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Here are men of good faith who feel things directly, and say not a word more than they feel. With a little ingenuity and disingenuousness one might make a douanier of them. They are scrupulous, sincere, and born painters. But they are not orderly. They are not organizers of form and colour. No: they are not. On the contrary, these good fellows had the most elementary notions of composition.
But nothing could well be more drowsy and desultory than this industry as I saw it practised, with the aid of two or three brown peasants and under the eye of a solitary douanier, who strolled on the little quay beneath the western wall.
Had the douanier been insolent, my peppery Irishman would have been insolent too, perhaps, in the hope of cowering the man by truculence more swashbuckling than his own; but he had been as polite as his countrymen proverbially are, if not goaded out of their suavity. If you'll take the ladies to the best hotel in town, Moray and I will stop and see this thing through. We'll follow when we can."
The brave douanier was hardly master enough to have great and enduring influence; nevertheless, the sincerity of his vision and directness of his method reinforced and even added to one part of the lesson taught by Cézanne: also, it was he who by his pictures, not by doctrine of course sent the pick of the young generation to look at the primitives.
Yet I daresay it was this jovial and unaffected good-fellowship, quite as much as his unquestionable genius, that won the brave douanier his place in the hearts of those brilliant people who frequented what he used to call his "soirées toutes familiales et artistiques."
I was equally polite on my part, inly resolving, that henceforward Austrian douanier should not lay finger on my note-book. The halt here was one of from two to three hours, which were spent in unlading the diligence, opening and locking trunks, for in Austria nothing is done in a hurry, save the trial and execution of Mazzinists.
"Il s'y fait un commerce terrible," a douanier said to me, as he looked up and down the interminable docks; and such a place has indeed much to say of the wealth, the capacity for production, of France, the bright, cheerful, smokeless industry of the wonderful country which produces, above all, the agreeable things of life, and turns even its defeats and revolutions into gold.
This gift they have in common with the Primitives; and this the douanier possessed in an extraordinary degree. Of Rousseau's sense of the decorative possibilities of paint it is, I suppose, unnecessary to say anything. Gauguin called his black "inimitable."
My little stock was collected, bound together with a cord, and sent in to the chief douanier, who sat, Radamanthus-like, in an inner apartment, to judge books, papers, and persons. There is nothing there, thought I, to which even an Austrian official can take exception. Soon I was summoned to follow my little library. The man examined the collection volume by volume.
Whatever the real differences between a noble savage and an unspoilt artisan may be, the difference between the ideas of them with which a jaded society diverts itself is negligible. "Il nous faut les barbares," said Gide. Meanwhile the douanier came at the right moment.
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