Octave Uzanne

“ Arthur Blackcross, painter and critic of mystical, esoteric, and symbolic art, a most refined spirit and founder of the already celebrated School of the Æsthetes of To-Morrow, was urged to tell us in his turn what he thought painting would come to a century and more from now. I think the few lines which follow accurately sum up his little discourse:
"Is what we call modern art really an art?" he cried. Do not the artists without vocation, who practise it fairly well, with a show of talent, sufficiently prove it to be a trade, in which soul is as much lacking as sight? ”

“ It is, however, with some dandy of the school of Rubempré and Rastignac, that often, on quitting the ball, an author shows us a romantic young lady in love, whose jealousy gnaws at her heart, who re-reads the letters of old times, and with wandering looks, like one overwhelmed, nervously tearing with her teeth a finger of her Glove, sadly dreams that the lover who is no longer all, is nothing, and that the moralist much deceived himself who wrote: “Woman is a charming creature, who puts off her love as easily as her Glove.” ”

“ Portraits are often unfaithful, but her features were probably always rather too virile, and her eyes too large, recalling the epithet given by the ancients to Minerva. She seems, in short, to have been entirely without those qualities which give so much charm to feminine beauty—softness, weakness, morbidezza, as the Italians say. She is the personification of the blue-stocking of genius, the androgynous and Romantic ideal, the woman strong in her fine moral harmony—tender, disinterested, and courageous. Her supreme kindliness breathes from all her portraits. ”

“ There is not, at the present hour, any woman or girl of the people, who has not her sunshade or her satin en-tout-cas—it seems to be the indispensable complement of the toilet for the promenade; and our modern painters have so well understood this gracious adjunct of feminine costume, that they take very good heed not to forget, in a study of a woman made in a full light, a rosy head with dishevelled hair, on the transparent ground of a Japanese Sunshade, thus producing an exquisite work with all freshness of colouring, and discreet shadows sifted upon sparkling eyes or a laughing mouth. ”

“ We shall also have, by way of supplement to the daily phonographic journal, a series of illustrations of the day, slices of active life, so to speak, fresh cut from the actual. We shall see the new pieces and the actors at the theatre, as easily as we may already hear them, in our own homes; we shall have the portrait, and, better still, the very play of countenance, of famous men, criminals, beautiful women. It will not be art, it is true, but at least it will be life, natural under all its make-up, clear, precise, and sometimes even cruel. ”

“ On Sundays and holidays, in the jostlings of the crowd at suburban fêtes, it is like an eddy of Sunshades; such the spectacle of ancient besiegers, who covered themselves with their bucklers and made the “tortoise,” so in the shimmer of the summer sun in the great Parisian parish festivals: gingerbread fairs of Saint-Cloud or Vaugirard, the Sunshade is on the trestles and among the promenaders; it protects equally the girl dancing on the tight-rope and the respectable citizen’s wife in her Sunday best, who rumples the flounce of her petticoats in these popular gatherings. ”

“ It seems that woman, that exquisite and delicate flower, blossoms in fur, as those white gardenias of the conservatory which half open and develop themselves in a nest of perfumed wadding.
In childhood, we delight to play with the large maternal Muff, to pass our hands over it the wrong way to excite the electricity of the long hair, to plunge our faces in the pungent heady odour of its down, and to make use of this furred sack in inconceivable tricks, in playing at hide-and-seek with small objects, or in burying therein the familiar cat, who becomes lazy in its warmth. ”

“ The great philosopher had surprised us no less by his treatment of the antiquity of the earth, which he showed to be a question of pure mechanics. In the face of geologists and naturalists he gave it a past history of not more than a score of millions of years, and showed that life had awakened upon earth in the very hour of the sun's birth — whatever may have been the origin of this fecundating star, whether the bursting of a pre-existing world or the concentration of nebulae formerly diffused. ”

“ Sometimes, in fine, in a fantastic sketch of an album, which one reads as a riot of the imagination, is perceived some human being excited to a singular degree, with hair tossed by the wind, and haggard eye, floating at the will of the tumultuous waves on a Parasol turned upside down, to the handle of which he clings with the energy of despair. The plates of the Voyage de Ricord, and especially the old Japanese albums, are useful to consult in order to understand better the varieties of forms of the Sunshade in Japan. ”

“ The art of being moved by the wit, the gaiety, and the thought of others must soon demand greater facilities. I believe, then, in the success of everything which will favor and encourage the indolence and selfishness of men; the elevator has done away with the toilsome climbing of stairs; phonography will probably be the destruction of printing. Our eyes are made to see and reflect the beauties of nature, and not to wear themselves out in the reading of texts ”

“ Admirable interpretation of things glimpsed at!
Everywhere on the exquisite decorative combinations of Japan, we see a large Parasol opened amidst delicate peach-blossoms, gracious flights of strange birds, indented leaves, and rosy ibises. Sometimes, on the inimitable paintings of the enamelled vases, the Japanese Sunshade shelters a king’s daughter, escorted by her followers, who makes her chaste preparations for entering the bath; sometimes, on a thin gauze, the Parasol half hides women, promenading on the margin of some vast blue lake, full of ideal dreams. ”

“ Taking his stand on the theory of Helmholtz, that the sun is a vast sphere in process of cooling, and, by the law of gravity, of shrinking in proportion as it cools, and having estimated the energy of the solar heat as four hundred and seventy-six million horse-power to the superficial square foot of its photo-sphere, Sir William had demonstrated that the radius of the photosphere grows about one-hundredth part shorter every two thousand years, and that it is therefore quite possible to fix the precise hour when its warmth will be insufficient to maintain life on our planet. ”

“ Here the Sunshade has the floating appearance of a glorious standard. It symbolised also the power of life and death, vested in the savage conqueror over the unfortunate conquered, delivered up wholly to his mercy.
In ancient India, the cradle of the human race, as it is said, the Parasol in every time, and more than anywhere else, is unfolded in its splendour and the grace of its contexture, as an immutable symbol of royal majesty. ”

“ When we shall have unfurnished our skull of those delicate things, the Sunshade, Glove, and Muff, to carry thither a current of more serious conceptions, we shall perhaps have leisure to read again our little work as strangers, and not as producers, and thus, doubtless, we shall reflect with a satisfied smile, that there was much more in us of wisdom than carelessness in not tarrying too long amongst such charming trifles! ”

“ The charming lady, dressed in a fresh striped blue and white robe, with a fawn-coloured shawl half falling from her shoulders, has on her head a large black felt hat, ornamented with feathers—one of those hats which have done more for the vulgarisation of the glory of Gainsborough than all his studies and portraits. Mrs. Siddons is seated, holding on her lap with her left hand a comfortable Muff of fox or Siberian wolf, of which she appears to caress the fur with her right hand, as if to show off the beauty and whiteness of her spindle-shaped fingers. ”

“ The Sunshade shows more favourably in the hour of peace, during the Restoration. All the journals of fashion of the time give us curious and varied specimens of it in their steel engravings, hand-coloured, which show us, during those days of a lull, languid ladies in the midst of amusing decorations, in winter amidst snowy country scenes, in summer in a park of profound distances, on some rustic bridge, where the mistresses of the manors of that time allowed their romantic reveries slowly to wander. ”

“ The Sunshade and the Fan are in fact presented by these magicians of the East with particular graces in the jugglery of the most varied exercises. Here it is a ball of ivory which rolls with the bickering of a babbling stream over the lamels or ribs of the Sunshade; there it is a Parasol held in equilibrium on the blade of a dagger, and a thousand other astonishing inventions. ”

“ The learned man, or the elegant man of the world, who would search out in every epoch the costumes of a people, would compile the most interesting history and the most rationally true. . . . . To ask the origin of shoes, of alms-purses, of hoods, of the cockade, of hoop-petticoats, of farthingales, of Gloves, of masks, is to drag a modilogist into the frightful maze of sumptuary laws, and upon all the battlefields, where civilisation has triumphed over the gross manners imported into Europe by the barbarism of the Middle Ages. ”

“ At the opera ball, in the surge of masks and of dominoes, in the midst of the comings and goings on that staircase so exalted, it needs but a Glove imprisoning a little hand to allure at once the passion of a man of delicacy—a long white Glove lovingly glued to a hand divinely small, a fine delicate wrist, and the exquisite roundness of the forearm. This is enough to transport a lover of the fair sex. The Glove appears not only in all festivals where grace and beauty preside ”

“ Like all objects of adornment in the hands of women, the Sunshade in the last century became, like the Fan, almost a light and graceful plaything, serving to punctuate an expression, to round a gesture, to arm an attitude of charming reverie, in which, guided by pretty indolent fingers, its point traces vague designs upon the sand. Before the burning breath of amorous declarations, often the frail Sunshade escapes from the hands of a beauty, in sign of armistice, and as an avowal of abandonment. ”

“ With the Egyptians, the hand was a symbol of force; with the Romans, a symbol of fidelity. We please ourselves in clothing the occult powers, such as Time, Nature, Destiny, with a human hand: the hand of Time overthrows empires, and impresses wrinkles on our brows; the hand of Nature is prodigal to us of gifts, which are ravished from us by the hand of Death; the hand of Destiny or of Providence, in fine, conducts us across the paths of life. ”

“ The hand, in a word, is the most perfect instrument given by God to man; but I ought not to forget, my fair friend, that poets seldom wear gloves, and philosophers never; and that, philosophising as I am, I remain outside the Glove, and, above all, appear to forget that axiom of Fontenelle: Had we our hand full of authenticated facts or truths, we should but half open it, and that after a feeble fashion. ”

“ When Love, who is represented blind, sets a mask on Venus-coquette, one might think the trickster boy was for burning the universe, for behind those yawning apertures of the black velvet mask, behind those murderous loopholes, two woman’s eyes are lying in ambush, pitiless, turn by turn laughing, burning, blazing, drowned in pleasure, charged, in a word, as with grape-shot, with all the shafts of the Cupidonian quiver. ”

“ But if, on the termination of a task, we love usually to put back regularly in order a library turned upside down by the fever of researches, happy in being nourished by the intellectual juice of old books, sometimes also we are prostrated by that intense discouragement which “dumfounds a man,” according to an every-day expression. In fact, the result has not answered so great a working up of material, a picture has been dreamed of too big for the frame, the artist has been obliged to reduce himself, to resign himself, and to put in nothing of his own essence ”