Renoir will have his place in that school, but another niche has been prepared for him amongst an even grander company. When, in 1917, Les Parapluies (a beautiful but not very characteristic work) was placed in the National Gallery some hundred English artists and amateurs seized the opportunity of sending the master a testimony of their admiration which, rather to their surprise and to their intense joy, apparently gave pleasure. In this they said:
Dès l'instant où votre tableau s'est trouvé installé parmi les chefs-d'oeuvre des maîtres anciens, nous avons eu la joie de constater qu'un de nos contemporains avait pris place d'emblée parmi les grands maîtres de la tradition européenne.
They said not a word too much.
TRADITION & MOVEMENTS
Much to its embarrassment, the National Gallery finds itself possessed of that superb picture Les Parapluies; and as the director at last feels obliged to exhume those masterpieces which, for so many happy months, he and his colleagues have had, albeit in the dark, to themselves, we can now see Renoir amongst his peers. He is perfectly at home there. Renoir takes his place quite simply in the great tradition; and when Cézanne, who is still too cheap to be within the reach of a national collection, has attained a price that guarantees respectability he, too, will be seen to fit neatly into that tradition of which he is as much a part as Ingres or Poussin, Raphael or Piero della Francesca.
That Cézanne was a master, just as Poussin and Piero were, and that he, like them, is part of the tradition, is what all sensitive people know and the wiser keep to themselves. For by stating the plain fact that Renoir, Cézanne, and, for that matter, Matisse are all in the great tradition of painting one seems to suggest that the tradition is something altogether different from what most people would wish it to be. If one is right it follows that it is not simply the counter-movement to the contemporary movement; indeed, it follows that it is not a movement at all. This is intolerable. An artist, seen as the protagonist of a movement, the exponent of a theory, and the clue to an age, has a certain interest for all active-minded people; whereas, seen merely as an artist, which is how he must be seen if he is to be seen in the tradition, he is of interest only to those who care for art. The significant characteristics of an artist, considered as the representative of a movement, are those in which he differs most from other artists; set him in the traditions and his one important characteristic is the one he shares with all—his being an artist. In the tradition a work of art loses its value as a means. We must contemplate it as an end—as a direct means to æsthetic emotion rather—or let it be. Tradition, in fact, has to do with art alone; while with movements can be mixed up history, archæology, philosophy, politics, geography, fashions, religion, and crime. So, by insisting on the fact that Matisse, Cézanne, Poussin, Piero, and Giotto are all in the tradition we insist on the fact that they are all artists. We rob them of their amusing but adscititious qualities; we make them utterly uninteresting to precisely 99.99 per cent. of our fellow-creatures; and ourselves we make unpopular.
The tradition of art begins with the first artist that ever lived, and will end with the last. Always it is being enriched or modified—never is it exhausted. The earliest artists are driven to creation by an irresistible desire to express themselves. Their over-bubbling minds supply abundance of matter; difficulties begin when they try to express it. Then it is they find themselves confronted by those terrible limitations of the human mind, and by other limitations, only less terrible, imposed by the medium in which they work. Every genuine artist—every artist, that is, with something of his own to say—is faced afresh by the problem, and must solve it for himself. Nevertheless, each one who succeeds in creating an appropriate form for his peculiar experience leaves in that form a record, and from the sum of these records is deduced something, less definite far than a code, by no means a pattern or recipe, which is yet a sign and a source of half-conscious suggestion to those that follow. No artist can escape the tradition of art except by refusing to grapple with the problem; which is how most do escape it. The academic humbug uses the old language to say nothing, the bombastic charlatan devises a new one for the same purpose; but once a man has something to express, and the passion to express it, he will find himself attacking the eternal problem and leaning on the inevitable tradition. Let anyone who doubts this mention quickly the name of some artist who owes nothing to his predecessors.
Often, however, owing either to some change in circumstances or to his innate peculiarity, a man of uncommon force and imagination will find himself with something to say for which the traditional instrument is, or at first seems to be, inadequate. What shall he do? Why, what Giotto did, what Masaccio did, what Ronsard and the poets of the Pléiade did, what Wordsworth did, and what Cézanne has done. All these great artists struck new veins, and to work them were obliged to overhaul the tool-chest. Of the traditional instruments some they reshaped and resharpened, some they twisted out of recognition, a few they discarded, many they retained. Above all, they travelled back along the tradition, tapping it and drawing inspiration from it, nearer to its source. Very rarely does the pioneer himself work out his seam: he leaves it to successors along with his technical discoveries. These they develop, themselves making experiments as they go forward, till of the heritage to which they succeeded they have left nothing—nothing but a fashion to be flouted by the next great original genius who shall rise. Such is the shape of a movement. A master, whose sole business it is to express himself, founds it incidentally, just as incidentally he enriches the tradition from which he borrows; successors exploit it; pious great-grand-nephews mummify and adore it. Movements are nothing but the stuff of which tradition is made. At any given moment tradition ends in the contemporary movement; the capital works of any age are almost sure to be capital examples of that movement; but a hundred years later, when these are clear-set in the tradition, the movement will have become dust and ashes—the daily bread of historians and archæologists.
Though lecturers still hold up the Renaissance as an example of the happy and stagnant state of the arts in a golden age when rebels were unknown, their pupils are aware that Giotto, the father of Renaissance painting, broke with the maniera greca at least as sharply as Cézanne did with the nineteenth-century convention; that in the art of the fifteenth century we have a revolt against Giottesque which must grievously have wounded many pious souls; and that Raphael himself stood, in his day, for a new movement. But distance gives a sense of proportion. We see the art of the Italian Renaissance whole, growing out of Byzantine and into French. The continuity is patent; and, what is much to my purpose, it is Giotto and his successors rather than the artists of the Palaeologie who seem to us to carry on the Byzantine tradition, while the heirs of the Renaissance are not Salvator Rosa and Carlo Dolci, but Claude and Poussin. The great artists stand out and join hands: the contests that clashed around them, the little men that aped them, the littler that abused, have fallen into one ruin. The odd thing is that, as often as not, the big men themselves have believed that it was the tradition, and not the stupid insensibility of their fellows, that thwarted them. They have made the mistake their enemies made infallibly: they have taken a dead movement for a live tradition. For movements die; that is one of the respects in which they differ most significantly from the tradition. The movement is a vein which is worked out; the tradition a live thing that changes, grows, and persists. The artist with a new vision comes on the tradition at its near end, and finds its implements lying in a heap mixed with the fashions of the moribund movement. He chooses; he changes; what happens next will depend a good deal on the state of public opinion. Should the artist have the luck to be born in a sensitive age and an intelligent country his innovations may be accepted without undue hubbub. In that case he will realize that artists can no more dispense with the tradition than tradition can exist without artists, and will probably come to feel an almost exaggerated reverence for the monuments of the past. But should the public be dull and brutish, and hardening the dust of dead movements into what it is pleased to call "tradition," pelt with that word the thing which above all others is to dull brutes disquieting—I mean passionate conviction—the artist, finding himself assailed in the name of tradition, will probably reply, "Damn the tradition." He will protest. And, for an artist, to become a protestant is even worse than using bad language.
Only in France, so far as I know, are the men who are working out the heritage of Cézanne allowed to be artists and expected to be nothing more. Elsewhere, the public by its uncritical attitude seems to encourage them to pose as supermen or to become rebels. Assuredly I am not advocating that slightly fatuous open-mindedness which led some Germans to seize on the movement before it was well grown and deal with it as they have dealt with so many others, collecting its artists as though they were beetles, bottling them, setting them, cataloguing them, making no mistake about them, and arranging them neatly in museums for the dust to settle on. Organized alertness of that sort is only less depressing than the smartness of those Italians who pounced so promptly on the journalistic possibilities of the movement as a means of self-advertisement. All I ask for in the public is a little more intelligence and sensibility, and a more critical attitude. Surely, by now, it should be impossible to hear what I heard only the other day—Mr. Charles Shannon being extolled, to humiliate some enterprising student, as a "traditional artist." Why, it would be as sensible to call the man who makes nest-eggs a traditional Buff Orpington! And ought it still to be possible for a cultivated dealer, because I had refused to admire a stale old crust by some young New English painter, who, to be in the movement, had misshaped a few conventionally drawn objects and put black lines round others—for a dealer, I say, who dabbles in culture to exclaim indignantly, as one did to me not long ago, "I can't think why you don't like it: it's Post-Impressionist, isn't it?"