Art

The Speaker, 16 July 1892, pages 77-78, 1,549 words

Last Saturday night I went to see Tristan und Isolde. During the second act I noticed that a very pretty difference of opinion was in progress between the conductor and a certain horn player; and the little dispute reminded me of an article which I had read, or, to be strictly truthful, partly read, that morning in THE SPEAKER. The writer of the article had been unwise enough to speak of Monet and Manet; and two names so nearly identical cannot be borne with in the same article – appearance before everything – and though the compositor sets up Monet and Manet, he will, before the paper goes to press, eliminate the slight orthographical distinction which distresses his eye. The horn player took the same course regarding the passage about which he and the conductor could not agree. I am sure the passage was played correctly at rehearsal – there the conductor could impose his idea on the horn player. "Far better lie low at rehearsal," said the horn player; "at the performance I shall be able to establish my own reading of the passage." This horn player and this compositor were born to know each other; they are kindred souls – is there no one who will bring them together? On a former occasion I remember writing ''Monet or Rousseau." The sentence appeared "Monitor Rousseau," an alteration so ingenious and so calculated to stimulate the brains of indolent readers that I hardly regretted my own commonplace. But last week the second column of my article was turned into such bewildering nonsense that I felt bound to explain. I have explained, and will now continue my article. But there's the rub. I have no sense of humour, and it would be impossible for me to dish up an article composed entirely of the comical mistakes which that most intelligent and well-instructed man, the printer, occasionally trips into; only a professional humorist could do that; and to change your subject in the middle of an article is like changing horses in mid-stream. I must, therefore, continue with Monet and Manet. I might, it is true, drop one of them out as the printer did.... Monet I have written about, but Manet I have only alluded to. An article on Manet would continue my little series of modern painters. We have had Degas, Whistler, Madame Morisot, Stevens, and Keene.

As a painter, no one stands higher than Manet – not Courbet, nor Whistler, nor Degas. Manet's fame is increasing every day. True, that since his death his pictures have not gone up in price; but they will go up in price, of that I am sure. Popular success has reached the lips of Degas and Whistler. The exquisite inveigling delicacy of Whistler's perception of things ended by charming the least brutal section of the public. The extraordinarily acute criticism of life which is never absent from Degas' work has taken hold of every man with the least pretension to intelligence, but Manet still hangs fire: the demand for Manets – if there is any demand – is but slight. I know that this is so, but I know that the next boom will be a Manet boom. And this for the best of reasons – because there is no one else to boom. For the moment painting is dead in France. For the last fifty years France has produced great painters in quick succession. There must be a pause: it would seem that the pause has come. Alone among the great ones Manet remains unrecognised. Is it not sure, therefore, that the hour of his triumph is at hand?

Manet has taken longer than the others to come to the front. In Manet there is nothing but good painting, and good painting is what the public never understands and instinctively dislikes. Nor can the fact that old masters fetch high prices be used to prove that picture buyers like good painting. The picture buyer buys a modern picture because he likes it; he buys old pictures because time has approved them and set a value upon them which he will vindicate as far as the limits of his purse will allow him. This must be so, for it is impossible to believe that the man who really likes a Turner, a Crome, or a Hobbema. Could endure a Leader or a Fildes. Mr. Brett, in one of his lectures on art, declared that Hobbema was completely without merit. It was not in the least necessary for Mr. Brett to make this statement; his own pictures of stuffed sea-gull and cheap china rocks afforded ample testimony of his convictions regarding the worthlessness of Hobbema. To admire Hobbema and to paint like Mr. Brett is inconceivable, and it is equally impossible to sincerely admire Hals and disdain Manet. As well might one of two half-crowns, both fresh from the Mint, be declared to be a masterpiece of workmanship, while the other is dismissed as an artistic abomination. The celebrated Hals in the Louvre, of which I spoke last week, "La Bohemienne," might almost be mistaken for a Manet. A clear and simple vision, a firm and simple handling, are the distinguishing merits of this picture, as they are of "Le Bon Bock." That Hals could accomplish more than Manet there can be little doubt; that Hals was far more complete than Manet I shall not attempt to deny; but I do maintain that it is impossible to understand and admire Hals and disdain Manet. Those who do not like Manet do not like Hals. The Hals exhibited this year in the Academy, and afterwards at the Guildhall, would fetch, at Christie's, something very like two thousand pounds. The "Bon Bock" would not probably fetch more than two or three hundred pounds. This difference in price it would be difficult to explain by reference to the pictures. Their merits are identical.

Twenty years ago Manet's name was a folly and a byword in the Parisian studios. The students of the Beaux-Arts used to stand before his Salon pictures and sincerely wonder how anyone could paint like that; the students were quite sure that it was done for a joke, to attract attention; and then, not quite sincerely, one would say: "But I'll undertake to paint you three pictures a week like that." I say the remark was never quite sincere, for I never heard it made without someone answering, "I don't think you could; just come and look at it again – there's more in it than you think." Then the first speaker would burst forth, but it was easy to see that he was not quite sure that there was not a something in the picture which would prevent him from painting three a week like it. No doubt we thought Manet very absurd, but there was always something forced and artificial in our laughter and the ridicule we heaped upon him.

But about that time my opinions were changing; and it was a great event in my life when Manet spoke to me in the café of the Nouvelle Athène. I knew it was Manet; he had been pointed out to

me, and I had admired the finely-cut face from whose prominent chin a closely-cut blond beard came forward; and the aquiline nose, the clear grey eyes, the decisive voice, the reml\rkable comeliness of the well-knit figure, scrupulously but simply dressed, represented a personality curiously sympathetic and curiously needful to me at that stage of my intellectual progress. On several occasions shyness had compelled me to abandon my determination to speak to him. But once he had spoken I entered eagerly into conversation, and next day I went to his studio. It was quite a simple place. Manet expended his aestheticism on his canvases, and not upon tapestries and inlaid cabinets. There was very little in his studio except his pictures; a sofa, a rocking chair, a table for his paints, and a marble table on iron supports, such as one sees in cafés. Being a fresh-complexioned, fair-haired young man, the type most suitable to Manet's palette, he at once asked me to sit. His first intention was to paint me in a café; he had met me in a café, and thought he could realise his impression of me in the first surrounding he had seen me in. But the portrait did not come right. I sat for it some twenty times, and had therefore every opportunity of studying Manet's method of painting. Strictly speaking, he had no method; painting with him was a pure instinct. Painting was one of the ways his nature manifested itself. That frank, fearless, prompt nature manifested itself in everything that concerned him – in his large plain studio, full of clear light as a conservatory, in his simple, scrupulous clothes, and yet with a touch of the dandy about them, in decisive speech, quick, hearty, and informed with a manly and sincere understanding of life. Never was an artist's inner nature in more direct conformity with his work. There were no circumlocutions in Manet's nature, there were none in his art.

But I have come to the end of my space, and must reserve till next week my criticism of his work. G.M.