Part 18

as it were, just out of reach of appetite--makes Renoir to me, personally, a peculiarly difficult artist. My taste for exotic artists such as Cosima Tura and his kin amounts at times to a vice. Consequently, I am sometimes in danger of not doing Renoir justice, because at the first approach to one of his pictures I miss the purely accessory delight of an unexpected attitude. The first approach to one of his pictures may indeed remind one of pictures that would be the delight of the servants’ hall, so unaffectedly simple is his acceptance of the charm of rosy-cheeked girls, of pretty posies and dappled sunlight. And yet one knows well enough that Renoir was as “artful” as one could wish. Though he had not the biting wit of a Degas, he had a peculiar love of mischievous humour; he was anything but a harmless or innocent character. All his simplicity is on the surface only. The longer one looks, the deeper does Renoir retire behind veil after veil of subtlety. And yet, compared with some modern artists, he was, after all, easy and instinctively simple. Even his plastic unity was arrived at by what seems a more natural method than, say, Cézanne’s. Whereas Cézanne undertook his indefatigable research for the perspective of the receding planes, Renoir seems to have accepted a very simple general plastic formula. Whatever Cézanne may have meant by his celebrated saying about cones and cylinders, Renoir seems to have thought the sphere and cylinder sufficient for his purpose. The figure presents itself to his eye as an arrangement of more or less hemispherical bosses and cylinders, and he appears generally to arrange the light so that the most prominent part of each boss receives the highest light. From this the planes recede by insensible gradations towards the contour, which generally remains the vaguest, least ascertained part of the modelling. Whatever lies immediately behind the contour tends to become drawn into its sphere of influence, to form an undefined recession enveloping and receiving the receding planes. As the eye passes away from the contour, new but less marked bosses form themselves and fill the background with repetitions of the general theme. The picture tends thus to take the form of a bas-relief in which the recessions are not into the profound distances of pictorial space, but only back, as it were, to the block out of which the bossed reliefs emerge, though, of course, by means of atmospheric colour the eye may interpret these recessions as distance. This is clearly in marked contrast to Cézanne’s method of suggesting endless recessions of planes with the most complicated interwoven texture.

Renoir’s drawing takes on the same fundamental simplicity. An Ingres arrived at the simplified statement necessary for great design by a process of gradual elimination of all the superfluous sinuosities which his hand had recorded in the first drawing from nature. Renoir seems never to have allowed his eye to accept more than the larger elements of mass and direction. His full, rounded curves embrace the form in its most general aspect. With advancing years and continually growing science he was able, at last, to state this essential synthesis with amazing breadth and ease. He continually increased the amplitude of his forms until, in his latest nudes, the whole design is filled with a few perfectly related bosses. Like Titian’s, Renoir’s power of design increased visibly up to the very end of his life. True, he was capable at all periods of conceiving large and finely co-ordinated compositions, such as “Les Parapluies” and the “Charpentier family”; but at the end even the smallest studies have structural completeness.

A POSSIBLE DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE[54]

Houses are either builders’ houses or architects’ houses. Not that speculative builders do not employ architects, but they generally employ architects who efface themselves behind the deadly conventionality and bewildering fantasy of their façades. Architects’ houses are generally built to the order of a gentleman who wishes his house to have some distinctive character, to stand out from the common herd of houses, either by its greater splendour or its greater discretion. The builder’s house, like the dresses of the lower middle class, is generally an imitation of the gentleman’s, only of a fashion that has just gone out of date and imitated badly in cheaper materials. No one defends it. It is made so because you must make a house somehow, and bought because it is the usual and therefore inevitable thing. No one enjoys it, no one admires it, it is accepted as part of the use and wont of ordinary life. The gentleman’s and architect’s house is different. Here time and thought, and perhaps great ingenuity and taste are employed in giving to the house an individual character. Unfortunately this individual character is generally terribly conscious of its social aspect, of how the house will look, not to those who live in it so much as to those who come to visit. We have no doubt outlived the more vulgar forms of this social consciousness, those which led to the gross display of merely expensive massiveness and profusion. Few modern houses would satisfy Mr. Podsnap. But its subtler forms are still apparent. They generally make themselves felt in the desire to be romantic. As it requires much too much imagination to find romance in the present, one looks for it in the past, and so a dive is made into some period of history, and its monuments studied and copied, and finally “adapted” to the more elaborate exigencies of modern life. But, alas, these divers into the past seem never to have been able to find the pearl of romance, for, ever since the craze began in the eighteenth century, they have been diving now here, now there, now into Romanesque, now into Gothic, now into Jacobean, now into Queen Anne. They have brought up innumerable architectural “features” which have been duly copied by modern machinery, and carefully glued on to the houses, and still the owners and the architects, to do them justice, feel restless, and are in search of some new old style to try. The search has flagged of late, people know it is useless, and here and there architects have set to work merely to build so well and with such a fine sense of the material employed that the result should satisfy the desire for comeliness without the use of any style. I am thinking of some of Mr. Blow’s earlier works where a peculiar charm resulted from the unstinting care with which every piece of material had been chosen and the whole fitted together almost as though the stones had been precious stones instead of flints or bricks.

But on the whole the problem appears to be still unsolved, and the architects go on using styles of various kinds with greater or less degrees of correctness. This they no longer do with the old zest and hope of discovery, but rather with a languid indifference and with evident marks of discouragement.

Now style is an admirable thing, it is the result of ease and coherence of feeling, but unfortunately a borrowed style is an even stronger proof of muddled and befogged emotions than the total absence of style. The desire for a style at all costs, even a borrowed style, is part of that exaggerated social consciousness which in other respects manifests itself as snobbery. What if people were just to let their houses be the direct outcome of their actual needs, and of their actual way of life, and allow other people to think what they like. What if they behaved in the matter of houses as all people wish to behave in society without any undue or fussy self-consciousness. Wouldn’t such houses have really a great deal more character, and therefore interest for others, than those which are deliberately made to look like something or other. Instead of looking like something, they would then be something.

The house which I planned and built for myself was the result of certain particular needs and habits. I had originally no idea of building a house: I had so often heard the proverb that “Fools build houses for wise men to live in,” that I had come to believe it, but I required a house of a certain size for my family within easy reach of London. I looked at a great many houses and found that those which had a sufficient number of rooms were all gentlemen’s establishments, with lodge, stabling, and green-houses. Now it was characteristic of my purse that I could not afford to keep up a gentleman’s establishment and of my tastes that I could not endure to. I was a town dweller, and I wanted a town house and a little garden in the country. As I could not find what I wanted, the idea came into my head that I must build it or go without. The means at my disposal were definitely limited; the question was therefore whether I could build a house of the required size with that sum. I made a plan containing the number of rooms of the sizes I required, and got an estimate. It was largely in excess of the sum I possessed for the purpose. I feared I must give up my scheme when I met a friend who had experimented in building cheap cottages on his estate, and learned from him that the secret of economy was concentration of plan. I also discovered in discussing my first estimate that roofs were cheaper than walls. I thereupon started on a quite different plan, in which I arranged the rooms to form as nearly as possible a solid block, and placed a number of the rooms in a hipped or Mansard roof. It will be seen that, so far, the planning of the house was merely the discovery of a possible equation between my needs and the sum at my disposal.

But in trying to establish this equation I had found it necessary to make the rooms rather smaller than I should have liked, and having a great liking for large and particularly high interiors--I hate Elizabethan rooms with their low ceilings in spite of their prettiness, and I love the interiors of the baroque palaces of Italy--I determined to have one room of generous dimensions and particularly of great height. This large room surrounded by small rooms was naturally made into a general living-place, with arrangements by means of a lift to enable it to be used as a dining hall if there were more in the house than could be accommodated in the small breakfast room.

The estimate for this new concentrated plan, in spite of the large dimensions of the living place, came to little more than half the estimate for the former plan, and made my project feasible, provided that I could calculate all details and did not run into extras.

So far then there has been no question of architecture; it has been merely solving the problem of personal needs and habits, and of cost, and if architecture there is to be, it should, I think, come directly out of the solution of these problems. The size and disposition of the plan having thus been fixed, the elevations are given in outline, and the only question is how the rectangle of each elevation is to be treated. Doors and windows are the elements of the design, and here again something will already be determined by needs or tastes. There is need of a certain amount of light, and my own taste is to have as much as possible, so that the windows had to be large rectangles. But when all these things are determined by need there is still a wide margin of choice--the size of the panes in the windows, the depth of recess of the windows within the wall, the flatness or relief of each element. All these and many more are still matters of choice, and it is through the artist’s sense of proportion and his feeling for the plastic relief of the whole surface that a work of mere utility may become a work of art. In the case of the main elevation of my house I found that when all the windows, including the long windows of the high living-place, were duly arranged, there was a want of unity owing to the nearly equal balance between the horizontal and vertical members. I therefore underlined the slight projection of the central part (a projection enforced by by-laws) by varying the material, replacing at this point the plaster of the walls by two bands of red brick. In this way the vertical effect of the central part was made to dominate the whole façade. The artistic or architectural part of this house was confined, then, merely to the careful choice of proportions within certain fixed limits defined by needs, and neither time, money, nor thought were expended on giving the house the appearance of any particular style.

I have gone thus at length into the history of my own house merely as an example of the way in which, I think, a genuine architecture, and in the end, no doubt, an architectural style, might arise. It requires a certain courage or indifference to public opinion on the part of the owner. My own house is neighboured by houses of the most gentlemanly picturesqueness, houses from which tiny gables with window slits jut out at any unexpected angle, and naturally it is regarded as a monstrous eyesore by their inhabitants. Indeed, when I first came here it was supposed that the ugliness of my house was so apparent that I myself could not be blind to it, and should not resent its being criticised in my presence. They were quite right, I did not resent it; I was only very much amused.

To arrive at such a genuine domestic architecture as I conceive, requires, then, this social indifference to surrounding snobbishness on the part of the owner, and it requires a nice sense of proportion and a feeling for values of plastic relief on the part of the artist who designs the house, but it does not require genius or even any extraordinary talent to make a genuine and honest piece of domestic architecture which will continue to look distinguished when the last “style” but one having just become _démodé_ already stinks in the nostrils of all cultured people.

JEAN MARCHAND[55]

There are some thirty pictures by M. Jean Marchand now on view at the Carfax Gallery in Bury Street. This gives one an occasion for reviewing the work of this comparatively young artist. M. Marchand belongs, of course, to the revolutionary movement of this century in that he derives the general principles of his art from Cézanne, but he is the most traditional of revolutionaries. Not by the wildest stretch of the imagination could one conceive of M. Marchand deliberately or consciously doing anything to astonish the public. It is quite true that no genuine artist ever did, but some artists have found an added piquancy in the thought that inventions that occurred to them would in point of fact have this adventitious charm. But with M. Marchand such possibilities seem more remote than with most of his compeers. An extreme simplicity and directness of outlook and a touching sincerity in all he does are the most prominent characteristics of his work. Not that he makes one suppose him to be too naïve to play tricks with his art; on the contrary, one sees that he is highly self-conscious and intellectual, but that he knows the utter futility of any deliberate emphasis on the artist’s part. He knows that any effect of permanent value must flow directly from the matter in hand; that it is useless to make anything appear more interesting or impressive than it is; that, whatever his vision is, it must be accepted literally, and without any attempt to add to its importance or effectiveness.

In short, M. Marchand is a classic artist--one might almost in these days say a French artist, and count it as synonymous, but that one remembers that the French, too, have had their orgies of romantic emphasis, and have always ready to hand a convention of coldly exaggerated rhetoric. Moreover, if one thinks of a nearly allied painter

such as Derain, whose work is so terribly _interesting_, one sees that to a quite peculiar degree M. Marchand exemplifies the sentimental honesty of the French. I leave the question open whether this is a moral trait, or is not rather the result of a clearer perception than we often attain to of the extreme futility of lying where art is concerned.

Certainly one can imagine the temptations for a man of M. Marchand’s great technical ability to choose some slightly wilful or fantastic formula of vision and to exploit it for what it might bring out; for M. Marchand was handicapped in any competition for notoriety by the very normality and sanity of his vision. Compared to the descriptions of sketches in “Jane Eyre,” his pictures would be judged to be entirely lacking in imagination. He never tries to invent what he has not actually seen. Almost any of the ordinary things of life suffice for his theme--a loaf of bread or a hat left on the table, a rather vulgar French château restored by Viollet-le-Duc with a prim garden and decorous lake, a pot of aspidistra in a suburban window. These and the like are the subjects of his pictures, and he paints the objects themselves in all their vulgar everydayness. They do not become excuses for abstract designs; they retain in his pictures all their bleak commonplaceness.

Any one unfamiliar with his pictures who read such an account of his work might think M. Marchand was a dull literalist, whose mere accomplishment it is to render the similitude of objects. But such a conclusion would be entirely wrong. However frankly M. Marchand accepts the forms of objects, however little his normal vision distorts or idealises them, however consciously and deliberately he chooses the arrangement, he does build up by sheer method and artistic science a unity which has a singularly impressive quality. I heard some one say, in front of a still life which represented a white tablecloth, a glass tumbler, an earthenware water-bottle and a loaf of bread, that it was like Buddha. With such a description as I give of the picture the appreciation sounds precious and absurd; before the picture it seems perfectly just. For M. Marchand has attained the reward of his inflexible honesty; his construction is so solid and unfaltering, he builds up his designs with such massive and direct handling, that without the slightest suggestion of emphasis, without any underlining, the effect comes through; the material becomes expressive; he becomes a creator, and not a mere adapter of form.

For the understanding of his personality it is interesting to consider his Cubist period, since Marchand’s reaction to Cubism is typical of his nature. Cubism, like S. Paul, has been all things to all men--at least to almost all artists of the present generation. To some it has been a doctrine and a revelation; to some it has been a convenient form of artistic journalism; to some it has been a quick road to notoriety, to some an aid to melodramatic effect. To M. Marchand it was just a useful method and a gymnastic. He used it for just what it could give him as an exercise in the organisation of form. It was to him like a system of notation to a mathematician, a means of handling quantities which without it would have been too elusive and too infinite to grasp. By means of Cubism the infinity of a sphere could be reduced to half a dozen planes, each of which he could learn to relate to all the other planes in the picture; and the singular ease and directness of his plastic construction seem to be due to his early practice of Cubist methods. Having once learned by this process of willed and deliberate analysis how to handle complex forms, he has been able to throw away the scaffolding and to construct palpably related and completely unified designs with something approaching the full complexity of natural forms, though the lucid statement and the ease of handling which it actuates testify to the effect of his apprenticeship in Cubism. Such a use of a theory--as a method, not as a doctrine--seems to me typical of M. Marchand’s balanced judgment, of his alert readiness to use any and every means that could conduce to his slow and methodical development, and hold out hopes of a continued growth.

M. Marchand, so assured, so settled an artist, is still young. In the landscapes which he did in the South of France just before the war he explored a peculiarly persuasive and harmonious scheme of colour, based on warm ochres, earth reds, and dull blues. These pictures have the envelopment and the sonorous harmony of some early Italian masters in spite of the frank oppositions and the vigorous scaffolding of modern design. In the later work done in the last year he shows a new sense of colour, a new sharpness and almost an audacity, if one can imagine so well-balanced a nature capable of audacity. He uses dull neutral colours, the dirty white of a cloudy sky, harsh dull greens and blacks, the obvious and unattractive colours that so frequently occur in nature; but he uses them in such combinations, and with such accents of tone and such subtly prepared accordances and oppositions, that these obvious dull colours strike one as fascinating discoveries. This is the height of artistic science, so to accept the obvious and commonplace that it gives one the pleasant shock of paradox. It seems hardly rash to foretell for him a solid and continually growing fame.

RETROSPECT[56]

The work of re-reading and selecting from the mass of my writings as an art critic has inevitably brought me up against the question of its consistency and coherence. Although I do not think that I have republished here anything with which I entirely disagree, I cannot but recognise that in many of these essays the emphasis lies in a different place from where I should now put it. Fortunately I have never prided myself upon my unchanging constancy of attitude, but unless I flatter myself I think I can trace a certain trend of thought underlying very different expressions of opinion. Now since that trend seems to me to be symptomatic of modern æsthetic, and since it may perhaps explain much that seems paradoxical in the actual situation of art, it may be interesting to discuss its nature even at the cost of being autobiographical.

In my work as a critic of art I have never been a pure Impressionist, a mere recording instrument of certain sensations. I have always had some kind of æsthetic. A certain scientific curiosity and a desire for comprehension have impelled me at every stage to make generalisations, to attempt some kind of logical co-ordination of my impressions. But, on the other hand, I have never worked out for myself a complete system such as the metaphysicians deduce from _a priori_ principles. I have never believed that I knew what was the ultimate nature of art. My æsthetic has been a purely practical one, a tentative expedient, an attempt to reduce to some kind of order my æsthetic impressions up to date. It has been held merely until such time as fresh experiences might confirm or modify it. Moreover, I have always looked on my system with a certain suspicion. I have recognised that if it ever formed too solid a crust it might stop the inlets of fresh experience, and I can count various occasions when my principles would have led me to condemn, and when my sensibility has played the part of Balaam with the effect of making temporary chaos of my system. That has, of course, always rearranged itself to take in the new experience, but with each such cataclysm it has suffered a loss of prestige. So that even in its latest form I do not put forward my system as more than a provisional induction from my own æsthetic experiences.