Charles Hiatt

“ The Paris of magnificent vistas is at least less fascinating to the artist than the comparatively provincial city of crooked lanes which has gone to make way for a series of lofty and pretentious street fronts and spacious squares.
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Strange it is that, where so much has been changed, the cathedral church of Notre Dame has remained almost unaltered in outline and general effect. Revolutions have surged round it; monstrous rites have been perpetrated within it; even the hail of shot and shell have left this wonderful Gothic creation poorer only in decorative detail. ”

“ Few men as richly endowed with the gift of decoration would I have been content to produce work which, were it not for the portfolio of the collector, would be of an entirely ephemeral character. It must be irritating to the artist to watch the gradual destruction of his chefs-d'œuvre, condemned as they are to be torn by every wind, soaked by every shower, blistered by the sun, blurred by the fog. ”

“ The irritating custom of railing off the eastern limb of the church and demanding a fee for admission happily does not obtain at Notre Dame. It is all but universal in England, and renders an intelligent appreciation of the architectural history of our great churches a matter of some difficulty. At Paris one may wander where one will, so long as one does not interrupt the offices. That pompous and irresponsible chatterer the cathedral verger does not impose himself upon us, and disturb our study and diminish our pleasure, as he does in churches on this side the Channel. ”

“ It may be that men of rarer, of more fascinating, talent have now and again devoted themselves to the affiche; but none of them can compare with Chéret in the magnitude and curiosity of his achievement. Many have produced charming wall pictures: nobody, save Chéret, has made an emphatic mark on the aspect of a metropolis. Paris, without its Chérets, would be Paris without one of its most pronounced characteristics; Paris, moreover, with its gaiety of aspect materially diminished. ”

“ Everywhere the lines of the building strike us as vast, massive, almost elemental, but everywhere there is an ordered, if a somewhat ponderous symmetry. It is strange that there ever was an age in which the innate dignity and majesty of these lines were not felt. Yet so barbarous did the architecture of Notre Dame appear to eighteenth-century eyes, that a desperate attempt was made to hide it. Vast pictures in gilt frames were placed from capital to capital of the main arcade on both sides. ”

“ His first business is not to achieve a decoration, but to call the attention of the man in the street to the merits of an article. He may be fantastic only in so far as his fantasy assists the advertisement; he must ever keep before his eyes the narrow object of his effort. The closest limits are set to his invention; it is not for him to do what he will, but rather to do what he must. Under such circumstances, it is, at the first blush, somewhat surprising that artists have condescended to the poster at all. ”

“ THE TRANSEPTS AND THE CHOIR. The austere character of the nave emphasises the splendid decorations of the eastern parts. No massive screen prevents our seeing the church from the great entrance to the apse. The fact that the choir is open possibly lessens our sense of mystery and of awe, but we are more than compensated by the splendid view of the building from end to end. ”

“ The great masses of variegated colour formed by Chéret's posters greet one joyously as one passes every hoarding, smile at one from the walls of every café, arrest one before the windows of every kiosque. The merits of the Saxoléine lamp, the gaieties of the Moulin Rouge, the charms of Loie Fuller, the value of a particular brand of cough-lozenges, are insisted upon with a good-humoured vehemence of which Jules Chéret alone appears to know the secret. Others, in isolated cases, have possibly achieved more compelling decorations, but none can pretend to a success so uniform and so unequivocal. ”

“ There is probably no Gothic interior in France which has suffered more terribly from the destruction of its ancient windows than Notre Dame. The coldness and severity which the mural decorations of Viollet-le-Duc vainly strive to mitigate were perhaps not felt at all when the light from every window seemed to be transmitted in glowing and gleaming shafts of every conceivable colour and tone. Fortunately, the old glass still remains in the great rose windows. That over the west door has been described; the others will be noticed in the account of the transepts. ”

“ By reason of a certain emphasis of colour and crudeness of design the art of Steinlen is admirably adapted to the production of such human documents. But it cannot be maintained that, whatever their technical merits, these studies of human misery are other than unpleasant—even painful. It is, therefore, altogether agreeable, when one turns to his essays in the art of the poster, to find his work graceful rather than tragic, urbane rather than mordant. Forsaking his mission of realistic illustration, he becomes gay, dainty, and fanciful as the best of his fellows. ”

“ It is pleasing and unpretentious, and contrasts only too favourably with the dull houses of the Rue du Cloître Notre-Dame, which are as undistinguished as they well can be.
The space at the back of the Cathedral is laid out as a garden. This is modern and somewhat formal, but it affords a fine view of the east end, and constitutes a welcome oasis of trees and grass in a grey waste of commonplace buildings. In the centre is a fountain with a statue of the Virgin and Child, and fragments of sculpture and carving taken from the church at different times lie about. ”

“ The waterfall, splashing itself into luminous dust, the immense and silent mountains, the lakes which are seas, the vasty cañons which occur in different parts of the States, inevitably appeal to the imagination. It is therefore not wonderful that the great lines of America have preferred literal and exact illustration to fantastic delineation. The railways of France, on the other hand, have employed to no inconsiderable extent the artist to figure the beauties of the places at which they have stations. ”

“ Grieffenhagen, as a designer of posters, can only be judged by a single production. It may be said at once that nothing more distinguished, nothing which is less imitative or derivative, has come from English hands than Mr. Grieffenhagen's advertisement for the "Pall Mall Budget." Admirable alike in colour and in pattern, the poster is entirely appropriate to its purpose of keeping before the eyes of the public a publication which escaped frivolity on the one hand and dulness on the other. ”

“ It is well ordered, and a perfectly sane piece of work (which Gothic architecture is not always) , but it has not the imaginative intricacy of Rouen, nor the rich exuberance of Amiens and Reims, nor the fortress-like grandeur of Bourges, nor the elegant variety of Chartres.... The truth is that the virtues of the west front of Notre Dame are classic rather than romantic. Everything in it seems the result of perfect knowledge and consummate calculation. There are none of those mistakes which generally occur in a work of wilder genius. ”

“ It is safe to say that, once seen, it will never be forgotten; it should have made the fortune of the performer whom it advertises. The mirth of the thing is victorious and infectious; one seems almost to hear the coarse laugh; the ample body in the green dress seems to move as one stares at it. In line, in movement, this poster is, from a certain point of view, a veritable masterpiece. An advertisement which is, it seems to me, altogether more worthy of Anquetin's great talent is one designed for "Le Rire," a recently issued journal. ”

“ In the first edition of Victor Hugo’s famous novel, Notre Dame, he tells us that if we examine one by one the traces of destruction imprinted on this ancient church, the work of time would be found to form the lesser portion—the worst destruction has been perpetrated by men—especially by men of art. Since Hugo wrote this much more “restoration” has been carried out at the metropolitan church of Paris. But though I regret so-called “restoration” on principle, I cannot help feeling that the work executed by M. Viollet-le-Duc and M. Lassus is far less objectionable than it might have been. ”

“ Lautrec's productions, alluring and powerful as they are, can by no stretch of the word be so scribed. He does not seek to attract you by joyousness of colour or grace of pattern, but rather to compel your attention by the force of his realism or the curiosity of his grotesqueness. For his posters are at once realistic and grotesque; they are delineations of life as seen by a man who, possessing the most acute powers of observation, is poignantly impressed by the incongruities of modern life, the physical peculiarities of modern men. ”

“ In Westminster Abbey we have an example of the shocking effect of inappropriate statuary in a Gothic building; we know, only too well, how terribly one of the most beautiful interiors in the world suffers from a crowd of tombs which are out of keeping with the very spirit of the place. By the removal of the memorials at Notre Dame, the church has doubtless regained the aspect intended by its designers.
The nave leads uninterruptedly to the choir, which ends in the high altar; and the high altar, with the adjacent shrine of St. Marcel, was the primary reason of the existence of the cathedral. ”

“ And so it happens that he is willing, nay eager, to turn his attention to the poster, with the result that the hoarding becomes an interesting, even a charming, gallery of designs. What was one of the most hideous of human inventions is transformed into a delight to the eyes. Colour and interest are added to the street; the gay and joyous take the place of the dull and ugly. ”

“ Incongruity among things beautiful in themselves is by no means a calamity, and we may fairly question alike the taste and the learning of those who crave for uniformity at all cost. One is glad to think that Viollet-le-Duc never for a moment contemplated the banishment of these stalls, which are a particularly fine example of the best work of which the craftsmen of the time were capable. The stalls have been rearranged since they were first placed in the choir, and their number has diminished. ”

“ It seems to me a specially interesting example of a remarkable talent applied to a very congenial subject. The posters of Lautrec are something more than works of art; they are human documents strangely eloquent of their moment. For this reason, their value may be more permanent than that of the productions either of Chéret or Grasset, delightfully fantastic as are the former, charmingly decorative as are the latter. ”