With the exception of Segantini, not one of these painters will own that there are poverty-stricken and miserable people in his native land. An everlasting blue sky still laughs over Italy, sunshine and the joy of life still hold undisputed sway over Italian pictures. There is no work in sunny Italy, and in spite of that there is no hunger. Even where work is being done there are assembled only the fairest girls of Lombardy, who kneel laughing and jesting on the strand, while the wind dallies with their clothes. They have a special delight for showing themselves while engaged at their toilette, in a bodice, their little feet in neat little slippers, their naked arms raised to arrange their red-gold hair. As a rule, however, they do nothing whatever but smile at you with their most seductive smile, which shows their pearl-white teeth, and ensnares every poor devil who does not suspect that they have smiled for years in the same way, and most of all with him who pays highest: “j’aime les hommes parse que j’aime les truffes.” These pictures are almost invariably works which are well able to give pleasure to their possessor, only they seldom suggest discussion on the course of art. Trop de marchandise is the phrase generally used in the Paris Salon when the Italians come under consideration. Few there are amongst them who are real pioneers, spirits pressing seriously forward and having a quickening influence on others. The vital questions of the painting of free light, Impressionism, and Naturalism do not interest them in the least. A naïve, pleasant, lively, and self-complacent technique is in most cases the solitary charm of their works. One feels scarcely any inclination to search the catalogue for the painter’s name, and whether the beauty—for she is not the first of her kind—who was called Ninetta last year has now become Lisa. Most of these modern Italians execute their pictures in the way in which gold pieces are minted, or in the way in which plastic works, which run through so many editions, are produced in Italy. Nowhere are more beautiful laces chiselled, and in the same manner painters render the shining splendour of satin and velvet, the glittering brilliancy of ornaments, and the starry radiance of the beautiful eyes of women. Only, as soon as one has once seen them one knows the pictures by heart, as one knows the works in marble, and this is so because the painters had them by heart first. Everywhere there are the evidences of talent, industry, ability, and spirit, but there is no soul in the spirit and no life in the colours. So many brilliant tones stand beside each other, and yet there is neither a refined tone nor the impression of truth to nature.

SEGANTINI.MATERNITY.

In all this art of theirs there is scarcely a question of any serious landscape. Apart from the works of some of the younger men—for instance, Belloni, Serra, Gola, Filippini, and others, who display an intimacy of observation which is worthy of honour—a really close connection with the efforts made across the Alps is not achieved in these days. As a rule the landscapes are mere products of handicraft, which are striking for the moment by their technical routine, but seldom waken any finer feelings, whether the Milanese paint the dazzling Alpine effects or the Venetian lagunes steeped in light, with gondolas and gondola-poles glowing in the sunshine, or the Neapolitans set glittering upon the canvas their beautiful bay like a brilliant firework. Most of them continue to pursue with complete self-satisfaction the flagged gondola of Ziem; the conquests of the Fontainebleau painters and of the Impressionists are unnoticed by them.

And this industrial characteristic of Italian painting is sufficiently explained by the entire character of the country. The Italian painter is not properly in a position to seek effects of his own and to make experiments. Hardly anything is bought for the galleries, and there are few collectors of superior taste. He labours chiefly for the traveller, and this gives his performances the stamp of attractive mercantile wares. The Italian is too much a man of business to undertake great trials of strength pour le roi de Prusse. He paints no great pictures, which would be still-born children in his home, nor does he paint severe studies of plein-air, preferring a specious, exuberant, flickering, and glaring revel in colour. In general he produces nothing which will not easily sell, and has a fine instinct for the taste of the rich travelling public, who wish to see nothing which does not excite cheerful and superficial emotions.

But it is possible that this decline of the Latin races is connected with the nature of modern art itself. Of late the words “Germanic” and “Latin” have been much abused. It has been proclaimed that the new art meant the victory of the German depth of feeling over the Latin sense of form, the onset of German cordiality against the empty exaggeration in which the imitation of the Cinquecento resulted. Such assertions are always hard to maintain, because every century shows similar reactions of truth to nature against mannerism. Nevertheless is it true that modern art, with its heartfelt devotion to everyday life and the mysteries of light, has an essentially Germanic character, finding its ancestors not in Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian, but in the English of the eighteenth, the Dutch of the seventeenth, and the Germans of the sixteenth century. The Italians and Spaniards, whose entire intellectual culture rests upon a Latin foundation, may therefore find it difficult to follow this change of taste. They either adhere to the old bombastic and theatrical painting of history, or they recast the new painting in an external drawing-room art draped with gaudy tinsel. Even in France the rise of the new art meant, as it were, the victory of the Frankish element over the Gallic. Millet the Norman, Courbet the Frank, Bastien-Lepage of Lorraine, drove back the Latins—Ingres and Couture, Cabanel and Bouguereau—just as in the eighteenth century the Netherlander Watteau broke the yoke of the rigid Latin Classicism.

It is perhaps no mere chance that the threads of the Germanic aim in art were drawn out with such zeal by the Germanic nations. With the Latins a striking effect is made by brilliant technique, mastery of the manual art of painting, and careless sway over all the enchantments of the craft; with the Teutons one stands in the presence of an art which is so natural and simple that one scarcely thinks of the means by which it was called into being. In one case there is virtuosity, ductility, and grace; in the other, health, intrinsic feeling, and temperament.

CHAPTER XXXVII

ENGLAND