by George Moore
But the Charm with her sullen blisses
Re-lives in these flower chalices.
The languors of the ancient taint
Weigh heavy in their odours faint.
O conquered heart! thou hast no hope
To quit the coverts of the slope
Of this vast wood. O heart exiled,
Bewitched by roses and beguiled!
(Translated from the French of Catulle Mendes).
A SAPPHIC DREAM.
I LOVE the luminous poison of the moon,
The silence of illimitable seas,
Vast night, and all her myriad mysteries,
Perfumes that make the burdened senses swoon
And weaken will, large snakes who oscillate
Like lovely girls, immense exotic flowers,
And cats who purr through silk-enfestooned bowers
Where white-limbed women sleep in sumptuous state.
My soul e’er dreams, in such a dream as this is,
Visions of perfume, moonlight and the blisses
Of sexless love, and strange unreached kisses.
The Non-Fiction
George Moore lived at No. 4 Upper Ely Place, Dublin, in the early 1900’s
Modern Painting
CONTENTS
WHISTLER.
CHAVANNES, MILLET, AND MANET.
THE FAILURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
ARTISTIC EDUCATION IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND.
INGRES AND COROT.
MONET, SISLEY, PISSARO, AND THE DECADENCE.
OUR ACADEMICIANS.
THE ORGANISATION OF ART.
ART AND SCIENCE.
ROYALTY IN ART.
ART PATRONS.
PICTURE DEALERS.
MR. BURNE-JONES AND THE ACADEMY.
THE ALDERMAN IN ART.
RELIGIOSITY IN ART.
THE CAMERA IN ART.
THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.
A GREAT ARTIST.
NATIONALITY IN ART.
SEX IN ART.
MR. STEER’S EXHIBITION.
CLAUDE MONET.
MR. MARK FISHER.
A PORTRAIT BY MR. SARGENT.
AN ORCHID BY MR. JAMES.
THE WHISTLER ALBUM.
INGRES.
SOME JAPANESE PRINTS.
THE NEW ART CRITICISM.
LONG AGO IN ITALY.
TO SIR WILLIAM EDEN, BART.
OF ALL MY BOOKS, THIS IS THE ONE YOU LIKE BEST; ITS SUBJECT HAS BEEN THE SUBJECT OF NEARLY ALL OUR CONVERSATIONS IN THE PAST, AND I SUPPOSE WILL BE THE SUBJECT OF MANY CONVERSATIONS IN THE FUTURE; SO, LOOKING BACK AND FORWARD, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO YOU.
G. M.
The Editor of “The Speaker” allowed me to publish from time to time chapters of a book on art. These chapters have been gathered from the mass of art journalism which had grown about them, and I reprint them in the sequence originally intended.
G. M.
WHISTLER.
I HAVE STUDIED Mr. Whistler and thought about him this many a year. His character was for a long time incomprehensible to me; it contained elements apparently so antagonistic, so mutually destructive, that I had to confess my inability to bring him within any imaginable psychological laws, and classed him as one of the enigmas of life. But Nature is never illogical; she only seems so, because our sight is not sufficient to see into her intentions; and with study my psychological difficulties dwindled, and now the man stands before me exquisitely understood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant and discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; the strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking at the pictures I see the man.
But at the outset the difficulties were enormous. It was like a newly-discovered Greek text, without punctuation or capital letters. Here was a man capable of painting portraits, perhaps not quite so full of grip as the best work done by Velasquez and Hals, only just falling short of these masters at the point where they were strongest, but plainly exceeding them in graciousness of intention, and subtle happiness of design, who would lay down his palette and run to a newspaper office to polish the tail of an epigram which he was launching against an unfortunate critic who had failed to distinguish between an etching and a pen-and-ink drawing! Here was a man who, though he had spent the afternoon painting like the greatest, would spend his evenings in frantic disputes over dinner-tables about the ultimate ownership of a mild joke, possibly good enough for Punch, something that any one might have said, and that most of us having said it would have forgotten! It will be conceded that such divagations are difficult to reconcile with the possession of artistic faculties of the highest order.
The “Ten o’clock” contained a good deal of brilliant writing, sparkling and audacious epigram, but amid all its glitter and “go” there are statements which, coming from Mr. Whistler, are as astonishing as a denial of the rotundity of the earth would be in a pamphlet bearing the name of Professor Huxley. Mr. Whistler is only serious in his art — a grave fault according to academicians, who are serious in everything except their “art”. A very boyish utterance is the statement that such a thing as an artistic period has never been known.
One rubbed one’s eyes; one said, Is this a joke, and, if so, where is the point of it? And then, as if not content with so much mystification, Mr. Whistler assured his ten o’clock audience that there was no such thing as nationality in art, and that you might as well speak of English mathematics as of English art. We do not stop to inquire if such answers contain one grain of truth; we know they do not — we stop to consider them because we know that the criticism of a creative artist never amounts to more than an ingenious defence of his own work — an ingenious exaltation of a weakness (a weakness which perhaps none suspects but himself) into a conspicuous merit.
Mr. Whistler has shared his life equally between America, France, and England. He is the one solitary example of cosmopolitanism in art, for there is nothing in his pictures to show that they come from the north, the south, the east, or the west. They are compounds of all that is great in Eastern and Western culture. Conscious of this, and fearing that it might be used as an argument against his art, Mr. Whistler threw over the entire history, not only of art, but of the world; and declared boldly that art was, like science, not national, but essentially cosmopolitan; and then, becoming aware of the anomaly of his genius in his generation, Mr. Whistler undertook to explain away the anomaly by ignoring the fifth century B.C. in Athens, the fifteenth century in Italy, and the seventeenth in Holland, and humbly submitting that artists never appeared in numbers like swallows, but singly like aerolites. Now our task is not to disprove these statements, but to work out the relationship between the author of the “Butterfly Letters” and the painter of the portrait of “The Mother”, “Lady Archibald Campbell”, “Miss Alexander”, and the other forty-one masterpieces that were on exhibition in the Goupil galleries.
There is, however, an intermediate step, which is to point out the intimate relationship between the letter-writer and the physical man. Although there is no internal evidence to show that the pictures were not painted by a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman, or a Westernised Japanese, it would be impossible to read any one of the butterfly-signed letters without feeling that the author was a man of nerves rather than a man of muscle, and, while reading, we should involuntarily picture him short and thin rather than tall and stalwart. But what has physical condition got to do with painting? A great deal. The greatest painters, I mean the very greatest — Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rubens — were gifted by Nature with as full a measure of health as of genius. Their physical constitutions resembled more those of bulls than of men. Michael Angelo lay on his back for three years painting the Sistine Chapel. Rubens painted a life-size figure in a morning of pleasant work, and went out to ride in the afternoon. But Nature has dowered Mr. Whistler with onl
y genius. His artistic perceptions are moreexquisite than Velasquez’s. He knows as much, possibly even a little more, and yet the result is never quite equal. Why? A question of health. C’est un tempérament de chatte. He cannot pass from masterpiece to masterpiece like Velasquez. The expenditure of nerve-force necessary to produce such a work as the portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell or Miss Alexander exhausts him, and he is obliged to wait till Nature recoups herself; and these necessary intervals he has employed in writing letters signed “Butterfly” to the papers, quarrelling with Oscar over a few mild jokes, explaining his artistic existence, at the expense of the entire artistic history of the world, collecting and classifying the stupidities of the daily and weekly press.
But the lesser side of a man of genius is instructive to study — indeed, it is necessary that we should study it if we would thoroughly understand his genius. “No man,” it has been very falsely said, “is a hero to his valet de chambre.” The very opposite is the truth. Man will bow the knee only to his own image and likeness. The deeper the humanity, the deeper the adoration; and from this law not even divinity is excepted. All we adore is human, and through knowledge of the flesh that grovels we may catch sight of the soul ascending towards the divine stars.
And so the contemplation of Mr. Whistler, the author of the “Butterfly Letters”, the defender of his little jokes against the plagiarising tongue, should stimulate rather than interrupt our prostrations. I said that Nature had dowered Mr. Whistler with every gift except that of physical strength. If Mr. Whistler had the bull-like health of Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Hals, the Letters would never have been written. They were the safety-valve by which his strained nerves found relief from the intolerable tension of the masterpiece. He has not the bodily strength to pass from masterpiece to masterpiece, as did the great ones of old time. In the completed picture slight traces of his agony remain. But painting is the most indiscreet of all the arts, and here and there an omission or a feeble indication reveal the painter to us in moments of exasperated impotence. To understand Mr. Whistler’s art you must understand his body. I do not mean that Mr. Whistler has suffered from bad health — his health has always been excellent; all great artists have excellent health, but his constitution is more nervous than robust. He is even a strong man, but he is lacking in weight. Were he six inches taller, and his bulk proportionately increased, his art would be different. Instead of having painted a dozen portraits, every one — even the mother and Miss Alexander, which I personally take to be the two best — a little febrile in its extreme beauty, whilst some, masterpieces though they be, are clearly touched with weakness, and marked with hysteria — Mr. Whistler would have painted a hundred portraits, as strong, as vigorous, as decisive, and as easily accomplished as any by Velasquez or Hals. But if Nature had willed him so, I do not think we should have had the Nocturnes, which are clearly the outcome of a highly-strung, bloodless nature whetted on the whetstone of its own weakness to an exasperated sense of volatile colour and evanescent light. It is hardly possible to doubt that this is so when we look on these canvases, where, in all the stages of her repose, the night dozes and dreams upon our river — a creole in Nocturne 34, upon whose trembling eyelids the lustral moon is shining; a quadroon in Nocturne 17, who turns herself out of the light anhungered and set upon some feast of dark slumber. And for the sake of these gem-like pictures, whose blue serenities are comparable to the white perfections of Athenian marbles, we should have done well to yield a littlestrength in portraiture, if the distribution of Mr. Whistler’s genius had been left in our hands. So Nature has done her work well, and we have no cause to regret the few pounds of flesh that she withheld. A few pounds more of flesh and muscle, and we should have had another Velasquez; but Nature shrinks from repetition, and at the last moment she said, “The world has had Velasquez, another would be superfluous: let there be Jimmy Whistler.”
In the Nocturnes Mr. Whistler stands alone, withouta rival. In portraits he is at his best when they are near to his Nocturnes in intention, when the theme lends itself to an imaginative and decorative treatment; for instance, as in the mother or Miss Alexander. Mr. Whistler is at his worst when he is frankly realistic. I have seen pictures by Mr. Henry Moore that I like better than “The Blue Wave”. Nor does Mr. Whistler seem to me to reach his highest level in any one of the three portraits — Lady Archibald Campbell, Miss Rose Corder, and “the lady in the fur jacket”. I know that Mr. Walter Sickert considers the portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell to be Mr. Whistler’s finest portrait. I submit, however, that the attitude is theatrical and not very explicit. It is a movement that has not been frankly observed, nor is it a movement that has been frankly imagined. It has none of the artless elegance of Nature; it is full of studio combinations; and yet it is not a frankly decorative arrangement, as the portrait of the mother or Miss Alexander. When Hals painted his Burgomasters, he was careful to place them in definite and comprehensible surroundings. He never left us in doubt either as to the time or the place; and the same obligations of time and place, which Hals never shirked, seem to me to rest on the painter, if he elects to paint his sitter in any attitude except one of conventional repose.
Lady Archibald Campbell is represented in violent movement, looking backwards over her shoulder as she walks up the picture; yet there is nothing to show that she is not standing on the low table on which the model poses, and the few necessary indications are left out because they would interfere with the general harmony of his picture; because, if the table on which she is standing were indicated, the movement of outstretched arm would be incomprehensible. The hand, too, is somewhat uncertain, undetermined, and a gesture is meaningless that the hand does not determine and complete. I do not speak of the fingers of the right hand, which are non-existent; after a dozen attempts to paint the gloved hand, only an approximate result was obtained. Look at the ear, and say that the painter’s nerves did not give wayonce or twice. And the likeness is vague and shadowy; she is only fairly representative of her class. We see fairly well that she is a lady du grand monde, who is, however, not without knowledge of les environs du monde. But she is hardly English — she might be a French woman or an American. She is a sort of hybrid. Miss Rose Corder and “the lady in the fur jacket” are equally cosmopolitan; so, too, is Miss Alexander. Only once has Mr. Whistler expressed race, and that was in his portrait of his mother. Then these three ladies — Miss Corder, Lady Archibald Campbell, and “the lady in the fur jacket” — wear the same complexion: a pale yellow complexion, burnt and dried. With this conventional tint he obtains unison and a totality of effect; but he obtains this result at the expense of truth. Hals and Velasquez obtained the same result, without, however, resorting to such meretricious methods.
The portrait of the mother is, as every one knows, in the Luxemburg; but the engraving reminds us of the honour which France has done, but which we failed to do, to the great painter of the nineteenth century; and after much hesitation and arguing with myself I feel sure that on the whole this picture is the painter’s greatest work in portraiture. We forget relations, friends, perhaps even our parents; but that picture we never forget; it is for ever with us, in sickness and in health; and in moments of extreme despair, when life seems hopeless, the strange magic of that picture springs into consciousness, and we wonder by what strange wizard craft was accomplished the marvellous pattern on the black curtain that drops past the engraving on the wall. We muse on the extraordinary beauty of that grey wall, on the black silhouette sitting so tranquilly, on the large feet on a foot-stool, on the hands crossed, on the long black dress that fills the picture with such solemn harmony. Then mark the transition from grey to white, and how le ton local is carried through the entire picture, from the highest light to the deepest shadow. Note the tenderness of that white cap, the white lace cuffs, the certainty, the choice, and think of anything if you can, even in the best Japanese work, more beautiful, more delicate, subtle, illusive, certain in its handicraft; and if the lace cuffs a
re marvellous, the delicate hands of a beautiful old age lying in a small lace handkerchief are little short of miraculous. They are not drawn out in anatomical diagram, but appear and disappear, seen here on the black dress, lost there in the small white handkerchief. And when we study the faint, subtle outline of the mother’s face, we seem to feel that there the painter has told the story of his soul more fully than elsewhere. That soul, strangely alive to all that is delicate and illusive in Nature, found perhaps its fullest expression in that grave old Puritan lady looking through the quiet refinement of her grey room, sitting in solemn profile in all the quiet habit of her long life.
Compared with later work, the execution is “tighter”, if I may be permitted an expression which will be understood in studios; we are very far indeed from the admirable looseness of handling which is the charm of the portrait of Miss Rose Corder. There every object is born unconsciously beneath the passing of the brush. If not less certain, the touch in the portrait of the mother is less prompt; but the painter’s vision is more sincere and more intense. And to those who object to the artificiality of the arrangement, I reply that if the old lady is sitting in a room artificially arranged, Lady Archibald Campbell may be said to be walking through incomprehensible space. But what really decides me to place this portrait above the others is the fact that while painting his mother’s portrait he was unquestionably absorbed in his model; and absorption in the model is perhaps the first quality in portrait-painting.
Still, for my own personal pleasure, to satisfy the innermost cravings of my own soul, I would choose to live with the portrait of Miss Alexander. Truly, this picture seems to me the most beautiful in the world. I know very well that it has not the profound beauty of the Infantes by Velasquez in the Louvre; but for pure magic of inspiration, is it not more delightful? Just as Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant” thrills the innermost sense like no other poem in the language, the portrait of Miss Alexander enchants with the harmony of colour, with the melody of composition.
