Paint, Paris and Perversity
From Toulouse-Lautrec to Rodin : with some personal im- pressions. By Arthur Symons. (The Bodley Head. 15'.) THESE essays, written at different times over a fairly long period of years, give an illuminating insight into the mind of a typical Englishman of the " nineties " in a typical, but still rather specialized, Paris of the same epoch.
It is essentially difficult to write about vice in English without appearing to be either " naice " or " naughty."
In French it is different. English words swell out so easily into something just a little pretentious and unreal. French words, even in the " wildest crescendo of rhetoric, alwayS seem to bite deeper into reality. One is prompted to this consideration by the first part of Mr. Symons' book, written, one would say, when he was recovering or had not quite recovered from the first bewilderment of the Montmartre of Toulouse-Lautrec, and continued a good deal later, with the thing still not quite in focus.
It is immensely interesting, of course, and leads to, a good deal of reflexion and comparison. How differently a French- man would have written some of these pages ! Indeed, how differently one has heard Frenchmen discuss the subject ! Again, how far away we seem in nineteen-thirty from the sins and the " Satanists " of forty years ago or less. They wallowed in the cult of pure horror then, and " sinister geniuses " who " were fated to die tragically young " abounded. Are we less wicked than they were, or more sophisticated ? To Mr. Symons our state would seem more parlous than
theirs ; for whereas we remain earthily indifferent, they saw their Sins intellectually, [esthetically with a capital S." Be that as it may, Mr. Symons makes his subjects live, if with some prolixity and repetition, going to their canvases for his evidence with illuminating zeal. Ce sent tie veritable. memoires sur lui-meme que ces tableaux.
The best essays are perhaps those on Whistler, Beardsley and Rodin ; but the book includes good chapters on Degas, Daumier, Manet and Forain and many others, some a little more than names to us, some a good deal less. An interest- ing book. It is a pity that the quotations in French were not corrected in the proof.
C. G.
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