| BAIGNEUSES, 1902 | RENOIR |
Renoir was a man who fundamentally was not revolutionary, an artist who was shown the way by others, a genius who culminated a great and febrile epoch. His beginnings were imitative of the painters of his day. He climbed the ladder from dark to light, from the stiff to the mobile. His first works under Courbet and Manet were no better than those of Hankwan. Later his pictures began to flow rhythmically in simple lines as in the Head of a Chinese Lady by Ririomin. Then they began to extend into depth, and as early as 1881 they surpassed Titian. From then on they approached steadily to the completeness of a modernised Rubens. That Renoir never reached that master’s greatness is due, not to his lack of acute and complete vision, but to his restriction of it to small works. A composer who writes a symphony in which each minute part is an intimate factor of the whole, is greater than he who writes only an overture whose entirety is no greater than one of the symphony’s movements. Renoir, in so far as he went, was as great as the greatest.
One cannot think of a Renoir canvas merely as a painting. It is a new and visually complete cosmos. In looking at his work the intelligence enters a world in which every form has interest, every line completion, every space a plasticity: in short, a world in which everything is visibly interrelated. A host of influences have been read into Renoir, and indeed there were many in his development. But they were only the steps by which he mounted to high achievement. So unimportant are the works of most of these other men when compared with Renoir’s personal accomplishments, that one may visualise this artist as a raindrop on a window, which, as it flows downward, consumes and embodies all those in its path. Courbet, Monet, Delacroix and Manet, had they no other claim on posterity than as instructors of Renoir, would not have lived in vain. The Chinese, the Greeks, the Renaissance, even that full Indian sculpture in the Chaitya of Karli of the eleventh century B.C.—are all within him. That they are temperamental affinities rather than direct influences none can deny; but, strange as it may seem, he has traits which directly recall each one of them. They all have the ineradicable germ of genius in them; and that germ, being changeless and eternal, lies at the root of all æsthetic creation. For this reason a great man belongs to all time. He embraces all the results of the struggles which have gone before. In the possession of Renoir we have no apologies to make to antiquity, any more than in having produced Cézanne must we abase ourselves before the artists who are yet to come.
VI
PAUL CÉZANNE
THE dilettante, avid for accounts of an artist’s eccentricities, will find abundant and varied material of this nature in half a hundred books written by critics of almost every nationality on that astounding and grotesque colossus, Cézanne. Perhaps no great artist in the world’s history has been so wantonly libelled, maligned and ridiculed as he. Nor has there ever been a painter of such wide influence so grossly misunderstood. Cézanne has been endowed with most fantastic powers, dismissed with a coup d’esprit for attributes he never possessed, and canonised for qualities he would have repudiated. Like Michelangelo he has been both the admiration and the mystery of critics. And he is at once the idol and the incubus of present-day artists. His letters alone have formed the technical basis of one great modern art school. A fragmentary phrase of his mentioning geometrical figures was seized upon by a Spaniard and made the foundation for another school. His mention of Poussin drove a horde of Scandinavians, Austrians and Bohemians to a contemplation of that artist. Cézanne’s very limitations have been the inspiration for an army of hardy imitators who believe it is more vital to imitate modernity than to reconstruct the past. Indeed it may be said that all art since Impressionism is divided into two groups, one which endeavours to develop some quality or qualities in Cézanne, the other which attempts the anachronism of resuscitating the primitive art of a simple-minded antiquity. For even this latter group, Cézanne is in part responsible. Did he not say that we must become classicists again by way of nature? And did this not give reactionary and servile minds ample excuse to cling with even greater passion to a dead and rigid past? In his great sense of order his disciples saw only immobility; their minds, redundant with parallels, harked back to the Egyptians. Thus has he been emulated: but, among all these branches shot out from the mother trunk, it can be stated incontestably that only one has understood him, has penetrated beneath the surface of his canvases, has realised his true gift to the art of the future. And this one, strangely enough, is the furthest removed from imitation.