Part 17

Emile Wéry, a young and fortunate man of talent, began his career with a great success. His view of an Amsterdam canal made a sensation, and gained the great prize at the “Salon.” Perhaps a little stupefied by this triumph, he kept for a while to the style of his prize picture, so that there was reason to fear he would early stiffen into a manner. He painted, for instance, an attractive triptych, which presents Venice to us in her three characteristic decorations: the narrow _Calle_, the slender _Rio_, and the splendid _Canal_. But what we cannot anyhow fancy absent from a view of Venice—the southern sky, the gleaming sun, and the warm tints of her old stones and tiles: these are here altogether lacking. It is all grey, northern grey. It is the same tone as in the prize picture of Amsterdam. As Faust found Helen in every woman, so Wéry then found apparently Dutch water-towns in every town, and Amsterdam herself in Venice. People think they are flattering the city on the Amstel, when they call it the Venice of the North. Wéry reversed the compliment: to him Venice was the Amsterdam of the South. How true it is that we see not with the eyes but with the soul!

The South, combined with his youthful impulses to development, was to save him from the danger of mannerism. Though he had seen Venice with his Amsterdam eyes, and found in the azure and gold of the city of lagunes the leaden waters and mist of the north, further south, in the light, he bathed his eyes clean from the muddiness of higher latitudes. In “Sicily” a girl’s brown head, with red cloth in the midst of a cluster of dark green-leaved branches with ripe oranges, flashes and glows the whole noon of the magic island, which this vigorous woman—a golden fruit among golden fruits—is to personify. But even after his return home he still remained drunk with the light of Italy. In a new picture, “The Little Ones,” we are once more in a harbour on the North Sea, at a place where Wéry’s talent takes its root. Flaxen-haired youngsters are playing round a boat; one of these, a little chap in wide, flapping trousers, is droll enough to eat. Water, sky, and river-bank are wedded in silver sheen, and over the whole reposes a happy sense of comfort, in which the artist’s cheerful heart is disclosed. He has happily got over his first crisis. Now his artistic career lies smooth and sunny before him.

Anders Zorn.—This Swede is a virtuoso of amazing skill. He delights in marvellous effects of light, in surprises, in fixing fugitive views. His pictures are snap-shots pitched on the canvas with an almost mechanically smart brush. He is a concert painter possessing talent. He is one of the great corruptors of young artists nowadays. It is so fascinating, by a few wild, staggering, nimble strokes of the brush, to conjure up a human figure or a scene. But this method leads to the worst superficiality, and attracts most the lazy fellows who wish to save themselves the trouble of learning properly the principles of drawing and painting. Zorn did not make the thing easy for himself. He honestly and industriously acquired a thorough mastery of technique before turning to execute his dazzling little pieces. He may allow himself to storm and rage over the canvas, for accuracy has become automatic in him. In spite of this haste, every line is on the right spot, and though people often regret that he only hints instead of stopping and deepening, nevertheless it is continually said: “The man knows how to build up a figure or a group.” His imitators, however, have caught only his daubing, and with them superficiality is but a bold excuse for ignorance of drawing.

Ignacio Zuloaga.—Spain can at the present time boast of a number of painters who might call out to their greatest predecessors among their countrymen the proud _anch’io_. What characterises them is a peculiar, almost mad energy in drawing, which appears in all details, in the living and the dead, not only in the mien and attitudes of men, but in the sharp profile of every leaf and blade of grass, in the bold relief of every stone, in the aggressive self-consciousness of every being as of every thing. This energy is not to be learnt. One has it or one has it not. There are foreign painters in plenty, whom Spain has bewitched, and who their whole life long recount nothing but bull-fights and processions, shepherds and gipsies, _cigarreras_ and _manolas_; but no one who knows the genuine Spaniards will confuse these with the foreign imitators. There is, for instance, the excellent Jules Worms. He has been exhibiting Spanish scenes uninterruptedly for forty years. They are always nicely painted, prettily conceived, and pleasantly executed. As contributions to knowledge of the nation they are not without value. They have gained him all official honours, and he passes for an undisputed master of his particular province. And yet how un-Spanish is this life-long Spanishness of Worms and all his rivals and imitators! It is as smooth, licked, tricked up, entertaining, and banal as the railway novel of an inquisitive but superficial globe-trotter. It is a conventional comic-opera Spanishness, a theatre decoration for scenery, with groups of costumes for living figures. It lacks the power, the stern virility which distinguishes the Spanish painters, even those of the second rank, and gives them a family likeness to their great ancestors, Valdes, Velasquez, and Ribera.

The most typical of these modern Spaniards is Ignacio Zuloaga, and the most typical, perhaps, of his pictures are the three sketches from Spanish folk-life, which were exhibited a few years ago in the “Salon.” An Andalusian, young, thin, and delicate, with a little crumpled face of apish ugliness, with a supple body that seems to whirl, stands in front of a poor mirror, and powders her face with coarse rice-powder, as though she were sticking on a comic Pierrot-mask, whilst her sparkling eyes testify that she wants to make herself thoroughly beautiful for the bull-fight. Then we see her in loud, bright ribbons, with the inimitably draped mantilla over her head and shoulders, passing quickly through the street, greeted by two old connoisseurs with highly-spiced endearment. On the third occasion she or her sister goes with a diabolically piquant young gipsy girl, whose insolent laugh discovers gleaming wolf’s teeth and turns up the sharply-curved nose, rapidly over the ground, probably to keep a Sabbath, from the expression of both grimaces. This is warm life such as not often glows on painted canvas. Zuloaga has felt his Andalusian wild creatures to his finger-tips, and renders them with all their _garbo_ and _salero_—the German _Schneid_ and _Mumm_, and the French _montant_ and _mousseux_ are weak translations of this expression. The pictures seem to be painted, not with mineral colours and oil, but with sulphuric acid and lunar-caustic. These ladies are young witches, of whom you would imagine that by touch they must give an electric shock like a torpedo-fish, that, if they open their mouths, red mice will jump out, and that it must be more natural for them to ride through the air on a broomstick than to make use of their legs in the usual way. In the piquant ugliness of their faces, made up with a thick layer of rice-powder, in the gorgeous Sunday array, in their attitudes and movements, in the gipsy-girl’s bestially insolent grinning and winking, in the lustful glances and laughter of the men, there is a fulness of hot life, an insolent sensuality such as is only met with in Brangwyn’s youthful works. One often heard the name of Goya pronounced before these pictures. It is indeed the same temperament, but another outlook on life, another art. Zuloaga has much of the cutting virtuosity of his great countryman; but he is no embittered critic of the world, rather a laughing Sunday’s child who enjoys life with all his senses.

And, above all, his pictures are patterns of a domestic art which, through its unreserved sincerity, is at the same time an universal art. For it reaches so deeply that it penetrates beyond the special type to humanity in general.

XIII

AUGUSTE RODIN

Rodin’s place in present-day art is a peculiar one. Auguste Rodin has been raised to the dignity of a test for decadent ways of feeling. We admittedly call “tests” or proof-objects the objects (for the most part, the shell-armour of diatoms or the scales of butterflies’ wings) on which the magnifying power and exactness of analysis of microscopes is tested. By Rodin the fanatics and snobs of insane tendencies test the genuineness and power of symbolico-mystic sentiment. What do you think of Rodin? Do you admire him? Good: then you need further only adore Besnard and rave about Félicien Rops, and you can claim to be numbered with the newest, without respect to the colour of your hair or opportunist baldness. You do not admire Rodin? Then sneak whimpering from our league. You are no decadent. No beauty with her hair combed in the Botticelli style will love you; Mallarmé will not write poems, nor will Nietzsche philosophise for you. Nobody will invite you even to a Black Mass. Go to the Philistines; you belong to the narrow-minded community, which is a herd of ruminants.

It would be intelligible if the provocations of the shriekers, who, after the manner of howling dervishes, dance and rave round Rodin, were to induce men to take a violent part against this very man. Justice, however, demands that people should suppress their natural tendency to make him responsible for the ear-piercing din of his drummers and trumpeters. After all, he cannot help a horde of swindlers and silly people making a vulgar disturbance about him and his works. If we are to judge him, we must try to forget that critical offenders, by invoking his name, continually outrage the sense of æsthetic decorum and artistic conscience. Rodin is, in fact, not the originator of this shameless proceeding, but the victim of the æsthetic Catiline conspirators who have got possession of him, and are pushing him on before them, so that it looks from a distance as if he was their leader. Rodin is not the least _cabotin_. He is of a modest, homely nature, but no strong character; and he has not been able to stand against the suggestions of those whose interest it is to eulogise him, who have for so long chattered his poor head full of their most brain-firing, æsthetic doctrines, and most profound interpretations of his alleged purposes, until he has lost his own personality, and makes the most desperate efforts to become like the picture which his critical Corybantes present of him to the open-mouthed gapers.

What has raised Rodin to an article of faith among the degenerates is three peculiarities. First, the choice of his materials, which appeal to the mysticism and sensual psychopathy of his body-guard of degenerates; secondly, his technique, which deviates from tradition in childish, would-be-original whims; and thirdly, his mistaking the natural limitations of his art, which he wants to make say things for which sculpture possesses no means of expression. These traits are proved by a short review of his principal works.

The production which first brought him the custom of the decadents is a composition which was devised for the gate of Dante’s _Inferno_. He had worked at it for decades. After a few fragments, which were to be seen in 1889 in the Universal Exhibition at Paris, he showed the whole in a plaster model at his private exhibition of 1900. It is inspired unmistakably by Ghiberti’s door of the Baptistery at Florence, but stands in intentional contrast to it. The great Quattrocentist depicts life in Paradise; Rodin’s intention is to show existence in Hell. The framing and articulation of the work, and nearly all its details, were rendered with organic necessity from this starting-point. The door is cut up into panels, which are not divided by stiff, geometrical lines, but, just as in the case of Ghiberti, are at the same time immediately separated, and again indirectly connected into a higher unity, by a feature of the picture itself, _e.g._, a cliff, a man’s figure, a piece of building. In every panel an act from the _Inferno_ is played. The parts, in the majority of cases indicated only in a sketchy way, betray strong, indeed mainly perversely directed, erotic imagination, and the gift of exhibiting human bodies in the movements of passion. Of course, Rodin, too, has not dropped down from heaven, but is the descendant of easily demonstrable spiritual forefathers. This sculpture of violent action, a particular development of French art, and in no way connected with the Laocoon, as one might easily make the mistake of assuming, has its first master in Rude, whose power is revealed most grandly in the “Marseillaise” on the Triumphal Arch at Paris. Rude’s successor and continuer is the incomparable Carpeaux, who, as is most clear from his group “The Dance” at the Grand Opera, in place of the wild heroes of his model and master, substituted wild Bacchantes; who celebrated, instead of self-oblivious joy in sacrifice in the service of rugged duty, self-oblivious intoxication in a debauch of sensuality, but represented a life of excitement no less sublimely and no less ravishingly than the former. Rodin is closely connected with Rude and Carpeaux. With him passion descends a step lower still to the uncivilised and dissolute. Heroic with Rude, voluptuous with Carpeaux, it is Satanic with Rodin. The “Gate of Hell” exhibits rows of naked women in all the situations and occupations of the witches’ Sabbath, when it is most devilish. Fits of hysteria shake and twist these bodies, every motion of which betrays shocking aberration and eager Sadism. The patients of the Salpetrière or the Atlas of Pictures edited in this _clinique_ (_Iconographie de la Salpetrière_) evidently served him for models. And from him, be it incidentally observed, Alexander appears to have drawn his inspirations with the aggravating circumstance that he clothes Rodin’s naked women in rich, modern toilettes, and by this artful means makes them even more obscene. The feminine genius of tragedy in Rude is inspired by Tyrtæan war-songs. Carpeaux’s two female dancers have drunk sparkling wine; Rodin’s demoniac women have swallowed pills of Spanish-fly. Thus it is clear that Rodin must be dear to all wanton schoolboys, impotent debauchees, and incipient spinal sufferers.

If the “Gate of Hell” is an illustration of hystero-epilepsy and feminine Sadism, so, too, is a marble group which he exhibited in 1898 of Masochism. A naked woman with horribly glacial, unmoved features sits leaning against a wall of rock. A man, apparently growing out of the earth, kneels before the merciless image, embraces its knees with despairingly imploring gesture, and presses his head against its body. This is supposed to show man in an ecstasy of desire, subjugated by the sexual power of woman. I can only say that a copy of this group would excellently suit as a frontispiece for an edition of the collected works of Sacher-Masoch. Other smaller groups of Rodin, which he exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon, hint at other forms of morbid sensuality on which I am reluctant to dwell. They all disclose a sub-soil of corrupted sensuality in the artist’s soul. That secures him influence on natures in harmony with his own. The degenerates who revel with Baudelaire in love of corpses, and with Félicien Rops in highly-spiced lewdness, find the same excitation in Rodin, and they intoxicate themselves with his ecstatic lasciviousness just as with the unnatural or madly exaggerated eroticism of their other fleshly poets and painters.

So much for Rodin’s choice of themes. Now for his technique. One of his singularities is that he loves to astonish people by a crude, external contrast between a block of unworked marble and the most exquisitely finished and sweetly polished sculpture of bodies. He takes a great cube out of all proportion, which he leaves as the labourer hewed it as it came out of the quarry; and he works a little corner of it into a head and body polished with the utmost nicety. In this way, the figure grows out of, or into, the natural stone. Looked at from three sides, a lump of rock or stone is presented to the eye, only on the fourth side the work of art is revealed, blooming, as it were, in the wilderness. We may describe this manner as the sculptural form of mysticism. The association of ideas which Rodin wishes to awaken by this device should make the idea dawn on the consciousness that here, before our eyes, a miracle of creation is being accomplished; that we surprise the very incarnation of the stone; that we are witnesses of the birth of organic form from the stiff, lifeless original matter, and may observe how the figure, still half imprisoned in chaos, struggles painfully forth to a form instinct with life. There are subjects for the representation of which Rodin’s style would have been a happy invention: perhaps the creation of Adam from a clod of earth, or the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, or a Promethean motive. But its uniform employment for all possible subjects—on banal busts or groups which have no reference to creation or genesis—causes the manner to be recognised for what it is, a snatching at effect by means of eccentricity. Of course, this striking and easily imitatable freak has founded a school. No American or Scandinavian who wants to frighten the Philistines with “modernism” neglects to exhibit a piece of, for the most part, wretched sculpture as tiny as possible on a clump of unworked rock as Cyclopean as possible. It cannot be said that the joke is cheap. The unhewn block of marble often represents a pretty stiff value in hard cash, in any case a higher one than the corner that has been chiselled. One can only say that any idiot can succeed in using a ton weight of stone as a support to a figure the size of a man’s hand.

Yet, in conclusion, it is a comparatively harmless folly which a practitioner can remedy with a few strokes of the saw. It is sufficient to cut the sculpture off, and give the rough block to a needy sculptor. Far worse, because it is incurable, is the æsthetic principle to which Rodin pays homage in the technique of his more important works especially. He is, to wit, an Impressionist. A line of motion in an individuality or group interests him. He seizes it, shapes it with convincing truth, with an emphasis exaggerated—certainly purposely—to the point of caricature, and neglects everything that does not serve to illustrate this line of motion. Sculpture, however, is an art which does not allow any Impressionism. It demands, according to its nature, a perfectly accurate formation of the whole figure, and simple honesty in reproducing the phenomenon. This can be proved by a theory of perception. Sculpture fills space and is of three dimensions; it addresses itself, in the first place, certainly to the eye, but also to the sense of touch. It calls for stereoscopic vision, and is, at least in theory, capable of further proof by a second sense. Now just this theoretic possibility of further proof, by means of the sense of touch, has the prohibitive effect, that fancy feels no inclination to supplement the image provided by the sense of sight. In works of painting we add in our mind much which is not optically given in the picture. In plastic works we have not this psychical habit, because a testing with the hands is opposed to the free, inventive power of the imagination, and makes us at once recognise what has been given in space, and what has been added by our imagination. On this ground, there is no place in sculpture for intentions or hints. That is enough for a rough plan, but not for the finished work. Rodin, however, stops at a stage of completion, which may, at best, pass for a promise, but never, in any case, for an achievement. He deliberately breaks up the frame of artistic form. He would fain work with the habits of the painter’s eye and the painter’s hand, and he applies this treatment to the statute, standing free and exposed to examination from all sides.

The confused lines which represent the draughtsman’s first sketch (_ébauche_) have their special charm and meaning on the surface to be painted. If, however, you translate them into three dimensions, if every careless movement of the artist’s hand, either still feeling its way or hurrying on, is finally fixed in clay or bronze, something inadmissible results, which has no right to proclaim itself a work of art.

Such a seeking after the right expression, such a stammering in metal is Rodin’s monument at Calais, which represents the burgesses of Calais with the rope round their necks, standing before Edward III., who had successfully besieged that city, and asking for mercy. The crushed spirit which Rodin tried to express is actually visible in the group; but the figures which express this emotion are formless from head to foot. The limbs are rugged boughs; the bodies violate the laws of anatomy; the whole group is on the stage of technical perfection reached by the idols hewn from wood by the South Sea Islanders, and is far inferior to many a pre-historic picture on mammoth’s teeth and stag’s horn, which may be seen, for instance, in the Museum of St Germain. Rodin’s domestic trumpeters promptly proclaimed this for a work of lofty genius. The Corporation of the town of Calais, who had ordered it, dared not reject it. The decadents’ reign of terror—it was in the year 1895—was then in all its fury. The whole Paris Press was in the power of the dictators of the Chat Noir, and the poor Calais burgesses, clever men of business, but very uncertain in questions of art, feared to be jeered at as wise men of Gotham, if they rebelled against the æsthetic edicts of the tyrants of Paris criticism. But they blush for shame and anger whenever they pass by the memorial, and now, when the reign of terror of decadent criticism is over, it will probably not be long before the Calais people pluck up courage enough to have Rodin’s bronze abomination carted off from the public square, and withdrawn, in a store-room in the Town Hall, from the scornful eyes of strangers.

A counterpart of the Calais group is the design for the Victor Hugo Memorial, which was for the first time exhibited in 1897, and again five years later, when it was somewhat further advanced. This design also showed nothing but intentions. The poet is sitting naked by the seashore. The last shallow wave washes gently up to his feet. Two female tutelary figures—perhaps History and Legend, or Poetry and Philosophy—are flying to him horizontally at the level of his head and whispering secrets in his ear. As a mere intention, the composition might be allowed to pass; but nothing of execution, practically, was yet to be seen. Victor Hugo’s body was not modelled; the flying female figures could not be distinguished, either from a distance or on close inspection, from cloud packs, or the fantastic animal figures of Gothic gargoyles. Nevertheless, Rodin disarmed intelligent criticism by declaring that the work was a mere sketch. Of course, he could no longer be fairly reproached with its shapelessness, and people had to content themselves with waiting for its completion, which has not come to pass up to now.