CHAPTER III - FONTAINEBLEAU - VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS
I
THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart. It is a place that
people love even more than they admire. The vigorous forest air,
the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of
tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain groves -
these are but ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre.
The place is sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the
shapes of things concord in happy harmony. The artist may be idle
and not fear the "blues." He may dally with his life. Mirth,
lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of the very
essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most smiling
forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember. Even on the
plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the
ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and
healthy in the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness
and hysteria. There is no place where the young are more gladly
conscious of their youth, or the old better contented with their
age.
The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this
country to the artist. The field was chosen by men in whose blood
there still raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great
art - Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose
modern brush was dipped in the glamour of the ancients. It was
chosen before the day of that strange turn in the history of art,
of which we now perceive the culmination in impressionistic tales
and pictures - that voluntary aversion of the eye from all
speciously strong and beautiful effects - that disinterested love
of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint the river-
side primrose. It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris. And
for the same cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter of
to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it. There is in France
scenery incomparable for romance and harmony. Provence, and the
valley of the Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of
masterpieces waiting for the brush. The beauty is not merely
beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the imagination, and surprises
while it charms. Here you shall see castellated towns that would
befit the scenery of dreamland; streets that glow with colour like
cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite proportions; flowers
of every precious colour, growing thick like grass. All these, by
the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very door of the
modern painter; yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to
Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot
cascade in Cernay valley. Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him;
even in Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered.
But one thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may choose to
paint and in whatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell
among graceful shapes. Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery,
is classically graceful; and though the student may look for
different qualities, this quality, silently present, will educate
his hand and eye.
But, before all its other advantages - charm, loveliness, or
proximity to Paris - comes the great fact that it is already
colonised. The institution of a painters' colony is a work of time
and tact. The population must be conquered. The innkeeper has to
be taught, and he soon learns, the lesson of unlimited credit; he
must be taught to welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in
a very greasy coat, and with little baggage beyond a box of colours
and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his faith in customers
who will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to buy
tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year. A colour
merchant has next to be attracted. A certain vogue must be given
to the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals, should
find himself alone. And no sooner are these first difficulties
overcome, than fresh perils spring up upon the other side; and the
bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate. This is the
crucial moment for the colony. If these intruders gain a footing,
they not only banish freedom and amenity; pretty soon, by means of
their long purses, they will have undone the education of the
innkeeper; prices will rise and credit shorten; and the poor
painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet. "Not here, O
Apollo!" will become his song. Thus Trouville and, the other day,
St. Raphael were lost to the arts. Curious and not always edifying
are the shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair;
like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his
chosen pool; but at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs.
Grundy must allow him licence. Where his own purse and credit are
not threatened, he will do the honours of his village generously.
Any artist is made welcome, through whatever medium he may seek
expression; science is respected; even the idler, if he prove, as
he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at
home. And when that essentially modern creature, the English or
American girl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns
as if into a drawing-room at home, the French painter owned himself
defenceless; he submitted or he fled. His French respectability,
quite as precise as ours, though covering different provinces of
life, recoiled aghast before the innovation. But the girls were
painters; there was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last
saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair
invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the
holiday shopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he
hounded from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.
This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist.
The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its
crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part,
when a man is too much occupied with style to be aware of the
necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman,
is excellent. To work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment,
to think of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at least,
the king's highway of progress. Here, in England, too many
painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the
intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely
indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence
of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and
last of all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to
publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading
of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the
painter. The arabesque, properly speaking, and even in literature,
is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with his material
as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second
stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of
representation. In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully;
that is his apprenticeship; and it is only the few who will really
grow beyond it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business
of real art - to give life to abstractions and significance and
charm to facts. In the meanwhile, let him dwell much among his
fellow-craftsmen. They alone can take a serious interest in the
childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years. They alone
can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard,
this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal painting
of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on.
They will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great
picture?" If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade
him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his
style falsified for life.
And this brings me to a warning. The life of the apprentice to any
art is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small
successes in the midst of a career of failure, patiently supported;
the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain progress; and if he
come not appreciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows
letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab. But the time comes when a
man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon
his will, and, for better or worse, begin the business of creation.
This evil day there is a tendency continually to postpone: above
all with painters. They have made so many studies that it has
become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush with
them; and death finds these aged students still busy with their
horn-book. This class of man finds a congenial home in artist
villages; in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to
call them "Snoozers." Continual returns to the city, the society
of men farther advanced, the study of great works, a sense of
humour or, if such a thing is to be had, a little religion or
philosophy, are the means of treatment. It will be time enough to
think of curing the malady after it has been caught; for to catch
it is the very thing for which you seek that dream-land of the
painters' village. "Snoozing" is a part of the artistic education;
and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else being
forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.
Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the
very air of France that communicates the love of style. Precision,
clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in
the handling, apart from any value in the thought, seem to be
acquired by the mere residence; or if not acquired, become at least
the more appreciated. The air of Paris is alive with this
technical inspiration. And to leave that airy city and awake next
day upon the borders of the forest is but to change externals. The
same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from the long alleys
and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are still pretty
in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be
decorative in its emptiness.
