FRENCH ART.* THE story is told of a banquet in
some provincial town, at which, after the usual loyal toasts had been honoured, Art was toasted as a means of getting a distinguished critic who was present, upon his legs. This gentleman, taken unawares, made some indiscreet references to the art of France, and the Mayor had therefore to apologise to the guests with the assurance that be had never thought French art would
• • French Art Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture. By W. 0. Brownell. London : David Nutt. 1892.
be mentioned under that roof. The utterance was a " record," but its spirit is vaguely echoed in the general ideas of our countrypeople about the art of their neigh- bours. A hasty dip into the Salon from time to time only confirms the British tourist in his ideas ; for with no guidance or perspective he steers straight for any pic- tures that confirm the legend of a loose and bloodthirsty art, and returns home to report these observations, taken in exhibitions to which the great French artists are strangers. A book like the one before us, written with knowledge, taste, and sanity, ought to do something with those who are capable of interest or appreciation, to make the history of French art understood,—the history of the passion on the one hand for classic beauty, on the other for the poetic expression of nature ; and to render more familiar in the order of their appearance and the order of their ideas, the heroic artistic figures that have dignified the history. Our notice of Mr. Brownell's book is somewhat belated, but it is a book so good that it can afford to wait. There is no other that exactly takes its place, and it is not likely to be immediately superseded.
Several writers have taken up the task of introducing English readers to French art. In former days, Mr. Hamerton did some service of this kind. Bat he and the writers of his generation gave out before the more recent developments of the French school. They could recite sympathetically the ancient conflicts of classicism and romanticism ; but the touchstone of the living artist found them at fault. It is a very curious thing to watch the logical ideas applicable to painting rehandled in each period. The man who is influenced in his approval or disapproval of art by arguments addressed to his intelligence, and not by the taste of his eye, has always to be brought round to anything new in the art by a logical rearrangement of venerable " pros " and " cons " about Nature and style, the admissibility of this and the authority for that. These persuasive logical arrangements of one generation of critics are the encumbrance of the next, and have to be rearranged to persuade the acceptance of a fresh develop- ment. And all the time the eye goes its way, following a logic which it is difficult for intelligence closely enough to follow and formulate. With the merely intelligent critic there comes a time when he stiffens up and refuses to re-form his forces, to occupy any further territory. Then there is a battle, a gap, a new generation.
Mr. Brownell is an American critic who has the advantages of a late-comer, and a late-corner with a singularly open and intelligent mind. If he has a fault, it is that his intelligence occasionally runs away with him, and sets him providing for imaginary cases in the air. But be goes to work in the right fashion for a critic who wishes to be catholic, to undulate with the waves of succeeding schools, to understand and sympathise. In this spirit he takes French art from its artificial start as an importation from Italy under Francis I.,—an art not home- grown, but established by the act of a connoisseur. He follows it down to the Revolution, when the classicising of David gave it a fresh imprint; tells the story of the Romantic school in its rise with Gerieault and Delacroix, its develop- ment in the art of Millet, Corot, and the rest ; explains the new ideas of Monet and his contemporaries, and finally discusses the Impressionism of Monet and the art of Degas, in which the classic veneration for line coming from Ingres, is so subtly blended with very different visual and emotional elements. In a fourth section he discusses sculpture, with a particularly good account of the great Rodin.
It would be possible to quarrel with Mr. Brownell's sense of proportion or the connections on which his theory hinges. Thus, to take an instance somewhat early in the book, he gives little credit to Watteau and Fragonard for their extension of observation to a new kind of grace, or for the new spirit and proportion with which they handled the elements of the Vene- tian picture. Changes in the ideas of picture-making may take place without any very violent interruption : a large part of the material remains stationary, but a slight variation in some other part, or the balance of the whole, has the effect of a vital revolution. But it is something to be able to say of a writer on art that he follows, from beginning to end, a luminous train of thought, and that this train is constructed near enough to the facts to include a large proportion of them in its exposition. Single passages, too, like that com- paring the treatment of light by G6rome, Monet, and Monet,
are handled with a great power of lucid statement. It is the defect of the merit of a book like this that " catholic " appre- ciation means an interest in ideas, rather than a warm admiration of the masterpieces of art. When you try to get at the "point of view" of each painter, to state what may be called the " pretence " of his work, you are apt in the end to think his work is better, because you have come to understand why he made it as it is. In the same way, the distinctions made by contemporary artists—and champions— may easily be taken too seriously. At a little distance, it is seen that a very alight departure was often magnified by the warmth of intention for or against it; the romantic is much liker to the classic than we supposed. Many of the disputes, like our disputes at this day, were battles of which the issue had long ago been fought out, and the Old Masters were standing silently by to see their descendants laboriously and passionately inventing as new, or suppressing as revo- lutionary, elements that long before had been victoriously added to the canon. But these parochial fights must go on to the end of the chapter, for the fine in art is amazing and disconcerting to the dunce as often as it appears.
Mr. Brownell's style is marred by some mannerisms of phrase, and occasionally by a lack of straightforward con- struction due to qualifications inserted in the process of statement. But the book is intelligible as well as subtle, and no account of art can be true if it is not that. We commend it to all students of its subject.
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