德拉克洛瓦似乎将他所有的情感都珍藏起来,贡献给了严肃的友谊,这些情感是阳刚的、深沉的。有一些人很容易喜欢上第一个见到的人;其他人则把这种神圣能力留给庄重的大场合。我正在津津乐道的这位名人,他可能不愿意被小事烦扰,但是在紧要关头,他会雪中送炭、一往无前、古道热肠。那些与他熟识的人,曾无数次见证过他在社会交往中表现出的忠诚不渝、谨小慎微和值得信赖,这些都是英国人的典型美德。如果说他对别人苛刻,那他对自己也没有宽容半分。

在这里,我还要提一下对欧仁·德拉克洛瓦的指责,虽然这让我感觉难过和不悦。我曾听人说他自私甚至贪财。请注意,先生,这些话总是出自无数庸人之口,攻击那些不辞劳苦的慷慨济人者,这慷慨既出于友谊,也出于关心。

德拉克洛瓦在管理钱财上很仔细,因为只有这样才让他可以不时慷慨解囊。我可以举几个这方面的例子,但是没有他和那些应该感谢他的人的允许,我也不方便这么做。

还有一点请注意,有许多年,他的画只能卖到很低的价钱,他的那些装饰画几乎吞掉了他全部的薪水。当一些穷艺术家跟他索要作品时,他的表现也证明了对金钱的蔑视。这时,就像那些个性自由而慷慨的医生,有时坚持要求付费,有时免费赠送,他会白送他的画或随便收点钱。

先生,最后,请记住,卓越之人比之其他人,尤其要留心保护自己。如果说全社会都与他为敌也不为过,我们曾不止一次验证这一点。他的礼貌被人说成冷漠;他的讽刺,不论怎样柔和,都被视为恶意;他的节俭呢,就成了吝啬。如果反过来,这个不幸的人挥霍无度,那社会非但不会对他表示同情,还会说:“活该!他这样挥霍,迟早变成穷光蛋。”

我可以肯定地说,在金钱和节俭上,德拉克洛瓦的观点与司汤达完全一致,即将伟大与谨慎统一起来。

司汤达曾说:“智者应该致力于取得必要的金钱,使自己不必依靠任何人(在司汤达的时代,这笔钱指年收入六千法郎)。而如果获得了这种保障后,还要浪费时间继续积累财富,那这个人就是个恶棍了。”

追求必要的,蔑视多余的,这就是智者与坚忍克己之人的做法。

我们的这位画家,在晚年时,最关心的一件事是后世对他的评价,以及他的作品传世的不确定性。在某个时刻,想到不朽的荣耀,他的想象力会炽烈得像着了火;在另一个时刻,他会失落地谈到画布和色彩的虚弱性。而在其他时候,他会不无嫉妒地谈到历史上的大师,他们中几乎所有人的作品都被技术高超的雕刻家选中,雕刻家用手中的针和刻刀将大师的天才表现出来;德拉克洛瓦则悲叹他还没有找到自己作品的雕刻家。与印刷作品的持久相比,绘画艺术作品的易损,也是他经常谈到的一个话题。

这个既脆弱又顽强,既敏感又大胆的人,这个在欧洲艺术年鉴上独树一帜的人,这个身体虚弱、冷淡,永远梦想在墙上涂抹自己强大构想的艺术家,在一次肺炎发作后离开了人世,而他对此已有预感。他的离开,让我们感受到一种精神的消沉和不断增长的孤独感,就像夏多布里昂和巴尔扎克的离世,而最近又是维尼 〔35〕 的离世带给我们的那种感受。在这个举国哀悼的时刻,在人类整体的活力处于低潮之时,有一片类似日蚀的阴影笼罩了知识界,这是对世界末日的一次暂时的模仿。

然而,我想,对他的离去感受尤为强烈的是这样一些人,他们在灵魂高贵的孤独中,只是靠着思想的联系,成功地找到了自己的圈子。至于其他公民,只有在很长时间之后,他们才会慢慢了解,自己的国家因为这位伟人的离去而蒙受的巨大损失,以及他的离世所留下的空白。即使那时还需要向他们不断讲明这一点。

我衷心地感谢您,先生,谢谢您容许我在对这位杰出天才的缅怀中畅所欲言,他生活在一个不幸的时代,这个时代既贫穷又富庶,有时过于苛刻,有时又过分宽容,而过于常见的却是不公。

注 释

〔1〕 欧仁·德拉克洛瓦(Eugène Delacroix, 1798—1863):法国著名画家,浪漫主义画派的典型代表。他继承和发展了文艺复兴以来欧洲各艺术流派,包括威尼斯画派、荷兰画派、P. P. 鲁本斯和J. 康斯特布尔等艺术家的成就和传统,并影响了以后的艺术家,特别是印象主义画家。

〔2〕 泰奥菲勒·西勒维斯特尔(Théophile Silvestre, 1823—1876):法国艺术批评家及历史学家。

〔3〕 夏尔·勒布伦(Charles Lebrun, 1619—1690):17世纪法国首席宫廷画家,也是当时最有权势的艺术家。曾为凡尔赛宫和卢浮宫做过大量的壁画和天顶画,被路易十四称为“有史以来法国最伟大的艺术家”。

〔4〕 皮埃尔·纳西斯·圭林(Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, 1744—1833):法国新古典主义画家和石版画家。

〔5〕 阿里奥斯托(Ludovico Ariosto, 1474—1533):意大利文艺复兴时期诗人,代表作为《疯狂的罗兰》(Orlando Furioso)。

〔6〕 H. 保罗·德拉罗什(Hippolyte-Paul Delaroche, 1797—1859):法国著名学院派画家,法国历史画家中自然主义的创始人,消极浪漫主义的代表人物之一。他的影响遍及全欧洲,特别对比利时、德国和英国影响更大。

〔7〕 天使传报(Annonciation):指天使加百列(Gabriel)向马利亚传报耶稣将通过马利亚成胎而降生,见《圣经·新约》。

〔8〕 颓废主义是19世纪下半叶欧洲资产阶级知识分子对资本主义社会表示不满而又无力反抗所产生的苦闷彷徨情绪在文艺领域中的反映。德拉克洛瓦1863年去世,他最后一幅伟大作品已经得到“颓废”一词的评价,所以说他比同时代的人超前。

〔9〕 普桑(Nicolas Poussin, 1594—1665):17世纪法国巴洛克时期重要画家,也是17世纪法国古典主义绘画的奠基人。

〔10〕 普吕东(Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, 1758—1823):法国大革命时期极具浪漫气息、独树一帜的画家。艺术上受文艺复兴诸名家,特别是达·芬奇和科雷乔的影响。作品追求古典美,富于感情色彩。代表作《“正义”与神圣的“复仇”追逐“罪恶”》、《西风神劫走普塞克》、《约瑟芬皇后》。

〔11〕 拉·封丹(Jean de la Fontaine, 1621—1695):法国古典文学的代表作家之一,著名的寓言诗人。他的作品经后人整理为《拉·封丹寓言》,与古希腊著名寓言诗人伊索的《伊索寓言》及俄国著名作家克雷洛夫所著的《克雷洛夫寓言》并称为世界三大寓言。

〔12〕 布瓦洛(Nicolas Boileau Despreaux, 1636—1711):法国诗人、文学理论家。被称为古典主义的立法者和发言人。最重要的文艺理论专著是1674年的《诗的艺术》。这部作品集中表现了他的哲学及美学思想,被誉为古典主义的法典。

〔13〕 马莱伯(François de Malherbe, 1555—1628):法国诗人。1605年到巴黎后的第一首诗《为亨利大王陛下利穆桑之行祝福》(1605),博得亨利四世的赏识。从此,马莱伯即以波旁王朝的官方诗人的姿态出现,所作诗歌多为祝颂之作。

〔14〕 第一帝国(First Empire, 1804—1815):法国拿破仑一世统治时期的资产阶级军事专制国家。

〔15〕 爱默生(Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803—1882):生于美国波士顿。美国思想家、文学家、诗人。爱默生是确立美国文化精神的代表人物。美国前总统林肯称他为“美国的孔子”、“美国文明之父”。

〔16〕 塞内加(Lucius Annaeus Seneca,前4—后65):古罗马哲学家、政治家和剧作家,尼禄皇帝的老师,因涉嫌谋杀尼禄而被迫自杀,哲学著作有《论天命》、《论忿怒》、《论幸福》等,悲剧有《美狄亚》、《奥狄浦斯》等九部。

〔17〕 超验主义(American Transcendentalism):美国的一个重要思潮,它兴起于19世纪30年代的新英格兰地区,波及其他地方,成为美国思想史上一次重要的思想解放运动。它是与拉尔夫·爱默生以及梭罗相关的一种文学和哲学运动,宣称存在一种理想的精神实体,超越于经验和科学之外,可以通过直觉得以把握。

〔18〕 孟德斯鸠(Montesquieu, 1689—1755):法国启蒙思想家、社会学家,是西方国家学说和法学理论的奠基人。

〔19〕 拿破仑·波拿巴(Napoléon Bonaparte, 1769—1821):法兰西第一共和国执政、法兰西第一帝国皇帝。

〔20〕 指1848年二月革命中,德拉克洛瓦的一些画遭到破坏。

〔21〕 维克多·雅克蒙(Victor Jacquemont, 1801—1832):法国植物学家和地质学家。

〔22〕 梵天(Brahmā):印度教的创造之神,与毗湿奴、湿婆并称三主神。他的坐骑为孔雀(或天鹅),配偶为智慧女神辩才天女,故梵天也常被认为是智慧之神。

〔23〕 普罗斯佩·梅里美(Prosper Mérimée, 1803—1870):法国现实主义作家、中短篇小说大师、剧作家、历史学家。他是著名歌剧《卡门》的作者。

〔24〕 德·拉帕利斯(Jacques de Chabannes, seigneur de la Palisse, 1470—1525):法国著名军事将领。

〔25〕 费拉里(Giuseppe Ferrari, 1811—1876):意大利作家。

〔26〕 菲迪亚斯(Phidias,前480—前430):古希腊的雕刻家、画家和建筑师,被公认为最伟大的古典雕刻家。雅典人。其著名作品为世界七大奇迹之一的宙斯巨像和巴特农神殿的雅典娜巨像。

〔27〕 原文为拉丁文:Odi Profanum vulgus,语出贺拉斯《颂歌》,下面一句是“我远离他们”。

〔28〕 乔登斯(Jacob Jordaens, 1593—1678):17世纪西班牙统治下尼德兰地区的著名画家及壁毯设计师,安特卫普学派代表人物,与鲁本斯和凡·戴克并称“佛兰德斯巴洛克艺术三杰”。

〔29〕 维洛(Fredric Villot, 1809—1875):法国雕刻家。1833年,德拉克洛瓦向费德瑞克·维洛学习铜版腐蚀法的技巧,他从1827年便结识维洛,二人一直维持朋友关系;德拉克洛瓦常旅居香帕塞(Champrosay),维洛在那里有一幢别墅。

〔30〕 德岗(Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, 1803—1860):法国画家。

〔31〕 安格尔(Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1780—1867):法国画家。

〔32〕 梅松尼尔(Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, 1815—1891):法国画家。他的前期作品,如《争吵》属于风俗画。后期作品以历史和军事为题材。他关于拿破仑一世战争的作品刻画非常细致,代表作为《1814年法国战役》。

〔33〕 特奥菲尔·戈蒂埃(Théophile Gautier, 1811—1872):法国19世纪重要的诗人、小说家、戏剧家和文艺批评家。

〔34〕 保罗·什纳瓦(Paul Chenavard, 1808—1895):法国画家。曾在安格尔的画室学习,后来受到德国哲学和绘画的影响,认为艺术的目的应是人道主义和具有教化功能的。

〔35〕 维尼(Alfred de Vigny, 1797—1863):法国诗人、剧作家和小说家。主要作品有历史小说《桑·马尔斯》(1826)、中篇小说集《军人的荣誉与屈辱》(1835)、剧本《夏特东》(1835)等。

论1859年的沙龙

——致《法兰西评论》编辑的信

一、现代艺术家

亲爱的M先生:

很荣幸受您之邀,就沙龙写一篇评论文章,您在信中说:“要简短;不要一一列举,而是写一篇概览,类似于在展览上轻松漫步式的文字。”好,您的愿望会完全得到满足,不是因为您的提议恰好与我对这类称为“沙龙”的无趣文章的看法一致(不过我们确实观点相同),也不是因为这种作文方式要更加容易,要知道,简短总是比冗长更费力气,而仅仅是因为,尤其是在目前情况下,其他方式都行不通。当然了,如果我发觉自己迷失在原创画作的森林中,如果现代法国人的性情突然发生变化,在它被净化了的、恢复活力的状态下,开放出绚烂而芬芳的各式花朵,我下笔会更加困难,因为那样我会发出一系列无法抑制的“噢啊”之类的惊奇之声,笔下流出溢美之词和堆砌辞藻的赞赏,并产生对批评语言中新类别的需求。然而对我而言幸运的是,这些都没有发生。没有情感的突然喷发,没有未经发掘的天才出现。由这个沙龙所引起的思考是如此简单,如此老式,如此传统,毫无疑问,只需寥寥数页,我就能把这些想法表达出来。不要感到惊讶,因为画家的平庸会导致作家的陈词滥调。在任何情况下,写陈词滥调都是安全的,因为没有什么东西比它更迷人、更富有成效和更令人兴奋了(我很高兴在这一点上您和我看法一致)。

在开始前,请允许我先表达一种难以言喻的遗憾。本来我们被告知,展览上会有一些我们不熟悉的客人;因为之前的蒙田大道展览,向常看展览的巴黎人介绍了一些他们相见恨晚的魅力四射的艺术家。所以,我一早就热切盼望着能与这些艺术家再见面,其中有莱斯利,那个富有、天真和高贵的幽默作家,他是英国思想最强有力的化身之一;大小亨特,一个是固执的自然主义画家 〔1〕 ,另外一个是热切而坚定的拉斐尔前派的创始人 〔2〕 ;麦克利斯 〔3〕 ,那位大胆的绘画大师,他笔触的冲动鲁莽也透露出足够的自信;米莱斯 〔4〕 ,一位在细节描绘上一丝不苟的诗人;约翰·夏隆 〔5〕 ,他融合了克劳德·洛兰 〔6〕 和华多 〔7〕 的画风,记录了在美丽的意大利公园里举行下午游园会的场景;格兰特 〔8〕 ,那位雷诺兹的天然继承人;胡克 〔9〕 ,他给自己梦中的威尼斯笼罩上神奇的光线;那位奇怪的帕顿爵士 〔10〕 ,他的作品把人们带回亨利·富塞利 〔11〕 时代,带着属于另一个时代的耐心,他精心描绘了众神混战的动人场面;乔治·卡特莫尔 〔12〕 ,一位用水彩描画历史场景的画家;还有另外一位令人讶异的艺术家,名字我忘记了,他是一位建筑家和梦想家,在纸上建起了城市,里面的桥由大象雕塑支撑着,在大象腿下,带着三个桅杆的大型纵帆船正满帆而行!墙上甚至都为这些充满想象力、创造不寻常色彩效果的朋友们,为这些怪诞的缪斯所垂青的人们预留了地方;然而,唉!因为我所不知道的原因,我想也不适合在您的报纸上发表,我的希望破灭了。就这样,那些悲剧的火焰,基恩和麦克雷迪式的手势,对家的深刻研究,反映在英国人思想诗境中的东方辉煌,苏格兰的青翠草木,迷人的凉亭,富有层次的水彩画,它使有限的画面显得像舞台布景一样宽敞,我们是看不到你们了,起码这次是看不到了。噢!你们这些想象力和灵魂的最宝贵才能的热情代表,你们是在第一次到来时受到了无礼对待吗,还是认为我们不配理解你们?

所以,亲爱的M先生,我们将不得不满足于法国现有的作品;但是相信我,没什么比高声赞美自己国家的艺术家让我更愉悦;遗憾的是,对于一个有经验的批判的头脑来说,爱国主义没有起到绝对主宰的作用,我们要承认一些丢脸的事。这次,我刚进入沙龙,便在楼梯上遇到了一位最敏锐、最受敬重的批评家,对我问的第一个问题,你应该能猜到是什么,他回答道:“沉闷,平庸,我几乎从没见过这么令人沮丧的沙龙。”他的话不能说不正确,也不能说正确。一个展出大量欧仁·德拉克洛瓦、潘基利 〔13〕 和弗洛芒丹 〔14〕 作品的展览不会是令人沮丧的;但从整体上看,我发觉他的话也有道理。确实,在每一个时代唱主角的都是平庸的,这是无可辩驳的;正如展览令人沮丧一样,这也是事实,因为平庸的支配力量比以往更强大了,已经到了碍眼的程度。放眼望去,整个展览就是许多陈词滥调的大团圆,这许多垃圾都用画笔认真地涂抹过,许多愚蠢或华而不实的失误被熟练地构建。接下来,我想到了过去的艺术家,并与今天的艺术家放在一起比较;然而,就像往常一样,在我令人气馁的思考结束后,那个可怕的、永恒的“为什么?”不可避免地摆在我面前。在艺术和文学这两大领域,卑微、幼稚、缺乏好奇心和乏味的愚蠢似乎已经取代了热情、高贵和奔涌的梦想;目前我们还不能奢望任何能与波旁王朝复辟时期相提并论的精神上的百花齐放出现。请相信,我不是唯一一个为这些令人不快的思考而在精神上感到压迫的人;马上我就会证明这一点。我自问道:“在过去,艺术家应该是什么样的呢(比如勒布伦或大卫)?”勒·布伦是博学、富有想象力、深谙历史和热爱富丽堂皇的代表。大卫,那位被自己的许多忠实追随者中伤的伟人,他不也是热爱历史、热爱富丽堂皇、博学多识吗?而今天,艺术家——这个诗人曾经的兄弟——又是怎样的呢?要圆满回答这个问题,亲爱的M先生,我们一定不能太宽容。不光彩的偏袒有时也需要同样的反作用力。艺术家身上缺少美德,他们在今天以及在过去许多年,都不过是一个被惯坏的孩子。想想那些浪费在没有灵魂和教养的人身上的荣誉和金钱吧!就我而言,我当然不支持引进一种与现有艺术手段不相融的手法;然而,举个例子,我会忍不住对什纳瓦这样的艺术家感到同情,他永远是那么讨人喜欢、令人愉快,就像好书一样,即使在最乏味的题材上也是那么优雅。至少我知道我能和他谈论维吉尔和柏拉图(就算他成为艺术学生的笑料我又怎么会介意?)。普雷奥特 〔15〕 有一种令人愉快的天赋,他在与生俱来的品位的引领下找到美,就像一头猛兽扑到它的天然猎物身上一样。奥诺雷·杜米埃被赋予了敏锐的辨识力,这让他的整个谈话都熠熠生辉。里卡尔 〔16〕 ,虽然他的谈话令人炫目,有时会不连贯,但时时能让人感觉到他知识丰富,曾进行过许多对比性研究。我想,我不必再提欧仁·德拉克洛瓦的谈话了,那是充实的哲学内容、巧智和燃烧的热情的绝妙结合。除他们之外,我想不到任何够得上与哲学家或诗人对话的人了。除了他们,你能找到的几乎都是惯坏的孩子。请告诉我,我恳求您,在哪一个客厅,哪一个酒馆,在怎样的社交或私下聚会上,您从一个被惯坏的孩子口中听到过任何诙谐话,任何深刻、智慧、意味深长的言语,任何发人深省、引人幻想的言语,简言之,任何一句值得注意的话!如果这样一句话在交谈中出现,它也许不是出自一个政客或者哲学家之口,但说出这话的人一定从事着某个不寻常的职业,比如猎人、水手、修椅子的,但不会是一个艺术家——那个被惯坏的孩子,永远不会!

这个被惯坏的孩子从前辈那里继承了一种在那个时代是合理的特权。人们对大卫、圭林、吉洛德 〔17〕 、格罗 〔18〕 、德拉克洛瓦、波宁顿 〔19〕 的热情,他今天忝承余荫;当优秀的诗人和勤奋的历史学家辛苦谋生之时,愚蠢的金融家在花大价钱买这些被惯坏的孩子创作的不知所谓的作品。请不要误会,如果值得敬重的人获得这种恩惠,我是不会发牢骚的。如果是一位到达艺术巅峰的歌唱家或舞蹈家,她每天努力工作,承担风险,最后成为富翁,我是不会嫉妒的。否则,那我恐怕会步去世的吉哈丹的后尘,制造骗人的记忆,他曾谴责泰奥菲尔·戈蒂耶 〔20〕 给自己想象力的标价比专区区长的薪水还要高。如果你还记得,在一个倒霉的日子,他用拉丁语对吓坏的众人说道:畜生说话了!不,我不会那么不讲理;当德拉克洛瓦的一幅佳作标价一千法郎都无人问津,而梅松尼尔的一幅无足轻重的小画却能卖到十倍甚至二十倍的价钱时,我们应该提高嗓门谴责今天人们的愚蠢。但是那些快乐的日子结束了;今天的我们已经愈加堕落,梅松尼尔先生尽管有其优点,但不幸的是,他首创了篇幅较小的画,并使之成为流行品味,不过跟今天那些华而不实的小画的创作者比起来,他是真正的大师。

想象力变得不可信,高贵受到蔑视,爱(不,这个词太美了)——一味追求技巧,这些,在我看来,是艺术家水准下降的主要原因。想象力越丰富,对技巧的掌握相应地一定要越娴熟,如果后者要在冒险征途上与前者步伐一致,就要成功克服想象力所热切寻找的困难。画家的技巧越娴熟,就越不该炫耀技巧,只有这样,他的想象力才能得以凸显,并熠熠生辉。智慧如是说,并补充道,空有技巧的人是笨蛋,而富有想象力却缺乏技巧的人是疯子。这些道理看似简单,但今天的艺术家却似乎并不懂。一个看门人的女儿自言自语道:“我要上音乐学校,首次登台演出要在国家大剧院 〔21〕 ,我要演高乃依 〔22〕 剧作中的人物,像以前曾经扮演这些角色的人那样获得肯定。”她说到做到。她的嗓音无比单调,本人也是极度乏味和无知,但她却成功做到了一件十分容易的事,即靠着自己的耐性,成为了国家大剧院的正式演员。而那个被惯坏的孩子——现代画家——也自言自语道:“他们所谓的想象力是什么?既危险又令人厌倦。对历史的研究和思考又是什么?不过是浪费时间而已。我要走古典路线,不是伯汀 〔23〕 那种(因为古典改变它的地点和名字),而是像……康斯坦·特罗容 〔24〕 那样的。”他说到做到。他挥毫作画,缚住自己的灵魂,直到自己的风格和流行画家一样。就这样,他凭借自己的愚蠢和技巧,得到了公众的肯定和金钱。他靠模仿别人成名,别人又模仿他,这样,每个人都在做着成名的美梦,越来越紧地缚住自己的灵魂,尤其是什么书也不读了,甚至连烹饪书都不碰了,这至少可以让他得到一个即使不太多金也更为光明的前途。一旦他掌握了调味、盛盘、浇糖浆、调肉汁、炖(我说的是绘画)等技巧,这个被惯坏的孩子开始装腔作势,用比以往更笃定的口吻重复道,其他一切都是没有必要的。

曾经有个德国农夫去见一位画家,下面是他对画家所说的话:“先生,我想让您为我画这样一幅肖像。在我家农场的大门口,我坐在一张父亲传给我的宽扶手椅上,妻子拿着她的女红在我身边,女儿们在近旁忙着准备晚餐。画面左边是一条宽敞的道路,我的儿子正从那里走来,他们干完农活正回家来,牛已经牵回了牛圈;我其他几个儿子正同我的孙子们一起,把装满干草的农场大车遮盖起来。另外,请别忘记画上我烟管里冒出来的被夕阳染上红色的烟圈。我还想让看这幅画的人听到从附近教堂的钟楼传来的祈祷钟声,那里是我家祖祖辈辈结婚的地方。还有很重要的一点,你要画出我在一天的这一刻,看着我的家人和我的财富所感受到的满足,而又一天劳作的结束更增加了这种满足感。”

请为这位农夫大声喝彩!他自己可能意识不到,但他理解了绘画。对自己职业的热爱提升了他的想象力。在我们的流行画家中,有谁能画出这样一幅画来?又有谁的想象力能跟这位农夫媲美?

二、现代大众与摄影

亲爱的M先生:

如果要博你一笑,那真是易如反掌,只要随便翻阅一下目录,把其中博眼球的可笑题目和主题拉一个清单出来即可。这是典型的法国人的态度。对于没有绘画天分的人来说,通过那些与艺术不搭边的手段让观众瞠目,是很好的手段。有时,一些极富天分的人染上这种陋习,他们用一种近乎邪恶的组合羞辱艺术,而这种人总是出现在法国。我可以向你一一展示那些戏剧化的作品题目,就像歌舞杂耍表演游行队伍一样,在你眼前一一掠过,其中有充满感情色彩的题目,只差一个感叹号了;有双关语的题目;有深沉哲思的题目;还有一些误导人或者陷阱题目,如《布鲁图:卑鄙的恺撒》。

“噢,你们这个堕落和没有信仰的民族,”我们的主说,“我还要跟你们在一起多久,我还要继续受苦受难多久?”这个民族,不管是艺术家还是普通大众,对绘画如此缺乏信仰,因此永远尝试伪装,外面包上糖衣药丸,就像是某种难吃的药品——这是什么糖啊!是啊,上帝!请让我选出两张画作的题目,顺便说一句,这两幅画我还没见过:《爱与炖兔肉》!你的好奇心一下子就被勾了起来,不是吗?我也在努力将这两个概念联系起来,爱与一只被炖的剥皮兔子。你不能期望我来假设,画家的想象力超凡,在一只家畜的尸体上,加上一个箭袋、一对翅膀和一个眼罩;那样的话,它的寓意真的会晦涩了。我更倾向于相信这个题目是生搬硬套来的,循着《厌世与忏悔》的格式。所以真正的题目应该是“一对爱人吃炖兔肉”。这样问题又来了:他们是年轻的还是年老的,是一个工人和他的女朋友,还是一个老兵和他的情妇坐在一个覆满灰尘的棚架下?只有那幅画能告诉我了。我们还有《君主制、天主教徒与士兵》!这幅画属于那种夸张的骑士类型,《耶路撒冷的巴黎路线》的类型(查理大帝,我向你致歉!最高贵的事物能成为漫画的手段,一位帝国领导的话语会成为涂鸦者的讽刺画)。这幅画上一定有一个人同时在做三件事:战斗、参加圣餐仪式、参加路易十四的“起床前仪式” 〔25〕 。又或者画的是一个有百合花和宗教图案纹身的军人?然而胡乱猜想有什么好处呢?一个简单的事实是,这类题目只是一些令人反感和枯燥乏味的手段,目的是博人眼球。而尤为可叹的是,那幅画可能是一幅好画,不管它的题目听起来有多奇怪。这也适用于《爱与炖兔肉》那幅画。我还注意到一组精美的雕刻,但很可惜没有记下它的编号;当我想要查找这组雕刻的主题时,我仔细翻阅了目录四遍,却徒劳无功。最后还是您善意地告诉我,这组雕刻名为《永远与曾经》。看到一个天才居然取了这样一个字谜似的题目,我真的感觉难过。

请您一定原谅我以廉价报纸的方式来取乐。但是,不管这件事在您看来多么不值一提,仔细探究之下,您就会发现一种可悲的症状。请允许我用一种自相矛盾的方式来总结我的观点,让我问问您,或者那些比我更熟知艺术历史的朋友们,为愚人的品味和为智者的品味是否从来都是存在的,诸如“供出租的公寓”这样过分精练的观点是否在某个时代都有,并像今天一样引起同样程度的热情,委罗内塞和巴萨诺 〔26〕 的威尼斯是否也曾受过这种字谜的影响,朱利·罗曼诺 〔27〕 、米开朗琪罗和班迪内利 〔28〕 是否都曾为类似的怪物而愕然;简单说,我就是想知道比亚德先生 〔29〕 是否像上帝一样永恒存在,并无处不在。我不相信,我把这些恐怖事物看作一种赋予法国人的恩惠的特殊形式。它们的艺术家确实赋予了它们这种品味,而它们确实也让艺术家满足了这一需要,因为如果艺术家愚弄了大众,那么大众也会以其人之道还治其人之身。他们形成环环相扣的两个条件,相互施加同等的影响。与此相应,让我们看看,我们正在“进步”的道路上以怎样的速度行进(这里所说的进步指的是对事物渐进的控制),也许仅凭耐心就能获得的平凡技能每天在以怎样的速度扩散。

在这个国家,天生的画家,就像天生的诗人一样,几乎是个怪物。我们对“真”的品味(这一品味如果限制在它正当的目的是如此高贵),压迫并扼杀了对“美”的品味。当只有该寻找美时——比如在一幅美丽的画上,任何人都能很容易猜到我想到的那种——我们的同胞却只寻找真。他们没有艺术品味,他们的品味不是与生俱来的,他们可能是哲学家,或者伦理学家、工程师、启发性逸事的爱好者等等,但一定不是天生有艺术鉴赏力的。他们会渐进地、分解式地去感受,或者不如说评判。其他一些更幸运的人,他们感受事物更快,能以一种综合的方式来感受。

我刚才提到一些艺术家,他们的目的就是要使观众瞠目结舌。想令人震惊或让自己感受震惊,这一欲望是完全合理的。“感到震惊是一种幸福”,而且“有梦想是一种幸福”。如果你坚持让我给你一个艺术家或艺术爱好者的头衔,那全部的问题就是,你打算通过何种手段来创造或感受这种震惊?因为美总是包含着使人震惊的成分,认为令人惊叹的总是美的,这种想法是荒唐的。现在的法国人,就像一些卑劣矮小的灵魂一样,尤其无法感受到梦想或者惊讶带来的快乐,而他们却想通过一些与艺术无关的手段来获得震惊带来的刺激,他们恭顺的艺术家向大众品味屈膝了;他们用一些小伎俩,目的就是吸引眼球,让人们惊讶,使人们目瞪口呆,因为他们知道,人们无法从真正的艺术的自然形式中获得陶醉。

在这个可悲的时代,一个新的工业形式发展起来,它很大程度地让愚人树立了自信,并毁掉了法国人头脑中残存的一点神圣痕迹。自然地,崇拜偶像的大众呼唤出现一个货真价实的理想,与自己的特性保持一致。在绘画和雕塑艺术领域,今天老于世故之人的信条,特别是在法国(我相信没人敢发表相反的说法),是这样说的:“我信仰自然,并且只信仰自然。”(对此我们有充足的理由。)“我相信艺术是,而且只能是,对自然的精确复制。”(如果有一些胆怯和持异议的人提出反例,那举出的一定是本身就令人讨厌的物件,比如便壶,或者骷髅)“如果一个工业程序能提供给我们一种与自然一模一样的产品,那将是绝对的艺术。”报复心重的上帝听到这些人的祈祷后,便派来他的弥赛亚——达盖尔 〔30〕 。然后,这些人说道:“既然摄影能绝对复制自然(他们居然相信,可怜的狂人!),那么艺术就是摄影。”从那一刻起,我们可厌的社会便像纳喀索斯一样,趋之若鹜地从相机的金属盘上看那些不值一提的影像了。愚蠢和狂热攫住了这些新时代的太阳崇拜者,一批令人讨厌的人出现了。人们集中起一群男男女女,把他们像狂欢节上的屠夫和洗衣女那样装扮起来,劝这些“主人公们”在摄像程序要求的时间内“保持”他们即兴做出的鬼脸,通过这种手段,就真的认为他们能代表古代历史上那些悲惨或者迷人的场景了。某个民主的作家一定能从中看到一种散播对历史的憎恶以及在大众中传播绘画的廉价手段,而这是一种双重亵渎,同时侮辱了绘画的神圣艺术以及演员的高端艺术。而就在不久前,几千双贪婪的眼睛似乎胶在立体镜的窥视孔上,好像它们是无限的天窗。对猥亵的热爱在人们心里疯狂地生长,就像自恋一样,它不会放过这样一个获得自我满足的好机会。请不要说,只有从学校回到家的孩子才会从这种愚蠢的举动中获得愉悦,它是整个社会的愤怒。我曾经听到一位智慧的女士跟她的朋友谈话,她是上流社会的女士,跟我属于不同的社会阶层。当时她的朋友试图藏起这样几张照片,不让她看到,而她说道:“给我看吧,没什么能让我惊讶的。”这是她亲口说的,我发誓,我是亲耳听到的,但是谁会相信我呢?大仲马说:“你能看到,她们都是高贵的女士。”“还有更加高贵的呢!”卡佐特 〔31〕 附和道。

失败的艺术家要么是天分不够,要么是太懒惰完不成学业,而摄影行业成了他们的庇护所,这种席卷全球的狂热不仅有了盲目和愚蠢的气质,而且有了某种复仇的意味。我不相信,或者至少我不能让自己相信,任何这种愚蠢的其中总有恶毒的坏人和骗局的阴谋,竟能够获得完全的胜利;但是我确信摄影的发展,就像所有纯物质的进步一样,大大穷尽了法国人的艺术天分,这天分本身是罕有的。现代的愚昧可以纵声大笑,它圆滚滚的肚子里发出响声,将近代哲学塞到它贪婪食道的所有消化不了的诡辩法吐将出来;当工业闯入艺术领域时,它便成为后者的死敌,这是一个简单的常识;在随之而来的功能混乱中,两者都不能很好地得到实现。诗歌与进步是两个雄心勃勃的人,对彼此有本能的仇恨,两虎相遇,必有一伤。如果摄影在一些艺术行为上被允许代表艺术,那么离它取代或完全毁灭艺术的日子也不远了,大众的愚蠢是它天然的盟友,对此功不可没。所以,摄影如回归到它真正的责任上,即作为艺术和科学的侍女,但一定是很谦恭的侍女,就像印刷和速记那样,既不能创造文学也不会对文学形成补充。让摄影快些充实旅行者的相册吧,他的记忆缺失的,让摄影来精确再现给他的眼睛;让它装饰自然学家的图书馆,放大显微镜下的昆虫,甚至增强天文学家的假设:简单说,让它成为任何因为专业原因需要绝对的形态精确性的人的秘书和记录员。现在一切还好。让它挽救那些摇摇欲坠的废墟,使之不至于默默无闻地消失,还有书、雕塑、手稿、时间的猎物,所有这些珍贵的东西注定要消失,然而恳求在我们记忆的卷宗里保有一席之地;在所有这些事物上,摄影都应该得到我们的感谢和掌声。但是如果一旦它被允许侵犯无形和想象的领域,侵犯任何只是因为人们的灵魂而获得价值的事物,我们就该倒霉了!

我知道人们会说:“你刚刚描述的是傻瓜的疾病。任何当得起艺术家头衔的人,任何真正的艺术爱好者,怎么会将艺术和工业混淆?”这个我知道,但是让我来问问,他们是否相信善与恶是会传染的,相信个人会感受到社会压力,相信个人不自觉、不可避免地会屈从于社会。艺术家影响大众,而大众反作用于艺术家,这是一个不容辩驳、无法抗拒的法则;而且,这些事实,这些证人,很容易研究;我们可以估量这整个灾难的程度。随着一天天过去,艺术日益失落在自尊中,在永恒的现实面前屈服,画家越来越倾向于画那些他眼睛看到而非梦中的事物。但做梦是一种幸福啊,曾经,表达自己梦中所见是一种荣耀,但是现在,人们还能相信画家依然有那种快乐吗?

一个诚实的旁观者,他会认为摄影的入侵以及今天疯狂的工业与这一可悲后果全无关系吗?当一个人的眼睛习惯于接受有形科学的结果作为美的产品时,在一段时间后,它评判和感受那些最虚无缥缈和无形事物的能力会显著削弱,这难道不是合乎逻辑的推断吗?

注 释

〔1〕 威廉·亨利·亨特(William Henry Hunt, 1790—1864):英国水彩画家。

〔2〕 威廉·霍尔曼·亨特(William Holman Hunt, 1827—1910):英国画家、拉斐尔前派创始人之一。

〔3〕 麦克利斯(Daniel Maclise, 1806—1870):爱尔兰历史、文学和肖像画家、插画家。

〔4〕 米莱斯(John Everett Millais, 1829—1896):英国画家、拉斐尔前派创始人之一。

〔5〕 约翰·夏隆(John James Chalon, 1778—1854):活跃在英格兰的瑞士画家,创作题材广泛,涉及风景、海洋景色、动物生活以及肖像画。

〔6〕 克劳德·洛兰(Claude Lorrain, 1600—1682):法国画家。终生醉心于海景和意大利风景。除油画之外,还擅长铜版画和素描。克劳德·洛兰的代表作品有油画《示巴女王乘船》(1648年),这是一幅有金色阳光和古代建筑的明快而抒情的海景画。

〔7〕 华多(Jean-Antoine Watteau, 1684—1721):法国18世纪洛可可时期最重要的画家。路易十五时代达到高潮的洛可可艺术,是流行于法国宫廷的一种浮华、柔媚、内容贫乏的艺术运动,代表着法国封建王朝衰落时期贵族富豪们庸俗的审美趣味。

〔8〕 弗兰西斯·格兰特爵士(Sir Francis Grant, 1803—1878):苏格兰肖像画家,曾为维多利亚女王和当时英国的许多贵族和政治人物画像。

〔9〕 胡克(James Clarke Hook, 1819—1907):英国画家,海洋、风俗和历史场景及风景画的蚀刻画家。

〔10〕 约瑟夫·诺尔·帕顿爵士(Sir Joseph Noel Paton, 1821—1901):苏格兰画家。

〔11〕 亨利·富塞利(Henry Fuseli, 1741—1825):瑞士出生的英国画家。作品有异国情调、独创性和色情味道。

〔12〕 乔治·卡特莫尔(George Cattermole, 1800—1868):英国画家与插图家,水彩方面造诣突出,与查尔斯·狄更斯等文学家与艺术家为友。

〔13〕 奥克塔夫·潘基利·拉里登(Octave Penguilly L'Haridon, 1811—1872):法国画家,以画布里多尼地区风景、神话和历史题材闻名。

〔14〕 弗洛芒丹(Eugène Fromentin, 1820—1876):法国画家、作家。游记《在撒哈拉沙漠的一个夏天》(1856)、《在撒赫尔的一年》(1858)获得好评。

〔15〕 普雷奥特(Antoine-Augustin Préault, 1809—1879):法国浪漫主义雕塑家。

〔16〕 里卡尔(Louis Gustave Ricard, 1823—1873):法国画家。

〔17〕 安·路易·吉洛德·特里奥松(Anne-Louis Giredet-Trioson, 1767—1824):法国古典主义画派和浪漫主义画派之间承前启后的著名画家,雅克·路易·大卫的学生。

〔18〕 格罗(Baron Gros, 1771—1835),法国浪漫派画家,以描写拿破仑军事生涯的历史画知名。

〔19〕 波宁顿(Richard Parkes Bonington, 1801—1828):英国浪漫派画家,以水彩风景画和历史画著名。生于诺丁汉附近城镇,1817年后侨居法国。师从格罗,并与德拉克洛瓦结为挚友。1825年重访英国。其写意手法画的风景画,格调清新,对法国浪漫主义风景画和英国风景画的发展都起了推动作用。

〔20〕 泰奥菲尔·戈蒂耶(Théophile Gautier, 1811—1872):法国唯美主义诗人、散文家和小说家。早年习画,后转而为文,以创作实践自己“为艺术而艺术”的主张。

〔21〕 国家大剧院(Comédie-Française):指(巴黎的)法国国家大剧院(建于1680年路易十四时期)。

〔22〕 高乃依(Corneille, 1606—1684):法国剧作家,法国古典主义悲剧奠基人,擅长运用戏剧场面揭示人物内心冲突,剧作有四大悲剧《熙德》、《贺拉斯》、《西拿》、《波里耶克特》等三十余部。

〔23〕 伯汀(Jean-Victor Bertin, 1767—1842):法国历史风景画家,以自己古典风格的微小细节而闻名。

〔24〕 康斯坦·特罗容(Constant Troyon, 1810—1865):法国画家。

〔25〕 “起床前仪式”(petit lever):指路易十四起床的第一道程序。八点,由贴身仆人叫醒他,然后大夫过来给他做个检查,仆人掀开床帘等。

〔26〕 巴萨诺(Jacopo Bassano, 1510—1592):意大利画家,被认为第一位现代风景画家。

〔27〕 朱利·罗曼诺(Giulio Romano, 1499—1546):意大利画家、建筑家,拉斐尔的学生。

〔28〕 班迪内利(Baccio Bandinelli, 1493—1560):文艺复兴时期意大利雕塑家、画家。

〔29〕 比亚德(François-Auguste Biard, 1799—1822):法国风俗画家。

〔30〕 达盖尔(Louis-Jacques-mandé Daguerre, 1787—1851):法国美术家和化学家,因发明银版照相法而闻名。

〔31〕 卡佐特(Jacques Cazotte, 1719—1792):法国作家。

Charles Baudelaire

The Painter of Modern Life

TRANSLATED BY P. E. CHARVET





PENGUIN BOOKS — GREAT IDEAS

The Painter of Modern Life

I. Beauty, Fashion and Happiness

In all social circles, and even in art circles, there are people who go to the Louvre, walk quickly past a large number of most interesting though secondary pictures, without throwing them so much as a look, and plant themselves, as though in a trance, in front of a Titian or a Raphael, one of those which the engraver's art has particularly popularized; then they go out satisfied, as often as not saying to themselves: 'I know my gallery thoroughly.' There are also people who, having once read Bossuet and Racine, think they have got the history of literature at their fingertips.

Happily from time to time knights errant step into the lists - critics, art collectors, lovers of the arts, curious-minded idlers - who assert that neither Raphael nor Racine has every secret, that minor poets have something to be said for them, substantial and delightful things to their credit, and finally that, however much we may like general beauty, which is expressed by the classical poets and artists, we nonetheless make a mistake to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance, the description of manners.

I am bound to admit that, for several years now, society has shown some improvement. The value that today's collectors attach to the delightful engraved and coloured trifles of the last century shows that a reaction has begun in the direction needed by the public; Debucourt, the Saint-Aubins and many others have achieved mention in the dictionary of artists worthy of study. But these represent the past, whereas my purpose at this moment is to discuss the painting of our contemporary social scene. The past is interesting, not only because of the beauty that the artists for whom it was the present were able to extract from it, but also as past, for its historical value. The same applies to the present. The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

I have here in front of me a series of fashion plates, the earliest dating from the Revolution, the most recent from the Consulate or thereabouts. These costumes, which many thoughtless people, the sort of people who are grave without true gravity, find highly amusing, have a double kind of charm, artistic and historical. They are very often beautiful and wittily drawn, but what to me is at least as important, and what I am glad to find in all or nearly all of them, is the moral attitude and the aesthetic value of the time. The idea of beauty that man creates for himself affects his whole attire, ruffles or stiffens his coat, gives curves or straight lines to his gestures and even, in process of time, subtly penetrates the very features of his face. Man comes in the end to look like his ideal image of himself. These engravings can be translated into beauty or ugliness: in ugliness they become caricatures; in beauty, antique statues.

The women who wore these dresses looked more or less like one or the other, according to the degree of poetry or vulgarity evident in their faces. The living substance gave suppleness to what appears too stiff to us. The viewer's imagination can even today see a marching man in this tunic or the shrug of a woman's shoulder beneath that shawl. One of these days perhaps some theatre or other will put on a play where we shall see a revival of the fashions in which our fathers thought themselves just as captivating as we ourselves think we are, in our modest garments (which also have their attractiveness, to be sure, but rather of a moral and spiritual kind); and, if they are worn and given life to by intelligent actors and actresses, we shall be surprised at our having laughed at them so thoughtlessly. The past, whilst retaining its ghostly piquancy, will recapture the light and movement of life, and become present.

If an impartially minded man were to look through the whole range of French fashions, one after the other, from the origins of France to the present day, he would find nothing to shock or even to surprise him. He would find the transition as fully prepared as in the scale of the animal kingdom. No gaps, hence no surprises. And if to the illustration representing each age he were to add the philosophic thought which that age was mainly preoccupied with or worried by, a thought which the illustration inevitably reflects, he would see what a deep harmony informs all the branches of history, and that, even in the centuries which appear to us the most outrageous and the most confused, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

Here we have indeed a golden opportunity to establish a rational and historical theory of beauty, in contrast to the theory of a unique and absolute beauty, and to show that beauty is always and inevitably compounded of two elements, although the impression it conveys is one; for the difficulty we may experience in distinguishing the variable elements that go to make beauty's unity of impression does not in any way invalidate the need of variety in its composition. Beauty is made up, on the one hand, of an element that is eternal and invariable, though to determine how much of it there is is extremely difficult, and, on the other, of a relative circumstantial element, which we may like to call, successively or at one and the same time, contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion. Without this second element, which is like the amusing, teasing, appetite-whetting coating of the divine cake, the first element would be indigestible, tasteless, unadapted and inappropriate to human nature. I challenge anyone to find any sample whatsoever of beauty that does not contain these two elements.

Let me take as an example the two extreme stages of history. In hieratic art duality is evident at the first glance; the eternal element of beauty reveals itself only by permission and under the control of the religion the artist belongs to. In the most frivolous work of a sophisticated artist, belonging to one of those ages we vaingloriously call civilized, the duality is equally apparent; the eternal part of beauty will be both veiled and expressed, if not through fashion, then at least through the individual temperament of the artist. The duality of art is an inevitable consequence of the duality of man. If you like it that way, you may identify the eternally subsisting portion as the soul of art, and the variable element as its body. That is why Stendhal, that impertinent, teasing, even repugnant mind (whose impertinences are, nevertheless, usefully thought-provoking), came close to the truth, much closer than many other people, when he said: 'The beautiful is neither more nor less than the promise of happiness.' No doubt this definition oversteps the mark; it subordinates beauty much too much to the infinitely variable ideal of happiness; it divests beauty too lightly of its aristocratic character; but it has the great merit of getting away from the mistake of the academicians.

More than once before I have explained these things; these few lines are explanation enough for those who enjoy these pastimes of abstract thought; but I am well aware that French readers for the most part take little pleasure in them, and I am myself keen to enter into the positive and solid part of my subject.

II. Manners and Modes

For sketches of manners, for the portrayal of bourgeois life and the fashion scene, the quickest and the cheapest technical means will evidently be the best. The more beauty the artist puts into it, the more valuable will the work be; but there is in the trivial things of life, in the daily changing of external things, a speed of movement that imposes upon the artist an equal speed of execution. The multi-coloured engravings of the eighteenth century are again enjoying the favour of current fashion, as I was saying just now; pastel, etching, aquatint have provided their successive quotas to this vast dictionary of modern life in libraries, in art collectors' portfolios and in the humblest shop windows. As soon as lithography was invented, it was quickly seen to be very suitable for this enormous task, so frivolous in appearance. We possess veritable national records in this class. The works of Gavarni and Daumier have been accurately described as complements to the Comédie humaine. Balzac himself, I feel sure, would not have been unwilling to adopt that idea, which is all the more accurate in proportion as the artist-portrayer of manners is a genius of mixed composition, in other words, a genius with a pronounced literary element. Observer, idler, philosopher, call him what you will, but, in order to define such an artist, you will surely in the end be brought to giving him an attributive adjective that you could not apply to a painter of things eternal, or at least things of a more permanent nature, of heroic or religious subjects. Sometimes he may be a poet; more often he comes close to the novelist or the moralist; he is the painter of the fleeting moment and of all that it suggests of the eternal. Every country, for its pleasure or its fame, has possessed a few men of that sort. In our own time, to Daumier, to Gavarni, the first names that come to mind, we may add Deveria, Maurin, Numa (all chroniclers of the Restoration's shady charms), Wattier, Tassaert, Eugène Lami, this last one almost English in his affection for aristocratic society, and even Trimolet and Traviès, the chroniclers of poverty and humble life.

III. An Artist, Man of the World, Man of Crowds, and Child

Today I want to talk to my readers about a singular man, whose originality is so powerful and clear-cut that it is self-sufficing, and does not bother to look for approval. None of his drawings is signed, if by signature we mean the few letters, which can be so easily forged, that compose a name, and that so many other artists grandly inscribe at the bottom of their most carefree sketches. But all his works are signed with his dazzling soul, and art-lovers who have seen and liked them will recognize them easily from the description I propose to give of them. M. C. G. [Monsieur Constantin Guys] loves mixing with the crowds, loves being incognito, and carries his originality to the point of modesty. M. Thackeray, who, as is well known, is very interested in all things to do with art, and who draws the illustrations for his own novels, one day spoke of M. G. in a London review, much to the irritation of the latter who regarded the matter as an outrage to his modesty. And again quite recently, when he heard that I was proposing to make an assessment of his mind and talent, he begged me, in a most peremptory manner, to suppress his name, and to discuss his works only as though they were the works of some anonymous person. I will humbly obey this odd request. The reader and I will proceed as though M. G. did not exist, and we will discuss his drawings and his water-colours, for which he professes a patrician's disdain, in the same way as would a group of scholars faced with the task of assessing the importance of a number of precious historical documents which chance has brought to light, and the author of which must for ever remain unknown. And even to reassure my conscience completely, let my readers assume that all the things I have to say about the artist's nature, so strangely and mysteriously dazzling, have been more or less accurately suggested by the works in question; pure poetic hypothesis, conjecture, or imaginative reconstructions.

M. G. is an old man. Jean-Jacques began writing, so they say, at the age of forty-two. Perhaps it was at about that age that M. G., obsessed by the world of images that filled his mind, plucked up courage to cast ink and colours on to a sheet of white paper. To be honest, he drew like a barbarian, like a child, angrily chiding his clumsy fingers and his disobedient tool. I have seen a large number of these early scribblings, and I admit that most of the people who know what they are talking about, or who claim to, could, without shame, have failed to discern the latent genius that dwelt in these obscure beginnings. Today, M. G., who has discovered unaided all the little tricks of the trade, and who has taught himself, without help or advice, has become a powerful master in his own way; of his early artlessness he has retained only what was needed to add an unexpected spice to his abundant gift. When he happens upon one of these efforts of his early manner, he tears it up or burns it, with a most amusing show of shame and indignation.

For ten whole years I wanted to make the acquaintance of M. G., who is by nature a great traveller and very cosmopolitan. I knew that he had for a long time been working for an English illustrated paper and that in it had appeared engravings from his travel sketches (Spain, Turkey, the Crimea). Since then I have seen a considerable mass of these on-the-spot drawings from life, and I have thus been able to 'read' a detailed and daily account, infinitely preferable to any other, of the Crimean campaign. The same paper had also published (without signature, as before) a large quantity of compositions by this artist from the new ballets and operas. When at last I ran him to ground I saw at once that I was not dealing exactly with an artist but rather with a man of the world. In this context, pray interpret the word 'artist' in a very narrow sense, and the expression 'man of the world' in a very broad one. By 'man of the world', I mean a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs; by 'artist', I mean a specialist, a man tied to his palette like a serf to the soil. M. G. does not like being called an artist. Is he not justified to a small extent? He takes an interest in everything the world over, he wants to know, understand, assess everything that happens on the surface of our spheroid. The artist moves little, or even not at all, in intellectual and political circles. If he lives in the Bréda quarter he knows nothing of what goes on in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. With two or three exceptions, which it is unnecessary to name, the majority of artists are, let us face it, very skilled brutes, mere manual labourers, village pub-talkers with the minds of country bumpkins. Their talk, inevitably enclosed within very narrow limits, quickly becomes a bore to the man of the world, to the spiritual citizen of the universe.

Thus to begin to understand M. G., the first thing to note is this: that curiosity may be considered the starting point of his genius.

Do you remember a picture (for indeed it is a picture!) written by the most powerful pen of this age and entitled The Man of the Crowd? Sitting in a café, and looking through the shop window, a convalescent is enjoying the sight of the passing crowd, and identifying himself in thought with all the thoughts that are moving around him. He has only recently come back from the shades of death and breathes in with delight all the spores and odours of life; as he has been on the point of forgetting everything, he remembers and passionately wants to remember everything. In the end he rushes out into the crowd in search of a man unknown to him whose face, which he had caught sight of, had in a flash fascinated him. Curiosity had become a compelling, irresistible passion.

Now imagine an artist perpetually in the spiritual condition of the convalescent, and you will have the key to the character of M. G.

But convalescence is like a return to childhood. The convalescent, like the child, enjoys to the highest degree the faculty of taking a lively interest in things, even the most trivial in appearance. Let us hark back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of our imaginations, to our youngest, our morning impressions, and we shall recognize that they were remarkably akin to the vividly coloured impressions that we received later on after a physical illness, provided that illness left our spiritual faculties pure and unimpaired. The child sees everything as a novelty; the child is always 'drunk'. Nothing is more like what we call inspiration than the joy the child feels in drinking in shape and colour. I will venture to go even further and declare that inspiration has some connection with congestion, that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less vigorous nervous impulse that reverberates in the cerebral cortex. The man of genius has strong nerves; those of the child are weak. In the one, reason has assumed an important role; in the other, sensibility occupies almost the whole being. But genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. To this deep and joyful curiosity must be attributed that stare, animal-like in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new, whatever it may be, face or landscape, light, gilding, colours, watered silk, enchantment of beauty, enhanced by the arts of dress. A friend of mine was telling me one day how, as a small boy, he used to be present when his father was dressing, and how he had always been filled with astonishment, mixed with delight, as he looked at the arm muscle, the colour tones of the skin tinged with rose and yellow, and the bluish network of the veins. The picture of the external world was already beginning to fill him with respect, and to take possession of his brain. Already the shape of things obsessed and possessed him. A precocious fate was showing the tip of its nose. His damnation was settled. Need I say that, today, the child is a famous painter.

I was asking you just now to think of M. G. as an eternal convalescent; to complete your idea of him, think of him also as a man-child, as a man possessing at every moment the genius of childhood, in other words a genius for whom no edge of life is blunted.

I told you that I was unwilling to call him a pure artist, and that he himself rejected this title, with a modesty tinged with aristocratic restraint. I would willingly call him a dandy, and for that I would have a sheaf of good reasons; for the word 'dandy' implies a quintessence of character and a subtle understanding of all the moral mechanisms of this world; but, from another aspect, the dandy aspires to cold detachment, and it is in this way that M. G., who is dominated, if ever anyone was, by an insatiable passion, that of seeing and feeling, parts company trenchantly with dandyism. Amabam amare, said St Augustine. 'I love passion, passionately,' M. G. might willingly echo. The dandy is blasé, or affects to be, as a matter of policy and class attitude, M. G. hates blasé people. Sophisticated minds will understand me when I say that he possesses that difficult art of being sincere without being ridiculous. I would willingly confer on him the title of philosopher, to which he has a right for more than one reason; but his excessive love of visible, tangible things, in their most plastic form, inspires him with a certain dislike of those things that go to make up the intangible kingdom of the metaphysician. Let us therefore reduce him to the status of the pure pictorial moralist, like La Bruyère.

The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird's, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes. The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find, just as the picture-lover lives in an enchanted world of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity. He, the lover of life, may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life. It is an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting. 'Any man,' M. G. once said, in one of those talks he rendered memorable by the intensity of his gaze, and by his eloquence of gesture, 'any man who is not weighed down with a sorrow so searching as to touch all his faculties, and who is bored in the midst of the crowd, is a fool! A fool! and I despise him!'

When, as he wakes up, M. G. opens his eyes and sees the sun beating vibrantly at his window-panes, he says to himself with remorse and regret: 'What an imperative command! What a fanfare of light! Light everywhere for several hours past! Light I have lost in sleep! and endless numbers of things bathed in light that I could have seen and have failed to!' And off he goes! And he watches the flow of life move by, majestic and dazzling. He admires the eternal beauty and the astonishing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained in the tumult of human liberty. He gazes at the landscape of the great city, landscapes of stone, now swathed in the mist, now struck in full face by the sun. He enjoys handsome equipages, proud horses, the spit and polish of the grooms, the skilful handling by the page boys, the smooth rhythmical gait of the women, the beauty of the children, full of the joy of life and proud as peacocks of their pretty clothes; in short, life universal. If in a shift of fashion, the cut of a dress has been slightly modified, if clusters of ribbons and curls have been dethroned by rosettes, if bonnets have widened and chignons have come down a little on the nape of the neck, if waist-lines have been raised and skirts become fuller, you may be sure that from a long way off his eagle's eye will have detected it. A regiment marches by, maybe on its way to the ends of the earth, filling the air of the boulevard with its martial airs, as light and lively as hope; and sure enough M. G. has already seen, inspected and analysed the weapons and the bearing of this whole body of troops. Harness, highlights, bands, determined mien, heavy and grim mustachios, all these details flood chaotically into him; and within a few minutes the poem that comes with it all is virtually composed. And then his soul will vibrate with the soul of the regiment, marching as though it were one living creature, proud image of joy and discipline!

But evening comes. The witching hour, the uncertain light, when the sky draws its curtains and the city lights go on. The gaslight stands out on the purple background of the setting sun. Honest men or crooked customers, wise or irresponsible, all are saying to themselves: 'The day is done at last!' Good men and bad turn their thoughts to pleasure, and each hurries to his favourite haunt to drink the cup of oblivion. M. G. will be the last to leave any place where the departing glories of daylight linger, where poetry echoes, life pulsates, music sounds; any place where a human passion offers a subject to his eye where natural man and conventional man reveal themselves in strange beauty, where the rays of the dying sun play on the fleeting pleasure of the 'depraved animal!' 'Well, there, to be sure, is a day well filled,' murmurs to himself a type of reader well-known to all of us; 'each one of us has surely enough genius to fill it in the same way'. No! few men have the gift of seeing; fewer still have the power to express themselves. And now, whilst others are sleeping, this man is leaning over his table, his steady gaze on a sheet of paper, exactly the same gaze as he directed just now at the things about him, brandishing his pencil, his pen, his brush, splashing water from the glass up to the ceiling, wiping his pen on his shirt, hurried, vigorous, active, as though he was afraid the images might escape him, quarrelsome though alone, and driving himself relentlessly on. And things seen are born again on the paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and better than beautiful, strange and endowed with an enthusiastic life, like the soul of their creator. The weird pageant has been distilled from nature. All the materials, stored higgledy-piggledy by memory, are classified, ordered, harmonized, and undergo that deliberate idealization, which is the product of a childlike perceptiveness, in other words a perceptiveness that is acute and magical by its very ingenuousness.

IV. Modernity

And so, walking or quickening his pace, he goes his way, for ever in search. In search of what? We may rest assured that this man, such as I have described him, this solitary mortal endowed with an active imagination, always roaming the great desert of men, has a nobler aim than that of the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call 'modernity', for want of a better term to express the idea in question. The aim for him is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory. If we cast our eye over our exhibitions of modern pictures, we shall be struck by the general tendency of our artists to clothe all manner of subjects in the dress of the past. Almost all of them use the fashions and the furnishings of the Renaissance, as David used Roman fashions and furnishings, but there is this difference, that David, having chosen subjects peculiarly Greek or Roman, could not do otherwise than present them in the style of antiquity, whereas the painters of today, choosing, as they do, subjects of a general nature, applicable to all ages, will insist on dressing them up in the fashion of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, or of the East. This is evidently sheer laziness; for it is much more convenient to state roundly that everything is hopelessly ugly in the dress of a period than to apply oneself to the task of extracting the mysterious beauty that may be hidden there, however small or light it may be. Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. There was a form of modernity for every painter of the past; the majority of the fine portraits that remain to us from former times are clothed in the dress of their own day. They are perfectly harmonious works because the dress, the hairstyle, and even the gesture, the expression and the smile (each age has its carriage, its expression and its smile) form a whole, full of vitality. You have no right to despise this transitory fleeting element, the metamorphoses of which are so frequent, nor to dispense with it. If you do, you inevitably fall into the emptiness of an abstract and indefinable beauty, like that of the one and only woman of the time before the Fall. If for the dress of the day, which is necessarily right, you substitute another, you are guilty of a piece of nonsense that only a fancydress ball imposed by fashion can excuse. Thus the goddesses, the nymphs, and sultanas of the eighteenth century are portraits in the spirit of their day.

No doubt it is an excellent discipline to study the old masters, in order to learn how to paint, but it can be no more than a superfluous exercise if your aim is to understand the beauty of the present day. The draperies of Rubens or Veronese will not teach you how to paint watered silk à l'antique, or satin à la reine, or any other fabric produced by our mills, supported by a swaying crinoline, or petticoats of starched muslin. The texture and grain are not the same as in the fabrics of old Venice, or those worn at the court of Catherine. We may add that the cut of the skirt and bodice is absolutely different, that the pleats are arranged into a new pattern, and finally that the gesture and carriage of the woman of today give her dress a vitality and a character that are not those of the woman of former ages. In short, in order that any form of modernity may be worthy of becoming antiquity, the mysterious beauty that human life unintentionally puts into it must have been extracted from it. It is this task that M. G. particularly addresses himself to.

I have said that every age has its own carriage, its expression, its gestures. This proposition may be easily verified in a large portrait gallery (the one at Versailles, for example). But it can be yet further extended. In a unity we call a nation, the professions, the social classes, the successive centuries, introduce variety not only in gestures and manners, but also in the general outlines of faces. Such and such a nose, mouth, forehead, will be standard for a given interval of time, the length of which I shall not claim to determine here, but which may certainly be a matter of calculation. Such ideas are not familiar enough to portrait painters; and the great weakness of M. Ingres, in particular, is the desire to impose on every type that sits for him a more or less complete process of improvement, in other words a despotic perfecting process, borrowed from the store of classical ideas.

In a matter such as this, a priori reasoning would be easy and even legitimate. The perpetual correlation between what is called the soul and what is called the body is a quite satisfactory explanation of how what is material or emanates from the spiritual reflects and will always reflect the spiritual force it derives from. If a painter, patient and scrupulous but with only inferior imaginative power, were commissioned to paint a courtesan of today, and, for this purpose, were to get his inspiration (to use the hallowed term) from a courtesan by Titian or Raphael, the odds are that his work would be fraudulent, ambiguous, and difficult to understand. The study of a masterpiece of that date and of that kind will not teach him the carriage, the gaze, the come-hitherishness, or the living representation of one of these creatures that the dictionary of fashion has, in rapid succession, pigeonholed under the coarse or light-hearted rubric of unchaste, kept women, Lorettes.

The same remark applies precisely to the study of the soldier, the dandy, and even animals, dogs or horses, and of all things that go to make up the external life of an age. Woe betide the man who goes to antiquity for the study of anything other than ideal art, logic and general method! By immersing himself too deeply in it, he will no longer have the present in his mind's eye; he throws away the value and the privileges afforded by circumstance; for nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility. The reader will readily understand that I could easily verify my assertions from innumerable objects other than women. What would you say, for example, of a marine painter (I take an extreme case) who, having to represent the sober and elegant beauty of a modern vessel, were to tire out his eyes in the study of the overloaded, twisted shapes, the monumental stern, of ships of bygone ages, and the complex sails and rigging of the sixteenth century? And what would you think of an artist you had commissioned to do the portrait of a thorough-bred, celebrated in the solemn annals of the turf, if he were to restrict his studies to museums, if he were to content himself with looking at equine studies of the past in the picture galleries, in Van Dyck, Bourguignon, or Van der Meulen?

M. G., guided by nature, tyrannized over by circumstance, has followed a quite different path. He began by looking at life, and only later did he contrive to learn how to express life. The result has been a striking originality, in which whatever traces of untutored simplicity may still remain take on the appearance of an additional proof of obedience to the impression, of a flattery of truth. For most of us, especially for businessmen, in whose eyes nature does not exist, unless it be in its strict utility relationship with their business interests, the fantastic reality of life becomes strangely blunted. M. G. registers it constantly; his memory and his eyes are full of it.

V. Mnemonic Art

The word 'barbarousness', which may have come too often from my pen, might lead some people to believe that I am alluding to a number of shapeless drawings that only the imagination of the viewer is capable of transforming into perfect things. This would be a serious misunderstanding of what I mean. I refer to a sort of inevitable, synthetic, childlike barbarousness, which can often still be seen in a perfect type of art (Mexican, Egyptian, or Ninevehite barbarousness) and derives from the need to see things big, to look at them particularly from the point of view of their effect as a whole. It is not superfluous to remark here that the accusation of barbarousness has often been made against all painters who have an eye for synthesis and abbreviation, M. Corot, for example, who begins by tracing the main lines of a landscape, its structure and features. Similarly, M. G., faithful interpreter of his own impressions, notes with instinctive vigour the culminating features or highlights of an object (they can be culminating or luminous from a dramatic point of view) or its main characteristics, sometimes even with a degree of exaggeration useful to human memory; and the imagination of the viewer, undergoing in its turn the influence of this imperious code, conjures up in clear outline the impression produced by objects on the mind of M. G. In this case, the viewer becomes the translator of a translation, which is always clear and always intoxicating.

There is a factor that adds greatly to the vitality of this pictorial record of everyday life. I refer to M. G.'s habit of work. He draws from memory, and not from the model, except in those cases (the Crimean War, for example) where there is an urgent need to take immediate, hurried notes and to establish the broad outlines of a subject. In fact all true draughtsmen draw from the image imprinted in their brain and not from nature. If the admirable sketches of Raphael, of Watteau and many others are quoted as examples to invalidate our contention, our reply is that these are indeed highly detailed notes, but mere notes they remain. When a true artist has reached the stage of the final execution of his work, the model would be more of an embarrassment to him than a help. It even happens that men like Daumier and M. G. who have been accustomed for years to using their memory, and filling it with images, find that, when confronted with a model and the multiplicity of detail this means, their main faculty is as though confused and paralysed.

Then begins a struggle between the determination to see everything, to forget nothing, and the faculty of memory, which has acquired the habit of registering in a flash the general tones and shape, the outline pattern. An artist with a perfect sense of form but particularly accustomed to the exercise of his memory and his imagination, then finds himself assailed, as it were, by a riot of details, all of them demanding justice, with the fury of a mob in love with absolute equality. Any form of justice is inevitably infringed; any harmony is destroyed, sacrificed; a multitude of trivialities are magnified; a multitude of little things become usurpers of attention. The more the artist pays impartial attention to detail, the greater does anarchy become. Whether he be short- or long-sighted, all sense of hierarchy or subordination disappears. This is an accident that often occurs in the works of one of our most fashionable painters, whose defects moreover are so well attuned to the defects of the crowd that they have greatly contributed to his popularity. The same sort of analogy may be sensed in the practice of the actor's art, that mysterious, profound art which in these days has fallen into the confusion of many forms of decadence. M. Frédérick-Lemaître builds up a role with the breadth and boldness of genius. Adorned as his acting is with brilliant detail, it nonetheless remains a unified sculptural composition. M. Bouffé builds his with the painstaking efforts of a myope or a bureaucrat. In him everything sparkles and crackles, but nothing strikes the eye, nothing claims a place in our memories.

Thus in M. G.'s execution two things stand out: the first is the absorbed intenseness of a resurrecting and evocative memory, a memory that says to every object: 'Lazarus, arise'; the second is a fire, an intoxication of pencil or brush, almost amounting to frenzy. This is the fear of not going fast enough, of letting the spectre escape before the synthesis has been extracted and taken possession of, the terrible fear that takes hold of all great artists and fills them with such an ardent desire to appropriate all means of expression, so that the commands of the mind may never be weakened by the hand's hesitation; so that, in the end, the ideal execution may become as unconscious, as flowing, as the process of digesting is for the brain of a healthy man after dinner. M. G. begins with a few light pencil touches, which scarcely do more than indicate the positions of the objects in space. The main planes are indicated next by a series of colour-washes, masses vaguely and lightly tinted at first, but worked over again later with applications of stronger colour. In the last stage, the outlines of objects are clearly traced with pencil and ink. Without having seen them, no one would guess the remarkable effects he can achieve by this so simple and almost elementary method. It has the incomparable advantage that, at almost any stage, each drawing seems to have reached a stage of completion satisfying enough to the viewer; you may call this a thumbnail sketch, but it is a perfect one. All the tone values are in harmony, and if he wants to work the tones up, they will always retain their relationship as they move towards the desired state of perfection. In this way he can work at up to twenty drawings at a time with a liveliness and joy charming to the eye and amusing even for him; the sketches pile up, one on top of the other, by tens, hundreds, by thousands. From time to time he runs through them, glancing at some, examining others, and then he chooses a few, to which he gives more intensity by giving greater depth to the shadow and touching up the highlights.

He attaches great importance to the backgrounds, which, whether strongly or lightly worked, are always of a quality and nature appropriate to the figures. The scale of tones and the general harmony are strictly observed, with a genius that derives more from instinct than from study. For M. G. possesses that mysterious talent of the colourist, by the light of nature, a veritable gift, which study can strengthen but which it cannot of itself, I believe, create. To sum it all up, our strange artist expresses both the gestures and attitudes, be they solemn or grotesque, of human beings and their luminous explosion in space.

VI. The Annals of War

Bulgaria, Turkey, the Crimea, Spain have all been a gorgeous feast for M. G.'s eyes, or rather for those of the imaginary artist we are agreed to call M. G.; for now and then it comes back to me that, to reassure his modesty, I promised to pretend he did not exist. I have looked through these archives of the Eastern War (battlefields strewn with the debris of death, heavy baggage trains, shipment of livestock and horses), scenes throbbing with life and interest, as though moulded on life itself, elements of a valuable form of picturesque, which many wellknown painters would have thoughtlessly neglected if they had found themselves in the same circumstances; amongst these, however, I would willingly make an exception of M. Horace Vernet, veritable journalist rather than true artist, with whom M. G., though a more delicate artist, has an evident relationship, assuming we want to think of him only as an archivist of life. No journal, I declare, no written record, no book could express so well this great epic of the Crimean War, in all its distressing detail and sinister breadth. The eye moves from the banks of the Danube to the shores of the Bosphorus, from Cape Kerson to the plain of Balaclava or the fields of Inkerman, and on to the English, French, Turkish and Piedmontese encampments, from the streets of Constantinople to the hospitals and to a variety of solemn religious and military ceremonies.

One of the drawings that sticks in my memory more than others is the Consécration d'un terrain funèbre à Scutari par l'évêque de Gibraltar. The picturesque character of the scene, which arises from the contrast between the surrounding oriental countryside and the western attitudes and uniforms of the participants, is brought out strikingly, and in a manner that gives food for thought and reverie. The ordinary soldiers and officers alike, all have that ineradicable air of 'gentlemen', that determined and reserved air they carry with them to the end of the earth, whether it be in the garrison towns of Cape Colony or the settlements in India; the Anglican clergy put one vaguely in mind of ushers or stockbrokers in cap and bands for the occasion.

And here in another drawing is the residence of Omar Pasha at Shumla. Turkish hospitality, pipes and coffee; all the visitors are seated on divans, sucking at pipes as long as blow-pipes, with the bowls at their feet. And here, Kurdes à Scutari depicts a weird-looking soldiery whose aspect suggests an invasion of barbarian hordes; and, no less strange, in another sketch are bashi-bazouks, with their European officers, Hungarian or Polish, veritable dandies in feature these latter, contrasting oddly with the curiously oriental character of their men.

One magnificent drawing that caught my eye is of a single standing figure; the man is stout and vigorous, his expression all at once thoughtful, carefree and bold; he is wearing high boots, which come up above his knees; his uniform is hidden under a heavy, ample topcoat, tightly buttoned up; his gaze, through his cigar smoke, is directed towards the threatening misty horizon; he has been wounded in the arm, and is wearing a sling. At the foot, a scribbled pencil note states: Canrobert on the battlefield of Inkerman. Taken on the spot.

And who might this horseman be? With white moustaches so vigorously drawn, with head erect, he seems to be scenting the terrible poetry of the battlefield, whilst his horse, sniffing the ground, picks his way between the heaps of corpses, feet upturned, faces contorted, in strange attitudes. At the bottom of the drawing, in a corner, are these words: Myself at Inkerman.

And who is this but M. Baraguay-d'Hilliers, with the Seraskier, inspecting the artillery at Béchichtash. Rarely have I seen a better likeness in the portrait of a soldier, done by a bolder or livelier hand.

Hard by, I caught sight of a name of sinister reputation since our Syrian disasters: Achmet Pasha, Commander-in-Chief, standing in front of his tent, surrounded by his staff, receives the European officers. Despite the generous extent of his Turkish paunch, Achmet-Pasha has, both in his bearing and in his face, the noble aristocratic air that usually belongs to the master races.

The battle of Balaclava figures several times, from different angles, in this interesting collection. There, amongst the most striking, is the historic cavalry charge sung by the heroic clarion of Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate: a mass of cavalry are shown thundering at speed towards the horizon, between the rolling clouds of gunsmoke. The background is shut in by a line of green hills.

From time to time a religious subject provides a welcome change to the viewer's gaze, saddened by this chaos of gunpowder and restless carnage. In the midst of the British troops of all arms, amongst whom the picturesque uniform of the kilted Scots is conspicuous, an Anglican chaplain holds the Sunday service; three drums, the topmost resting on the other two, serve as a lectern.

It is difficult in all conscience for the mere pen to translate this vast and complex poem, composed of a thousand sketches, and to express the feelings of intoxication arising from all the picturesque details - often distressing but never maudlin - which are collected in these few hundred pages. The stained and torn condition of these is eloquent in its own way of the chaos and tumult in the midst of which the artist noted down his memories of each day. As evening came the mail would carry away towards London M. G.'s notes and drawings, and, often enough, he would thus entrust to the post ten or more quickly executed thumbnail sketches, done on thin paper, which the engravers and subscribers to the magazine were eagerly awaiting.

Sometimes ambulances are depicted, where the very atmosphere seems sick, gloomy and heavy, every bed a bed of pain; another time, it is the hospital at Pera, with two sisters of mercy, tall, pale and straight like the figures of Lesueur, talking, I notice, to an informally dressed visitor quaintly designated as 'my humble self'. Or again, on rough, winding paths strewn with the debris of a past engagement, a long string of pack animals - mules, donkeys, or horses - moves slowly, carrying in rough panniers, balanced on either flank, pale and inert wounded. Across vast expanses of snow come camels, with majestic dewlaps and heads held high. Led by Tartars, they are hauling provisions and munitions of all kinds; a whole warlike world appears, full of life and silent activity, encampments, bazaars, where samples of every type of supplies are displayed, like barbarian cities, conjured up for the circumstances. Amidst the huts, along the stony or snowy roads, in the defiles, can be seen the uniforms of several countries, more or less worn and torn by war, or altered in appearance by lumpy fur coats or heavy boots.

How sad it is to think that this album, which has now been scattered in a variety of places, and the precious pages of which have been kept by the engravers commissioned to reproduce them, or by the editors of the Illustrated London News, should not have been submitted to the Emperor. He, I am sure, would have been glad to see (not without emotion) this record of his soldiers, their day-in, day-out doings, expressed with minute care, from the most brilliant feats of arms to the most trivial occupations of life, by this soldier-artist's sure and intelligent hand.

VII. Pomp and Ceremony

Turkey has also contributed some admirable subjects to our dear G.: the festivals of Bairam, profound and rippling splendours, in the background of which appears, like a pallid sun, the ineradicable boredom of the late Sultan; ranged to the left of the sovereign stand all the officers of the civil order; to his right, all those of the military order, the chief of them being Said Pasha, Sultan of Egypt, who was at Constantinople at the time; processions, moving with solemn pomp to the little mosque near the palace, and in these throngs are to be seen a number of Turkish functionaries, veritable caricatures of decadence, crushing their splendid horses under the weight of their fantastic obesity; the heavy, massive carriages, not unlike coaches from the days of Louis XIV, gilded and otherwise adorned with oriental fantasy, from the inside of which curious feminine glances dart from time to time, through the narrow interval left to the eyes by muslin veils worn close to the face; the frenzied dances of mountebanks of the 'third sex' (never has Balzac's humorous phrase been more applicable than in the present case, for beneath these throbbing unsteady lights, under the generous waving folds of the garments, under the heavy make-up of cheeks, eyes and eyebrows, in all these hysterical and convulsive gestures, in the long hair down to the hips, you would find it difficult, not to say impossible, to guess that virility was there): and finally the women of easy virtue (if one can speak in such terms, where the Levant is concerned), generally provided by Hungarian, Walachian, Jewish, Polish, Greek and Armenian women; for under a despotic government, it is the oppressed races, and especially those amongst them that suffer the greatest privations, that provide the most recruits to prostitution. Amongst these women some have kept their national costumes, embroidered bodices, short sleeves, loosely hanging scarves, baggy trousers, Turkish slippers with upturned points, striped or spangled muslins, and all the tinsel of their homeland; others, by far the more numerous, have adopted the principal mark of civilization, which, for a woman, is invariably the crinoline, not, however, without introducing in their attire a faint reminiscence of the Levant, with the result that they have an air of Parisian women attempting to disguise themselves.

M. G. excels at depicting all the display of official ceremonies, the pomp and circumstance of national occasions, not coldly and didactically, like painters who see only lucrative drudgery in commissions of this kind, but with all the ardour of a man in love with space, perspective, great expanses or explosions of light, hanging like teardrops or sparkling diamonds on the asperities of the uniform or court dresses. La fête commémorative de l'indépendance dans la cathédrale d'Athènes affords an interesting example of this talent. All the little figures, each of them so well placed, give more depth to the space that contains them. The cathedral is vast and festooned with solemn draperies. King Otto and the Queen, standing on a dais, are depicted in the traditional dress, which they are wearing with marvellous ease, as though to bear witness to the sincerity of their adoption, and to the most refined Hellenic patriotism. The King is as tightly belted as the smartest palikar, and his kilt flares out with all the exaggeration of national dandyism. Opposite the royal couple, the patriarch is stepping towards them, an old man with bowed shoulders, flowing white beard, little eyes behind green glasses, his whole bearing betraying the most consummate oriental impassivity. All the figures that people this composition are portraits; one of the most interesting, on account of the oddness of the features, which are anything but Hellenic, is that of a German woman standing next to the Queen and attached to her service.

In all M. G.'s series of drawings, a figure often to be found is the French Emperor, whose face the artist has succeeded in reducing to an infallible shorthand sketch without losing the likeness, which he executes with all the sureness of a signature flourish. Now the Emperor, at full gallop, is holding a review, accompanied by officers with easily recognizable features, or by foreign potentates, European, Asiatic, or African, to whom he is doing, as it were, the honours of Paris. Sometimes he is shown motionless on his horse, whose hooves are as firmly on the ground as the four legs of a table, with the Empress on his left in riding habit, and on his right, the little Prince Imperial, in a busby, and holding himself militarily erect on a little rough-haired horse, like the ponies English artists love to show dashing about in their landscapes; at other times, cascades of light and dust enfold him as he rides in the alleys of the Bois de Boulogne; at others again, we see him greeted by the acclamations of the crowds as he moves amongst them in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. One of these water-colours in particular quite dazzled me by its magical quality: the Empress, composed and relaxed, is seen at the front of a richly and majestically decorated box at the theatre; the Emperor is leaning forward slightly, as though to get a better view of the theatre; below, two guardsmen stand erect in military, almost religious immobility, their brilliant uniforms sparkling with the reflections of the light from the footlights. Behind this band of light in the ideal atmosphere of the stage, the actors are singing, declaiming and gesticulating harmoniously; on the near side, there is an abyss of suffused light and a circular space full of human faces at every tier: the chandelier and the audience.

The mob demonstrations, the clubs, the solemn occasions of 1848 also provided M. G. with subjects for a series of scenes, most of which have been engraved for the Illustrated London News. A few years ago, after a sojourn in Spain, which was very fruitful for his genius, he compiled an album of the same kind, of which I have seen only a few fragments. The carelessness with which he gives away or lends his drawings often exposes him to irreparable losses.

VIII. The Soldier

To define once more the kind of subject this artist likes best, let us call it the pomp of life, as it is displayed in the capitals of the civilized world, the pageant of military life, of high life, of loose life. Our eye-witness is always punctually at his observation post, wherever flow the deep and impetuous desires, the great rivers of the human heart, war, love, gaming; wherever the festivities and figments which are the external form of these great elements of happiness and sorrow are in full swing. But the artist shows a very marked predilection for military life, for the soldier, and I think that this love of his derives, not only from the virtues and qualities that inevitably flow from the warrior's soul into his bearing and his face, but also from the showy apparel his profession clothes him in. M. Paul de Molènes has written a few pages, as delightful to read as they are full of good sense, on military coquetry and on the moral significance to be drawn from those dazzling costumes in which all governments like dressing their troops. M. G. would willingly sign these pages.

We have already spoken of the idiom of beauty peculiar to every age, and we have noted that every century had, so to speak, its own characteristic grace. The same observation may be applied to the professions; each one draws its external beauty from the moral laws that govern it. In some, this type of beauty will be marked by energy, and in others it will bear the visible signs of idleness. It is, as it were, the emblem of character, the stamp of fate. The soldier considered in general has his type of beauty, just as the dandy and the woman of the town have theirs, and each has its own distinctive quality. The reader will accept it as natural that I should ignore those professions where, as a result of a single form of violent exercise, muscles become distorted and the face is marked by servitude. Accustomed as he is to surprises, the soldier does not easily lose his composure. Thus, in this case, beauty will consist of a carefree, martial air, a strange mixture of calm and boldness; it is a form of beauty that comes from the need to be ready to die at any moment. But the face of the ideal military man must be stamped with a great air of simplicity; for living as they do in a community, like monks and schoolboys, accustomed as they are to unload the daily concern of living on to a remote, paternalist organization, soldiers are, in many matters, as simple as children; and like children, once duty has been done, they are easy to amuse, and given to boisterous forms of fun. I do not think I am exaggerating when I maintain that all these moral considerations spring naturally from the sketches and water-colours of M. G. Not a single military type is missing, and all of them have been caught by the artist with a kind of enthusiastic joy: the old infantry officer, of the sad countenance, distressing his horse by his obesity; the pampered staff officer, wasp-waisted and bending forward over ladies' chairs without bashfulness, with affected movements of the shoulders, and, seen from the rear, reminiscent of some slender and elegant insect; the zouave and the rifleman, whose whole bearing suggests outstanding audacity, self-reliance and, as it were, a more than ordinary sense of personal responsibility; and the free and easy manner, the mercurial gaiety of the light cavalry; the vaguely professorial and academic features of the technical arms, like the gunners and the sappers, often confirmed by the unwarlike apparatus of spectacles: none of these models, none of these nuances is neglected, and all of them are summed up, defined, with the same love and wit.

I have in front of me, as I write, one of these drawings; its subject, which conveys a general impression of heroism, is the head of an infantry column; maybe these men are back from Italy and have halted on the boulevards, basking in the enthusiasm of the crowds; maybe they have just accomplished long marches on the roads of Lombardy; I do not know, but what is dearly visible, what comes across fully, is the steadfast audacious character, even in repose, of all these sun-tanned, weather-beaten faces.

This is without a doubt the uniform expression produced by discipline, sufferings undergone together, the resigned air of courage, tempered by long periods of exhausting strain. Trousers turned up and tucked into gaiters, great-coats tarnished by dust and vaguely discoloured, the whole equipment in fact has itself taken on the indestructible appearance of beings that have returned from afar, and have experienced strange adventures. It really is as though these men were more solidly screwed on to their hips, more firmly planted on their feet, more self-assured than ordinary mortals. If Charlet, who was always on the look-out for just this kind of beauty, and who found it often enough, had seen this drawing, he would have been greatly impressed by it.

IX. The Dandy

The wealthy man, who, blasé though he may be, has no occupation in life but to chase along the highway of happiness, the man nurtured in luxury, and habituated from early youth to being obeyed by others, the man, finally, who has no profession other than elegance, is bound at all times to have a facial expression of a very special kind. Dandyism is an ill-defined social attitude as strange as duelling; it goes back a long way, since Caesar, Catilina, Alcibiades provide us with brilliant examples of it; it is very widespread, since Chateaubriand found examples of it in the forests and on the lake-sides of the New World. Dandyism, which is an institution outside the law, has a rigorous code of laws that all its subjects are strictly bound by, however ardent and independent their individual characters may be.

The English novelists, more than others, have cultivated the 'high life' type of novel, and their French counterparts who, like M. de Custine, have tried to specialize in love novels have very wisely taken care to endow their characters with purses long enough for them to indulge without hesitation their slightest whims; and they freed them from any profession. These beings have no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking. Thus they possess, to their hearts' content, and to a vast degree, both time and money, without which fantasy, reduced to the state of ephemeral reverie, can scarcely be translated into action. It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man, or the accomplishment of a conjugal duty. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardour and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.

If I speak of love in the context of dandyism, the reason is that love is the natural occupation of men of leisure. But the dandy does not consider love as a special aim in life. If I have mentioned money, the reason is that money is indispensable to those who make an exclusive cult of their passions, but the dandy does not aspire to wealth as an object in itself; an open bank credit could suit him just as well; he leaves that squalid passion to vulgar mortals. Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind. Thus, in his eyes, enamoured as he is above all of distinction, perfection in dress consists in absolute simplicity, which is, indeed, the best way of being distinguished. What then can this passion be, which has crystallized into a doctrine, and has formed a number of outstanding devotees, this unwritten code that has moulded so proud a brotherhood? It is, above all, the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions. It is a kind of cult of the ego which can still survive the pursuit of that form of happiness to be found in others, in woman for example; which can even survive what are called illusions. It is the pleasure of causing surprise in others, and the proud satisfaction of never showing any oneself. A dandy may be blasé, he may even suffer pain, but in the latter case he will keep smiling, like the Spartan under the bite of the fox.

Clearly, then, dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism, but a dandy can never be a vulgar man. If he were to commit a crime, he might perhaps be socially damned, but if the crime came from some trivial cause, the disgrace would be irreparable. Let the reader not be shocked by this mixture of the grave and the gay; let him rather reflect that there is a sort of grandeur in all follies, a driving power in every sort of excess. A strange form of spirituality indeed! For those who are its high priests and its victims at one and the same time, all the complicated material conditions they subject themselves to, from the most flawless dress at any time of day or night to the most risky sporting feats, are no more than a series of gymnastic exercises suitable to strengthen the will and school the soul. Indeed I was not far wrong when I compared dandyism to a kind of religion. The most rigorous monastic rule, the inexorable commands of the Old Man of the Mountain, who enjoined suicide on his intoxicated disciples, were not more despotic or more slavishly obeyed than this doctrine of elegance and originality, which, like the others, imposes upon its ambitious and humble sectaries, men as often as not full of spirit, passion, courage, controlled energy, the terrible precept: Perinde ac cadaver! [as a corpse].

Fastidious, unbelievables, beaux, lions or dandies: whichever label these men claim for themselves, one and all stem from the same origin, all share the same characteristic of opposition and revolt; all are representatives of what is best in human pride, of that need, which is too rare in the modern generation, to combat and destroy triviality. That is the source, in your dandy, of that haughty, patrician attitude, aggressive even in its coldness. Dandyism appears especially in those periods of transition when democracy has not yet become all-powerful, and when aristocracy is only partially weakened and discredited. In the confusion of such times, a certain number of men, disenchanted and leisured 'outsiders', but all of them richly endowed with native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to break down because established on the most precious, the most indestructible faculties, on the divine gifts that neither work nor money can give. Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages; and the sort of dandy discovered by the traveller in Northern America in no sense invalidates this idea; for there is no valid reason why we should not believe that the tribes we call savage are not the remnants of great civilizations of the past. Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons. Here in France, dandies are becoming rarer and rarer, whereas amongst our neighbours in England the state of society and the constitution (the true constitution, the one that is expressed in social habits) will, for a long time yet, leave room for the heirs of Sheridan, Brummell and Byron, always assuming that men worthy of them come forward.

What to the reader may have seemed a digression is not one in fact. The moral reflections and musings that arise from the drawings of an artist are in many cases the best interpretation that the critic can make of them; the notions they suggest are part of an underlying idea, and, by revealing them in turn, we may uncover the root idea itself. Need I say that when M. G. commits one of his dandies to paper, he always gives him his historical character, we might almost say his legendary character, were it not that we are dealing with our own day and with things that are generally held to be light-hearted? For here we surely have that ease of bearing, that sureness of manner, that simplicity in the habit of command, that way of wearing a frock-coat or controlling a horse, that calmness revealing strength in every circumstance, that convince us, when our eye does pick out one of those privileged beings, in whom the attractive and the formidable mingle so mysteriously: 'There goes a rich man perhaps, but quite certainly an unemployed Hercules.'

The specific beauty of the dandy consists particularly in that cold exterior resulting from the unshakeable determination to remain unmoved; one is reminded of a latent fire, whose existence is merely suspected, and which, if it wanted to, but it does not, could burst forth in all its brightness. All that is expressed to perfection in these illustrations.

X. Woman

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend; that awe-inspiring being, incommunicable like God (with this difference that the infinite does not reveal itself because it would blind and crush the finite, whereas the being we are speaking about is incommunicable only, perhaps, because having nothing to communicate); that being in whom Joseph de Maistre saw a beautiful animal, whose charm brightens and facilitates the serious game of politics; for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general and for M. G. in particular, only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star, that presides over all the conceptions of the male brain; she is like the shimmer of all graces of nature, condensed into one being; she is the object of the most intense admiration and interest that the spectacle of life can offer to man's contemplation. She is a kind of idol, empty-headed perhaps, but dazzling, enchanting, an idol that holds men's destinies and wills in thrall to her glances. She is not, I repeat, an animal whose limbs, correctly assembled, provide a perfect example of harmony; nor is she even that type of pure beauty which might be imagined by a sculptor, in his moments of most austere meditation; not even that would suffice to explain her mysterious and complex spellbinding power. Neither Winckelmann nor Raphael can help us in this context; and I am sure that M. G., in spite of the breadth of his intelligence (be it said without affront to him), would turn away from a piece of ancient statuary if, by looking at it, he were to lose the opportunity of enjoying a portrait by Reynolds or Lawrence. All the things that adorn woman, all the things that go to enhance her beauty, are part of herself; and the artists who have made a special study of this enigmatic being are just as enchanted by the whole mundus muliebris [world of women] as by woman herself. Woman is doubtless a light, a glance, an invitation to happiness, sometimes a spoken word; but above all, she is a harmonious whole, not only in her carriage and in the movement of her limbs, but also in the muslins and the gauzes, in the vast and iridescent clouds of draperies in which she envelops herself, and which are, so to speak, the attributes and the pedestal of her divinity; in the metal and precious stones that serpentine round her arms and neck, that add their sparkle to the fire of her eyes, or whisper softly at her ears. When he describes the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, what poet would dare to distinguish between her and her apparel? Show me the man who, in the street, at the theatre, or in the Bois, has not enjoyed, in a wholly detached way, the sight of a beautifully composed attire, and has not carried away with him an image inseparable from the beauty of the woman wearing it, thus making of the two, the woman and the dress, an indivisible whole. This seems to me the moment to come back to certain questions relating to fashion and adornment, which I only briefly touched on at the beginning of this study, and to vindicate the art of dress against the inept slanders heaped upon it by certain highly equivocal nature-lovers.

XI. In Praise of Make-Up

I know a song so valueless and futile that I scarcely dare quote from it in a work with some claims to being serious; but it expresses very aptly, in vaudeville style, the aesthetic notions of people not given to thinking. 'Nature embellishes beauty.' It may be presumed that the 'poet', had he been able to write his own language properly, would have said: 'Simplicity embellishes beauty', which is tantamount to this truth of a wholly unexpected kind: 'Nothing embellishes what is.'

Most wrong ideas about beauty derive from the false notion the eighteenth century had about ethics. In those days, Nature was taken as a basis, source and prototype of all possible forms of good and beauty. The rejection of original sin is in no small measure responsible for the general blindness of those days. If, however, we are prepared merely to consult the facts that stare us in the face, the experience of all ages, and the Gazette des Tribunaux, we can see at once that natures teaches nothing or nearly nothing; in other words, it compels man to sleep, drink, eat and to protect himself as best he can against the inclemencies of the weather. It is nature too that drives man to kill his fellow-man, to eat him, to imprison and torture him; for as soon as we move from the order of necessities and needs to that of luxury and pleasures, we see that nature can do nothing but counsel crime. It is this so-called infallible nature that has produced parricide and cannibalism, and a thousand other abominations, which modesty and nice feeling alike prevent our mentioning. It is philosophy (I am referring to the right kind), it is religion that enjoins upon us to succour our poor and enfeebled parents. Nature (which is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest) tells us to knock them on the head. Review, analyse everything that is natural, all the actions and desires of absolutely natural man: you will find nothing that is not horrible. Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. Crime, which the human animal took a fancy to in his mother's womb, is by origin natural. Virtue, on the other hand, is artificial, supernatural, since in every age and nation gods and prophets have been necessary to teach it to bestialized humanity, and since man by himself would have been powerless to discover it. Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art. All I have said about nature, as a bad counsellor in matters of ethics, and about reason, as the true power of redemption and reform, can be transferred to the order of beauty. Thus I am led to regard adornment as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul. The races that our confused and perverted civilization so glibly calls savage, with a quite laughable pride and fatuity, appreciate, just as children do, the high spiritual quality of dress. The savage and the infant show their distaste for the real by their naive delight in bright feathers of different colours, in shimmering fabrics, in the superlative majesty of artificial shapes, thus unconsciously proving the immateriality of their souls. Woe to him who, like Louis XV (who far from being the product of a true civilization was that of a recurrence of barbarism), drives depravity to the point of appreciating nothing but nature unadorned. 〔1〕

Fashion must therefore be thought of as a symptom of the taste for the ideal that floats on the surface in the human brain, above all the coarse, earthy and disgusting things that life according to nature accumulates, as a sublime distortion of nature, or rather as a permanent and constantly renewed effort to reform nature. For this reason, it has been judiciously observed (though without discovering the cause) that all fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind. But, if we want to enjoy fashions thoroughly, we must not look upon them as dead things; we might as well admire a lot of old clothes hung up, limp and inert, like the skin of St Bartholomew, in the cupboard of a second-hand-clothes dealer. They must be pictured as full of the life and vitality of the beautiful women who wore them. Only in that way can we give them meaning and value. If therefore the aphorism 'All fashions are charming' offends you as being too absolute, say - and then you can be sure of making no mistake - all were legitimately charming in their day.

Woman is well within her rights, we may even say she carries out a kind of duty, in devoting herself to the task of fostering a magic and supernatural aura about her appearance; she must create a sense of surprise, she must fascinate; idol that she is, she must adorn herself, to be adored. It follows, she must borrow, from all the arts, the means of rising above nature, in order the better to conquer the hearts and impress the minds of men. It matters very little that the ruse and the artifice be known of all, if their success is certain, and the effect always irresistible. These are the kind of reflections that lead the philosopher-artist to justify readily all the means employed by women, over the centuries, to consolidate and, so to speak, divinize their fragile beauty. Any enumeration would have to include countless details; but, to limit ourselves to what in our day is commonly called make-up, who can fail to see that the use of rice powder, so fatuously anathematized by innocent philosophers, has as its purpose and result to hide all the blemishes that nature has so outrageously scattered over the complexion, and to create an abstract unity of texture and colour in the skin, which unity, like the one produced by tights, immediately approximates the human being to a statue, in other words to a divine or superior being? As for black pencil for eye effects, and rouge for heightening the colour of the upper part of the cheek, although their use comes from the same principle, the need to surpass nature, the result is destined to satisfy a quite opposite need. Red and black represent life, a supernatural, excessive life; black rings round the eyes give them a deeper and stranger look, a more decisive appearance of a window open on the infinite; the rouge which heightens the glow of cheek-bones confers still greater brightness on the pupils, and gives to a lovely woman's face the mysterious passion of a priestess.

Thus, if I have been properly understood, painting the face is not to be used with the vulgar, unavowable intention of imitating the fair face of nature, or competing with youth. It has, moreover, been observed that artifice does not embellish ugliness, and can only serve beauty. Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature? Make-up has no need of concealment, no need to avoid discovery; on the contrary, it can go in for display, if not with affectation, at least with a sort of ingenuousness.

I will readily allow people whose ponderous gravity prevents their looking for beauty in its very minutest manifestations to laugh at my reflections, and to condemn their childish solemnity; the austere judgements of such folk worry me not at all; I am content to appeal to the true artists, and to women who have received at birth a spark of that sacred fire they would feign use to light up their whole being.

XII. Women: Honest Ones, and Others

Thus M. G., having undertaken the task of seeking and explaining beauty in modernity, enjoys depicting women in all their finery, their beauty enhanced by every kind of artifice, regardless of what social class they belong to. Moreover, in the whole of his works, just as in the throng and bustle of human life itself, the differences of class and breeding, whatever may be the apparatus of luxury used by the individual, are immediately apparent to the eye of the spectator.

At one moment we see, bathed in the diffused light of the auditorium, a group of young women of the highest social circles, the brightness reflected in their eyes, in their jewellery and on their shoulders, framed in their boxes, resplendent as portraits. Some of them are grave and serious, others fair and feather-brained. Some display their precocious charms with aristocratic nonchalance, others, in all innocence, their boyish busts. All are biting their fans, and have a far-away look in their eyes, or a fixed stare; their postures are theatrical and solemn, like the play or opera they are pretending to listen to.

Another time we see smartly dressed families strolling along the paths of the public gardens, the wives without a care in the world, leaning on the arms of their husbands, whose solid contented air betrays the self-made man, full of money and self-satisfaction. Here the general air of wealth takes the place of haughty distinction. Little girls with match-stick arms and ballooning skirts, looking like little women by their gestures and appearance, are skipping, playing with hoops or pretending to be grown-ups on a visit, performing in the open air the social comedy their parents perform at home.

Or again, we are shown a lower level of society, where chits of actresses from the suburban theatres, proud as peacocks to appear at last in the glare of the footlights, slim, frail, scarcely grown-up, are shaking down, over their virginal, sickly bodies, absurd garments which belong to no period, but are the joy of their owners.

Or, at a café door, we see, leaning against the broad windows lit from without and within, one of those lounging halfwits; his elegance is the work of his tailor, and the distinguished cut of his jib, that of his hairdresser. Beside him, her feet resting on the indispensable footstool, sits his mistress, a great cow of a woman, in whom almost nothing is lacking (but that 'almost nothing' meaning almost everything, in a word: distinction) to make her look like a high-born lady. Like her pretty boyfriend, she has, filling the whole orifice of her little mouth, an outsize cigar. Neither of these two beings has a thought in his head. Can one even be sure they are looking at anything - unless, like Narcissuses of fat-headedness, they are contemplating the crowd, as though it were a river, offering them their own image. In reality they exist much more for the joy of the observer than for their own.

And now we get a glimpse of the amusement halls, your Valentinos, your Casinos, your Prados (the Tivolis, the Idalias, the Follies, the Paphoses of former days), glory-holes with their galleries full of light and hubbub, where the idle, gilded youth can give free rein to their animal spirits. Women, who have exaggerated the latest fashion to the point where its grace of line is spoilt, are ostentatiously sweeping the polished floors with their trains and the points of their shawls, as they come and go, pass and repass, wide-eyed like animals, apparently seeing nothing but in fact observing everything.

Against a background of light as from the infernal regions or of the aurora borealis, red, orange, sulphurous, pink (a pink suggesting a notion of ecstasy in frivolity), sometimes violet (that colour, like dying embers behind a blue curtain, so beloved of canonesses), against such magical backgrounds, with diversified firework effects, we are shown the varied image of the shadier type of beauty, now majestic, now frolicsome, now slim, thin even, now cyclopean, now doll-like and sparkling, now heavy and statuesque. This shady type of beauty either displays an alluring and barbaric form of elegance of her own invention, or she apes, more or less successfully, the simplicity current in higher circles. She moves towards us, glides, dances, sways as though by the weight of her embroidered petticoats, acting as both pendulum and pedestal to her; her eyes flash from under her hat like a portrait in its frame. She is a perfect image of savagery in the midst of civilization. She has a kind of beauty, which comes to her from sin; always lacking spirituality, but at times tinged with fatigue masquerading as melancholy. Her eyes are cast towards the horizon, like a beast of prey: the same wildness, the same indolent detachment, sometimes the same riveted attention. She is a gipsy type, dwelling on the fringes of regular society; the triviality which is the substance of her life of trickery and struggle inevitably betrays itself beneath the surface finery. To her may well be applied the words of the inimitable master La Bruyère: 'Some women have an artificial nobility, which is due to the way they move their eyes or hold their heads, or their manner of walking; and it goes no deeper...'

These reflections about the courtesan may, to a certain extent, be applied to the actress; for she too is a creature of show, an object of public pleasure. But in this case the conquest and the prey are of a nobler, more spiritual kind. The aim is to win public favour, not only by pure physical beauty, but also by talents of the rarest order. If, on the one hand, the actress comes close to the courtesan, on the other she reaches up to the poet. Let us not forget that, apart from natural beauty and even artificial beauty, all beings have the stamp of their trade, a characteristic which may, on the physical level, express itself as ugliness, but also as a kind of professional beauty.

In this extensive gallery of London and Paris life, we meet with the different types of unattached woman, of the woman in revolt, at every level: first the woman of the town in the first flower of her beauty, cultivating, as best she can, patrician airs, proud both of her youth and of her luxury, which expresses such genius and soul as she possesses; we see her delicately holding with two fingers a broad flounce of the satin, the silk or the velvet that floats about her, and showing off her pointed foot, in a shoe whose excessive ornateness would be enough to reveal her for what she is, even without the rather showy emphasis of her dress. Down the ladder a few rungs, and we come upon the slaves confined in those hovels, often enough decorated like cafés; unfortunate creatures these, subjected to the most avaricious tutelage, with nothing they can call their own, not even the eccentric adornments that act as condiment to their beauty. Amongst these, some, in whom an innocent yet monstrous sort of fatuity is only too apparent, carry in their faces and in their eyes, which look you brazenly in the face, the evident joy of being alive (in truth, one wonders why). Sometimes they effortlessly adopt poses, both provocative and dignified, that would be the joy of the most fastidious sculptor, if only the sculptor of today had the courage and the wit to seize hold of nobility everywhere, even in the mire; at others, they show themselves in prostrate attitudes of despairing boredom, or flaunt the indolent postures of café life, with masculine effrontery, and smoking cigarettes to pass away the hours with resigned, oriental fatalism; there they lie, sprawling on sofas, skirts ballooning to front and back double-fanwise, or they balance themselves precariously on stools or chairs; fat, dejected, empty-headed, absurd, their eyes glazed with brandy, and their obstinacy written across their rounded foreheads. We have reached the bottom step of the spiral to find the foemina simplex of the Latin satirist. Nor shall we fail, at some time, to discern through the drink and smoke-laden atmosphere, here the emaciated, feverish cheeks of the consumptive, there the curves of adiposity, that hideous form of health born of sloth. In this foggy chaos, bathed in golden light, undreamed of by indigent chastity, gruesome nymphs and living dolls, whose childlike eyes have sinister flashes, move and contort themselves; whilst behind a counter laden with liqueur bottles lolls a fat shrew, her hair tied up in a dirty silk scarf, which throws on the wall the shadow of its satanic points, thus convincing us that everything dedicated to Evil must be condemned to have horns.

In truth, my purpose in spreading out before the reader's eyes scenes such as these is neither to please nor to scandalize him; in either case, that would have been to show him scant respect. What gives these scenes value and a kind of sanctity is the innumerable thoughts they give rise to, usually austere and gloomy. But if, by chance, some ill-advised person were to seek an opportunity to satisfy an unhealthy curiosity in these works of M. G.'s, scattered as they are here, there and everywhere, let me give him a charitable warning that he will find nothing to excite a prurient imagination. He will find nothing but inevitable vice, in other words the eye of the devil hidden in the shadows, or Messalina's shoulder gleaming under the gaslight; nothing but pure art, in other words the type of beauty peculiar to evil, the beautiful in the horrible. And even, to recall in passing what has previously been said, the general impression conveyed by this great store-house is more full of sadness than fun. What constitutes the specifically beautiful quality of these pictures is their moral fecundity. They are big with suggestion, cruel, harsh suggestion, which my pen, accustomed though it is to struggle with the evocation of plastic images, may have rendered only inadequately.

XIII. Carriages

And so they extend into the distance, these long galleries of 'high life' and 'low life', with innumerable side galleries leading from them. Let us for a moment escape towards a world which, if not pure, is at least more refined; let us breathe perfumes, not more wholesome perhaps, but more delicate. I have already said that M. G.'s brush, like that of Eugène Lami, was wonderfully fitted to depict the glories of dandyism and the elegance of society lionesses. The attitudes of the rich man are well-known to him; he can, with a light stroke of the pen and a sureness of hand which is never at fault, capture that indefinable sense of security evident in eye, gesture and carriage which comes from the monotony of good fortune in the lives of privileged beings. In this particular series of drawings we are presented with sporting, racing, hunting occasions in their innumerable aspects, with horse and carriage exercise in the woods, with proud dames or a delicate miss controlling, with practised hand, steeds of impeccable contour, stylish, glossy, and themselves as capricious as women. For M. G. not only knows all about the horse in general, but applies himself with equal success to expressing the individual beauty of horses. Some drawings depict a meeting, a veritable encampment, of numerous equipages, where, perched up on the cushions, the seats, the boxes, shapely youths and women, attired in the eccentric costumes authorized by the season, are seen watching some solemn turf event, the runners disappearing in the distance; another shows a horseman cantering gracefully alongside an open light four-wheeler, his curveting mount bowing, it might seem, in his own way, whilst the carriage follows an alley streaked with light and shade, at a brisk trot, carrying along a bevy of beauties, cradled as in the gondola of a balloon, lolling on the cushions, lending an inattentive ear to compliments, and lazily enjoying the caresses of the breeze.

Fur or muslin wraps them to the chin and flows in waves over the carriage door. The domestics are stiff and perpendicular, motionless and all alike; as always, they are the monotonous and uncharacterized effigy of servility, precise and disciplined; their whole character consists in having none. In the background, the woods are decked in green or brown, shimmering with light or darkening, according to the hour and the season. Its bowers are full of autumn mists, blue shadows, yellow beams, rose-pink effulgence or thin streaks of lightning flashing through the darkness, like sword thrusts.

If the countless water-colours from the war in the Levant had not shown us M. G.'s powers as a landscape artist, these would certainly suffice to do so. But here no question of the war-torn ground of the Crimea, nor the theatrical shores of the Bosphorus; we are back in the familiar intimate landscapes that encircle any of our big cities with verdure, and where the play of light produces effects that a truly romantic artist cannot disdain.

Another merit which is not unworthy of mention here is the remarkable knowledge of harness and coachwork. M. G. draws and paints a carriage, and every kind of carriage, with the same care and the same ease as a skilled marine artist displays over every kind of ship. All his coachwork is correct, every detail is in its right place, and does not need to be gone over again. In whatever position it is drawn, at whatever speed it may be going, a carriage, like a vessel, derives, from the fact of motion, a mysterious and complex gracefulness which is very difficult to note down in shorthand. The pleasure that the artist's eye gets from it comes apparently from the series of geometrical figures that the object, already so complex in itself, vessel or carriage, describes successively in space.

We are betting on a certainty when we say that in a few years the drawings of M. G. will become precious archives of civilized life. His works will be sought after by discerning collectors, as much as those of Debucourt, of Moreau, of Saint-Aubin, of Carle Vernet, of Lami, of Deveria, of Gavarni, and of all those exquisite artists who, although they have confined themselves to recording what is familiar and pretty, are nonetheless, in their own ways, important historians. Several of them have even sacrificed too much to the 'pretty-pretty', and have sometimes introduced into their compositions a classic style foreign to the subject; several have deliberately rounded the angles, smoothed over the harshness of life, toned down its flashing colours. Less skilful than they, M. G. retains a profound merit, which is all his own; he has deliberately filled a function which other artists disdain, and which a man of the world above all others could carry out. He has gone everywhere in quest of the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day, the characteristic traits of what, with the reader's permission, we have called 'moder-nity'. Often bizarre, violent, excessive, but always full of poetry, he has succeeded, in his drawings, in distilling the bitter or heady flavour of the wine of life.

注 释

〔1〕 It is recorded that when Madame Dubarry wanted to avoid receiving the King, she was careful to put on rouge. That was enough; it meant she was closing her door. In beautifying herself she used to put to flight the royal disciple of nature.

The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix

To the Editor of L'Opinion nationale

Sir,

Once more, and for the last time, I want to pay tribute to the genius of Eugène Delacroix, and I beg you to be good enough to find space in your paper for these few pages, where I shall endeavour to set down as briefly as possible the record of his talent, the reasons for his superiority (which, in my opinion, is not yet properly recognized), and finally some anecdotes and some observations on his life and character.

I had the good fortune when still very young (as early as 1845, if I remember rightly) to have friendly contact with this great man, now dead; and in this relationship, where respect on my side and kindness on his did not exclude mutual confidence and familiarity, I was able to form at leisure extremely accurate notions not only on his method but also on the most intimate qualities of his great soul.

You will not expect me, sir, to embark here on a detailed analysis of the works of Delacroix. Apart from the fact that each of us has done that according to his power, as and when the great painter showed the public the successive productions of his thought, the list of these is so long that, even allowing only a few lines to each of his major works, an analysis of this sort would well nigh fill a volume. Let it suffice for us to give a rapid summary.

His monumental paintings cover the walls of the Salon du Roi at the Chambre des Députés, of the Library of the Chambre des Députés, of the Library of the Luxemburg Palace, of the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre, and of the Salon de la Paix at the Hôtel de Ville. These decorative pieces include an enormous mass of allegorical, religious and historical subjects, all of which belong to the highest spheres of human intelligence. As for his so-called easel pictures, his sketches, grisailles, water-colours, etc. - the total reaches an approximate figure of 236.

The great compositions exhibited at different Salons number seventy-seven. I am taking these facts from the catalogue that M. Théophile Silvestre published at the end of his excellent study of Eugène Delacroix in his book entitled Histoire des Peintres Vivants.

I have myself tried more than once to draw up this enormous catalogue; but my patience was invariably exhausted by this unbelievable fecundity, and in the end I gave up the unequal struggle. If M. Théophile Silvestre has made any mistakes, it can be only by omission.

To my mind, sir, the important thing here is simply to look for the characteristic quality of Delacroix's genius and to try and define it; to ask ourselves in what way he differs from his illustrious predecessors, whilst equalling them; and finally to show, in so far as the written word allows, the magical art thanks to which he succeeded in translating the spoken word into plastic images, more full of life and more appropriate than those of any other creator of the same profession: in short, to show what speciality Providence had entrusted to Eugène Delacroix in the historical development of painting.

I

What is Delacroix? What was his role and what his duty in this world? That is the first question we must examine. I shall be brief, and I aim to arrive at immediate conclusions. Flanders has Rubens, Italy has Raphael and Veronese; France has Lebrun, David and Delacroix.

A superficial mind may be shocked, at first sight, by my bracketing together these names, which stand for such different qualities and methods. But a more penetrating spiritual eye will see at once that there is, between them all, a common relationship, a kind of brotherhood or cousinage, stemming from their love of the great, the national, the immense and the universal, a love that has always found expression in so-called decorative painting and in what are known as great machines.

Many others, no doubt, have executed great machines; but those I have named did them in the manner most likely to leave an eternal mark in human memory. Which is the greatest of these men, so diverse in their greatness? Each of us is free to decide that as he pleases, according to whether by nature he is inclined to prefer the prolific, shining, almost jovial abundance of Rubens, or the soft majesty and eurhythmic order of Raphael, the paradisal and land-of-afternoon colours of Veronese, the austere and intense severity of David, or the dramatic and quasiliterary fluency of Lebrun.

None of these men can be replaced; they had a similar aim but used different methods, drawn from their personal natures. Delacroix, the last-comer, expressed with admirable vehemence and fervour what the others had conveyed only incompletely. In doing so, did he perhaps sacrifice other qualities, as his predecessors, for that matter, did before him? It may be so, but that is not the question that claims our attention.

Many others besides me have taken care to emphasize the inevitable consequences of an essentially personal genius; and it could also well be, after all, that the finest expressions of genius elsewhere than in purest heaven - here below, in other words, where even perfection is imperfect - can be achieved only at the price of inevitable sacrifice.

But 'Come, sir!' you will doubtless be saying, 'what then is this mysterious, indefinable something that Delacroix, to the great glory of our age, has communicated better than anyone else?' The answer is: the invisible, the impalpable, reverie, the nerves, the soul; and this he did - pray, sir, take good note of this - without any means other than contour and colour; he did it better than anyone you care to mention; he did it with the perfection of a consummate painter, with the rigour of a subtle writer, the eloquence of a passionate musician. It is one element in the diagnosis of the spiritual climate of our age, be it added, that the arts strive, if not to substitute for one another, at least to lend each other new power and strength, by the help of their own.

Delacroix is the most suggestive of all painters, the one whose works, even those chosen from amongst the minor or inferior ones, give the most food for thought, and recall to mind the greatest sum of poetic feelings and thought already experienced, but believed to have been engulfed for ever in the night of time.

The work of Delacroix sometimes seems to me to be like a mnemonic device of the greatness and the inborn passions of universal man. This peculiar and wholly new merit of M. Delacroix, which enabled him to express simply by contour man's gesture, however violent, and to evoke with colour alone what might be called the atmosphere of the human drama, or the spiritual mood of the creator - this quality, peculiar to him, has always drawn to him the sympathy of all poets; and, if it were legitimate to draw a philosophic proof from a purely material phenomenon, I would ask you to notice, sir, that in the crowd that gathered to pay him the last honours, many more writers could be counted than painters. To put it crudely, the truth is that the latter have never fully understood him.

II

And what, after all, is so surprising about that? Do we not know that the age of the Michelangelos, the Raphaels, the Leonardo da Vincis, yes, and even of the Reynoldses, is long since passed, and that the general intellectual level of artists has gone down markedly? Doubtless it would be unfair to look for philosophers, poets and scientists amongst contemporary artists; but it would be legitimate to expect from them a greater degree of interest than they evince in religion, poetry and the sciences.

Beyond the walls of their studios what do they know? What do they like? What do they want to express? Eugène Delacroix, on the other hand, was, as well as a painter devoted to his art, a man of general culture, in contrast to other modern artists, who are for the most part scarcely more than well-known or obscure daubers, gloomy specialists, be they old or young; craftsmen pure and simple, some of them with the knack of producing academic figures, others fruit, others again cattle. Eugène Delacroix loved everything, could paint everything and was capable of appreciating every kind of talent. His was a mind open to all ideas and to all impressions; he was the most eclectic and impartial lover of all experience.

A great reader, that goes without saying. His readings from the poets left him with awe-inspiring visions, quickly achieving sharpness of outline: ready-made pictures, so to speak. However different he may have been from his master, Guérin, in his method and his colour, he inherited, from the great republican and imperial school, the love of the poets and an indefinably vigorous spirit of rivalry with the written word. David, Guérin and Girodet set their minds aflame by contact with Homer, Virgil, Racine and Ossian. Delacroix was the moving translator of Shakespeare, Dante, Byron and Ariosto. There is an important similarity, and a slight difference.

But let us now, by your leave, Mr Editor, go more deeply into what might be called the teaching of the master, teaching that, for me, arises not only from the successive contemplation of all his works and of several side by side, as one was able to enjoy them at the Universal Exhibition of 1855, but also from many a conversation I had with the artist himself.

III

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to seek the means of expressing passion in the most visible manner. In this dual character, be it said in passing, we find the two distinguishing marks of the most substantial geniuses, extreme geniuses, scarcely created to please timorous souls who are easy to satisfy, and find adequate nourishment in flabby, soft, imperfect works. An immense thrust of passion coupled with formidable will-power, such was the man.

And he was fond of repeating: 'Since I consider the impression communicated by nature to the artist as the most important thing to translate, is it not necessary that he should be forearmed with all the quickest means of translation?'

It is clear that, in his eyes, imagination was the most precious gift, the most important faculty, but that this faculty remained powerless and sterile if it did not have at its command a swift technical skill, capable of following the great despotic faculty in its impatient flights of fancy. There was certainly no need for him to stoke up the fires of his imagination, constantly at white heat; but he always found the day too short for the study of the technical means of expression.

To that ceaseless preoccupation must be attributed his unremitting researches into colour and the quality of colours, his interest in problems of chemistry and his discussion with colour manufacturers. In this matter he comes close to Leonardo da Vinci, who was also a prey to these obsessions.

In spite of his admiration for the ardent phenomena of life, never can Eugène Delacroix be confused with that mob of vulgar artists and writers whose myopic intelligence shelters behind that vague and obscure word realism. The first time I saw M. Delacroix, in 1845, I believe it was (how the swift and voracious years flow away!), we talked about many commonplace subjects, in other words, questions vast in scope and yet of the simplest: nature, for example. At this point, sir, I shall, with your permission, quote a passage of my own, for a paraphrase would not be as good as the words I once wrote, almost under the master's dictation: 'Nature is but a dictionary,' he was fond of saying. To understand clearly the full meaning implied in this remark, we must bear in mind the numerous and ordinary uses a dictionary is put to. We look up the meaning of words, the derivation of words, the etymology of words; and, finally, we get from a dictionary all the component parts of sentences and ordered narrative; but no one has ever thought of a dictionary as a composition in the poetic sense of the word. Painters who obey imagination consult their dictionaries in search of elements that fit in with their conceptions; and even then, in arranging them with artistry, they give them a wholly new appearance. Those who have no imagination copy the dictionary, from which arises a very great vice, the vice of banality, to which are particularly exposed those painters whose speciality lies nearest to socalled inanimate nature: the landscape artists, for example, who regard it generally as a triumph if they can conceal their personalities. They contemplate so much that in the end they forget to feel and to think.

'For this great painter, all the areas of art, of which one man selects this one, and another that one, as the most important, were - are, I mean - no more than the most humble handmaids of a unique and superior faculty. If a very neat execution is necessary, that is so that the dream may be very clearly translated; if it should be very quick, that is to ensure that nothing is lost of the extraordinary impression that accompanied the birth of the idea; if the artist should pay attention to the cleanness of his tools, that too is easily understood, since every precaution should be taken to ensure that the execution is nimble and decisive.'

In passing be it added that, never in my life, did I see a palette so minutely and delicately prepared as Delacroix's. It looked like a bouquet of skilfully assorted flowers.

'In such a method, which is essentially logical, all the figures, their grouping in relation to each other, the landscape or interior that provides their background or horizon, their clothes, everything, in short, must serve to shed light on the general idea, and wear its original colour - its livery, so to speak. Just as a dream is bathed in its own appropriate atmosphere, so a conception, become composition, needs to have its being in a setting of colour peculiar to itself. Obviously a given tone will be attributed to some portion or other of the picture, and this then becomes the key, controlling all the others. Everyone knows that yellow, orange and red inspire and represent ideas of joy, wealth, glory and love; but there are thousands of yellow or red atmospheres, and all the other colours will be modified logically and in given proportions by the dominant atmosphere. The art of the colourist is evidently connected, in some respects, with mathematics and music.

'Yet its most delicate operations are the result of a sentiment which long practice has brought to a degree of sureness that defeats description. It will be seen that this great law of overall harmony condemns many garish efforts and raw daubings, even though by the hand of the most illustrious painters. There are some paintings by Rubens that remind us, not only of a coloured firework, but of several fireworks set off on the same ground. The bigger the picture, the broader must be the touches of colour, that goes without saying; but the touches are better not worked into each other; they melt naturally together, at a given distance, by the law of sympathy that brought them together. In this way colour gains in energy and freshness.

'A good picture, faithful and worthy of the dreams that gave it birth, must be created like a world. Just as the creation, as we see it, is the result of several creations, the earlier ones always being completed by the later, so a harmonically fashioned picture consists of a series of superimposed pictures, each fresh surface giving added reality to the dream, and raising it by one degree towards perfection. In complete contrast, I remember seeing, in the studios of Paul Delaroche and Horace Vernet, enormous canvases, not broadly sketched in, but begun piecemeal, in other words, completely finished in certain areas whilst others existed only in a black or white outline. This sort of product could be compared to a purely manual type of work, to which is assigned the job of covering a given area in a given time, or to a long road divided into a large number of stages. As soon as one stage has been completed, that is the end of that, and when the road has been followed throughout its whole length, the artist is delivered of his picture.

'All these precepts are, of course, modified, more or less, by the different temperaments of the artists. But I am convinced that the foregoing is the surest method for men with rich imaginations. It follows that too great deviations from the method in question are proof that an abnormal and unjustified importance is being attributed to some secondary aspect of art.

'I am not afraid of its being said that it is absurd to imagine a single system of teaching being applied to a crowd of different individuals. For it is evident that systems of rhetoric and prosody are not arbitrarily invented forms of tyranny, but collections of rules demanded by the very structure of a man's spiritual being. Nor have systems of rhetoric and prosody ever prevented originality from showing itself clearly. The contrary, namely that they have helped the flowering of originality, would be infinitely truer.

'For the sake of brevity, I must omit a number of corollaries deriving from the main principle, which, so to speak, contains within itself the whole code of true aesthetics, and may be expressed as follows: the whole visible universe is nothing but a storehouse of images and signs, to which man's imagination will assign a place and relative value; it is a kind of pasture for the imagination to digest and transform. All the faculties of the human soul must be subordinated to the imagination, which puts them all under contribution at once. Just as a good knowledge of the dictionary does not necessarily imply a knowledge of the art of composition, and the art of composition itself does not imply the gift of universal imagination, so a good painter may well not be a great painter, but a great painter is of necessity a skilful painter, because a universal imagination comprises the understanding of all technical means and the desire to acquire them.

'From the ideas I have just explained to the best of my ability (and how many more things there would be to say, particularly on the areas of common ground between the arts and the similarities between their methods), it is evident that the immense group of artists, or, in other words, of men dedicated to artistic expression, may be divided into two very distinct camps. In one, we have those who call themselves "realists", a word with a double meaning, and the sense of which is not precisely determined; to bring out more clearly their error, we will call them "positivists". The "positivist" says: "I want to represent things as they are, or as they would be on the assumption that I did not exist." The universe without man. In the other camp, there are the imaginative ones who say: "I want to illuminate things with my mind and cast its reflection on other minds." Although both these methods, which are diametrically opposed, may enhance or diminish any subject, from a religious scene to the most modest landscape, yet the imaginative man must usually have come to the fore in religious painting and in fantasy, whereas genre paintings, so-called, and landscape must, on the face of it, have offered vast resources to lazy minds not easily stimulated...

'Delacroix's imagination! Here was an imagination that never feared to scale the difficult heights of religion; heaven belongs to it, just as hell does, and war, and Olympus and pleasure. He surely is the archetype of the painter-poet! He surely is one of the rare elect, and the breadth of his mind brings religion into its domain. His imagination, as fiercely bright as a mortuary chapel, is alight with every shade of flame and crimson. All the grief in the Passion enthrals him; all the splendours in the Church fill him with light. Onto his inspired canvases he pours blood, light and darkness, by turns. I believe he would gladly add his own natural magnificence to the majesty of the Gospel, as an extra offering.

'I remember seeing a little Annonciation by Delacroix, where the angel, messenger to Mary, was not alone but ceremoniously escorted by two other angels, and the impact of this heavenly company was powerful and full of charm. One of his early paintings, Le Christ aux Oliviers ("Lord, take thou this cup from me"), is suffused with feminine tenderness and poetic suavity. The suffering and the majesty which resound so loudly in religion always awaken an echo in his mind.'

And still more recently, with reference to the Chapel of the Holy Angels at St Sulpice (Héliodore, chassé du Temple and La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange), his last great work, so inanely criticized, I said: 'Never, not even in the Clémence de Trajan, not even in L'Entrée des Croisés à Constantinople, has Delacroix displayed a sense of colour more splendidly and more learnedly supernatural; never has he executed a drawing more deliberately epic. I am well aware that some people, stonemasons, no doubt, architects perhaps, have pronounced the word decadence with reference to this last work. This is the place for me to recall that the great masters, poets or painters, Hugo or Delacroix, are always several years ahead of their timid admirers.

'In relation to genius the public are like a clock that is losing. Amongst perceptive people, who does not understand that the first picture by the Master contained all the others in embryo? But that he should constantly perfect his natural gifts, that he should sharpen them with care, draw new effects from them, that he should himself drive his nature to the utmost, that is inevitable, inescapable, and praiseworthy. The principal feature of Delacroix's genius is precisely that it knows not decadence; it displays only progress. But his original qualities were so powerful and so rich, and they made such a vigorous impact on even the most commonplace minds, that the latter are insensitive to his daily progress; only informed minds can perceive it clearly.

'I referred just now to the remarks of certain masons. For me, the word describes that class of gross materialistic minds (their number is legion) that take an appreciative interest in objects only by their contour or worse still on a three-dimensional basis: breadth, length and depth, just as savages or peasants do. I have often heard people of that sort draw up a hierarchy of qualities, which was totally unintelligible to me; they would maintain, for example, that the faculty that enables this man to create an exact contour or that man a contour of supernatural beauty is superior to the faculty that can assemble colours in an enchanting manner. According to these people colour has no power to dream, to think or speak. It would appear that when I contemplate the works of those men especially known as colourists, I am giving myself up to a pleasure that is not of a noble kind; for twopence they would stamp me as a materialist, reserving for themselves the aristocratic epithet of spiritualists.

'These shallow minds do not reflect that the two faculties can never be entirely separated and that both are the result of an original seed carefully cultivated. External nature does no more than provide the artist with an ever-recurring chance of cultivating the seed; nature is no more than an uncoordinated mass of material that the artist is invited to assemble and put in order, an incitamentum, an alarm-clock for the slumbering faculties. To speak with precision, there is in nature neither line nor colour. It is man that creates line and colour. Both are abstractions drawing their equal dignity from the same origin.

'As a child, a draughtsman born will see in nature, whether still or moving, a number of sinuous shapes from which he gets some pleasure and which he enjoys recording by lines on paper, accentuating or reducing as the spirit moves him their inflections. In this way he learns how to produce curves, elegance and character in drawing. Now let us imagine the case of a child destined to perfect that part of art called colour: it is from the collision or happy union of two tones and the pleasure he gets from it that he will derive the inexhaustible knowledge of tone combinations. In both cases nature has acted exclusively as a stimulus.

'Both line and colour arouse thought and induce reverie; the pleasures that flow from these are different in kind, but perfectly equal and absolutely independent of the subject of the picture.

'A picture by Delacroix, placed too far away for you to be able to assess the merits of the contours or the greater or lesser dramatic quality of the subject, offers even at that distance a supernatural pleasure. It is as though a magical atmosphere has moved towards you and is enveloping you. This impression, gloomy and yet delightful, luminous but calm, and planted for ever in your memory, is the proof of the genuine, the perfect colourist. Nor will the act of analysing the subject when you come closer take anything away from this initial pleasure, or add anything to it, its source being elsewhere and far removed from any defined thought.

'I can reverse the example. A well-drawn figure inspires in you a pleasure that is quite foreign to the subject. Be it voluptuous or frightening, this figure owes its charm exclusively to the pattern it describes in space. The limbs of a martyr being flayed alive, or the body of a nymph in a swoon, provided they are skilfully drawn, offer a species of pleasure in which the nature of the subject counts for nothing; if it were otherwise for you, you would oblige me to write you down as a torturer or an amorist.

'But alas! what is the good, what is the good of for ever repeating these useless truths?'

Yet perhaps, sir, your readers will value all this rhetoric less than the details I am myself impatient to give them on the personality and the way of life of our lamented great painter.

IV

It is particularly in the writings of Eugène Delacroix that the duality of nature I was referring to emerges. Many people, as you yourself know, sir, were surprised at the wisdom of his written opinions and the moderation of his style, a matter of regret for some people, for others a reason for approval. Les Variations du beau, the studies on Poussin, Prud'hon and Charlet, and the other pieces published either in L'Artiste, which then belonged to M. Ricourt, or even in the Revue des Deux Mondes, only serve to confirm this dual character of great artists, which leads them, as critics, to praise and analyse with special relish the qualities which they stand in most need of as creative artists and which are the antithesis of those they possess in abundance. If Eugène Delacroix had praised and commended the things we particularly admire in him, his violence, the decisive gesture, the tumultuousness of his composition, the magic of his colour, that in truth would have been good reason for astonishment. Why look for the things we possess superabundantly, and how may we avoid the urge to extol the things that seem rarer to us and more difficult to acquire? We shall always see the same phenomenon emerge, Mr Editor, in creative geniuses, whether painters or writers, every time they apply their faculties to criticism. At the time of the great struggle between the two schools, the classic and the romantic, the simpletons gaped in surprise when they heard Eugène Delacroix constantly vaunting Racine, La Fontaine and Boileau. I know a poet, naturally given to storm and stress, who goes into prolonged ecstasy over a line of Malherbe, symmetrical and musically four-square.

Moreover, however wise, sensible, and clearly defined in expression and intention the great painter's literary fragments may seem to us, it would be absurd for us to think they were written easily and with the same sureness of attack as his brush displays. He was as confident of writing what he thought on canvas as he was worried at his inability to paint his thought on paper. 'The pen', he was fond of saying, 'is not my tool; I feel that I am thinking right, but the need for ordered argument, which I am forced to observe, puts me off. Would you believe it, but the fact of having to write a page of text gives me a migraine?' This awkwardness, which comes from lack of practice, accounts for certain rather threadbare, rather poncif, and even First Empire expressions that fell too often from a pen otherwise distinguished.

The most obviously characteristic features of Delacroix's style are conciseness, and a kind of intensity without ostentation, the usual type of thing arising from concentrating the whole of one's spiritual powers on a given point. 'The hero is he who is immovably centred,' says Emerson, the transatlantic moralist, who may have the reputation of being the leader of the boring Bostonian school, but who nonetheless has a certain touch of Seneca about him, which can well be a spur to meditation. 'The hero is he who is immovably centred' - the maxim that the leader of American 'transcendentalism' applies to the conduct of life and to the sphere of business - may equally well be applied to the domain of poetry and art. One could just as well say: 'The hero of literature, the true writer, in other words, is he who is immovably centred.' You will not therefore be surprised to learn, sir, that Delacroix had a very pronounced sympathy for concise and concentrated writers, those whose prose, little encumbered with ornaments of style, appears to imitate the quick movement of thought, and whose sentences have the decisiveness of a gesture, Montesquieu, for example. I can give you a curious example of this fruitful and poetic brevity. No doubt you have read, as I have, a very interesting and very fine study by M. Paul de Saint-Victor, which appeared recently in La Presse, on the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon. The various conceptions of the flood, the way the legends about the deluge should be interpreted, the inner meaning of the scenes and actions that go to make up the whole of this marvellous piece of painting, nothing has been forgotten; and the painting itself is minutely described in that charming style, as witty as it is colourful, of which the author has given us so many examples. Yet the whole thing will leave only a formless shadow of itself in our memories, something like the very pale light of a photographic enlargement. Compare this lengthy passage with the following few lines, to my mind much more vigorous and more conducive to creating a mental picture, even if one were to suppose that the picture they sum up did not exist. I am simply giving what is said in the programme distributed by M. Delacroix to his friends when he invited them to come and see the work in question:

Apollo, conqueror of the serpent Python

Mounted on his chariot, the god has already shot a number of his arrows; his sister Diana behind him, in full cry, offers him her quiver. The hideous reptile, bleeding from wounds already inflicted by the arrows of the god of heat and life, is seen in its death throes, writhing with impotent rage, and enveloped in a fiery haze. The waters of the deluge are beginning to recede, leaving the corpses of men and animals behind them on the mountain tops, or carrying them away. The gods are indignant at the sight of the earth delivered over to ill-shapen monsters, foul spawn of primeval slime. They have armed themselves, as Apollo has done; Minerva and Mercury are seen springing forward to exterminate them, that eternal wisdom may in time repeople the solitude of the universe. Hercules is crushing them with his club; Vulcan, the god of fire, is driving night and its fetid vapours before him, while Boreas and the Zephyrs dry up the waters with their breath and scatter the remnants of the clouds. The nymphs of the rivers and the streams have returned to their withy beds and their urn, still soiled with mire and debris. A number of shyer divinities are watching from a distance this struggle between the gods and the elements. Meanwhile, from highest heaven, Victory is shown coming down to crown Apollo victor, and Iris, messenger of the gods, unfurls in the soft air her veil, symbol of light's triumph over darkness and the rebellion of the waters.



I know the reader will have to imagine a great deal and collaborate, so to speak, with the author of the explanatory note; but do you honestly think, sir, that my admiration for the painter has transformed me into a visionary in this case, and that I am wholly wrong in claiming to see here the traces of aristocratic habits, acquired by reading good books, and of that precision of thought which has enabled society folk, soldiers, adventurers and even courtiers to write, with careless unconcern, mighty fine books, which we professional writers cannot help admiring?

V

Eugène Delacroix was a strange mixture of scepticism, courtesy, dandyism, fiery will, guile, despotism, and, withal, of a species of particular kindness and restrained tenderness that always accompanies genius. His father belonged to that race of strong men, the last of whom we knew in our childhood: some of them were fervent apostles of Jean-Jacques, others were convinced disciples of Voltaire, but all of them took part with equal determination in the French Revolution; and their survivors, Jacobins or left-wing progressives, rallied in perfect good faith (it is important to remember) to the policies of Bonaparte.

Eugène Delacroix always retained traces of this revolutionary background. It may be said of him, as of Stendhal, that he was frightened to death of being taken in. Sceptical and aristocratic as he was, his experience of passion and the supernatural came to him only through his enforced acquaintance with reverie. A hater of the masses, he thought of them only as iconoclasts, and the violence suffered at their hands by some of his own works in 1848 was scarcely calculated to convert him to the political sentimentality of our times. In his bearing, manners and opinions, there was even something in him reminiscent of Victor Jacquemont. I know that the comparison is slightly unflattering, and I therefore intend it to be taken only with reserve. There was, in Jacquemont, a suggestion of a middle-class wit, with a chip on his shoulder, and a waggishness that was as ready to fool the priests of Brahma as those of Jesus Christ. Delacroix, guided by the good taste always inherent in genius, could never have stooped to such low tricks. My comparison, therefore, refers only to the spirit of cautiousness and moderation that marks them both. In the same way, the hereditary traits which the eighteenth century had left in his nature seemed to be borrowed particularly from that class as far removed from utopians as from madmen, the class of polite sceptics, the victors and survivors, who, generally, derived from Voltaire, rather than Jean-Jacques. Thus at first sight, Eugène Delacroix appeared simply as a man of the 'Enlightenment' in the best sense of the word, a perfect gentleman without prejudices and without passions. Only by cultivating his society more assiduously could one penetrate the veneer, and become aware of the deeper recesses of his soul. A man to whom he could more legitimately be compared, in his outward bearing and manners, is M. Mérimée. He had the same apparent coldness, slightly affected, the same icy mantle covering modest sensitiveness and an ardent passion for what is good and beautiful; under the same simulated egoism was to be found the same devotion to personal friends and dearly held ideas.

There was something of the recluse in Eugène Delacroix; that was the most precious side of his nature, the side entirely dedicated to giving pictorial form to his dreams, and to the worship of his art. There was something in him of the society man; that part of him was destined to hide the other, and to allay any resentment it could cause. I believe it to have been one of the great preoccupations of his life to conceal the waves of anger welling up in his heart, and to appear not to be a man of genius. His spirit of domination, which was perfectly legitimate, inevitable moreover, had almost disappeared under the cloak of countless kindnesses. One could have compared him to the crater of a volcano artistically hidden under a bouquet of flowers.

Another point of resemblance with Stendhal was his liking for simple formulas, brief maxims, for the good conduct of life. Like all people whose liking for method is all the greater because their ardent and sensitive temperament seems to turn them away from it, Delacroix liked fashioning those little catechisms of practical morality, which nit-wits and layabouts without an aim in life are likely to attribute disdainfully to M. de la Palisse, but which genius does not despise because genius is related to simplicity; sound, strong, simple, hard maxims that are a breast-plate and shield for the man driven by genius into an everlasting battle.

Need I tell you that the same spirit of unshakeable and disdainful wisdom inspired the opinions of M. Delacroix in political matters? He believed that nothing changes, although everything appears to change, and that certain climacteric periods in the history of nations invariably bring back analogous phenomena. In fact, his thought in this sort of question came very close, especially in its aspects of cold and distressing resignation, to the thought of a historian I, for my part, have a great respect for, and whom you, sir, who are so familiar with these arguments and can appreciate talent even when it contradicts you, have surely been constrained to admire more than once. I refer to M. Ferrari, the subtle and learned author of the Histoire de la Raison d'État. Inevitably, any talker who, in the presence of M. Delacroix, let himself go in childish utopian enthusiasms very soon felt the effect of his bitter laugh, informed with sarcastic pity; and if, incautiously, one were, in his hearing, to launch the grand chimera of modern times, the monster-balloon of perfectibility and indefinite progress, he was fond of asking: 'Where then are your Phidiases? Where are your Raphaels?'

You may be sure, on the other hand, that M. Delacroix's robust good sense in no way detracted from his charm of manner. This vigorous incredulity, this refusal to be taken in, gave a kind of Byronic flavour to his conversation, so full of poetry and colour. He had also, drawn from within himself much more than derived from his long experience of society - from himself, that is his genius, and from the knowledge of his genius - a self-confidence, a wonderful ease of manner, and with them a politeness that emitted, like a prism, every shade from the most cordial bonhomie to the most irreproachable brush-off. He had a good twenty ways of saying 'Mon cher monsieur', in which a practised ear could detect a remarkable scale of feelings. For after all, I must add, since the fact strikes me as another reason for praise, Eugène Delacroix, although a man of genius, or because he was a complete man of genius, had much of the dandy about him. He himself admitted that, in his youth, he had indulged with joy in all the material vanities of dandyism, and, laughing at himself but not without a suspicion of self-glorification, told how, with the help of his friend Bonington, he had worked hard to implant in the fashionable younger set the taste for English cut in footwear and clothes. This detail, I presume, will not seem out of place to you; for no memories are superfluous when we are portraying the nature of certain men.

I have told you that what particularly struck the attentive observer was the natural part of Delacroix's soul, in spite of the obscuring veil cast over it by our refined way of life. He was full of energy, but an energy that came from the nerves and the will; for physically he was frail and delicate. The tiger, shadowing his prey, has less glint in his eyes and impatient twitching of his muscles than our great painter showed, when his whole soul was pinpointed on an idea, or wanted to take possession of adream. The physical character of his features, his Peruvian or Malaysian complexion, his big dark eyes, which seemed to get smaller as they blinked in concentration, appeared to be sipping at the light, his mass of glossy hair, his obstinate brow, his tight lips, to which the constant tension of his will imparted a cruel expression, his whole person, in fact, conveyed the idea of an exotic origin. More than once, as I stood looking at him, there came into my mind a vision of the ancient rulers of Mexico, of Montezuma, whose hand, practised in sacrificial rites, could dispatch, in the space of a single day, three thousand human creatures on the pyramidal altar of the sun, or one of the Hindu princes who, in the splendours of the most glorious festivals, have, in the depths of their eyes, a look of unsatisfied greed and an inexplicable nostalgia, something that might be the memory of things unknown and yearning for them. Pray note that the general tonality of Delacroix's paintings also conforms to the colour appropriate to eastern landscapes and interiors, and that it produces an impression analogous to that felt in tropical lands, where a vast diffusion of light creates, for the sensitive eye, a general effect that is quasicrepuscular in spite of the intensity of local tones. The morality of his works, if in fact one may legitimately speak of morality in painting, also has a visible connection with Moloch; nothing in his work that does not tell of desolation, massacres, fire; everything bears witness against the everlasting and incorrigible barbarity of man; cities set alight and smoking, murder and rape, children thrown under the horses' hooves, or stabbed by mothers unhinged with horror; the whole work, I repeat, is like a terrible hymn composed in honour of fate and inescapable grief. Sometimes he found it possible to apply his brush to the expression of tender and voluptuous feelings, for he certainly did not lack tenderness; but there too the incurable sense of bitterness was present in strong degree, whilst carefree joy, the usual companion of simple pleasure, was absent. Only once, I think, did he make a tentative incursion into drollery and buffoonery, and, as though he had guessed that to be beyond and beneath his nature, he never came back to it.

VI

I know a number of people who have the right to say Odi profanum vulgus; but which of them can add triumphantly et arceo [I hate the vulgar crowd ... and keep at a distance]? Handshakes, too freely given, debase the character. If ever a man had an 'ivory tower', well defended by bars and bolts, it was Eugène Delacroix. Who more than he has loved his 'ivory tower', his privacy, in other words? I believe he would willingly have armed it with cannon, and removed it to the depth of a forest or to the top of an inaccessible rock. Who more than he has loved his home, both sanctuary and den? Others may seek privacy for the sake of debauchery; he sought it for the sake of inspiration, and he indulged in veritable orgies, of work. 'The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation,' says the American philosopher we have already quoted.

M. Delacroix could have been the author of that maxim; in any case he certainly practised it with austerity. He was too much a man of society not to despise society; and the efforts he made to avoid being too visibly himself drove him naturally to enjoy our society most. 'Our' does not imply merely the humble author of these lines; but also some others, young or old, journalists, poets, musicians, amongst whom he could freely relax and let himself go.

In his delightful monograph study on Chopin, Liszt numbers Delacroix amongst the musician-poet's most frequent visitors, and says that he loved to fall into deep reverie at the sound of that delicate and passionate music, which evokes a brightly coloured bird, hovering over the horrors of a bottomless pit.

And so it came about that, owing to our very genuine admiration, we were admitted, though still very young at the time, into that well-guarded studio, where the temperature, despite our inclement climate, was equatorial, and where the first thing that struck the visitor's eye was the air of restrained solemnity, and that austerity peculiar to the old school. Exactly similar were the studios, seen in our childhood, of the former rivals of David, men of touching heroism, long since gone. To penetrate this retreat was to feel at once that it could not be the abode of a frivolous mind excited by a thousand incoherent whims.

No rusty armour, no Malayan kukris, no old Gothic ironwork, no trinkets, no old clothes, no bric-à-brac, nothing that reveals in its owner a liking for the latest trifle, or for wandering away in childish dreaming. A wonderful portrait by Jordaens, which he had unearthed heaven knows where, a few studies, and a number of copies, done by the master himself, were all the decoration to be seen in this vast studio, where reigned a spirit of reflection, bathed in a soft, peaceful light.

These copies will probably be seen at the sale of Delacroix's drawings and pictures due to take place, so I am told, next January. He had two very distinct manners in copying. One, the free and broad, was compounded of fidelity and infidelity, and into it he put a great deal of himself. From this manner a bastard and delightful product emerged, throwing the mind into an agreeable state of uncertainty. It is in this paradoxical guise that I first saw a copy of the Miracles de Saint Benoît by Rubens. In his other manner, Delacroix becomes his model's most obedient and humble slave, and he achieved an exactness of imitation that those people may well doubt who have not seen these miracles. Such, for example, are the copies made of two heads by Raphael in the Louvre, where the expression, the style and manner are imitated with such perfect naturalness that nothing could be easier than to take the originals for the translations and vice versa.

After a luncheon lighter than an Arab's, and having arranged the colours on his palette with as much care as a flower girl or a cloth vendor, Delacroix would strive once more to recapture the interrupted flow of ideas; but before launching into his stormy work, he would often experience a feeling of languor or of terror, or of exasperation that recalls the pythoness fleeing the presence of the God, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau frittering his time away or tidying up papers and books for a whole hour before putting pen to paper. But once the fascination had gripped the artist, he would stop only when overcome by physical fatigue.

One day as we were discussing a matter of abiding interest to artists and writers, namely the tonic effect of work and the conduct of life, he said to me: 'Years ago, when I was young, I could settle down to work only when I had some pleasure in prospect for the evening. Some music, or dancing, or any other sort of entertainment. But nowadays I am no longer like a schoolboy; I can work without ceasing and without any hope of reward. Moreover,' he added, 'if only you knew how broad-minded and easy to please hard work makes one when it comes to pleasures! The man who has filled his working day to his own satisfaction will be quite happy in the company of the local street porter, playing cards with him!'

This remark made me think of Machiavelli playing at dice with the peasants. One day, a Sunday, I caught sight of Delacroix in the Louvre; with him was his old maid, the one who looked after him so devotedly, and served him for thirty years. He, the man of fashion, the dandy, the scholar, was not at all above showing and explaining the mysteries of Assyrian sculpture to this worthy woman, who, moreover, was listening to him with unaffected attention. The image of Machiavelli and the memory of my conversation years before at once came into my mind.

The truth is that in his last years, all the things we commonly call pleasure had disappeared from his life. One pleasure only, harsh, demanding, terrible, had replaced them all: work, which by then was no longer merely a passion but could well have been called a craving.

After devoting all the hours of daylight to painting, either in his studio or on the scaffoldings to which his big decorative work called him, Delacroix still found strength in his love of art, and he would have felt his day had been badly filled if the evening hours at his fireside had not been used, by the light of the lamp, to draw, to cover his paper with dreams, with projects, with figures he had chanced to catch a glimpse of in the daily round, sometimes to copy the drawings of other artists with temperaments wholly opposed to his; for he had a passion for notes and sketches, and used to busy himself with them wherever he might be. For quite a long time, he had a habit of drawing at the houses of friends with whom he was spending the evening. That is how M. Villot comes to own quite a number of excellent drawings from this prolific pen.

He once said to a young man I know: 'If you have not got the knack of making a sketch of a man who has thrown himself out of the window whilst he is falling from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to go in for the big stuff.' I perceive in that colossal hyperbole the central preoccupation of his whole life, which, as is well known, was to execute a drawing with enough speed and enough exactness to let no particle evaporate of the action's intensity or of the idea.

As many other people have been able to observe, Delacroix was fond of conversation. But the funny thing is that he was suspicious of conversation, as if it were a kind of debauchery, a sort of dissipation in which he ran the risk of wasting his strength. His first words when you went to see him at his studio were: 'We won't have a talk this morning, if you agree? Or else only a very short one.'

And then he would talk for three hours on end. His conversation was startling, subtle but full of facts, memories and anecdotes: in short, full of nourishment.

When he was roused by contradiction, he would withdraw momentarily, and then, instead of delivering a frontal attack on his adversary, a manoeuvre that carries the danger of introducing the brutality of platform oratory into the skirmishes of the drawing-room, he would sport for a while with his opponent, and then return to the attack with a whole lot of unexpected arguments and facts. It was the characteristic talk of a man delighting in conflict, but a slave to courtesy of a wily kind, yielding by design, full of unexpected ruses in flight and attack.

In the intimacy of his studio, he would willingly let himself go to the point of confiding his opinion about living painters, and it was particularly on those occasions that we often had a chance to admire the generosity of genius, which stems perhaps from a particular form of simplicity, or from a capacity to enjoy things easily.

He had an astonishing weakness for Decamps, much out of favour today, but who doubtless still reigned over Delacroix's mind by the power of memory. The same applies to Charlet. He once summoned me to his house for the express purpose of hauling me over the coals about a disrespectful article I had been guilty of on that spoilt child of chauvinism. In vain did I try to explain that it was not the Charlet of the earlier manner that I had been attacking, but the Charlet of the later decadent period: not the noble historian of Napoleon's veterans but the tavern wit. I never succeeded in getting myself forgiven.

He admired Ingres for certain parts of his work, and, to be sure, he needed a powerful critical faculty to admire by force of reason what he must have rejected by temperament. He even went so far as to copy with care the photographs of some of those pencil portraits done with such minute delicacy, where the hard and penetrating talent of M. Ingres, which gains in skill the more circumscribed it is, is to be seen at its best.

The horrible colour tones of Horace Vernet did not prevent Delacroix from feeling the artist's natural strength, which gives life to most of his pictures; and he used to find surprising expressions of praise for this bubbling and indefatigable energy. His admiration for Meissonier went a little too far. He had acquired almost by violence the preparatory drawings for the composition called La Barricade, the best picture by Meissonier, whose talent, moreover, expresses itself much more vigorously in pencil than with the brush. Of Meissonier he often used to say, as though thinking anxiously of the future: 'After all, of all of us, he is the most certain to survive!' Is it not strange to see the author of such great works casting an envious eye on someone who excels only in little ones?

The only man whose name had the power to draw a few coarse epithets from those aristocratic lips was Paul Delaroche. For the works of that painter he could certainly find no excuse whatever, and he had an ineradicable recollection of what he had suffered at the sight of all that grimy, sour painting, done 'with ink and boot polish', as Théophile Gautier once said.

But the man he liked to choose particularly for launching into lengthy discussions with was the man who was the least like him in talent as in ideas, his diametrical opposite, whose brain, though clouded by the smoky skies of his native town, contains a host of admirable things. I refer to M. Paul Chenavard.

The abstruse theories of this painter-philosopher from Lyons made Delacroix smile, and the abstract principle-chasing pedagogue, on his side, looked upon the sensuous joys of pure painting as frivolous, not to say guilty things. But however distant from each other - and even because of that distance - they liked to come together, and, like two ships locked together by grappling irons, they could no longer part company. Both, moreover, being highly cultivated and endowed with great sociability, they met on the common ground of scholarship. That, as is well known, is not the quality for which artists usually shine.

Chenavard was therefore for Delacroix a great stand-by. It was a real pleasure to see them fighting it out in harmless warfare, the words of the one tramping heavily along like an elephant in full panoply of war, the words of the other as vibrant, as pointed and flexible as a fencing foil. In the last hours of his life, our great painter expressed the wish to shake his friendly gainsayer by the hand. But the latter was far away at the time.

VII

Sentimental and affected women may perhaps be shocked to learn that, like Michelangelo (pray recall the ending of one of his sonnets: 'Sculpture! Divine sculpture, thou art my only love!'), Delacroix had made of painting his unique muse, his mistress, his sole and sufficient pleasure.

No doubt women had been a major preoccupation in the stormy hours of his youth. Who has not sacrificed too much at the altar of this dangerous idol? And who does not know that it is just those men who have served the idol best who complain of her most? But already long before his end he had cut women out of his life. Had he been a Moslem, he would perhaps not have driven her out of his mosque, but in his inability to understand what sort of dialogue she could have with Allah, he would have felt surprised to see her enter it.

In this matter, as in many others, oriental ideas were coming to take a lively and despotic hold of him. He looked upon woman as an object of art, delightful and made to excite the mind, but an unruly and disturbing object if we allow her to cross the threshold of our hearts, devouring greedily our time and strength.

I remember once in some public place, as I was pointing out to him a woman's face of uncommon beauty and melancholy expression, he condescended to admire its beauty, but said to me, with that characteristic laugh of his: 'How can you think that a woman could be melancholy?' thereby insinuating, no doubt, that women lack an essential something to be capable of experiencing the sentiment of melancholy.

That, unfortunately, is a most unflattering theory, and, for my part, I would not wish to commend opinions of a kind defamatory to a sex that has so often shown ardent virtues. But who will not agree that it is a theory full of caution; that talent cannot be too cautious in a world where booby-traps abound; and that a man of genius has the privilege of holding certain opinions (provided they do not threaten public order) which would scandalize us in the citizen pure and simple, or the ordinary father of a family.

I must add, at the risk of casting a shadow over his memory, at least in the opinion of wistful souls, that he showed no greater tenderness for children either. In his mind, children always had jam on their fingers (which dirties canvases and paper) or were for ever beating drums (which disturbs meditation), or were as incendiary, and full of dangerous animal spirits, as monkeys.

'I remember well,' he used sometimes to say, 'that when I was a child I was a little monster. The understanding of duty is acquired only very slowly; and only through suffering, punishment and the developing exercise of reason does man diminish, little by little, his natural wickedness.'

Thus, by simple good sense, he was coming back towards the Catholic idea. For it may be said that children in general, and relatively to the grown man in general, are much closer to original sin.

VIII

It was as though Delacroix had treasured up all his sensibility, which was manly and deep, for the austere feeling of friendship. There are some people who take easily to the first-comer; others allow the divine faculty to operate only on great occasions. The famous man I am speaking to you about with so much pleasure may not have liked being bothered with little things, but he could be helpful, courageous, ardent when important matters were at stake. Those who have known him well have had numerous opportunities of appreciating his wholly English sense of loyalty, punctiliousness and dependability, in social relationships. If he was demanding towards others, he was no less strict with himself.

It is only with sadness and ill-humour that I come to say a few words of certain accusations levelled against Eugène Delacroix. I have heard people tax him with selfishness and even avarice. Pray note, sir, that this reproach is always made, by innumerable hordes of mediocrities, against those who take the trouble to administer their generosity with no less care than their friendship.

Delacroix was very careful with his money; that was the only way for him to be very generous on occasion. I could give several examples of that, but I would hesitate to do it without his authority and that of the people who have had good cause to be glad of him.

Observe too that for many years his paintings fetched poor prices, and that his decorative works swallowed nearly the whole of his salary, when he was not actually out of pocket. He gave many proofs of his own disdain for money when impecunious artists showed their desire to possess one or other of his works. Then, like physicians of a liberal and generous temper, who sometimes insist on being paid for their services and at other times give them for nothing, he would make a present of his pictures or let them go at a knock-down figure.

And finally, sir, let us emphasize that the superior man, more than any other, has to take particular care to defend himself. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of society is at war with him. More than once we have been able to see how true that is. His politeness is called coldness; his irony, however subdued, becomes spite; his economy, meanness. But if, on the other hand, the unfortunate man shows himself to be improvident, then, far from showing pity for him, society will say: 'Serve him right; his penury is a punishment for his prodigality.'

I can confidently say that in matters of money and economy Delacroix entirely shared Stendhal's opinion, which reconciled greatness with prudence.

'The intelligent man,' the latter used to say, 'should apply himself to acquiring what is strictly necessary to avoid his having to depend on anybody' (in Stendhal's day, this meant an annual income of 6,000 francs); 'but if, having achieved that degree of security, he wastes time in increasing his fortune, the man's a scoundrel.'

The pursuit of what is necessary, disdain for what is superfluous, that is the conduct of a wise man and a stoic.

One of the great preoccupations of our painter in his latter days, was the thought of what posterity's verdict on him would be, and of the uncertain durability of his works. At one moment his lively imagination would catch fire at the thought of immortal glory; at another, he would speak bitterly of the fragility of canvases and colours. At other times again, he would refer with envy to the old masters, nearly all of whom had had the luck to be translated by skilful engravers who had understood how to adapt their own needles and burins to the nature of the master's talent, and he ardently deplored the fact that he had not found his translator. This friability of the painted work of art, compared with the solidity of the printed work, was one of his habitual themes of conversation.

When this man, who was so frail and so stubborn, so highly strung and so stout-hearted, this man unique in the annals of European art, the sickly, the chilly artist, for ever dreaming of covering great walls with his powerful conceptions, was carried off by one of those attacks of inflammation of the lungs of which he had an instinctive foreboding, we were all overcome with a feeling similar to the depression of soul, to the growing sense of solitude, that the deaths of Chateaubriand and of Balzac had already made us feel, an experience quite recently renewed by the death of Vigny. There is, in a time of great national mourning, a lowering of the general vitality, a shadow comes over the intellect similar to a solar eclipse, that momentary imitation of the end of the world.

I think, however, that this impression particularly comes to those men who, in their exalted solitariness of soul, succeed in gathering a family about them only by their intellectual relationships. As for other citizens, they learn to know only slowly the great loss their country has suffered by the death of the great man, and the gap he has created by his going. Even then they need telling.

I thank you heartily, sir, for having allowed me to say freely all the things that were suggested to me by the memory of one of the rare geniuses of our unhappy age, both so poor and so rich, now too demanding, now over-generous, and unjust too often.

From The Salon of 1859

Letters to the Editor of the Revue Française

I. The Modern Artist

My dear M ★★★★ ,

When you did me the honour of asking for a critical review of the Salon you said: 'Be brief; do not produce a catalogue but a general survey, something like the account of a brisk philosophic walk round the exhibition.' Well, your wishes will be fully satisfied; not because your programme fits in, which in fact it does, with my own conception of this boring type of article called a 'Salon'; not because this way of tackling it is easier than the other, brevity always demanding greater efforts than prolixity; but simply because, especially in the present case, no other way is possible. Certainly, my quandary would have been more serious if I had found myself lost in a forest of original works, if the modern French temperament had suddenly undergone a change, and, in its purified, rejuvenated state, had put forth such vigorous and variously scented flowers that the result would have been a series of irrepressible Ohs and Ahs of astonishment, abundant praise, a flow of wordy admiration, and the need for new categories in the language of criticism. But fortunately (for me), nothing of that sort happened. No explosions; no unknown geniuses. The thoughts generated by the sight of this Salon are so simple, so ancient, so classic, that relatively few pages will, no doubt, be all I need to develop them. Do not be surprised, therefore, if banality in the painter has engendered commonplaces in the writer. In any case, you will lose nothing by that; for is there anything (and I am delighted to note that you agree with me in this), anything more charming, more productive, more positively exciting, than the commonplace?

Before I begin, allow me to express a regret that will, I believe, only rarely find expression. We had been told that we were to have some guests to welcome, guests not exactly unknown to us; for the Exhibition in the Avenue Montaigne had already introduced to Parisian exhibitiongoers a number of those charming artists who had been unknown to them far too long. I had therefore looked forward eagerly to renewing my acquaintance with Leslie, that rich, naive and noble humorist, one of the most vigorous embodiments of the British mind; with the two Hunts, one of them a stubborn naturalist, the other the ardent and determined creator of Pre-Raphaelitism; with Maclise, that bold master of composition, as impetuous as he is sure of himself; with Millais, that poet of minute detail; with J. Chalon, that mixture of Claude and Watteau, chronicler of lovely afternoon fêtes in the great Italian parks; with Grant, that natural heir of Reynolds; with Hook, who has the secret of filling his dreams of Venice with a magic light; with that strange Paton, who carries the mind back to Fuseli, and who, with a patience characteristic of another age, embroiders graceful visions of pantheistic chaos; with Cattermole, the painter of historical scenes in water-colour, and with that other astonishing artist, whose name escapes me, architect and dreamer, who builds, on paper, cities with bridges supported by elephants - colossi, under whose legs pass great three-masted schooners in full sail! Wall space had even been reserved for these friends of the imagination and of unusual colour effects, for these, the beloved of the bizarre muse; but alas! for reasons which are unknown to me, and which would, I think, be out of place in your paper, my hopes were disappointed. And so, tragic fires, gestures in the manner of Kean and Macready, intimate studies of the home, oriental splendours, reflected in the poetic mirror of the English mind, Scottish verdures, enchanting arbours, receding depths in water-colours, as spacious as a stage set and yet so small, we shall not gaze on you, not this time at least. Oh! enthusiastic representatives of the imagination and of the most precious faculties of the soul, were you so badly received at your first coming, and do you think us unworthy of understanding you?

And so, my dear M ★★★★ , we shall have to content ourselves with France; and, believe me, nothing would give me more intense pleasure than to rise to lyrical heights in speaking of my own country's artists; unhappily, in a critical mind with some experience, patriotism does not play an absolutely tyrannical role, and we have certain humiliating admissions to make. The first time I set foot in this Salon, on the very staircase, I met one of our most subtle and most esteemed critics, and to my first question, the question I could naturally be expected to ask, he replied: 'Flat, mediocre; I have seldom seen so depressing a Salon.' He was both right and wrong. An exhibition that can boast a large number of works by Delacroix, by Penguilly and Fromentin cannot be depressing; but looking at the thing as a whole I came to see that there was truth in what he said. True, mediocrity has always dominated the scene in every age, that is beyond dispute; but what is also as true as it is distressing is that the reign of mediocrity is stronger than ever, to the point of triumphant obtrusiveness. After allowing my gaze to wander round for some time on a crowd of platitudes brought to successful conclusions, so many bits of rubbish carefully licked over with the brush, so many stupid or specious things skilfully constructed, I was led, by the natural trend of my reflections, to consider the artist in the past, setting him alongside the artist of today; and then, as usual, at the end of my discouraging meditations, the terrible, the eternal 'Why?' arose inevitably before me. It would seem that meanness, puerility, incuriosity, the flat calm of fatuity have taken the place of ardour, nobility, and turbulent ambition, both in the fine arts and in literature; and that nothing, for the moment, gives us grounds for hope of seeing any spiritual flowering comparable with that of the Restoration. Nor am I alone in feeling oppressed by these sour reflections, believe me; and I shall prove it to you presently. I was accordingly saying to myself: in former days, what manner of man was the artist (Lebrun or David, for example)? Lebrun stands for erudition, imagination, knowledge of the past, love of grandeur. David, that colossus, maligned by a crowd of myrmidons, was he not also love of the past, love of grandeur, allied to erudition? And today, what is the artist, that ancient brother-in-arms of the poet? To answer that question well, my dear M ★★★★ , we must not be afraid of being too harsh. Scandalous favouritism sometimes calls for a reaction of equal force. Despite his lack of merit, the artist is today, and for many years has been, simply a spoilt child. Just think of the honours, the money squandered on soulless and uncultivated men! For my part, I certainly do not support introducing into a given art means that are foreign to it; and yet, to give an example, I cannot help feeling some sympathy for an artist like Chenavard, always agreeable, agreeable, that is, like good books, and graceful even when most ponderous. At least with him (and what do I care if he be the target of art students' jokes?) I know I can discuss Virgil or Plato. Préault has a delightful talent; it is his instinctive good taste that flings him on the beautiful like a beast of prey on its natural victim. Daumier is endowed with luminous good sense, and this colours his whole conversation. Ricard, in spite of the dazzling and disjointed nature of his talk, reveals at every turn that he knows a lot, and has done a lot of comparative study. There is no need, I think, for me to mention Eugène Delacroix's conversation, which is an admirable mixture of philosophic solidity, light wit and burning enthusiasm. Beyond them I can remember no one worthy of conversing with a philosopher or a poet. Apart from them, you will scarcely find anyone but spoiled children. Tell me, I beg, I entreat you, in what drawing-room, in what tavern, in what social or intimate gathering you have ever heard any witty remark come from the lips of a spoilt child, any profound, brilliant, pregnant remark, a thought- or reverie-provoking one, in short a significant remark! If such a remark has been flung out in conversation, it may not have come from a politician or a philosopher, but certainly from a man of some unusual profession, a hunter, a sailor, a chair-mender; but from an artist, a spoilt child - never!

The spoilt child has inherited from his predecessors a privilege which was legitimate in their day. The enthusiasm that greeted David, Guérin, Girodet, Gros, Delacroix, Bonington, still sheds a kindly afterglow on his mean little person; and while good poets and vigorous historians painfully earn a living, the dunder-headed financier pays sumptuous prices for the spoilt child's indecent bits of impertinence. And please note, that if such favours came the way of worthy recipients, I should not complain. I am not one of those people who begrudge a singer or a dancer who has reached the peak of her art a fortune earned by the hard work and the risks that are her daily portion. If I were, I should be afraid of falling into the pernicious ways of the late Girardin, of fraudulent memory, who one day reproached Théophile Gautier for setting a higher price on his imagination than a Sous-Préfet for his services. That, if you remember rightly, happened on one of those ill-starred days when a terrified public heard him talking in Latin: pecudesque locutae [and the beasts spoke]! No, I am not as unjust as all that; but it is a good thing to raise one's voice and denounce present-day folly when a lovely picture by Delacroix could scarcely find a buyer at a thousand francs, and, at the very same time, the insignificant little figures of Meissonier were fetching ten or even twenty times more. But those happy days are over; now we have sunk even lower, and M. Meissonier, who, in spite of his merits, had the misfortune of introducing and popularizing the taste for the diminutive, is a veritable giant in comparison with our creators of little baubles today.

Imagination discredited, grandeur disdained, love (no, that word is too beautiful) - exclusive concentration on technique, such, I believe, are the main reasons, so far as the artist is concerned, for his decline. The greater the degree of imagination, the surer must be the corresponding mastery of technique, if the latter is to keep pace with the former in its adventurous flights, and to conquer the difficulties imagination eagerly seeks. And the surer his technical mastery, the less the painter should boast and make a parade of it, so that his imagination may shine with its full brilliance. Thus speaks wisdom, and wisdom adds: the man who has mere skill is a fathead, and the man with imagination who tries to do without skill is a lunatic. But simple though such things may be, they are above or below our present-day artist. The daughter of a concierge says to herself: 'I shall go to the Conservatoire, I shall make my début at the Comédie-Française, and I shall speak the lines of Corneille, until such time as I win the same recognition as those who have been speaking them for a long time.' And she is as good as her word. Most classically monotonous, most classically boring and ignorant she is too; but she has succeeded in what was perfectly easy, namely obtaining, by her patience, the privileges of full membership of the Comédie-Française troupe. And the spoilt child, the modern painter, says to himself: 'What is this imagination they talk about? Something dangerous and tiring. What is the study and contemplation of the past? A waste of time. I shall be classical, not like Bertin (for the classical changes its place and its name), but like ... Troyon, for example.' And he does what he said he would. He paints away, and he stops up his soul, and he goes on painting until at last his manner is like that of the artist in fashion, and by his stupidity and skill he deserves the public's favour and money. The imitator of the imitator finds imitators in his turn, and in this way each chases after his own dream of greatness, stopping up more and more tightly his own soul, and above all reading nothing, not even a cookery book, which could at least have provided him with a more glorious, if less lucrative, career. Once he has mastered the art of sauces, patinas, glazes, rubbings, gravies, stews (I am speaking of painting), the spoilt child starts striking attitudes, and repeats, with more conviction than ever, that all the rest is unnecessary.

Once upon a time a German peasant went to see a painter, and this is what he said to him: 'Sir, I want you to paint my portrait. You will show me sitting at the main entrance of my farm in the big armchair I inherited from my father. You will paint my wife by my side, with her distaff; behind us, coming and going, my daughters preparing the family supper. To the left, you will depict the grand avenue, and emerging from it those of my sons who are returning from the fields, after having brought the cows back to the cowshed; others of them, with my grandsons, are busy putting the farm carts stacked with hay under cover. As I contemplate the scene, please do not forget the puffs of smoke from my pipe, tinted by the rays of the setting sun. I should also like the viewer to hear the sounds of the Angelus ringing from the church belfry close by. That is where we all got married, father and sons. It is important that you should paint the satisfied air I enjoy at that time of the day, as I look upon my family and my wealth, increased by the labour of another day.'

Loud cheers for that peasant! Without knowing it, he had understood painting. The love of his profession had heightened his imagination. Which of our fashionable painters would be worthy of executing that portrait, and which of them has an imagination on a level with that one?