THE MOREAU MUSEUM
This herculean attempt at reassembling many styles in a unique style that would best express a certain frozen symbolism was the amiable mania his life long of Moreau. He compelled the spirits to come to his bidding. The moment you cross the threshold of his house the spell begins to work. It is dissipated by the daylight of Paris, but while you are under the roof of the museum you can't escape it. Nor is it as with Rossetti, a mystic opiate, or with Wiertz, a madman's delirious fancy. Moreau was a philosophic poet, and though he disclaimed being a "literary" painter, it is literature that is the mainspring of his elevated and decorative art. Open at random the catalogue full of quotations from the painter's pen and you encounter such titles as Leda and the Swan, treated with poetic restraint; Jupiter and Semele, Tyrtæus Singing During the Combat, St. Elizabeth and the Miracle of the Roses, Lucretia and Tarquin, Pasiphae, the Triumph of Alexander, Salome, Dante and Virgil, Bathsheba, Jason and the Golden Fleece. All literatures were ransacked for themes. This painter suffered from the nostalgia of the ideal. When a subject coincided with his technical expression the result approximates perfection. Consider the Salome, so marvellously paraphrased in prose by Huysmans. The aquarelle in the Luxembourg is more plastic, more jewelled than the oil; Moreau often failed in the working-out of his ideas. Yet, never in art has a hallucination been thus set before us with such uncompromising reality. The sombre, luxurious décor, the voluptuous silhouette of the dancing girl, the hieratic pose of the Tetrarch, even the aureoled head of John, are forgotten in the contemplation of Salome, who is become cataleptic at sight of the apparition. Arrested her attitude her flesh crisps with fear. Her face is contracted into a mask of death. The lascivious dance seems suspended in midair. To have painted so impossible a picture bears witness to the extraordinary quality of Moreau's complex art. Nor is the Salome his masterpiece. In the realm of the decorator he must be placed high. His genius is Byzantine. Jupiter and Semele, with its colossal and acrian architectures, its gigantic figure of the god, from whose august head emanate spokes of light, is Byzantine of a wild luxuriousness in pattern and fancy. Moreau excels in representing cataracts of nude women, ivory-toned of flesh, exquisite in proportion, set off by radiant jewels and wonder-breeding brocades. His skies are in violent ignition, or else as soft as Lydian airs. What could be more grandiose than the Triumph of Alexander (No. 70 in the catalogue)? Not John Martin or Piranesi excelled the Frenchman in bizarre architectural backgrounds. And the Chimeras, what a Baudelairian imagination! Baudelaire of the bitter heart! All luxury, all sin, all that is the shame and the glory of mankind is here, as in a tapestry dulled by the smoke of dreams; but as in his most sanguinary combats not a sound, not a motion comes from this canvas. When the slaves, lovely females, are thrown to the fish to fatten them for some Roman patrician's banquet, we admire the beauty of colour, the clear static style, the solidity of the architecture, but we are unmoved. If there is such a thing as disinterested art it is the claustral art of Moreau—which can be both perverse and majestic.
His versatility amazes. He did not always paint the same picture. The Christ Between Two Thieves is academic, yet attracts because the expression of the converted thief is remarkable. The Three Magi and Moses Within Sight of the Promised Land do not give one the fullest sense of satisfaction, as do The Daughters of Thespus or The Rape of Europa; yet they suggest what might be termed a tragic sort of decoration. Moreau is a painter who could have illustrated Marlowe's fatuous line, "Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia," and superbly; or, "See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament." He is an exotic blossom on the stem of French art. He saw ivory, apes, and peacocks, purple, gold, and the heavens aflame with a mystic message. He never translated that message, for his was an art of silence; but the painter of The Maiden with the Head of Orpheus, of Salome, of Jason and Medea, of Jupiter and Semele, will never fail to win the admiration and homage of those art lovers who yearn for dreams of vanished ages, who long to escape the commonplaces of the present. Gustave Moreau will be their poet-painter by predilection.
Once in the streets of prosaic Paris he is as unreal as Rossetti or the Pre-Raphaelites (though their superior as one who could make palpable his visions). In the Louvre—where the Salon Carré is little changed—Manet's Olympe, with her every-day seductiveness, resolves the phantasies of Moreau into thin air. Here is reality for you, familiar as it may be. It is wonderful how long it took French critics to discover that Manet was un peintre de race. He is very French in the French gallery where he now hangs. He shows the lineage of David, one of whose declamatory portraits with beady eyes hangs near by. He is simpler than David in his methods—Mr. C.S. Ricketts critically described David as possessing the mind of a policeman—and as a painter more greatly endowed. But Goya also peeps out from the Olympe. After seeing the Maja desnuda at the Prado you realise that Manet's trip to Madrid was not without important results. Between the noble lady who was the Duchess of Alba and the ignoble girl called Olympe there is only the difference between the respective handlings of Goya and Manet.