Part 3

Among the paintings wherein the simple, three-sided composition does not appear, the most notable are his animal pictures (in which he substituted the S design) and those canvases in which his momentary admiration for others (as for Veronese in the Retour de Christophe Colomb, and for the Dutch in Cromwell au Chateau de Windsor) made him forget himself. Even this primitive comprehension of linear balance had passed out of French painting with the death of Poussin, and its reapparition in Delacroix is analogous to the impetus toward rhythm which was given to the stiff Byzantine painting of Venice by Nicolo di Pietro and Giovanni da Bologna in the fourteenth century.

In Rubens we find turbulent movement, as great as in life itself, organised in such a way that all the emotions, exalted, depressive, dramatic, are expressed. But in Delacroix there is merely co-ordinated action. And this action, even in the busiest centres of his canvases, is more suggestive of unrest than of movement. However, the real cause for his failure to express a spirit as modern as Rubens's lay in his inability to understand the opposition in rhythmic line-balance of three dimensions which is to be found in even the slightest of Rubens's canvases. His details are always interesting, but he never succeeded in welding them into a sequacious and interrelated whole. His high gift of invention was inadequate equipment for so difficult a feat. Compare Rembrandt's exquisite bathing girl in the London National Gallery and Delacroix's La Grece Expirant sur les Ruines de Missolonghi. In technical treatment these two paintings are not unlike, but the scattered feeling and lack of plastic concentration in the latter emphasises the superior force of the Dutchman.

Delacroix's work fell between flat decoration and deep painting. Although in his small drawings and details he exhibits a genuine feeling for volume, as his Lion Dechirant un Cadavre shows, his constant refinements of reasoning nearly always resulted in his form being flattened out until it sometimes became commonplace. Simple balance of line defined the limits of his ability for organisation. If he had carried out in other pictures the compositional elements of his Pieta, which had distinct movement, his work would have taken a higher place in the history of art. In many canvases his seeming fullness of form is only a richness of line--a richness, however, which had seldom been found in painting since Masaccio. This voluptuousness in Delacroix (analogous to Wagner's music) results from the balance of large dark and light masses--the fullness of chiaroscuro. It is particularly appreciable in La Justice de Trajan, La Captivite de Babylone, Repos (reminiscent of Goya's La Maja Desnuda) and his animal compositions.

Delacroix's greatest deficiency lay in his inability to recognise the difference between the inventive intelligence and the imaginative instinct. Had he understood this he could have seen that his limitless ambition was incommensurate with his comparatively small capabilities. But his mind was not sufficiently open. In fact his viewpoint at times was a petty one. Even his patriotism was chauvinistic. He was rabidly anti-Teutonic and attempted to compress all the great masters of art into the French mould. He inveighed against style in painting because France had always been barren of it. He pretended to detest Wagner, his musical prototype, and ignoring the latter's dramatic undulations, criticised him severely for his methods. Beethoven was too long for Delacroix, and Il Trovatore too complicated. However, he had a profound admiration for Titian and Mozart; and in these preferences we have the man's psychology. Both were great classicists, but both lacked that genuine and magistral fullness which was the _propre_ of Beethoven and Michelangelo.

Delacroix's thoughts were on deep things rather than deep in themselves. Among the romanticists he was at home: all his life Byron and Walter Scott provided him with themes. And though he had sufficient foresight to see the hopeless trend of the painting of his day, and combated it, he did not advance. His muse was the corpse of Venetian art. He was the brake which put an end to the reactionary tendencies of art. His discoveries did not reach fruition until Impressionism, twenty years after his death.

In all his struggles destiny seemed to conspire to bring about his fame. In 1824, the very year he brought colour into his painting, Gericault, who gave promise of outstripping him, died. Constable and Turner came forward with their achievements. David's influence had died out, and the painter himself was an exile in Brussels. Fromentin tells us that Gericault helped paint Delacroix's first canvas. Certain it is that several of the great Englishmen painted some of his second. This, no doubt, taught Delacroix much. In 1827 the government ordered Justinien Composant les Institutes. All France rallied round his standard. He was decorated by Louis Philippe; and at the age of thirty he was proclaimed a great master by one of the leading critics of the day.

From the first he had had the backing of men respected as authorities. But though they helped make his position tenable, they obfuscated his true significance by their purely literary appreciations. Gautier, Dumas, Baudelaire, Stendhal and Merimee--there was none whose temperament was not either romantic or idealistic. They could not see that, though he strove with them for modernity of expression, his language was unmodern. However, Ernest Chesneau, Theophile Silvestre, Eugene Veron and C. P. Landon have all given us side-lights on his methods, and, in this, their expositions are of value.

But, though the men of letters did not understand him thoroughly, several of his fellow painters recognised his eclecticism. Among them was Thomas Couture who, in his highly instructive booklet, Methodes et Entretiens d'Atelier, had the audacity to point out the painter's selective habits. In the main his charge was just. Delacroix's first canvas contains influences of both Rubens and Michelangelo. His second picture echoes Rubens, the Venetians and Goya. Later came more prominent evidences of Titian and Veronese. Delacroix was museum-bred. He absorbed impressions avidly, and did his best work only after he had undergone an intellectual experience. Had his art been truly expressive of all that was within him, he would have been in turn--diluted, to be sure--a Giotto, a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt. He felt the call of these men, but instead of halting at appreciation, he tried to use them. But the old masters, like the lords of the earth, are not amenable to high-handed demands.

The diversity of his pursuits, which sprang from a desire to compete with Leonardo da Vinci, smacks of the dilettante. His great mistake was that he did not separate his capabilities from his desires. Had he done so he would have produced small figure pieces of gem-like richness and voluminous composition. Enthusiasm is not the proper equipment for extended labour. It burns out too soon, and is kept alive only by quick and brilliant results. For this reason his pictures are viewed to better effect framed and in galleries than as mural decorations. In trying to paint monumental subjects on extensive canvases he lost that spirit of organisation which would have been his on more limited surfaces. One of his finest expositions of colour, La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange, in a chapel at Saint Sulpice, is ineffective because its surface is too large for his treatment of the theme. Delacroix in reality was a painter of still-life in the broad meaning of the term, just as Rembrandt and Cezanne were still-life painters. He failed in the accomplishment of his larger programme because his vision was too restricted to permit him to weld his details into great ensembles, as Rubens did. His ambition outstripped his power, and strive as he might, he could not make up the discrepancy by reasoning. Undoubtedly he sensed his own weakness, for all his days he was in continual pursuit of system. System was to him what law was to the old masters. Herein he was reflecting the rationalistic philosophers of his day who substituted theory for observation.

Were all Delacroix's paintings destroyed and his Journal and drawings saved, his _apport_ to art would be but imperceptibly decreased. We should still possess his linear compositions and his colour theories--his two significant gifts to modern art. Without the liberation of draughtsmanship expressed in the former, Courbet's struggle would have been more difficult, and rhythm in drawing would have had to wait for another resuscitator. Without his colour theories Impressionism would have been postponed for half a century; Van Gogh could not have done his best pictures; and the Pointillists, with their system of complementaries, might never have existed. Delacroix was the first to speak of simultaneity in painting, on which phrase has recently been founded a school; and he sketched a dictionary of art terms and definitions which even now, after fifty years, is far more intelligent than present-day academic precepts.

Let us regard Delacroix as a great pioneer who fought against the zymotic formalism of his day and by so doing opened up a new era of expression. He is the link in the chain which holds the brilliant gems of painting. If he himself fell short of genius, he nevertheless fulfilled a destiny which intrinsically is in many ways more fine: he made genius possible for those who were to come after him.

The other man who contributed vitally to modern colour theories was J. M. W. Turner, born in 1775, one year before Constable. Like Delacroix he had ardent and influential defenders; and the coincidence is emphasised by the fact that between these two great colour innovators there existed a striking thematic similarity. Ruskin took care that Turner should taste those beneficent honours which the world generally withholds from a painter during his lifetime. He accomplished this feat by praise which was largely enthusiasm and by criticism which spelled partiality. But a panegyric not founded on accuracy and authenticity defeats its own object in the end. Turner himself remarked that Ruskin discovered recondite points in his painting of which he, as the artist, was ignorant. This might have been true, or it might have been sarcasm. But whether Ruskin or Turner knew more about the latter's art, the fact remains that the author of Modern Painters overestimated the painter for a reason totally inapposite to aesthetic consideration:--the almost photographic perfection of his canvases. Later, when the _spirituel_ Whistler tarnished this English didactician's reputation for infallibility, the latter's pronunciamentos were questioned, in some quarters ridiculed. And Turner, accepted because of Ruskin's assurances, became suspect.

But no amount of effulgent literary criticism can obscure the authentic accomplishments of this poor barber's son. Turner's contributions to the colour methods of the eighties were too large, and his imitators too bold, for the fact to be longer ignored. In his Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, The Fighting Temeraire and especially in Rain, Steam and Speed, he had begun to divide the surfaces of his objects into minute _touches_ of different colours--not, perhaps, for the purpose of heightening the emotional qualities of the paintings as a whole, but for the primitive reason that the device gave accuracy to them as representations of nature. These pictures Monet and Pissarro studied closely during the Franco-Prussian War, and there is no doubt that the result of this study determined the direction taken by the Impressionists. Turner's earlier pictures had been too sombre to meet the demand for brilliancy in that first great modern school, and the canvases in which his vision of sunlight began to take form had not yet been painted. These later pictures, with their light tonality and their full use of misty blue and gold, had a further influence on the Impressionists' conception of colour.

When Monet and Pissarro went to London in 1871 they had been habituated to the use of broad flat tones, and were astonished at Turner's extraordinary snow and ice effects which were obtained by juxtaposing little spots of diverse colour and by the gradating of tones. On their return to France they both made use of this striking artifice, and developed it, in conjunction with Delacroix's theories, into what later an unknown humorist of the _Charivari_ named Impressionism. This process was given further impetus by another Frenchman, Jongkind, called the European Hiroshige. There is more than a superficial analogy between Jongkind and Turner; and the Impressionists, first under the influence of Corot and Courbet, found the effects they sought by using the purity of Turner with the _facture_ of Jongkind. It was thus they were brought back to the theories of Delacroix which they had partially abandoned. This return had a profound _raison d'etre_, for between the last phase of Delacroix and the later sketches of Turner there is a similarity which was apparent even to their contemporaries. But though the resemblance was as pronounced as that between Turner and the Impressionists, the eulogists of that movement chose to ignore and, in some cases, to deny it.

This new method of using colour did not constitute the only debt the Impressionists owed Turner. They also found in him an added inspiration toward freedom of arrangement and unconventionality of design. The landscape painters before Turner's day conceived their out-of-door pictures in more or less definite moulds. A tree in one man's canvas, being an idealistic conception, was difficult of differentiation from a tree in another's. All their pictures were permeated by the same motif. But Turner, along with Constable and Bonington, began putting character into landscapes. As a consequence their pictures exuded a new freedom of arrangement.

To appreciate Turner fully we must overlook his astonishing ability for transcription--a heritage from his architectural days--and consider him as a man who loved nature so ardently that it was impossible for him to approach it intellectually. His sketches, both in water-colour and oil, were, unlike those of the Impressionists, rarely done in the open. He conceived them in pencil, wrote upon his clouds, trees and stones the colours he saw in them, and later, in the solitude of his studio, "worked them up." Had the Impressionists, after their frenzied _seances_ before models, taken their canvases home, organised and modified them, they would no doubt have produced greater net results artistically. Organisation, in its finest sense, comes only through contemplation and reflection; and while Turner did not possess the genius for rhythm in any of its manifestations, he nevertheless realised that mere truth does not make a picture. The Sun of Venice Going to Sea is as excellent as anything Monet or Sisley has ever done. In Turner there is a feeling for the grandiose such as few moderns possess. Did this gift come from Claude whom he delighted in imitating? Even Constable spoke of a Turner canvas as the most complete work of genius he ever saw. But this was the _beau geste_ of a contemporary who wished to appear broad-minded. The truth lay further down the slope. Turner undoubtedly showed genius in his competent copying of even the most insignificant of nature's accidents. The composition of The Devil's Bridge is the foundation on which are built many of Monet's pictures; and the Rain, Steam and Speed canvas can hang beside La Gare St. Lazare without loss to either.

Delacroix re-established an Italian mode of expression and tried to make of it a modern language. Turner, in a new language, spoke of ancient things. But Courbet ignored all method, and withal became the father of latter-day art. In him was the embryo of that distinctly modern spirit which demands visible proof before believing. Like William of Orange, he arose triumphant above every opposition. His art stemmed temperamentally from the Dutch and Spaniards, for while he imitated no one, he was unconsciously influenced by many. So complete was his assimilation of great men that in his expression they all had a place. He himself says that he studied antiquity as a swimmer crosses a river. The academicians were drowned there. So was Delacroix. Courbet learned in his passage that in adaptation is the confession of sterility. But though he avoided paraphrasing and copying the old masters, we find throughout his life recurring traces of Van Dyke, Zurbaran, Delacroix, Rembrandt, El Greco, Gericault, Ribera, Velazquez and that little known Valencian master, Juan de Juanes.

Courbet was considered an ignorant, vulgar and brutal peasant. But this judgment was the outgrowth of public miscomprehension rather than of any authentic evidence in the man himself. Courbet was the epitome of that unstudied naturalism which is antipodal to the hypocrisies of society. France, during his day, was governed by the dictates of theatricalism. Its ideals were those of Renaissance Italy, and its artistic attitude reflected a refinement of vision approaching decadence. Courbet's deportmental crudities alone were a source of antagonism, and when to these were added scorn and indifference the hostility against him became violent. But temperamentally he was aristocratic. The peasant mind is fundamentally traditional: Courbet was violently revolutionary. Nor did he lack fineness of mind. His early portraits embodied the subtleties of modelling in Rembrandt as well as the extraordinary niceties of characterisation in El Greco. The compositions of his pictures alone belie any coarseness of fibre in the man. They are founded on a weakened S which, since the decay of Byzantine art, had done valiant service for the most exalted painters such as Rubens and Tintoretto. This compositional figure appears, either exact or varied, in his Le Combat de Cerfs, Le Retour de la Conference, Chien et Lievres, and L'Enterrement a Ornans.

Courbet's reputation for vulgarity was derived more from his lack of facile fluency, so common in the French tradition, than from a basic understanding of the structural synthesis of his work. And this misconception of him was aggravated by his being the first painter unwilling to accept praise as the public chose to dole it out. He was a self-advertiser, and such men as George Bernard Shaw are but echoes of his methods. He pushed his way to the front unceasingly, and continually theorised as a means of silencing his adversaries. He regarded all public demonstration as _blague_, and later in life carried this attitude into politics. Whistler, his pupil, was quick to sense the advantage of his teacher's methods; and it is the irony of fate that this ineffectual American was believed and respected while Courbet was abused and ridiculed and forced to die in exile. He had carried his assaults too far. "To be not only a painter but a man," he wrote at one time. "To create a living art--this is my aim." It is a masterly statement of his real ambitions. He was intensely interested in life, as were Rubens and Cellini. "You want me to paint a goddess?" he exclaimed. "Show me one!" In this _mot_ he summed up the very spirit of modern times. It expressed the new realism found in such widely separated men as Dostoievsky, Zola, George Moore, Conrad, Andreiev, Theodore Dreiser, Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Korngold, Sibelius, Manet, Renoir, Sorolla and Zorn.

It is strange how Courbet, so far removed from the French temperament, should, at the crucial period of his life, have reverted to a French gesture by refusing the cross of the Legion of Honor. But in that famous letter of rejection, written in a cafe and mailed with a grandiloquent toss in the presence of Fantin-Latour, he summed up aptly the man of genius who, though avid for honour, throws it away at the moment of attainment. Not even Napoleon was more concerned with the thoughts of posterity than Courbet, and some of the artist's letters are not dissimilar in tone to the bombastic _manifestos_ of certain ultra-modern schools. At the time of his first exhibition he wrote to Bruyas: "I stupefy the entire world. I am triumphant not only over the moderns but the ancients as well. Here is the Louvre gallery. The Champs Elysees does not exist, nor the Luxembourg. There is no more Champs de Mars. I have thrown consternation into the world of art." This spirit of monumental self-confidence, so startling to a generation whose taste was measured by the decadent poetry of Beaudelaire, brought frantic sarcasm hurtling about his head. This troubled Courbet little. He valued friendships only in so far as they were useful. It was Meissonier who said in a Paris _salon_, when standing before the famous Femme de Munich which Courbet had painted in a few hours for Baron Remberg: "It is no longer a question of art, but of dignity. From now on Courbet must be as one dead to us."

Charles Beaudelaire, who helped fight the battle for Wagner, Poe, Delacroix, Manet and Monet, tentatively praised him at first, but later allied himself with the public and became his bitterest assailant. It was not surprising. A poet so superficial as to call Delacroix "a haunted lake of blood" could not be expected to appreciate the _terre a terre_ qualities of this master of Ornans. And Courbet was so little French that he was incomprehensible to his national contemporaries. He disclaimed all tradition, swore he had no forerunners, and struck blindly into the unknown. For a man without genius this would have been fatal, but, after all, only a genius would attempt such things.

Courbet was disgusted with the allegory and romance of his time. His nature cried aloud for a pose that was natural, for a landscape that resembled the out-of-doors, for objects in which life was discernible. Consequently the critics and painters of his day put him aside either indifferently or insolently. They could not understand a work of art which did not delineate a literary episode or in which the postures were not taken direct from the theatre. Courbet needed no literature to paint great pictures. He went straight to nature, and his compositions grew out of his sheer enjoyment in visible objects, whether they were dramatic or not. To the public his pictures appeared ugly, even repellent. Here was a man who painted a funeral realistically--_Dieu m'en garde!_ With only the example of canvases filled with familiar gods and goddesses and melting nudes in golden pink, he dared set forth, in a sacred theme, peasants' faces and peasants' shoes, cloudy skies, and holes in the brown earth. To those who had come to look upon art as something ethereal and evanescent, L'Enterrement a Ornans was more than blasphemy. It was this picture, falling like a bomb into the midst of the vagaries of his time, that sounded the death knell of romanticism. It was the last spade of earth on the graves of the classicists. The mere picture was sensation enough, but Courbet was not content to let the matter rest there. At the time of his exhibition in 1855, held in a barrack of his own building on the Rond Point de l'Alma, he wrote a defensive and provocative preface to his catalogue. In it he proclaimed himself not only the first realist, but realism itself.