CHAPTER XXIV

THE BEGINNINGS OF “PAYSAGE INTIME”

How it was that the secrets of paysage intime were reserved for our own century—and this assuredly by no mere accident—can only be delineated in true colours when some one writes a special history of landscape painting, a book which at the present time would be the most seasonable in the literature of art. Wereschagin once declared that in the province of landscape the works of the old masters seem like the exercises of pupils in comparison with the performances of modern art; and certain it is that the nineteenth century, if it is inferior to previous ages in everything else, may, at any rate, offer them an equivalent in landscape. It was only city life that could produce this passionately heightened love of nature. It was only in the century of close rooms and over-population, neurosis and holiday colonies, that landscape painting could attain to this fulness, purity, and sanctity. It was only our age of hurry and work that made possible a relation between nature and the human soul, which really has something of what the Earth Spirit vouchsafed to Faust: “to gaze into her heart as into the bosom of a friend.”

In France also, the tendency which since the eighteenth century had made itself felt in waves rising ever higher, had been for a short time abruptly interrupted by Classicism. Of the pre-revolutionary landscapists Hubert Robert was the only one who survived into the new era. His details of nature and his rococo savour were pardoned to him for the sake of his classic ruins. At first there was not one of the newer artists who was impelled to enter this province. A generation which had become ascetic, and which dreamed only of rude, manly virtue, expressed through the plastic and purified forms of the human body, had lost all sense for the charms of landscape. And when the first landscapes appeared once more, after several years, they were, as in Germany, solemn stage-tragedy scenes, abstract “lofty” regions such as Poussin ostensibly painted. Only in Poussin a great feeling for nature held together the conventional composition, in spite of all his straining after style; whereas nothing but frigid rhetoric and sterile formalism reigns in the works of these newer painters, works which were created at second-hand. The type of the beautiful which had been borrowed from the antique was worked into garden and forest with a laboured effort at style, as it had been worked into the human form and the flow of drapery. A prix de Rome was founded for historical landscapes.

Henri Valenciennes was the Lenôtre of this Classicism, the admired teacher of several generations. The beginner in landscape painting modelled himself upon Valenciennes as the figure painter upon Guérin. His Traité élémentaire de perspective pratique, in which he formulated the principles of landscape, contains his personal views as well as the æsthetics of the age. Although, as he premises, he “is convinced that there is in reality only one kind of painting, historical painting, it is true that an able historical painter ought not entirely to neglect landscape.” Rembrandt, of course, and the old Dutch painters were without any sort of ideal, and only worked for people without soul or intelligence. How far does a landscape with cows and sheep stand below one with the funeral of Phocion, or a rainy day by Ruysdael below a picture of the Deluge by Poussin! Hardly does Claude Lorrain find grace in the eyes of Valenciennes. “He has painted with a pretty fidelity to nature the morning and evening light. But just for that very reason his pictures make no appeal to the intelligence. He has no tree where a Dryad could dwell, no spring in which nymphs could splash. Gods, demigods, nymphs, satyrs, even heroes are too sublime for these regions; shepherds could dwell there at best.” Claude, indeed, loved Italy, but knew the old writers all too little, and they are the groundwork for landscape painters. As David said to his pupil Gros, “Look through your Plutarch,” Valenciennes advised his own pupils to study Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid: only from these authors might be learnt what were the regions suitable for gods and heroes.

“Vos exemplaria græca Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna.”

If, for example, the landscapist would paint Morning, let him portray the moment when Aurora rises laughing from the arms of her aged spouse, when the hours are yoking four fiery steeds to the car of the sun-god, or Ulysses kneels imploring before Nausicaa. For Noon the myth of Icarus or of Phaëton might be turned to account. Evening may be represented by painting Phœbus hastening his course as he nears the horizon in flaming desire to cast himself into the arms of Thetis. Having once got his themes from the old poets, the landscape painter must know the laws of perspective to execute his picture; he must be familiar with Poussin’s rules of composition, and occasionally he ought even to study nature. Then he needs a weeping willow for an elegy, a rock for the death of Phaëton, and an oak for the dance of the nymphs. To find such motives he should make journeys to the famed old lands of civilisation; best of all on the road which art itself has traversed—first to Asia Minor, then to Greece, and then to Italy.

Baschet.
HUBERT ROBERT.MONUMENTS AND RUINS.

These æsthetics produced Victor Bertin and Xavier Bidault, admired by their contemporaries for “richness of composition and a splendid selection of sites.” Their methodical commonplaces, their waves and valleys and temples, bear the same relation to nature as the talking machine of Raimundus Lullus does to philosophy. The scholastic landscape painter triumphed; a school it was which nourished itself on empty formulas, and so died of anæmia. Bidault, who in his youth made very good studies, is, with his stippled leaves and polished stems, his grey skies looking sometimes like lead and sometimes like water, the peculiar essence of a tiresome Classicism; and he is the same Bidault who, as president of the hanging committee, for years rejected the landscapes of Théodore Rousseau from the Salon. It is only the figure of Michallon, who died young, that still survives from this group. He too belongs to the school of Valenciennes, through his frigid, meagre, and pedantically correct style; but he is distinguished from the rest, for he endeavoured to acquire a certain truth to nature in the drawing of plants, and was accounted a bold innovator at the time. He did not paint “the plant in itself,” but burs, thistles, dandelions, everything after its kind, and through this botanical exactness he acquired in the beginning of the century a fame which it is now hard to understand. In the persons of Jules Cogniet and Watelet the gates of the school were rather more widely opened to admit reality. Having long populated their classic valleys with bloodless, dancing nymphs and figurants of divine race, they abandoned historical for picturesque landscape, and “dared” to represent scenes from the environs of Paris, castles and windmills. But as they clung even here to the classical principles of composition, it is only nature brushed and combed, trimmed and coerced by rules, that is reflected in their painting. Even in 1822, when Delacroix exhibited his “Dante’s Bark,” the ineffable Watelet shone in his full splendour. Amongst his pictures there was a view of Bar-sur-Seine, which the catalogue appropriately designated not simply as a vue, but as a vue ajustée. Till his last breath Watelet was convinced that nature did not understand her own business, and was always in need of a painter to revise her errors and correct them.