The main facts of Manet's career may be soon disposed of. His mother was Eugénie Désirée Fournier; she was the goddaughter of Charles Bernadotte, King of Sweden. Her father, a prefect at Pau, had rendered services to Bernadotte which the latter did not forget. When she married, in 1831, Auguste Manet, a distinguished judge of the Seine tribunal, Bernadotte made her many valuable presents and a dowry. Her three sons were Edouard, Eugène, and Gustave. They inherited from their rich grandfather, Fournier. Edouard was born at Paris, Rue Bonaparte, January 23, 1832. His brother Eugène became a doctor of medicine and later married one of the most gifted of women painters, Berthe Morisot, who died in 1895, after winning the praise of the most critical pens in all Europe. Edouard was intended for the bar, but he threw up his studies and swore he would become a painter. Then he was sent abroad. He visited South America and other countries, and kept his eyes wide open, as his sea-pieces proved. After his mother became a widow he married, in 1863, Susanne Leenhoff, of Delft, Holland. She was one of the early admirers of Schumann in Paris and played the A minor piano concerto with orchestra there, and, it is said, with success. She was an admirer of her husband's genius, and during all the turmoil of his existence she was a friend and counsellor.
The young couple lived with the elder Mme. Manet in the Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, and their weekly reception became a rallying centre for not only les Jeunes, but also for such men as Gambetta, Emile Ollivier, Clemenceau, Antonin Proust, De Banville, Baudelaire, Duranty—with whom Manet fought a duel over a trifle—Zola, Mallarmé, Abbé Hurel, Monet, and the impressionistic group. Edouard entertained great devotion for his mother. She saw two of her sons die, Edouard in 1883 (April 30) and Gustave in 1884. (He was an advocate and took Clemenceau's place as municipal councillor when the latter was elected Deputy.) Mme. Manet died in 1885. The painter was stricken with locomotor ataxia, brought on by protracted toil, in 1881. For nearly three years he suffered, and after the amputation of a leg he succumbed. His obsequies were almost of national significance. His widow lived until 1906.
Manet et manebit was the motto of the artist. He lived to paint and he painted much after his paralytic seizure. He was a brilliant raconteur, and, as Degas said, was at one time as well known in Paris as Garibaldi, red shirt and all. The truth is, Manet, after being forced with his back to the wall, became the active combatant in the duel with press and public. He was unhappy if people on the boulevard did not turn to look at him. "The most notorious painter in Paris" was a description which he finally grew to enjoy. It may not be denied that he painted several pictures as a direct challenge to the world, but a painter of offensive pictures he never was. The execrated Picnic, proscribed by the jury of the Salon in 1861, was shown in the Salon des Refusés (in company with works by Bracquemond, Cazin, Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, J.P. Laurens, Legros, Pissarro, Vollon, Whistler—the mildest-mannered crew of pirates that ever attempted to scuttle the bark of art), and a howl arose. What was this shocking canvas like? A group of people at a picnic, several nudes among them. In vain it was pointed out to the modest Parisians (who at the time revelled in the Odalisque of Ingres, in Cabanel, Gérôme, Bouguereau, and other delineators of the chaste) that in the Louvre the Concert of Giorgione depicted just such a scene; but the mixture of dressed and undressed was appalling, and Manet became a man marked for vengeance. Perhaps the exceeding brilliancy of his paint and his unconventional manner of putting it on his canvas had as much to do with the obloquy as his theme. And then he would paint the life around him instead of producing pastiches of old masters or sickly evocations of an unreal past.
He finished Olympia the year of his marriage, and refused to exhibit it; Baudelaire insisted to the contrary. It was shown at the Salon of 1865 (where Monet exhibited for the first time) and became the scandal of the day. Again the painter was bombarded with invectives. This awful nude, to be sure, was no more unclothed than is Cabanel's Venus, but the latter is pretty and painted with soap-suds and sentimentality. The Venus of Titian is not a whit more exposed than the slim, bony, young woman who has just awakened in time to receive a bouquet at the hands of her negress, while a black cat looks on this matutinal proceeding as a matter of course. The silhouette has the firmness of Holbein; the meagre girl recalls a Cranach. It is not the greatest of Manet; one could say, despite the bravura of the performances, that the painter was indulging in an ironic joke. It was a paint pot flung in the face of Paris. Olympia figured at the 1887 exhibition in the Pavilion Manet. An American (the late William M. Laffan) tried to buy her. John Sargent intervened, and a number of the painter's friends, headed by Claude Monet, subscribed a purse of twenty thousand francs. In 1890 Monet and Camille Pelletan presented to M. Fallières, then Minister of Instruction, the picture for the Luxembourg, and in 1907 (January 6), thanks to the prompt action of Clemenceau, one of Manet's earliest admirers, the hated Olympia was hung in the Louvre. The admission was a shock, even at that late day when the din of the battle had passed. When in 1884 there was held at the École des Beaux-Arts a memorial exposition of Manet's works, Edmond About wrote that the place ought to be fumigated, and Gérôme "brandished his little cane" with indignation. Why all the excitement in official circles? Only this: Manet was a great painter, the greatest painter in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Beautiful paint always provokes hatred. Manet won. Nothing succeeds like the success which follows death. (Our only fear nowadays is that his imitators won't die. Second-rate Manet is as bad as second-rate Bouguereau.) If he began by patterning after Hals, Velasquez, and Goya, he ended quite Edouard Manet; above all, he gave his generation a new vision. There will be always the battle of methods. As Mr. MacColl says: "Painting is continually swaying between the chiaroscuro reading of the world which gives it depth and the colour reading which reduces it to flatness. Manet takes all that the modern inquisition of shadows will give to strike his compromise near the singing colours of the Japanese mosaic."
What a wit this Parisian painter possessed! Duret tells of a passage at arms between Manet and Alfred Stevens at the period when the former's Le Bon Bock met for a wonder with a favourable reception at the Salon of 1873. This portrait of the engraver Belot smoking a pipe, his fingers encircling a glass, caused Stevens to remark that the man in the picture "drank the beer of Haarlem." The mot nettled Manet, whose admiration for Frans Hals is unmistakably visible in this magnificent portrait. He waited his chance for revenge, and it came when Stevens exhibited a picture in the Rue Lafitte portraying a young woman of fashion in street dress standing before a portière which she seems about to push aside in order to enter another room. Manet studied the composition for a while, and noting a feather duster elaborately painted which lies on the floor beside the lady, exclaimed: "Tiens! elle a done un rendezvous avec le valet de chambre?"
XII. A NEW STUDY OF WATTEAU
New biographical details concerning Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) may never be forthcoming, though theories of his enigmatic personality and fascinating art will always find exponents. Our knowledge of Watteau is confined to a few authorities: the notes in D'Argenville's Abrégé de la Vie des Plus Fameux Peintres; Catalogue Raisonné, by Gersaint; Julienne's introduction to the Life of Watteau by Count de Caylus—discovered by the Goncourts and published in their brilliant study of eighteenth-century art. Since then have appeared monographs, études, and articles by Cellier, Mollet, Hanover, Dohme, Müntz, Séailles, Claude Phillips, Charles Blanc, Virgile Joez, F. Staley, Téodor de Wyzewa, and Camille Mauclair. Mauclair is the latest and one of the most interesting commentators, his principal contribution being De Watteau à Whistler, a chapter of which has been afterward expanded into a compact little study entitled Watteau and translated from the French text by Mme. Simon Bussy, the wife of that intimate painter of twilight and poetic reverie, Simon Bussy, to whom the book is dedicated.
It is the thesis put forth and cleverly maintained by Mauclair that interests us more than his succinct notation of the painter's life. It is not so novel as it is just and moderate in its application. The pathologic theory of genius has been overworked. In literature nowadays "psychiatrists" rush in where critics fear to tread. Mahomet was an epilept; so was Napoleon. Flaubert died of epilepsy, said his friends; nevertheless, René Dumesnil has proved that his sudden decease was caused not by apoplexy but by hystero-neurasthenia. Eye strain played hob with the happiness of Carlyle, and an apostle of sweetness and light declared that Ibsen was a "degenerate"—Ibsen, who led the humdrum exterior life of a healthy bourgeois. Lombroso has demonstrated—to his own satisfaction—that Dante's mystic illumination was due to some brand of mental disorder. In fact, this self-styled psychologist mapped anew the topography of the human spirit. Few have escaped his fine-tooth-comb criticism except mediocrity. Painters, poets, patriots, musicians, scientists, philosophers, novelists, statesmen, dramatists, all who ever participated in the Seven Arts, were damned as lunatics, decadents, criminals, and fools. It was a convenient inferno in which to dump the men who succeeded in the field wherein you were a failure. The height of the paradox was achieved when a silly nomenclature was devised to meet every vacillation of the human temperament. If you feared to cross the street you suffered from agoraphobia; if you didn't fear to cross the street, that too was a very bad sign. If you painted like Monet, paralysis of the optical centre had set in—but why continue?
It is a pity that this theory of genius has been so thoroughly discredited, for it is a field which promises many harvestings; there is mad genius as there are stupid folk. Besides, normality doesn't mean the commonplace. A normal man is a superior man. The degenerate man is the fellow of low instincts, rickety health, and a drunkard, criminal, or idiot. The comical part of the craze—which was short-lived, yet finds adherents among the half-baked in culture and the ignorant—is that it deliberately twisted the truth, making men of fine brain and high-strung temperament seem crazy or depraved, when the reverse is usually the case. Since the advent of Lombroso "brainstorms" are the possession of the privileged. Naturally your grocer, tailor, or politician may display many of the above symptoms, but no one studies them. They are not "geniuses."
All this to assure you that when Camille Mauclair assumes that the malady from which Antoine Watteau died was also a determining factor in his art, the French critic is not aping some modern men of science who denounce the writings of Dostoïevsky because he suffered from epileptic fits. But there is a happy mean in this effort to correlate mind and body. If we are what we think or what we eat—and it is not necessary to subscribe to such a belief—then the sickness of the body is reflected in the soul, or vice versa. Byron was a healthy man naturally, when he didn't dissipate, and Byron's poems are full of magnificent energy, though seldom in the key of optimism. The revolt, the passion, the scorn, were they all the result of his health? Or of his liver? Or of his soul? Goethe, the imperial the myriad-minded Goethe, the apostle of culture, the model European man of the nineteenth century—what of him? Serenity he is said to have attained, yet from the summit of eighty years he confessed to four weeks of happiness in a long lifetime. Nor was he with all his superb manhood free from neurotic disorders, neurotic and erotic. Shelley? Ah! he is a pronounced case for the specialists. Any man who could eat dry bread, drink water, and write such angelic poetry must have been quite mad. Admitted. Would there were more Shelleys. Browning is a fair specimen of genius and normality; as his wife illustrated an unstable nervous temperament allied to genius. George Borrow was a rover, a difficult man to keep as a friend, happy only when thinking of the gipsies and quarrelling when with them. Would Baudelaire's magic verse and prose sound its faint, acrid, sinister music if the French poet had led a sensible life? Cruel question of the dilettante for whom the world, all its splendor, all its art, is but a spectacle. It is needless to continue, the list is too large; too large and too contradictory. The Variations of Genius would be as profound and as vast a book as Lord Acton's projected History of Human Thought. The truth is that genius is the sacrificial goat of humanity; through some inexplicable transposition genius bears the burdens of mankind; afflicted by the burden of the flesh intensified many times, burdened with the affliction of the spirit, raised to a pitch abnormal, the unhappy man of genius is stoned because he staggers beneath the load of his sensitive temperament or wavers from the straight and narrow path usually blocked by bores too thick-headed and too obese to realise the flower-fringed abysses on either side of the road. And having sent genius in general among the goats, let us turn to consumptive genius in particular.