Hippolyte Taine

“ Temperament in this country is too militant, the will too stern, the mind too utilitarian, man too case-hardened, too absorbed and too overtasked to linger over and revel in the beautiful and delicate gradations of contours and colors. Their national painter, Hogarth, simply produced moral caricatures. Others, like Wilkie, use their pencil to render sentiments and characteristic traits visible; even in landscape they depict the spiritual element, corporeal objects serving them simply as an index or suggestion ”

“ Here, as at Venice, nature has made man colorist. Observe the different aspect of things according as you are in a dry country like Provençe and the neighborhood of Florence, or on a wet plain like the Netherlands. In the dry country the line predominates, and at once attracts attention; the mountains cut sharp against the sky, with their stories of architecture of a grand and noble style, all objects projecting upward in the limpid air in varied prominence. ”

“ The eye is led to noticing these gradations of obscurity, this vague train of light mingling with shadow, the remains of brightness clinging to the lingering lustre of the furniture, a reflection from a greenish window-sash, a piece of embroidery, a pearl, some golden spark astray upon a necklace. Having become sensitive to these delicacies, the painter, instead of uniting the extremes of the gamut, simply selects the beginning of it ”

“ Nothing is wanting but the pure and the noble; the whole of human nature is in his grasp, save the loftiest heights. Hence it is that his creativeness is the vastest we have seen, comprehending as it does all types, Italian cardinals, Roman emperors, contemporary citizens, peasants and cowherds, along with the innumerable diversities stamped on humanity by the play of natural forces and which more than fifteen hundred pictures did not suffice to exhaust. ”

“ The atmosphere there is colder, rains more frequent, and the sun the oftenest concealed. Hence a natural gamut of colors, which has provoked a corresponding artificial gamut. A full light being rare, objects do not reflect the imprint of the sun. You do not meet with those golden tones, that magnificent ruddiness so frequent in the monuments of Italy. The water is not of that deep sea-green resembling silkiness, as in the lagoons of Venice. ”

“ There are moments in the history of a nation when it bears some resemblance to Christ taken to the top of a high mountain by Satan, and there bid to choose between a heroic and a common life; here the tempter is Philip II., with his armies and executioners; the people of the North and the South, both subject to the same trial, decide differently according to the petty diversities of their composition and character. The choice made these diversities grow, and are exaggerated by the effects of the situation they themselves have produced. ”

“ From Greece to Florence, from Florence to Venice, from Venice to Antwerp, every step of the passage can be traced. The conception of man and of life goes on decreasing in nobleness and increasing in breadth. Rubens is to Titian what Titian was to Raphael, and Raphael to Phidias. Never did artistic sympathy clasp nature in such an open and universal embrace. Ancient boundaries, already often extended, seem removed purposely to expose an infinite career. There is no respect for historic proprieties ”

“ A race with a genius totally opposed to that of the Latin peoples makes for itself, after and alongside of them its place in the world. Among the numerous nations of this race, one there is in which a special territory and climate develope a particular character predisposing it to art and to a certain phase of art. Painting is born with it, lasts, becomes complete, and the physical milieu surrounding it, like the national genius which founds it, give to and impose upon it its subjects, its types and its coloring. ”

“ The intense brown which faintly impregnates foliage, the powerful reds gilding sunlit distances, the tones of veined marble, amethyst and sapphire with which water is resplendent, all decline, in order to give place to the deadened whiteness of expanded vapor, the bluish glow of misty twilight, the slaty reflections of the ocean, the turbid hue of rivers, the pallid verdure of the fields, and the grayish atmosphere of household interiors. ”

“ The eye is epicurean like the palate, and painting is an exquisite feast served up to it. For this reason it is that Germany and England have had no great pictorial art. In Germany the too great domination of abstract ideas has left no room for the sensuousness of the eye. Its early school, that of Cologne, instead of representing bodies, represented mystic, pious and tender souls. In vain did the great German artist of the sixteenth century, Albert Dürer, familiarize himself with the Italian masters ”

“ They almost always paint man in a well-to-do condition and content with his lot. When they exalt him it is without raising him above his terrestrial condition. The Flemish school of the seventeenth century does no more than expand his appetite, his lusts, his energy and his gayety. Generally they leave him as he is. The Dutch school confines itself to reproducing the repose of the bourgeois interior, the comforts of shop and farm, out-door sports and tavern enjoyments, all the petty satisfactions of an orderly and tranquil existence. Nothing could be better adapted to painting ”

“ The great crisis through which the nation has passed serves to remove the monotonous varnish with which tradition and custom have overspread things. We find out what man is; we seize on the fundamental points of his renewed and transformed nature; we see its depth, its secret instincts, the master forces which denote his race and are about to control his history; half a century later and we see them no more, because during a half century they have been constantly visible. ”

“ These tones, moreover, are full and rich. A dry country is of a dull aspect; southern France and the whole of the mountainous portion of Italy leave on the eye no sensation but that of a gray and yellow checker-board. Besides this, all the tones of the soil and of buildings are lost in the preponderating splendor of the sky and the all-pervading luminousness of the atmosphere. In truth, a southern city, and a Provençe or Tuscan landscape are simply drawings ”

“ The Southern provinces henceforth become Belgium. The dominant trait is the craving for peace and comfort, the disposition to take life on the jovial and pleasant side, in brief, the sentiment of Peniers. In fact, even in a dilapidated cabin or in a bare tavern on a wooden bench a man may laugh, sing, smoke a good pipe and swallow deep draughts of beer; it is not disagreeable to attend mass as a fine ceremony, nor to recount one's sins to an accommodating Jesuit. After the capture of Antwerp, Philip II. is delighted to hear that communions have become more and more frequent. ”

“ Man is qualified for this through his birth in a crumbling society and an education in the midst of veritable tragedies; like Victor Hugo and George Sand, the child Rubens, in exile, alongside of his imprisoned father, hears, in his home and all around him, the roar of tempest and of wreck. After an active generation which has suffered and created, comes the poetic generation which writes, paints or models. It expresses and amplifies the energies and desires of a society founded by its fathers. ”

“ A sky which is thus filled up, thus mobile, thus adapted to harmonizing, varying and emphasizing the tones of the earth, affords a colorist school. Here, as at Venice, art has followed nature, the hand having been forcibly guided by optical sensations.
If, however, the analogies of climate have endowed the Venetian eye and that of the inhabitant of the Netherlands with an analogous education, differences of climate have given them a different education. The Netherlands are situated three hundred leagues to the north of Venice. ”

“ It has for complement or for relief the blackness of clouds which suddenly melt away in transient showers, the grayness of scattered and ragged banks of fog, the vague, bluish network enveloping distances, the sparkling of flickering light arrested in flying scuds sometimes the dazzling satin of a motionless cloud, or some abrupt opening through which the azure penetrates. ”

“ What distinguishes their race from classic races is, as you have seen, a prefrence for substance over form, of actual verity to beautiful externals, of the real, complex, irregular and natural object to the well-ordered, pruned, refined and transformed object. This instinct, of which you remark the ascendancy in their religion and literature, has likewise controlled their art and notably their painting. ”

“ Here the low horizon is without interest, and the contours of objects are softened, blended and blurred out by the imperceptible vapor with which the atmosphere is always filled; that which predominates is the spot. ”

“ Like an Indian deity at "leisure he relieves his fecundity by creating worlds, and from the matchless folds and hues of his tossed simarres to the snowy whites of his flesh, or the pale silkiness of his blonde tresses, there is no tone in any of his canvasses which does not appear there purposely to afford him delight. ”

“ All the ordinary occurrences of life get to be interesting and attractive; he revives, and for the first time seems to live. It is circumstances like these out of which always springs a spontaneous literature and an original art. ”

“ The generation whose energy and aspirations had inspired the grand picturesque revery, faded away man by man; Crayer and Jordaens alone, by merely living, kept art up for twenty years. The nation, reviving for a moment, falls backward ”

“ For the same reason, in the representation of the body, he comprehended more profoundly than any one the essential characteristic of organic life; he surpasses in this the Venetians, as they surpass the Florentines; he feels still better than they that flesh is a changeable substance in a constant state of renewal; and such, more than any other, is the Flemish body, lympathic, sanguine and voracious, more fluid, more rapidly tending to accretion and waste than those whose dry fibre and radical temperance preserve permanent tissues. ”

“ Rubens goes to mass every morning, and presents a picture in order to obtain indulgences; after which he falls back upon his own poetic feeling for natural life and, in the same style, paints a lusty Magdalen and a plump Siren; under the Catholic varnish the heart and the intellect, all social ways and observances are pagan. On the other side, this art is truly Flemish; everything issues from and centres on a mother idea which is new and national ”

“ They will not devote themselves like the mystic painters of Cologne, or the moralist painters of England, to the representation of spiritual traits and characters; little will they concern themselves with the disproportion between mind and matter. In a fertile and luxurious country, amidst jovial customs, in the presence of placid, honest and blooming faces they are to obtain the models suited to their genius. ”

“ A bluish or gray vapor is constantly rising from the canals, the rivers, the sea, and from the saturated soil: a universal haze forms a soft gauze over objects, even in the finest weather. Flying scuds, like thin, half-torn white drapery, float over the meadows night and morning. ”

“ The present with them is impregnated with the past and big with the future; not only the whole face but the entire attitude conspires to manifest the flowing stream of their thought, feeling and complete being; we hear the inward utterance of their emotion ”

“ Nobody has endowed figures with such spirit, with a gesture so impulsive, with an impetuosity so abandoned and furious, such an universal commotion and tempest of swollen and writhing muscles in one single effort. ”

“ The truth is he is not repelled by the trivialities and deformities of life. He does not naturally enter into the symmetrical composition, the tranquil and easy action, the beautiful proportions, the healthiness and ability of the naked figure. When the Flemings in the sixteenth century resorted to the Italian school, they only succeeded in spoiling their original style. During seventy years of patient imitation they brought forth nothing but hybrid abortions. ”

“ Hence it is that nobody has depicted its contrasts in stronger relief, nor as visibly shown the decay and bloom of life at one time the dull flabby corpse, a genuine clinical mass, empty of blood and substance, livid, blue and mottled through suffering, a clot of blood on the mouth, the eye glassy and the feet and hands clayish, swollen and deformed because death seized them first ”

“ The old despotism becomes relaxed; to the rigors of the Duke of Alva succeeds the liberal policy of the Duke of Parma. After an amputation, a man who has bled profusely must be restored by soothing and strengthening treatment: hence it is that, after the pacification of Ghent, the Spaniards let their terrible edicts against heresy lie dormant. Executions are at an end. The latest martyr is a poor sewing woman, buried alive in 1597. In the following century Jordaens, with his wife and her family, become Protestants without being annoyed, and even without losing any of his commissions. ”

“ Such, in this country, is the human plant; we have now to examine its art, which is the flower. Among all the branches of the Germanic trunk, this plant alone has produced a complete flower the art which developes so happily and so naturally in the Netherlands proves abortive with the other Germanic nations for the reason that this glorious privilege emanates from the national character as we have just set it forth. ”