COURBET
For us who grew up and matured in this first quarter of the twentieth century, the name of the painter-poet of Ornans is rich in touching memories and a very gentle nostalgia. When we were born, he was already gone, exiled to the shores of a lake between his land and ours, in an ancient fishermen’s inn on whose crumbling walls one could still read the symbolic words Safe Harbor, words which convey an indefinable impression of consolation and melancholy, like the final hymn of Pandolfo Colenuccio. And yet, all that past is near us, so near that we almost feel its warmth. That word, “yesterday,” envelops us in nostalgic echoes, as when we awaken with our sense of time and logic still confused, and the memory of a happy hour lived the day before reverberates in our minds. Sometimes we think of Courbet and his work as we think of our father’s youth.
He was a worker and a poet. Poetic inspiration was a necessary complement to his painting. His first activity was the worker’s. Like those engineers of nineteenth-century Europe, bearded and powerful; like the industrialists, the colonizers, like all that generation of indefatigable constructors, sons of a continent already old, at the threshold of a new aspect of the life that inventions of all kinds had revealed (for already fleets of ships were plowing the seas, joining the continents more rapidly, and railroads were penetrating the darkness of tunnels and striating the plains), like these men, Courbet was a son of his time.
One imagines him, powerfully chested, tall, bearded, affable and melancholy, in the Baudelairean atmosphere of his Paris studio or in the smoke and noise of the Café de Madrid in the company of the ardent Gambetta and the romantic Jules Vallès, or again leaning on his long alpenstock, his shoulders laden like those of a Zouave in a colonial battalion, roaming the mountains, valleys, and forests of France in search of beautiful landscapes; emotional and curious, like an impassioned hunter in quest of game. And always he appears to us in the atmosphere of his time: a Romantic.
Romantic! A strange word, pregnant with meanings that seem to come to us from afar. A word that gives rise to suspicions and ambiguities. But for us, it means not only an emotive and moving art, an art firmly established on the solid pavement of reality, but also an art which lets us experience only that small portion of the great mystery of infinity that pierces the gap in flying clouds on a moonlit night.
There have been epochs, peoples, periods of art in the world that were absolutely devoid of romantic meaning. Egypt, for example. Against all that this word can evoke of construction, architecture, sculpture, painting, one sees the great inexorable vault of a silent, cloudless summer night; this image has for us something disagreeably mute, empty, and alarming; the complete absence of all happiness and hope. It is not romantic. But when, on a moonlit night, we look up to the sky in which great white clouds sail like icebergs adrift in the northern seas and when we discover in the archipelago of clouds, like the shreds of a suspended sea, the sky, nocturnal, somber, and profound, then a joyous, happy emotion seizes our minds and our hearts; a breath of presentiment, of adventure and nostalgia envelops us, and with this breath a name resounds in us, powerful: Homer!
Homer was a Romantic.
We are not aesthetes, still less are we fanatics, and we thus take little pleasure in dreaming. We have an inveterate habit of meditating deeply on each of our emotions and each of our feelings.
The fact that the night sky seems more beautiful to us seen through clouds has a reason that is precise and definite as a geometrical design. The cloud in the night sky represents reality; the lunar light defines, accentuates, and solidifies its volume as it illuminates it; thus it is an actual ceiling we see above us, so that when we glimpse the night’s darkness through a crack in this ceiling, the emotion we experience is happy, and it is an emotion belonging to art. In the Iliad, the Homeric hero and the Homeric god always stand solidly on the planks of reality.
The Olympic gods who preside over the destinies of Priam’s city are solid and real as the besieging Achaeans on the beach and the besieged Trojans assembled on the walls and towers to defend their city.
In the Odyssey, under the feet of wandering Ulysses there is always the solid surface of four tarred planks, the planks of his ship.
* * *
The sense of reality is always linked to a work of art. The deeper it is, the more poetic and romantic the work will be. Mysterious laws and reasons of perspective govern such facts. Who can contradict the disturbing relation that exists between perspective and metaphysics?
Courbet, who experienced the sense of reality more deeply than Delacroix, is thus more poetic and romantic than he, despite the opinion of critics of his time and ours. The error of considering Delacroix at first sight as the preeminently romantic painter is easy to commit; but all his art is only an aspect of movement, something oblique and swirling like banners twisted by a gale, horses and men bent beneath a tempest.
It is an aspect that is more literary than purely poetic. Courbet’s romanticism is much more pathetic and solitary. Baudelaire himself is mistaken, and in his best things he is much closer to Courbet than to Delacroix.
Courbet places the reality of a face or an object in the foreground, in that hot summer evening light that he expressed with so much pathos. And it was a fruit or a face, a nude or a tree, a cliff or the whitecapped waves of a stormy sea. But behind the fruit and the twisted leaves, one perceives the sky in the distance and the clouds in flight; behind the reclining woman is the perforation of the window, dividing the trees and planes of the park below into rectangles; and behind the cliff polished by the waves rises the horizon lit up by the setting sun, and the great storm clouds fly away, low over the sea. The beautiful Baudelairean verses resound:
“Free man, you shall ever desire the sea! The sea is your mirror, there you contemplate your soul. In the infinite unrolling of its wave.”
In each of his paintings, from the simplest still life to his vast compositions, you always hear the refrain of a romantic song, a song which was then not only French but European, which passed from country to country, from race to race. It was an evening music, most gentle. It was the lamentation of the barbatouli of the nineteenth century; it was their consolation. It was the repose of the weary engineer. There is something of this bizarre poetic sense in a phrase from this passage which Baudelaire dedicated to Franz Liszt: “Through the mist, beyond the rivers, above the cities where the pianos chant your glory…”
Courbet is a storyteller: The Demoiselles of the Seine, The Wrestlers, The Picnic, The Kill are narrations, passages from a novel in which the characters don’t appear under their present-day aspect (verism) but under their poetic and spectral aspect (realism). In the latter guise, even a portrait can disturb us and give us that ineffable emotion we experience in the presence of works of high poetic fantasy. His numerous self-portraits, the portrait of the art patron Bruyas, and that of the writer Jules Vallès, the romantic journalist, have that same spectral, pathetic, and touching quality we find in the first daguerreotypes and which lasts down to the moment when aestheticism and perfected machines and photographic methods inspired in us the horror of modern artistic photography, opaque, dirty-brown, confused, and idiotic.
In fact, in photography one sees very well the difference that exists between realism and verism. Modern photography, rapid, perfected, and aestheticizing, only shows us the wan, tiresome, present-day aspect of people and things. With the help of an old photograph one can even make a painting that is not lacking in poetry. Thus Manet did his portrait of Maximilian’s execution from a photograph. Today, photography offers us assistance in the form of characteristic examples of Tito and Sartorio.
Nulla sine narratione ars. By the word “narration” we do not mean the recounting of a scene or a historical event. It is something very different indeed. The work of art must narrate something beyond the limits of its volume. The object or the figure represented must also narrate poetically what is far from it, and also what its very volume conceals materially. A certain dog depicte
d by Courbet is like a poetic and romantic tale of a hunt.
Since he was a poet, he was very fond of painting. In the museums of France, Flanders, and Germany, he studied the painters of the past. The supple and the solid tempted and disturbed him; the hard and the fragmented annoyed him. The more the painter is a poet, the more he feels the magic of his craft in his work, which is the most magical of all and also the most painful. Consequently, only the good painter, inspired by a lyrical élan, can find the right modus operandi.
After the first scenes and portraits, still stiff and heavy, and weak in atmosphere, like the portrait of his sister as a young girl, Courbet, guided by his poet’s instinct, went on to perfect himself further and acquired a craftsmanship always more aerated and more profound. Like all great artists, he followed a continually ascending line. The misfortunes of his last years neither wearied nor discouraged him. Abandoned by his friends, in the solitary life he led near the lakes and mountains of his hospitable Switzerland, he idealized and spectralized poetically the landscapes that rose before him.
Perhaps the old castle of Chillon with its robust towers, situated down on the sunny shores of the lake, appeared more beautiful than the cliffs of Etretat and the wild landscapes of his birthplace to the ever happier enthusiasm of this pictor poeta, and perhaps while he worked at his last paintings, before lying down to rest at last in the arms of his good death, the last words of the aged Corot rose from his heart to his lips: “What beautiful landscapes! I have never seen such beautiful ones!”
Hebdomeros: With Monsieur Dudron’s Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1992). First published in Art and Literature 11 (Winter 1967).
THE ENGINEER’S SON
Strolling one evening
In the puritan city
We’ll go seeking …
Beyond life the dark fountain
Where the child sleeps.
There the bitter brooks of faded illusions
Will dry up.
In the day without decline in love
Without complaint
We shall live again.
—Emile Bronnaire, Poésies
All the way along that shadowy avenue bordered with pepper trees, I imagined the drama of the Passion as paintings and engravings show it: Roman soldiers, helmeted and plumed, raising their heads to peer at Christ, and olive-skinned rabbis arguing with the gestures of Neapolitan camorristi. It was in autumn and the memory always returned at that time of year. The pepper trees were numerous and bushy, planted close together so that the avenue was quite dark in places; from the ground which had become sticky and slippery, for the red pellets of those gnarled, piperaceous trees completely covered it, arose a strong, sweetish odor; often, one of the rare promenaders would lose his balance as he walked along and, like a novice skater, would fan the air with outstretched arms so as to regain his stability. It was, in short, a kind of tropical forest through which the stubborn traveler hacks his way with axe and torch, under the constant menace of the poisonous insect whose sting is fatal and of the rhinoceros with ironclad flanks like a monitor, against which the armored bullets from Colt revolvers and grooved rifles flattened out lamentably. It was thus that I used to advance along the avenue of pepper trees in the days of my distant childhood. What about clearings, you will ask. Yes, there were some, but not many; one in particular dominated the others; it rose gently toward the palace of King Otto. A vast building decked out with a truly regal balcony, this palace had something both solemn and dreary about it; in another respect it disturbed one with certain ideas that it evoked: nocturnal fêtes ending a day of coronation or the marriage of a foreign princess, and also dark nights of revolution. Then the balcony would fill with a seething mass of gesticulating conspirators, and while all the windows shone like enormous rectangular lanterns, something small and black, a kind of dislocated dummy, would be tossed from the balcony onto the front steps and lie there without anyone’s paying any attention to it, doubled up in the classic pose of assassinated rulers in historical paintings. What a delight then to take refuge in shadows and slink into the night, at the far end of the royal park, behind the palace, with one hand on the grip of the pistol, the other on the hilt of the dagger, with all one’s passports and identity papers in order, and one’s pockets crammed with useful objects: phials of tincture of iodine, Pyramidon pills, fountain pens, etc., and protected from the bite of vipers by high boots of unrivaled strength, reinforced with double, triple, and even quadruple soles. Ah! How good it was then to be in the shadows! Between the trunks of century-old cypresses and prophetic oaks one could see without being seen.
The nocturnal fête in the palace; night of revolt; the armed guard had crossed the river by torchlight singing the famous anthem “Watch Over the King.” But for the attentive spectator these events were not so unexpected as they seemed. Already in the late afternoon when evening began gently to darken the mountains east of the city, and the rocks of the citadel were dyed a grayish mauve, one felt that something was in the air, in the words of the nursemaids who sat gossiping on the benches of the municipal square. Warning signs which could not elude a watchful observer had already authorized all those bizarre incidents and dangerous disturbances at the heart of a sober and thoughtful populace. Of these signs the most characteristic in my opinion was that the shepherds had already fled into the mountains and, although night had not yet descended completely on the countryside, one could now see their bonfires burning from peak to peak, which reminded certain folk of the means used by prehistoric tribes to communicate news across vast deserts untrodden by human feet, wherein lions, as though harnessed to invisible chariots, wandered in perfectly symmetrical couples hunting the antelope with gentle eyes.
And then one likes also to take refuge at noon (a clear, cool Sunday noon in winter) at the moment when the military band starts to play sublime and piercing tunes. For these are moments when the light is everywhere; the square is full of people, one rubs elbows with one’s fellows at every step; the women are pretty and kind, already informed by their husbands of your brilliant career, aware that you are no upstart, secretly flattered by your attentions; the men have a reassuring manner and are dressed in the English style. At such moments suicide becomes something possible, and, I might even say, agreeable; if it had been a question, there in broad daylight and in the midst of the crowd, of throwing himself into the water of the ornamental lake and disappearing, he would not have hesitated an instant; I can assure you that it would have been a joy for him to dive into the clear water of the lake. But on this horrible winter night, with the owls hooting and the rusty arms clanking against the decrepit walls, in this ramshackle castle howling its terror through all the flues of its chimneys, on this storm-tossed night, in the middle of this bed with damp sheets, in this bed vast as a mountain and funereal as a catafalque, while the unpleasant memories and disgraces of his tumultuous life danced an obscene and infernal round before the alcove, on this night of insomnia and anguish—fire a pistol into one’s brain? No! A thousand times no! He would never have done it. Not that he lacked courage; usually he was brave; twice he had volunteered for service in a cholera hospital in the Orient, and only recently on the waterfront, near the pier, he had intervened between two brawling sailors armed with Finnish knives. But tonight … No, it was unthinkable.
And yet he remembered so many odd things. A train with an old-fashioned locomotive puffing along the edge of a cliff above the sea. When the cars passed close to the wild quince trees he would divert himself by grabbing at the branches and pulling off the leaves; sometimes too, using an old revolver loaded with cartridges with projecting primers, and boasting neither a butt nor a cylinder, he would fire at the zinc-plated cones that crowned the turrets of certain villas of Helvetic appearance, half-hidden in the foliage.
For all these absurd and incoherent acts he had more than once incurred the criticism of the train personnel; once they had gone so far as to tell him an endless story ab
out train cars that had had to be put away in sheds along the old waterfront, so riddled with holes they were, for irascible peasants would discharge their rifles at the passing trains to take revenge on certain equivocal individuals who would amuse themselves, when the trains passed close to the straggling villages, by gesturing obscenely at the peasant women leaning at the windowsills. There was scarcely any need to recount such a tale, and everything would have happened for the best if they had had the decency to take him more often in the afternoons into the cool and shadowy house surrounded by lemon trees, whose walls were ornamented with magnificent still lifes. A waste of time! The train still advanced and one sensed that the sea would soon disappear behind that irregular backdrop of trees and rocks. It was here that one of the most beautiful events in his life took place; he was so stunned by it that at first he was afraid he had been the victim of one of those hallucinations caused by some half-forgotten childhood memory, like the time that enormous mask appeared on the ceiling of his nursery one night when he couldn’t sleep; but this time he was indeed obliged to yield to reality and his soul felt a very sweet and consoling emotion and, what was even better, a greater confidence than before in the gods’ benevolence and the destiny of superior men: It was thus that he habitually spoke of Prometheus and Christ. Mercury* in person was helping the eagle of Jupiter to transport the injured man (Prometheus was hurt quite seriously on his right side). The rash plunderer was forcefully grasping in his fists the claws of the great winged creature, which moved onward in laborious flight. Sometimes its great wings woven of feathers as hard as iron flayed in passing the forearms of Prometheus, who grimaced in pain; but despite all this, and despite his wound which continued to bleed, he was fundamentally happy, and he had reason to be, for after all it was flight, liberation, and anyone in his place would have been as happy as he. Mercury, acting the part of the god who knows how to get out of scrapes and is never surprised at anything, held him up under the knees like those painted personages in the “Entombment”: He gripped the straps of his petasus firmly in his teeth lest the wind blow it away. This trio advanced with difficulty, but it advanced nevertheless; sometimes the group flew so low that it almost grazed the foaming crests of the waves; the sea at this moment was of a green verging on gray, for it was the beginning of afternoon. In the distance a steamship of the Goudi Brothers Line seemed motionless despite the fact that its red-girdled smokestack disgorged with perfect regularity a dark brown smoke whose contours were carefully modeled like those clouds spaced out near alpine summits that you find in certain scientific tomes. As for Mercury, the god Mercury if you will, it was he, always the same; the Mercury of moving vans, and suburban villas burglarized at high noon; the Mercury of seaports; the Mercury of big navigation lines; the Mercury who soars in gliding flight above the stock exchange at the moment when all the roarers blacken the steps of the temple; the Mercury with the vague, disturbing gaze; the Mercury of tollhouses at the gates of cities; the Mercury of cities, European and transatlantic; the Mercury of Hamburg and San Francisco; the Mercury of political rallies held in white, geometrically ordered cities on the edge of the Pacific; the modern Mercury of the Berlin stadium; the Mercury of horse-drawn trolleys moving along tracks in front of the synagogue and the Protestant church in the clear, gentle September afternoon.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 17
