Part 4

Gericault's Radeau de la Meduse and Delacroix's Dante et Virgile aux Enfers were acceptable to the public, the one because of its dramatic interest, the other because of its literature. But L'Enterrement a Ornans entirely lacked the popular qualities of these two other pictures. It was full of rugged and hardy precision. Its insolent ugliness of subject-matter and its implied indifference to all tradition, seemed to express the quintessence of artistic degradation and sordidness. At first view the picture appears to have been inspired by El Greco's Obsequies of the Count of Orgaz, but it is more likely that these peasants of Ornans, each a notable of the town, with their indifferent expressions and awkward gestures, were attributable to The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew of Ribera and La Folle of Gericault, rather than to the master of Toledo. But that the Spanish helped paint it is evident: some parts of the landscape are taken bodily from their canvases. Meier-Graefe states that this funeral picture, like most of the representative pictures of the nineteenth century, is not representative of the artist himself. But did Meier-Graefe understand more profoundly the synthesis of composition found in individual painters, he would have seen that here was the famous S composition which was used throughout the painter's life. Instead of being set on end, as was the practice of the Italians, it is used laterally and extends from left to right in depth.

In colour also this picture is representative of Courbet, for it shows his limitations in that medium. Delacroix brought a new palette to painting, but could not use it. Courbet contented himself with a palette as meagre as that of Caravaggio and Guercino. And yet, though colour has come latterly to mean tactile form in its highest sense, this black canvas, when placed beside either an Ingres, a David, a Delacroix or a Gerard, appears less flat and inconsequential than the latter. The form is even suggestive of Rembrandt, Giotto, Cezanne and Renoir.

Champfleury was the only friend of Courbet who dared defend him. Delacroix was set against him, and the critics, without understanding him, obscured the true importance of his art by talking of his want of transcendentalism and sentiment. Especially were his landscapes the butt of their ridicule, for painters up to that time had made use of conventional arrangements of dainty trees copied for their drawing and tone. In Courbet all this was changed. He organised landscapes as he did still-lives and nudes. Objects, as such, meant nothing to him. In this he struck a new and modern note which the good people of his day considered not only bad art but a slur upon the spiritual meanings of nature. Even in Les Baigneuses, where the figures are unimportant, the trees are superb. In La Grotte he went further, for here the figure was part of the whole. His paintings of the hills about Ornans had a movement which gave off a sensation of weight entirely new in painting. In Les Grands Chataigniers he reached his apogee in landscape painting. This picture is greater than those of any of the Englishmen.

Though many critics have written that Millet influenced Courbet, the reverse is the truth. The former's life work was largely a repetition of the lights and darks found in Courbet's earlier pictures. Les Casseurs de Pierres is far greater than anything Millet has ever done, despite the vast popularity of such purely sentimental pictures as The Angelus and The Man with the Hoe. Courbet could never have been satisfied with the angularity and absence of rhythm in the other's work. In Millet's best canvases one finds at most only a parallelism of lines, and in his lesser pictures even this amateurish attempt at organisation is lacking. But in Les Casseurs de Pierres the arrangement is one which recalls the competency of linear balance and development in Tintoretto's Minerva Expelling Mars.

When Courbet entered painting, he had neither prejudices nor a _parti pris_. He tested his ability before engaging his full complement of resources. Though untutored, he had that cast of intelligence which no amount of study can produce and no amount of adverse criticism influence. Delacroix, on the other hand, was the archetype of the highly cultured and educated man. He foresaw the necessity for radical reform, but was unable to bring it about significantly. Courbet instinctively projected himself into that void at the brink of which tradition halts and the unknown begins. And because he was a man of genius he did not return empty-handed.

The art of Courbet was too aristocratic to be appreciated. Not aristocratic in the Delacroix sense, but isolated and superior. Rejecting the colour discoveries of his day, he created his own materials. Delacroix foreshadowed the medium which was to serve as a vehicle for the achievement of future generations, but it was Courbet who brought to art a new mental attitude without which there would be no excuse for modern painting. By turning men's thoughts from ancient Italy to the actualities of their own day, and by expelling the literary canvas from art, he left those who came after him free to evolve a medium which would translate the new vision. Delacroix's heritage to art was intellectual, Courbet's dynamic. And though objectively the work of Courbet is the uglier and less gracious, in it there is more of the sublime. But both men are indispensable, and have a just claim to the eternal respect of posterity.

The construction of form as voluminous phenomena--that integer of modern painting which was lacking in Delacroix, Turner and Courbet, but which has become one of the leading preoccupations of present-day artists--was introduced by Honore Daumier. This painter who, unlike his three great contemporaries, fought for the pure love of the fight, was celebrated as a caricaturist at twenty-five. Such fame was warranted, for he was unquestionably the greatest and most trenchant caricaturist the world has ever produced. From 1835 to 1848 he made capital of all those many catastrophes which overtook France. Only the curtailing of the freedom of the press on December 2, 1848, put an end to his career as publicist. This culmination of his editorial activities was a beneficial thing for both Daumier and the world, for it permitted him freedom to devote himself wholly to the development of the larger side of his genius. He endeavoured to interest his friends in his painting; but too long had he been known as a critic of current topics for them to look with serious eyes upon his more solid endeavours.

But though neglected by his friends, Daumier holds a position of tremendous importance in relation to the moderns. His work developed along lines unthought-of by either Delacroix or Courbet. Even his cartoons were more than clever pictorial comments on national events. Intrinsically they were great pieces of rugged flesh which had all the appearance of having been chiselled out of a solid medium with a dull tool. The richness of his line is as complete as in Rembrandt's etchings; and his economy of means reached a point to which painters had not yet attained. His significance, however, lies more especially in his new method of obtaining volume than in the flexibility of his line drawings. He built his pictures in tone first. The drawing came afterward as a direct result of the tonal volumes. This new manner of painting permitted him a greater subtlety and fluency than Courbet possessed. In fact, Daumier's comprehension of form in the subjective sense was greater than that of any Frenchman up to his time. Compare, for instance, Daumier's canvas, Les Lutteurs, with Courbet's picture of the same name. The massiveness of the one is monumental. One feels the weight of the two struggling men, heavy and shifting, clinging and panting. They are modelled by a craftsman who can juggle deftly with his means. In Courbet's picture the figures are seen carefully copied in a strained pose by one who has not the complete mastery of his tools. In Daumier's picture we also sense that elusive but vital quality called mental attitude. Superficially it is almost indistinguishable from its negation, but to those who know its significance, it is of permeating importance.

Contour and shading to his forerunners had meant two separated and distinct steps in the construction of form. Daumier created both qualities simultaneously as one emotion. Depth with other painters was obtained by carrying their figures into the background by the means of line and perspective. With Daumier it meant a plastic building up of volume from the background forward. The feeling we have before his canvases that we are looking at form itself and not merely an excellent representation of it, is as strong as it is in a greater way when we stand before a Leonardo da Vinci. In this he gave proof that he was a draughtsman in the most vital sense. Unless he had felt form uniquely, Le Repos des Saltimbanques and Le Bain would have been impossible of creation. This last picture sums up what Carriere aspired to but failed to attain.

Recalling the great masters of form we instinctively visualise Michelangelo first. For this reason perhaps Michelangelo is regarded the major influence in Daumier. "_Il avait du Michel Ange dans la peau_," say the French: and certain it is that Daumier's colossal simplicity and feeling for tactility were derived from the Renaissance master. But only in one picture, a composition called La Republique--1848, do we find any direct and conscious influence. Frankly this is but a modernisation of one of the sibyls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The truth is Daumier is more akin to Rembrandt than to Michelangelo. But there is in him none of the conscious copying of Rembrandt that we find, for instance, in Joshua Reynolds. The latter, admiring Rembrandt, essayed to equal his power by imitating his externals with academic processes. Daumier, temperamentally affiliated with his master, went deeper. Putting aside the results of Rembrandt's final brush strokes, he studied the very functioning procedure of his art. Both used the human figure as a _terrain_ for the unceasing struggle of light against dark. In the process of painting the infinite play and by-play of opposed values on a given theatre, they produced form as an inevitable result.

A critic has stated of Daumier: "He left hardly anything but sketches, splashes of colour that resolve themselves into faces...." It is said without attempt at profundity. Nevertheless the remark unsuspectingly touches the crucial point of Daumier's significance. The very resolution of those "splashes of colour" into faces is the prefiguration of the modern conception of form. In this particular Daumier, even more than Rembrandt, was the avant-courier of Cezanne. This latter artist, through his concern with the play of one colour on another, gave birth to form more intensely than did either of the older men. Too much stress cannot be laid on Daumier's contribution to modern painting. By regarding the two drawings, La Vierge a l'Ecuelle and Renaude et Angelique--the one by Correggio in chalk, the other by Delacroix in water-colour--we perceive the attainment of form by less profound methods. But neither possesses the significance of Daumier's work.

Of Daumier's colour little need be said. At times it emerges from its sombreness and blossoms forth in all the hot softness of now the Venetians, of again the Spaniards; but compared with the artist's genius for plastic form it is of subsidiary importance.

Although the inception of Daumier's greatness can be traced to Rembrandt, he reacted to many influences. Suggestions of Monnier and Granville are to be found in his work. Decamps's Sonneurs de Cloches was studied by him and emulated. His simplifications stemmed from Ingres, and his caricature of Guizot had the same qualities as that master's portraits. Delacroix also had some trifling influence on him in such paintings as Don Quichotte. But Daumier's influence on others is more direct and far-reaching than his own garnerings of inspiration. He foreshadowed the formal abbreviations of Toulouse-Lautrec, Forain and Steinlen, and he affected, more than is commonly admitted, the works of Manet, Degas, and Van Gogh. In his sculptured pieces, Ratapoil and Les Emigrants, he paved the way for Meunier and Rodin. Even such minor men as Max Beerbohm learned much from him without understanding him. And apart from the vital new methods he brought to painting, the originality of his subject-matter led modern men to copy him thematically. Le Drame fathered a whole series of Degas's paintings.

Daumier is only beginning to receive the intelligent appreciation which in time may engulf his eminent contemporary, Courbet. For if choice there is between the intrinsically artistic achievements of the painter of L'Enterrement a Ornans and the creator of Silene, the preference rests with Daumier.

The forces underlying the development of genius, working in conjunction with the right circumstances, produce the fertilising methods which nature uses to bring about a final flowering of a long period of intense germination. Before the greatest eras of all art the battles have been fought and won. The descendants of the pioneers become the introspective and creative souls who open, free from the stain of combat, to the sun of achievement. Delacroix, Turner, Courbet, Daumier--these are the men who cleared the ground and thereby made possible a new age of aesthetic creation. To Delacroix belongs the credit for giving an impetus to the vitalisation of colour, and for freeing drawing from the formalisms of the past. Turner raised the tonality of colour, and introduced a new method for its application. Courbet heightened uniformly the signification of objects in painting, and handed down a mental attitude of untraditional relativity. And Daumier conceived a new vision of formal construction. These men were the pillars of modern painting.

III

EDOUARD MANET

The purely pictorial has always been relished by the public. The patterns of the mosaicists and very early primitives, the figured stuffs of the East and South, the vases of China and Persia, the frescoes on the walls of Pompeii, the drawings and prints of old Japan--all are examples of utilitarian art during epochs when the public took delight in the contemplation of images. Even the delicate designs on Greek pottery, the rigid and ponderous arts of architectural Egypt and the drawings and adorned totem poles of the North American Indians are relics of times when the demand for art was created by the masses. For the most part all these early crafts were limited to simple designs, wholly obvious to the most rudimentary mind. The ancients were content with a representation of a natural object, the likeness of a familiar animal, the symmetry of an ornamental border, an effigy of a god in which their abstract conceptions were given concrete form. At that time the artist was only a craftsman--a man with a communistic mind, content to follow the people's dictates and to reflect their taste. Art was then democratic, understood and admired by all. It did not raise its head about the mean level; it was abecedary, and consequently comprehensible.

When the Greek ideal of fluent movement took birth in art and became disseminated, drawing, painting and sculpture began to grow more rhythmic and individual. Slowly at first and then more and more swiftly, art became insulated. The popular joy in the native crafts, despite the impetus of centuries behind it, decreased steadily. The antagonism of the masses to the artist sprang up simultaneously with the disgust of the artist for the masses. It was the inevitable result of the artist's mind developing beyond them. He could not understand why they were no longer in accord with him; and they, finding him in turn unfathomable, considered him either irrational or given over to fantastic buffoonery. So long had they been the dictator of his vision that his emancipation from their prescriptions left them astounded and angered at his audacity. The nobles then, feeling it incumbent upon them to defend this new luxury of art, stepped into the breach, and for a time the people blindly patterned their attitude on that of their superiors. Later came the disintegration of the nobility; its caste being lost, the people no more imitated it. From that time on, although there were a few connoisseurs, the large majority was hostile to the artist, and made it as difficult as possible for him to live. He was looked upon as a madman who threatened the entire social fabric. His isolation was severe and complete; and while many painters strove to effect a reinstatement in public favour, art for 300 years forced its way through a splendid evolution in the face of neglect, suspicion and ridicule.

For so many generations had the public looked upon art as the manifestation of a disordered and dangerous brain that they found it difficult to recognise a man in whose work was the very pictorial essence they had originally admired. This man was Edouard Manet. Instead of being welcomed for his reversion to decoration, strangely enough he was considered as dangerous as his contemporary heretics, Delacroix and Courbet. Courbet was at the zenith of his unpopularity when Manet terminated his apprenticeship under Couture. The young painter had had numerous clashes with his academic master, and the latter had prophesied for him a career as reprehensible as Daumier's. Spurred on by such incompetent rebukes, Manet determined to launch himself single-handed into the vortex of the aesthetic struggle. This was in 1857. For two years thereafter he put in his time to good purpose. He travelled in Holland, Germany and Italy, and copied Rembrandt, Velazquez, Titian and Tintoretto. These youthful preferences give us the key to his later developments. In 1859 he painted his Le Buveur d'Absinthe, a canvas which showed all the ear-marks of the romantic studio, and which exemplified the propensities of the student for simplification. It was a superficial, if enthusiastic, piece of work, and the _Salon_ of that year was fully justified in rejecting it. Two years later Manet had another opportunity to expose. In the meantime he had painted his La Nymphe Surprise which, though one of his best canvases, contained all the influence of a hurriedly digested Rembrandt and a Dutch Titian.

In 1861 these influences were still at work, but the _Salon_ not only accepted his Le Guitarrero but, for some unaccountable reason, awarded it with an honourable mention. In this picture, Manet's first Spanish adaptation, are also traces of other men. Goya and even Murillo are here--the greys of Velazquez and Courbet's modern attitude toward realism. In this canvas one sees for the first time evidences of its creator's technical dexterity, a characteristic which later he was to develop to so astonishing a degree. But this picture, while conspicuously able, is, like L'Enfant a l'Epee and also Les Parents de l'Artiste, the issue of immaturity. Such paintings are little more than the adroit studies of a highly talented pupil inspired by the one-figure arrangements of Velazquez, Mazo and Carreno. Where Manet improved on the average student was in his realistic methods. While he did not present the aspect of nature in full, after the manner of Daubigny and Troyon, he stated its generalisations by painting it as seen through half-closed eyes, its parts accentuated by the blending of details into clusters of light and shadow. This method of visualisation gives a more forceful impression as an image than can a mere accurate transcription. As slight an innovation as was this form of painting, it represented Manet's one point of departure from tradition, although it was in truth but a modification of the traditional manner of copying nature. The public, however, saw in it something basically heretical, and derided it as a novelty. The habit of ridicule toward any deviation from artistic precedent had become thoroughly fixed, ever since Delacroix's heterodoxy.

It was not until 1862 that Manet, as the independent and professional painter, was felt. Up to this time his talent and capabilities had outstripped his powers of ideation. But with the appearance of Lola de Valence the man's solidarity was evident. This picture was exposed with thirteen other works at Martinet's the year following. It was hung beside the accepted and familiar Fontaineleau painters, Corot, Rousseau and Diaz; and almost precipitated a riot because of its informalities. In these fourteen early Manets are discoverable the artist's first tendencies towards simplification for other than academic reasons. Here the abbreviations and economies, unlike those in Le Buveur d'Absinthe, constitute a genuine inclination toward emphasising the spontaneity of vision. By presenting a picture, free from the stress of confusing items, the eye is not seduced into the by-ways of detail, but permitted to receive the image as an ensemble. This impulse toward simplification was prefigured in his Angelina now hanging in the Luxembourg Gallery. Here he modelled with broad, flat planes of sooty black and chalky white, between which there were no transitional tones. While in this Manet was imitating the externals of Daumier, he failed to approach that master's form. Consequently he never achieved the plasticity of volume which Daumier, alone among the modern men, had possessed. However, despite Manet's failure to attain pliability, these early paintings are, in every way, sincere efforts toward the creation of an individual style. It was only later, after his first intoxicating taste of notoriety, that the _arriviste_ spirit took possession of him and led him to that questionable and unenviable terminus, popularity. One can imagine him, drunk with eulogy, reading some immodest declaration of Courbet's in which was set forth that great man's egoistic confidence, and saying to himself: "_Tiens! Il faut que j'aille plus loin._"

The famous _Salon des Refuses_, called by some critics of the day the _Salon des Reprouves_, gave Manet his chance to state in striking fashion his beliefs in relation to aesthetics. For whereas mere realism could no longer excite the animosity of the official _Salon_ jury, as it had done twenty years before, immorality--or, as Manet chose to put it, _franchise_--could. Therefore Manet was barred from the company of the Barbizon school and the other favourites of the day. In the _Salon des Refuses_, which must be held to the credit of Napoleon III, those painters who had suffered at the hands of the academic judges were allowed a hearing. Whistler, Jongkind, Pissarro and Manet here made history. Manet sent Le Bain, which, through the insistence of the public, has come to be called Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe. But despite the precedent of Giorgione's Rural Concert (the Concert Champetre in the Louvre), it was looked upon only as the latest manifestation of degeneracy in a man who gave every promise of becoming a moral pariah. The nude, contrasted as it was with attired figures, was too suggestive of sheer nakedness. Had the nude stood alone, as in Ingres's La Source, or among other nudes, as in Ingres's Le Bain Turc, the picture would have caused no comment. Its departures in method were not extravagant. The scene is laid out of doors, yet it bears all the evidences of the studio conception; and those lights and reflections which later were brought to such perfection in the pictures of the Impressionists and Renoir, are wholly absent. But in one corner is a beautifully painted still-life of fruits, a basket and woman's attire, which alone should have made the picture acceptable. This branch of painting Manet was to develop to its highest textural possibilities.