long in the same position, as a painter must, who thinks only of his work.”

The health that he hoped for, and so anxiously waited for, did not come. On the contrary, as the heat increased, Jules felt more unwell and more fatigued. The last letter that he wrote to me reached me at Granada, in that hotel, the “Siete Suelos,” where Fortuny and Henri Regnault had lived. There was all through it a sentiment of touching melancholy and discouragement.

“My good friends, this is delightful. It is too good to get your photographs at the same time as your kind and affectionate letter. I am glad you are going to Spain. Lucky fellows! Go along! while I, who should so like to see a bull fight!… You had not time to come, and indeed it was selfish to ask you. You could not have stayed more than a few days. But that is to be done some day when I am no longer a cripple, and when we can have two months before us. We are comfortably settled here. At this moment I am writing to you under the tent set up in the terraced court of our villa, with a wonderful view before me. Placed a little to the left of a semicircle, formed by the hills of Mustapha, 170 yards above the sea which flows at their base, we have at every hour of the day, a different landscape; for the sides of the hills are full of ravines, and the sun, according to the time of day, throws their slopes into light, or makes a network of shade, in a way quite peculiar to this corner of Africa. Little villas gleaming in the sunshine or grey in the shade give effect to the groups of verdure, the whole looking from the distance like a rich embroidery, with bosses of green harmoniously arranged. All this runs down toward the Gulf of Algiers, and trending away from here forms Cape Matifou. Above are the crests of the Little Atlas, far away, and lost in heaven’s blue; near by, sloping gardens spread out their golden or silvery verdure, according as one looks upon olive or eucalyptus. Add to this the perfume of the orange and lemon trees, the pleasure of telling you that I embrace you all three, Tristan included, that I am a little better, and you will have the state of my heart.

“Enjoy yourselves,――and you, my dear forester, with your Toledo eyes, what are you going to give to the world after all this delight of sunshine and kindly fellowship and the loving union of the charming trio that you make? It seems to me I have the heart and voice to make a fourth――what say you? Ah! that shall be after the rheumatism! Kindest regards from mama and from me. A last embrace to all three of you.”

The improvement he had experienced on arriving in Algiers ceased about the end of April. His strength and appetite gradually failed; and at the end of May it was decided to take the invalid back to France. He settled again in the Rue Legendre with the poor little mother, who never left him afterwards. When I saw him again I was shocked at the progress the disease had made. His thinness was such that my unhappy friend was nowhere in the garments that were made for his journey. His legs refused their service; he could no longer work; and yet he kept a little hope. He had just begun a new treatment, and talked of going into Brittany “as soon as he was strong enough.” He drove every day in the Bois when the weather was fine, and spent the rest of his day on cushions in the corner of the studio, occupied in contemplating, with a heartrending look, his studies hanging on the walls. This inaction was most distressing to him.

“Ah!” cried he, “if I was told: They are going to cut off your two legs, but after that you will be able to paint again, I would willingly make the sacrifice….”

He could only sleep now with the help of injected morphine, and he waited with impatience for the hour when a new supply should give him some relief, and a factitious drowsiness should make him forget his suffering.

In proportion as digestion became more difficult his appetite became more capricious. He wanted to have dishes made which reminded him of the cooking of his village; then, when they were brought to him, he turned away disgusted, without tasting them. “No,” said he, pushing aside the plate, “that’s not it; to have it good it must be made down there, prepared by the Damvillers people, with home-grown vegetables.” And while he was speaking one saw by his moist eyes a sudden and painful calling up of the impressions of former days; he saw all at once the old home, the gardens and orchards of Damvillers at the fall of evening, the peaceful village interiors at the time when the fires were lighted for the evening meal.

As the season advanced his strength decreased. In September his brother was obliged to take him on his back to carry him to the carriage, and he drove about slowly for an hour in the avenues of the Bois. He could not read, and was easily wearied by conversation. His nerves were become very irritable, and the slightest odours were disagreeable to his sense of smell. His courage seemed to forsake him; at the same time he was always wanting to know what others thought of his illness. His blue eyes with their penetrating look anxiously searched the eyes of his friends, and of his mother, who never left his side. The heroic little woman did her best to dissimulate, and was always smiling and affecting a cheerfulness and a confidence which were painful to see; then, when she could escape for a moment, she hastened into the neighbouring room and melted into tears.

For months this cruel agony was thus prolonged. Bastien was only a shadow of himself. On the 9th of December, during great part of the night, he talked of Damvillers with his mother and his brother. Then at about four in the morning he said to them, with a kiss, “Come, it is time for children to sleep.” All three slept. Two hours later Mme. B. was awakened by Jules, who asked for something to drink; she rose, and brought him a cup of tea, and was alarmed on finding that the invalid groped for the cup to guide it to his lips; he could no longer see; but he still spoke and even joked about the difficulty he had in moving his limbs.

Shortly afterwards he dozed, and sliding gently from sleep into death, he expired at six in the evening, December 10, 1884.

I saw him next day lying on his mortuary bed, in the midst of a thick covering of flowers. His poor emaciated face, with its sightless and deeply sunk orbits, made him look like one of those Spanish figures of Christ, fiercely cut in wood by Montanez.

On the 12th of December a long train of friends and admirers accompanied his remains to the Eastern Railway Station, whence it was conveyed to the Meuse. The next day, Sunday, the whole population of Damvillers waited at the entrance of the town for the funeral carriage, which brought back Bastien-Lepage to his native place.

The sad procession advanced slowly on that road from Verdun where the painter had loved to walk at twilight, talking with his friends. A pale mist blotted out those hills and woods whose familiar outlines he had so often reproduced. The _cortège_ stopped before the little church where he had intended painting his Burial of a Young Girl. The morning was showery; the wreaths and festoons of flowers, placed the night before on his coffin, were revived and refreshed by the moisture; when they were heaped up upon the grave they seemed to come to life again, and to send out with their renewed perfume a last adieu from Paris to the painter of the peasants of the Meuse.

VI.

On the 17th of the following March, at the Hôtel de Chimay, now connected with the École des Beaux Arts, the exhibition of the works of him whom we have surnamed the “Primitif” was opened. All the works of Bastien, with the exception of the Jeanne d’Arc, were collected there.

On visiting this exhibition the most prejudiced minds were struck with the suppleness, the fecundity, and power of the talent of this painter, carried off at the age of thirty-six. For the first time his varied and original work could be judged as a whole.

One could study in detail these productions of a thoroughly conscientious artist, and follow the growth of each composition as one follows the development of a beautiful plant――first in the drawings, so pure, so sober, and expressive; then in the sketches so truthful and sincere; and, lastly, in the finished pictures, so harmonious and luminous. By the side of the great pictures, Les Foins (The Hay), La Saison d’Octobre (October), Le Mendiant (The Beggar), Père Jacques (Father Jacques), and L’Amour au Village (Love in the Village), like windows opening upon life itself, one admired that collection of small portraits in which the most penetrating physiological observation was united with an execution most masterly, precise, and delicate. One passed delighted from those interiors worthy of the Dutch painters, such as La Forge and La Lessive, to the landscapes breathing the odours of the fields and of the woods, such as Le Vieux Gueux (The Old Beggar), Les Vendanges (The Vintage), La Prairie (The Meadow), La Mare (The Pool), Les Blés Mûrs (Ripe Corn), or to those full of air and motion, like London Bridge and the Thames; then one stopped before La Petite fille allant à la École (The Little Girl going to School), or that poetic Idyl, Le Soir au Village (Evening in the Village).

In this exhibition containing more than two hundred canvases and a hundred drawings, there was nothing trifling, nothing indifferent. The smallest sketches were interesting because they revealed passionate worship of what is simple and natural, hatred of the almost and the conventional, and the incessant striving of the artist after his ideal, which is Truth.

A healthy and robust poetry exhaled from this collection. One left the Hôtel de Chimay with a sensation of strengthening and reviving pleasure, such as one gets from certain aspects of nature――deep woods, limpid waters, and the bright sky of a summer morning.

Unhappily this joy was mixed with the sad thought of the sudden death of the young man who had produced all this masterly work.

On first entering these rooms reserved for his pictures I was, for a long time, impressed with a feeling that I had already experienced at the exhibition of the works of the talented young artist, Mdlle. Bashkirtseff, mown down like Bastien, in full youth, and at the same time as he. This cruel death seemed only a bad dream.

On seeing again these unfinished sketches, these perfect portraits, these canvases that I had seen him paint one after another, I felt as if I was conversing with the painter and the friend who had created all this. I felt that he was still living and in possession of all his force. I expected every moment to see him appear among us, smiling, happy, fortified by the now unanimous admiration of the crowd gathered before his work.

Alas! instead of himself my eyes only met his portrait, placed in the first room, and the mournful eloquence of the wreaths and flowers attached to the frame recalled me harshly to the heartrending reality.

The poor “Primitif” will paint no more. The atelier at Damvillers where we have spent such happy hours is closed for ever. The peasants of the village will no more meet their countryman on the roads where he used to work in the open air. The rustic flowers that he used to paint in the foreground of his pictures, the blue chicory and the groundsel, will flower again this summer by the edges of the fields, but he will not be there to study and admire them.

Among the sketches exhibited by the side of the great pictures there was one that I had already remarked at Damvillers, and that I now saw again with deep emotion. It represents an old peasant woman going in the early morning into her garden to visit her apple tree in blossom. The nights of April are perfidious, and the spring frosts give mortal wounds; the old woman draws to her a flowering branch and inspects with anxious eye the disasters caused by the hurtful rays of the red moon. Bastien-Lepage was like this tree, full of sap and of promising blossom. For years the heavens had been clement to him, and the flowers had given many and rich fruits; then in a single night a murderous frost destroyed all――the open flowers by thousands, and the tree itself. All that remains is the splendid fruit of past seasons, but the exquisite flavour of that the world will long enjoy.

Things truly beautiful have wonderful vitality and last on through the centuries, hovering above the earth where the generations of men go turn by turn to sleep,――and this survival of the works of the spirit of man is perhaps the surest immortality upon which he can count.

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST.

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST.

The work of Bastien-Lepage ranks, to my mind, with the very best in modern art. He brought to us what was in some ways a new view of nature――one whose truth was at once admitted, but which was nevertheless the cause of much discussion and criticism. It was objected to mainly, I think, as not being in accord with established rules, but nevertheless the objectors expressed their admiration for the skill of the painter; while, on the other hand, for those who accepted him (chiefly the younger men these), no praise was too great, no admiration too enthusiastic.

It is only a few years since his untimely death was mourned as a loss to the whole art-world, for his whole career is so recent that his fellow-students are still young men, many of them only now beginning to obtain full recognition; and yet it is perhaps long enough ago to enable his work to be considered as a whole, and his place in the art-movement to be seen. For although he was an innovator, and one showing in all he did a strong individuality, the general direction of his genius was given him by the artistic tendencies of his time.

It will be generally admitted that if painting has made any advance in our day, if it shows in any direction a new departure, or fresh revelation of the beauty that exists throughout nature, it is in the development of the problems which have arisen from the study of landscape and of the effects of light. There now prevails a close and sincere study of nature, founded on the acceptance of things as they are, and an increasing consciousness on the part of artists (or perhaps it would be more correct to say an increasing courage on the part of artists to express their conviction) that a picture should be the record of something seen, of some impression felt, rather than be formally constructed. And men have awakened at length to see that all nature is beautiful, that all light is beautiful, and that there is colour everywhere; that the endeavour to realize truly the natural relation of people to their surroundings is better than to follow unquestioning on the old conventional lines. This is, roughly speaking, the modern standpoint, and it cannot be denied that it is an enormous advance on the accepted artistic ideals of thirty or forty years ago. And to the men who have brought this about――to the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood; to Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Courbet, Manet, and Mr. Whistler――to all those who have fought the battle and to whom our present clearer outlook is due, we owe a lasting debt of gratitude.

It is a little surprising now, that the work of Bastien-Lepage, based as it is on the simple acceptance of nature, should have caused so much discussion on its first appearance. For time has justified him; we feel on comparing his work with other men of his time that it marks a new departure, and we realize that it has helped to form our present standpoint. But as the majority of people tune their eyes by pictures and not by nature, and only admire in nature that which is made manifest to them by their artistic prophet, it may be taken as a compliment to a man of independent genius that when he discloses a fresh view of nature, it is not for some time accepted. “Good gracious, sir!” said an eminent critic, referring to Claude Monet, “like nature? Yes; of course it’s like nature; but a man has no business to choose that aspect of it!”

Every picture may be said to appeal to the spectator from two sides or points of view――the literary and the æsthetic.

A picture may tell its story to perfection――may point a moral and all the rest of it, and so fulfil the purpose of its author――and still, or, as some extreme persons would say, therefore――may be bad art, may indeed be not worthy to rank as art at all. Such pictures are frequently seen. And again, a picture may, by raising and defining to some inner sense emotions dimly felt by us before nature, leave us with a fuller sense of beauty, a feeling of something revealed to us. And yet it need have no subject or story. We are convinced that this picture is beautiful: that no other form of artistic expression can precisely so touch us. Such pictures are rare, but happily they do exist. Yet, from the nature of things, it is impossible but that such a picture should speak to some――ever so slight――extent to the mind; and also the most literary picture is never without evidence of some desire to please the eye.

The work of Bastien-Lepage seems to me to embrace both these points of view. The literary and æsthetic sides of art were very evenly balanced in him. If we take any individual work, as, for example, the Beggar, we find a most perfect realization of character: the whole life-history of the man seen and brought before us――evidently this was the motive of the picture; yet the painting is in itself so full of charm, the perception of colour so fine, that we feel he was equally interested in that. He tried to hold the balance even. His work shows an extraordinary receptive power, an unequalled (almost microscopic on occasion) clearness of vision, allied with an absolute mastery of his material. His attitude towards nature is one of studied impartiality, and seems to show the resolute striving of an intensely sympathetic nature to get at the actual optical appearances and to suppress any hint of his own feelings. And his subjects are presented with such force and skill that their truth to nature is at once felt, and if a painter, you cannot fail also to feel the charm of his simple and sincere method. You cannot tally it by any other painter’s work: it stands by itself.

His impartial attitude towards his model constitutes one of Bastien-Lepage’s distinctions. I am not sure that it is not the distinct note of all his work. He paints a man――and the man stands before you, and you ask yourself, “What is he going to say? What does the artist wish to express?” You may make what you can of him; Lepage gives you no clue. To me, I confess, this quality is a very high one; it seems to indicate a great gift, and to be, if I may presume to say so, akin to Shakespeare’s method of presenting his characters without a hint of his own feelings towards them.

Although it is no doubt owing to Millet that Lepage’s eyes were opened to the paintableness of country life, he saw his subjects in his own way and approached them from his own point of view. With Millet the subject and type were everything――the individual nothing. He was passionately moved by his subject, and once its action and sentiment were expressed, everything was subordinated to them. He cared nothing for the smaller truths of detail provided the general impression were true to his mental image, and his aim was avowedly to impose his mental impression on the spectator. Lepage, on the contrary, appears to avoid communicating his mental impression. He will give you the visual impression, as truly as he possibly can; you may, if you please, find――as he has found――pathos and poetry in it: as before the same scene in nature, if you have sympathy; but for his part he will not help you by any comment of his own.