Handling

The Speaker, 30 July 1892, pages 135-136, 1,759 words

A fortnight ago my article on Manet was interrupted by want of space. I was telling how I sat to this great painter for a portrait. I mentioned that my hair was yellow. The colour of my hair never gave me a thought until Manet began to paint it. Then the blonde gold that came up under his brush filled me with admiration, and I was astonished when, a few days after, I saw him scrape off the rough paint and prepare to start afresh.

"Are you going to get a new canvas?"

"No: this will do all right."

"But you can't paint yellow ochre on yellow ochre without getting it dirty?"

" Yes, I think I can. You go and sit down."

Half an hour after he had entirely repainted the hair, and without losing anything of its brightness. He painted it again and again; every time it came out brighter and fresher, and the painting never seemed to lose anything in quality. That this portrait cost him infinite labour and was eventually destroyed matters nothing: my point is merely that he could paint yellow over  yellow without getting the colour muddy. One day, seeing that I was in difficulties with a black, he took a brush from my hand, and it seemed to have hardly touched the canvas when the ugly heaviness of my tiresome black began to disappear. There came into it grey and shimmering lights, the shadows filled up with air, and the silk seemed to float and rustle. There was no method – there was no trick; he merely painted. My palette was the same to him as his own; he did not prepare his palette; his colour did not exist on his palette before he put it on the canvas: but working under the immediate dictation of his eye, he snatched the tints instinctively, without premeditation. Ah! that marvellous hand, those thick fingers holding the brush so firmly – somewhat heavily; how malleable, how obedient, that most rebellious material, oil-colour, was to his touch. He did with it what he liked. I believe he could rub a picture over with Prussian blue without experiencing any inconvenience: half an hour after the colour would be fine and beautiful.

Was the magic in the hand or in the eye? Nine people out of ten will say: "In the eye, of course." And eight out of the nine will add: "By the eye we mean the brain." Eight out of the nine will affirm without hesitation that the form and the weight of five bits of flesh and bone cannot determine the artistic value of a work of art. It would be degrading to art to think that they could. A work of art proceeds straight from the brain, unassailed by the materialism of the hand; the hand is but the humble instrument. One set of fingers may be more adroit than another set, but the most maladroit must in the end submit to and execute the sovran will of the brain. So does modern sentiment deny all genius to the flesh, preferring to credit all genius to a mass of white gelatine.

But this arbitrary assignment of genius to the brain is surely the foolish intolerance of a too Christian world. I am weary of that overpraised organ called the brain – of all our organs the least prepossessing in appearance – a handful of nasty white gelatine! and I am eager to rehabilitate the hand in the position it has wrongfully been deprived of by the usurping brain. And not only will I speak of the genius of the hand, I will even speak of the genius of the material. The sculptor owes something to the block of marble. Some marble seems to come forth to meet the inspiration, and even prompts it; and when the artist is working bronze, and silver, and gold, and porcelain, the debt that he owes to his material becomes even more obvious. Why is it that, given two yachts built on identically similar lines – measured from stern to bow, they do not vary an eighth of an inch – yet one will easily outsail the other? Why is it that one watch will excel in the excellence of its time-keeping a hundred other watches, and yet they all correspond unfailingly in every spring and wheel? It is to the genius of the material that the ship-builder and the watch-maker owe their masterpieces, to some mysterious association of qualities in the wood and metal which chance has brought together. The quality of colour supplied by the colour-man counts for little in the momentary beauty of the artist's work, but in a hundred, even in five-and-twenty, years the paint begins to assume tones that the artist is not responsible for. Then, if we have to admit the genius of the material, why should we refuse genius to the hand? Why should we assume that any fingers will accomplish what the brain wills? As in the ship and the watch, may there not be a mysterious association of qualities which chance has brought into the flesh and bone of a set of fingers which enables the artist to use oil-colour as none of his contemporaries can?

And never did this mysterious power which produces what artists know as "quality" exist in greater abundance in any fingers than it did in the slow, thick fingers of Edouard Manet: never since the world began; not in Velasquez, not in Hals, not in Delacroix, not in Titian. As an artist Manet could not compare with the least among these illustrious painters; but as a manipulator of oil-colour he never was and never will be excelled. Manet was born a painter as absolutely as any man that ever lived, so absolutely that a very high and lucid intelligence never for a moment came between him and the desire to put nothing into his picture except good painting. I remember his saying to me, "I also tried to write, but I did not succeed; I never could do anything but paint." And what a splendid thing for an artist to be able to say. The real meaning of his words did not reach me till years after; perhaps I even thought at the time that he was disappointed that he could not write. I know now what was passing in his mind: Je ne me suis pas trompé de métier. How many of us can say as much? What happiness to be able to say, Je ne me suis pas trompé de métier. Go round a picture-gallery, and of how many pictures, ancient or modern, can you. stand before and say, Voilà un homme qui ne s'est pas trompé de métier?

And Manet was right, without any doubt; perhaps above all men of our generation he made the least mistake in his choice of a trade. Let those who doubt go and look at the beautiful picture of Boulogne Pier, now on view in Mr. Van Wesselingh's gallery, 26, Old Bond Street. The wooden pier goes right across the canvas; all the wood piers are drawn, there is no attempt to hide or attenuate their regularity. Why should Manet attenuate when he could fill the interspaces with the soft lapping of such exquisite green sea-water. Above the piers there is the ugly yellow-painted rail. But why alter the colour when he could keep it in such exquisite value? On the canvas it is beautiful. In the middle of the pier there is a mast and a sail which does duty for an awning; perhaps it is only a marine decoration. A few loungers are on the pier – men and women in grey clothes. Why introduce reds and blues when he was sure of being able to place the little figures in their places, to draw them so firmly, and to relieve the grey monotony with such beauty of execution? It would be vain to invent when so exquisite an execution is always at hand to relieve and to transform. Mr. Whistler would have chosen to look at the pier from a more fanciful point of view. Degas would have taken an odd corner; he would have outcut the composition strangely, and commented on the humanity of the pier. But Manet just painted it without circumlocutions of any kind. The subject as he found it was void of pictorial relief. There was not even a blue space in the sky, nor yet a dark cloud. He took the scene as it was – a white sky, full of an inner radiance, two sailing-boats floating in mist of heat, one in shadow, the other in light. I said that a Vandervelde would seem trivial and precious beside painting so firm, so manly, so free from trick, so beautifully logical and so unerring. I do not think I could have expressed myself better.

Manet did not often paint sea-pieces. He is best known and is most admired as a portrait painter; but from time to time he ventured to trust his painting to every kind of subject – I know even a cattle piece by Manet, and his Christ watched over by angels in the tomb is one of his finest works. His Christ is merely a rather fat model sitting with his back against a wall, and two women with wings on either side of him. There is no attempt to suggest a Divine death or to express the Kingdom of Heaven on the angels' faces. But the legs of the man are as fine a piece of painting as has ever been accomplished, and the colour throughout is exceedingly beautiful.

A great deal has been said in some quarters about Manet's originality. He was too great a painter to think about anything outside of painting. I know that the manipulation of colours is not the whole of art: but it was the whole of Manet's art. What he had was a miraculous execution. Manet's painting of still life has never been exceeded, and never will be. I remember a painting of a single pear that used to hang in his studio. No one ever painted better and no one ever will paint better. In an exhibition of portraits now open in Paris, entitled Cent Chefs-d'Oeuvre, Manet hss been paid the highest honour; he himself would not demand a greater honour – his "Bon Bock" has been hung next to a celebrated portrait by Hals....

Alas! I have come to the end of my space. G.M.