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One can perhaps convey it best in terms of the other arts, and by reference to them; and, indeed, some of these poems are as iridescent and as exquisite as a lovely fragment of Venetian glass; others as delicate in perfect workmanship and as single in natural motive as an etching by Whistler is, or one of those beautiful little Greek figures which in the olive woods round Tanagra men can still find, with the faint gilding and the fading crimson not yet fled from hair and lips and raiment; and many of them seem like one of Corot's twilights just passing into music; for not merely in visible colour, but in sentiment also which is the colour of poetry may there be a kind of tone.
Guided by a perfect instinct, he progressed, fulfilling the course of his artistic destiny. We notice change, but each change brings fuller beauty. And through the long and beautiful year of Corot's genius full as the year itself of months and seasons we notice that the change that comes over his art is always in the direction of purer and more spiritual beauty.
The maidens in Corot's paintings, for example, seem to belong as naturally to the landscape as the very trees themselves. But the painter can depict the human body not merely as something sensuously beautiful, but as expressive, through gesture and pose and countenance, of character and thought. The complex psychic life of man is thus open to him for delineation.
It has a pure, crisp, vibrant accent, quite without analogue in the technic of landscape painting. Taking technic in its widest sense, one may speak of Corot's shortcomings not, I think, of his failures.
It is perhaps in these pictures that he has revealed certain dreams hitherto jealously hidden. And now I must speak of his technique. It is very singular and varied, and one of the most complicated in existence. In his first works, which are apparently as simple as Corot's, he does not employ the process of colour-spots.
"To make Campbell Corot's acquaintance proved more difficult than I had expected. He confided to me immediately that he had been a durn fool to give himself away to my friend, but talk was cheap, and people never believed him, anyway. Then gloom descended, and my professions of confidence received only the most surly responses.
Corot's parents were Parisians of the purest dye, having been court-dressmakers to Napoleon I.; and when Corot finally determined to leave the draper's shop and become a painter, his father said: "You shall have a yearly allowance of 1,200 francs, and if you can live on that, you can do as you please."
For this, if it was worth anything, the dealer promised he should be liberally paid. Naturally Campbell Corot's professional dander was up, and he produced in a week a Corotish 'Dance of Nymphs, if anything, more specious than the last.
Every man who knows what it is to dream of landscape meets with one of these works of Corot's first manner with a cry, not of welcome only, but of recognition. Here is morning perceived by the spirit of the hours of sleep. The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization has been kind.
And Corot's landscapes, where the dim, shadowy lovers sit on the bankside under the great oaks the most lovely pictures ever painted by the hand of man reveal the extreme evolution from a time when the lovers occupied the center of the stage, and the landscape was only an accessory.
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