VARIOUS

Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that: “The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it.” It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule which is poor because it won’t work both ways. All master reformers, heretics, and rebels at first were great corrupters. “Corruption,” so-called, is a prime factor in their propaganda. Buddha, Jesus, and Moses; Arius and Aristophanes, Mohammed and Napoleon, Paul and Augustine, Luther and Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner, Kant and Schopenhauer—here are a few names of men who undermined the current beliefs and practices of their epoch, whether for good or for evil. Rousseau has been accused by Pierre Lasserre as being the greatest corrupter in modern history; yet his name will always be associated with the Constitution of the United States of America. Tom Paine has been called a “dirty little atheist,” but he wrote The Rights of Man. In prose of unequalled force and limpidity Pascal denounced the Jesuits as corrupters of youth—poor, persecuted Jesuits, who were the “Yellow Peril” of that time. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an “intellectual” and a philosophic anarch, wrote to Friedrich Nietzsche: “I, too, love Pascal. But even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal. Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with notes. The best edition is that of the Jesuits.”

Were not Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils of painting for William Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn’t much matter whether we consider a great man as either a regenerator or a corrupter. It all depends on your critical angle of vision. Taine called Napoleon a bandit, notwithstanding the idolatries of his contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ much from that of his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, although he borrowed his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the sincerest friendship of his solitary life—his love for Richard Wagner. We know that the most “objective”—comical old categories, “objective” and “subjective”—philosophies are tinged by the temperaments of their makers; perhaps the chief characteristic of philosophers is their unphilosophic contempt for fellow-thinkers. This trait Schopenhauer displayed when he abused Hegel & Co., Berlin, Ltd. Nietzsche attacked Wagner after writing that lucid and comprehensive study of him, Richard Wagner and Baireuth. Wagner was a bitter polemist and didn’t spare Meyerbeer and other operatic trusts. He was an amateur philosopher, his rickety system adorned with plumes borrowed from Feuerbach, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. But Arthur Schopenhauer was endowed with a more powerful, more original intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche. He “corrupted” both, though it may be admitted that their intellectual and artistic soil was primed for just such corruption. And Schopenhauer, gay old misogynist, was materialist enough to echo an epigram attributed to Fontenelle: “To be happy a man must have a good stomach and a wicked heart.” In other words, if your stomach is sound your soul will take care of itself. All Hobbes, Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Helvetius, and Condillac are in that phrase.

But it is not my intention to stray among the pleasant groves of speculation, taking an occasional potshot at the strange fauna of metaphysic or admiring its many-colored flora. Some one wrote asking me if Manette Salomon, by de Goncourt—the brothers Edmond and Jules,—had been translated into English; also if it were the only fiction about art and artists. I can’t say yes or no as to the translation; if it is not, it should be; but it is safe to say that Manette is the best novel dealing entirely with paint and painters that I know of. Fiction about art and artists is rare; that is, good fiction, not the stuff daily ground out by publishing mills for the gallery gods. A classic example in American literature is The Marble Faun, by Hawthorne. Romola, by George Eliot, is atmospheric with Florentine art and the genius of place. However, it is to the French that we must go for such literature, Manette being a notable example. It depicts the spiritual and physical decadence of a splendid painting talent, Coriolis, and contains veracious pictures of the pre-impressionist days in Paris. Balzac in the Unknown Masterpiece has left a model. His Frenhofer is the first of the impressionists withal, a fumbler of genius. In both Daudet and de Maupassant there are stories clustered about the artistic guild. Strong as Death, by de Maupassant, is long enough to be called a novel (roman), though it is but an expanded episode, and a mighty interesting one, even a touching one, for the usually impassive Guy. Daudet described a Paris Salon on varnishing day in his accustomed facile, febrile style; but it stems from Goncourt and Zola. Zola’s His Masterpiece (L’Œuvre) is one of his best-written books. It was said to be a favorite of his, and it justifies his taste. The much-belauded fifth chapter is a faithful transcription of the first Salon of Rejected Painters (Salon des refusés) at Paris in 1863. Napoleon III, after social and political pressure had been brought to bear on him, had consented to a special Salon within the official Salon at the Palais de l’Industrie, where the rejected work of the young lunatics who wished to paint purple turkeys, vermilion water, and black sunsets would be harbored. Ivory hallucinations and girls with carmilion-colored eyes were not barred. It is an enormously clever book, this chiefly deriving from Manette Salomon and Balzac’s Frenhofer. Claude Lantier is said to be the portrait of Paul Cézanne, a schoolmate and friend of Zola at Aix-en-Provence. When I made the trip from Marseilles to Aix Cézanne still lived, but I had been warned not to mention the name of Zola, who shows Cézanne in this novel as an impotent groper after impossible ideals. The irritable Paul would go into spasms of rage when Zola was referred to in his presence. Imbecile, traitor, charlatan! These were sample expressions. A reading of L’Œuvre at once convinces you that the artistic procedures of Claude Lantier and Paul Cézanne are diametrically different. Claude failed and hanged himself. There are contemporary critics who consider Cézanne the greatest master of the impressionist group. But the struggle for artistic veracity on the part of Zola’s sorry hero is not unlike the case of Manet. The Breakfast on the Grass, described by Zola, was actually the title and the subject of a Manet canvas that had scandalized Paris at this period. The fantastic idea of nude females at an al fresco banquet upon the grass, while the other figures were clothed and in their right mind—all this was too much for a purblind public and hostile critics; although there are many examples in Italian renaissance painting of the same style of composition. The picture became notorious. Manet, like Richard Wagner, knew the uses of advertising.

Poe, Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, inter alia, have dealt with the theme pictorial, and Paul Bourget, in his thrice-charming story, The Lady Who Lost Her Painter. Henry James has written delightful tales, such as The Liar, The Real Thing, and The Tragic Muse—this a full-fledged novel in two volumes—in which artists appear and live their lives. But it is the particular psychologic problem involved, rather than theorizing about art, that steers the cunning pen of James. We all recall the woman in The Liar, who destroyed the portrait of her husband because it revealed to her, at last, the secret of his moral infirmity. In this story John Singer Sargent has been accredited as the psychologist of the brush. There is a nice, fresh young fellow in The Tragic Muse, who, weak-spined as he is, prefers, at the last, his palette and brush to the charms and wealth of Julia Dallow and her ambitious plans for his political career. In The Real Thing we recognize—Henry James would call it the “emotion of recognition”—one of those unerring strokes that prove the writer to be master-psychologist among English novelists. Any discerning painter will tell you that the value of a model who can take the “pose” far outshines crude naturalism. It is the suggestiveness of the pose with its pictorial implications that sets moving the imagination of the artist. Upon this thesis the novelist has built a semi-pathetic, amusing, and striking fable.

There are painters and sculptors scattered throughout English fiction—shall we ever forget Thackeray and Clive Newcome? Ouida has not missed weaving Tyrian purples into the gorgeous patterns of her romantic painters. And Disraeli. And George Bernard Shaw—there is a painting creature in his Love Among the Artists. (I contend that an admirable novelist was killed in Mr. Shaw when he deserted fiction for the playhouse. He won’t agree with me, but I should willingly part with all his prefaces for another Byron Cashel’s Profession.) But it is to George Moore we must go for fiction of this sort. He has devoted more of his pages to paint and painters than other latter-day novelists. The reason is that George Moore went to Paris, there to study art, and he drifted into the Julian atelier just as would any likely young chap with a well-filled purse and hazy notions concerning art. Those early experiences were not wasted, they cropped up in his stories and critical studies. He became the critical pioneer in England of French impressionist art painters, the champion of Manet, Monet, Degas, and the rest. He even declared, in an article of rare acumen, that if Jemmy Whistler had been a heavier man, with more beef and brawn and beer, as was Rubens, for example, the spider-waisted American painter might have been as great an artist as Velasquez. To the weighing scales, fellow-artists! retorted Whistler; nevertheless, the bolt of Mr. Moore reached the mark. Whistler’s remarks about the Irish critic, especially after the Eden litigation, were, so it is reported, not “fit to print.”

In Spring Days, the first volume of Mr. Moore’s trilogy—A Modern Lover and Mike Fletcher are the other two—we are shown a young painter who thinks more of petticoats than paint. Mike Fletcher, the most virile and, for some of us, the quintessence of Moore, has its share of paint talk. In A Modern Lover the hero is an artist who succeeds in the fashionable world by painting pretty, artificial portraits, thereby winning wealth, popular applause, and official approbation. He also makes love in a fascinating fashion—the secret of his mundane success. This same Lewis Seymour lives and paints modish London beauties in rose color. He may be found in Paris and New York. He is a type. The sitter for this portrait is said to have been Sir Frederick Leighton, a statement I accept on its face value, and one that Mr. Moore would probably vehemently deny. But his irony must have entered the souls of a hundred celebrated humbugs; that is, if they had souls to boast. A Modern Lover, despite the rewriting and consequent defacement of the original design, is distinctly a painter’s novel and the best of its kind, were it not that subsequently the novelist wrote a masterpiece, Mildred Lawson, to be found in the volume entitled Celibates—a Balzacian title, by the way. Masterly in analysis and description, this story chiefly deals with art. Mildred, a selfish English girl without heart, soul, or talent, studies in the Julian atelier and goes to Fontainebleau during the summer vacation. Naturally, no one has ever described the Forest better than Flaubert in Sentimental Education; Flaubert, who wrote better than any one else save Balzac. In this great canvas of Parisian life there are marvellous evocations. There is a semi-burlesque painter, Pellerin, who first reads all the literature of æsthetics before he draws a line, and poses his sitters à la Van Dyck, Rubens, Gainsborough, or Titian; in a word, the man of precedent. De Goncourt, too, has excelled in his impressions of the Forest and its painters; in particular, François Millet.

It is only just to Mr. Moore to say that you can’t find Mildred Lawson in Flaubert or de Goncourt; no, not even in Balzac, whose work is the very matrix of modern fiction. She is her own cruel, perverse, Moorovian self, and she lives here or London or in the Philippines. Elsewhere I have classed her as one of the most disagreeable heroines in fiction, an inky sister of Hedda Gabler and Undine Spragg (in Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country).

All the one-time novel theories of “plein air” impressionism are discussed in Zola’s His Masterpiece, yet the work as a whole lacks the fine-fibred style and clairvoyance of Manette Salomon; that breviary for painters which in 1867 anticipated the experimentings, the discoveries, and the practice of the naturalistic and impressionist groups, running the gamut from Manet, Monet, to Cézanne, Maufra, and Paul Gauguin. The book is crowded with verbal pictures of art students, atelier and open-air life; painting was still one of the romantic arts when de Goncourt wrote. No such psychological manual of the painter has appeared, before or since, Manette Salomon. The celibate bias of the brothers is revealed in the leading motive—oh, that musty, fusty melodramatic idea—which is the degradation of a man’s artistic ideals because of the woman—Manette, his model—he marries. It was Goncourt who introduced Japanese art to Europe; the brothers were friends of the late M. Bing, a pioneer collector in Paris. And they foresaw the future of fiction as well as painting.