A profound student of light and of movement, Rodin, by deliberate amplification of the surfaces of his statues, avoiding dryness and harshness of outline, secures a zone of radiancy, a luminosity, which creates the illusion of reality. He handles values in clay as a painter does his tones. He gets the design of the outline by movement which continually modifies the anatomy—the secret, he believes, of the Greeks. He studies his profiles successively in full light, obtaining volume—or planes—at once and together; successive views of one movement. The light plays with more freedom upon his amplified surfaces—intensified in the modelling by enlarging the lines. The edges of certain parts are amplified, deformed, falsified, and we see that light-swept effect, that appearance as if of luminous emanations. This deformation, he declares, was practised by the great sculptors to snare the undulating appearance of life. Sculpture, he asserts, is the "art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures." Finish kills vitality. Yet Rodin can chisel a smooth nymph for you if he so wills, but her flesh will ripple and run in the sunlight. His art is one of accents. He works by profile in depth, not by surfaces. He swears by what he calls "cubic truth"; his pattern is a mathematical figure; the pivot of art is balance, i.e., the oppositions of volume produced by movement. Unity haunts him. He is a believer in the correspondences of things, of the continuity in nature; a mystic as well as a geometrician. Yet such a realist is he that he quarrels with any artist who does not see "the latent heroic in every natural movement."

Therefore he does not force the pose of his model, preferring attitudes or gestures voluntarily adopted. His sketch-books, as copious, as vivid as the drawings of Hokusai—he is very studious of Japanese art—are swift memoranda of the human machine as it dispenses its normal muscular motions. Rodin, draughtsman, is as surprising and original as Rodin, sculptor. He will study a human foot for months, not to copy it, but to possess the secret of its rhythms. His drawings are the swift notations of a sculptor whose eye is never satisfied, whose desire to pin on paper the most evanescent movements of the human machine is almost a mania. The French sculptor avoids studied poses. The model tumbles down anywhere, in any contortion or relaxation he or she wishes. Practically instantaneous is the method adopted by Rodin to preserve the fleeting attitudes, the first shiver of surfaces. He draws rapidly with his eye on the model. It is a mere scrawl, a few enveloping lines, a silhouette. But vitality is in it; and for his purposes a mere memorandum of a motion. A sculptor has made these extraordinary drawings not a painter. It will be well to observe the distinction. He is the most rhythmic sculptor of them all. And rhythm is the codification of beauty. Because he has observed with a vision quite virginal he insists that he has affiliations with the Greeks. But if his vision is Greek his models are Parisian, while his forms are more Gothic than the pseudo-Greek of the academy. As W.C. Brownell wrote years ago: "Rodin reveals rather than constructs beauty... no sculptor has carried expression further; and expression means individual character completely exhibited rather than conventionally suggested." Mr. Brownell was also the first critic to point out that Rodin's art was more nearly related to Donatello than to Michael Angelo. He is in the legitimate line of French sculpture, the line of Goujon, Puget, Rude, Barye. Dalou did not hesitate to assert that the Dante portal is "one of the most, if not the most, original and astonishing pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth century."

This Dante Gate, begun more than twenty years ago, not finished yet, and probably never to be, is an astounding fugue, with death, the devil, hell, and the passions as a horribly beautiful four-voiced theme. I saw the composition a few years ago at the Rue de l'Universite atelier. It is as terrifying a conception as the Last Judgment; nor does it miss the sonorous and sorrowful grandeur of the Medici Tombs. Yet how different, how feverish, how tragic! Like all great men working in the grip of a unifying idea, Rodin modified the old technique of sculpture so that it would serve him as plastically as does sound a musical composer. A deep lover of music, his inner ear may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms—his marbles are ever musical; not "frozen music" as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but silent swooning music. This gate is a Frieze of Paris, as deeply significant of modern aspiration and sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is the symbol of the great clear beauty of Hellas. Dante inspired this monstrous and ennobled masterpiece, but Baudelaire filled many of its chinks and crannies with writhing ignoble shapes; shapes of dusky fire that, as they tremulously stand above the gulf of fears, wave ineffectual desperate hands. Heine in his Deutschland asks:

Kennst du die Hoelle des Dante nicht, Die schreckliche Terzetten? Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt Den kann kein Gott mehr retten.

And from the "singing flames" of Rodin there is no rescue.

But he is not all tragedy and hell fire. Of singular delicacy, of exquisite proportions are his marbles of youth, of springtide, and the desire of life. In 1900, at his special exhibition, Paris, Europe, and America awoke to these haunting visions. Not since Keats or Swinburne has love been sung so sweetly, so romantically, so fiercely. Though he disclaims understanding the Celtic spirit, one could say that there is Celtic magic, Celtic mystery in his work. He pierces to the core the frenzy and joy of love and translates them in beautiful symbols. Nature is for him the sole theme; his works are but variations on her promptings. He knows the emerald route and all the semitones of sensuousness. Fantasy, passion, even paroxysmal madness there are; yet what elemental power in his Adam as the gigantic first homo painfully heaves himself up from the earth to that posture which differentiates him from the beasts. Here, indeed, the two natures are at strife. And Mother Eve, her expression suggesting the sorrows and shames that are to be the lot of her seed; her very loins seem crushed by the ages that are hidden within them. You may walk freely about the burghers of Calais, as did Rodin when he modelled them; that is one secret of the group's vital quality. About all his statues you may walk—he is not a sculptor of one attitude, but a hewer of men and women. Consider the Balzac. It is not Balzac the writer of novels, but Balzac the prophet, the seer, the great natural force—like Rodin himself. That is why these kindred spirits converse across the years, as do the Alpine peaks in that striking parable of Turgenieff's. No doubt in bronze the Balzac will arouse less wrath from the unimaginative; in plaster it produces the effect of some surging monolith of snow.

As a portraitist of his contemporaries Rodin is the unique master of character. His women are gracious, delicious masks; his men cover many octaves in virility and variety. That he is extremely short-sighted has not been dealt with in proportion to the significance of this fact. It accounts for his love of exaggerated surfaces, his formless extravagance, his indefiniteness in structural design; possibly, too, for his inability, or let us say lack of sympathy, for the monumental. He is essentially a sculptor of the intimate emotions; he delineates passion as a psychologist; and while we think of him as a cyclops wielding a huge hammer destructively, he is often ardent in his search of subtle nuance. But there is breadth even when he models an eyelid. Size is only relative. We are confronted by the paradox of an artist as torrential, as apocalyptic as Rubens and Wagner, carving with a style wholly charming a segment of a baby's back so that you exclaim, "Donatello come to life!" His slow, defective vision, then, may have been his salvation; he seems to rely as much on his delicate tactile sense as on his eyes. His fingers are as sensitive as a violinist's. At times he seems to model tone and colour. A marvellous poet, a precise sober workman of art, with a peasant strain in him like Millet, and, like Millet, very near to the soil; a natural man, yet crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor of a sensibility exalted, and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, very close to the periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante's alter ego in his vast grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate fling at nature; withal a sculptor, always profound and tortured, translating rhythm and motion into the terms of sculpture. Rodin is a statuary who, while having affinities with both the classic and romantic schools, is the most startling artistic apparition of his century. And to the century he has summed up so plastically and emotionally he has also propounded questions that only the unborn years may answer. He has a hundred faults to which he opposes one imperious excellence—a genius, sombre, magical, and overwhelming.



V. EUGENE CARRIERE



Death has consecrated the genius of three great painters happily neglected and persecuted during their lifetime—Manet, Monticelli, and Carriere. Though furiously opposed, Manet was admitted to the Luxembourg by the conditions of the Caillebotte legacy. There that ironic masterpiece, Olympe—otherwise known as the Cat and Cocotte—has hung for the edification of intelligent amateurs, though it was only a bequest of triumphant hatred in official eyes. And now the lady with her cat and negress is in the Louvre, in which sacrosanct region she, with her meagre, subtle figure, competes among the masterpieces. Yet there were few dissenting voices. Despite its temperamental oscillations France is at bottom sound in the matter of art. Genius may starve, but genius once recognised, the apotheosis is logically bound to follow. No fear of halls of fame with a French Poe absent.

Eugene Carriere was more fortunate than his two famous predecessors. He toiled and suffered hardship, but before his death he was officially acknowledged though never altogether approved by the Salon in which he exhibited; approved or understood. He fought under no banner. He was not an impressionist. He was not a realist. Certainly he could be claimed by neither the classics nor romantics. A "solitary" they agreed to call him; but his is not the hermetic art of such a solitary as Gustave Moreau. Carriere, on the contrary, was a man of marked social impulses, and when in 1889 he received the Legion of Honour, he was enabled to mingle with his equals—he had been almost unknown until then. He was the most progressive spirit among his brethren. Nowadays he is classed as an Intimist, in which category and with such men as Simon Bussy, Menard, Henri le Sidaner, Emile Wery, Charles Cottet, Lucien Simon, Edouard Vuillard, the Griveaus, Lomont, Lobre, and others, he is still their master, still the possessor of a highly individualised style, and in portraiture the successor to such diverse painters as Prudhon, Ricard, and Whistler.

Gabriel Seailles has written a study, Eugene Carriere, l'Homme et l'Artiste, and Charles Morice has published another, Eugene Carriere. The latter deals with the personality and ideas of one of the most original thinkers among modern French painters. We have spoken of the acerbity of Degas, of his wit, so often borrowed by Whistler and Manet; we have read Eugene Fromentin's delightful, stimulating studies of the old masters, but we doubt if Fromentin was as profound a thinker as Carriere. Degas is not, though he deals in a more acid and dangerous form of aphorism. It is one of the charms of the eulogy of M. Morice to find embalmed therein so many phrases and speeches of the dead painter. He was both poet and philosopher, let us call him a seer, for his work fully bears out this appellation. A grand visionary, he well deserves Jean Dolent's description of his pictures as "realities having the magic of a dream."

Carriere's career was in no wise extraordinary. He fled to no exotic climes as did Paul Gauguin. His only tragedy was the manner of his death. For three years previous he suffered the agonies of a cancer. His bravery was admirable. No one heard him complain. He worked to the last, worked as he had worked his life long, untiringly. Morice gives a "succinct biography" at the close of his study. From it we learn that Eugene Carriere was born January 29, 1849, at Gournay (Seine-Inferieure); that he made his first steps in art at the Strasbourg Academy; in 1869 he entered the Beaux-Arts, in Cabanel's class. Penniless, he earned a precarious existence in designing industrial objects. In 1870 he was made prisoner by the Prussians, with the garrison of Neuf-Brisach, and taken to Dresden, where he was confined in prison. After peace had been declared he resumed his studies at the Beaux-Arts. In 1877 he married—an important event in his art; thenceforward Madame Carriere and the children born to them were his continual models, both by preference and also by force of circumstances—he was too poor in the beginning to hire professional models. He spent six months in London, which may or may not account for his brumous colour; and in 1879, when he was thirty years old, he exposed in the Salon of that year his Young Mother, the first of a long series of Maternities. He was violently attacked by the critics, and as violently defended. During the same year he attempted to win the "prix de Rome" and gained honours for his sketch. Luckily he did not attain this prize; and, still more luck, he left the school.

In 1884 he received an honourable mention for a child's portrait; in 1885 a medal for his Sick Child, bought by the State; in 1886 Le Premier voile was bought by the State and he was proposed for a medal of honour and—singular dream of Frenchmen—he was decorated in 1889. He died March 27, 1906. Not a long, but a full life, a happy one, and at the last, glory—"le soleil des morts," as Balzac said—and a competence for his dear ones. And it is to the honour of such writers as Roger Marx, Anatole France, Hamel, Morice, Mauclair, Verhaeren, Geffroy, that they recognised the genius of Carriere from the beginning. In 1904 Carriere was made honorary president of the Autumn Salon and was the chief guest of these young painters, who really adored Paul Cezanne, and not the painter of an illusive psychology. I wrote at that time: "Carriere, whose delicately clouded portraits, so intimate in their revelation of the souls of his sitters, was not seen at his best. He offered a large decorative panel for the Mairie of the Thirteenth Arrondissement, entitled Les Fiances, a sad-looking betrothal party ... the landscape timid, the decorative scheme not very effective... His tender notations of maternity, and his heads, painted with the smoky enchantments of his pearly gray and soft russet, are more credible than this panneau." Was Carriere a decorative painter by nature—setting aside training? We doubt it, though Morice does not hesitate to name him after Puvis de Chavannes in this field. The trouble is that he did not make many excursions into the larger forms. He painted a huge canvas, Les Theatres Populaires, in which the interest is more intimate than epical. He also did some decorations for the Hotel de Ville, The Four Ages for a Mairie, and the Christ at the Luxembourg and a view of Paris. Nevertheless, it is his portraits that will live.

Carriere was, first and last, a symbolist. There he is related to the Dutch Seer, Rembrandt; both men strove to seek for the eternal correspondence of things material and spiritual; both sought to bring into harmony the dissonance of flesh and the spirit. Both succeeded, each in his own way—though we need not couple their efforts on the technical side. Rembrandt was a prophet. There is more of the reflective poet in Carriere. He is a mystic. His mothers, his children, are dreams made real—the magic of which Dolent speaks is always there. To disengage the personality of his sitter was his first idea. Slowly he built up those volumes of colour, light, and shadow, the solidity of which caused Rodin to exclaim: "Carriere is also a sculptor!" Slowly and from the most unwilling sitter he extorted the secret of a soul. We speak of John Sargent as the master psychologist among portraitists, a superiority he himself has never assumed; but that magnificent virtuoso, an aristocratic Frans Hals, never gives us the indefinite sense of things mystic beneath the epidermis of poor, struggling humanity as does Eugene Carriere. Sargent is too magisterial a painter to dwell upon the infinite little soul-stigmata of men and women. Who can tell the renunciations made by the Frenchman in his endeavour to wrest the enigma of personality from its abysmal depths?

As Canaille Mauclair says: "Carriere was first influenced by the Spaniards, then by Ver Meer and Chardin ... formerly he coloured his canvas with exquisite delicacy and with a distinction of harmonies that came very near to Whistler's. Now he confines himself to bistre, black and white, to evoke those dream pictures, true images of souls, which make him inimitable in our epoch and go back to Rembrandt's chiaroscuro." Colour went by the board at the last, and the painter was dominated by expression alone. His gamut of tones became contracted. "Physical magnetism" is exactly the phrase that illuminates his later methods. Often cavernous in tone, sooty in his blacks, he nevertheless contrives a fluid atmosphere, the shadows floating, the figure floating, that arrests instant attention. He became almost sculptural, handled his planes with imposing breadth, his sense of values was strong, his gradations and degradation of tones masterly; and he escaped the influences of the new men in their researches after luminosity at all hazards. He considered impressionism a transition; after purifying muddy palettes of the academics, the division-of-tones painters must necessarily return to lofty composition, to a poetic simplicity with nature, to a more rarefied psychology.

Carriere, notwithstanding his nocturnal reveries, his sombre colouring, was not a pessimist. Indeed, the reverse. His philosophy of life was exalted—an exalted socialism. He was, to employ Nietzsche's pithy phrase, a "Yes-Sayer"; he said "Yes" to the universe. A man of vigorous affirmations, he worshipped nature, not for its pictorial aspects, but for the god which is the leaf and rock and animal, for the god that beats in our pulses and shines in the clear sunlight. Nor was it vague, windy pantheism, this; he was a believer—a glance at his Christ reveals his reverence for the Man of Sorrows—and his religious love and pity for mankind was only excelled by his hatred of wrong and oppression. He detested cruelty. His canvases of childhood, in which he exposes the most evanescent gesture, exposes the unconscious helplessness of babyhood, are so many tracts—if you choose to see them after that fashion—in behalf of mercy to all tender and living things. He is not, however, a sentimentalist. His family groups prove the absence of theatrical pity. Because of his subtle technical method, his manner of building up his heads in a misty medium and then abstracting their physical non-essentials, his portraits have a metaphysical meaning—they are a Becoming, not a Being, tangible though they be. Their fluid rhythms lend to them almost the quality of a perpetual rejuvenescence. This may be an illusion, but it tells us of the primary intensity of the painter's vision. Withal, there is no scene of the merely spectral, no optical trickery. The waves of light are magnetic. The picture floats in space, seemingly compelled by its frame into limits. Gustave Geffroy once wrote that, in common with the great masters, Carriere, on his canvas, gives a sense of volume and weight. Whatever he sacrificed, it was not actuality. His draughtsmanship never falters, his touch is never infirm.

I have seen his portraits of Verlaine, Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Geffroy, of the artist himself and many others. The Verlaine is a veritable evocation. It was painted at one seance of several hours, and the poet, it is said, did not sit still or keep silence for a moment. He was hardly conscious that he was being painted. What a head! Not that of the old faun and absinthe-sipping vagabond of the Latin quarter, but the soul that lurked somewhere in Verlaine; the dreamer, not the mystifier, the man crucified to the cross of aspiration by his unhappy temperament. Musician and child, here is the head of one of those pious, irresponsible mendicants who walked dusty roads in the Middle Ages. It needed an unusual painter to interpret an unusual poet.

The Daudet face is not alone full of surface character, but explains the racial affinities of the romancer. Here he is David, not Daudet. The head of De Goncourt gives in a few touches—Carriere is ever master of the essential—the irritable pontiff of literary impressionism. Carriere was fond of repeating: "For the artist the forms evoke ideas, sensations, and sentiments; for the poet, sensations, ideas, sentiments evoke forms." Never expansively lyrical as was Monticelli, Carriere declared that a picture is the logical development of light. And on the external side his art is a continual variation with light as a theme. Morice contends that he was a colourist; that the blond of Rubens and the russet of Carriere are not monochromes; that polychromy is not the true way of seeing nature coloured. Certainly Carriere does not sacrifice style, expression, composition for splashing hues. Yet his illuminating strokes appear to proceed from within, not from without. He interrogates nature, but her answer is a sober, not a brilliant one. Let us rather say that his colouring is adequate—he always asserted that a sense of proportion was success in art. His tone is peculiarly personal; he paints expressions, the fleeting shades that cross the face of a man, a woman, a child. He patiently awaits the master trait of a soul and never misses it, though never displaying it with the happy cruelty of Sargent and always judging mercifully. Notwithstanding his humble attitude in the presence of nature, he is the most self-revealing of painters. Few before him ever interpreted maternity as he has done.

Carriere is not a virtuoso. He is an initiator—a man of rare imagination. Above all, he escapes the rhetoric of the schools. His apprehension of character is that of sympathetic genius. He divines the emotions, especially in those souls made melancholy by sorrow; uneasy, complex, feverish souls; them that hide their griefs, and souls saturated with the ennuis of existence—to all he is interpreter and consoler. He has pictured the Weltschmerz of his age; and without morbid self-enjoyment. A noble soul, an elevating example to those artists who believe that art and life may be dissociated. Carriere has left no school, though his spiritual influence has been great. A self-contained artist, going his own way, meditating deeply on art, on life, his canvases stand for his singleness and purity of purpose. On the purely pictorial side he is, to quote M. Mauclair, "an absolutely surprising painter of hands and glances."

In the sad and anxious rectitude of his attire the artistic interest in modern man is concentrated upon his head and hands; and upon these salient points Carriere focussed his art. Peaceful or disquieted, his men and women belong to our century. Spiritually Eugene Carriere is the lineal descendant of the Rembrandt school—but one who has read Dostoievsky.



VI. DEGAS



Let us suppose that gay old misogynist Arthur Schopenhauer persuaded to cross the Styx and revisiting the earth. Apart from his disgust if forced to listen to the music of his self-elected disciple Richard Wagner, what painted work would be likely to attract him? Remember he it was who named Woman the knock-kneed sex—since the new woman is here it matters little if her figure conforms to old-fashioned, stupid, masculine standards of beauty. But wouldn't the nudes of Degas confirm the Frankfort philosopher in his theories regarding the "long-haired, short-brained, unaesthetic sex," and also confirm his hatred for the exaggerations of poet and painter when describing or depicting her? We fear that Schopenhauer would smile his malicious smile and exclaim: "At last the humble truth!" It is the presentation of the humble truth that early snared the affections of Degas, who has with a passionate calm pursued the evanescent appearances of things his entire life. No doubt death will find him pencil in hand. You think of Hokusai, the old man mad with paint, when the name of Degas is mentioned. He was born in Paris July 19, 1834—his full name is Hilaire Germain Edgard (or Edgar)—and there is one phrase that will best describe his career: He painted. Like Flaubert, he never married, but lived in companionship with his art. Such a mania could have been described by Balzac. Yet no saner art ever issued from a Parisian atelier; sane, clear, and beautiful.

Degas is a painter's painter. For him the subject is a peg upon which to hang superb workmanship. In amazement the public asked: How could a man in the possession of his powers shut himself up in a studio to paint ballet girls, washerwomen, jockeys, drabs of Montmartre, shopgirls, and horses? Even Zola, who should have known better, would not admit that Degas was an artist fit to be compared with such men as Flaubert and Goncourt; but Zola was never the realist that is Degas. Now it is difficult to keep asunder the names of Goncourt and Degas. To us they are too often unwisely bracketed. The style of the painter has been judged as analogous to the novelist's; yet, apart from a preference for the same subjects for the "modernity" of Paris, there is not much in Degas that recalls Goncourt's staccato, febrile, sparkling, "decomposed", impressionistic prose. Both men are brilliant, though not in the same way. Pyrotechnics are abhorrent to Degas. He has the serenity, sobriety, and impersonality of the great classic painters. He is himself a classic.

His legend is slender. Possessing a private income, he never was preoccupied with the anxieties of selling his work. He first entered the atelier of Lamotte, but his stay was brief. In the studio of Ingres he was, so George Moore declares, the student who carried out the lifeless body of the painter when Ingres fell in his fatal fit. There is something peculiarly interesting about this anecdote for the tradition of Ingres has been carried on by Degas. The greatest master of pure line, in his portraits and nudes—we have forgotten his chilly pastiches of Raphael—of the past century, Ingres has been and still is for Degas a god on the peaks of Parnassus. Degas is an Ingres who has studied the Japanese. Only such men as Pollajuolo and Botticelli rank with Degas in the mastery of rhythmic line. He is not academic, yet he stems from purest academic traditions. He is not of the impressionists, at least not in his technical processes, but he associated with them, exhibited with them (though rarely), and is as a rule confused with them. He never exhibited in the Salons, he has no disciples, yet it is doubtful if any painter's fashion of seeing things has had such an influence on the generation following him. The name of Degas, the pastels of Degas, the miraculous draughtsmanship of Degas created an imponderable fluid which still permeates Paris. Naturally, after the egg trick was discovered we encounter scores of young Columbuses, who paint ballet girls' legs and the heads of orchestral musicians and scenes from the racing paddock.

Degas had three painters who, if any, might truthfully call themselves his pupils. These are Mary Cassatt, Alexis Rouart, and Forain. The first has achieved solid fame. The last is a remarkable illustrator, who "vulgarised" the austere methods of his master for popular Parisian consumption. That Renoir, Raffaelli, and Toulouse-Lautrec owe much to Degas is the secret of Polichinello. This patient student of the Tuscan Primitives, of Holbein, Chardin, Delacroix, Ingres, and Manet—the precepts of Manet taught him to sweeten the wiriness of his modelling and modify his tendency to a certain hardness—was willing to trust to time for the verdict of his rare art. He associated daily with Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Whistler, Duranty, Fantin-Latour, and the crowd that first went to the Cafe Guerbois in the Batignolles—hence the derisive nickname, "The Batignolles School"; later to the Nouvelle Athenes, finally to the Cafe de la Rochefoucauld. A hermit he was during the dozen hours a day he toiled, but he was a sociable man, nevertheless, a cultured man fond of music, possessing a tongue that was feared as much as is the Russian knout. Mr. Moore has printed many specimens of his caustic wit. Whistler actually kept silent in his presence—possibly expecting a repetition of the mot: "My dear friend, you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent at all." Manet good-naturedly took a browbeating, but the Academic set were outraged by the irreverence of Degas. What hard sayings were his! Poor Bastien-Lepage, too, came in for a scoring. Barricaded in his studio, it was a brave man who attempted to force an entrance. The little, round-shouldered artist, generally good-tempered, would pour a stream of verbal vitriol over the head of the unlucky impertinent.

In 1860 or thereabout he visited America, and in New Orleans he saw the subject of his Interior of a Cotton Factory, which was shown as an historical curiosity at the Paris exposition in 1900. While it is implacably realistic there is little hint of the future Degas. The name of the painter was in every French painter's mouth, and the brilliant article of Huysmans concentrated his fame. Huysmans it was who first saw that Degas had treated the nude as Rembrandt would if he had been alive—making allowances for temperamental variations. Degas knew that to grasp the true meaning of the nude it must be represented in postures, movements which are natural, not studio attitudes. As Monet exposed the fallacy of studio lighting, so Degas revealed the inanity of its poses. Ibsen said the stage should be a room with the fourth wall removed; Degas preferred the key-hole through which we seem to peep upon the privacy of his ugly females bathing or combing their hair or sleeping, lounging, yawning, quarrelling, and walking. The simian and frog-like gestures and sprawling attitudes are far from arousing amiable sensations. These poor, tired women, hard-working laundresses, shopgirls, are not alluring, though they are not as hideous as the women of Cezanne or Edvard Muench; but the veracity of the "human document" (overworked phrase!) is there. Charles Morice has said that to Cezanne a potato was as significant as a human countenance. The pattern interested him in both. For Degas the beauty of life lies in the moving line. He captures with ease the swift, unconscious gesture. His models are never posed. They are nature caught in the act. There is said to be a difference between the epidermis of the professional model and the human who undresses only to go to bed. Degas has recorded this difference. What an arraignment of the corset are the creased backs and gooseflesh of his nudes! What lurking cynicism there is in some of his interiors! Voila l'animale! he exclaims as he shows us the far from enchanting antics of some girl. How Schopenhauer would laugh at the feminine "truths" of Degas! Without the leer of Rops, Degas is thrice as unpleasant. He is a douche for the romantic humbug painter, the painter of sleek bayaderes and of drawing-room portraiture.

Pity is deeply rooted in his nature. He is never tender, yet there is veiled sympathy in the ballet-girl series. Behind the scenes, in the waiting-rooms, at rehearsal, going home with the hawk-eyed mother, his girls are all painfully real. No "glamour of the foot-lights," generally the prosaic side of their life. He has, however, painted the glorification of the danseuse, of that lady grandiloquently described as prima donna assoluta. What magic he evokes as he pictures her floating down stage! The pastel in the Luxembourg, L'Etoile, is the reincarnation of the precise moment when the aerial creature on one foot lifts graceful arms and is transfigured in the glow of the lights, while about her beats—you are sure—the noisy, insistent music. It is in the pinning down of such climaxes of movement that Degas stirs our admiration. He draws movement. He can paint rhythms. His canvases are ever in modulation. His sense of tactile values is profound. His is true atmospheric colour. A feeling of exhilaration comes while contemplating one of his open-air scenes with jockeys, race-horses, and the incidental bustle of a neighbouring concourse. Unexcelled as a painter of horses, as a delineator of witching horsemanship, of vivid landscapes—true integral decorations—and of the casual movements and gestures of common folk, Degas is also a psychologist, an ironical commentator on the pettiness and ugliness of daily life, of its unheroic aspects, its comical snobberies and shocking hypocrisies; and all expressed without a melodramatic elevation of the voice, without the false sentimentalism of Zola or the morbidities of Toulouse-Lautrec. There is much Baudelaire in Degas, as there is also in Rodin. All three men despised academic rhetoric; all three dealt with new material in a new manner.

It is the fashion to admire Degas, but it is doubtful if he will ever gain the suffrage of the general. He does not retail anecdotes, though to the imaginative every line of his nudes relates their history. His irony is unremitting. It suffuses the ballet-girl series and the nude sets. Irony is an illuminating mode, but it is seldom pleasant; the public is always suspicious of an ironist, particularly of the Degas variety. Careless of reputation, laughing at the vanity of his contemporaries who were eager to arrive, contemptuous of critics and criticism, of collectors who buy low to sell high (in the heart of every picture collector there is a bargain counter), Degas has defied the artistic world for a half-century. His genius compelled the Mountain to come to Mahomet. The rhythmic articulations, the volume, contours, and bounding supple line of Degas are the despair of artists. Like the Japanese, he indulges in abridgments, deformations, falsifications. His enormous faculty of attention has counted heavily in his synthetical canvases. He joys in the representation of artificial light; his theatres are flooded with it, and he is equally successful in creating the illusion of cold, cheerless daylight in a salle where rehearse the little "rats" and the older coryphees on their wiry, muscular, ugly legs. His vast production is dominated by his nervous, resilient vital line and by supremacy in the handling of values.

The Degas palette is never gorgeous, consisting as it does of cool grays, discreet blues and greens, Chardin-like whites and Manet-blacks. His procedure is all his own. His second manner is a combination of drawing, painting, and pastel. "He has invented a kind of engraving mixed with wash drawing, pastel crayon crushed with brushes of special pattern."



VII. BOTTICELLI



The common identity of the arts was a master theory of Richard Wagner, which he attempted to put into practice. Walter Pater in his essay on The School of Giorgione has dwelt upon the same theme, declaring music the archetype of the arts. In his Essays Speculative John Addington Symonds said some pertinent things on this subject. Camille Mauclair in his Idees Vivantes proposes in all seriousness a scheme for the fusion of the seven arts, though he deplored Wagner's efforts to reach a solution. Mauclair's theory is that the fusion can only be a cerebral one, that actually mingling sculpture, architecture, music, drama, acting, colour, dancing can never evoke the sensation of unity. Synthesis is not thus to be attained. It must be in the idea of the arts rather than their material realisation. A pretty chimera! Yet one that has piqued the world of art in almost every century. It was the half-crazy E.T.W. Hoffmann, composer, dramatist, painter, poet, stage manager, and a dozen other professions, including that of genius and drunkard, who set off a train of ideas which buzzed in the brains of Poe, Baudelaire, and the symbolists. People who hear painting, see music, enjoy odorous poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are now classed by the omnipotent psychical police as decadents, though such notions are as old as literature. Suarez de Mendoza in his L'Audition Coloree has said that the sensation of colour hearing, the faculty of associating tones and colours, is often a consequence of an association of ideas established in youth. The coloured vowels of Arthur Rimbaud, which must be taken as a poet's crazy prank; the elaborate treatises by Rene Ghil, which are terribly earnest; the remarks that one often hears, such as "scarlet is like a trumpet blast"; certain pages of Huysmans, all furnish examples of this curious muddling of the senses and mixing of genres. Naturally, it has invaded criticism, which, limited in imagery, sometimes seeks to transfer the technical terms of one art to another.

Whistler with his nocturnes, notes, symphonies in rose and silver, his colour-sonatas, boldly annexed well-worn musical phrases, that in their new estate took on fresher meanings even if remaining knee-deep in the kingdom of the nebulous. It must be confessed modern composers have retaliated. Musical impressionism is having its vogue, while poets are desperately pictorial. Soul landscapes and etched sonnets are not unpleasing to the ear. What if they do not mean much? There was a time when to say a "sweet voice" would arouse a smile. What has sugar to do with sound? It may be erratic symbolism, this confusing of terminologies; yet, once in a while, it strikes sparks. There is a deeply rooted feeling in us that the arts have a common matrix, that they are emotionally akin. "Her slow smile" in fiction has had marked success with young people, but a "slow landscape" is still regarded suspiciously. The bravest critic of art was Huysmans. He pitched pell-mell into the hell-broth of his criticism any image that assaulted his fecund brain. He forced one to see his picture—for he was primarily concerned not with the ear, but the eye.

And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a "comprehensive"—as those with the sixth or synthetic sense have been named by Lombroso? Botticelli, beginning as a goldsmith's apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle), ended as a painter, the most original in all Italy. His canvases have a rare, mysterious power of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and the brothers Pollajuolo, and his inward vision must have been something more than paint and pattern and subject. A palimpsest may be discerned by the imaginative—or, let us say, fanciful, since Coleridge long ago set forth the categories—whose secrets are not to be deciphered easily, yet are something more than those portrayed by the artist on the flat surface of his picture. He painted the usual number of Madonnas, like any artist of his period; yet he did not convince his world, or the generations succeeding, that this piety was orthodox. Suspected during his lifetime of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, has in our times been definitely ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and still a mystic. Doesn't the perverse clash in such a complex temperament give us exotic dissonances? All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli walked its narrow ways and lived its splendid coloured life. His sensitive nature absorbed as a sponge does water the impulses and motives of his contemporaries. The lurking secrets of the "new learning"—doctrines that made for damnation, such as the recrudescence of the mediaeval conception of an angelic neuter host, neither for Heaven nor Hell, not on the side of Lucifer nor with the starry hosts—were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its note is in Citta di Vita, in the heresy of the Albigenses, and it goes as far back as Origen. Those who read his paintings, and there were clairvoyant theologians abroad in Florence, could make of them what they would. Painted music is less understandable than painted heresy. Matteo Palmieri is said to have dragged Botticelli with him into dark corners of disbelief; there was in the Medicean days a cruel order of intelligence that delighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals of the young. It was more savage and cunning when Machiavelli, shrewdest of men, wrote and lived. A nature like Botticelli's, which surrendered frankly to ideas if they but wore the mask of subtlety, could not fail to have been swept away in the eddying cross-currents of Florentine intellectual movements. Never mere instinct, for he was a sexless sort of man, moved him from his moral anchorage. Always the vision! He did not palter with the voluptuousness of his fellow-artists, yet his canvases are feverishly disquieting; the sting of the flesh is remote; love is transfigured, not spiritually and not served to us as a barren parable, but made more intense by the breaking down of the thin partition between the sexes; a consuming emotion not quite of this world nor of the next. The barren rebellion which stirred Botticelli's bosom never quite assumed the concrete. His religious subjects are Hellenised, not after Mantegna's sterner and more inflexible method, but like those of a philosophic Athenian who has read and comprehended Dante. Yet the illustrations show us a different Dante, one who would not have altogether pleased the gloomy exile. William Blake's transpositions of the Divine Comedy seem to sound the depths; Botticelli, notwithstanding the grace of his "baby centaurs" and the wreathed car of Beatrice, is the profounder man of the two.

His life, veiled toward the last, was not a happy one, though he was recognised as a great painter. Watteau concealed some cankering secret; so Botticelli. Both belong to the band of the Disquieted. Melancholy was at the base of the Florentine's work. He created as a young man in joy and freedom, but the wings of Duerer's bat were outstretched over his head: Melencolia! There is more poignant music in the Primavera, in the weary, indifferent countenances of his lean, neuropathic Madonnas—Pater calls them "peevish"—in his Venus of the Uffizi, than in the paintings of any other Renaissance artist. The veils are there, the consoling veils of an exquisite art missing in the lacerated realistic holy people of the Flemish Primitives. Joyfulness cannot be denied Botticelli, but it is not the golden joy of Giorgione. An emaciated music emanates from the eyes of that sad, restless Venus, to whom love has become a scourge of the senses. Music? Yes, here is the "coloured hearing" of Mendoza. These canvases of Botticelli seem to give forth the opalescent over-tones of an unearthly composition. Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin whose right hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor at the head of an invisible orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, supremely impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven paces tread the measures of a dance whose music we but overhear. Garlanded with blossoms, a glorious girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric moods; her gesture, surely a divine one, shows her casting flowers upon the richly embroidered floor of the earth. The light filters through the thick trees; its rifts are as rigid as candles. The nymph in the brake is threatening. Another epicene creature flies by her. Love shoots his bolt in midair. Is it from Paphos or Mitylene! What the fable! Music plucked down from the vibrating skies and made visible to the senses. A mere masque laden with the sweet, prim allegories of the day it is not. Vasari, blunt soul, saw but its surfaces. Politian, the poet, got closer to the core. Centuries later our perceptions, sharpened by the stations of pain and experience traversed, lend to this immortal canvas a more sympathetic, less literal interpretation.

Music, too, in the Anadyomene of the Uffizi. Still stranger music. Those sudden little waves that lap an immemorial strand; that shimmering shell, its fan-spokes converging to the parted feet of the goddess; her hieratic pose, its modesty symbolic, the hair that serpentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders that slope into delicious arms; the Japanese group, blowing tiny, gem-like buds with puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tiptoe offering her mantle to Venus; and enveloping them all vernal breezes, unseen, yet sensed on every inch of the canvas—what are these things but the music of an art original at its birth and never since reborn? The larger rhythms of the greater men do not sweep us along with them in Botticelli. But his voice is irresistible.

Modern as is his spirit, as modern as Watteau, Chopin, or Shelley, he is no less ethereal than any one of these three; ethereal and also realistic. We may easily trace his artistic ancestry; what he became could never have been predicted. Technically, as one critic has written, "he was the first to understand the charm of silhouettes, the first to linger in expressing the joining of the arm and body, the flexibility of the hips, the roundness of the shoulders, the elegance of the leg, the little shadow that marks the springing of the neck, and above all the carving of the hand; but even more he understood 'le prestige insolent des grands yeux.'"

For Pater his colour was cold, cadaverous, "and yet the more you come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you like this peculiar quality of colour." Bernard Berenson goes further. For him the entire picture, Venus Rising From the Sea, presents us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and movement... The vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life communicating movement, is always there. And writing of the Pallas in the Pitti he most eloquently said: "As to the hair—imagine shapes having the supreme life of line you may see in the contours of licking flames and yet possessed of all the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to its own desire!"

And after speaking of Botticelli's stimulating line, he continues: "Imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences of movement-values and you will have something that holds the same relation to representation that music holds to speech—and this art exists and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but in Europe never!... He is the greatest master of lineal design that Europe ever had."

Again music, not the music nor the symbolism of the emotions, but the abstract music of design. Botticelli's appeal is also an auditive one. Other painters have spun more intricate, more beautiful scrolls of line; other painters sounded more sensuous colour music, but the subtle sarabands of Botticelli they have not composed. There is here a pleasing problem for the psychiatrist. Manifestations in paint of this species may be set down to some mental lesion; that is how Maurice Spronck classifies the sensation in writing about the verbal sensitivity of the Goncourts and Flaubert. The latter, you may remember, said that Salammbo was purple to him, and L'Education Sentimentale gray. Carthage and Paris—a characteristic fancy! But why is it that these scientific gentlemen who account for genius by eye-strain do not reprove the poets for their sensibility to the sound of words, the shape and cadences of the phrase? It appears that only prose-men are the culpable ones when they hear the harping of invisible harps from Ibsen steeplejacks, or recognise the colour of Zarathustra's thoughts. In reality not one but thousands sit listening in the chill galleries of Florence because of the sweet, sick, nervous music of Botticelli; this testimony of the years is for the dissenters to explain.

Fantastico, Stravaganie, as Vasari nicknamed Botticelli, has literally created an audience that has learned to see as he did, fantastically and extravagantly. He passed through the three stages dear to arbitrary criticism. Serene in his youthful years; troubled, voluptuous, visionary during the Medicean period; sombre, mystic, a convert to Savonarola at the end. He passed through, not untouched, a great crisis. Certain political assassinations and the Pazzi conspiracy hurt him to the quick. He noted the turbulence of Rome and Florence, saw behind the gay-tinted arras of the Renaissance the sinister figures of its supermen and criminals. He never married. When Tommaso Soderini begged him to take a wife, he responded: "The other night I dreamed I was married. I awoke in such horror and chagrin that I could not fall asleep again. I arose and wandered about Florence like one possessed." Evidently not intended by nature as a husband or father. Like Watteau, like Nietzsche, grand visionaries abiding on the other side of the dear common joys of life, these men were not tempted by the usual baits of happiness. The great Calumnia in the Uffizi might be construed as an image of Botticelli's soul. Truth, naked and scorned—again we note the matchless silhouette of his Venus—misunderstood and calumniated, stands in the hall of a great palace. She points to the heavens; she is an interrogation mark, Pilate's question. Botticelli was adored. But understood? An enigmatic malady ravaged his being. He died poor and alone, did this composer of luminous chants and pagan poems, this moulder of exotic dreams and of angels who long for other gods than those of Good and Evil. A grievously wounded, timid soul, an intruder at the portals of paradise, but without the courage to enter or withdraw. He had visions that rapt him up into the seventh heaven, and when he reported them in the speech of his design his harassed, divided spirit chilled the ardours of his art. And thus it is that many do not worship at his shrine as at the shrine of Raphael, for they see the adumbration of a paganism long since dead, but revived by a miracle for a brief Botticellian hour. Madonna and Venus! The Christ Child and Bacchus! Under which king? The artist never frankly tells us. The legends of fauns turned monks, of the gods at servile labour in a world that had forgotten them, are revived, but with more sublimated ecstasy than by Heine, when we stand before Botticelli and listen to his pallid, muted music.

He was born at Florence in 1446; he died May 27, 1510; in 1515, according to Vasari. A study of him is by Emile Gebhart, late of the French Academy. It is erudite, although oddly enough it ignores the researches of Morelli and Berenson. Gebhart attributes to Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi about eighty-five pictures, many of which were long ago in Morelli's taboo list—that terrible Morelli, the learned iconoclast who brought many sleepless nights to Dr. Wilhelm Bode of Berlin. Time has vindicated the Bergamese critic. Berenson will allow only forty-five originals to Botticelli's credit. Furthermore, Gebhart does not mention in his catalogue the two Botticellis belonging to Mrs. Gardner of Boston, a lamentable oversight for a volume brought out in 1907. Need we add that this French author by no means sees Botticelli in the musical sense? He is chiefly concerned with his historic environment. Gebhart's authorities are the Memoriale of Francesco Albertini; Anonyme Gaddiano, the manuscript of the Magliabecchiana, which precedes the Vasari edition; the Life of Botticelli, by Vasari, and many later studies, the most complete, he avers, being that of Hermann Ulmann of Munich, whose Sandro Botticelli, which appeared in 1893, is rigorously critical. Nevertheless, it is not as critical as Morelli's Italian Painters. Details about the typical ears, hands, and noses of the painter may be found therein. The last word concerning Botticelli will not be uttered until his last line has vanished. And, even then, his archaic harmonies may continue to sound in the ears of mankind.



VIII. SIX SPANIARDS



"EL GRECO"



Large or small, there has been a Greco cult ever since the Greek-Spanish painter died, April 7, 1614, but during the last decade it has grown into a species of worship. One hears the names of Velasquez and El Greco coupled. His profound influence on the greatest of the realists is blithely assumed, and for these worshippers, Ribera, Zurbaran, Murillo are hardly to be ranked with the painter of the Burial of the Count of Orgaz. While this undiscriminating admiration may be deplored, there are reasons enough for the canonisation of El Greco in the church of art. Violent to exaggeration in composition, morbidly mystic, there are power and emotional quality revealed in his work; above all else he anticipated Velasquez in his use of cool gray tones, and as a pupil or at least a disciple of Titian he is, as his latest biographer, Senor Manuel B. Cossio, names him, "the last epigone of the Italian Renaissance." But of the man we know almost nothing.

We read his exhaustive study, a big book of over seven hundred pages fortified by a supplementary volume containing one hundred and ninety-three illustrations, poor reproductions of El Greco's accredited works (El Greco, por Manuel B. Cossio). Senor Cossio has so well accomplished his task that his book may be set down as definitive. A glance at the bibliography he compiled shows that not many writers on art have seen fit to pay particular attention to El Greco. A few Spaniards, Senor Beruete heading them; Max Boehm, Carl Justi (in his Diego Velasquez); Paul Lafond, William Ritter, Arthur Symons, William Stirling, Signor Venturi, Louis Viardot, Wyzewa, Havelock Ellis, and the inimitable Theophile Gautier—whose Travels in Spain, though published in 1840, is, as Mr. Ellis truthfully remarks, still a storehouse of original exploration. But the Cossio work, naturally, tops them all. He is an adorer, though not fanatical, of his hero, and it is safe to assert that all that is known to-day of El Greco will be found in these pages. The origins of the painter, his visit to Italy, his arrival at Toledo, are described with references to original documents—few as they are.

Then follows a searching and vivid exposition of the pictures in Madrid, Toledo, and elsewhere, a technical and psychological analysis which displays vast research, critical acumen, and the sixth sense of sympathy. No pictures, sketches, sculptures, or retablos escape Cossio. He considers El Greco in his relations to Velasquez and modern art. He has all the authorities at his tongue's tip; he views the man and artist from every angle.

"Domenico El Greco died at Toledo two years before his contemporary Cervantes," says Cossio. Domenicos Theotocopoulos was his original name, which was softened into Domenico Theotocopuli—which, no doubt proving too much of a tongue-twister for the Spaniards, was quickly superseded by a capital nickname, "The Greek." His birthplace was the island of Crete and his birth-year between 1545 and 1550. Justi was the first to demonstrate his Cretan ancestry, which was corroborated in 1893 by Bikelas. In 1570, we learn through a letter written by Giulio Clovio to Cardinal Farnese, El Greco had astonished Roman artists by his skill in portraiture. He was said to be a pupil of Titian, on Clovio's authority. Why he went to Spain has not been discovered. He had a son, Jorge Manuel Theotocopuli, a sculptor and architect. Who the mother was history does not say. The painter took up his abode in Toledo and is not known to have left Spain thereafter. Pacheco visited him at Toledo and reported him to be as singular as his paintings and of an extravagant disposition. He was also called a wit and a philosopher. He wrote on painting, sculpture, and architecture, it is said. He made money; was, like most of his adopted countrymen, fond of litigation; lived well, loved music—and at his meals!—and that is all we may ever record of a busy life; for he painted many pictures, a careful enumeration of which makes Cossio's book valuable.

There are Grecos scattered over Europe and the two Americas. Madrid and Toledo boast of his best work, but as far as St. Petersburg and Bucharest he is represented. In the United States there are eleven examples, soon to be increased by Mr. Archer M. Huntington's recent acquisition from the Kann collection. In Boston at the Museum there is the portrait of Fray Paravicino, a brilliant picture. (The worthy monk wrote four sonnets in glorification of the painter, whom he calls "Divino Griego." Quoted in one of the Cossio appendices.) There is an Assumption of the Virgin in Chicago at the Art Institute, and an Apostle, belonging to Charles Deering. In Philadelphia Mr. "J. Widner" (read P.A.B. Widener) owns a St. Francis, and at the Metropolitan Museum, hanging in Gallery 24, there is The Adoration of the Shepherds, a characteristic specimen of Greco's last manner, and in excellent condition. The gallery of the late H.O. Havemeyer contains one of the celebrated portraits of the Cardinal Inquisitor D. Fernando Nino de Guevara, painted during the second epoch, 1594 to 1604. It furnishes a frontispiece for the Cossio volume. The same dignitary was again painted, a variant, which Rudolph Kann owned, and now in the possession of Mrs. Huntington. The cardinal's head is strong, intellectual, and his expression proud and cold. Mr. Frick, at a private club exhibition, showed his Greco, St. Jerome, a subject of which the painter was almost as fond as of St. Francis (of Assisi). The National Gallery, London, owns a St. Jerome, Madrid another. Mr. Frick's example belongs to the epoch of 1584 to 1594. Mr. Erich in New York possesses three pictures, St. Jerome, a portrait of St. Domingo de Guzman and a Deposition. El Greco is a painter admired by painters for his salt individualism. Zuloaga, the Spaniard, has several; Degas, two; the critic Duret, two; John S. Sargent, one—a St. Martin. Durand-Ruel once owned the Annunciation, but sold it to Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, and the Duveens in London possess a Disrobing of Christ. At the National Gallery there are two.

Gautier wrote that El Greco surpassed Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe in his pell-mell of horrors; "extravagant and bizarre" are the adjectives he employs (said of most painters whose style is unfamiliar or out of the beaten track). In the Baptism of Christ he finds a depraved energy, a maleficent puissance; but the ardent colours, the tonal vivacity, and the large, free handling excite the Frenchman's admiration. Justi avers that Greco's "craving for originality developed incredible mannerisms. In his portraits he has delineated the peculiar dignity of the Castilian hidalgos and the beauty of Toledan dames with a success attained by few." R.A. Stevenson devotes to him a paragraph in his Velasquez. Referring to the influence of El Greco upon the greater painter, he wrote: "While Greco certainly adopted a Spanish gravity of colouring, neither that nor his modelling was ever subtle or thoroughly natural... Velasquez ripened with age and practice; Greco was rather inclined to get rotten with facility." Mr. Ricketts says that "his pictures might at times have been painted by torchlight in a cell of the Inquisition." Richard Ford in his handbook of Spain does not mince words: "Greco was very unequal... He was often more lengthy and extravagant than Fuseli, and as leaden as cholera morbus." Ritter speaks of his "symphonies in blue minor" (evidently imitating Gautier's poem, Symphony in White-Major). In Havelock Ellis's suggestive The Soul of Spain there is mention of Greco—see chapter Art of Spain. Ellis says: "In his more purely religious and supernatural scenes Greco was sometimes imaginative, but more often bizarre in design and disconcerting in his colouring with its insistence on chalky white, his violet shadows on pale faces, his love of green. [Mr. Ellis finds this 'predilection for green' significant as anticipating one of the characteristics of the Spanish palette.] His distorted fever of movement—the lean, twisted bodies, the frenzied, gesticulating arms, the mannerism of large calves that taper down to pointed toes—usually fails to convince us. But in the audacities of his colouring he revealed the possibilities of new harmonies, of higher, brighter, cooler keys." The Count Orgaz burial scene at Toledo Mr. Ellis does not rank among the world's great pictures.

There is often a depressing morbidity in Greco; Goya is sane and healthy by comparison. Greco's big church pieces are full of religious sentiment, but enveloped in the fumes of nightmare. Curious it was that a stranger from Greece should have absorbed certain not particularly healthy, even sinister, Spanish traits and developed them to such a pitch of nervous intensity. As Arthur Symons says, his portraits "have all the brooding Spanish soul with its proud self-repression." Senor Cossio sums up in effect by declaring that Venice educated Greco in his art; Titian taught him technique; Tintoretto gave him his sense of dramatic form; Angelo his virility. But of the strong personality which assimilated these various influences there is no doubt when confronted with one of his canvases, every inch of which is signed El Greco.



"VELASQUEZ"



Why so well-known and authoritative a work as Velasquez, by Aureliano de Beruete, should have been so long in reaching America is a puzzle when you consider the velocity with which the Atlantic Ocean is traversed by so many mediocre books on art. The first Spanish edition of the Beruete monograph appeared about 1897; the same year saw it in French, and from the latter tongue it was translated into English by Hugh E. Poynter in 1906. Senor Beruete is considered with reason as the prime living authority on the great Spanish realist, though his study is not so voluminous as that of Carl Justi. The Bonn professor, however, took all Spain for his province. Velasquez and His Times is the title of his work, the first edition of which came out in 1888, the second in 1903. Beruete (whose portrait by Sorolla was one of that master's most characteristic pictures at the recent Hispanic Society exhibition in New York) is not at odds on many points with Justi; but more sceptical he is, and to R.A.M. Stevenson's list of Velasquez pictures, two hundred and thirty-four, Beruete opposes the comparatively meagre number of eighty-nine. He reduces the number of sketches and waves away as spurious the Velasquez "originals" in Italy, several in the Prado, the very stronghold of the collection; and of the eleven in that famous cabinet of the Vienna Imperial Museum—to which we went as to a divine service of eye and soul—he allows only seven as authentic. The portrait of Innocent X in the Doria palace, Rome, is naturally a masterpiece, as is the bust portrait of the same subject at the Hermitage, St. Petersburg; but the Boston Museum full-length of Philip IV is discredited as a copy, only the Prince Don Baltasar Carlos Attended by a Dwarf being admitted in the company of the true Velasquezes.

Of the "supposed portrait of Cardinal Pamphili," a real Velasquez, now hanging in the Hispanic Society, 156th Street, Beruete writes: "In the winter of 1902 there appeared in Paris a bust portrait of a cardinal brought from Italy by Messrs. Trotty & Co., which had been alluded to by Professor A. Venturi of Rome in L'Art. It is life size, representing a person about thirty years of age in the dress of a cardinal, with smiling face and black hair, moustache and pointed beard, good carriage and a touch of levity not in keeping with the dignity and austerity of a prince of the Church. The beretta and cape, of a fine red colour, the latter painted in a uniform tone and without a crease, harmonise with the roseate hue of the features, and the plain gray background. Every detail reveals the hand of Velasquez, and it can be classed without hesitation among the characteristic works of his second style. It is on that ground that I make mention of it here. However, in Rome, at the house in which this picture was found, it was held to be the portrait of Cardinal Pamphili, nephew of Innocent X, who according to Palomino was painted in Rome by Velasquez at the same time as the Pontiff, that is in 1650."

Beruete believes Palomino was wrong in declaring that Velasquez painted the young cardinal in Rome; Madrid was the likelier city. The style proves an earlier date than 1650. The cardinal withdrew from the cardinalate after three years, 1644-47 > and married. The portrait was acquired by the American artist the late Francis Lathrop. Stevenson grants to the Metropolitan Museum a fruit-piece by Velasquez. Not so Beruete. J. H. McFadden of Philadelphia once owned the Dona Mariana of Austria, second wife of Philip IV, in a white-and-black dress, gold chain over her shoulder, hair adorned with red bows and red-and-white feather, from the Lyne-Stephens collection in the New Gallery, 1895—and is so quoted by Stevenson; but he sold the picture and Beruete has lost track of it.

Whereas Stevenson in his invaluable book studies his subject broadly in chapters devoted to the dignity of the Velasquez technique, his colour, modelling, brushwork, and his impressionism, Beruete follows a more detailed yet simpler method. Picture by picture, in each of the three styles—he adopts Justi's and Stevenson's classification—he follows the painter, dealing less with the man than his work. Not that biographical data are missing—on the contrary, there are many pages of anecdotes as well as the usual facts—but Beruete is principally concerned with the chronology and attribution of the pictures. He has dug up some fresh material concerning the miserable pay Velasquez received, rather fought for, at the court of Philip, where he was on a par with the dwarfs, barbers, comedians, servants, and other dependants of the royal household.

The painter has been criticised for his attachment to the king; but as he was not of a religious nature and did not paint religious pieces with the gusto of his contemporaries, the court was his only hope of existence; either court or church. He made his choice early, and while we must regret the enormous wasting of the hours consequent upon the fulfilment of his duties as a functionary, master of the revels, and what not, we should not forget how extremely precarious would have been his lot as a painter without royal favour in the Spain of those days. He had his bed, board, house, and though he died penniless—his good wife Juana only survived him seven days—he had the satisfaction of knowing that he owed no man, and that his daughter had married his pupil Mazo. Velasquez was born at Seville in 1599; died at Madrid, 1660. His real name was Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez. He was a Silva—for the "de" was acquired from the king after much pettifoggery on the part of that monarch with the prognathic jaw—and he was of Portuguese blood. He signed Velasquez—a magic grouping of letters for the lovers of art—though born as he was in Spain his forefathers came from Portugal. The mixed blood has led to furious disputes among hot-headed citizens of the two kingdoms. As if it much mattered. Velasquez's son-in-law, by the way, Juan Mazo, was the author of a number of imitations and forgeries. He was a true friend of the picture-dealers.

Velasquez belonged to that rare family of sane genius. He was eminently the painter of daylight and not a nocturnal visionary, as was Rembrandt. Shakespeare, who had all the strings to his lyre, had also many daylight moments. Mozart always sang them, and how blithely! No one, not Beethoven, not Raphael, not Goethe—to name three widely disparate men of genius—saw life as steadily as the Spaniard. He is a magnificent refutation of the madhouse doctors who swear to you that genius is a disease. Remember, too, that the limitations of Velasquez are clearly defined. Imagination was denied to him, asserts Beruete; he had neither the turbulent temperament of Rubens nor possessed the strained, harsh mysticism of El Greco—a painter of imagination and the only painter allowed by Beruete to have affected the Velasquez palette. In a word, Velasquez was a puzzling comminglement of the classic and the realist. He had the repose and the firm, virile line of the classics, while his vision of actuality has never been surpassed. The Dutch Terburg, Vermeer, Van der Helst, Frans Hals saw as vividly the surfaces of things material; the last alone was the match of Velasquez in brushwork, but not Rembrandt recorded in his Anatomy Lesson the facts of the case as did Velasquez.

Senor Beruete wittily remarks that Los Borrachos (The Topers) of Velasquez is the truer anatomy lesson of the two. A realist, an impressionist, as Stevenson has it, the Spaniard was; but he was also something more. He had a magic hand to define, the rendering of the magical mystery of space and atmosphere. Grant that he was not a colourist in the sense the Venetians were, or Rubens, yet how much more subtle, more noble, more intellectual, is his restricted tonal gamut. Those silver-grays, resonant blacks, browns, blues, and reds sing in your memory long after you have forgotten the tumultuous golden waves breaking upon the decorative coasts of Rubens. We are constrained to question the easy way Beruete and other critics deny the attributes of imagination and poetry to Velasquez. There is, perhaps, a more sublimated poetry in his pictures than in the obvious religious and mythological and allegorical set pieces of Rubens, Murillo, and how many others. His realism did not run to seed in the delineation of subject. He was as natural as Cervantes—the one great man of Spain who may be compared to him—and he saw the larger patterns of life, while never forgetting that the chief function of a painter is to paint, not to "think," not to rhapsodise, not to be "literary" on canvas. His cool, measuring eye did more than record sordid facts. He had a sort of enraptured vision of the earth as beautiful, the innocence of the eye we encounter in children only. Stevenson rages at those who say that Velasquez was not a colourist—and Beruete is of them, though he quotes with considerable satisfaction the critical pronouncement of Royal Cortissoz (in Harper's Magazine, May, 1895) that Las Meninas is "the most perfect study of colour and values which exists."

The truth is, Stevenson, Cortissoz, and Beruete are all three in the right. That Velasquez, when in Rome, studied the pictures there; that he didn't care for Raphael; that he had very much admired the Venetians, Titian, Tintoretto; that he had admired Rubens, with whom he associated daily on the occasion of the Flemish master's visit of nine months to Madrid—these are truths not to be denied. Beruete claims that the Rubens influence is not to be seen in Velasquez, only El Greco's. Every object, living or inanimate, that swam through the eyeballs of the Spaniard—surely the most wonderful pair of eyes in history—was never forgotten. His powers of assimilation were unexcelled. He saw and made note of everything, but when he painted his spectators saw nothing of any other man, living or dead. Was not the spiritual impulse missing in this man? He couldn't paint angels, because he only painted what he saw; and as he never saw angels he only painted mankind. Life, not the "subject," appealed to him. He had little talent, less taste, for the florid decorative art of Rubens and the Venetians; but give him a simple, human theme (not pretty or sentimental) and he recreated it, not merely interpreted the scene; so that Las Meninas, The Spinners (Las Hilanderas), the hunting pictures, the various portraits of royalty, buffoons, beggars, outcasts, are the chronicles of his time, and he its master psychologist.

Beruete says that Ribera more than Zurbaran affected Velasquez; "El Greco taught him the use of delicate grays in the colouring of the flesh." Hot, hard, and dry in his first period (Borrachos), he becomes more fluid and atmospheric in the Breda composition (The Lances), and in the third period he has attained absolute mastery of his material. His salary at the court was two and sixpence a day in 1628. Even Haydn and Mozart did better as menials. Yet some historians speak of the liberality of Philip IV. An "immortal employee" indeed, as Beruete names his idol. Luca Giordano called Las Meninas the "theology of painting." Wilkie declared that the Velasquez landscapes possessed "the real sun which lights us, the air which we breathe, and the soul and spirit of nature." "To see the Prado," exclaims Stevenson, "is to modify one's opinion of the novelty of recent art." To-day the impressionists and realists claim Velasquez as their patron saint as well as artistic progenitor. The profoundest master of harmonies and the possessor of a vision of the real world not second to Leonardo's, the place of the Spaniard in history will never be taken from him.

Velasquez is more modern than all the moderns; more modern than to-morrow. That sense of the liberation of the spirit which Mr. Berenson is fond of adducing as the grandest attribute of the Space Composers, Raphael and the rest, may be discovered in Las Meninas, or in The Spinners, space overhead, with mystery superadded. The brumous North was the home of mysticism, of Gothic architecture. The note of tragic mystery was seldom sounded by the Italians. Faith itself seems more real in the North. It remained for Rembrandt to give it out in his chords of chiaroscuro. And is there more noble, more virile music in all art than The Surrender of Breda?

Mr. Berenson refers only once to Velasquez and then as an "impersonal" painter. As a counterblast to his theory of impersonality let us quote a few lines from R.A.M. Stevenson's Velasquez (that most inspiring of all art monographs): "Is it wonderful," he asks, "that you can apply Morelli's principles of criticism to the Pre-Raphaelite Italian schools; that you can point to the thumbs, fingers, poses of the head, ovals of the face and schemes of colour that the painters learned by heart, and can even say from whom they learned? The later Venetians broke away, and when you come to Velasquez the system holds good as little as it can in our own day." But this charge holds good for many painters of the Renaissance, painters of patterns. Velasquez, like the great prose-master of France, Gustave Flaubert, is always in modulation. No two canvases are rhythmically alike, except in the matter of masterfulness. He, too, was a master of magnificent prose painting, painting worth a wilderness of makers of frozen mediaeval patterns. Mr. Henry B. Fuller, the author of the Chevalier di Pensieri-Vani, once spoke of the "cosy sublimity" in Raphael's Vision of Ezekiel; one might paraphrase the epigram by describing the pictures of Velasquez as boxed-in eternities. Dostoievsky knew such a sensation when he wrote of "a species of eternity within the space of a square foot." But there are many connoisseurs who find evidences of profounder and more naive faith in the angular loveliness of the Flemish Primitives than in all the religious art of Italy or Spain.



GOYA



I

Goya was a Titan among artists. He once boasted that "Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt are my masters." It was an excellent self-criticism. He not only played the Velasquez gambit in his portraits, the gambit of Rembrandt in his sombre imaginative pieces, but he boldly annexed all Spain for his sinister and turbulent art. He was more truly Spanish in the range and variety of his performances than any Spanish-born painter since Velasquez. Without the sanity, solidity, nobility of Velasquez, whose vision and voice he never possessed; without the luscious sweetness of Murillo, whose sweetness he lacked, he had something of El Greco's fierceness, and much of the vigour of Ribera. He added to these influences a temperament that was exuberant, fantastic, morose, and pessimistic yet humorous, sarcastic, sometimes melting, and ever masterful. He reminds one of an overwhelming force. The man dominates the painter. A dozen comparisons force themselves upon you when the name of Goya is pronounced: comets, cataracts, whirlwinds, and wild animals. Anarch and courtier, atheist and decorator of churches, his "whole art seems like a bullfight," says Richard Muther. One might improve on this by calling him a subtle bull, a Hercules who had read Byron. "Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt!" cries MacColl in a too brief summary. "How inadequate the list! Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Legion had a hand in the teaching."

Goya incarnated the renaissance of old Spain and its art. Spanish art has always come from without, for its foundations were northern and Flemish. The Van Eycks and Van der Weyden were studied closely; Jan Van Eyck visited Madrid. The Venetian influence was strong, and El Greco his life long, and a pupil of Titian as he was, this gloomy painter with the awkward name of Theotocopoulo endeavoured to forget his master and became more Spanish than the Spanish. Ribera, emotional, dramatic, realistic, religious, could sound the chords of tenderness without the sentimentalism of Murillo. Goya stems more from Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa than from any of his predecessors, except Velasquez. The presence of Tiepolo, the last of the Venetians, in Spain may have influenced him. Certainly Raphael Mengs, the "Saxon pedant," did not—Mengs associated with Tiepolo at Madrid. It is in company with the bravos of the brush, Caravaggio and Rosa, that Goya is closely affiliated. We must go to Gustave Courbet for a like violence of temperament; both men painted con furia; both were capable of debauches in work; Goya could have covered the walls of hell with diabolic frescoes. In music three men are of a like ilk: Berlioz, Paganini, Liszt. Demoniacal, charged with electric energy, was this trinity, and Goya could have made it a quartet.

But if Spain was not a country of original artists—as was Italy, for example—she developed powerful and astounding individualities. Character is her leit motiv in the symphony of the nations. The rich virility and majestic seriousness of her men, their aptitudes for war, statesmanship, and drama, are borne out in her national history. Perhaps the climate plays its part. Havelock Ellis thinks so. "The hard and violent effects, the sharp contrasts, the strong colours, the stained and dusky clouds, looking as if soaked in pigment, may well have affected the imagination of the artist," he writes. Certainly the landscapes of Velasquez could not be more Spanish than they are; and, disagreeing with those who say that he had no feeling for nature, the bits of countryside and mountain Goya shows are truly peninsular in their sternness. It may be well to remark here that the softness of Tuscany is not to be found in the lean and often arid aspects of Spain. Spain, too, is romantic—but after its own fashion. Goya revived the best traditions of his country's art; he was the last of the great masters and the first of the moderns. Something neurotic, modern, disquieting, threads his work with devilish irregularity. He had not the massive temper of Velasquez, of those men who could paint day after day, year after year, until death knocked at their ateliers. As vigorous as Rubens in his sketches, Goya had not the steady, slow nerves of that master. He was very unequal. His life was as disorderly as Hals's or Steen's, but their saving phlegm was missing. In an eloquent passage—somewhere in his English Literature—Taine speaks of the sanity of genius as instanced by Shakespeare. Genius narrowly escapes nowadays being a cerebral disorder, though there was Marlowe to set off Shakespeare's serene spirit, and even of Michael Angelo's mental health and morals his prime biographer, Parlagreco, does not speak in reassuring terms. Goya was badly balanced, impulsive, easily angered, and not slow to obey the pull of his irritable motor centres when aroused. A knife was always within reach. He drove the Duke of Wellington from his presence because the inquisitive soldier asked too many questions while his portrait was being blocked out. A sword or a dagger did the business; but Wellington returned to the studio and, as Mr. Rothenstein tells us, the portrait was finished and is now at Strathfieldsaye. A sanguine is in the British Museum. His exploits in Rome may have been exaggerated, though he was quite capable of eloping with a nun from a convent, as is related, or going around the top of the Cecilia Metella tomb supported only by his thumbs. The agility and strength of Goya were notorious, though in a land where physical prowess is not the exception. He was picador, matador, banderillero by turns in the bull ring. After a stabbing affray he escaped in the disguise of a bull-fighter.

If he was a dompteur of dames and cattle, he was the same before his canvas. Anything that came to hand served him as a brush, an old brown stick wrapped up in cloth, a spoon—with the latter he executed that thrilling Massacre, May 2, 1808, in the Prado. He could have painted with a sabre or on all fours. Reckless to the degree of insanity, he never feared king or devil, man or the Inquisition. The latter reached out for him, but he had disappeared, after suffering a dagger-thrust in the back. When on the very roof of his prosperity, he often slipped downstairs to the company of varlets and wenches; this friend of the Duchess of Alba seemed happier dicing, drinking, dancing in the suburbs with base-born people and gipsies. A genre painter, Goya delighted in depicting the volatile, joyous life of a now-vanished epoch. He was a historian of manner as well as of disordered souls, and an avowed foe of hypocrisy.

Not "poignantly genteel," to use a Borrovian phrase, was he. Yet he could play the silken courtier with success. The Arabs say that "one who has been stung by a snake shivers at a string," and perhaps the violence with which the painter attacked the religious may be set down to the score of his youthful fears and flights when the Inquisition was after him. He was a sort of Voltaire in black and white. The corruption of churchmen and court at this epoch seems almost incredible. Goya noted it with a boldness that meant but one thing—friends high in power. This was the case. He was admired by the king, Charles IV, and admired—who knows how much!—by his queen, Marie Louise of Parma, Goya painted their portraits; also painted the portraits of the royal favourite and prime minister and Prince de la Paz, Manuel Godoy—favourite of both king and queen. Him, Goya left in effigy for the scorn of generations to come. "A grocer's family who have won the big lottery prize," was the witty description of Theophile Gautier when he saw the picture of the royal family.

Curiously enough, this Goya, who from the first plucked success from its thorny setting, was soon forgotten, and until Gautier in 1840 recorded his impressions in his brilliant Voyage en Espagne, critical literature did not much concern itself with the versatile Spaniard. And Gautier's sketch of a few pages still remains the most comprehensive estimate. From it all have been forced to borrow; Richard Muther in his briskly enthusiastic monograph and the section in his valuable History of Modern Painting; Charles Yriarte, Will Rothenstein, Lafond, Lefort, Conde de la Vinaza—all have read Gautier to advantage. Valerian von Loga has devoted a study to the etchings, and Don Juan de la Rada has made a study of the frescoes in the church of San Antonio de la Florida; Carl Justi, Stirling Maxwell, C.G. Hartley should also be consulted. Yriarte is interesting, inasmuch as he deals with the apparition of Goya in Rome, an outlaw, but a blithe one, who, notebook in hand, went through the Trastevere district sketching with ferocious rapidity the attitudes and gestures of the vivacious population. A man after Stendhal's heart, this Spaniard. And in view of his private life one is tempted to add—and after the heart, too, of Casanova. Notwithstanding, he was an unrivalled interpreter of child-life. Some of his painted children are of a dazzling sweetness.



GOYA



II

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born March 30 (or 31), 1746, at Fuentetodos, near Saragossa, Aragon. He died at Bordeaux, France, where he had gone for his health, April 16, 1828—Calvert, possibly by a pen slip, makes him expire a month earlier. He saw the beginnings of French romanticism, as he was himself a witness of the decadence of Spanish art. But his spirit has lived on in Manet and Zuloaga. Decadent he was; a romantic before French romanticism, he yet had borrowed from an earlier France. Some of his gay Fetes Champetres recall the influence of Watteau—a Watteau without the sweet elegiac strain. He has been called a Spanish Hogarth—not a happy simile. Hogarth preaches; Goya never; satirists both, Goya never deepened by a pen stroke the didactic side. His youth was not extraordinary in promise; his father and mother were poor peasants. The story of his discovery by a monk of Saragosela—Father Felix Salvador of the Carthusian convent of Aula Dei—is not missing. He studied with Jose Martinez. He ran away in 1766. He remained, say some, in Italy from 1769 to 1774; but in 1771 he appeared in Saragossa again, and the year 1772 saw him competing for the painting about to be undertaken in the cathedral. He married Josefa Bayeu, the sister of the court painter. He has told us what he thought of his jealous, intriguing brother-in-law in a portrait. In 1775 he was at Madrid. From 1776 he executed forty-six tapestry cartoons. In 1779 he presented to the king his etchings after Velasquez. His rise was rapid. He painted the queen, with her false teeth, false hair, and her infernal simper, and this portrait was acclaimed a masterpiece.

His religious frescoes, supposed to be ad majorem Dei gloriam, were really for the greater glory of Goya. They are something more than secular, often little short of blasphemous. That they were tolerated proves the cynical temper of his times. When the fat old scoundrel of a Bourbon king ran away with all his court and the pusillanimous Joseph Bonaparte came upon the scene, Goya swerved and went through the motions of loyalty, a thing that rather disturbs the admirers of the supposedly sturdy republican. But he was only marking time. He left a terrific arraignment of war and its horrors. Nor did he spare the French. Callot, Hell-Breughel, are outdone in these swift, ghastly memoranda of misery, barbarity, rapine, and ruin. The hypocrite Ferdinand VII was no sooner on the throne of his father than Goya, hat in hand but sneer on lip and twinkle in eye, approached him, and after some parleying was restored to royal favour. Goya declared that as an artist he was not personally concerned in the pranks of the whirligig politic. Nevertheless he was bitterly chagrined at the twist of events, and, an old man, he retired to his country house, where he etched and designed upon its walls startling fancies. He died disillusioned, and though nursed by some noble countrymen, his career seemed to illustrate that terrifying picture of his invention—a skeleton lifts its gravestone and grinningly traces with bony finger in the dust the word Nada—Nothing! Overtaxed by the violence of his life and labours—he left a prodigious amount of work behind him—soured by satiety, all spleen and rage, he was a broken-down Lucifer, who had trailed his wings in the mud. But who shall pass judgment upon this unhappy man? Perhaps, as he saw the "glimmering square" grow less, the lament of Cardinal Wolsey may have come to a brain teeming with memories. Goya had always put his king before his God. But in his heart he loved the old romantic faith—the faith that hovered in the background of his art. Goya is not the first son of his mother church who denied her from sheer perversity. What a nation! Cervantes and Lope da Vega, Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada—most glorious of her sex, saint and genius—and Goya! Spain is the land of great and diverse personalities. But with Calderon we must now say: "Let us to our ship, for here all is shadowy and unsettled."

Goya, as Baudelaire pointed out more than half a century ago, executed his etchings by combining aquatint and the use of the dry point. A few years before his death he took up lithography, then a novelty. His Caprices, Proverbs, and Horrors of War may outlive his paintings. His colour scheme was not a wide one, blacks, reds, browns, and yellows often playing solo; but all modern impressionism may be seen on his canvases—harsh dissonances, dots, dabs, spots, patches, heavy planes, strong rhythmic effects of lighting, heavy impasto, luminous atmosphere, air, sunshine, and vibrating movements; also the strangeness of his material. Manet went to him a beginner. After studying the Maja desnuda at the Prado Museum he returned to France and painted the Olympe, once of the Luxembourg, now in the Louvre. The balcony scenes of Goya, with their manolas—old-fashioned grisettes—must have stirred Manet; recall the Frenchman's Balcony. And the bull-fights? Oh! what an iron-souled master was there—Goya when he slashed a bull in the arena tormented by the human brutes! None of his successors matches him. The same is the case with that diverting, devilish, savoury, and obscene series he called Caprices. It is worth remembering that Delacroix was one of the first artists in Paris who secured a set of these rare plates. The witch's sabbaths and the modern version of them, prostitution and its symbolism, filled the brain of Goya. He always shocks any but robust nerves with his hybrid creatures red in claw and foaming at mouth as they fight in midair, hideous and unnamable phantoms of the dark. His owls are theologians. The females he often shows make us turn aside our head and shudder. With implacable fidelity he displayed the reverse of war's heroic shield. It is something more than hell.

Sattler, Charlet, Raffet, James Ensor, Rethel, De Groux, Rops, Edvard Muench (did you ever see his woman wooed by a skeleton?), and the rest of these delineators of the morbid and macabre acknowledge Goya as their progenitor. He must have been a devil-worshipper. He pictures the goat devil, horns and hoofs. Gautier compares him to E.T.W. Hoffmann—Poe not being known in Paris at that time—but it is a rather laboured comparison, for there was a profoundly human side to the Spaniard. His perception of reality was of the solidest. He had lived and loved and knew before Flaubert that if the god of the Romantics was an upholsterer the god of eighteenth-century Spain was an executioner. The professed lover of the Duchess of Alba, he painted her nude, and then, hearing that the Duke might not like the theme so handled, he painted her again, and clothed, but more insolently uncovered than before. At the Spanish museum in New York you may see another portrait of this bold beauty with the name of Goya scratched in the earth at her feet. Her attitude is characteristic of the intrigue, which all Madrid knew and approved. At home sat Mrs. Goya with her twenty children.

Goya was a man of striking appearance. Slender in youth, a graceful dancer, in middle life he had the wide shoulders and bull neck of an athlete. He was the terror of Madrilenan husbands. His voice had seductive charm. He could twang the guitar and fence like ten devils. A gamester, too. In a word, a figure out of the Renaissance, when the deed trod hard on the heels of the word. One of his self-portraits shows him in a Byronic collar, the brow finely proportioned, marked mobile features, sombre eyes—the ideal Don Juan Tenorio to win the foolish heart of an Emma Bovary or a bored noblewoman. Another, with its savage eye—it is a profile—and big beaver head-covering, recalls Walt Whitman's "I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out." A giant egoist, and as human, all too human, a fellow as Spain ever begot, Goya is only hinted at in Baudelaire's searching quatrain beginning: "Goya, cauchemar plein de choses inconnues." Fleurs du Mal would be a happy title for the work of Francisco Goya if to "The Flowers of Evil" were added "and Wisdom." Goya is often cruel and lascivious and vulgar, but he is as great a philosopher as painter. And to offset his passionate gloom there are his visions of a golden Spain no longer in existence; happy, gorgeous of costume, the Spain of sudden coquetries, of fans, masques, bull-fights, and fandangos, of a people dancing on the rim of a fire-filled mountain, pious, capricious, child-like, romantic, and patriotic—the Spain of the eighteenth century. Goya is its spokesman, as is Velasquez the mirror of Philip's more spacious times. Velasquez—Goya! poles asunder, yet both born to the artistic purple. And the stately aristocrat who signed himself Velasquez is not more in tune with the twentieth-century Zeitgeist than that coarse-fibred democrat of genius, Francisco Goya.



FORTUNY



Mariano Fortuny: what a magic-breeding name! The motto of this lucky Spanish painter might have been "Fortuny Fortunatus." Even his sudden death, at the early age of thirty-six, came after he had executed a number of masterpieces, an enormous quantity of water-colours, etchings, ceramics, damascene swords and chased ornaments; it followed on the heels of sudden glory. His name was in the mouth of artistic Europe, and the sale of the contents of his studio at Rome in 1875 brought eight hundred thousand francs. Yet so slippery is fame that Fortuny's name to-day is seldom without a brace of epithets, such as "garish," or "empty." His work is neither. He is a virtuoso. So was Tiepolo. He is a Romantic; so the generation preceding him. The Orientalist par excellence, he has somehow been confounded with Meissonier and Gerome, has been called glittering like the former, hard as was the latter. It is true there are no emotional undertones in his temperament, the brilliant overtones predominating; but it is also true that when he died his manner was changing. He had said that he was tired of the "gay rags" of the eighteenth century, and his Strand of Portici shows a new line of departure. Edouard Manet made special appeal to Fortuny; Manet, who had derived from Goya, whose Spanish fond is undeniable. Perhaps the thrice-brilliant Fortuny's conscience smote him when he saw a Frenchman so successfully absorbing the traditions of Goya; but it was not to be. He passed away at the very top of his renown, truly a favourite of the gods. He was admired, imitated, above all parodied; though, jealously as are his pictures guarded, he has been put on the shelf like one of the amazing painted bibelots in his work.

The injustice of this is patent. Between Fortuny and Meissonier there lies the gulf that separates the genius and the hard-working man of talent. Nevertheless Meissonier's statue is in the garden of the Louvre, Meissonier is extolled as a master, while Fortuny is usually described in patronising terms as a facile trifler. The reverse is the truth. No one has painted sunlight with more intensity; he was an impressionist before the word was coined. He is a colourist almost as sumptuous as Monticelli, with a precision of vision never attained by the Marseilles rhapsodist. His figures are as delicious as Watteau's or Debucourt's—he recalls the latter frequently—and as an Orientalist he ranks all but a few. Gerome, Guillaumet, Fromentin, Huguet are not to be mentioned in the same breath with Fortuny as to the manipulation of material; and has Guillaumet done anything savouring more of the mysterious East than Fortuny's At the Gate of the Seraglio? The magician of jewelled tones, he knew all the subtler modulations. His canvases vibrate, they emit sparks of sunlight, his shadows are velvety and warm. Compared with such a picture as The Choice of a Model, the most laboriously minute Meissonier is as cold and dead as a photograph—Meissonier, who was a capital fan painter, a patient miniaturist without colour talent, a myopic delineator of costumes, who, as Manet said, pasted paper soldiers on canvas and called the machine a battle-field.