Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1003
A gentle critic who went away with me from that company of artists said, in the street:
“What is the matter with our fellows? What is the matter with our Art? …” The Royal Academy Exhibition of British old masters had lately closed and had left him in a state of ungovernable depression … I said I thought it was mostly a matter of diet–that and dampness. If you eat too much bleeding beef you become eventually ashamed of yourself. Then you yearn for ‘delicacy’.
My friend said he wished I would sometimes be serious. He accompanied me back here, where I write, and, after he had drunk the cup of strong tea that I made him, sat desolate, his head hanging over his hands on the table.
To cheer him up I walked up and down behind his back, haranguing him…. After all, if I goaded him enough with the doctrines of the alien extremists that I share he might, in the end, react against me and take heart again for writing about the damp delicacies that seemed to have broken his back.
If, I said, you lived in Provence–even if you only came there as did Enguerrand Quarton, the Picard, or Pierre Villatte, the Limousin, or Flemings like Melchior Brederlam, or the Maitre de Flémalle or Italians like Simone Martini–you could afford to look at life and make patterns out of it–as did Cézanne at Aixen-Provence.
That was as true of Nice as of Avignon; in the fifteenth century as of today … The marvellous “Burning Bush” by Nicholas Fromentin, as the almost more marvellous picture by Quarton in the hospice of Villeneuve les Avignon, or the frescoes in the little room through which the guide hurries you in the castle of the Popes were the products of the same spirit, of the same life, of the same digestions, of the same climate and of the same cosmopolitan spirit as the bathers of Cézanne or the glorious last ten years’ work of Renoir. It was not for nothing that Cézanne stuck as obstinately to his Aix en Provence as Mistral did to his Maillanne; or that Gauguin and Van Gogh settled in Arles; or Monticelli remained faithful to Marseilles or Matisse and the Fauves live in the Provençal Riviera … Nor was it coincidence. It was the necessity for clear light, a life of dignity and a settlement in the only territory in the world where the tides of civilisation flow for ever backwards and forwards … Along the Great Trade Route that has been the main civilising factor of the world since the days when the merchant was sacred.
To be a great artist in any art, I went on, you must be content to look at and make your patterns from your own day. There was perhaps one English figure painter of whom one did not have to be ashamed when thinking of any meridional foreigner–the Hogarth of the “Shrimp Girl.” And then Constable–whom the French discovered. And possibly Cotman–and just possibly my grandfather of “Work” and “The Last of England,” pictures that at that moment: were making their little sensation in London, eighty years after they had been painted.
Conditions of life had never been bearable for the Northern artist; could never be bearable. It took a Breughel to stand up against Northern rigours…. Paris was the world’s art centre because it was the most Southerly of the world’s great markets.
After it had reached the ford on the Seine which was the occasion for the existence of Paris, the Great Trade Route branched out, losing itself gradually in valley bottoms, swamps, heaths and damp nationalisms … And losing too its civilising mission…. I had been reading that afternoon in one of the “serious” magazines an article by a very cultured gentleman from Missouri who was of opinion that the art-hegemony of the world had passed from Lutetia into the hands of himself and his friends of Bloomsbury and Harvard…. It is early days to say that; gentlemen from Missouri are proverbially sanguine.
In arts, as in thought and as in statecraft, knowledge and ability have spread slowly with the slow spread of Latinity to the North and to the West, through Provence, To give us the Age of Dante it looped even back to Italy–who was the pupil of the Provençal poets.
I do not hold any special brief for Paris. She surely does not need it. She is impregnable just because she sits over that ford across the Seine…. I have written so much about that elsewhere that I cannot again take up the theme … It is sufficient here to say that Paris exists because the merchants of the Trade Route, finding the Seine and its marshes barring their progress to the North and West, had to find a ford across which to get themselves and their goods and that Paris is the first ford from the sea on the Seine–much as Kingston on Thames, being situate on the first ford on the Thames was, in the time of Cæsar, the capital of the Gauls of South Britain. It was not for nothing that the highest and most sacred official of Rome was the Pontifex Maximus, and until Paris can he divorced from her geographical position it is unlikely that she will cease to be the filter of civilisation.
And Paris, as should never be forgotten, is sufficiently far to the South for men to be able, most days of the year, to sit in companies out of doors and speculate aloud or think. That is a condition without which arts and civilisation are impossible. Thought or serious and speculative conversation are exhausting employments and call for the oxygen of the open air to aid in restoring wasted tissues…. Or if they are not impossible they are so difficult that few men can achieve them. That is why in London you may have a few great books but no literature; one or two great painters but no art-life.
In Avignon, on the other hand, almost all of life passes and has always passed in the open air. So you had the great school of Art in the time of the popes and the continued practice of the arts by almost the entire peasant population–a practice that has filled the churches of Provence with the thousands of little votive paintings that have had so great an influence on the living art of today. For, just as the writing of conte-fables has occupied the small trade-and craftsmen all over Provence ever since the days of the Troubadours, so painting, domestic architecture and sculpture in miniature have continued to be produced by small people in the small towns and hamlets all over Gallia Narbonensis, to this day.
That is a phenomenon very largely climatic; but it has also its social side. A peasantry that has seen its feudal lords engage in poetic contests and many of its sons ennobled because of their poetic gifts and that has seen painting and sculpture and painters and sculptors held in high honour in the courts of the sovereign spiritual director of the world will not look askance at the practitioners of those arts and so in Provence there arose and continned the tradition that occupation with one art or the other is a proper thing for sound men.
My house in Toulon has its rooms frescoed, very primitively, by the retired naval quartermaster who built it–himself and his wife, with their own hands, using a cement, said to be of their own manufacture, made from burning oyster-shells according to the Roman tradition and so hard that it will turn any cold chisel. How that may be–as far as the tradition of cement–I do not know–but there the pictures are: scenes of rural life, dovecotes, ponds, fish-stews, swans, wild-fowl, carp, small fish, men rowing boats, men fishing; all under the shadow of the great mountains that are in the Toulon hinterland and all amidst a profusion of leafage and flowers … And all a very charming decoration….
Another room is decorated–I imagine by the wife alone, since the paintings are more traditional and she probably went to an art-school–with bouquets of flowers, only some of which are naïve, alive and charming, and all this having been done about 1890 or so.
But imagine an English retired naval quartermaster, in the suburbs of Portsmouth, building, along with his lady and with their own hands, a house of Roman cement, tiled with Roman-S shaped tiles … And then frescoing it! … Or, for the matter of that, what would be the emotion of an English or American ex-naval officer of high rank on learning that he had let one of his houses to a “poet”? Yet, as I have elsewhere related, the first emotion of my landlord here in Provence when he had that news was to get into his car and drive a hundred and fifty miles to fetch me a root of asphodel. Because all poets must have in their gardens that fabulous herb….
And, if towards Christmas, I go out from my frescoed rooms, down into the town I shall pass near a village where they are performing their pastorale and at every street corner there will be booths where peasants will be offering for sale saintons such as their ancestors have made in these parts ever since the first Attic-Boeotian colonists came to these parts from the Oropos three thousand years ago and moulded from the red clay their Tanagra figures. Today the little images are there manufactured in honour of the Saviour and represent every condition of man and every craft, so that all humanity may be shewn standing before the crêches in the homes of the peasants and townsmen–fishermen with their nets, market-gardeners with their melons, vintners with their casks; white, yellow and black kings with their crowns to remind you of the Magi, and all standing or kneeling before the straw cradle of a little, pink, naked celluloid doll in a plaster of Paris stable…. You will not find the like of those saintons till you get to Mexico. There Indian peasant families have maintained the art for generations in their families and manufacture still such saintons as they learned to make at the points of the swords of the Conquistadores–the early Spaniards having brought the art from Barcelona and Aragon and the Barcelonese and Aragonese having learnt the art from Provence at a time when Spain was part of Provence. Or Provence part of Spain, if you prefer it.
And if, on Christmas day, I go down to the harbour I shall see, lying in the sun beneath the exquisite caryatids of Puget on the Mairie and behind his incomparable “Navigaror” an “oil-paintist.” He will have ranged beside him along the Mairie wall ten or a dozen panel-paintings. Not deathless masterpieces of course for he will be neither a Monticelli nor a Douanier Rousseau. But like those two, and lying contentedly in the sun, he will earn his years’ bed and board by those sincere crudenesses and neither you nor the burgesses of the city need feel disgraced at having paid twenty-five francs for one or the other of them.
And up in the town you will find one who will write for you your letters in verse–in classical Alexandrines at thirty lines per half hour for ten sous a line … But he will ask more if you want more tricky metres.
The point is that, in Provence, the arts live, if hidden from Missouri then in the hearts of the people. And you cannot call it either a proletariat art or one induced from above, since it is the product of peasant-proprietors–and not of peasant-proprietors only. The sons of not too rich newspaper proprietors paint pictures; those of millionaire tanners write epics; naval officers paint water-colours from Cap Sète to Annam … and proud of it! … That is the point.
I do not say that the production of masterpieces is enormous; but the presence of the celluloid doll before the three-thousand-year descended saintons is a proof of how intimately the native arts enter into the real life of the people even today. They are a part of life as unnoticed as the daily bread, the prayers, the games of boules, the furniture and the Sunday bullfights.
The same tendency is to be found in the votive pictures. You will see a domestic scene rendered with all the sincerity and lack of tradition of any of the primitive schools–Sienese, French, South German, the pictures having that air of super-reality that marionnettes have. A man is knocked down by a carriage and six; a child is hauled head-downwards out of a fountain basin; a lady in ruffled skirts, carrying a parasol is in the jaws of a crocodile; an invalid is in extremis in a room full of Louis-Phillipard mahogany furniture, beneath a miraculous, oriental, bed-tester … In another part of the canvas or panel will appear the man erect and cured; the child eating soup; the lady, escaped from the crocodile promenading, her lap-dog behind her, stiffly beneath her parasol; the invalid will be sawing amazingly real logs with an enormous tenon-saw. And in the sky, between the representation of extremity and escape, will be the image of the saint or Holy Personage to whom the sufferer expressed vows or supplications in that moment of peril….
That apparition will be within a wavy lozenge of light and will be a copy or an inspiration from the most banal of devotional cards such as you see in the shops for articles de réligion round St Sulpice or on stalls in the shadow of the spires of Cologne. It is the celluloid doll again; a proof that to the painter of the votive picture his art was a part of his daily life, like the seasonal greetings that the faithful of those parts exchange, at the great feasts, from four to ten times yearly.
And it is to be remembered that the motive of the artist was always sensual and never representational. He desired to give pleasure to the saint to whom his picture was addressed; to win with its prettiness one more smile from Ste Thérèse of the Roses in Heaven. It is unnecessary to record for her how the miraculous preservation looked. She was there. But you can add one more to her heavenly joys … and he, the painter, desired to add more beauties to the church in which his offering should be suspended.
It is that that has caused these works to have such a tremendous influence on the art of today.
Obviously the Avignon atelier drew inspiration from the Italian primitives of the fourteenth century so that they could continue and keep fresh a real art long after the gradually sophisticated Italians had abandoned the greatest of their traditions. For it was in the age of Raphael that the “easel-picture” was invented and the image reached its quintessence and evolved its stultifying conventions and the ateliers of Avignon and Nice were at their most flourishing just between 1480 and 1520.
Those earlier painters, whether of Siena or Avignon, painted to adorn spaces. If it was their aim to aid religion it was far more their aim to exalt the mind of the onlooker … to create in him a religious frame of mind by letting him see what good inventions of beauty they could see in the world of God. And the idea of making portrait-images of the Virgin and Child or journalistic records of the Crucifixion never entered their minds. They painted to make churches glow and tired eyes be rested by the assured beauty and movements of their designs. That was Art.
It was also an intellectual feat. The intellect of plastic art manifests itself not in portraits of thinkers or in the portrayals of the blessings conferred on humanity by the applied sciences. It expresses itself in design and pattern and in the movement of the eye running from place to place on painted walls.
Æsthetically speaking, movement in a picture has nothing to do with the correct anatomical representation of a javelin thrower in action or of a lion in mid air springing on its prey. It consists in such inspiration of line, colour and mass that the confiding eye, coerced by the art of the painter, can let its glance meet the surface of a painting and be conveyed unerringly from place to place on that surface. That ocular progress is what causes æsthetic pleasure and emotion.
The quattrocentists and their predecessors back to the Byzantines treated the subjects on their wall-spaces exactly as composers treat their themes in abstract music. The–literally and only literally–meaningless contrapuntal passages of Bach are infinitely emotional and the cause of emotion–and they are much more mystically so than the most realistic programme-music founded on the most earnest and ingenious renderings of the snortings of dragons, Valkyrs or serpents. So the Virgins and Children of the primitive Italians or French, like the mosaics of the Byzantines, are no more presentations of sacred individuals than Bach’s “Matthew Passion” is a representation of divine searchings of the soul. They are, as I have said, abstract variations on an æsthetic, given theme.
And there is as much movement in a Byzantine mosaic, a design of Cimabuë, Giotto, Simone Martini, Quarton, Clouet or Fromentin, or of the Master of St Anne, the Unknown Master of Cologne, Cranach, El Greco, Poussin, Cézanne or Matisse–to name the whole apostolic succession–as in any of Bach’s fugal writings. And as much thought as in any of the writings of Einstein.
That narrow path is hard to keep in. In that late exhibition of British Art at Burlington House that you find so depressing … I am still addressing my appalled friend the Critic whose head remains between his hands … you had two excellent examples of my double theme. You had the mediæval, probably only so-called English, painted panels, retables and chests. Whoever produced them they were inspired through, and perhaps imported from, Avignon. Possibly some of them, like the painted rood-screens of Southwold and East Anglia in general … and it should be remembered that Constable and Cotman came from East Anglia and worshipped in those same churches–possibly, then, some of them came from Flanders. In that case the inspiration merely came, by a roundabout way from Avignon, passing through the territories of the Dukes of Burgundy in their court at Dijon–where I hope very soon now to be eating a tournedos Meyerbeer–and so to the Flemish provinces of that same sovereign. For when I get to Dijon, after having had my tournedos I shall go to the Ducal Palace and then see the works of Brederlam and Campin from Flanders, all painted in Dijon, and those of the painters of the Burgundian, Avignonnais and Sienese ateliers all equally painted there. And I shall see the great tomb of Philip the Bold which was begun by Jean de Marville, lent to the Duke by the anti-Pope Clement VII of Avignon, continued by the Fleming Claus Sluter, who was the Duke’s favourite sculptor, and finished by Sluter’s nephew, Claus Werve…. You could not have a better instance than that of how, along the Great Route, the streams of the Northern and Meridional Arts passed for ever backwards and forwards–through Provence…. And the other instance at Burlington House was that afforded by the works of the poor dear old pre-Raphaelites that the Royal Academicians so grudgingly exhibited. That these painters after barking up an astonishingly right tree should have gone off so wilfully and so soon after two hares as singularly wrong as the camera eye and the Great Moral Purpose, or that, after studying as well as they could, the decorative works of Giotto or Cimabue they should have so completely misunderstood their purpose–all that does not take away from the fact that the original impulse came from the Italian primitives, by way of those of Avignon. For I have already given sufficient proof of the fact that my grandfather who was, however ineffectually, their preceptor and precursor, went specially up the Rhone to see the Bastide at Tarascon, the Quarton at Villeneuve-les-Avignon and the matchless Fromentin at Aix en Provence with the two wings, shewing as donors the Good King René in his cap of vair and his Queen in her steeple-crowned hat….
