"Velasquez and Poussin"

VELASQUEZ AND POUSSIN* 

-December 1899, The Bookman


Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velasquez, the living man, was a court-painter, polished, stately, and serene. The trouble is that three centuries after his entombment, the dead man has suddenly become a demogogue, a controversialist, a party leader. He is the captain of the Impressionists. Mr. Stevenson, in the clever work before us, is constantly boasting that Velasquez was an Impressionist. Fortunately for himself, Velasquez lived in an age which did not call upon him to be any sort of "ist," except an artist. He was impressional, decorative or realistic, as he felt inclined, and had no new critic looking over his shoulder, to weep when he lapsed into lucidity. One of the very few virtues we are really losing is the virtue of inconsistency.

We have seldom read a specimen of the art monograph so thoroughly worth reading as Mr. Stevenson's. We must be permitted to enrage him by assuring him that he is very like Mr. Ruskin. Like that great critic of the opposite school, he is one-sided, he is digressive, he is fanciful. But, like him, he is full of ideas, ideas that it would be equally fascinating to accept and to refute.

That Velasquez was an Impressionist may be called the main thesis of the book, and in one sense, doubtless, it is true enough. But we must beg leave to draw a strong distinction between Impressionism as understood by Velasquez and Impressionism as understood by some young gentlemen we know. Velasquez subordinates all detail to effect. There is something magnificent in the breadth, the courage, we had almost said the scorn, with which he splashes in his great backgrounds, as blank and grey as Mr. Whistler's. He is never a realist in the sense that a realist is another name for a snob, a painter of fur that might be stroked, of satin that might be meant for sale. In his wonderful picture of the Dwarf Antonio, for example, there are no properties round the actor. No carpet peers like an ill-mannered dog between his legs; no bedstead or Dutch clock rears itself behind, as insolently truthful as a candid friend. Not that this painter of dwarfs and idiots thinks anything below him. He would paint a turnip seriously; but never with that blatant materialism that seems to say in every line, "This is a turnip; you have often seen one before." His picture would say, the one lesson of all art, all philosophy, all religion, "This is a turnip. You have never seen one before."

But here comes in the great distinction. What is undefined is only used by Velasquez to throw up what is defined. The surroundings of the Dwarf Antonio are shadowy. But the dark, passionate little face, the open nostrils, the great eyes vivid with the double vanity of a dwarf and a Spaniard—there is no doubt about these. In a very thoughtful chapter Mr. Stevenson defends Impressionism from the point of view of optics, urging that the surroundings of an object are, as a fact, only seen vaguely. But something is seen clearly, above all in a portrait. The artist, however "unmoral," has one duty at least in common with the honest man—that of looking a man straight in the face. Too many ultra-modern "impressions " are like the impressions of an irate employer formed by a defaulting clerk.

There is another sense in which Velasquez is eminently fitted to correct as well as inspire his modern followers. The school of l'art pour l'art is quite justified in claiming that Velasquez stands outside didactic morality and sentiment. But when they say that he stands on form and colour alone, that he expresses no spiritual personality, we think we are warmer disciples. Velasquez was a revolutionary on behalf of ugliness. He does not sanctify ugliness, like the great Durer, nor even reverence it, like Rembrandt. He protests on its behalf, with a slap dash energy that is profoundly human. There are pictures of Velasquez that are like a cavalry charge. In his turn for the horrible, in his mania for painting dwarfs, in all this there is something perhaps that is not quite healthy, something at least that is eminently Spanish, that belongs to the kingdom of the Inquisition, the superb kingdom which can be everything but happy. But there the spirit is. To say that Velasquez was unconscious of all this that we are reading in his pictures, is simply to say that it came out of his inmost soul. Probably the only thing in us which is really potent in art or morals is this self of which we are unconscious. Probably it is only when a trait or conception has become invisible to ourselves that it becomes vivid to the world. And in this wider sense of morality Velasquez is as much a moralist as Mr. Whistler. More we could not say.

If we wish to see the faults and the merits of Mr. Stevenson avoided with equal success, we have only to turn to Miss Denio's work, " Nicolas Poussin."

Nicolas Poussin was a typical Frenchman. His art was a brilliant compromise. Like his nation, he was an interpreter between nations, mingling the traditions of the Italian and the Flemish schools, typifying better perhaps than any other man the iridescent decay of the Renascence. Above all, with all his limitations, he was a really great man. It is just that, after a period of no little literary neglect, he should have dedicated to him a book so well bound, so well illustrated and so well written as this. Miss Denio's style is good, with occasional lapses. We note with terror a sign of the times in the extraordinary word "portraitist." The amount of vital force exhausted by writing the one additional syllable involved in the word "portrait-painter " does not seem to us enough to justify playing pranks with the English language, but we bow to the trend of things, and will call Miss Denio a bookist whenever she signifies a desire for it. We think that Miss Denio suffers somewhat from industry. To many her lucid and impartial marshalling of facts, without comment or room for comment, will strongly appeal. To us, we confess, it rather suggests the homely simile of the coal putting out the fire. That Poussin went from Villers, where he was born, to Paris and from Paris to Rome is a fact in itself of no interest to any human being, except the innkeepers along the road. It is made valuable to us by the inferences that may be drawn from it, and it is precisely these inferences that are crowded out. Miss Denio would have written a quite admirable book if she had cultivated the art of digression; there is no more misleading element in biography than a mean and cowardly relevancy. "Sticking to the point" has more than a verbal resemblance to being impaled.

Her only other fault as a biographer is a lack of enthusiasm for her subject. And it must be confessed, we think, that Poussin does not evoke enthusiasm. His technical merits are indeed high, and the instinct of the French middle classes for temperance, civilisation, and the via media; kept him with manliness and decency through that degenerate time, from the grossness of Rubens and the far more polluted piety of Guido Reni. But in the magnificent "Martyrdom of St. Erasmus" the essential falsity of his school shows itself in the two Christmas card cherubim who dance delightedly over the scene of horror.

The truth is that Poussin is uninteresting because of his merits; because he is the most perfect exponent of the matured school of classicism and of classic mythology. And of classic mythology the world is sick with a deadly sickness. When paganism was re-enthroned at the Renascence, it proved itself for the first time a religion by the sign that only its own worshippers could slay it. It has taken them three centuries, but they have thrashed it threadbare. Just as poets invoked Mars and Venus, for every trivial flirtation, so Poussin and his school multiplied nymphs and satyrs with the recurrence of an.endless wall paper, till a bacchanal has become as respectable as a bishop and the god of love is too vulgar for a valentine. This is the root of the strange feeling of sadness evoked by the groups and landscapes of Poussin. We are looking at one of the dead loves of the world. Never were men born so out of time as the modern neo-pagans. For this is the second death of the gods—a death after resurrection. And when a ghost dies, it dies eternally.


*" Velasquez." By K. A. M. Stevenson. 5s. (George Bell and Sons.)

"Nicolas Poussin. His Life tnd Work." By Elizabeth H. Denio, Ph.D. 12s. 6d. (Sampson Low, Mirslon and Co.)