when it is literature--and after the
hullabaloo of the moral bell-boys has ceased, the book is quietly
forgotten on its shelf. Flaubert once wrote of the vast fund of
indifference possessed by society. Dramas, books, pictures, statues
have never ruined our overmoral world. The day for such things--if
there ever was such a day--has passed. Besides, among the people of
most nations, the hatred of art and literature is pushed to the point
of lecturing boastfully about that same hatred.

XVII

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES

Although he has been dead since October 24, 1898, critical battles are
still fought over the artistic merits of Puvis de Chavannes. Whether
you agree with Huysmans and call this mural painter a pasticheur of
the Italian Primitives, or else the greatest artist in decoration
since Paolo Veronese, depends much on your critical temperament. There
are many to whom Henri Martin's gorgeous colour--really the methods of
Monet applied to vast spaces--or the blazing originality of Albert
Besnard make more intimate appeal than the pallid poetry, solemn
rhythms, and faded moonlit tonal gamut of Puvis. Because the names of
Gustave Moreau and Puvis were often associated, Huysmans, ab irato,
cries against the "obsequious heresy" of the conjunction, forgetting
that the two men were friends. Marius Vauchon, despite his excessive
admiration for Puvis has rendered a service to his memory in his
study, because he has shown us the real, not the legendary man. With
Vauchon, we are far from Huysmans, and his succinct, but disagreeable,
epigram: C'est un vieux rigaudon qui s'essaie dans le requiem. The
truth is, that some idealists were disappointed to find Puvis to be a
sane, healthy, solidly built man, a bon vivant in the best sense of
the phrase, without a suggestion of the morbid, vapouring pontiff or
haughty Olympian. Personally he was not in the least like his art, a
crime that sentimental persons seldom forgive. A Burgundian--born at
Lyons, December 14, 1824--he possessed all the characteristics of his
race. Asceticism was the last quality to seek in him. A good dinner
with old vintage, plenty of comrades, above all the society of his
beloved Princess Cantacuzene, whose love of her husband was the one
romance in his career; these, and twelve hours' toil a day in his
atelier made up the long life of this distinguished painter. He lived
for a half-century between