AN ASTONISHING BIOGRAPHY

Henri Rousseau. By Rcelt Grey. With 33 reproductions in phototype. (Valori Plastici, Rome. 8 Lire.) TI1ERE is a q tiality in the painting of Rousseau " the Douanier which makes it fitting that his biography in English should have a peculiar tone ; but M. Roch Grey has gone further than even the most fantastic imagination could have expected.

Henri Rousseau is a " modern " painter little known, but highly esteemed by many people in Paris and London. Odd he certainly is, but not incompetent. His stiff groups of work- people in gala dress, attended by impossible dogs in leafy back-gardens, are far stranger than Cezanne or Van Gogh, and resemble nothing but those anonymous amateur works which hang on the walls of wayside inns. In Rousseau's pictures purely imaginary tigers or monkeys grimace in a thicket of waxy foliage ; his cows and rabbits seem made of expensive velvet and everything has a miraculous quality, whether it be an airship, a dog-cart or Adam and Eve. But his dog-cart is drawn with real competence and the perspectives of his odd landscapes are convincing ; above all, every object that he re- produces is seen and painted lovingly, almost ecstatically. It is to be doubted if he recognized himself for an eccentric.

Nor probably does his biographer, M. Roch Grey ; but his account of the workman-painter's life and work is worthy of a place among the curiosities of literature. There are lovers of the peculiar in English composition who treasure conies of Mrs. Amanda Ros's Define Delaney, of the defunct Blast, of the prose of a Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino, who wrote among other things John Bullesses I Have Known, and of The Life and Death of the Honble Onueul Chundra Moukerjec, which was composed by an Indian with an immense but highly individual vocabulary. There is an insane sanity about them all which recalls Lewis Carroll at his best and equally pleasantly stirs surprised merriment in the reader. Henri Rousseau is exactly in their Category.

In reading its few pages, just as in watching a Chaplin film- farce, reality and common-sense fade away : an unusual feeling of amusement is induced such as one usually expe- riences in dreams. The biography begins :- "Since artistic plastic art has been rooted in the lives of men those who have exercised it have almost always belonged to an ambient propitious to its development . . . masters willingly gathered round them pupils and enticed their youth to suffer the commands of kings and patrons. Later on, men of Arts, driven by every evolution, gave themselves up entirely to spiritual life. The mingling of different races, impossible to verify, created in the world a possibility of every aspiration, discovering in every cross-birth an index necessary to a desire to rise to better things.

But. the author insists that the genius of Rousseau was beyond calculation :- " No influence of his surroundings -drove Henri Rousseau to be an artist . . . the sameness of the workman's life is the barrier to all possibilities of intellectual effervescence."

Rousseau had to struggle alone to find something which would satisfy him ; and it is suggested, apparently with no good reason, that even as a child he derived a particular aesthetic joy from

" everything that was well-done, well-executed, smooth, equal : an old credence glossed over by use like the surface of a fountain in the dusk of evening twilight when the water is still ; or the mechanism of a paternal watch in a till bulb."

This is not the bad English of a naif translator, but the lively pidgin English of one who " knows " literary style from attentive study. Often quite incomprehensible, often silly because of its cumbrous turn, at times there is so • much ex- pressed though awkwardly by an unaccustomed juxtaposition of words and phrases that the reader is half inclined iko feel that if it be not English, then it ought to be. How grand is this :- " his simplicity, approaching to the extreme aristocratic in the sovereign possession of himself without the necessity of attributes strange to him."

And how rich the description of the Jardin des Plantes which - inspired Rousseau to paint his exotic landscapes :- " The hothouse where marvellous healthy plants grew . . . flowers with immaculate chalices to corollas never seen, and others alike with constructions impossible to define. . . Near by, the -lions roared, the tigers scented thedeath of the beasts they would fell to the ground, gross serpents attenuated with sadness, in their blankets inherited from hospitals, red parroquets, blue and yellow,

screaming injuries over the heads of geese that have no idea of anything, and idle monkeys sweetly dying of love."

We are to understand, I think, that the gross serpents were nestling in discarded army blankets : while the " parroquets " were screaming not injuries but " injures " or bad language.

Rousseau was employed in a Customs house until quite late in life, and used to paint only on Sundays and holidays " uniquely destined to gladness " : that is why, as his bio- grapher suggests, his compositions all have the strained, unreal look of peasants in their best clothes, of a landscape trans- figured :—

" The noise of the city on Sunday was opposed to that which weaned the week-days. Even human respiration instead of being feverously accelerated by the pressure of the order given by neces- sity, experiences a calm, following the breathing natural to its existence. The very beast, even the most harassed like the horses (with the exception of some inhuman exigencies), sleep peacefully in their stables ; dogs, too, even belonging to less fortunate beings, participate in this universal tendency to the domenical joy and quietness."

When already old, the artist gave up his employment and lived difficultly by giving violin lessons. Every now and then he gave a concert for his pupils and their parents, to which aesthetes sometimes came out of curiosity.

" Henri Rousseau dressed in a frock coat and white neck-tie was chef of his juvenile orchestra, and composer of ritournelles and songs in which he revested his poems . . . he had the pro- grammes entirely composed of his works, so touching whon one thought of his age. . . .

He remained the least successful of men, a sad fact which causes M. Grey to remark :—

" By pure negligence, by blindness easy to comprehend, they left him to proceed oa his way. Inoffensive, poor and old, his shoulders slightly bowed, his fine face and clear complexion with his blue eyes like those of an infant, who could do him ill, who could remove so simple an apparition ? No one tried to stay criticism ; the ignorants who in the flourishing days of Henri Rousseau, directed the march of every glory, because they used no defensive arms of violence against him, will themselves enter comfortably in eternity. Play of Destiny in which some familiar shadow of genius stiftles a burst of laughter."

A few of the intellectuals at one time interested themselves in Rousseau, but not very seriously :-

" Without precising the matter or case of this extreme apparition, some artists bethought of approaching him ; certain of them maliciously considering him as a silly and gay half-fool ; others felt a sort of admiration for him, easily diminished or modified under the pressure of a malevolent laugh. '

For twenty-four years Rousseau pulled his canvases on a small hand-cart to the Salon d'Automne and the Independents,

but " they never ascended the halls of honour inaccessible on account of their appearance so uncommon,"

though now and then the laundry or a restaurant proprietor would accept one or two of them instead of money. Rousseau also gave drawing-lessons to two pupils, one of whom was seventy-two and the other eighty years old, and both of them used to grumble at him all the time for having thrown up his good job in the Customs. For a long time he walked every day across Paris to visit his pauvre petite, a lady called Leonie, aged fifty-four, whose father refused his consent to a marriage (it would have been Rousseau's third) and who seems to have treated him very shabbily. The autumnal love affair, the concerts for pupils, the pathetic trundling of canvases to exhi-

bitions all came to an end :-

" A violent death due to the want of care and comfort brought him humbly prostrate to a hospital bed. Here he passed away qualified as an alcoholic patient, and buried immediately in a com- mon grave."

Unique among painters, even such as nowadays find post- humous fame (the works of Rousseau the Douanier are very very expensive indeed now), he has found an unique biographer who shall be allowed to have the last word :—

" Product of the coincidences of nature working outside every heritage, on the part of some paradisaical superfluity treating of universal harmony, Henri lived a life without malice."