IX. CHARDIN



Zola, as reported by George Moore, said of Degas: "I cannot accept a
man who shuts himself up all his life to draw a ballet girl as ranking
co-equal in dignity and power with Flaubert, Daudet, and Goncourt."
This remark gives us the cue for Zola's critical endowment; despite
his asseverations his naturalism was only skin deep. He, too, was
swayed by his literary notions concerning the importance of the
subject. In painting the theme may count for little and yet a great
picture result; in Zola's field there must be an appreciable subject,
else no fiction. But what cant it is to talk about "dignity." Zola
admits ingrained romanticism. He would not see, for instance, that the
Degas ballet girls are on the same plane as the Ingres odalisques;
that a still-life by Chardin outweighs a big canvas by David; and it
must be admitted that the world is on the side of Zola. The heresy of
the subject will never be stamped out, the painted anecdote will
always win the eye of the easily satisfied majority.

It may be remembered that the great Spaniard began his apprenticeship
to art by copying still-life, which he did in a superlative manner;
his Bodegones, or kitchen pieces, testify to this. Chardin, who led as
laborious an existence as Degas, shutting himself away from the world,
studied surfaces with an intensity that Zola, the apostle of realism,
would have misunderstood. Later the French painter devoted himself
with equal success to genre and figure subjects; but for him there was
no such category as still-life. Everything of substance, shape,