Watteau was a consumptive; he died of the disease. A consumptive genius! It is a hard saying. People of average health whose pulse-beat is normal in tempo luckily never realise the febrile velocity with which flows the blood in the veins of a sick man of genius. But there is a paradox in the case of Watteau, as there was in the case of Chopin, of Keats, of Robert Louis Stevenson. The painter of Valenciennes gave little sign of his malady on his joyous lyrical canvases. Keats sang of faëry landscapes and Chopin's was a virile spirit; the most cheerful writer under the sun was Stevenson, who even in his Pulvis et Umbra conjured up images of hope after a most pitiless arraignment of the universe and man. And here is the paradox. This quartet of genius suffered from and were slain by consumption. (Stevenson died directly of brain congestion; he was, however, a victim to lung trouble.) That the poets turn their sorrow into song is an axiom. Yet these men met death, or what is worse, met life, with defiance or impassible fronts. And the world which loves the lilting rhythms of Chopin's mazourkas seldom cares to peep behind the screen of notes for the anguish ambushed there. Watteau has painted the gayest scenes of pastoral elegance in a land out of time, a No-Man's Land of blue skies, beautiful women, gallant men, and lovely landscapes, while his life was haunted by thoughts of death.
The riddle is solved by Mauclaìr: These flights into the azure, these evocations of a country west of the sun and east of the moon, these graceful creatures of Watteau, the rich brocade of Chopin's harmonies, the exquisite pictures of Keats, the youthful joy in far-away countries of Stevenson, all, all are so many stigmata of their terrible affliction. They sought by the magic of their art to create a realm of enchantment, a realm wherein their ailing bodies and wounded spirits might find peace and solace. This is the secret of Watteau, says Mauclair, which was not yielded up in the eighteenth century, not even to his followers, Pater, Lancret, Boucher, Fragonard, whose pagan gaiety and artificial spirit is far removed from the veiled melancholy of Watteau. As we see Chopin, a slender man, morbid, sickly, strike the martial chord in an unparalleled manner, Chopin the timid, the composer of the Heroic Polonaise, so Watteau, morbid, sickly, timid, slender, composes that masterpiece of delicate and decorative joyousness, The Embarkment for Cythera, which hangs in the Louvre (a gorgeous sketch, the final version, is at Potsdam in the collection of the German Emperor). In these works we find the aura of consumption.
None of Watteau's contemporaries fathomed the meaning of his art: not Count de Caylus, not his successors, who all recognised the masterly draughtsman, the marvellous colourist, the composer of pastoral ballets, of matchless fêtes galantes, of conversations, of miniatures depicting camp life, and fanciful decorations in the true style of his times. But the melancholy poet that was in the man, his lyric pessimism, and his unassuaged thirst for the infinite—these things they did not see. Caylus, who has left the only data of value, speaks of Watteau's hatred of life, his aversion at times from the human face, his restlessness that caused him to seek new abodes—Chopin was always dissatisfied with his lodgings and always changing them. The painter made friends in plenty, only to break with them because of some fancied slight. Chopin was of umbrageous nature, Liszt tells us. Watteau never married, and never, as far as is known, had a love affair. He is an inspired painter of women. (Perhaps, because of his celibacy.) He loved to depict them in delicious poses, under waving trees in romantic parks or in the nude. A gallant artist, he was not a gallant man. He had the genius of friendship but not the talent for insuring its continuity. Like Arthur Rimbaud, he suffered from the nostalgia of the open road. He disappeared frequently. His whereabouts was a mystery to his friends. He did not care for money or for honours. He was elected without volition on his part as a member of the Academy. Yet he did not use this powerful lever to further his welfare. Silent, a man of continent speech, he never convinced his friends that his art was chaste; yet he never painted an indelicate stroke. His personages, all disillusionised, vaguely suffer, make love without desire—disillusioned souls all. L'Indifférent, that young man in the Louvre who treads the earth with such light disdain, with such an airy expression of sweetness and ennui, that picture, Mauclair remarks, is the soul of Watteau. And, perhaps, spills his secret.
Mauclair does not like the coupling of Watteau's name with those of Boucher, Pater, Lancret, De Troy, Coypel, or Vanloo. They imitated him as to externals; the spirit of him they could not ensnare. If Watteau stemmed artistically from Rubens, from Ruysdael, from Titian (or Tiepolo, as Kenyon Cox acutely hints) he is the father of a great school, the true French school, though his stock is Flemish. Turner knew him; so did Bonington. Delacroix understood him. So did Chardin, himself a solitary in his century. Without Watteau's initiative Monticelli might not be the Monticelli we know, while Claude Monet, Manet, Renoir are the genuine flowering of his experiments in the division of tones and the composition of luminous skies.
Mauclair smiles at Caylus for speaking of Watteau's mannerisms, the mannerisms that proclaim his originality. Only your academic, colourless painter lacks personal style and always paints like somebody he is not. Watteau's art is peculiarly personal. Its peculiarity—apart from its brilliancy and vivacity—is, as Mauclair remarks, "the contrast of cheerful colour and morbid expression." Morbidezza is the precise phrase; morbidezza may be found in Chopin's art, in the very feverish moments when he seems brimming over with high spirits. Watteau was not a consumptive of the Pole's type. He did not alternate between ecstasy and languor. He was cold, self-contained, suspicious, and inveterately hid the state of his health. He might have been cured, but he never reached Italy, and that far-off dream and his longing to realise it may have been the basis of his last manner—those excursions into a gorgeous dreamland. He yearned for an impossible region. His visions on canvas are the shadowy sketches of this secret desire that burned him up. It may have been consumption—and Mauclair makes out a strong case—and it may have been the expression of a rare poetic temperament. Watteau was a poet of excessive sensibility as well as the contriver of dainty masques and ballets.
In literature one man at least has understood him, Walter Pater. Readers of his Imaginary Portraits need not be reminded of A Prince of Court Painters, that imaginative reconstruction of an almost obscure personality. "His words as he spoke of them [the paintings of Rubens] seemed full of a kind of rich sunset with some moving glory within it." This was the Watteau who is summed by Pater (a distant kinsman, perhaps, of the Pater Watteau tutored) as a man who had been "a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all." Camille Mauclair eloquently ends his study with the confession that the mere utterance of Watteau's name "suffices to evoke in men's minds a memory of the melancholy that was his, arrayed in garments of azure and rose. Ah! crepuscular Psyche, whose smile is akin to tears!"
XIII. GAUGUIN AND TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
I - GAUGUIN
The key-note to the character of Paul Gauguin, painter and sculptor, may be found in his declaration that in art there are only revolutionists or plagiarists. A brave speech. And a proud man who uttered it; for unless he wished to avoid its implications he must needs prove his sincerity. In the short, adventurous, crowded life vouchsafed him, Paul Gauguin proved himself indeed a revolutionary painter. His maxim was the result of hard-won experiences. He was born at Paris June 7, 1848—a stormy year for France; he died at Dominique May 9, 1904. His father was a native of Brittany, while on his mother's side he was Peruvian. This mixed blood may account for his wandering proclivities and his love for exotic colouring and manners. To further accentuate the rebellious instincts of the youth his maternal grandmother was that Flora Tristan, friend of the anarchistic thinker Proudhon. She was a socialist later and a prime mover in the Workman's Union; she allied herself with Père Enfantin and helped him to found his religion, "Mapa," of which he was the god, Ma, and she the goddess, Pa. Enfantin's career and end may be recalled by students of St. Simon and the socialistic movements of those times. Paul's father, Clovis Gauguin, wrote in 1848 the political chronicle on the National, but previous to the coup d'etat he left for Lima, there to found a journal. He died of an aneurism in the Straits of Magellan, a malady that was to carry off his son. After four years in Lima the younger Gauguin returned to France. In 1856 a Peruvian grand-uncle died at the extraordinary age of one hundred and thirteen. His name was Don Pio de Tristan, and he was reported very rich. But Paul got none of this wealth, and at fourteen he was a cabin-boy, feeble of health but extremely curious about life. He saw much of life and strange lands in the years that followed, and he developed into a powerfully built young sailor and no doubt stored his brain with sumptuous images of tropical scenery which reappeared in his canvases. He traversed the globe several times. He married and took a position in a bank. On Sundays he painted. His hand had itched for years to reproduce the landscapes he had seen. He made friends with Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, Guillaumin, and Manet. He called himself an amateur and a "Sunday painter," but as he was received on terms of equality with these famous artists it may be presumed that, autodidact as he was, his versatile talent—for it literally was versatile—did not escape their scrutiny. He submitted himself to various influences; he imitated the Impressionists, became a Neo-Impressionist of the most extravagant sort; went sketching with Cézanne and Van Gogh, that unfortunate Dutchman, and finally announced to his friends and family that "henceforward I shall paint every day." He gave up his bank, and Charles Morice has said that his life became one of misery, solitude, and herculean labours.
He painted in Brittany, Provence, at Martinique, in the Marquesas and Tahiti. He had parted with the Impressionists and sought for a new æsthetik of art; to achieve this he broke away not only from tradition, even the tradition of the Impressionists, but from Europe and its civilisation. To this half-savage temperament devoured by the nostalgia of the tropics the pictures of his contemporaries bore the fatal stamp of the obvious, of the thrice done and used up. France, Holland, Spain, Italy—what corner was there left in these countries that had not been painted thousands of times and by great masters! The South Seas, Japan, China—anywhere away from the conventional studio landscape, studio models, poses, grimaces! At Pont-Aven in 1888, between trips made to Martinique and Provence, Gauguin had attained mastery of himself; Cézanne had taught him simplicity; Degas, his avowed admirer, had shown him the potency of the line; Renoir's warm colouring had spurred him to a still richer palette; and Manet had given him sound advice. A copy of the Olympe, by Gauguin, finished about this time, is said to be a masterpiece. But with Degas he was closer than the others. A natural-born writer, his criticisms of the modern French school are pregnant with wit and just observation. What was nicknamed the School of Pont-Aven was the outcome of Gauguin's imperious personality. A decorative impulse, a largeness of style, and a belief that everything in daily life should be beautiful and characteristic sent the painters to modelling, to ceramics and decoration. Armand Seguin, Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Filiger, Serusier, Bonnard, Vuillard, Chamaillard, Verkade, O'Conor, Durio, Maufra, Ranson, Mayol, Roy, and others are to-day happy to call themselves associates of Paul Gauguin in this little movement in which the idolatry of the line and the harmonies of the arabesque were pursued with joyous fanaticism.