Complete works of george.., p.912
Complete Works of George Moore, page 912
The glass door of the café grates upon the sand again, and Degas enters, a round-shouldered man in a suit of pepper-and-salt. Now there is nothing very trenchantly French about him, except the large necktie. His eyes are small, his words sharp, ironical, cynical. Degas and Manet are the leaders of the Impressionistic school, and their friendship has been jarred but once, when Degas came to the Rue Amsterdam and sat with his back to the pictures, saying that his eyes were too weak to look at them. If your eyes are too weak you shouldn’t have come to see me, Manet answered. Manet is an instinct, Degas an intellectuality, and he believes with Edgar Poe that one becomes original by saying, I will not do a certain thing because it has been done before.
So the day came when Degas had to put Semiramis aside for a ballet girl; the ballet girl had not been painted before; it was Degas who introduced her and the acrobat and the repasseuse into art. And remembering that portraits lacked intimacy, he designed Manet sprawling on a sofa indifferent to his wife’s music, thinking of the painting he had done that morning, or of the painting he was going to do the next morning. If Leonardo had lived in the nineteenth century, I said, he might have painted like that; and I wandered on through the Louvre thinking of the twain as intellectuals, till Rembrandt’s portrait of his wife absorbed me as no other picture had ever done, and perhaps as no other picture will ever do again. The spell that it laid upon me was conclusive; when I approached the eyes faded into brown shadow, but when I withdrew they began to tell the story of a soul — of one who seems conscious of her weakness, of her sex, and the burden of her own special lot — she is Rembrandt’s wife, a servant, a satellite, a watcher. The mouth is no more than a little shadow, but what wistful tenderness there is in it! and the colour of the face is white, faintly tinted with bitumen, and in the cheeks some rose madder shows through the yellow. She wears a fur jacket; grey pearls hang in her ears; there is a brooch upon her breast, and a hand at the bottom of the picture passing out of the frame, and the hand reminds us, as the chin does, of the old story that God took a little clay, etc., for the chin and hand and arm are moulded without display of knowledge as Nature moulds.
The Mona Lisa, celebrated in literature, hanging a few feet away, seems factitious when compared with this portrait; her hesitating smile which held my youth in a little tether has come to seem to me but a grimace, and the pale mountains no more mysterious than a globe or map seems at a distance, a sort of riddle, an acrostic, a poetical decoction, a ballade, a rondel, a villanelle, or ballade with double burden, a sestina or chant royal. The Mona Lisa, being literature in intention rather than painting, has drawn round her many poets, and we must forgive her many mediocre verses for the sake of a prose passage that our generation had by heart. The Mona Lisa and Degas’s Leçon de Danse are thoughtful pictures painted with the brains rather than with the temperaments; and we ask sooner or later, but assuredly we ask, of what worth are Degas’s descriptions of washerwomen and dancers and racehorses compared with that fallen flower, that Aubusson carpet, above all, the footstool? and if any one of Degas’s pictures is bought for this gallery I hope it will be one of these early pictures, the red-headed girl, for instance, an unfinished sketch, exhibited some time ago at Knightsbridge, the property, I believe, of Durand Ruel.
In the days of the Nouvelle Athènes we used to repeat Degas’s witticisms, how he once said to Whistler, Whistler, if you were not a genius you would be the most ridiculous man in Paris. Leonardo made roads, Degas makes witticisms. I remember his answer when I confided to him one day that I did not care for Daumier — the beautiful Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that hangs on the wall I had not then seen; that is my apology, an insufficient one, I admit. Degas answered, If you were to show Raphael a Daumier he would admire it, but if you were to show him a Cabanel he would say with a sigh: That is my fault — an excellent quip. But we should not attach the same importance to a quip as to a confession. Manet said to me: I tried to write, but I couldn’t; and we must esteem these words as an artist’s brag; I am a painter, and only a painter. Degas could not boast that he was a painter and only a painter, for he often wearied of painting; he turned to modelling, and he abandoned modelling for the excitement of collecting pictures — not for himself but for the Louvre. I’ve got it, he said to me in the Rue Maubeuge, and he was surprised when I asked him what he had got; great egotists always take it for granted that every one is thinking of what they are doing. Why, the Jupiter, of course the Jupiter, and he took me to see the picture — a Jupiter with beetling brows, and a thunderbolt in his hand. He had hung a pear next to it, a speckled pear on six inches of canvas, one that used to hang in Manet’s studio, and guessing he was about to be delivered of a quip, I waited. You notice the pear? Yes, I said. I hung it next to the Jupiter to show that a well-painted pear could overthrow a God. There is a picture by Mr Sargent in this room — one of his fashionable women. She is dressed to receive visitors, and is about to spring from her chair; the usual words, How do you do, Mary, are upon her crimson lips, and the usual hysterical lights are in her eyes, and her arms are like bananas as usual. There is in this portrait the same factitious surface-life that informs all his pictures, and, recognising fashionable gowns and drawing-room vivacities as the fundamental Sargent, Degas described him as Le chef de rayon de la peinture. Le chef de rayon is the young man behind the counter who says, I think, madam, that this piece of mauve silk would suit your daughter admirably, ten yards at least will be required. If your daughter will step upstairs, I will take her measure. Vous pouvez me confier votre fille; soyez sûre que je ne voudrais rien faire qui pût nuire à mon commerce.
Any one, Degas said once to me, can have talent when he is five-and-twenty; it is more difficult to have talent when you are fifty. I remember the Salon in which Bastien Lepage exhibited his Potato Harvest, and we all admired it till Degas said, The Bouguereau of the modern movement. Then every one understood that Bastien Lepage’s talent was not an original but a derivative talent, and when Roll, another painter of the same time, exhibited his enormous picture entitled Work, containing fifty figures, Degas said, One doesn’t make a crowd with fifty figures, one makes a crowd with five. Quips, merely quips, and there were far too many quips in Degas’s life; and I include in my list of quips a great number of ballet girls and racehorses. His butcher’s corpulent wife standing before a tin tub was much talked about in our cafe, until Monet returned after a long absence in the country, bringing with him twenty or thirty canvases, a row of poplars seen in perspective against a grey sky, or a view of the Seine with a bridge cutting the picture in equal halves, or a cottage shrouded in snow with some low hills. Pissarro admired these, of course, but his preference ran to Sisley, who, he said, was more of a poet; and should a Sisley come later into this collection, my hope is that it will be a picture I saw years ago in the galleries of George Pettit: the bare wall of a cottage, a frozen pond, and some poplar-trees showing against the first film of light, a vision so exquisite that Constable’s art seems in comparison coarse and clumsy.
Monet’s art is colder, more external, and those who like to trace individual qualities back to race influence may, if they will, attribute the exquisite reverie which distinguishes Sisley’s pictures to his northern blood.
Monet began by imitating Manet, and Manet ended by imitating Monet. They were great friends. Manet painted Monet and Madame Monet in their garden, and Monet painted Manet and Madame Manet in the same garden; they exchanged pictures, but after a quarrel each returned the other his picture. Monet’s picture of Manet and his wife I never saw, but Manet’s picture of Monet and Madame Monet belongs to a very wealthy merchant, a Monsieur Pellerin, who has the finest collection of Manets and Cézannes in the world. Cézanne exhibited with the Impressionists, but I do not remember having seen him in the Nouvelle Athènes or heard his name mentioned by Manet or Degas. Alexis told us once that he had breakfast with him that morning at the Moulin de la Galette, and that Cézanne had arrived in jack-boots covered with mud and had spent thirty francs on the meal, which was an unusual feat in those days and in those districts. Alexis was struck by the resemblance of Cézanne to his pictures. A peasant come straight out of The Reapers, he said; I thought of Manet, and we congratulated ourselves on the advancement of our taste, forgetful that the next generation may speak of Cézanne’s portraits as the art of the trowel rather than of the brush. The word masonry must have been in Zola’s mind when he exalted Cézanne in L’Oeuvre, and at the dinner given to celebrate the publication of the book declared him to be a greater painter than Manet. Both came from Aix; both had talent; and both were denied the exquisite vision and handicraft of Sisley and Verlaine.
Within the Impressionist movement were two women, Mary Casatt, who derived her art from Degas, and Berthe Morisot, who derived hers from Manet. Berthe Morisot married Manet’s brother, and there can be little doubt that she would have married Manet if Manet had not been married already. I remember him saying to me once: My sister-in-law wouldn’t have been noticed without me; she carried my art across her fan. Berthe is dead, and her pictures are very expensive and picture-dealers do not make presents, but Mary Casatt is alive, she is a rich woman, and I take this opportunity of suggesting that she should be asked to give a picture. After an absence of many years I went to see her and found her blind, but talkative as of yore, and we talked of all the people we had known, till at the end of breakfast she said, There is one we haven’t spoken about, perhaps the greatest of all. I said, You mean Renoir? And she reproached me with having been always a little indifferent to his art. I don’t think that this is true, or if it be true, it is only true in a way. I know of nothing that I would sooner hang in my drawing-room than one of Renoir’s bathers, or a portrait of a child in grey fur dressed to be taken to the Bois by her mother. Some of his portraits of children are the most beautiful I know — they are white and flower-like, and therefore very unlike the stunted, leering little monkeys that Sir Joshua Reynolds persuaded us to accept as representative of tall and beautiful English children. I think it was at the end of the ‘sixties that Renoir painted the celebrated picture of the woman looking into the canary cage — a wonderful picture, but so unlike his later work that it may be doubted if anybody would recognise it as being by the man who painted the bathers. By the bathers I mean all the plump girls whom he painted on green banks under trees, their fat so permeated with light that they seem like luminous flowers; yet they are flesh, and full-blooded flesh that would bleed. It may be that Manet never painted naked flesh so realistically. His art is less casual, less modern, less actual, than Renoir’s. It came out of a different tradition, and upon it is the birthmark of easy circumstances and the culture thereof; whereas Renoir was a Parisian workman; he began life in a factory painting flowers, and his talent was not sufficient to redeem his art from the taint of an inherited vulgarity. Whistler would have cried for an umbrella to hide himself under were he asked to consider The Umbrellas.
The man I see when my thoughts return to the Nouvelle Athènes is a tall, lean man with red in his ragged hair and beard, and his voice has a ring in it. If Renoir had not been an aesthete he wold have been a Socialist orator. Some of his denunciations are quoted in Confessions of a Young Man, and here is an anecdote that a few may think instructive. Money suddenly began to accumulate at his bank, and he bethought himself of a stock of wine and cigars, a carriage, several suits of clothes, or a flat in the quarter of the Champs Élysées with a mistress in it. But turning from these legitimate issues, he went to Venice to study Tintoretto, and on his return to Paris he laboured in a school of art until it became plain to him that his studies, instead of decreasing, were increasing the distance between himself and Tintoretto. I remember his embittered, vehement voice in the Nouvelle Athènes, and I caught a glimpse of his home life on the day that I went to Montmartre to breakfast with him, and finding him, to my surprise, living in the same terrace as Paul Alexis, I asked: Shall we see Alexis after breakfast? He would waste the whole of my afternoon, Renoir muttered, sitting here smoking cigars and sipping cognac; and I must get on with my picture. Marie, as soon as we have finished, bring in the asparagus, and get your clothes off, for I shall want you in the studio when we have had our coffee.
The evenings that Pissarro did not come to the Nouvelle Athènes were so rare that I cannot think of the Nouvelle Athènes without seeing him in the far corner on the right, listening to Manet and Degas, approving of all they said. I remember his pictures, many of them, as well as his white beard and hair, and nose of the race of Abraham. He figures in Confessions of a Young Man, and turning to this youthful book I find an appreciation of him, and, as I think today as I thought then, I will quote it. Speaking of a group of girls gathering apples in a garden, I wrote: Sad greys and violets, beautifully harmonised with figures that seem to move as in a dream on the thither side of life, in a world of quiet colour and perfect resignation. But the apples will never fall from the branches, the baskets of the stooping girls will never be filled, for the orchard is one that life has not for giving, that the painter has set in an eternal dream of violet and grey, an apple orchard with peasants gathering the spare fruit of the mildew collected on a planet’s surface. The picture in the present exhibition represents Pissarro in his first period, when he followed Corot; I hope Dublin will acquire it. And having said this much, my thoughts return to the last time I spoke with this dear old man, so like himself and his race. It was at Rouen about six years ago, whither he had gone to paint the Cathedral. For Monet having painted the Cathedral, why not he likewise? Why not, indeed? for he always followed somebody’s dream. But though his wanderings were many and sudden, he never quite lost his individuality, not even when he painted yachts after the manner of Signac.
Who had invented Impressionism? was asked when he died, and attempts were made to trace Monet back to Turner. Monet, it was said, had been to England, and in England he must have seen Turner, and it was impossible to see Turner without being influenced by Turner. Yes! Monet was in England many times, and he painted in England, and one day we went together to an Exhibition of Old Masters in Burlington House, and there we saw a picture for which many thousands of pounds had just been paid, and Monet said, Is that brown thing your great Turner? It is true, the picture we were looking at was not much more interesting than brown paper, and I told him that Turner had painted other pictures that he would like better, The Frosty Morning, and he said he had seen it, remarking that Turner had painted that morning with his eyes open. Whistler likes Calais Pier better than The Frosty Morning, for it was more like his own painting, and no very special discernment is required to understand that Turner and Constable could not have influenced painters whose desire was to dispense altogether with shadow. Whether, by doing so, they failed sometimes to differentiate between a picture and a strip of wallpaper is a question that does not come within the scope of the present inquiry. Mr Lane is asking us to consider if a collection of Impressionist pictures would benefit Dublin, and it seems to me certain that Manet, Monet, Sisley, and Renoir are more likely to draw our thoughts to the beauty of this world than a collection of Italian pictures gathered from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
VII
AS SOON AS the applause died away, Yeats who had lately returned to us from the States with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat, rose to speak. We were surprised at the change in his appearance, and could hardly believe our ears when, instead of talking to us as he used to do about the old stories come down from generation to generation he began to thunder like Ben Tillett against the middle classes, stamping his feet, working himself into a great temper, and all because the middle classes did not dip their hands into their pockets and give Lane the money he wanted for his exhibition. When he spoke the words, the middle classes, one would have thought that he was speaking against a personal foe, and we looked round asking each other with our eyes where on earth our Willie Yeats had picked up the strange belief that none but titled and carriage-folk could appreciate pictures. And we asked ourselves why our Willie Yeats should feel himself called upon to denounce his own class; millers and shipowners on one side, and on the other a portrait-painter of distinction; and we laughed, remembering AE’s story, that one day whilst Yeats was crooning over his fire Yeats had said that if he had his rights he would be Duke of Ormonde. AE’s answer was: I am afraid, Willie, you are overlooking your father — a detestable remark to make to a poet in search of an ancestry; and the addition: We both belong to the lower-middle classes, was in equally bad taste. AE knew that there were spoons in the Yeats family bearing the Butler crest, just as there are portraits in my family of Sir Thomas More, and he should have remembered that certain passages in The Countess Cathleen are clearly derivative from the spoons. He should have remembered that all the romantic poets have sought illustrious ancestry, and rightly, since romantic poetry is concerned only with nobles and castles, gonfalons and oriflammes. Villiers de l’Isle Adam believed firmly in his descent, and appeared on all public occasions with the Order of Malta pinned upon his coat; and Victor Hugo, too, had inquired out his ancestry in all the archives of Spain and France before sitting down to write Hernani ... and with good reason, for with the disappearance of gonfalons and donjons it may be doubted if — My meditation was interrupted by Yeats’s voice.
