Читать книгу Ananias or the False Artist - Walter Pach - Страница 8

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A poor old argument, worn threadbare with misuse, still reappears from time to time. It is to the effect that citing the attacks on the earlier masters of the modern period is an attempt to prove that every man who is attacked must, therefore, be a master. No one in his senses ever made such a claim. This book is not about modern art. It is about a particular type of artist as old as the Bible. I shall try to show, presently, why he has been especially plentiful in modern times. My recalling the cases of Ingres and Delacroix had a purpose quite different from that of defending the period to which they belong. It was because they present one of the most dramatic examples of antagonism between two great men—a case about which we have more complete details than those handed down by tradition about the slurs which Michael Angelo is said to have cast on Titian and even on Leonardo.

People will say: “You call opposition to the great men the work of Ananias. Do you apply that name to Ingres, with his bitter hostility to Delacroix? When the great Romanticist was finally elected to the Institute, Ingres said, ‘Now the wolf is loose in the sheepfold!’ Or if you want a specimen of what the chief of the Classical school thought of one of the Old Masters, what do you make of those words which Ingres pronounced to his atelier: ‘You are my pupils, and therefore my friends, and, as such, you would not salute one of my enemies if he happened to pass beside you in the street. Turn away, then, from Rubens in the museums, wherever you meet him, for if you go toward him, he will certainly speak evil of my teaching and of me.’ After that, from a great man, let me hear what you have to say about your grand principles, your beautiful right and wrong. I tell you, art is a matter of taste, and I don’t agree with yours when you use the name of Ananias as to what is simply a difference of honest opinion.”

I never linked Ingres with the men about whom this book is written. I mention him now only to deny that he has any likeness to the breed. Delacroix never impugned the sincerity of his rival, and it was only in the intimate confidences of a diary that he revealed his opinion of Ingres’s painting, “The complete expression of an incomplete intelligence.” The terrible epigram is mitigated by other of his observations on the Classicist, many of them favorable in the extreme. Taking the matter from the other angle, considering the opposition to Delacroix by Ingres, we read the following in Lapauze’s biography: “Ingres had no reproach against the man; what he pursued in Delacroix was the delirium of the brush, which he abominated, and the influence, a disastrous one in his opinion, which, sweeping along the ignorant and easily captivated, was precipitating the decadence of French art.” There is no hint, then, in the words of either of the masters, that he charged his opponent with that desertion of principles which I take as the characteristic of Ananias. If the case of Ingres and Delacroix be offered, therefore, as an example of arraignments as drastic as my own and which have since turned out to be baseless, I think it is clear that such instances of past error have no bearing on my argument. There is no connection between “honest differences of opinion” and a breach of faith.

There remains the certain matter that convictions as to art may be held with passionate sincerity and yet be mistaken. Time decides such questions. Ingres was wrong about Delacroix, whose influence has been almost everywhere victorious in French art—and without precipitating any decadence. On the contrary, every development that has come from it directly or indirectly has been one of health and fertility. “But when you admit that even a master like Ingres may fall into error, should it not make you pause, when you may be committing the gravest injustice toward men against whose style you probably have nothing more than a merely personal dislike? Look at Ingres’s attack on Rubens. The personal element in it is clear when you notice the words ‘he will certainly speak evil of my teaching and of me.’” No; there is evidence that we are even here dealing with general principles, and with essential agreement as to good and bad. In his scholarly commentary on “L’Atelier d’Ingres” by Amaury-Duval, Elie Faure adduces a significant sentence which he came on among notes which the Classicist thought of as “destined never to see the light.” We may be happy that they did, for they are needed, both for a better understanding of Ingres himself and for the certitude they give us that opposition to the masters, by those who are at all of their race, is always more apparent than real. Here are the words, “Yes, to be sure, Rubens is a great painter; but he is that great painter who has ruined everything.” Again the idea that we found in the statement about Delacroix, the worshiper of Rubens. The two masters themselves are not the object of Ingres’s enmity; he warns the world against the “disastrous influence” of the one, and the fact (as he sees it) that the other ruins those who approach him. Ingres had the idea which Goethe had expressed in his axiom—“Classicism means health; Romanticism means disease.” Finding two great painters—one of an older school, the other a modern—leading French art in the direction he abhorred, Ingres thought it his duty to combat them by every means at his disposal.

The truth about his attitude toward Delacroix appears in that passage in M. Faure’s invaluable notes on his new edition of “L’Atelier d’Ingres,” wherein he permits Chenavard to recount again the scene witnessed by the latter as he and Delacroix were going to the Institute for one of its sessions:

Chance willed that Ingres should be only a few steps ahead of us. As we were approaching the door, and those two irreconcilable enemies were just meeting and measuring each other with a look, Ingres suddenly extended his hand to Delacroix, moved by an impulse of secret sympathy which for a long time had been drawing together the natures of the two great artists, both revolutionaries in their way and both sterling men....

I cannot tell you the joy that gripped my heart when I stood beside those two splendid athletes whom the French School had watched in their proud struggle, when I saw their two flags finally united by their embrace of friendship, when I evoked the memory of so many fallen comrades, who, could they have seen as I did, Ingres and Delacroix—irreproachable draftsmanship and the life inseparable from it—meeting and clasping hands on the landing of the Institute of France, would have asked no more for the moment of their death as conquered men.

The “objective” critics will not fail to notice that the artist-philosopher has proved nothing with his “lyricism.” His references to struggles, flags, embraces of friendship, France, and death will be for them only another example of the Gallic temperament venting its fury in theatrical eloquence. Yet I must impenitently confess that I cannot read the passage without experiencing the very emotion which Chenavard describes; and if that is a sign of weakness, then I fall back on the fact (and the objectivist loves a fact) that Ingres, deep in his heart, had the respect for his rival which made him suddenly offer his hand to the man whom he had attacked. That gesture of the old artist who had taken it for granted that even his pupils would not bow to his enemies, may well cause us to suspect that it is in the pupils of both men that we are to see the chief explanation of their enmity. “No one lies like a disciple.” The insults exchanged between the two camps caused a personal bitterness between the masters and led Ingres to speak in public those words against Rubens, the idol of the Romanticist, which he nullified by the contradictory words he wrote in private.

Chenavard, it may be asserted, has offered at best a hypothesis, not a proof. I agree; I will go further and deny that any essential thing in art ever was absolutely proved. I spoke before of the impotence of science to demonstrate quite simple, material points. Let me now ask the man who insists on my giving proof that Ananias is what I claim, how he proves that Rembrandt is great, or Shakespeare. The opinion of educated men? Possibly—if it were quite unanimous throughout many centuries. But we have no such approach to proof—the opinion on Rembrandt a hundred years ago was a relatively low one; somewhat later, Ruskin, entranced by the purity of the Italian Primitives, spoke of Rembrandt as vulgar; and in 1851, when Delacroix in his musings confided to his diary that a day may come when Rembrandt will be looked on as far greater than Raphael, he speaks in the next line of his thought as blasphemy, or at least as something that will seem like blasphemy. And as to Shakespeare, one cannot lightly dismiss the opposition of so clear and powerful an intellect as that of Voltaire. The possible explanations of it leave it still a fact, and with it one may cite similar instances, not many, it is true, but enough to let us say, Gentlemen may cry “proof, proof,” but there is no proof.

And there is, I am sure, no inconsistency in my denying the right to ask for proof in art-matters after taking up so much time with my insistence that there is a right and wrong in art. I cannot prove that the fault lay with Ruskin and Voltaire instead of with Rembrandt and Shakespeare. But who wants proof in the question? Only the man who does (or rather, only the man who can supply it) may demand proof of the convictions expressed in this book. I will meet you as far along the way as I can; I will affirm that my beliefs are those of a large number of artists and art-lovers, not merely of one school or one time, but of all schools and all times; I will offer evidence where I can, as in the case of Ingres and Delacroix; and I point to the record of all true artists as that of a body of men who have held to their faith with a singleness of purpose that rises above the need of proof or the possibility of it. Here, then, is the central fact in the problem: the artist does not create by means of intellectual logic, such as presides over a mathematical demonstration. Reason is satisfied by his result, when sufficiently familiar with it; but reason alone is powerless to bring it into being. A coördination of the brain with the senses (sight, hearing, and touch) is needed, and their meeting involves the whole of the man; we sometimes say he acts by instinct, by inspiration, by intuition. The recognition of art is closely akin to the creation of it, and though incomparably more frequent and less intense than the artist’s experience, that of the appreciator is still near enough to explain the world’s perennial delight in works of art. When men like Schiller and Beethoven discuss art together, it is not in the terms of the law court, or of the chair of logic, of chemistry, or of mathematics, it is in the words of the “Ode to Joy” which closes the Ninth Symphony—“Hail to thee, daughter of Elysium.”