Life in the form of power and equilibrium


Maupassant, Mallarmé, Verlaine, between these three and Renoir there existed a common comprehension of the times and above all community regarding certain features of the thought of those days. L'Héritage, Le Baptême, la Femme de Paul, Pierre et Jean are full of scenes and faces which are, as it were, pictures by Renoir in words. To be sure the Venus of Syracusa, that marble female of which Maupassant makes use, is not Renoir's dazzling woman of flesh and blood, but their method or their lack of theory originated in the same state of mind; both created without disquietude, without coming into conflict with themselves, indifferent as they were to æsthetical and philosophical controversies. Where they differed was in their attitude towards life. As a naturalist incapable of imagination, the author of Une Vie accepted reality, was submissive to the world's images as they presented themselves before his registering apparatus, whereas Renoir possessed too great a love not to react in front of Nature, and in the very direction of Nature. He was constantly present in his pictures; he selected what pleased him, was not satisfied with merely looking; he «decoyed the eyes» of the selected model; he poetized, kneaded, or caressed the flesh he was painting. Despite his respect for Nature, he could not prevent himself intervening. Maupassant, on the contrary, was an impassive witness.
Renoir saw Mallarmé chiefly at the house of Berthe Morizot. What he liked in this exquisite man was «his delightful simplicity». He willingly acknowledged that, «certain poems by Mallarmé were beyond his comprehension,» and he confessed that he preferred Dumaspère. Yet he «took such a pleasure in seeing him,» for, he added, «though I never understood very much of what he wrote, what a treat it was to hear him speak!» He produced a frontispiece for one of his Pages, and the resemblance has already been noted between a nude woman by Renoir and that described in Mallarmé's Phénomène futur, -- «Some original and naïve folly, an ecstacy in gold, I know not what! in her parlance, her hair, folded with the grace of stuffs around a face lit up by the sanguinary nudity of her lips... And the eyes, comparable to rare stones! which are not worth the look coming from her happy flesh...» The poet of the azure, whom Victor Hugo called his «dear Impressionist poet», and to whom the autumn appeared as though «scattered with freckles», just as La Promenade or La Balançoire are strewn with touches of gold, was also the author of that poem of Rubens-like procreation and fleshly deception, after the manner of Watteau, -- L'Après-midi d'un Faune. But Renoir's nymph did not steal away. The Saône, she threw herself into the arms of the Rhône. Venus, chosen by Paris, -- she hesitated no more than the shepherd, she advanced without even knowing Rubens' hesitations, -- and Bonnard's violence was useless. Renoir was the offering without ceremony, and amiable. But the faun, seeing «an animal whiteness at rest, undulating», «on the blue-grey gold of distant verdure», or admiring «the splendid bath of hair» which disappeared amidst brightness and quivering, «O! ye gems!» seems to describe, under the form of naiades, the women-bathers of Cagnes.
Verlaine's grossness was no more to Renoir's taste than Mallarmé's cerebral perversity. Renoir was neither fin de siècle, nor fin de race. The pantheistic appeals and efforts towards virility of an effeminate period he transcribed into a quiet and healthy plasticity; and thus he held aloof from that decadence whose very name he was ignorant of. He had no need to evoke either the robing-room of Italian comedy, or the masks of the buried past, but was content with a reality as devoid of despair as it was of the idea of forfeiture. To him the flesh had never had the taste of «bitter fruit» which Verlaine experienced; the nobility of Man and his body was intact in the mind of Renoir.
Yet Verlaine and Renoir viewed the human form with similar eyes. They described woman whilst noting the same beloved features, and so long as the poet held himself aloof from vice there was a sensual brotherhood between them. As soon as the oval of a face was sketched in, Renoir placed the light of the eyes; whilst Verlaine strove primarily to be «rich with beautiful eyes», «to believe in large eyes», and to seize «the profound brilliancy of eyes». Invisibly they were both of them attracted by that liquid brightness, when the picture had been barely begun; and the poet, in his L'Amoureuse du Diable, dedicated to Mallarmé, shows her to us:
«Avec ses cheveux d'or épars comme du feu
Assise, et ses grand yeux d'azur tristes un peu.»
Moreover, in Les Fêtes Galantes, do we not see, even as far as her look is concerned, one of Renoir's models?
«Blonde en somme. Le nez mignon avec la bouche Incarnadine, grasse et divine d'orgueil Inconscient. D'ailleurs plus fine que la mouche Qui ravive l'éclat un peu niais de l'œil.»
To the desires of these three men, Maupassant, Mallarmé, and Verlaine, -- unnatural desires if regarded as being realized to their fullest extent, exaggerated desires because of the very decadence of their spiritual and physical forces, -- the desire of one of them for Nature and Reality up to the point when all personality becomes obliterated, in the case of another desire for the liberation of the intellect to the borderland of the impenetrable, and with the third the desire for intimate possession of the created to the extent both of degradation and unstable elevation, -- Renoir, the virile man and poet, brought life in the form of power and equilibrium.

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