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WHEN the nineteenth century opens, two forces sustain the word—German thought and the French Revolution. Outside of these, in political Germany, Russia, England, Italy, and Spain, everything is confusion, irresolution, sordid interest, stammering, stagnation, or half-sleep. And in France itself, the activity is too powerful for a dawn of the spirit. With the voice of Lamarck stifled, there is, in the Occident, but one thought, that of Kant; one word, that of Goethe; one cry, that of Beethoven. The only man who replies to them, the only one whose imagination is sufficiently vast to give to action the grand face of the dream, the inner order sufficiently master of itself to assemble into a living symphony all hearts—which are happy in their obedience, the mind sufficiently imperious and rapid to stamp strategic marches and the movements of armies with the continuity of line and the harmonious grouping of mass which define a picture, effaces all, in France, who around him attempt to exist by themselves, and makes demi-gods of all who, by habit, are the most humble of men. Moreover, Beethoven is vexed but admires, Goethe understands and acquiesces, Byron flies in the wake of the lightning, Goya grinds his teeth under the hot iron, but. to gain his victory, rises still higher. The rumblings of the thunder will not die down for a century; they will unite the fragments of the peoples, will break the last bonds of the Middle Ages, and will plunge into the soul of the great pessimists of Europe, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Schopenhauer, Delacroix, Wagner, Dostoievski, and Nietzsche, the image of the only power, since the power of Christ, capable of giving direction to the world. Napoleon the poet, leading the aroused crowds, determines the character of the century, and, if he drains the peoples of their blood, he injects such a ferment into their souls that they seem to date from him.
WHEN the nineteenth century opens, two forces sustain the word—German thought and the French Revolution. Outside of these, in political Germany, Russia, England, Italy, and Spain, everything is confusion, irresolution, sordid interest, stammering, stagnation, or half-sleep. And in France itself, the activity is too powerful for a dawn of the spirit. With the voice of Lamarck stifled, there is, in the Occident, but one thought, that of Kant; one word, that of Goethe; one cry, that of Beethoven. The only man who replies to them, the only one whose imagination is sufficiently vast to give to action the grand face of the dream, the inner order sufficiently master of itself to assemble into a living symphony all hearts—which are happy in their obedience, the mind sufficiently imperious and rapid to stamp strategic marches and the movements of armies with the continuity of line and the harmonious grouping of mass which define a picture, effaces all, in France, who around him attempt to exist by themselves, and makes demi-gods of all who, by habit, are the most humble of men. Moreover, Beethoven is vexed but admires, Goethe understands and acquiesces, Byron flies in the wake of the lightning, Goya grinds his teeth under the hot iron, but. to gain his victory, rises still higher. The rumblings of the thunder will not die down for a century; they will unite the fragments of the peoples, will break the last bonds of the Middle Ages, and will plunge into the soul of the great pessimists of Europe, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Schopenhauer, Delacroix, Wagner, Dostoievski, and Nietzsche, the image of the only power, since the power of Christ, capable of giving direction to the world. Napoleon the poet, leading the aroused crowds, determines the character of the century, and, if he drains the peoples of their blood, he injects such a ferment into their souls that they seem to date from him.
A
romanticist through his original culture, his love for Rousseau, for Goethe,
and for the Ossianic poems, through his need to turn his eyes toward the
Orient, toward Egypt, toward India—the whole Empire of the sun, a romanticist
through his great, pitiless dream, which handles multitudes and souls like
lights and shadows on a surface to be sculptured, through his violent lyricism
which precipitates conquest on the heels of desire, and through his vision of
the final nothingness, which causes him to go through life with passion alone
as his object, and fatality as his law, he unchains romanticism. The mothers
curse him. But their womb trembles from the moment when he appears on the
horizon. Every man who will be great in France, during the century—Corot,
Vigny, Delacroix, Michelet, Balzac, Hugo, Berlioz, and Daumier—to speak only of
artists, and who is there that counts between such a man and the artists?—is
born, and grows up between the Italian Iliad of 1796 and the hour when he
reaches his summit.
When
they attain maturity, the sentimentalism of Rousseau has ripened in all hearts;
Chateaubriand brings into literature the art of the Middle Ages, the Orient,
the forest, the virgin rivers, and legendary Christianity; Madame de Staël
brings the unknown soul of the north, with its metaphysical torment, and with
its vertiginous need for color, for the exception, and for the vague
intoxication of religion; and the whole of literature rushes upon its course of
lyric passion, along which the individual, indifferent to everything which is
not himself, surrenders himself to the torrent of the forces and of the eternal
images of the universe and of love. The stamp of Catholicism, and the reaction
of form and of desire against the abstract rationalism of the preceding century
are of but little importance. By its capacity for passion, by hurling itself
with its wild exaltation into the conquest of the earth, of history, of the
light, and of death, romanticism contributes to break the ancient forms of
religion and of the law, which science, with its slower, stealthier step,
attacks at the same time. France, who for two centuries had been a reasoner,
suddenly becomes an artist again, and launches forth wildly toward life, which
reveals its new rhythms, and bursts the old molds. In the domain of sensation
she equals the effort which the preceding age had made in the direction of war
and liberty. The philosophical investigation of the French, the metaphysical
analysis of the Germans, and the impotence for action after the greatest moment
of action in history have produced intellectual despair, and also the sensation
that it is increased by its indifference to the moral problem; but again there
is consolation for that in the endless splendor which has been achieved. France
has inundated the world, which flows back from everywhere. Here is the whole
terrestrial universe, and all the skies and all the oceans, all the adventures
of the men of the olden time and of to-day, all the ancient or distant myths of
the sun and of the mist, the Inferno of Dante, the pitiless, clear sight of
Goethe, and the immense reverie, enchanted and poignant, of Shakespeare.
Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Gluck, and the last to come, Beethoven, contribute, to
the troubled depths of existence the tumult of the great harmonies of nature,
which turn confusedly into new elements expressive of the delirium of the
intelligence and of the tragedy in men's hearts.
Painting
offers itself to the artist. It is music in its power of expressing the form of
sentiment, by color, by its multiple reflections which answer one another, by
its gradations, its passages, its immense keyboard, from black or colored
shadow at the bottom of the abyss, to the brilliant summits of the most
strongly marked projections. The sensation of sonority and the sensation of
color merge in it, the tempest of the orchestra unchains in it a rhythmed
tumult of subtle sense impressions in which one perceives clamors, moans, cries
of anger, and sighs of voluptuousness, even as one sees grand architectures
arising, and forms mounting and descending like a sea when the power of an
orchestra forces one to close one's eyes. In this century, the poets will be
painters. The whole surface of the world breaks up and vibrates and moves in
the work of Hugo; and in the work of Baudelaire, the whole burning spirit of
matter, of perfumes, and of colors pours forth from the heart, like a lava of
blood, following each throb of the arteries. In the music of Berlioz, the face
of nature appears like a violent drawing, in which decisive strokes cross their
flames, or crawl like reptiles, leaving a wake of fire. But painting is an
object in itself, an object which France has kept under her eyes constantly for
three hundred years, while Germany, who never really loved it, has, for two
hundred years, no longer had the vision for it, while in Italy it is falling to
dust, and while Spain no longer perceives it save in the glare of a single
flash of lightning. The dictatorship of David bears its fruits at once. While
the Academy claims to follow him, in order to drag on for two generations more
its insolent and servile poverty, everything strong and green turns to David to
seek the structure which Delacroix will break in places, will brutally twist,
and will combine in a hundred fashions, in order to sustain the burning flesh
and the movement of his fever, and which Ingres will purify and vivify, little
by little, in order to inclose in it the concrete and definite object of his
desire. Down to Courbet—and including the time of Courbet—David will hold the
regency of painting. Under him the sculptor Rude studied the anatomical nude
and learned how to set a violent body in equilibrium on legs which seem to hold
to the ground like trunks of oak trees, and how to hurl into the stone his democratic
enthusiasm—a trifle hollow, but living—which sets up a vibration on the face of
the walls. The "Raft of the Medusa" of Géricault, the
"Barricade" of Delacroix, and the first plates of Daumier bear the
traces, quite as manifestly, of the lessons of the old regicide, who would have
recognized his spirit in their mountainous modeling, which throws the muscles
and the skeleton into relief, and so brings these masters nearer to him than
Ingres ever was. And it is from him that Gros will borrow, for his military
poems, the solid, but too stiff and too fixed, architecture which will end by
paralyzing their movement and stifling their flame.
It is
certain that the man was born a great painter. Whereas the fire of Watteau was
no longer giving forth more than a few intermittent gleams in the painting of
Greuze and of Fragonard, whereas Davidian discipline concentrated itself entire
upon the rendering of brute matter and upon following the contours of Roman
sculptures, Gros felt the warrior energy of his time burning in his veins.
Rubens, the man who launched his own life like a great river into all future
time, had dazzled him. He had followed Bonaparte on foot, from the Alps to the
Tyrol, lived in the tumultuous crowd of the camps and of the marches that struck
like thunderbolts, seen the slender boy with the eyes of fever seizing a flag
amid the bullets and pass through death, in order to gain possession of the
right to command men and to subjugate the future. There is no abstraction in
his desire. He painted war horses with open nostrils, bloody eyes, and hair
matted by blood and dust, while their breath and sweat mingle with the reddened
haze of smoke of the northern battlefields. He copied cadavers in the
blood-stained snow. While Bonaparte was annexing to the moral domain of Europe
the desert peopled with sphinxes and with tombs, and the oldest adventure of
the world. Gros experienced the chagrin of remaining exiled in France,
imagining the burning sand, the leaden expanse of the mirages, the storm of the
horsemen with the wind whipping their bernouses, and, in the damp, ill-smelling
shadow of some mosque where the lamps have burned out, where the dulled glaze
of tiles is soiled by disease, the dying men who crawl there, their faces
turning green, and their bandages spotted with black blood around open sores.
With the blue steel of the cuirasses, the cloth and the velvet of the
multicolored uniforms, with the flashes of the firing, and with bits of sky
seen amid flying manes, he had acquired the power of organizing dramas full of
the color and movement of war; in them life was exalted by war, whose brutal
movement was carried into the young and lyrical souls which were opening up
everywhere.
Had
Gros already possessed the mastery needed to project outside himself his
furious gestures and his powerful harmonies, as a free and unified symbol of
the storms of his heart, romanticist painting would have been finished at a
single blow. But he hesitated. He hesitated between the object too closely
pursued and the magisterial doctrine to which he gave too servile attention.
The two things clashed. A too direct realism enchained the tragedy. The
overtense drawing of the School arrested the living sentiment which was ready
to bound from the soul, paralyzing its flight in a tangle of bizarre and
factitious forms. Gros's work stands as a passage full of anguish between the
immobility of David and the tumult of Delacroix. He kept on stubbornly till the
end, and even seemed to comprehend the situation less and less. While around
him, with Géricault, and soon with Delacroix, the flame of revolt was rising,
he made it his point of honor to defend the School of the old master, exiled in
Brussels by the Restoration. But the old master was, in his letters at this
very time, confessing to him his admiration for Rubens. Against the young men
who were taking him as a point of departure, almost against David, and, above
all, against himself. Gros remained obstinate in establishing his art at the
antipodes of his being. Upon a certain day, in despair at the oblivion into
which he was sinking, bleeding from all the wounds which the art he had
revealed was inflicting upon him at each new exhibition, incapable of breaking
the matrix which was hardening around his genius and was crushing him little by
little, he killed himself. He died a romanticist, at the very moment when,
through Hugo, through Berlioz, and through Delacroix, Romanticism was affirming
itself.
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