by George Moore
I have only now to withdraw the word “reform”. The Academy cannot reform, and must be destroyed. The Academy has tried to reform, and has failed. Thirty years ago the pre-Raphaelite movement nearly succeeded in bringing about an effectual shipwreck. But when Mr. Holman Hunt went to Italy, special terms were offered and accepted. The election of Millais and Watts saved the Academy, and instead of the Academy, it was the genius of one of England’s greatest painters that was destroyed. “Ophelia”, “Autumn Leaves”, and “St. Agnes’ Eve” are pictures that will hold their own in any gallery among pictures of every age and every country. But fathomless is the abyss which separates them from Sir John Millais’ academic work.
The Academy is a distinctly commercial enterprise. Has not Sir John Millais said, in an interview, that the hanging committee at Burlington House selects the pictures that will draw the greatest number of shillings. The Academy has been subventioned by the State to the extent of three hundred thousand pounds, and that money has been employed in arrogant commercialism. The Academy holds a hundred thousand pounds in trust, left by Mr. Chantry for the furtherance of art in this country; and this money is spent on the purchase of pictures by impecunious Academicians, and the collection formed with this money is one of the seven horrors of civilisation. The Academy has tolerated genius when it was popular, it has trampled upon genius when it was unpopular; and the business of the new art criticism is to rid art of the incubus. The Academy must be destroyed, and when that is accomplished the other Royal institutes will follow as a matter of course. The object of the new art criticism is to give free trade to art.
LONG AGO IN ITALY.
COME TO THE New Gallery. We shall pass out of sight of flat dreary London, drab-coloured streets full of overcoats, silk hats, dripping umbrellas, omnibuses. We shall pass out of sight of long perspectives of square houses lost in fine rain and grey mist. We shall enter an enchanted land, a land of angels and aureoles; of crimson and gold, and purple raiment; of beautiful youths crowned with flowers; of fabulous blue landscape and delicate architecture. Know ye the land? Botticelli is king there, king of clasped hands and almond-eyed Madonnas. It was he who conceived and designed that enigmatic Virgin’s face; it was he who placed that long-fingered hand on the thigh of the Infant God; it was he who coiled that heavy hair about that triangle of neck and interwove it with pearls; it was he who drew the graceful lace over the head-dress, and painted it in such innumerable delicacy of fold that we wonder and are fain to believe that it is but the magic of an instant’s hallucination. Know ye the land? Filippo Lippi is prince there, prince of angel youths, fair hair crowned with fair flowers; they stand round a tall throne with strings of coral and precious stones in their hands. It was Filippo Lippi who composed that palette of grey soft pearly pink; it was he who placed that beautiful red in the right-hand corner, and carried it with such enchanting harmony through the yellow raiment of the angel youth, echoing it in a subdued key in the vesture which the Virgin wears under her blue garment, and by means of the red coral which decorates the tall throne he carried it round the picture; it was he, too, who filled those angel eyes with passion such as awakens in heaven at the touch of wings, at the sound of citherns and cintoles.
Know ye the land where Botticelli and Filippo Lippi dreamed immortal dreams? Know ye the land, Italy in the fifteenth century? Exquisite angel faces were their visions by day and night, and their thoughts were mystic landscapes and fantastic architecture; aureoles, roses, pearls, and rich embroideries were parcel of their habitual sense; and the decoration of a surface with beautiful colour was their souls’ desire. Of truth of effect and local colour they knew nothing, and cared nothing. Beauty for beauty’s sake was the first article of their faith. They measured a profile with relentless accuracy, and followed its outline unflinchingly, their intention was no more than to produce a likeness of the lady who sat posing for her portrait, but some miracle saved them from base naturalism. The humblest, equally with the noblest dreamer, was preserved from it; and that their eyes naturally saw more beautifully than ours seems to be the only explanation. Ugliness must have always existed; but Florentine eyes did not see ugliness. Or did their eyes see it, and did they disdain it? Do they owe their art to a wise festheticism, or to a fortunate limitation of sight? These are questions that none may answer, but which rise up in our mind and perplex us when we enter the New Gallery; for verily it would seem, from the dream pictures there, that a time once existed upon earth when the world was fair as a garden, and life was a happy aspiration. In the fifteenth century the world seems to have been made of gold, jewellery, pictures, embroidered stuffs, statues, and engraved weapons; in the fifteenth century the world seems to have been inhabited only by nobles and prelates; and the only buildings that seem to have existed were palaces and cathedrals. Then Art seemed for all men, and life only for architecture, painting, carving, and engraving long rapiers; and length of time for monks to illuminate great missals in the happy solitude of their cells, and for nuns to weave embroideries and to stitch jewelled vestments.
The Florentines loved their children as dearly as we do ours; but in their pictures there is but the Divine Child. They loved girls and gallantries as well as we do; but in their pictures there are but the Virgin and a few saints.
History tells us that wars, massacres, and persecutions were frequent in the fifteenth century; but in its art we learn no more of the political than we do of the domestic life of the century. The Virgin and Child were sufficient inspiration for hundreds of painters. Now she is in full-face, now in three-quarter face, now in profile. In this picture she wears a blue cloak, in that picture she is clad in a grey. She is alone with the Child in a bower of tall roses, or she is seated on a high throne. Perhaps the painter has varied the composition by the introduction of St. John leaning forward with clasped hands; or maybe he has introduced a group of angels, as Filippo Lippi has done. The throne is sometimes high, sometimes low; but such slight alteration is enough for a new picture. And several generations of painters seem to have lived and died believing that their art was to all practical and artistic purposes limited to the continual variation of this theme.
Among these painters Botticelli was the incontestable master; but about him crowd hundreds of pictures, pictures rather than names. Imagine a number of workmen anxious to know how they should learn to paint well, to paint with brilliancy, with consistency, with ease, and with lasting colours. Imagine a collection of gold ornaments, jewels, and enamels, in which we can detect the skill of the goldsmith, of the painter of stained-glass, of the engraver, and of the illuminator of missals; the inspiration is grave and monastic, the destination a palace or a cathedral, the effect dazzling; and out of this miraculous handicraft Filippo Lippi is always distinct, soft as the dawn, mysterious as a flower, less vigorous but more illusive than Botticelli, and so strangely personal that while looking at him we are absorbed.
To differentiate between the crowd of workmen that surrounded Filippo Lippi and Botticelli were impossible. They painted beautiful things because they lived in an age in which ugliness hardly existed, or was not as visible as it is now; they were content to merge their personalities in an artistic formula; none sought to invent a personality which did not exist in himself. Employing without question a method of drawing and of painting that was common to all of them, they worked in perfect sympathy, almost in collaboration. Plagiarism was then a virtue; they took from each other freely; and the result is a collective rather than individual inspirations. Now and then genius breaks through, as a storm breaks a spell of summer weather. “The Virgin and Child, with St. Clare and St. Agatha”, lent by Mrs. Austin and the trustees of the late J. T. Austin, is one of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen. The temperament of the painter, his special manner of feeling and seeing, is strangely, almost audaciously, affirmed in the mysterious sensuality of the angels’ faces; the painter lays bare a rare and remote corner of his soul; something has been said that was never said before, and neve
r has been said so well since. But if the expression given to these angels is distinctive, it is extraordinarily enhanced by the beauty of the colour. Indeed, the harmony of the colour-scheme is inseparable from the melodious expressiveness of the eyes. Look at the gesture of the hand on the right; is not the association of ideas strangely intimate, curious, and profound?
But come and let us look at a real Botticelli, a work which convinces at the first glance by the extraordinary expressiveness of the drawing, by the originality of the design, by the miraculous handicraft; let us look at the “Virgin and Child and St. John”, lent by Messrs. Colnaghi.
It is a panel some 36 by 25 inches, almost filled by a life-size three-quarter-length figure of the Virgin. She is seated on the right, and holds the Infant Saviour in her arms. In the foreground on the left there is a book and cushion, behind which St. John stands, his hands clasped, bearing a cross. Never was a head designed with more genius than that strange Virgin, ecstatic, mysterious, sphinx-like; with half-closed eyes, she bends her face to meet her God’s kiss. In this picture Botticelli sought to realise the awfulness of the Christian mystery: the Mother leans to the kiss of her Son — her Son, who is likewise her God, and her brain is dim with its ecstasy. She is perturbed and overcome; the kiss is in her brain, and it trembles on her lips. You who have not seen the picture will think that this description is but the tale of the writer who reads his fancies into the panel before him. But the intention of the painter did not outstrip the power of expression which his fingers held. He expressed what I say he expressed, and more perfectly, more suggestively, than any words. And how? It will be imagined that it was by means of some illusive line that Botticelli rendered the very touch and breath of this extraordinary kiss; by that illusive line which Degas employs in his expressions of the fugitive and the evanescent. How great, therefore, is our surprise when we look into the picture to find that the mystery and ecstasy of this kiss are expressed by a hard, firm, dark line.
And the sensation of this strange ecstatic kiss pervades the entire composition; it is embodied in the hand placed so reverently on the thigh of the Infant God and in the eyes of St. John, who watches the divine mystery which is being accomplished. On St. John’s face there is earthly reverence and awe; on Christ’s face, though it is drawn in rigid outline, though it looks as if it were stamped out of iron, there is universal love, cloudlike and ineffable; and Christ’s knees are drawn close, and the hand of the Virgin holds them close; and through the hand come bits of draperies exquisitely designed. Indeed, the distribution of line through the picture is as perfect as the distribution of colour; the form of the blue cloak is as perfect as the colour, and the green cape falls from the shoulder, satisfying both senses; the crimson vesture which she wears underneath her cloak is extraordinarily pure, and balances the crimson cloak which St. John wears. But these beauties are subordinate to the beauty of the Virgin’s head. How grand it is in style! How strange and enigmatic! And in the design of that head Botticelli has displayed all his skill. The fair hair is covered with delicate gauze edged with lace, and overcoming the difficulties of that most rebellious of all mediums — tempera! — his brush worked over the surface, fulfilling his slightest thought, realising all the transparency of gauze, the intricacy of lace, the brightness of crimson silk, the very gravity of the embossed binding of the book, the sway and texture of every drapery, the gold of the tall cross, and the darker gold of the aureole high up in the picture, set against a strip of Florentine sky.
Preface to ‘Piping Hot!’ by Émile Zola
One day, in the middle of a long literary conversation, Théodore Duret said to me: “I have known in my life two men of supreme intelligence. I knew of both before the world knew of either. Never did I doubt, nor was it possible to doubt, but that they would one day or other gain the highest distinctions — those men were Léon Gambetta and Émile Zola.”
Of Zola I am able to speak, and I can thoroughly realise how interesting it must have been to have watched him, at that time, when he was poor and unknown, obtaining acceptance of his articles with difficulty, and surrounded by the feeble and trivial in spirit, who, out of inborn ignorance and acquired idiocy, look with ridicule on those who believe that there is still a new word to say, still a new cry to cry.
I did not know Émile Zola in those days, but he must have been then as he is now, and I should find it difficult to understand how any man of average discrimination could speak with him for half-an-hour without recognising that he was one of those mighty monumental intelligences, the statues of a century, that remain and are gazed upon through the long pages of the world’s history. This, at least, is the impression Émile Zola has always produced upon me. I have seen him in company, and company of no mean order, and when pitted against his compeers, the contrast has only made him appear grander, greater, nobler. The witty, the clever Alphonse Daudet, ever as ready for a supper party as a literary discussion, with all his splendid gifts, can do no more when Zola speaks than shelter himself behind an epigram; Edmond De Goncourt, aristocratic, dignified, seated amid his Japanese watercolours, bronzes, and Louis XV. furniture, bitterly admits, if not that there is a greater naturalistic god than he, at least that there is a colossus whose strength he is unable to oppose.
This is the position Emile Zola takes amid his contemporaries.
By some strange power of assimilation, he appropriates and makes his own of all things; ideas that before were spattered, dislocated, are suddenly united, fitted into their places. In speaking, as in writing, he always appears greater than his subject, and, Titan-like, grasps it as a whole; in speaking, as in writing, the strength and beauty of his style is an unfailing use of the right word; each phrase is a solid piece of masonry, and as he talks an edifice of thought rises architecturally perfect and complete in design.
And it is of this side of Émile Zola’s genius that I wish particularly to speak — a side that has never been taken sufficiently into consideration, but which, nevertheless, is its ever-guiding and determinating quality. Émile Zola is to me a great epic poet, and he may be, I think, not inappropriately termed the Homer of modern life. For he, more than any other writer, it seems, possesses the power of seeing a subject as a whole, can divest it at will of all side issues, can seize with a firm, logical comprehension on the main lines of its construction, and that without losing sight of the remotest causes or the furthest consequences of its existence. It is here that his strength lies, and his is the strength which has conquered the world. Of his realism a great deal, of course, has been said, but only because it is the most obvious, not the most dominant quality of his work. The mistletoe invariably hides the oak from the eyes of the vulgar.
That Émile Zola has done well to characterise his creations with the vivid sentiment of modern life rather than the pale dream which reveals to us the past, that he was able to bend, to model, to make serviceable to his purpose the ephemeral habits and customs of our day, few will now deny. But this was only the off-shoot of his genius. That the colour of the nineteenth century with which he clothes the bodies of his heroes and heroines is not always exact, that none other has attempted to spin these garments before, I do not dispute. They will grow threadbare and fall to dust, even as the hide of the megatharium, of which only the colossal bones now remain to us wherewith to construct the fabric of the primeval world. And, in like manner, when the dream of the socialist is realized, when the burden of pleasure and work is proportioned out equally to all, and men live on a more strictly regulated plan than do either the ant or the bee, I believe that the gigantic skeleton of the Rougon-Macquart family will still continue to resist the ravages of time, and that western scientists will refer to it when disputing about the idiosyncrasies of a past civilization.
In the preceding paragraph, I have said neither more nor less than my meaning, for I am convinced that the living history of no age has been as well written as the last half of the nineteenth century is in the Rougon-Maequart series. I pass over the question
whether, in describing Renee’s dress, a mistake was made in the price of lace, also whether the author was wrong in permitting himself the anachronism of describing a fête in the opera-house a couple of years before the building was completed. Errors of this kind do not appear to me to be worth considering. What I maintain is, that what Émile Zola has done, and what he alone has done — and I do not make an exception even in the case of the mighty Balzac — is to have conceived and constructed the frame-work of a complex civilization like ours, in all its worse ramifications. Never, it seems to me, was the existence of the epic faculty more amply demonstrated than by the genealogical tree of this now celebrated family.
The grandeur, the amplitude of this scheme will be seen at once. Adélaïde Fouque, a mad woman confined in a lunatic asylum at Plassans, is the first ancestor; she is the transmitter of the original neurosis, which, regulated by his or her physical constitution, assumes various forms in each individual member of the family, and is developed according to the surroundings in whieh he or she lives. By Rougon this woman had two children; by Macquart, with whom she cohabited on the death of her husband, she had three. Ursule Macquart married a man named Mouret, and their children are therefore cousins of the Rougon-Macquarts. This family has some forty or fifty members, who are distributed through the different grades of our social system. Some have attained the highest positions, as, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, others have sunk to the lowest depths, as Gervaise in “L’Assommoir,” but all are tainted with the hereditary malady. By it Nana is invincibly driven to prostitution; by it Etienne Lantier, in “Germinal,” will be driven to crime; by it his brother, Claude, will be made a great painter. Protean-like is this disease. Sometimes it skips over a generation, sometimes lies almost latent, and the balance of the intelligence is but slightly disturbed, as in the instance of Octave in “Pot-Bouille,” and Lazare in “La Joie de Vivre.” But the mind of the latter is more distorted than is Octave’s. Lazare lives in a perpetual fear of death, and is prevented from realizing any of his magnificent projects by his vacillating temperament; in him we have an example how a splendid intelligence may be drained away like water through an imperceptible crack in the vase, and how what might have been the fruit of a life withers like the flowers from which the nourishing liquid has been withdrawn.