Art is dying. Something else must be made to light the heart. Only people with the wonder, the love of little children within them, can create it now, or understand it. They will perforce join the discards.
There are three pictures by Manet I saw in Paris which I have thought about too much. One, a woman in grey skirt, loose coat of the same color, her hand to her lips. She wears a small dark toque upon dark hair. A strange puritan grey for Manet to love, dominates the picture; a grey sensitive, fastidious, his somewhat English tempered soul created in midst of orgies of pagan Paris—Paris of unrestraint, aesthetic sensuality, intellectual freedom. It is an ascetic color that recalls old Spanish masters. It has the chill, the sternness of Cathedral cloisters. Spanish masters used similar grey, but from dissimilar impulse.
Manet was exquisite. He was the conversationally charming. But into depths of his soul no friend was permitted to peep. There is hint of this sensitive secretiveness in these three pictures, I remember. The gossiping, disclosing shorthand of self is in colors he chose. The picture of the woman is what one might call artistically wise. It keeps a reticence of brush which the maker’s facile, dissembling tongue did not have. Likewise it has something in common with Chinese portraits, whose distinguished personages wore woven robes of sad metallic hues. More than is grasped at a glance! Here is the direct transcribing! The same dignity. Here are sober colors Chinese noblemen wore. The picture is notable for absence of what is meretricious. Nothing for show. Nothing for compromise. It has the reliability of faith.
Soap Bubbles, by Manet. The same grey, but paler for youth; slightly sun-enriched. A truthful piece a Hollander might have signed. A boy by a table. He is blowing bubbles, whose airy grace delighted the maker. Dark, unrelieved background. Hues in the foreground that recall preciousness of ivory.
Still Life—Manet. Apples, pears; one dull, grey-green; one yellow rose; a black bottle; a tall white glass. Sober, against a dull background. Painted in low key, a key chosen for grey-yellow he loved.
How far removed from the blue-grey of Whistler! It is founded upon gift for reality of the Latin, his basic vision for things as they are.
Manet was gloomy beneath the flowering of his moods. An interesting article could be written on the greys of great masters; upon colors that are coefficients of mind. I see difference between those used by Velasquez, Greco, Goya, and those used in France, in the period of 1830, or in Holland, in the Seventeenth Century. Or the grey created by Manet.
I saw the other day a large, lovely Cazin, kept in higher key than is customary, which is Schumannesque. We do not find the dull, wet grass we know; the grey, sage-green of some sad world’s end he has made his.
This picture shows a blond, sun-dusted field on a hot day. A field whose gold, whose perpendicular light is dulled by its own splendor. The field forms the foreground. The background one end of a low farm house, whose coral roof all but touches the ground. A low, green tree makes out the house-line, with aid of one of his windmills. Above, blue heat of noon; happy, white, harvest clouds.