Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/245

 and an architect, a stage decorator, an original master of applied art. There are no weak points in Vrubel's artistic personality. He is everywhere the same magnificent virtuoso, the same phantast of a fiery temperament, the same genuine artist, never yielding to timid vulgarity, all flame and enthusiasm.

But at the same time Vrubel is a true décadent and herein lies the cause of his failure to achieve success not only among the public at large, but also among artists. We do not mean to say that Vrubel ever played antics to please the fad of the hour, or that he purposely distorted his art. Vrubel is just such a décadent as Beardsley, Somov, Gauguin, as Tiepolo and Watteau in former days, as the art of Rococo, and as that of the "flamboyant" Gothic style and of Romanticism. Vrubel is excessively exquisite, too refined, too far removed from common understanding. At the same time,—and this is a feature of the end of the nineteenth century—his magnificent art is full of inconsistencies, of chasms and oddities. Many see in these deficiencies the first signs of his insanity, but it appears to us that his disease was to a considerable degree caused by the consciousness of these deficiencies, which he could not correct, and which were rooted in the entire state of contemporary art. The struggle of a soul of an artistic genius with the inability to express