The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  ‘Haydn, rhetorical grace, tinkling music for an elderly ancestress with powdered hair. … Mozart, the pioneer genius, the first to endow the orchestra with individuality. … Between them, they produced Beethoven; that’s why they’re significant. … Beethoven! There’s power, there’s strength through calm, serenity in pain! Michelangelo at the tomb of the Medici! Hero, logician, moulder of human minds, he was all these! The great composers of today all spring direct from the Choral Symphony!’

  Tired of lingering, the waiter began to trail around, idly putting out the lights, bringing a strange feeling of gloom down on the deserted café, filthy with cigar-ends and globs of spittle, and reeking of the stale drink spilled on the tables; while the only sound that could be heard from the drowsy boulevard outside was the lonely sobbing of a drunk.

  Gagnière, lost to the world, was still viewing his cavalcade of dreams:

  ‘There goes Weber,’ he murmured, ‘in the setting of a Romantic landscape, leading the Dance of Death among the weeping willows and the gnarlèd limbs of oaks. … Next comes Schubert, through the pale beams of the moon along the shores of silvery lakes. … And now Rossini, talent in person, gay, unaffected, heedless of expression, snapping his fingers in everybody’s face. Not at all my sort of fellow, of course, but amazing nevertheless for his abundant inventiveness and the tremendous effects he gets out of the accumulation of voices and the fuller orchestration of a repeated theme. … Out of those three you get Meyerbeer. A smart fellow, Meyerbeer, who knew how to make the most of his chances. After Weber, it was he who put the symphony into opera; it was he, too, who gave dramatic expression to the formula unconsciously produced by Rossini. Oh, there are some magnificent things in Meyerbeer, with his feudal pomp and soldierly mysticism! The thrill he imparts to fantastic legends! He’s like a cry of passion echoing through history! On top of that he’s a discoverer: the individuality of instruments, dramatic recitative with symphonic accompaniment, characteristic phrase acting as keystone to the entire work. … Oh, he’s one of the masters, Meyerbeer, one of the really great masters!’

  Here the waiter broke in with:

  ‘Monsieur, we’re closing.’

  But, as Gagnière did not so much as look at him, he went over to rouse the gentleman who was dozing in front of his empty saucer, repeating:

  ‘We are closing, monsieur.’

  With a shudder the lingering customer pulled himself together and began to grope about in the semi-darkness for his stick; when the waiter had recovered it for him from under his chair, he departed. But Gagnière went on talking.

  ‘Berlioz brought literature into his music,’ he said. ‘He is the musical illustrator of Shakespeare and Virgil and Goethe. And what a painter! The Delacroix of music, with his fine conflagration of sounds, the same clashing contrast of colours! Like all the Romantics, he had his mental kink, of course: religion, and a tendency to let himself be swept away into a lot of high-flown ecstasies. No sense of construction in opera, but marvellous in his orchestral work, though he does tend to torture his orchestra by over-emphasizing the separate character of every instrument. He actually thought of them as real people, you know. I always get a delightful thrill out of what he said about clarinets: “Clarinets are women who know they are loved”, he said. … Then there’s Chopin, such a dandy, and so Byronic, the poet of the mind diseased! Mendelssohn, now, is like a faultless engraver, Shakespeare in dancing-pumps, and his “Songs Without Words” are jewels for intelligent women! … What comes after can be spoken of only on bended knee. …’

  There was only one light left burning now, the one immediately above his head, and the waiter was standing behind him in the cold, inhospitable gloom, ready to turn it out. Gagnière’s voice now assumed a religious tremor, in preparation for his devotions, for now he had reached the innermost sanctuary, the holy of holies.

  ‘Oh, Schumann! Despair and pleasure in despair. The end of all things, one last, pure, melancholy song, soaring above the ruins of the world! … Oh, Wagner! The god, the incarnation of centuries of music! His work, the mighty firmament, where all the arts are blended into one, characters portrayed in all their true humanity, and the orchestra itself lives through every phase of the acted drama. What an onslaught on conventions, what wholesale destruction of ineffectual theories it stands for, the revolution, the breaking-down of barriers to infinity! … The overture to Tannhäuser, what is it but the mighty hallelujah of the new age! First, the pilgrims’ chorus, the calm, slow beat of the profound religious motif, gradually giving place to the Sirens’ song, the voluptuous pleasures of Venus, their rapturous delights and fascinating languors imposing themselves more and more, to the point of complete abandon; then, little by little, the sacred theme comes back, takes all the other themes and welds them into one supreme harmony and carries them away on the wings of a great triumphal anthem!’

  ‘We’re closing now, monsieur,’ the waiter announced again, and Claude who had not been listening, so engrossed was he in his own thoughts, drank up his beer and said in a loud voice:

  ‘Come on old chap! Closing time!’

  That brought Gagnière to himself with a start. A look of pain flashed across his ecstatic features, and he shuddered as he realized he had returned to earth. He swallowed down his beer and then, outside on the pavement, he shook his companion’s hand without a word and walked off into the darkness.

  It was nearly two when Claude reached the Rue de Douai. For a week now he had been doing his round of Paris, and every night he had come home feverish after the encounters of the day, but never before had he come back so late, his brain seething with so much excitement. The lamp had gone out, and Christine, overcome by fatigue, had dropped to sleep with her head on the table.

  Chapter 8

  With one last flick of Christine’s feather duster, their installation in the Rue de Douai was completed. Besides the small, inconvenient studio, they had only a tiny bedroom and a kitchen no bigger than a cupboard, and as the studio served as both living-room and dining-room, the child was always in the way. Christine had done her best with their few sticks of furniture, in her effort to keep down expenses, but she had had to buy an old bed, second-hand, and she had even succumbed to the necessary luxury of white muslin curtains at seven sous a metre. Once they were installed, the place looked pleasant enough, she thought, in spite of its drawbacks, and she made a point of keeping up a high standard of cleanliness, though she had decided to do without a servant, as living was going to be more costly now they were in town.

  Claude spent the first few months in Paris in a state of increasing nervous tension. The din and excitement of the streets, visits to friends, hectic discussions, anger, indignation, and all the newly-fledged ideas he brought home from the outer world kept him arguing at the top of his voice, even in his sleep. Paris had got him in its grip again; he could feel it in the very marrow of his bones. It was like going through a furnace and emerging with his youth renewed, full of enthusiasm, ambitious to see everything, do everything, conquer everything. Never had he experienced such an urge to work, never had he known such hope or felt that all he had to do was stretch out his hand and produce masterpieces which would put him in the rank which was his by right, the first rank. As he walked about Paris he discovered pictures everywhere; the whole city, its streets and squares and bridges and its ever-changing skyline opened out before him gigantic frescoes which, in his intoxication with the colossal, he always found too small. He would return home in high spirits, his brain bubbling over with plans which, in the evening, in the lamplight, he would sketch on bits of paper, but without ever being able to make up his mind how or where he would set to work on the series of great works he so often dreamed of.

  One serious obstacle was the restricted size of his studio. If only he could have had the old garret on the Quai de Bourbon, or even the huge dining-room at Bennecourt! But what could he do in a long narrow room like this? It was nothing more than a corridor, really, though the landlord had had the
impertinence to let it as a studio at four hundred francs a year once he had put in a skylight. What was worse, the skylight, with its northern aspect, was hemmed in between two high walls, so the only light it admitted was of no more value than the dull, greenish light of a basement. He had, consequently, to postpone the realization of his great ambitions and resolved to start on canvases of modest dimensions, consoling himself with the thought that size does not of necessity prove genius.

  The moment was most propitious, he thought, for the success of an artist with courage enough to strike a note of sincerity and originality amid the general collapse of the old schools. Even the most recent dogmas were beginning to totter. Delacroix had died without pupils; Courbet was being followed merely by a few clumsy imitators; the masterpieces they left behind in their turn were going to be nothing more than museum pieces, dimmed with age, examples of period art. It seemed a simple matter to forecast the formula which would crystallize out of the work of the younger painters from the burst of blazing sunshine, the limpid dawn that was breaking in so many recent paintings, through the growing influence of the Open-Air School. There was no denying now that the light-coloured pictures which had been the laughing-stock of the ‘Salon des Refusés’ were now quietly working on a number of artists, lightening a great many palettes. Nobody would admit it yet, but the ball was rolling, and the tendency was becoming more and more obvious at every Salon. What a coup it would be if, among all the unconscious copies of the untalented, and the sly or half-hearted efforts of those with the skill, a real master were to declare himself, a painter who presented the new formula boldly and forcefully, refusing all concessions, presenting it as sound and complete as it should be to ensure its establishment as the gospel of the closing century!

  With this renewal of hope and vigour, Claude, instead of being assailed by endless doubts, believed in his own genius. The painful crises which used to force him to tramp the streets of Paris day after day in search of his lost courage, ceased and gave place to a fever which steeled him and drove him to work with the blind determination of the artist who tears open his very flesh to bring forth the fruit of his torment. His long rest in the country had given him a remarkable freshness of vision and a renewed delight in execution. He was coming back to his painting, he felt, with an ease and a balance he had never known before, and with them, as he realized the success of his efforts, a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of the deepest content. As he used to say at Bennecourt, he had ‘got’ his open-air, meaning the painting with the harmonious liveliness of colour which so surprised his friends when they came to see him. They all admired it, and were all convinced that with works so personal in their expression, showing as they did, for the first time, nature bathed in real light, with its interplay of reflections and the continuous decomposition of colours, all he had to do was to show himself to take his place, and a very high place too, in contemporary art.

  So for three whole years Claude struggled on, never weakening, clinging firmly to his own ideas, gaining impetus from his failures and marching stoutly ahead in the unshakeable conviction that he was right.

  The first year, in December, when the snow was on the ground, he went and stood for four hours a day down behind Montmartre on the corner of a patch of waste land, and painted: in the background, poverty, dismal hovels dominated by great factory chimneys; in the foreground a couple of ragged urchins, a boy and a girl, devouring stolen apples in the snow. His insistence on painting from life complicated his task beyond description, involved him in almost insurmountable difficulties. Nevertheless, he finished his picture out of doors and limited his work in the studio to cleaning up. When he saw it in the cold, dead light of the studio, the picture amazed even Claude by its brutality; it was like a door flung open on the street revealing the blinding snow against which two pitiful figures stood out in dirty grey. He knew at once that a picture like that would never be accepted, but he made no attempt to tone it down and sent it to the Salon as it was. After swearing he would never try to get into the Salon again, he now contended that on principle one should always put something before the Selection Committee, if only to prove it was in the wrong. Besides, he acknowledged the usefulness of the Salon as the only battlefield on which an artist could assert himself at one blow. The Committee rejected his picture.

  The second year he tried a contrast. He chose the Square des Batignolles in May: huge horse-chestnuts casting their shadows over a stretch of lawn, six-storey buildings in the background; in the foreground, sitting on a bright green bench, a row of nursemaids and local inhabitants watching three little girls making sand pies. It needed a vast amount of courage, once he had been given permission to do so, to set up his easel and work there among the facetious crowd. He decided, however, to go at about five o’clock in the morning to work on the background and to be content to make sketches of the figures and finish off the whole in the studio. This time the picture did not look quite so harsh; it seemed to have taken on some of the dreary softness of the light filtered by the glass in the roof. He thought it had been accepted, and all his friends hailed it as a masterpiece and spread the news that it was going to revolutionize the Salon. To their amazement and indignation they heard that the Committee had rejected the picture. This time, without the slightest doubt, there was prejudice, a deliberate attempt to stifle an original artist. Claude himself, after a first outburst of resentment, turned the full force of his anger on the picture itself. It was a dishonest, misleading, disgusting piece of work he said. It had taught him a memorable lesson, and a lesson he deserved. He ought never to have let himself go back to the miserable light of the studio or the revolting trickery of painting figures from memory! When the picture came back he took his knife and ripped it from corner to corner.

  The third year he put all his pent-up fury into a work of revolt; he determined to paint blazing sunshine, the blazing sunshine peculiar to Paris, where the pavements on some days are white hot with the dazzling reflection from the fronts of the buildings. No place can be hotter than Paris; it makes even people from tropical countries mop their brows, for it might be some African clime when the heat comes pouring down from a sky like a fiery furnace. His subject was a view of the Place du Carrousel at midday, when the sun beats down without mercy. He showed a cab ambling across in the quivering heat, the driver drowsing on his box, and the horse, head down, perspiring between the shafts, while the passers-by were apparently staggering along on the pavements, all except one young woman who, all fresh and rosy under her parasol, swept with the ease of a queen through the fiery air which was clearly her natural element. But the really startling thing about the picture was its original treatment of light, breaking it down into its components after uncompromising accuracy of observation, but deliberately contradicting all the habits of the eye by stressing blues, yellows, and reds in places where no one expected to see them. In the background, the Tuileries melted away into a golden mist; the pavements were blood-red and the passers-by were merely indicated by a number of darker patches, swallowed up by the overbright sunshine. This time Claude’s friends shouted their admiration, as usual, but they were also embarrassed, seriously disturbed even, for they all felt that martyrdom could be the only reward for painting such as this. Claude accepted their words of praise, but he knew that, behind them, a break was in preparation, and when the Committee once again refused to admit him to the Salon, he cried out in a moment of heart-rending intuition:

  ‘Now there’s no giving in! … I’ll die first!’

  Gradually, though his valiant determination never seemed to diminish, he began to slip back into his old fits of doubt when his struggle against nature showed any sign of weakening. Every picture rejected he pronounced bad, or rather incomplete, since it failed, he said, to fulfil his intentions. It was this feeling of impotence that exasperated him even more than the Committee’s repeated rejections. Of course he could never forgive the Committee for being so obdurate; even the sketchiest of his works was a hundred
times better than the rubbish it accepted. What was really unbearable was the inability ever to express himself to the full because his genius refused to give birth to the essential masterpiece! Everything he did had its masterly patches; he acknowledged them and they satisfied him. But why the sudden gaps? Why the worthless patches, unnoticed while the work was in progress, yet an indelible blemish which killed the whole effect of the finished picture? He felt he would never be able to correct himself, as if a great insurmountable wall rose up before him, beyond which he was forbidden to go. Twenty times he would go over the same bit and in the end it would be twenty times as bad as when he started, a meaningless mess of paint on canvas. Then, giving way to his irritation, his vision would become distorted and his power of execution diminish through what was nothing more or less than total paralysis of his will-power. Could there be something wrong with his eyes that made his hands feel as if they were no longer his to control? Could it mean that the lesions, the imagined existence of which had caused him so much worry in the past, were increasing? As his crises recurred more and more frequently, he would spend weeks in unbearable self-torture, hovering between hope and uncertainty, and through all the weary hours he spent wrestling with his rebellious masterpiece one great mainstay was the consoling dream of the picture which he would paint one day, when his hands were freed from their present invisible shackles, and which would satisfy him completely. What happened at present was that the urge to create ran away with his fingers, which meant that whenever he was working on one picture his mind was already at work on the next, so that his one remaining desire was to finish the task in hand as quickly as possible, as he felt his original enthusiasm ebbing away. He persuaded himself that this picture would be worthless, like the rest, that he was going through the stage at which an artist is obliged to ignore his conscience, make the inevitable concessions, and even cheat to a certain extent. But once he had passed that stage, was he not going to produce something which he knew would be superb, heroic, something irreproachable, something indestructible?—Perpetual mirage which, in the world of art, spurs on the courage of the damned! Tender, self-pitying falsehood, without which production would be impossible for all who die of the inability to create a living masterpiece!