Confessions of a Young Man. George Moore
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written than I started at once for London, confident I should find no difficulty in getting my play produced.
CHAPTER III
Is it necessary to say that I did not find a manager to produce my play? A printer was more attainable, and the correction of proofs amused me for a while. I wrote another play; and when the hieing after theatrical managers began to lose its attractiveness my thoughts reverted to France, which always haunted me; and which now possessed me as if with the sweet and magnetic influence of home.
How important my absence from Paris seemed to me; and how Paris rushed into my eyes!—Paris—public ball-rooms, cafés, the models in the studio and the young girls painting, and Marshall, Alice, and Julien. Marshall!—my thoughts pointed at him through the intervening streets and the endless procession of people coming and going.
"M. Marshall, is he at home?" "M. Marshall left here some months ago." "Do you know his address?" "I'll ask my husband." "Do you know M. Marshall's address!" "Yes, he's gone to live in the Rue de Douai." "What number?" "I think it is fifty-four." "Thanks." "Coachman, wake up; drive me to the Rue de Douai."
But Marshall was not to be found at the Rue de Douai; and he had left no address. There was nothing for it but to go to the studio; I should be able to obtain news of him there—perhaps find him. But when I pulled aside the curtain, the accustomed piece of slim nakedness did not greet my eyes; only the blue apron of an old woman enveloped in a cloud of dust. "The gentlemen are not here to-day, the studio is closed; I am sweeping up." "Oh, and where is M. Julien?" "I cannot say, sir: perhaps at the café, or perhaps he is gone to the country." This was not very encouraging, and now, my enthusiasm thoroughly damped, I strolled along le Passage, looking at the fans, the bangles and the litter of cheap trinkets that each window was filled with. On the left at the corner of the Boulevard was our café. As I came forward the waiter moved one of the tin tables, and then I saw the fat Provençal. But just as if he had seen me yesterday he said, "Tiens! c'est vous; une deme tasse? oui … garçon, une deme tasse." Presently the conversation turned on Marshall; they had not seen much of him lately. "Il parait qu'il est plus amoureux que jamais," Julien replied sardonically.
I found my friend in large furnished apartments on the ground floor in the Rue Duphot. The walls were stretched with blue silk, there were large mirrors and great gilt cornices. Passing into the bedroom I found the young god wallowing in the finest of fine linen—in a great Louis XV. bed, and there were cupids above him. "Holloa! what, you back again, Dayne? we thought we weren't going to see you again."
"It's nearly one o'clock: get up. What's the news?"
"To-day is the opening of the exposition of the Impressionists. We'll have a bit of breakfast round the corner, at Durant's, and we'll go on there. I hear that Bedlam is nothing to it; there is a canvas there twenty feet square and in three tints: pale yellow for the sunlight, brown for the shadows, and all the rest is sky-blue. There is, I am told, a lady walking in the foreground with a ring-tailed monkey, and the tail is said to be three yards long."
And so we went to jeer a group of enthusiasts that willingly forfeit all delights of the world in the hope of realising a new aestheticism; we went insolent with patent leather shoes and bright kid gloves and armed with all the jargon of the school. "Cette jambe ne porte pas;" "la nature ne se fait pas comme ça;" "on dessine par les masses; combien de têtes?" "Sept et demi." "Si j'avais un morceau de craie je mettrais celle-là dans un bocal, c'est un foetus," etc.; in a word, all that the journals of culture are pleased to term an artistic education. And then the boisterous laughter, exaggerated in the hope of giving as much pain as possible.
The history of Impressionist art is simple. In the beginning of this century the tradition of French art—the tradition of Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau—had been completely lost; having produced genius, their art died. Ingres is the sublime flower of the classic art which succeeded the art of the palace and the boudoir: further than Ingres it was impossible to go, and his art died. Then the Turners and Constables came to France, and they begot Troyon, and Troyon begot Millet, Courbet, Corot, and Rousseau, and these in turn begot Degas, Pissarro, Madame Morizot, and Guillaumin. Degas is a pupil of Ingres, but he applies the marvellous acuteness of drawing he learned from his master to delineating the humblest aspects of modern life. Degas draws not by the masses, but by the character;—his subjects are shop-girls, ballet-girls, and washerwomen, but the qualities that endow them with immortality are precisely those which eternalise the virgins and saints of Leonardo da Vinci in the minds of men. You see the fat, vulgar woman in the long cloak trying on a hat in front of the pier-glass. So marvellously well are the lines of her face observed and rendered that you can tell exactly what her position in life is; you know what the furniture of her rooms is like; you know what she would say to you if she were to speak. She is as typical of the nineteenth century as Fragonard's ladies are of the Court of Louis XV. To the right you see a picture of two shop-girls with bonnets in their hands. So accurately are the habitual movements of the heads and the hands observed that you at once realise the years of bonnet-showing and servile words that these women have lived through. We have seen Degas do this before—it is a welcome repetition of a familiar note, but it is not until we turn to the set of nude figures that we find the great artist revealing any new phase of his talent. The first, in an attitude which suggests the kneeling Venus, washes her thighs in a tin bath. The second, a back view, full of the malformations of forty years, of children, of hard work, stands gripping her flanks with both hands. The naked woman has become impossible in modern art; it required Degas' genius to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. Cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the middle ages, and with cynicism Degas has rendered the nude again an artistic possibility. What Mr. Horsley or the British matron would say it is difficult to guess. Perhaps the hideousness depicted by M. Degas would frighten them more than the sensuality which they condemn in Sir Frederick Leighton. But, be this as it may, it is certain that the great, fat, short-legged creature, who in her humble and touching ugliness passes a chemise over her lumpy shoulders, is a triumph of art. Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible; Velasquez knew this when he painted his dwarfs.
Pissarro exhibited a group of girls gathering apples in a garden—sad greys and violets beautifully harmonised. The figures seem to move as in a dream: we are on the thither side of life, in a world of quiet colour and happy aspiration. Those apples will never fall from the branches, those baskets that the stooping girls are filling will never be filled: that garden is the garden of the peace that life has not for giving, but which the painter has set in an eternal dream of violet and grey.
Madame Morizot exhibited a series of delicate fancies. Here are two young girls; the sweet atmosphere folds them as with a veil; they are all summer; their dreams are limitless, their days are fading, and their ideas follow the flight of the white butterflies through the standard roses. Take note, too, of the stand of fans; what delicious fancies are there—willows, balconies, gardens, and terraces.
Then, contrasting with these distant tendernesses, there was the vigorous painting of Guillaumin. There life is rendered in violent and colourful brutality. The ladies fishing in the park, with the violet of the skies and the green of the trees descending upon them, is a chef d'oeuvre. Nature seems to be closing about them like a tomb; and that hillside—sunset flooding the skies with yellow and the earth with blue shadow—is another piece of painting that will one day find a place in one of the public galleries; and the same can be said of the portrait of the woman on a background of chintz flowers.
We could but utter coarse gibes and exclaim, "What could have induced him to paint such things? surely he must have seen that it was absurd. I wonder if the Impressionists are in earnest or if it is only une blague qu'on nous fait?" Then we stood and screamed at Monet, that most exquisite painter of blonde light. We stood before the "Turkeys," and seriously we wondered if "it was serious work,"—that chef d'oeuvre! the high grass that the turkeys are gobbling is flooded with sunlight so swift and intense that for a moment the illusion is complete. "Just look at the house! why, the turkeys couldn't walk in