In all social circles, and even in art circles, there are people who go to the Louvre, walk quickly past a large number of most interesting though secondary pictures, without throwing them so much as a look, and plant themselves, as though in a trance, in front of a Titian or a Raphael, one of those which the engraver’s art has particularly popularized; then they go out satisfied, as often as not saying to themselves: ‘I know my gallery thoroughly.’ There are also people who, having once read Bossuet and Racine, think they have got the history of literature at their fingertips.
Happily from time to time knights errant step into the lists – critics, art collectors, lovers of the arts, curious-minded idlers – who assert that neither Raphael nor Racine has every secret, that minor poets have something to be said for them, substantial and delightful things to their credit, and finally that, however much we may like general beauty, which is expressed by the classical poets and artists, we nonetheless make a mistake to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance, the description of manners.
I am bound to admit that, for several years now, society has shown some improvement. The value that today’s collectors attach to the delightful engraved and coloured trifles of the last century shows that a reaction has begun in the direction needed by the public; Debucourt, the Saint-Aubins and many others have achieved mention in the dictionary of artists worthy of study. But these represent the past, whereas my purpose at this moment is to discuss the painting of our contemporary social scene. The past is interesting, not only because of the beauty that the artists for whom it was the present were able to extract from it, but also as past, for its historical value. The same applies to the present. The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
I have here in front of me a series of fashion plates, the earliest dating from the Revolution, the most recent from the Consulate or thereabouts. These costumes, which many thoughtless people, the sort of people who are grave without true gravity, find highly amusing, have a double kind of charm, artistic and historical. They are very often beautiful and wittily drawn, but what to me is at least as important, and what I am glad to find in all or nearly all of them, is the moral attitude and the aesthetic value of the time. The idea of beauty that man creates for himself affects his whole attire, ruffles or stiffens his coat, gives curves or straight lines to his gestures and even, in process of time, subtly penetrates the very features of his face. Man comes in the end to look like his ideal image of himself. These engravings can be translated into beauty or ugliness: in ugliness they become caricatures; in beauty, antique statues.
The women who wore these dresses looked more or less like one or the other, according to the degree of poetry or vulgarity evident in their faces. The living substance gave suppleness to what appears too stiff to us. The viewer’s imagination can even today see a marching man in this tunic or the shrug of a woman’s shoulder beneath that shawl. One of these days perhaps some theatre or other will put on a play where we shall see a revival of the fashions in which our fathers thought themselves just as captivating as we ourselves think we are, in our modest garments (which also have their attractiveness, to be sure, but rather of a moral and spiritual kind); and, if they are worn and given life to by intelligent actors and actresses, we shall be surprised at our having laughed at them so thoughtlessly. The past, whilst retaining its ghostly piquancy, will recapture the light and movement of life, and become present.
If an impartially minded man were to look through the whole range of French fashions, one after the other, from the origins of France to the present day, he would find nothing to shock or even to surprise him. He would find the transition as fully prepared as in the scale of the animal kingdom. No gaps, hence no surprises. And if to the illustration representing each age he were to add the philosophic thought which that age was mainly preoccupied with or worried by, a thought which the illustration inevitably reflects, he would see what a deep harmony informs all the branches of history, and that, even in the centuries which appear to us the most outrageous and the most confused, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
Here we have indeed a golden opportunity to establish a rational and historical theory of beauty, in contrast to the theory of a unique and absolute beauty, and to show that beauty is always and inevitably compounded of two elements, although the impression it conveys is one; for the difficulty we may experience in distinguishing the variable elements that go to make beauty’s unity of impression does not in any way invalidate the need of variety in its composition. Beauty is made up, on the one hand, of an element that is eternal and invariable, though to determine how much of it there is is extremely difficult, and, on the other, of a relative circumstantial element, which we may like to call, successively or at one and the same time, contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion. Without this second element, which is like the amusing, teasing, appetite-whetting coating of the divine cake, the first element would be indigestible, tasteless, unadapted and inappropriate to human nature. I challenge anyone to find any sample whatsoever of beauty that does not contain these two elements.
Let me take as an example the two extreme stages of history. In hieratic art duality is evident at the first glance; the eternal element of beauty reveals itself only by permission and under the control of the religion the artist belongs to. In the most frivolous work of a sophisticated artist, belonging to one of those ages we vaingloriously call civilized, the duality is equally apparent; the eternal part of beauty will be both veiled and expressed, if not through fashion, then at least through the individual temperament of the artist. The duality of art is an inevitable consequence of the duality of man. If you like it that way, you may identify the eternally subsisting portion as the soul of art, and the variable element as its body. That is why Stendhal, that impertinent, teasing, even repugnant mind (whose impertinences are, nevertheless, usefully thought-provoking), came close to the truth, much closer than many other people, when he said: ‘The beautiful is neither more nor less than the promise of happiness.’ No doubt this definition oversteps the mark; it subordinates beauty much too much to the infinitely variable ideal of happiness; it divests beauty too lightly of its aristocratic character; but it has the great merit of getting away from the mistake of the academicians.
More than once before I have explained these things; these few lines are explanation enough for those who enjoy these pastimes of abstract thought; but I am well aware that French readers for the most part take little pleasure in them, and I am myself keen to enter into the positive and solid part of my subject.
For sketches of manners, for the portrayal of bourgeois life and the fashion scene, the quickest and the cheapest technical means will evidently be the best. The more beauty the artist puts into it, the more valuable will the work be; but there is in the trivial things of life, in the daily changing of external things, a speed of movement that imposes upon the artist an equal speed of execution. The multi-coloured engravings of the eighteenth century are again enjoying the favour of current fashion, as I was saying just now; pastel, etching, aquatint have provided their successive quotas to this vast dictionary of modern life in libraries, in art collectors’ portfolios and in the humblest shop windows. As soon as lithography was invented, it was quickly seen to be very suitable for this enormous task, so frivolous in appearance. We possess veritable national records in this class. The works of Gavarni and Daumier have been accurately described as complements to the Comédie humaine. Balzac himself, I feel sure, would not have been unwilling to adopt that idea, which is all the more accurate in proportion as the artist-portrayer of manners is a genius of mixed composition, in other words, a genius with a pronounced literary element. Observer, idler, philosopher, call him what you will, but, in order to define such an artist, you will surely in the end be brought to giving him an attributive adjective that you could not apply to a painter of things eternal, or at least things of a more permanent nature, of heroic or religious subjects. Sometimes he may be a poet; more often he comes close to the novelist or the moralist; he is the painter of the fleeting moment and of all that it suggests of the eternal. Every country, for its pleasure or its fame, has possessed a few men of that sort. In our own time, to Daumier, to Gavarni, the first names that come to mind, we may add Deveria, Maurin, Numa (all chroniclers of the Restoration’s shady charms), Wattier, Tassaert, Eugène Lami, this last one almost English in his affection for aristocratic society, and even Trimolet and Traviès, the chroniclers of poverty and humble life.
Today I want to talk to my readers about a singular man, whose originality is so powerful and clear-cut that it is self-sufficing, and does not bother to look for approval. None of his drawings is signed, if by signature we mean the few letters, which can be so easily forged, that compose a name, and that so many other artists grandly inscribe at the bottom of their most carefree sketches. But all his works are signed with his dazzling soul, and art-lovers who have seen and liked them will recognize them easily from the description I propose to give of them. M. C. G. [Monsieur Constantin Guys] loves mixing with the crowds, loves being incognito, and carries his originality to the point of modesty. M. Thackeray, who, as is well known, is very interested in all things to do with art, and who draws the illustrations for his own novels, one day spoke of M. G. in a London review, much to the irritation of the latter who regarded the matter as an outrage to his modesty. And again quite recently, when he heard that I was proposing to make an assessment of his mind and talent, he begged me, in a most peremptory manner, to suppress his name, and to discuss his works only as though they were the works of some anonymous person. I will humbly obey this odd request. The reader and I will proceed as though M. G. did not exist, and we will discuss his drawings and his water-colours, for which he professes a patrician’s disdain, in the same way as would a group of scholars faced with the task of assessing the importance of a number of precious historical documents which chance has brought to light, and the author of which must for ever remain unknown. And even to reassure my conscience completely, let my readers assume that all the things I have to say about the artist’s nature, so strangely and mysteriously dazzling, have been more or less accurately suggested by the works in question; pure poetic hypothesis, conjecture, or imaginative reconstructions.
M. G. is an old man. Jean-Jacques began writing, so they say, at the age of forty-two. Perhaps it was at about that age that M. G., obsessed by the world of images that filled his mind, plucked up courage to cast ink and colours on to a sheet of white paper. To be honest, he drew like a barbarian, like a child, angrily chiding his clumsy fingers and his disobedient tool. I have seen a large number of these early scribblings, and I admit that most of the people who know what they are talking about, or who claim to, could, without shame, have failed to discern the latent genius that dwelt in these obscure beginnings. Today, M. G., who has discovered unaided all the little tricks of the trade, and who has taught himself, without help or advice, has become a powerful master in his own way; of his early artlessness he has retained only what was needed to add an unexpected spice to his abundant gift. When he happens upon one of these efforts of his early manner, he tears it up or burns it, with a most amusing show of shame and indignation.
For ten whole years I wanted to make the acquaintance of M. G., who is by nature a great traveller and very cosmopolitan. I knew that he had for a long time been working for an English illustrated paper and that in it had appeared engravings from his travel sketches (Spain, Turkey, the Crimea). Since then I have seen a considerable mass of these on-the-spot drawings from life, and I have thus been able to ‘read’ a detailed and daily account, infinitely preferable to any other, of the Crimean campaign. The same paper had also published (without signature, as before) a large quantity of compositions by this artist from the new ballets and operas. When at last I ran him to ground I saw at once that I was not dealing exactly with an artist but rather with a man of the world. In this context, pray interpret the word ‘artist’ in a very narrow sense, and the expression ‘man of the world’ in a very broad one. By ‘man of the world’, I mean a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs; by ‘artist’, I mean a specialist, a man tied to his palette like a serf to the soil. M. G. does not like being called an artist. Is he not justified to a small extent? He takes an interest in everything the world over, he wants to know, understand, assess everything that happens on the surface of our spheroid. The artist moves little, or even not at all, in intellectual and political circles. If he lives in the Bréda quarter he knows nothing of what goes on in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. With two or three exceptions, which it is unnecessary to name, the majority of artists are, let us face it, very skilled brutes, mere manual labourers, village pub-talkers with the minds of country bumpkins. Their talk, inevitably enclosed within very narrow limits, quickly becomes a bore to the man of the world, to the spiritual citizen of the universe.
Thus to begin to understand M. G., the first thing to note is this: that curiosity may be considered the starting point of his genius.
Do you remember a picture (for indeed it is a picture!) written by the most powerful pen of this age and entitled The Man of the Crowd? Sitting in a café, and looking through the shop window, a convalescent is enjoying the sight of the passing crowd, and identifying himself in thought with all the thoughts that are moving around him. He has only recently come back from the shades of death and breathes in with delight all the spores and odours of life; as he has been on the point of forgetting everything, he remembers and passionately wants to remember everything. In the end he rushes out into the crowd in search of a man unknown to him whose face, which he had caught sight of, had in a flash fascinated him. Curiosity had become a compelling, irresistible passion.
Now imagine an artist perpetually in the spiritual condition of the convalescent, and you will have the key to the character of M. G.
But convalescence is like a return to childhood. The convalescent, like the child, enjoys to the highest degree the faculty of taking a lively interest in things, even the most trivial in appearance. Let us hark back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of our imaginations, to our youngest, our morning impressions, and we shall recognize that they were remarkably akin to the vividly coloured impressions that we received later on after a physical illness, provided that illness left our spiritual faculties pure and unimpaired. The child sees everything as a novelty; the child is always ‘drunk’. Nothing is more like what we call inspiration than the joy the child feels in drinking in shape and colour. I will venture to go even further and declare that inspiration has some connection with congestion, that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less vigorous nervous impulse that reverberates in the cerebral cortex. The man of genius has strong nerves; those of the child are weak. In the one, reason has assumed an important role; in the other, sensibility occupies almost the whole being. But genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. To this deep and joyful curiosity must be attributed that stare, animal-like in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new, whatever it may be, face or landscape, light, gilding, colours, watered silk, enchantment of beauty, enhanced by the arts of dress. A friend of mine was telling me one day how, as a small boy, he used to be present when his father was dressing, and how he had always been filled with astonishment, mixed with delight, as he looked at the arm muscle, the colour tones of the skin tinged with rose and yellow, and the bluish network of the veins. The picture of the external world was already beginning to fill him with respect, and to take possession of his brain. Already the shape of things obsessed and possessed him. A precocious fate was showing the tip of its nose. His damnation was settled. Need I say that, today, the child is a famous painter.
I was asking you just now to think of M. G. as an eternal convalescent; to complete your idea of him, think of him also as a man-child, as a man possessing at every moment the genius of childhood, in other words a genius for whom no edge of life is blunted.
I told you that I was unwilling to call him a pure artist, and that he himself rejected this title, with a modesty tinged with aristocratic restraint. I would willingly call him a dandy, and for that I would have a sheaf of good reasons; for the word ‘dandy’ implies a quintessence of character and a subtle understanding of all the moral mechanisms of this world; but, from another aspect, the dandy aspires to cold detachment, and it is in this way that M. G., who is dominated, if ever anyone was, by an insatiable passion, that of seeing and feeling, parts company trenchantly with dandyism. Amabam amare, said St Augustine. ‘I love passion, passionately,’ M. G. might willingly echo. The dandy is blasé, or affects to be, as a matter of policy and class attitude, M. G. hates blasé people. Sophisticated minds will understand me when I say that he possesses that difficult art of being sincere without being ridiculous. I would willingly confer on him the title of philosopher, to which he has a right for more than one reason; but his excessive love of visible, tangible things, in their most plastic form, inspires him with a certain dislike of those things that go to make up the intangible kingdom of the metaphysician. Let us therefore reduce him to the status of the pure pictorial moralist, like La Bruyère.
The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes. The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find, just as the picture-lover lives in an enchanted world of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity. He, the lover of life, may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life. It is an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting. ‘Any man,’ M. G. once said, in one of those talks he rendered memorable by the intensity of his gaze, and by his eloquence of gesture, ‘any man who is not weighed down with a sorrow so searching as to touch all his faculties, and who is bored in the midst of the crowd, is a fool! A fool! and I despise him!’
When, as he wakes up, M. G. opens his eyes and sees the sun beating vibrantly at his window-panes, he says to himself with remorse and regret: ‘What an imperative command! What a fanfare of light! Light everywhere for several hours past! Light I have lost in sleep! and endless numbers of things bathed in light that I could have seen and have failed to!’ And off he goes! And he watches the flow of life move by, majestic and dazzling. He admires the eternal beauty and the astonishing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained in the tumult of human liberty. He gazes at the landscape of the great city, landscapes of stone, now swathed in the mist, now struck in full face by the sun. He enjoys handsome equipages, proud horses, the spit and polish of the grooms, the skilful handling by the page boys, the smooth rhythmical gait of the women, the beauty of the children, full of the joy of life and proud as peacocks of their pretty clothes; in short, life universal. If in a shift of fashion, the cut of a dress has been slightly modified, if clusters of ribbons and curls have been dethroned by rosettes, if bonnets have widened and chignons have come down a little on the nape of the neck, if waist-lines have been raised and skirts become fuller, you may be sure that from a long way off his eagle’s eye will have detected it. A regiment marches by, maybe on its way to the ends of the earth, filling the air of the boulevard with its martial airs, as light and lively as hope; and sure enough M. G. has already seen, inspected and analysed the weapons and the bearing of this whole body of troops. Harness, highlights, bands, determined mien, heavy and grim mustachios, all these details flood chaotically into him; and within a few minutes the poem that comes with it all is virtually composed. And then his soul will vibrate with the soul of the regiment, marching as though it were one living creature, proud image of joy and discipline!
But evening comes. The witching hour, the uncertain light, when the sky draws its curtains and the city lights go on. The gaslight stands out on the purple background of the setting sun. Honest men or crooked customers, wise or irresponsible, all are saying to themselves: ‘The day is done at last!’ Good men and bad turn their thoughts to pleasure, and each hurries to his favourite haunt to drink the cup of oblivion. M. G. will be the last to leave any place where the departing glories of daylight linger, where poetry echoes, life pulsates, music sounds; any place where a human passion offers a subject to his eye where natural man and conventional man reveal themselves in strange beauty, where the rays of the dying sun play on the fleeting pleasure of the ‘depraved animal!’ ‘Well, there, to be sure, is a day well filled,’ murmurs to himself a type of reader well-known to all of us; ‘each one of us has surely enough genius to fill it in the same way.’ No! few men have the gift of seeing; fewer still have the power to express themselves. And now, whilst others are sleeping, this man is leaning over his table, his steady gaze on a sheet of paper, exactly the same gaze as he directed just now at the things about him, brandishing his pencil, his pen, his brush, splashing water from the glass up to the ceiling, wiping his pen on his shirt, hurried, vigorous, active, as though he was afraid the images might escape him, quarrelsome though alone, and driving himself relentlessly on. And things seen are born again on the paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and better than beautiful, strange and endowed with an enthusiastic life, like the soul of their creator. The weird pageant has been distilled from nature. All the materials, stored higgledy-piggledy by memory, are classified, ordered, harmonized, and undergo that deliberate idealization, which is the product of a childlike perceptiveness, in other words a perceptiveness that is acute and magical by its very ingenuousness.
And so, walking or quickening his pace, he goes his way, for ever in search. In search of what? We may rest assured that this man, such as I have described him, this solitary mortal endowed with an active imagination, always roaming the great desert of men, has a nobler aim than that of the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call ‘modernity’, for want of a better term to express the idea in question. The aim for him is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory. If we cast our eye over our exhibitions of modern pictures, we shall be struck by the general tendency of our artists to clothe all manner of subjects in the dress of the past. Almost all of them use the fashions and the furnishings of the Renaissance, as David used Roman fashions and furnishings, but there is this difference, that David, having chosen subjects peculiarly Greek or Roman, could not do otherwise than present them in the style of antiquity, whereas the painters of today, choosing, as they do, subjects of a general nature, applicable to all ages, will insist on dressing them up in the fashion of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, or of the East. This is evidently sheer laziness; for it is much more convenient to state roundly that everything is hopelessly ugly in the dress of a period than to apply oneself to the task of extracting the mysterious beauty that may be hidden there, however small or light it may be. Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. There was a form of modernity for every painter of the past; the majority of the fine portraits that remain to us from former times are clothed in the dress of their own day. They are perfectly harmonious works because the dress, the hairstyle, and even the gesture, the expression and the smile (each age has its carriage, its expression and its smile) form a whole, full of vitality. You have no right to despise this transitory fleeting element, the metamorphoses of which are so frequent, nor to dispense with it. If you do, you inevitably fall into the emptiness of an abstract and indefinable beauty, like that of the one and only woman of the time before the Fall. If for the dress of the day, which is necessarily right, you substitute another, you are guilty of a piece of nonsense that only a fancy-dress ball imposed by fashion can excuse. Thus the goddesses, the nymphs, and sultanas of the eighteenth century are portraits in the spirit of their day.
No doubt it is an excellent discipline to study the old masters, in order to learn how to paint, but it can be no more than a superfluous exercise if your aim is to understand the beauty of the present day. The draperies of Rubens or Veronese will not teach you how to paint watered silk à l’antique, or satin à la reine, or any other fabric produced by our mills, supported by a swaying crinoline, or petticoats of starched muslin. The texture and grain are not the same as in the fabrics of old Venice, or those worn at the court of Catherine. We may add that the cut of the skirt and bodice is absolutely different, that the pleats are arranged into a new pattern, and finally that the gesture and carriage of the woman of today give her dress a vitality and a character that are not those of the woman of former ages. In short, in order that any form of modernity may be worthy of becoming antiquity, the mysterious beauty that human life unintentionally puts into it must have been extracted from it. It is this task that M. G. particularly addresses himself to.
I have said that every age has its own carriage, its expression, its gestures. This proposition may be easily verified in a large portrait gallery (the one at Versailles, for example). But it can be yet further extended. In a unity we call a nation, the professions, the social classes, the successive centuries, introduce variety not only in gestures and manners, but also in the general outlines of faces. Such and such a nose, mouth, forehead, will be standard for a given interval of time, the length of which I shall not claim to determine here, but which may certainly be a matter of calculation. Such ideas are not familiar enough to portrait painters; and the great weakness of M. Ingres, in particular, is the desire to impose on every type that sits for him a more or less complete process of improvement, in other words a despotic perfecting process, borrowed from the store of classical ideas.
In a matter such as this, a priori reasoning would be easy and even legitimate. The perpetual correlation between what is called the soul and what is called the body is a quite satisfactory explanation of how what is material or emanates from the spiritual reflects and will always reflect the spiritual force it derives from. If a painter, patient and scrupulous but with only inferior imaginative power, were commissioned to paint a courtesan of today, and, for this purpose, were to get his inspiration (to use the hallowed term) from a courtesan by Titian or Raphael, the odds are that his work would be fraudulent, ambiguous, and difficult to understand. The study of a masterpiece of that date and of that kind will not teach him the carriage, the gaze, the come-hitherishness, or the living representation of one of these creatures that the dictionary of fashion has, in rapid succession, pigeonholed under the coarse or light-hearted rubric of unchaste, kept women, Lorettes.
The same remark applies precisely to the study of the soldier, the dandy, and even animals, dogs or horses, and of all things that go to make up the external life of an age. Woe betide the man who goes to antiquity for the study of anything other than ideal art, logic and general method! By immersing himself too deeply in it, he will no longer have the present in his mind’s eye; he throws away the value and the privileges afforded by circumstance; for nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility. The reader will readily understand that I could easily verify my assertions from innumerable objects other than women. What would you say, for example, of a marine painter (I take an extreme case) who, having to represent the sober and elegant beauty of a modern vessel, were to tire out his eyes in the study of the overloaded, twisted shapes, the monumental stern, of ships of bygone ages, and the complex sails and rigging of the sixteenth century? And what would you think of an artist you had commissioned to do the portrait of a thorough-bred, celebrated in the solemn annals of the turf, if he were to restrict his studies to museums, if he were to content himself with looking at equine studies of the past in the picture galleries, in Van Dyck, Bourguignon, or Van der Meulen?
M. G., guided by nature, tyrannized over by circumstance, has followed a quite different path. He began by looking at life, and only later did he contrive to learn how to express life. The result has been a striking originality, in which whatever traces of untutored simplicity may still remain take on the appearance of an additional proof of obedience to the impression, of a flattery of truth. For most of us, especially for businessmen, in whose eyes nature does not exist, unless it be in its strict utility relationship with their business interests, the fantastic reality of life becomes strangely blunted. M. G. registers it constantly; his memory and his eyes are full of it.
The word ‘barbarousness’, which may have come too often from my pen, might lead some people to believe that I am alluding to a number of shapeless drawings that only the imagination of the viewer is capable of transforming into perfect things. This would be a serious misunderstanding of what I mean. I refer to a sort of inevitable, synthetic, childlike barbarousness, which can often still be seen in a perfect type of art (Mexican, Egyptian, or Ninevehite barbarousness) and derives from the need to see things big, to look at them particularly from the point of view of their effect as a whole. It is not superfluous to remark here that the accusation of barbarousness has often been made against all painters who have an eye for synthesis and abbreviation, M. Corot, for example, who begins by tracing the main lines of a landscape, its structure and features. Similarly, M. G., faithful interpreter of his own impressions, notes with instinctive vigour the culminating features or highlights of an object (they can be culminating or luminous from a dramatic point of view) or its main characteristics, sometimes even with a degree of exaggeration useful to human memory; and the imagination of the viewer, undergoing in its turn the influence of this imperious code, conjures up in clear outline the impression produced by objects on the mind of M. G. In this case, the viewer becomes the translator of a translation, which is always clear and always intoxicating.
There is a factor that adds greatly to the vitality of this pictorial record of everyday life. I refer to M. G.’s habit of work. He draws from memory, and not from the model, except in those cases (the Crimean War, for example) where there is an urgent need to take immediate, hurried notes and to establish the broad outlines of a subject. In fact all true draughtsmen draw from the image imprinted in their brain and not from nature. If the admirable sketches of Raphael, of Watteau and many others are quoted as examples to invalidate our contention, our reply is that these are indeed highly detailed notes, but mere notes they remain. When a true artist has reached the stage of the final execution of his work, the model would be more of an embarrassment to him than a help. It even happens that men like Daumier and M. G. who have been accustomed for years to using their memory, and filling it with images, find that, when confronted with a model and the multiplicity of detail this means, their main faculty is as though confused and paralysed.
Then begins a struggle between the determination to see everything, to forget nothing, and the faculty of memory, which has acquired the habit of registering in a flash the general tones and shape, the outline pattern. An artist with a perfect sense of form but particularly accustomed to the exercise of his memory and his imagination, then finds himself assailed, as it were, by a riot of details, all of them demanding justice, with the fury of a mob in love with absolute equality. Any form of justice is inevitably infringed; any harmony is destroyed, sacrificed; a multitude of trivialities are magnified; a multitude of little things become usurpers of attention. The more the artist pays impartial attention to detail, the greater does anarchy become. Whether he be short- or long-sighted, all sense of hierarchy or subordination disappears. This is an accident that often occurs in the works of one of our most fashionable painters, whose defects moreover are so well attuned to the defects of the crowd that they have greatly contributed to his popularity. The same sort of analogy may be sensed in the practice of the actor’s art, that mysterious, profound art which in these days has fallen into the confusion of many forms of decadence. M. Frédérick-Lemaître builds up a role with the breadth and boldness of genius. Adorned as his acting is with brilliant detail, it nonetheless remains a unified sculptural composition. M. Bouffé builds his with the painstaking efforts of a myope or a bureaucrat. In him everything sparkles and crackles, but nothing strikes the eye, nothing claims a place in our memories.
Thus in M. G.’s execution two things stand out: the first is the absorbed intenseness of a resurrecting and evocative memory, a memory that says to every object: ‘Lazarus, arise’; the second is a fire, an intoxication of pencil or brush, almost amounting to frenzy. This is the fear of not going fast enough, of letting the spectre escape before the synthesis has been extracted and taken possession of, the terrible fear that takes hold of all great artists and fills them with such an ardent desire to appropriate all means of expression, so that the commands of the mind may never be weakened by the hand’s hesitation; so that, in the end, the ideal execution may become as unconscious, as flowing, as the process of digesting is for the brain of a healthy man after dinner. M. G. begins with a few light pencil touches, which scarcely do more than indicate the positions of the objects in space. The main planes are indicated next by a series of colour-washes, masses vaguely and lightly tinted at first, but worked over again later with applications of stronger colour. In the last stage, the outlines of objects are clearly traced with pencil and ink. Without having seen them, no one would guess the remarkable effects he can achieve by this so simple and almost elementary method. It has the incomparable advantage that, at almost any stage, each drawing seems to have reached a stage of completion satisfying enough to the viewer; you may call this a thumbnail sketch, but it is a perfect one. All the tone values are in harmony, and if he wants to work the tones up, they will always retain their relationship as they move towards the desired state of perfection. In this way he can work at up to twenty drawings at a time with a liveliness and joy charming to the eye and amusing even for him; the sketches pile up, one on top of the other, by tens, hundreds, by thousands. From time to time he runs through them, glancing at some, examining others, and then he chooses a few, to which he gives more intensity by giving greater depth to the shadow and touching up the highlights.
He attaches great importance to the backgrounds, which, whether strongly or lightly worked, are always of a quality and nature appropriate to the figures. The scale of tones and the general harmony are strictly observed, with a genius that derives more from instinct than from study. For M. G. possesses that mysterious talent of the colourist, by the light of nature, a veritable gift, which study can strengthen but which it cannot of itself, I believe, create. To sum it all up, our strange artist expresses both the gestures and attitudes, be they solemn or grotesque, of human beings and their luminous explosion in space.
Bulgaria, Turkey, the Crimea, Spain have all been a gorgeous feast for M. G.’s eyes, or rather for those of the imaginary artist we are agreed to call M. G.; for now and then it comes back to me that, to reassure his modesty, I promised to pretend he did not exist. I have looked through these archives of the Eastern War (battlefields strewn with the debris of death, heavy baggage trains, shipment of livestock and horses), scenes throbbing with life and interest, as though moulded on life itself, elements of a valuable form of picturesque, which many well-known painters would have thoughtlessly neglected if they had found themselves in the same circumstances; amongst these, however, I would willingly make an exception of M. Horace Vernet, veritable journalist rather than true artist, with whom M. G., though a more delicate artist, has an evident relationship, assuming we want to think of him only as an archivist of life. No journal, I declare, no written record, no book could express so well this great epic of the Crimean War, in all its distressing detail and sinister breadth. The eye moves from the banks of the Danube to the shores of the Bosphorus, from Cape Kerson to the plain of Balaclava or the fields of Inkerman, and on to the English, French, Turkish and Piedmontese encampments, from the streets of Constantinople to the hospitals and to a variety of solemn religious and military ceremonies.
One of the drawings that sticks in my memory more than others is the Consécration d’un terrain funèbre à Scutari par l’évêque de Gibraltar. The picturesque character of the scene, which arises from the contrast between the surrounding oriental countryside and the western attitudes and uniforms of the participants, is brought out strikingly, and in a manner that gives food for thought and reverie. The ordinary soldiers and officers alike, all have that ineradicable air of ‘gentlemen’, that determined and reserved air they carry with them to the end of the earth, whether it be in the garrison towns of Cape Colony or the settlements in India; the Anglican clergy put one vaguely in mind of ushers or stockbrokers in cap and bands for the occasion.
And here in another drawing is the residence of Omar Pasha at Shumla. Turkish hospitality, pipes and coffee; all the visitors are seated on divans, sucking at pipes as long as blow-pipes, with the bowls at their feet. And here, Kurdes à Scutari depicts a weird-looking soldiery whose aspect suggests an invasion of barbarian hordes; and, no less strange, in another sketch are bashi-bazouks, with their European officers, Hungarian or Polish, veritable dandies in feature these latter, contrasting oddly with the curiously oriental character of their men.
One magnificent drawing that caught my eye is of a single standing figure; the man is stout and vigorous, his expression all at once thoughtful, carefree and bold; he is wearing high boots, which come up above his knees; his uniform is hidden under a heavy, ample topcoat, tightly buttoned up; his gaze, through his cigar smoke, is directed towards the threatening misty horizon; he has been wounded in the arm, and is wearing a sling. At the foot, a scribbled pencil note states: Canrobert on the battlefield of Inkerman. Taken on the spot.
And who might this horseman be? With white moustaches so vigorously drawn, with head erect, he seems to be scenting the terrible poetry of the battlefield, whilst his horse, sniffing the ground, picks his way between the heaps of corpses, feet upturned, faces contorted, in strange attitudes. At the bottom of the drawing, in a corner, are these words: Myself at Inkerman.
And who is this but M. Baraguay-d’Hilliers, with the Seraskier, inspecting the artillery at Béchichtash. Rarely have I seen a better likeness in the portrait of a soldier, done by a bolder or livelier hand.
Hard by, I caught sight of a name of sinister reputation since our Syrian disasters: Achmet Pasha, Commander-in-Chief, standing in front of his tent, surrounded by his staff, receives the European officers. Despite the generous extent of his Turkish paunch, Achmet-Pasha has, both in his bearing and in his face, the noble aristocratic air that usually belongs to the master races.
The battle of Balaclava figures several times, from different angles, in this interesting collection. There, amongst the most striking, is the historic cavalry charge sung by the heroic clarion of Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate: a mass of cavalry are shown thundering at speed towards the horizon, between the rolling clouds of gunsmoke. The background is shut in by a line of green hills.
From time to time a religious subject provides a welcome change to the viewer’s gaze, saddened by this chaos of gunpowder and restless carnage. In the midst of the British troops of all arms, amongst whom the picturesque uniform of the kilted Scots is conspicuous, an Anglican chaplain holds the Sunday service; three drums, the topmost resting on the other two, serve as a lectern.
It is difficult in all conscience for the mere pen to translate this vast and complex poem, composed of a thousand sketches, and to express the feelings of intoxication arising from all the picturesque details – often distressing but never maudlin – which are collected in these few hundred pages. The stained and torn condition of these is eloquent in its own way of the chaos and tumult in the midst of which the artist noted down his memories of each day. As evening came the mail would carry away towards London M. G.’s notes and drawings, and, often enough, he would thus entrust to the post ten or more quickly executed thumbnail sketches, done on thin paper, which the engravers and subscribers to the magazine were eagerly awaiting.
Sometimes ambulances are depicted, where the very atmosphere seems sick, gloomy and heavy, every bed a bed of pain; another time, it is the hospital at Pera, with two sisters of mercy, tall, pale and straight like the figures of Lesueur, talking, I notice, to an informally dressed visitor quaintly designated as ‘my humble self’. Or again, on rough, winding paths strewn with the debris of a past engagement, a long string of pack animals – mules, donkeys, or horses – moves slowly, carrying in rough panniers, balanced on either flank, pale and inert wounded. Across vast expanses of snow come camels, with majestic dewlaps and heads held high. Led by Tartars, they are hauling provisions and munitions of all kinds; a whole warlike world appears, full of life and silent activity, encampments, bazaars, where samples of every type of supplies are displayed, like barbarian cities, conjured up for the circumstances. Amidst the huts, along the stony or snowy roads, in the defiles, can be seen the uniforms of several countries, more or less worn and torn by war, or altered in appearance by lumpy fur coats or heavy boots.
How sad it is to think that this album, which has now been scattered in a variety of places, and the precious pages of which have been kept by the engravers commissioned to reproduce them, or by the editors of the Illustrated London News, should not have been submitted to the Emperor. He, I am sure, would have been glad to see (not without emotion) this record of his soldiers, their day-in, day-out doings, expressed with minute care, from the most brilliant feats of arms to the most trivial occupations of life, by this soldier-artist’s sure and intelligent hand.
Turkey has also contributed some admirable subjects to our dear G.: the festivals of Bairam, profound and rippling splendours, in the background of which appears, like a pallid sun, the ineradicable boredom of the late Sultan; ranged to the left of the sovereign stand all the officers of the civil order; to his right, all those of the military order, the chief of them being Said Pasha, Sultan of Egypt, who was at Constantinople at the time; processions, moving with solemn pomp to the little mosque near the palace, and in these throngs are to be seen a number of Turkish functionaries, veritable caricatures of decadence, crushing their splendid horses under the weight of their fantastic obesity; the heavy, massive carriages, not unlike coaches from the days of Louis XIV, gilded and otherwise adorned with oriental fantasy, from the inside of which curious feminine glances dart from time to time, through the narrow interval left to the eyes by muslin veils worn close to the face; the frenzied dances of mountebanks of the ‘third sex’ (never has Balzac’s humorous phrase been more applicable than in the present case, for beneath these throbbing unsteady lights, under the generous waving folds of the garments, under the heavy make-up of cheeks, eyes and eyebrows, in all these hysterical and convulsive gestures, in the long hair down to the hips, you would find it difficult, not to say impossible, to guess that virility was there): and finally the women of easy virtue (if one can speak in such terms, where the Levant is concerned), generally provided by Hungarian, Walachian, Jewish, Polish, Greek and Armenian women; for under a despotic government, it is the oppressed races, and especially those amongst them that suffer the greatest privations, that provide the most recruits to prostitution. Amongst these women some have kept their national costumes, embroidered bodices, short sleeves, loosely hanging scarves, baggy trousers, Turkish slippers with upturned points, striped or spangled muslins, and all the tinsel of their homeland; others, by far the more numerous, have adopted the principal mark of civilization, which, for a woman, is invariably the crinoline, not, however, without introducing in their attire a faint reminiscence of the Levant, with the result that they have an air of Parisian women attempting to disguise themselves.
M. G. excels at depicting all the display of official ceremonies, the pomp and circumstance of national occasions, not coldly and didactically, like painters who see only lucrative drudgery in commissions of this kind, but with all the ardour of a man in love with space, perspective, great expanses or explosions of light, hanging like teardrops or sparkling diamonds on the asperities of the uniform or court dresses. La fête commémorative de l’indépendance dans la cathédrale d’Athènes affords an interesting example of this talent. All the little figures, each of them so well placed, give more depth to the space that contains them. The cathedral is vast and festooned with solemn draperies. King Otto and the Queen, standing on a dais, are depicted in the traditional dress, which they are wearing with marvellous ease, as though to bear witness to the sincerity of their adoption, and to the most refined Hellenic patriotism. The King is as tightly belted as the smartest palikar, and his kilt flares out with all the exaggeration of national dandyism. Opposite the royal couple, the patriarch is stepping towards them, an old man with bowed shoulders, flowing white beard, little eyes behind green glasses, his whole bearing betraying the most consummate oriental impassivity. All the figures that people this composition are portraits; one of the most interesting, on account of the oddness of the features, which are anything but Hellenic, is that of a German woman standing next to the Queen and attached to her service.
In all M. G.’s series of drawings, a figure often to be found is the French Emperor, whose face the artist has succeeded in reducing to an infallible shorthand sketch without losing the likeness, which he executes with all the sureness of a signature flourish. Now the Emperor, at full gallop, is holding a review, accompanied by officers with easily recognizable features, or by foreign potentates, European, Asiatic, or African, to whom he is doing, as it were, the honours of Paris. Sometimes he is shown motionless on his horse, whose hooves are as firmly on the ground as the four legs of a table, with the Empress on his left in riding habit, and on his right, the little Prince Imperial, in a busby, and holding himself militarily erect on a little rough-haired horse, like the ponies English artists love to show dashing about in their landscapes; at other times, cascades of light and dust enfold him as he rides in the alleys of the Bois de Boulogne; at others again, we see him greeted by the acclamations of the crowds as he moves amongst them in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. One of these water-colours in particular quite dazzled me by its magical quality: the Empress, composed and relaxed, is seen at the front of a richly and majestically decorated box at the theatre; the Emperor is leaning forward slightly, as though to get a better view of the theatre; below, two guardsmen stand erect in military, almost religious immobility, their brilliant uniforms sparkling with the reflections of the light from the footlights. Behind this band of light in the ideal atmosphere of the stage, the actors are singing, declaiming and gesticulating harmoniously; on the near side, there is an abyss of suffused light and a circular space full of human faces at every tier: the chandelier and the audience.
The mob demonstrations, the clubs, the solemn occasions of 1848 also provided M. G. with subjects for a series of scenes, most of which have been engraved for the Illustrated London News. A few years ago, after a sojourn in Spain, which was very fruitful for his genius, he compiled an album of the same kind, of which I have seen only a few fragments. The carelessness with which he gives away or lends his drawings often exposes him to irreparable losses.
To define once more the kind of subject this artist likes best, let us call it the pomp of life, as it is displayed in the capitals of the civilized world, the pageant of military life, of high life, of loose life. Our eye-witness is always punctually at his observation post, wherever flow the deep and impetuous desires, the great rivers of the human heart, war, love, gaming; wherever the festivities and figments which are the external form of these great elements of happiness and sorrow are in full swing. But the artist shows a very marked predilection for military life, for the soldier, and I think that this love of his derives, not only from the virtues and qualities that inevitably flow from the warrior’s soul into his bearing and his face, but also from the showy apparel his profession clothes him in. M. Paul de Molènes has written a few pages, as delightful to read as they are full of good sense, on military coquetry and on the moral significance to be drawn from those dazzling costumes in which all governments like dressing their troops. M. G. would willingly sign these pages.
We have already spoken of the idiom of beauty peculiar to every age, and we have noted that every century had, so to speak, its own characteristic grace. The same observation may be applied to the professions; each one draws its external beauty from the moral laws that govern it. In some, this type of beauty will be marked by energy, and in others it will bear the visible signs of idleness. It is, as it were, the emblem of character, the stamp of fate. The soldier considered in general has his type of beauty, just as the dandy and the woman of the town have theirs, and each has its own distinctive quality. The reader will accept it as natural that I should ignore those professions where, as a result of a single form of violent exercise, muscles become distorted and the face is marked by servitude. Accustomed as he is to surprises, the soldier does not easily lose his composure. Thus, in this case, beauty will consist of a carefree, martial air, a strange mixture of calm and boldness; it is a form of beauty that comes from the need to be ready to die at any moment. But the face of the ideal military man must be stamped with a great air of simplicity; for living as they do in a community, like monks and schoolboys, accustomed as they are to unload the daily concern of living on to a remote, paternalist organization, soldiers are, in many matters, as simple as children; and like children, once duty has been done, they are easy to amuse, and given to boisterous forms of fun. I do not think I am exaggerating when I maintain that all these moral considerations spring naturally from the sketches and water-colours of M. G. Not a single military type is missing, and all of them have been caught by the artist with a kind of enthusiastic joy: the old infantry officer, of the sad countenance, distressing his horse by his obesity; the pampered staff officer, wasp-waisted and bending forward over ladies’ chairs without bashfulness, with affected movements of the shoulders, and, seen from the rear, reminiscent of some slender and elegant insect; the zouave and the rifleman, whose whole bearing suggests outstanding audacity, self-reliance and, as it were, a more than ordinary sense of personal responsibility; and the free and easy manner, the mercurial gaiety of the light cavalry; the vaguely professorial and academic features of the technical arms, like the gunners and the sappers, often confirmed by the unwarlike apparatus of spectacles: none of these models, none of these nuances is neglected, and all of them are summed up, defined, with the same love and wit.
I have in front of me, as I write, one of these drawings; its subject, which conveys a general impression of heroism, is the head of an infantry column; maybe these men are back from Italy and have halted on the boulevards, basking in the enthusiasm of the crowds; maybe they have just accomplished long marches on the roads of Lombardy; I do not know, but what is clearly visible, what comes across fully, is the steadfast audacious character, even in repose, of all these sun-tanned, weather-beaten faces.
This is without a doubt the uniform expression produced by discipline, sufferings undergone together, the resigned air of courage, tempered by long periods of exhausting strain. Trousers turned up and tucked into gaiters, great-coats tarnished by dust and vaguely discoloured, the whole equipment in fact has itself taken on the indestructible appearance of beings that have returned from afar, and have experienced strange adventures. It really is as though these men were more solidly screwed on to their hips, more firmly planted on their feet, more self-assured than ordinary mortals. If Charlet, who was always on the look-out for just this kind of beauty, and who found it often enough, had seen this drawing, he would have been greatly impressed by it.
The wealthy man, who, blasé though he may be, has no occupation in life but to chase along the highway of happiness, the man nurtured in luxury, and habituated from early youth to being obeyed by others, the man, finally, who has no profession other than elegance, is bound at all times to have a facial expression of a very special kind. Dandyism is an ill-defined social attitude as strange as duelling; it goes back a long way, since Caesar, Catilina, Alcibiades provide us with brilliant examples of it; it is very widespread, since Chateaubriand found examples of it in the forests and on the lake-sides of the New World. Dandyism, which is an institution outside the law, has a rigorous code of laws that all its subjects are strictly bound by, however ardent and independent their individual characters may be.
The English novelists, more than others, have cultivated the ‘high life’ type of novel, and their French counterparts who, like M. de Custine, have tried to specialize in love novels have very wisely taken care to endow their characters with purses long enough for them to indulge without hesitation their slightest whims; and they freed them from any profession. These beings have no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking. Thus they possess, to their hearts’ content, and to a vast degree, both time and money, without which fantasy, reduced to the state of ephemeral reverie, can scarcely be translated into action. It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man, or the accomplishment of a conjugal duty. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardour and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
If I speak of love in the context of dandyism, the reason is that love is the natural occupation of men of leisure. But the dandy does not consider love as a special aim in life. If I have mentioned money, the reason is that money is indispensable to those who make an exclusive cult of their passions, but the dandy does not aspire to wealth as an object in itself; an open bank credit could suit him just as well; he leaves that squalid passion to vulgar mortals. Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind. Thus, in his eyes, enamoured as he is above all of distinction, perfection in dress consists in absolute simplicity, which is, indeed, the best way of being distinguished. What then can this passion be, which has crystallized into a doctrine, and has formed a number of outstanding devotees, this unwritten code that has moulded so proud a brotherhood? It is, above all, the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions. It is a kind of cult of the ego which can still survive the pursuit of that form of happiness to be found in others, in woman for example; which can even survive what are called illusions. It is the pleasure of causing surprise in others, and the proud satisfaction of never showing any oneself. A dandy may be blasé, he may even suffer pain, but in the latter case he will keep smiling, like the Spartan under the bite of the fox.
Clearly, then, dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism, but a dandy can never be a vulgar man. If he were to commit a crime, he might perhaps be socially damned, but if the crime came from some trivial cause, the disgrace would be irreparable. Let the reader not be shocked by this mixture of the grave and the gay; let him rather reflect that there is a sort of grandeur in all follies, a driving power in every sort of excess. A strange form of spirituality indeed! For those who are its high priests and its victims at one and the same time, all the complicated material conditions they subject themselves to, from the most flawless dress at any time of day or night to the most risky sporting feats, are no more than a series of gymnastic exercises suitable to strengthen the will and school the soul. Indeed I was not far wrong when I compared dandyism to a kind of religion. The most rigorous monastic rule, the inexorable commands of the Old Man of the Mountain, who enjoined suicide on his intoxicated disciples, were not more despotic or more slavishly obeyed than this doctrine of elegance and originality, which, like the others, imposes upon its ambitious and humble sectaries, men as often as not full of spirit, passion, courage, controlled energy, the terrible precept: Perinde ac cadaver! [as a corpse].
Fastidious, unbelievables, beaux, lions or dandies: whichever label these men claim for themselves, one and all stem from the same origin, all share the same characteristic of opposition and revolt; all are representatives of what is best in human pride, of that need, which is too rare in the modern generation, to combat and destroy triviality. That is the source, in your dandy, of that haughty, patrician attitude, aggressive even in its coldness. Dandyism appears especially in those periods of transition when democracy has not yet become all-powerful, and when aristocracy is only partially weakened and discredited. In the confusion of such times, a certain number of men, disenchanted and leisured ‘outsiders’, but all of them richly endowed with native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to break down because established on the most precious, the most indestructible faculties, on the divine gifts that neither work nor money can give. Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages; and the sort of dandy discovered by the traveller in Northern America in no sense invalidates this idea; for there is no valid reason why we should not believe that the tribes we call savage are not the remnants of great civilizations of the past. Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons. Here in France, dandies are becoming rarer and rarer, whereas amongst our neighbours in England the state of society and the constitution (the true constitution, the one that is expressed in social habits) will, for a long time yet, leave room for the heirs of Sheridan, Brummell and Byron, always assuming that men worthy of them come forward.
What to the reader may have seemed a digression is not one in fact. The moral reflections and musings that arise from the drawings of an artist are in many cases the best interpretation that the critic can make of them; the notions they suggest are part of an underlying idea, and, by revealing them in turn, we may uncover the root idea itself. Need I say that when M. G. commits one of his dandies to paper, he always gives him his historical character, we might almost say his legendary character, were it not that we are dealing with our own day and with things that are generally held to be light-hearted? For here we surely have that ease of bearing, that sureness of manner, that simplicity in the habit of command, that way of wearing a frock-coat or controlling a horse, that calmness revealing strength in every circumstance, that convince us, when our eye does pick out one of those privileged beings, in whom the attractive and the formidable mingle so mysteriously: ‘There goes a rich man perhaps, but quite certainly an unemployed Hercules.’
The specific beauty of the dandy consists particularly in that cold exterior resulting from the unshakeable determination to remain unmoved; one is reminded of a latent fire, whose existence is merely suspected, and which, if it wanted to, but it does not, could burst forth in all its brightness. All that is expressed to perfection in these illustrations.
The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend; that awe-inspiring being, incommunicable like God (with this difference that the infinite does not reveal itself because it would blind and crush the finite, whereas the being we are speaking about is incommunicable only, perhaps, because having nothing to communicate); that being in whom Joseph de Maistre saw a beautiful animal, whose charm brightens and facilitates the serious game of politics; for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings – woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general and for M. G. in particular, only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star, that presides over all the conceptions of the male brain; she is like the shimmer of all graces of nature, condensed into one being; she is the object of the most intense admiration and interest that the spectacle of life can offer to man’s contemplation. She is a kind of idol, empty-headed perhaps, but dazzling, enchanting, an idol that holds men’s destinies and wills in thrall to her glances. She is not, I repeat, an animal whose limbs, correctly assembled, provide a perfect example of harmony; nor is she even that type of pure beauty which might be imagined by a sculptor, in his moments of most austere meditation; not even that would suffice to explain her mysterious and complex spellbinding power. Neither Winckelmann nor Raphael can help us in this context; and I am sure that M. G., in spite of the breadth of his intelligence (be it said without affront to him), would turn away from a piece of ancient statuary if, by looking at it, he were to lose the opportunity of enjoying a portrait by Reynolds or Lawrence. All the things that adorn woman, all the things that go to enhance her beauty, are part of herself; and the artists who have made a special study of this enigmatic being are just as enchanted by the whole mundus muliebris [world of women] as by woman herself. Woman is doubtless a light, a glance, an invitation to happiness, sometimes a spoken word; but above all, she is a harmonious whole, not only in her carriage and in the movement of her limbs, but also in the muslins and the gauzes, in the vast and iridescent clouds of draperies in which she envelops herself, and which are, so to speak, the attributes and the pedestal of her divinity; in the metal and precious stones that serpentine round her arms and neck, that add their sparkle to the fire of her eyes, or whisper softly at her ears. When he describes the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, what poet would dare to distinguish between her and her apparel? Show me the man who, in the street, at the theatre, or in the Bois, has not enjoyed, in a wholly detached way, the sight of a beautifully composed attire, and has not carried away with him an image inseparable from the beauty of the woman wearing it, thus making of the two, the woman and the dress, an indivisible whole. This seems to me the moment to come back to certain questions relating to fashion and adornment, which I only briefly touched on at the beginning of this study, and to vindicate the art of dress against the inept slanders heaped upon it by certain highly equivocal nature-lovers.
I know a song so valueless and futile that I scarcely dare quote from it in a work with some claims to being serious; but it expresses very aptly, in vaudeville style, the aesthetic notions of people not given to thinking. ‘Nature embellishes beauty.’ It may be presumed that the ‘poet’, had he been able to write his own language properly, would have said: ‘Simplicity embellishes beauty’, which is tantamount to this truth of a wholly unexpected kind: ‘Nothing embellishes what is.’
Most wrong ideas about beauty derive from the false notion the eighteenth century had about ethics. In those days, Nature was taken as a basis, source and prototype of all possible forms of good and beauty. The rejection of original sin is in no small measure responsible for the general blindness of those days. If, however, we are prepared merely to consult the facts that stare us in the face, the experience of all ages, and the Gazette des Tribunaux, we can see at once that natures teaches nothing or nearly nothing; in other words, it compels man to sleep, drink, eat and to protect himself as best he can against the inclemencies of the weather. It is nature too that drives man to kill his fellow-man, to eat him, to imprison and torture him; for as soon as we move from the order of necessities and needs to that of luxury and pleasures, we see that nature can do nothing but counsel crime. It is this so-called infallible nature that has produced parricide and cannibalism, and a thousand other abominations, which modesty and nice feeling alike prevent our mentioning. It is philosophy (I am referring to the right kind), it is religion that enjoins upon us to succour our poor and enfeebled parents. Nature (which is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest) tells us to knock them on the head. Review, analyse everything that is natural, all the actions and desires of absolutely natural man: you will find nothing that is not horrible. Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. Crime, which the human animal took a fancy to in his mother’s womb, is by origin natural. Virtue, on the other hand, is artificial, supernatural, since in every age and nation gods and prophets have been necessary to teach it to bestialized humanity, and since man by himself would have been powerless to discover it. Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art. All I have said about nature, as a bad counsellor in matters of ethics, and about reason, as the true power of redemption and reform, can be transferred to the order of beauty. Thus I am led to regard adornment as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul. The races that our confused and perverted civilization so glibly calls savage, with a quite laughable pride and fatuity, appreciate, just as children do, the high spiritual quality of dress. The savage and the infant show their distaste for the real by their naïve delight in bright feathers of different colours, in shimmering fabrics, in the superlative majesty of artificial shapes, thus unconsciously proving the immateriality of their souls. Woe to him who, like Louis XV (who far from being the product of a true civilization was that of a recurrence of barbarism), drives depravity to the point of appreciating nothing but nature unadorned.*
Fashion must therefore be thought of as a symptom of the taste for the ideal that floats on the surface in the human brain, above all the coarse, earthy and disgusting things that life according to nature accumulates, as a sublime distortion of nature, or rather as a permanent and constantly renewed effort to reform nature. For this reason, it has been judiciously observed (though without discovering the cause) that all fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind. But, if we want to enjoy fashions thoroughly, we must not look upon them as dead things; we might as well admire a lot of old clothes hung up, limp and inert, like the skin of St Bartholomew, in the cupboard of a second-hand-clothes dealer. They must be pictured as full of the life and vitality of the beautiful women who wore them. Only in that way can we give them meaning and value. If therefore the aphorism ‘All fashions are charming’ offends you as being too absolute, say – and then you can be sure of making no mistake – all were legitimately charming in their day.
Woman is well within her rights, we may even say she carries out a kind of duty, in devoting herself to the task of fostering a magic and supernatural aura about her appearance; she must create a sense of surprise, she must fascinate; idol that she is, she must adorn herself, to be adored. It follows, she must borrow, from all the arts, the means of rising above nature, in order the better to conquer the hearts and impress the minds of men. It matters very little that the ruse and the artifice be known of all, if their success is certain, and the effect always irresistible. These are the kind of reflections that lead the philosopher-artist to justify readily all the means employed by women, over the centuries, to consolidate and, so to speak, divinize their fragile beauty. Any enumeration would have to include countless details; but, to limit ourselves to what in our day is commonly called make-up, who can fail to see that the use of rice powder, so fatuously anathematized by innocent philosophers, has as its purpose and result to hide all the blemishes that nature has so outrageously scattered over the complexion, and to create an abstract unity of texture and colour in the skin, which unity, like the one produced by tights, immediately approximates the human being to a statue, in other words to a divine or superior being? As for black pencil for eye effects, and rouge for heightening the colour of the upper part of the cheek, although their use comes from the same principle, the need to surpass nature, the result is destined to satisfy a quite opposite need. Red and black represent life, a supernatural, excessive life; black rings round the eyes give them a deeper and stranger look, a more decisive appearance of a window open on the infinite; the rouge which heightens the glow of cheek-bones confers still greater brightness on the pupils, and gives to a lovely woman’s face the mysterious passion of a priestess.
Thus, if I have been properly understood, painting the face is not to be used with the vulgar, unavowable intention of imitating the fair face of nature, or competing with youth. It has, moreover, been observed that artifice does not embellish ugliness, and can only serve beauty. Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature? Make-up has no need of concealment, no need to avoid discovery; on the contrary, it can go in for display, if not with affectation, at least with a sort of ingenuousness.
I will readily allow people whose ponderous gravity prevents their looking for beauty in its very minutest manifestations to laugh at my reflections, and to condemn their childish solemnity; the austere judgements of such folk worry me not at all; I am content to appeal to the true artists, and to women who have received at birth a spark of that sacred fire they would feign use to light up their whole being.
Thus M. G., having undertaken the task of seeking and explaining beauty in modernity, enjoys depicting women in all their finery, their beauty enhanced by every kind of artifice, regardless of what social class they belong to. Moreover, in the whole of his works, just as in the throng and bustle of human life itself, the differences of class and breeding, whatever may be the apparatus of luxury used by the individual, are immediately apparent to the eye of the spectator.
At one moment we see, bathed in the diffused light of the auditorium, a group of young women of the highest social circles, the brightness reflected in their eyes, in their jewellery and on their shoulders, framed in their boxes, resplendent as portraits. Some of them are grave and serious, others fair and feather-brained. Some display their precocious charms with aristocratic nonchalance, others, in all innocence, their boyish busts. All are biting their fans, and have a far-away look in their eyes, or a fixed stare; their postures are theatrical and solemn, like the play or opera they are pretending to listen to.
Another time we see smartly dressed families strolling along the paths of the public gardens, the wives without a care in the world, leaning on the arms of their husbands, whose solid contented air betrays the self-made man, full of money and self-satisfaction. Here the general air of wealth takes the place of haughty distinction. Little girls with match-stick arms and ballooning skirts, looking like little women by their gestures and appearance, are skipping, playing with hoops or pretending to be grown-ups on a visit, performing in the open air the social comedy their parents perform at home.
Or again, we are shown a lower level of society, where chits of actresses from the suburban theatres, proud as peacocks to appear at last in the glare of the footlights, slim, frail, scarcely grown-up, are shaking down, over their virginal, sickly bodies, absurd garments which belong to no period, but are the joy of their owners.
Or, at a café door, we see, leaning against the broad windows lit from without and within, one of those lounging halfwits; his elegance is the work of his tailor, and the distinguished cut of his jib, that of his hairdresser. Beside him, her feet resting on the indispensable footstool, sits his mistress, a great cow of a woman, in whom almost nothing is lacking (but that ‘almost nothing’ meaning almost everything, in a word: distinction) to make her look like a high-born lady. Like her pretty boyfriend, she has, filling the whole orifice of her little mouth, an outsize cigar. Neither of these two beings has a thought in his head. Can one even be sure they are looking at anything – unless, like Narcissuses of fat-headedness, they are contemplating the crowd, as though it were a river, offering them their own image. In reality they exist much more for the joy of the observer than for their own.
And now we get a glimpse of the amusement halls, your Valentinos, your Casinos, your Prados (the Tivolis, the Idalias, the Follies, the Paphoses of former days), glory-holes with their galleries full of light and hubbub, where the idle, gilded youth can give free rein to their animal spirits. Women, who have exaggerated the latest fashion to the point where its grace of line is spoilt, are ostentatiously sweeping the polished floors with their trains and the points of their shawls, as they come and go, pass and repass, wide-eyed like animals, apparently seeing nothing but in fact observing everything.
Against a background of light as from the infernal regions or of the aurora borealis, red, orange, sulphurous, pink (a pink suggesting a notion of ecstasy in frivolity), sometimes violet (that colour, like dying embers behind a blue curtain, so beloved of canonesses), against such magical backgrounds, with diversified firework effects, we are shown the varied image of the shadier type of beauty, now majestic, now frolicsome, now slim, thin even, now cyclopean, now doll-like and sparkling, now heavy and statuesque. This shady type of beauty either displays an alluring and barbaric form of elegance of her own invention, or she apes, more or less successfully, the simplicity current in higher circles. She moves towards us, glides, dances, sways as though by the weight of her embroidered petticoats, acting as both pendulum and pedestal to her; her eyes flash from under her hat like a portrait in its frame. She is a perfect image of savagery in the midst of civilization. She has a kind of beauty, which comes to her from sin; always lacking spirituality, but at times tinged with fatigue masquerading as melancholy. Her eyes are cast towards the horizon, like a beast of prey: the same wildness, the same indolent detachment, sometimes the same riveted attention. She is a gipsy type, dwelling on the fringes of regular society; the triviality which is the substance of her life of trickery and struggle inevitably betrays itself beneath the surface finery. To her may well be applied the words of the inimitable master La Bruyère: ‘Some women have an artificial nobility, which is due to the way they move their eyes or hold their heads, or their manner of walking; and it goes no deeper …’
These reflections about the courtesan may, to a certain extent, be applied to the actress; for she too is a creature of show, an object of public pleasure. But in this case the conquest and the prey are of a nobler, more spiritual kind. The aim is to win public favour, not only by pure physical beauty, but also by talents of the rarest order. If, on the one hand, the actress comes close to the courtesan, on the other she reaches up to the poet. Let us not forget that, apart from natural beauty and even artificial beauty, all beings have the stamp of their trade, a characteristic which may, on the physical level, express itself as ugliness, but also as a kind of professional beauty.
In this extensive gallery of London and Paris life, we meet with the different types of unattached woman, of the woman in revolt, at every level: first the woman of the town in the first flower of her beauty, cultivating, as best she can, patrician airs, proud both of her youth and of her luxury, which expresses such genius and soul as she possesses; we see her delicately holding with two fingers a broad flounce of the satin, the silk or the velvet that floats about her, and showing off her pointed foot, in a shoe whose excessive ornateness would be enough to reveal her for what she is, even without the rather showy emphasis of her dress. Down the ladder a few rungs, and we come upon the slaves confined in those hovels, often enough decorated like cafés; unfortunate creatures these, subjected to the most avaricious tutelage, with nothing they can call their own, not even the eccentric adornments that act as condiment to their beauty. Amongst these, some, in whom an innocent yet monstrous sort of fatuity is only too apparent, carry in their faces and in their eyes, which look you brazenly in the face, the evident joy of being alive (in truth, one wonders why). Sometimes they effortlessly adopt poses, both provocative and dignified, that would be the joy of the most fastidious sculptor, if only the sculptor of today had the courage and the wit to seize hold of nobility everywhere, even in the mire; at others, they show themselves in prostrate attitudes of despairing boredom, or flaunt the indolent postures of café life, with masculine effrontery, and smoking cigarettes to pass away the hours with resigned, oriental fatalism; there they lie, sprawling on sofas, skirts ballooning to front and back double-fanwise, or they balance themselves precariously on stools or chairs; fat, dejected, empty-headed, absurd, their eyes glazed with brandy, and their obstinacy written across their rounded foreheads. We have reached the bottom step of the spiral to find the foemina simplex of the Latin satirist. Nor shall we fail, at some time, to discern through the drink and smoke-laden atmosphere, here the emaciated, feverish cheeks of the consumptive, there the curves of adiposity, that hideous form of health born of sloth. In this foggy chaos, bathed in golden light, undreamed of by indigent chastity, gruesome nymphs and living dolls, whose childlike eyes have sinister flashes, move and contort themselves; whilst behind a counter laden with liqueur bottles lolls a fat shrew, her hair tied up in a dirty silk scarf, which throws on the wall the shadow of its satanic points, thus convincing us that everything dedicated to Evil must be condemned to have horns.
In truth, my purpose in spreading out before the reader’s eyes scenes such as these is neither to please nor to scandalize him; in either case, that would have been to show him scant respect. What gives these scenes value and a kind of sanctity is the innumerable thoughts they give rise to, usually austere and gloomy. But if, by chance, some ill-advised person were to seek an opportunity to satisfy an unhealthy curiosity in these works of M. G.’s, scattered as they are here, there and everywhere, let me give him a charitable warning that he will find nothing to excite a prurient imagination. He will find nothing but inevitable vice, in other words the eye of the devil hidden in the shadows, or Messalina’s shoulder gleaming under the gaslight; nothing but pure art, in other words the type of beauty peculiar to evil, the beautiful in the horrible. And even, to recall in passing what has previously been said, the general impression conveyed by this great store-house is more full of sadness than fun. What constitutes the specifically beautiful quality of these pictures is their moral fecundity. They are big with suggestion, cruel, harsh suggestion, which my pen, accustomed though it is to struggle with the evocation of plastic images, may have rendered only inadequately.
And so they extend into the distance, these long galleries of ‘high life’ and ‘low life’, with innumerable side galleries leading from them. Let us for a moment escape towards a world which, if not pure, is at least more refined; let us breathe perfumes, not more wholesome perhaps, but more delicate. I have already said that M. G.’s brush, like that of Eugène Lami, was wonderfully fitted to depict the glories of dandyism and the elegance of society lionesses. The attitudes of the rich man are well-known to him; he can, with a light stroke of the pen and a sureness of hand which is never at fault, capture that indefinable sense of security evident in eye, gesture and carriage which comes from the monotony of good fortune in the lives of privileged beings. In this particular series of drawings we are presented with sporting, racing, hunting occasions in their innumerable aspects, with horse and carriage exercise in the woods, with proud dames or a delicate miss controlling, with practised hand, steeds of impeccable contour, stylish, glossy, and themselves as capricious as women. For M. G. not only knows all about the horse in general, but applies himself with equal success to expressing the individual beauty of horses. Some drawings depict a meeting, a veritable encampment, of numerous equipages, where, perched up on the cushions, the seats, the boxes, shapely youths and women, attired in the eccentric costumes authorized by the season, are seen watching some solemn turf event, the runners disappearing in the distance; another shows a horseman cantering gracefully alongside an open light four-wheeler, his curveting mount bowing, it might seem, in his own way, whilst the carriage follows an alley streaked with light and shade, at a brisk trot, carrying along a bevy of beauties, cradled as in the gondola of a balloon, lolling on the cushions, lending an inattentive ear to compliments, and lazily enjoying the caresses of the breeze.
Fur or muslin wraps them to the chin and flows in waves over the carriage door. The domestics are stiff and perpendicular, motionless and all alike; as always, they are the monotonous and uncharacterized effigy of servility, precise and disciplined; their whole character consists in having none. In the background, the woods are decked in green or brown, shimmering with light or darkening, according to the hour and the season. Its bowers are full of autumn mists, blue shadows, yellow beams, rose-pink effulgence or thin streaks of lightning flashing through the darkness, like sword thrusts.
If the countless water-colours from the war in the Levant had not shown us M. G.’s powers as a landscape artist, these would certainly suffice to do so. But here no question of the war-torn ground of the Crimea, nor the theatrical shores of the Bosphorus; we are back in the familiar intimate landscapes that encircle any of our big cities with verdure, and where the play of light produces effects that a truly romantic artist cannot disdain.
Another merit which is not unworthy of mention here is the remarkable knowledge of harness and coachwork. M. G. draws and paints a carriage, and every kind of carriage, with the same care and the same ease as a skilled marine artist displays over every kind of ship. All his coachwork is correct, every detail is in its right place, and does not need to be gone over again. In whatever position it is drawn, at whatever speed it may be going, a carriage, like a vessel, derives, from the fact of motion, a mysterious and complex gracefulness which is very difficult to note down in shorthand. The pleasure that the artist’s eye gets from it comes apparently from the series of geometrical figures that the object, already so complex in itself, vessel or carriage, describes successively in space.
We are betting on a certainty when we say that in a few years the drawings of M. G. will become precious archives of civilized life. His works will be sought after by discerning collectors, as much as those of Debucourt, of Moreau, of Saint-Aubin, of Carle Vernet, of Lami, of Deveria, of Gavarni, and of all those exquisite artists who, although they have confined themselves to recording what is familiar and pretty, are nonetheless, in their own ways, important historians. Several of them have even sacrificed too much to the ‘pretty-pretty’, and have sometimes introduced into their compositions a classic style foreign to the subject; several have deliberately rounded the angles, smoothed over the harshness of life, toned down its flashing colours. Less skilful than they, M. G. retains a profound merit, which is all his own; he has deliberately filled a function which other artists disdain, and which a man of the world above all others could carry out. He has gone everywhere in quest of the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day, the characteristic traits of what, with the reader’s permission, we have called ‘modernity’. Often bizarre, violent, excessive, but always full of poetry, he has succeeded, in his drawings, in distilling the bitter or heady flavour of the wine of life.