Vuillard and Keene
Charles Keene. By Derek Hudson. (Pleiades. 18s.)
THESE books by M. Roger Marx and Mr. Hudson appear side by side with a peculiar appropriateness. Not only are their respective artists as characteristically French and English as could be wished, but the monographs themselves might fairly be taken as typical samples of the two conventions of criticism. The French writer ranges widely over the incomparable glories of his national school, regarding its monuments as he wanders among them, tenderly but acutely. It is a free, allusive ramble round the subject ; if some of the shades evoked (Seurat and Le Sueur are among the names often on the pen of M. Marx) have to the barbarian eye little obvious relevance, every turn reveals none the less a justified pride, a cultivation of the values of the native tradition. The English manner is prosaic by comparison. As if to conceal some lurking embarrassment the writer keeps very close to matters of fact. Juvenilia and facetiae are prominently pre- sented; the domestic details which might half excuse the unconven- tional attributes of such a hero are amply recorded. Such artistic claims as the writer makes for him have an air almost of defiance ; when Mr. Hudson is in search of a parallel it is to Velasquez that he turns. With his subject's tobacco, his bagpipes, his taste for marmalade with his meat, he is on firmer ground. It is the English way to deal warily with the characteristic which distinguishes an artist from other kinds of eccentric.
Mr. Hudson's book is nevertheless indispensable. Unfortunately, in the present scarcity of literature on Keene, this is a distinction which would attach to almost any book about him. Mr. Hudson has drawn upon some unpublished sources (thus adding to the formidable body of material which still awaits digestion in an adequate biography). And the rediscovery of the chalk drawings from Thomas Barret's Book of Beauty, whose prominence here we doubtless owe to the taste of the book-buying public for coloured plates, will have a permanent value; it is unlikely that anyone will trouble with them again. A serious consideration of the development of Keene's style is still lacking. The abundance of evidence—almost every week for forty years Punch unwittingly provided a future historian with the terminus ante quem of one or more of his most beautiful drawings— makes it a perfect laboratory specimen of a draughtsman's evolution, but the study has not yet been attempted. Keene is to blame; he floats so modestly, unprotesting, along on the current of his time that an elaborate expedition to rescue him would be in permanent danger of seeming ridiculous. Keene never discussed his work or anyone else's. Vuillard's formative years, on the other hand, were spent on the fringe of a desperate eruption of aesthetic fervour and argument. No:one will discover quite what the famous battles were about from this book, for M. Mars's method is oblique and reminiscent. Vuillard's contact with the ferment was momentary only, but such a stimulus has its penalties; in later years the artist was not far from exhaustion. England protects her artists, or used to, from intellectual strain with a completeness that has often crippled them. In Keene the com- pensations are visible; few artists since have been able to indulge their delight in commonplace appearances so naturally. Vuillard's studio contained a cast of the Venus of Melos ; Keene's, it is said, a large collection of characteristic types of boot. For Vuillard, with his unsatisfied longing for the classic, his nostalgia for the style of Puvis (revealed so unhappily at Geneva at the end of his life), the commonplace, once so cull of poetry, came to wear almost the aspect of a prison. Keene's most subtle and luminous transformations were liberated by the intimate nature of the coffee-stall drunk, the cabby, the four-wheeler. Over both lives, Vuillard living with his mother in the lacy, screened • Parisian apartments, and Keene living with his mother in the Hammer- smith Road, hangs a faint shadow of disappointment. Keene told a friend that he was "always looking forward to the time when he should be able to devote himself to etching and painting." He never did, though he made a fortune before he died. In his seclusion Vuillard watched the theoretical convulsions which had touched his youth spread and destroy the style which had nourished him. Keene with his essentially sociable nature, was luckier; his influence has
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