I strongly recommend that you read it sometime

24 November

Today and yesterday I drew two figures of an old man with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

What a fine sight an old working man makes, in his patched bombazine suit with his bald head.
I’ve finished the book by Zola, Pot-bouille. I thought the most powerful passage was the kitchen maid Adele (scruffy Breton) giving birth in the dark attic room. Josserand is also portrayed with devilish skill and with sentiment. The rest of the characters too, but these two sombre ones, Josserand writing his addresses at night, and that tiny maid’s room, made the most impression on me.

But after Zola’s book I read Quatre vingt treize by V. Hugo at long last. That’s entirely different territory. It’s painted, I mean written, like Decamps or Jules Dupré, with expressions as in old Ary Scheffers, such as The man in tears and The cutter of the tablecloth — or the figures in the background of Christus Consolator. I strongly recommend that you read it sometime if you haven’t read it, for the sentiment in which this book is written is becoming ever more uncommon, and amid the new I see nothing more noble. Truly.
It’s easier to say, as Mesdag did of a certain painting by Heyerdahl done in the sentiment of Murillo or Rembrandt that he didn’t want to buy from you, ‘Oh, that’s the old manner, we don’t need that’, than to replace the old manner by something equivalent, let alone something better. And since many reason like Mesdag these days, without giving it any further thought, it can do no harm if others do reflect on whether we are in the world to pull down rather than to build up. The phrase ‘not needed any more’ — how eagerly people use it and what a stupid and ugly phrase it is. I believe that in a certain fairy tale Andersen puts it in the mouth not of a person but of an old pig. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Tagged as: book, drawing, fairy tale, Hugo, literature, old man, painting, pig, Rembrandt, Scheffer, sentiment, Zola