It was near the end of last century that first appeared what has so misleadingly been called Post-Impressionism, an art with a new synthetic vision which saw beyond realism, which repudiated illusion, which tried to get deep down to where life and beauty touch and so externalise that indefinite something which makes things what they always seem to us to be. This art which has recreated decoration, which is going to revolutionise stage-craft, house furniture and even building, while it deals unhesitatingly with any subject, is perhaps chiefly significant in its bearing on landscape.
In this department appears that extraordinary parallel with Indian ideas which has already been mentioned. No Indian artist ever aimed at a mere representation of nature. He drew from his store of imagination and memory a revisualised landscape which suggests the idea behind nature and not her seeming reality. To him natural forms were merely incarnations of ideas, and the effort to complete the expression necessitated a repudiation of illusion. It follows that the representative science displayed appears inept, if judged by ordinary outward standards. But when one considers that accuracy is purely relative, and that the synthetic vision naturally subordinates certain features in its preoccupation with others, to condemn Indian drawing as bad, or Byzantine either, for the case is analogous, shows a faulty standard of judgment.[7]
As in Indian, so in modern European art, an understanding of the peculiar ideas which have inspired is necessary for appreciation. Keeping, therefore, this fact in view, that the aim is not for illusion but for the subtler and truer realism which lies in all natural phenomena, we can pass to the consideration of an artist who stands at the head of ‘Post-Impressionist’—or, as I prefer to call it, ‘Fauvist’—landscape tradition, and who really marks the beginning of the new appreciation of mountains.
Paul Cézanne has waited longer than any of his contemporaries for sympathy and fame, but now that his time has come he bids fair easily to outstrip Manet and the Impressionists in importance. As is often the case, the same reason accounts for his being neglected and for his later popularity, and that reason is the complete newness of his outlook. His vision was a much stranger and newer one than had been that of the Impressionists, and yet but for a fortunate failing of his own it might never have been expressed at all. Cézanne was a very great artist and a very bad painter. One may go further and say that had he not been such a bad painter he might never have shown himself to be a great artist. His whole being was clumsy and blundering, and his attempts to emulate the brilliant Manet in his light effects were constantly balked by this very clumsiness. In despair, he gave up the task and lumped down what he saw, and, being a great artist, he saw something quite new.[8] He saw line and decorative grouping where Impressionism saw only a shimmer of sunlight. His tactless, outspoken nature is reproduced in his paintings, be they still-life, figure-pieces, portraits, or landscapes. Mr. Sickert, comparing his work with the ‘gentle painter-like art of Pissarro,’ describes his pictures as ‘ninety per cent. monstrous, tragic failures,’ and from this standpoint the statement seems just enough.[9] But ‘brilliant and sane efficiency’ is not the highest attribute in an artist, and Cézanne by his genius redeems and almost glorifies his clumsiness. To landscape he gave structure and rhythm. In his pictures of Ste. Victoire, of steep fields and hillsides, the strong architecture of the landscape is the framework of the whole.
This originality of Cézanne has been developed and perfected by an artist working in England to-day, whose work is more in sympathy with the moods and structure of mountains than even that of his great predecessor, and the artist is Professor C. J. Holmes, whom I have already quoted (see above).
Mr. Holmes is very modern, and he is an Englishman; that is to say, he is part of a movement which has a deep feeling for synthesis and the subtlety of rhythm—and this is important with a view to what has been said about the synthetic nature of mountains—and also he is a member of the race which has always shown more understanding for nature than any other in Europe or, perhaps, in the world.
France, the leader in matters artistic, has never had any real grasp of nature since the days of Ronsard. The French are too intelligent, too pitilessly logical, to accept the moods of nature without reasoning.
From such a generalisation one should, perhaps, except Rousseau. Although in much of his teaching it is difficult to escape the idea that the nature he preached has been touched up by civilisation, in comparison with many of his disciples he had a genuine desire to escape the works of men. In his political theory, in his morality, in his conception of the beautiful, he turned always to nature for his ideal. From his home in Geneva he learnt to love the mountains, to love the great calm and dignity of them, their aloofness from man and his pettiness:—
‘En effet, c’est une impression générale qu’éprouvent tous les hommes ... que sur les hautes montagnes ... les plaisirs sont moins ardents, les passions plus modérées. Il semble qu’en s’élevant au-dessus du séjour des hommes, on y laisse tous les sentiments bas et terrestres.’[10]
But even here one suspects that Rousseau is rather contrasting the worries of a race cursed with powers of emotion, with the sublime peace of unfeeling nature, than admitting the passion of the hills, which differs only from that of men in its loftiness and nobility. And this last belief is not only held by the England of to-day, but was a prominent conviction of William Wordsworth’s, and he lies behind the English fondness for nature throughout the nineteenth century.