Studies in seven arts

Front matter

ARTHUR. SYMONS

BY

ARTHUR SYMONS

Contents

PAOK

THE PAINTING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 33 GUSTAVE MOREAU . . . .71 WATTS ...... 89

WHISTLER . . . .121 CATHEDRALS . . . .151 THE DECAY OF CRAFTSMANSHIP IN ENGLAND . 175 BEETHOVEN . . . . .191 THE IDEAS OF RICHARD WAGNER . . 225 THE PROBLEM OF RICHARD STRAUSS . .301 ELEONORA DUSE .... 331

II

In one of Rodin’s finest creations, a great hand, large, strong, and smooth, holds in a paternal grasp a lump of earth, out of which emerge two ephemerides, fragile, pathetic creatures, with the delicate, insubstantial grace of passing things, who cling to each other joyously, accepting life on its terms of brief delight. It is God bidding the earth increase and multiply ; it symbolises human life, in all its dependence on that unknown force in the hollow of whose hand it lives and moves. Elsewhere he has indicated the vain struggles, the insane desires, the insatiable longings, the murderous divisions, of the ephemerides, man and woman ; here he indicates their not less pathetic content, the butterfly accepting its hour.

All Rodin’s work is founded on a conception of force ; first, the force of the earth, then the two conflicting forces, man and woman ; with, always, behind and beyond, the secret, unseizable, inexplicable force of that mystery which surrounds the vital energy of the earth itself, as it surrounds us in our existence on the earth. Out of these forces he has chosen for the most part the universal, vivifying force of sex. In man he represents the obvious energy of nature, thews and muscles, bones, strength of limb ; in woman, the exquisite strength of weakness, the subtler energy of the senses. They fight the eternal battle of sex, their embraces are a grapple of enemies, they seek each other that they may overcome each other. And the woman, softly, overcomes, to her own perdition. The man holds her in the hollow of his hand, as God holds both man and woman ; he could close his hand upon the fragile thing that nestles there, and crush it ; but something paralyses his muscles in a tender inaction. The hand will never close over her, she will always have the slave’s conquest.

Every figure that Rodin has created is in the act of striving towards something : a passion, an idea, a state of being, quiescence itself. His ‘ Gates of Hell ’ are a headlong flight and falling, in which all the agonies of a place of torment, which is Baudelaire’s rather than Dante’s, swarm in actual movement. ‘ Femmes damnees ’ lean upward and downward out of hollow caves and mountainous crags, they cling to the edge of the world, off which their feet slip, they embrace blindly over a precipice, they roll together into bottomless pits of descent. Arms wave in appeal, and clasp shuddering bodies in an extremity of despair. And all this sorrowful and tortured flesh is consumed with desire, with the hurrying fever of those who have only a short time in which to enjoy the fruits of desire. Their mouths open towards one another in an endless longing, all their muscles strain violently towards the embrace. They live only with a life of desire, and that obsession has carried them beyond the wholesome bounds of nature, into the violence of a perversity which is at times almost insane.

But always, in the clay itself, there is ecstasy. Often it is a perverse ecstasy ; at times, as in the Iris, as in the Muse who swoops like an eagle, as in the radiant figure with the sun in his hair who flings open the gates of the mountains in the monument to General Sarmiento, it is pure joy ; often, as in the Balzac, the Hugo, the Puvis de Chavannes, it is the ecstasy of creative thought. But always there is ecstasy.

In Rodin’s sculpture, clay or marble, that something powerful of which he speaks has ended in a palpitating grace, as of living flesh. He feels, he translates, sensation for sensation, the voluptuous soft cool warmth of the flesh, the daintiness of the skeleton, indicated under its smooth covering ; all that is exquisite in the structure of bone and muscle, in the force of man and the suppleness of woman. The flesh seems to shiver, curdle, tightening upon the bone as if at a touch ; it lies abandoned, in a tender repose ; it grapples, flesh upon flesh, in all the agonies of all the embraces. His hand seems to press most caressingly about the shoulder-blades and the hollows of the loins. The delicate ridge and furrow of the backbone draw his hand to mould them into new shapes and motions of beauty. His hand follows the loins where they swell into ampler outlines : the back, from neck to croup, lies quivering, in all the beauty of life itself.

In the drawings, which constitute in themselves so interesting a development of his art, there is little of the delicacy of beauty. They are notes for the clay, ‘ instantan^s,’ and they note only move-

B ment, expression. They are done in two minutes, by a mere gallop of the hand over paper, with the eyes fixed on some unconscious pose of the model. And here, it would seem (if indeed accident did not enter so largely into the matter) that a point in sentiment has been reached in which the perverse idealism of Baudelaire has disappeared, and a simpler kind of cynicism takes its place. In these astonishing drawings from the nude we see woman carried to a further point of simplicity than even in Degas : woman the animal ; woman, in a strange sense, the idol. Not even the Japanese have simplified drawing to this illuminating scrawl of four lines, enclosing the whole mystery of the flesh. Each drawing indicates, as if in the rough block of stone, a single violent movement. Here a woman faces you, her legs thrown above her head ; here she faces you with her legs thrust out before her, the soles of her feet seen close and gigantic. She squats like a toad, she stretches herself like a cat, she stands rigid, she lies abandoned. Every movement of her body, violently agitated by the remembrance, or the expectation, or the act of desire, is seen at an expressive moment. She turns upon herself in a hundred attitudes, turning always upon the central pivot of the sex, which emphasises itself with a fantastic and frightful monotony. The face is but just indicated, a face of wood, like a savage idol ; and the body has rarely any of that elegance, seductiveness, and shivering delicacy of life which we find in the marble. It is a machine in movement, a monstrous, devastating machine, working mechanically, and possessed by the one rage of the animal. Often two bodies interlace each other, flesh crushing upon flesh in all the exasperation of a futile possession ; and the energy of the embrace is indicated in the great hand that lies like a weight upon the shoulders. It is hideous, overpowering, and it has the beauty of all supreme energy.

And these drawings, with their violent simplicity of appeal, have the distinction of all abstract thought or form. Even in Degas there is a certain luxury, a possible low appeal, in those heavy and creased bodies bending in tubs and streaming a sponge over huddled shoulders. But here luxury becomes geometrical ; its axioms are demonstrated algebraically. It is the unknown X which sprawls, in this spawning entanglement of animal life, over the damped paper, between these pencil outlines, each done at a stroke, like a hard, sure stroke of the chisel.

For, it must be remembered, these are the drawings of a sculptor, notes for sculpture, and thus indicating form as the sculptor sees it, with more brevity, in simpler outline, than the painter. They speak another language than the drawings of the painter, searching, as they do, for the points that catch the light along a line, for the curves that indicate contour tangibly. In looking at the drawings of a painter, one sees colour ; here, in these shorthand notes of a sculptor, one’s fingers seem actually to touch marble.

Ill

Rodin will tell you that in his Interpretation of life he is often a translator who does not understand the message which he hands on. At times it is a pure idea, an abstract conception, which he sets himself to express in clay ; something that he has thought, something that he has read : the creation of woman, the legend of Psyche, the idea of prayer, of the love of brother and sister, a line of Dante or of Baudelaire. But more often he surrenders himself to the direct guidance of life itself : a movement is made before him, and from this movement he creates the idea of the movement. Often a single figure takes form under his hands, and he cannot understand what the figure means : its lines seem to will something, and to ask for the completion of their purpose. He puts it aside, and one day, happening to see it as it lies among other formless suggestions of form, it groups itself with another fragment, itself hitherto unexplained ; suddenly there is a composition, the idea has penetrated the clay, life has given birth to the soul. He endeavours to represent life in all its mystery, not to penetrate the mystery of life. He gives you a movement, an expression ; if it has come straight from life, if it has kept the living contours, it must mean something, and he is but your comrade in the search for that meaning.

Yet he is never indifferent to that meaning ; he is rarely content to leave any single figure wholly to the chance of interpretation. Rodin is a thinker, as well as a seer ; he has put the whole of his intelligence into his work, not leaving any fragment of himself unused. And so this world of his making becomes a world of problems, of symbols, in which life offers itself to be understood. Here is a face, fixed in an attitude of meditation, and set aside unfinished, to which a hand, lifted daintily to the temples, has found its way out of another study ; and the man’s hand waits, giving the movement which completes the woman’s head, until the hand of the same model has been studied in that position. Here two lovers, on the back of an eagle, are seen carried to the same point of heaven on the flight of the same desire. Christ agonises in the garden of Eden, or it may be Prometheus ; he is conquered, and a useless angel, who cannot help, but perhaps comes as an angel of glory, hovers down to him. A shoal of rapid Muses, hurrying to reach the poet, swim towards him as upon carrying waves. A great Muse, swooping like an eagle, hurls inspiration into the brain of the poet. Another figure of inspiration, an Iris, meant for the monument of Victor Hugo, is seen arrested in a moment of violent action, which tears the whole body almost in two. With one hand she grasps her foot, drawing the leg up tight against the body ; the other leg is flung out at a sharp angle, in a sudden, leaping curve. All the force of the muscles palpitates in this strenuous flesh ; the whole splendour of her sex, unveiled, palpitates to the air ; the messenger of the gods, bringing some divine message, pauses in flight, an embodied inspiration.

In a group meant for some shadowy corner of a park, among growing things, dear to Pan and the nymphs, a satyr grasps a woman with fierce tenderness, his gay animal face, sharpened with desire, the eyes oblique like the ears, appearing over her shoulder ; his hoofs clutch the ground ; one hand catches her by the hair, the other seizes her above the knee, as if to lift her in his arms ; she pushes him away, startled, resisting the brutality of instinct, inevitably at his mercy. Here are two figures : one, a woman, rigid as an idol, stands in all the peace of indifierence ; the other, a man tortured with desire, every muscle strained to exasperation, writhes in all the ineffectual energy of a force which can but feed upon itself She is there, before him, close to him, infinitely apart, and he could crush but never seize her. In an exquisite and wholly new rendering of the Temptation of St. Anthony, the saint lies prostrate, crouched against the cross, which his lips -kiss feverishly, as he closes his pained eyes ; the shoulders seem to move in a shuddering revolt from the burden which they bear unwillingly ; he grovels in the dust like a toad, in his horror of the life and beauty which have cast themselves away upon him. And the woman lies back luxuriously, stretching her naked limbs across his back, and twisting her delicate arms behind her head, in a supple movement of perfectly happy abandonment, breathing the air ; she has the innocence of the flesh, the ignorance of the spirit, and she does not even know what it is to tempt. She is without perversity ; the flesh, not the devil ; and so, perhaps, the more perilous.

It is interesting to compare this version of a subject which so many artists have treated, always in a spirit of perversity or of grotesque horror, with all those other versions, from Hieronymus van Bosch, with his crawling and swooping abortions, in whom there could lie no possible temptation, to Bops, with his woman of enticing flesh spread out mockingly upon the cross, from which she has cast off* the divine body. To Rodin it is the opposition of the two powers of the world ; it is the conflict of the two rejections, the two absolute masters of the human will. St. Anthony cannot understand the woman, the woman cannot understand St. Anthony. To her, he seems to be playing at abnegation, for the game’s sake, stupidly ; to him, she seems to be bringing all hell-fire in the hollow of her cool hands. They will never understand one another, and that will be the reason of the eternal conflict.

Here is the Balzac, with its royal air, shouldering the crowd apart, as it steps into the final solitude, and the triumph. It is the thinker of action, the visionary creator of worlds, standing there like a mountain that has become man. The pose is that of a rock against which all waves must dash themselves in vain. There is exultation, a kind of ferocity of enjoyment of life and of the making of life, in the great beaked head, the great jaws, the eagles eyes under the crag of eyebrows. And the rock which suggests the man, the worker wrapped in the monastic habit of his dressing-gown, all supple force under the loose folds of moulded clay, stands there as if growing up out of the earth, planted for the rest of time. It is the proudest thing that has been made out of clay.

It is Balzac, but it is more than Balzac ; it is the genius and the work of Balzac ; it is the ‘ Comedie Humaine,’ it is Seraphita and Vautrin and Lucien and Valerie ; it is the energy of the artist and the solitude of the thinker and the abounding temperament of the man ; and it is the triumph of all this in one supreme incarnation, which seems to give new possibilities to sculpture.

IV

All his life Eodin has been a fighter, and now, at the age of sixty-one, after the creation of a series of masterpieces, he is still fighting. The history of the Balzac is too well known to need repeating ; but that miracle of official imbecility, the refusal of Rodin’s work and the substitution of one of the compilations of Falguifere (a true artist, born to be a painter, who paints to please himself and does sculpture to please the public) has been followed, only the other day, by a similar insult. The civic authorities of Paris ordered from M. Rodin a bust of Victor Hugo, to be set up in the Place Royale. M. Rodin set to work immediately, and produced the bust, which is now to be seen in the Salon ; the bust was photographed, the photographs sent to the H6tel de Ville, and the same evening an official letter was received by the sculptor telling him to consider the order null and void, seeing that an arrangement had been made with another sculptor on better terms (‘ de consid^rer comme nulle et non avenue la commande qui m’avait 6t6 faite, attendu qu’il avait traite sous de meilleures conditions avec un autre sculpteur '). I take these words, which have their value as a document in the history of the relations of art and the State, from a note in the ‘ Gaulois/ confirmed by M. Rodin himeelf.^

No, even now, Rodin is not accepted, universally accepted, as the one great modern sculptor, as the Wagner of sculpture. It is true that one only needs the eyes to see, that one only needs to open one’s eyes, and to forget to bring with one any ready-made ways of seeing. There, precisely there, lies all the difiiculty. Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticises before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself. Take, for instance, the idea of beauty. Almost every one can see the beauty of Raphael, only a certain number can see the beauty of Velasquez, not many can see the

* A further comment remains to be added. I find in ‘ La Plume ’ of the 1st May the following note : ‘ Le Conseil, on s’en souvient, trouva trop 61ev6 le prix de 2500 fr. propose par I’auteur du Balzac, pour le buste de Victor Hugo destin6 au Centenaire (et qui repr(5sentait rien que la recuperation des frais). II s’adressa ii un artiste qui faisait “ k de meilleures conditions.” L’artiste a prdsent4 sa note, acceptee incontinent : elle s’eieve ^ 25,000 francs. . . . Le promoteur du vote est M. Quentin-Bauchart ; le statuaire s’appelle M. Barreau.’

beauty of Blake. In the human figure, every one can see the beauty of a breast ; not many can see the beauty of a shoulder-blade. In nature, every one can see the beauty of the Alps at dawn ; not many can see the beauty of a putrescent pool. Yet all these are but different forms of the same essential beauty ; all wait patiently for the same acceptance, all offer themselves to the same mere sight of the eyes.

But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves ; we have to unlearn whole traditions of prejudice ; we have to force ourselves to look things straight in the face. The art of sculpture has seemed the one art which has already reached finality ; here, at aU events, sighed the public with relief, we shall have nothing more to learn or to unlearn ; we know at least what a piece of sculpture is when we see it. From the first Bodin has been perturbing. This warmth of life, is it not excessive? This softness, suppleness, spring, are they quite the qualities proper to sculpture ? Here is a back which will shiver if I touch it, but why is the face half lost in the marble out of which the figure seems to grow ? Finally, is this a man or a mountain or an eagle which calls itself Balzac, and is so different from the known portraits of Balzac ? Something new has come even into sculpture ; there is a troubling upheaval of some restless inner life in the clay ; even sculpture has gone the way of all the other arts, and has learnt to suggest more than it says, to embody dreams in its flesh, to become at once a living thing and a symbol.

THE PAINTING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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THE PAINTING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I

Mr. D. S. MacColl’s book on ‘ Nineteenth Century Art ’ is the most important book on painting which has been published since Ruskin’s ‘ Modern Painters.’ It is neither a challenge nor a prophecy, and ‘ Modern Painters ’ was both. It is an interpretation. Mr. MacColl is a painter who is a writer, and not a writer who has studied painting. He is in the movement of the century, and as a painter he has a small, definite place of his own, where a fastidious temperament can be seen at work exquisitely. The main value of the criticism in his book is that it is a painter’s criticism, letting one in by secret doors into the recesses of the painter’s brain and workshop. But the book is not merely a collection of scattered essays on artists, it is a view of a period of art ; an attempt, as we are told in the preface, ‘ to throw the chief figures of the period into perspective ; to define their imaginative attitude ; to indicate how some of them went with the drift of art special to the century, and others against it.’ Each artist is studied not only as an artist, but as a temperament, and his intentions are expressed, as often as possible, by quotations from his letters and sayings. This, it seems to me, is how the history of any art should be written ; not in a generalised sketch of ‘tendencies,’ ‘schools,’ and the like, but in an eager disentangling of the personality of each artist, of his aims in working, and of the manner of his work. In this research into the springs of action, every word that an artist has let fall about his own art is of value as evidence. Mr. MacColl’s book is a storehouse of such quotations, chosen with great skill ; and it contains no other quotations, it is indebted to no other critic, it is all his own.

The modern criticism of painting in England has been for the most part, somewhat accidental ; we have had, since Ruskin, one or two good books and many good detached essays, but no body of really fine art criticism. The influence of Ruskin has undoubtedly been a good influence ; beauty was to him, literally, what a Frenchman has called it, a religion ; and he preached the religion of beauty at a period almost as much absorbed in the pedantries of science and the ignominies of material success as the present period. Much of his force came from his narrowness ; you cannot be a prophet and a disinterested analyst at the same time. Ruskin did more than any man of our century to interest Englishmen in beautiful things, and it matters little whether his choice among beautiful things was always really the choice of an artist. He could convince the stubborn and Philistine British public, or he could brow-beat that public into fancying that it ought to be convinced. William Morris, who made all kinds of beautiful things himself, and who also tried to argue on behalf of beauty as a socialist orator, has had very much less influence on the bulk of the British public. Morris, however, was really continuing the work which Ruskin began.

Had Walter Pater devoted himself exclusively to art criticism, there is no doubt that, in a sense, he would have been a great art critic. There are essays scattered throughout his work, the essay on ‘ The School of Giorgione,’ for instance, in which the essential principles of the art of painting are divined and interpreted with extraordinary subtlety. I remember hearing him say, that, as he grew older, books interested him less and less, pictures delighted him more and more. But with him art criticism was but one function of a close, delicate, unceasing criticism of life ; and the ideas at the root of painting, as well as of every other form of the activity of the spirit, meant more to him, in spite of his striving after absolute justice, than the painting itself. Thus, even in that admirable essay on Giorgione, he could leave out all mention of ‘ The Geometricians ’ in the Vienna Gallery, as, in writing subtly about the ideas of Coleridge, he could leave out ‘ Kubla Khan ’ from the selection of Coleridge’s poetry which was to accompany his essay. As it was, he corrected many of the generous and hasty errors of Buskin, and helped to bring back criticism to a wiser and more tolerant attitude towards the arts.

Everything that Mr. Whistler has written about painting deserves to he taken seriously, and read with understanding. Written in French, and signed by Baudelaire, his truths, and paradoxes reflecting truths, would have been realised for what they are. Written in English, and obscurely supposed to conceal some dangerous form of humour, they are left for the most part unconsidered by the ‘serious’ public of the annual picture galleries.

There is one book by another writer who has not always been fairly treated, Mr. George Moore’s ‘ Modern Painting,’ which stands out among the art criticism of our time. It is full of injustice, brutality, and ignorance ; but it is full also of the most generous justice, the most discriminating sympathy, and the genuine knowledge of the painter. It is hastily thought out, hastily written ; but there, in those vivid, direct, unscrupulously logical pages, you will find some of the secrets of the art of painting, let out, so to speak, by an intelligence all sensation, which has soaked them up without knowing it.

In Mr. MacColl we have the art critic who is at once the painter, the man of letters, and the learned student of his art and of its history. He writes with authority, and his writing is as good as if he were merely amusing himself with phrases. Listen to a few of the phrases, and observe how just is the criticism expressed with so much point and brilliance. Of Daumier he says : ‘ Daumier’s style is grand and elemental, his matter is trivial ; his effect is the angry assault of that drawing on this matter, the tilt of the lance against the windmill and the sheep.’ Of Albert Moore : ‘ He is a Pygmalion who transforms the woman into marble.’ Of Degas : ‘ If gymnastic and poetry have parted company, he takes the spirit of gymnastic where it is.’ The work of Boucher is ‘ the play and gallantry of Kubens in its last dishevelment.’ And of music he says, with more amplification, more extravagance, if you will : ‘ An art that came out of the old world two centuries ago with a few chants, love songs, and dances, that a century ago was still tied to the words of a mass or opera, or threading little dance movements together in a “ suite,” became, in the last century, this extraordinary debauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, or worshipped a god may not only ideally, but through the response of his nerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical attack, enjoy the ghosts of struggle, rapture, and exaltation with a volume and intricacy, an anguish, a triumph, an irresponsibility unheard of.’ Sometimes, it is true, Mr. MacColTs vision and judgment seem to be limited a little by the narrowing perfection of his own definitions. He flashes them out, and they solidify and look so well on the page that they seem to him final. And also, in his sentences, the imagery can become, at times, a little ferocious, the emphasis a little mechanical in its reiteration. He says of Courbet : ‘ He will have no blasphemy of matter ; he lets down among the painter Rabbis a St. Peter’s sheet, filled with creatures banned as common and unclean in their Numbers and Deuteronomy, and proclaims them all blessed by light.’ The bricks, in his work, are often better than the building. Every sentence in a paragraph may be good, but the paragraph has only rarely the air of having been composed after a pattern, or to a tune. Most of the sentences could be transposed, each with its separate thing worth saying and well said, and none of them would be the worse for the changre. It is in this flaw, perhaps, that one distinguishes the writer to whom writing is a supplementary profession, the writer who is first of all a painter.

II

‘ What exactly,’ says Mr. MacColl, ‘ was the special and final addition made to the instrument of painting in the nineteenth century ? It may be expressed by saying that painting accepted at last the full contents of vision as material, all that is given in the coloured camera-reflection of the real world.’ So far so good, but is that all, or even the essential part, of what the painting of the century has tried to do ? Is it not rather that modern painters have tried to do with the aid of nature what the old painters did without it ? to And the pattern and rhythm of their pictures in nature itself rather than in their own brains and on their own palettes ? It is not merely a question of seeing things as they are, and ‘ accepting the full contents of vision as material ’ ; it is the deeper and more difficult question of getting nature, seen frankly, into the pattern, instead of coming to nature with one’s pattern ready made.