Modern Painting

by George Moore

THE NEW ART CRITICISM.

Before commenting on the very thoughtless utterances of two distinguished men, I think I must—even at the risk of appearing to attach over-much importance to my criticisms—reprint what I said about L'Absinthe; for in truth it was I who first meddled with the moral tap, and am responsible for the overflow:—

"Look at the head of the old Bohemian—the engraver Deboutin—a man whom I have known all my life, and yet he never really existed for me until I saw this picture. There is the hat I have always known, on the back of his head as I have always seen it, and the wooden pipe is held tight in his teeth as I have always seen him hold it. How large, how profound, how simple the drawing! How easily and how naturally he lives in the pose, the body bent forward, the elbows on the table! Fine as the Orchardson undoubtedly is, it seems fatigued and explanatory by the side of this wonderful rendering of life; thin and restless—like Dumas fils' dialogue when we compare it with Ibsen's. The woman that sits beside the artist was at the Elysée Montmartre until two in the morning, then she went to the ratmort and had a soupe aux choux; she lives in the Rue Fontaine, or perhaps the Rue Breda; she did not get up till half-past eleven; then she tied a few soiled petticoats round her, slipped on that peignoir, thrust her feet into those loose morning shoes, and came down to the café to have an absinthe before breakfast. Heavens! what a slut! A life of idleness and low vice is upon her face; we read there her whole life. The tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson. Hogarth's view was larger, wider, but not so incisive, so deep, or so intense. Then how loose and general Hogarth's composition would seem compared to this marvellous epitome, this essence of things! That open space in front of the table, into which the skirt and the lean legs of the man come so well—how well the point of view was selected! The beautiful, dissonant rhythm of that composition is like a page of Wagner—the figures crushed into the right of the canvas, the left filled up with a fragment of marble table running in sharp perspective into the foreground. The newspaper lies as it would lie across the space between the tables. The colour, almost a monochrome, is very beautiful, a deep, rich harmony. More marvellous work the world never saw, and will never see again: a maze of assimilated influences, strangely assimilated, and eluding definition—remembrances of Watteau and the Dutch painters, a good deal of Ingres' spirit, and, in the vigour of the arabesque, we may perhaps trace the influence of Poussin. But these influences float evanescent on the canvas, and the reading is difficult and contradictory."

I have written many a negligent phrase, many a stupid phrase, but the italicised phrase is the first hypocritical phrase I ever wrote. I plead guilty to the grave offence of having suggested that a work of art is more than a work of art. The picture is only a work of art, and therefore void of all ethical signification. In writing the abominable phrase "but it is a lesson" I admitted as a truth the ridiculous contention that a work of art may influence a man's moral conduct; I admitted as a truth the grotesque contention that to read Mdlle. de Maupin may cause a man to desert his wife, whereas to read Paradise Lost may induce him to return to her. In the abominable phrase which I plead guilty to having written, I admitted the monstrous contention that our virtues and our vices originate not in our inherited natures, but are found in the books we read and the pictures we look upon. That art should be pure is quite another matter, and the necessity of purity in art can be maintained for other than ethical reasons. Art—I am speaking now of literature—owes a great deal to ethics, but ethics owes nothing to art. Without morality the art of the novelist and the dramatist would cease. So we are more deeply interested in the preservation of public morality than any other class—the clergy, of course, excepted. To accuse us of indifference in this matter is absurd. We must do our best to keep up a high standard of public morality; our living depends upon it—and it would be difficult to suggest a more powerful reason for our advocacy. Nevertheless, by a curious irony of fate we must preserve—at least, in our books—a distinctly impartial attitude on the very subject which most nearly concerns our pockets.

To remove these serious disabilities should be our serious aim. It might be possible to enter into some arrangement with the bishops to allow us access to the pulpits. Mr. So-and so's episcopal style—I refer not only to this gentleman's writings, but also to his style of figure, which, on account of the opportunities it offers for a display of calf, could not fail to win their lordships' admiration—marks him as the proper head and spokesman of the deputation; and his well-known sympathies for the pecuniary interests of authors would enable him to explain that not even their lordships' pockets were so gravely concerned in the maintenance of public morality as our own.

I have allowed my pen to wander somewhat from the subject in hand; for before permitting myself to apologise for having hypocritically declared a great picture to be what it was not, and could not be—"a lesson"—it was clearly incumbent on me to show that the moral question was the backbone of the art which I practise myself, and that of all classes none are so necessarily moral as novelists. I think I have done this beyond possibility of disproof, or even of argument, and may therefore be allowed to lament my hypocrisy with as many tears and groans as I deem sufficient for the due expiation of my sin. Confession eases the heart. Listen. My description of Degas' picture seemed to me a little unconventional, and to soothe the reader who is shocked by everything that lies outside his habitual thought, and to dodge the reader who is always on the watch to introduce a discussion on that sterile subject, "morality in art", to make things pleasant for everybody, to tickle the Philistine in his tenderest spot, I told a little lie: I suggested that some one had preached. I ought to have known human nature better—what one dog does another dog will do, and straight away preaching began—Zola and the drink question from Mr. Richmond, sociology from Mr. Crane.

But the picture is merely a work of art, and has nothing to do with drink or sociology; and its title is not L' Absinthe, nor even Un Homme et une Femme assis dans un Café, as Mr. Walter Sickert suggests, but simply Au Café. Mr. Walter Crane writes: "Here is a study of human degradation, male and female." Perhaps Mr. Walter Crane will feel inclined to apologise for his language when he learns that the man who sits tranquilly smoking his pipe is a portrait of the engraver Deboutin, a man of great talent and at least Mr. Walter Crane's equal as a writer and as a designer. True that M. Deboutin does not dress as well as Mr. Walter Crane, but there are many young men in Pall Mall who would consider Mr. Crane's velvet coat, red necktie, and soft felt hat quite intolerable, yet they would hardly be justified in speaking of a portrait of Mr. Walter Crane as a study of human degradation. Let me assure Mr. Walter Crane that when he speaks of M. Deboutin's life as being degraded, he is speaking on a subject of which he knows nothing. M. Deboutin has lived a very noble life, in no way inferior to Mr. Crane's; his life has been entirely devoted to art and literature; his etchings have been for many years the admiration of artistic Paris, and he has had a play in verse performed at the Théâtre Français.

The picture represents M. Deboutin in the café of the Nouvelle Athènes He has come down from his studio for breakfast, and he will return to his dry-points when he has finished his pipe. I have known M. Deboutin a great number of years, and a more sober man does not exist; and Mr. Crane's accusations of drunkenness might as well be made against Mr. Bernard Shaw. When, hypocritically, I said the picture was a lesson, I referred to the woman, who happens to be sitting next to M. Deboutin. Mr. Crane, Mr. Richmond, and others have jumped to the conclusion that M. Deboutin has come to the café with the woman, and that they are "boozing" together. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Deboutin always came to the café alone, as did Manet, Degas, Duranty. Deboutin is thinking of his dry-points; the woman is incapable of thought. If questioned about her life she would probably answer, "je suis à la coule". But there is no implication of drunkenness in the phrase. In England this class of woman is constantly drunk, in France hardly ever; and the woman Degas has painted is typical of her class, and she wears the habitual expression of her class. And the interest of the subject, from Degas' point of view, lies in this strange contrast—the man thinking of his dry-points, the woman thinking, as the phrase goes, of nothing at all. Au Café—that is the title of the picture. How simple, how significant! And how the picture gains in meaning when the web of false melodrama that a couple of industrious spiders have woven about it is brushed aside!

I now turn to the more interesting, and what I think will prove the more instructive, part of my task—the analysis of the art criticism of Mr. Richmond and Mr. Crane.

Mr. Richmond says "it is not painting at all". We must understand therefore that the picture is void of all accomplishment—composition, drawing, and handling. We will take Mr. Richmond's objections in their order. The subject-matter out of which the artist extracted his composition was a man and woman seated in a café furnished with marble tables. The first difficulty the artist had to overcome was the symmetry of the lines of the tables. Not only are they exceedingly ugly from all ordinary points of view, but they cut the figures in two. The simplest way out of the difficulty would be to place one figure on one side of a table, the other on the other side, and this composition might be balanced by a waiter seen in the distance. That would be an ordinary arrangement of the subject. But the ingenuity with which Degas selects his point of view is without parallel in the whole history of art. And this picture is an excellent example. One line of tables runs up the picture from left to right, another line of tables, indicated by three parts of one table, strikes right across the foreground. The triangle thus formed is filled by the woman's dress, which is darker than the floor and lighter than the leather bench on which both figures are seated. Looking still more closely into the composition, we find that it is made of several perspectives —the dark perspective of the bench, the light perspective of the partition behind, on which the light falls, and the rapid perspective of the marble table in the foreground. The man is high up on the right-hand corner, the woman is in the middle of the picture, and Degas has been careful to place her in front of the opening between the tables, for by so doing he was able to carry his half-tint right through the picture. The empty space on the left, so characteristic of Degas's compositions, admirably balances the composition, and it is only relieved by the stone matchbox, and the newspaper thrown across the opening between the tables. Everywhere a perspective, and these are combined with such strange art that the result is synthetic. A beautiful dissonant rhythm, always symphonic coulant longours de source; an exasperated vehemence and a continual desire of novelty penetrated and informed by a severely classical spirit—that is my reading of this composition.