Expression is the general law of art.—Division of arts.—Distinction between liberal arts and trades.—Eloquence itself, philosophy, and history do not make a part of the fine arts.—That the arts gain nothing by encroaching upon each other, and usurping each other's means and processes.—Classification of the arts:—its true principle is expression.—Comparison of arts with each other.—Poetry the first of arts.
Expression is the general law of art.—Division of arts.—Distinction between liberal arts and trades.—Eloquence itself, philosophy, and history do not make a part of the fine arts.—That the arts gain nothing by encroaching upon each other, and usurping each other's means and processes.—Classification of the arts:—its true principle is expression.—Comparison of arts with each other.—Poetry the first of arts.
Arésuméof the last lecture would be a definition of art, of its end and law. Art is the free reproduction of the beautiful, not of a single natural beauty, but of ideal beauty, as the human imagination conceives it by the aid of data which nature furnishes it. The ideal beauty envelops the infinite:—the end of art is, then, to produce works that, like those of nature, or even in a still higher degree, may have the charm of the infinite. But how and by what illusion can we draw the infinite from the finite? This is the difficulty of art, and its glory also. What bears us towards the infinite in natural beauty? The ideal side of this beauty. The ideal is the mysterious ladder that enables the soul to ascend from the finite to the infinite. The artist, then, must devote himself to the representation of the ideal. Every thing has its ideal. The first care of the artist will be, then, whatever he does, to penetrate at first to the concealed ideal of his subject, for his subject has an ideal,—in order to render it, in the next place, more or less striking to the senses and the soul, according to the conditions which the very materials that he employs—the stone, the color, the sound, the language—impose on him.
So, to express the ideal of the infinite in one way or another, is the law of art; and all the arts are such only by their relation tothe sentiment of the beautiful and the infinite which they awaken in the soul, by the aid of that high quality of every work of art that is called expression.
Expression is essentially ideal: what expression tries to make felt, is not what the eye can see and the hand touch, evidently it is something invisible and impalpable.
The problem of art is to reach the soul through the body. Art offers to the senses forms, colors, sounds, words, so arranged that they excite in the soul, concealed behind the senses, the inexpressible emotion of beauty.
Expression is addressed to the soul as form is addressed to the senses. Form is the obstacle of expression, and, at the same time, is its imperative, necessary, only means. By working upon form, by bending it to its service, by dint of care, patience, and genius, art succeeds in converting an obstacle into a means.
By their object, all arts are equal; all are arts only because they express the invisible. It cannot be too often repeated, that expression is the supreme law of art. The thing to express is always the same,—it is the idea, the spirit, the soul, the invisible, the infinite. But, as the question is concerning the expression of this one and the same thing, by addressing ourselves to the senses which are diverse, the difference of the senses divides art into different arts.
We have seen, that, of the five senses which have been given to man,[120]three—taste, smell, and touch—are incapable of producing in us the sentiment of beauty. Joined to the other two, they may contribute to the understanding of this sentiment; but alone and by themselves they cannot produce it. Taste judges of the agreeable, not of the beautiful. No sense is less allied to the soul and more in the service of the body; it flatters, it serves the grossest of all masters, the stomach. If smell sometimes seems to participate in the sentiment of the beautiful, it is because the odor is exhaled from an object that is already beautiful,that is beautiful for some other reason. Thus the rose is beautiful for its graceful form, for the varied splendor of its colors; its odor is agreeable, it is not beautiful. Finally, it is not touch alone that judges of the regularity of forms, but touch enlightened by sight.
There remain two senses to which all the world concedes the privilege of exciting in us the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful. They seem to be more particularly in the service of the soul. The sensations which they give have something purer, more intellectual. They are less indispensable for the material preservation of the individual. They contribute to the embellishment rather than to the sustaining of life. They procure us pleasures in which our personality seems less interested and more self-forgetful. To these two senses, then, art should be addressed, is addressed, in fact, in order to reach the soul. Hence the division of arts into two great classes,—arts addressed to hearing, arts addressed to sight; on the one hand, music and poetry; on the other, painting, with engraving, sculpture, architecture, gardening.
It will, perhaps, seem strange that we rank among the arts neither eloquence, nor history, nor philosophy.
The arts are called the fine arts, because their sole object is to produce the disinterested emotion of beauty, without regard to the utility either of the spectator or the artist. They are also called the liberal arts, because they are the arts of free men and not of slaves, which affranchise the soul, charm and ennoble existence; hence the sense and origin of those expressions of antiquity,artes liberales,artes ingenuæ. There are arts without nobility, whose end is practical and material utility; they are called trades, such as that of the stove-maker and the mason. True art may be joined to them, may even shine in them, but only in the accessories and the details.
Eloquence, history, philosophy, are certainly high employments of intelligence; they have their dignity, their eminence, which nothing surpasses, but rigorously speaking, they are not arts.
Eloquence does not propose to itself to produce in the soul of the auditors the disinterested sentiment of beauty. It may also produce this effect, but without having sought it. Its direct end, which it can subordinate to no other, is to convince, to persuade. Eloquence has a client which before all it must save or make triumph. It matters little, whether this client be a man, a people, or an idea. Fortunate is the orator if he elicits the expression: That is beautiful! for it is a noble homage rendered to his talent; unfortunate is he if he does not elicit this, for he has missed his end. The two great types of political and religious eloquence, Demosthenes in antiquity, Bossuet among the moderns, think only of the interest of the cause confided to their genius, the sacred cause of country and that of religion; whilst at bottom Phidias and Raphael work to make beautiful things. Let us hasten to say, what the names of Demosthenes and Bossuet command us to say, that true eloquence, very different from that of rhetoric, disdains certain means of success; it asks no more than to please, but without any sacrifice unworthy of it; every foreign ornament degrades it. Its proper character is simplicity, earnestness—I do not mean affected earnestness, a designed and artful gravity, the worst of all deceptions—I mean true earnestness, that springs from sincere and profound conviction. This is what Socrates understood by true eloquence.[121]
As much must be said of history and philosophy. The philosopher speaks and writes. Can he, then, like the orator, find accents which make truth enter the soul, colors and forms that make it shine forth evident and manifest to the eyes of intelligence? It would be betraying his cause to neglect the means that can serve it; but the profoundest art is here only a means, the aim of philosophy is elsewhere; whence it follows that philosophy is not an art. Without doubt, Plato is a great artist; he is the peer of Sophocles and Phidias, as Pascal is sometimesthe rival of Demosthenes and Bossuet;[122]but both would have blushed if they had discovered at the bottom of their soul another design, another aim than the service of truth and virtue.
History does not relate for the sake of relating; it does not paint for the sake of painting; it relates and paints the past that it may be the living lesson of the future. It proposes to instruct new generations by the experience of those who have gone before them, by exhibiting to them a faithful picture of great and important events, with their causes and their effects, with general designs and particular passions, with the faults, virtues, and crimes that are found mingled together in human things. It teaches the excellence of prudence, courage, and great thoughts profoundly meditated, constantly pursued, and executed with moderation and force. It shows the vanity of immoderate pretensions, the power of wisdom and virtue, the impotence of folly and crime. Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus undertake any thing else than procuring new emotions for an idle curiosity or a worn-out imagination; they doubtless desire to interest and attract, but more to instruct; they are the avowed masters of statesmen and the preceptors of mankind.
The sole object of art is the beautiful. Art abandons itself as soon as it shuns this. It is often constrained to make concessions to circumstances, to external conditions that are imposed upon it; but it must always retain a just liberty. Architecture and the art of gardening are the least free of arts; they are subjected to unavoidable obstacles; it belongs to the genius of the artist to govern these obstacles, and even to draw from them happy effects, as the poet turns the slavery of metre and rhyme into a source of unexpected beauties. Extreme liberty may carry art to a caprice which degrades it, as chains too heavy crush it. It is the death of architecture to subject it to convenience, tocomfort. Is the architect obliged to subordinate general effect and the proportions of the edifice to such or such a particular end that is prescribed to him? He takes refuge in details, in pediments, in friezes, in all the parts that have not utility for a special object, and in them he becomes a true artist. Sculpture and painting, especially music and poetry, are freer than architecture and the art of gardening. One can also shackle them, but they disengage themselves more easily.
Similar by their common end, all the arts differ by the particular effects which they produce, and by the processes which they employ. They gain nothing by exchanging their means and confounding the limits that separate them. I bow before the authority of antiquity; but, perhaps, through habit and a remnant of prejudice, I have some difficulty in representing to myself with pleasure statues composed of several metals, especially painted statues.[123]Without pretending that sculpture has not to a certain point its color, that of perfectly pure matter, that especially which the hand of time impresses upon it, in spite of all the seductions of a contemporaneous[124]artist of great talent, I have little taste, I confess, for that artifice that is forced to give to marble themorbidezzaof painting. Sculpture is an austere muse; it has its graces, but they are those of no other art. Flesh-color must remain a stranger to it: there would nothing more remain to communicate to it but the movement of poetry and the indefiniteness of music! And what will music gain by aiming at the picturesque, when its proper domain is the pathetic? Give to the most learned symphonist a storm to render. Nothing is easier to imitate than the whistling of the winds and the noise of thunder. But by what combinations of harmony will he exhibit to the eyes the glare of the lightning rending all of a sudden the veil of the night, and what is most fearful in the tempest, the movement of the waves that now ascend like amountain, now descend and seem to precipitate themselves into bottomless abysses? If the auditor is not informed of the subject, he will never suspect it, and I defy him to distinguish a tempest from a battle. In spite of science and genius, sounds cannot paint forms. Music, when well guided, will guard itself from contending against the impossible; it will not undertake to express the tumult and strife of the waves and other similar phenomena; it will do more: with sounds it will fill the soul with the sentiments that succeed each other in us during the different scenes of the tempest. Haydn will thus become[125]the rival, even the vanquisher of the painter, because it has been given to music to move and agitate the soul more profoundly than painting.
Since theLaocoonof Lessing, it is no longer permitted to repeat, without great reserve, the famous axiom,—Ut pictura poesis; or, at least, it is very certain that painting cannot do every thing that poetry can do. Everybody admires the picture of Rumor, drawn by Virgil; but let a painter try to realize this symbolic figure; let him represent to us a huge monster with a hundred eyes, a hundred mouths, and a hundred ears, whose feet touch the earth, whose head is lost in the clouds, and such a figure will become very ridiculous.
So the arts have a common end, and entirely different means. Hence the general rules common to all, and particular rules for each. I have neither time nor space to enter into details on this point. I limit myself to repeating, that the great law which governs all others, is expression. Every work of art that does not express an idea signifies nothing; in addressing itself to such or such a sense, it must penetrate to the mind, to the soul, and bear thither a thought, a sentiment capable of touching or elevating it. From this fundamental rule all the others are derived; for example, that which is continually and justly recommended,—composition. To this is particularly applied the precept of unity and variety. But, in saying this, we have said nothing solong as we have not determined the nature of the unity of which we would speak. True unity, is unity of expression, and variety is made only to spread over the entire work the idea or the single sentiment that it should express. It is useless to remark, that between composition thus defined, and what is often called composition, as the symmetry and arrangement of parts according to artificial rules, there is an abyss. True composition is nothing else than the most powerful means of expression.
Expression not only furnishes the general rules of art, it also gives the principle that allows of their classification.
In fact, every classification, supposes a principle that serves as a common measure.
Such a principle has been sought in pleasure, and the first of arts has seemed that which gives the most vivid joys. But we have proved that the object of art is not pleasure:—the more or less of pleasure that an art procures cannot, then, be the true measure of its value.
This measure is nothing else than expression. Expression being the supreme end, the art that most nearly approaches it is the first of all.
All true arts are expressive, but they are diversely so. Take music; it is without contradiction the most penetrating, the profoundest, the most intimate art. There is physically and morally between a sound and the soul a marvellous relation. It seems as though the soul were an echo in which the sound takes a new power. Extraordinary things are recounted of the ancient music. And it must not be believed that the greatness of effect supposes here very complicated means. No, the less noise music makes, the more it touches. Give some notes to Pergolese, give him especially some pure and sweet voices, and he returns a celestial charm, bears you away into infinite spaces, plunges you into ineffable reveries. The peculiar power of music is to open to the imagination a limitless career, to lend itself with astonishing facility to all the moods of each one, to arouse or calm, with the sounds of the simplest melody, our accustomedsentiments, our favorite affections. In this respect music is an art without a rival:—however, it is not the first of arts.
Music pays for the immense power that has been given it; it awakens more than any other art the sentiment of the infinite, because it is vague, obscure, indeterminate in its effects. It is just the opposite art to sculpture, which bears less towards the infinite, because every thing in it is fixed with the last degree of precision. Such is the force and at the same time the feebleness of music, that it expresses every thing and expresses nothing in particular. Sculpture, on the contrary, scarcely gives rise to any reverie, for it clearly represents such a thing and not such another. Music does not paint, it touches; it puts in motion imagination, not the imagination that reproduces images, but that which makes the heart beat, for it is absurd to limit imagination to the domain of images.[126]The heart, once touched, moves all the rest of our being; thus music, indirectly, and to a certain point, can recall images and ideas; but its direct and natural power is neither on the representative imagination nor intelligence, it is on the heart, and that is an advantage sufficiently beautiful.
The domain of music is sentiment, but even there its power is more profound than extensive, and if it expresses certain sentiments with an incomparable force, it expresses but a very small number of them. By way of association, it can awaken them all, but directly it produces very few of them, and the simplest and the most elementary, too,—sadness and joy with their thousand shades. Ask music to express magnanimity, virtuous resolution, and other sentiments of this kind, and it will be just as incapable of doing it, as of painting a lake or a mountain. It goes about it as it can; it employs the slow, the rapid, the loud, the soft, etc., but imagination has to do the rest, and imagination does only what it pleases. The same measure reminds one of a mountain, another of the ocean; the warrior finds in it heroicinspirations, the recluse religious inspirations. Doubtless, words determine musical expression, but the merit then is in the word, not in the music; and sometimes the word stamps the music with a precision that destroys it, and deprives it of its proper effects—vagueness, obscurity, monotony, but also fulness and profundity, I was about to say infinitude. I do not in the least admit that famous definition of song:—a noted declamation. A simple declamation rightly accented is certainly preferable to stunning accompaniments; but to music must be left its character, and its defects and advantages must not be taken away from it. Especially it must not be turned aside from its object, and there must not be demanded from it what it could not give. It is not made to express complicated and factitious sentiment, nor terrestrial and vulgar sentiments. Its peculiar charm is to elevate the soul towards the infinite. It is therefore naturally allied to religion, especially to that religion of the infinite, which is at the same time the religion of the heart; it excels in transporting to the feet of eternal mercy the soul trembling on the wings of repentance, hope, and love. Happy are those, who, at Rome, in the Vatican,[127]during the solemnities of the Catholic worship,have heard the melodies of Leo, Durante, and Pergolese, on the old consecrated text! They have entered heaven for a moment, and their souls have been able to ascend thither without distinction of rank, country, even belief, by those invisible and mysterious steps, composed, thus to speak, of all the simple, natural, universal sentiments, that everywhere on earth draw from the bosom of the human creature a sigh towards another world!
Between sculpture and music, those two opposite extremes, is painting, nearly as precise as the one, nearly as touching as the other. Like sculpture, it marks the visible forms of objects, but adds to them life; like music, it expresses the profoundest sentiments of the soul, and expresses them all. Tell me what sentiment does not come within the province of the painter? He has entire nature at his disposal, the physical world, and the moral world, a churchyard, a landscape, a sunset, the ocean, the great scenes of civil and religious life, all the beings of creation, above all, the figure of man, and its expression, that living mirror of what passes in the soul. More pathetic than sculpture, clearer than music, painting is elevated, in my opinion, above both, because it expresses beauty more under all its forms, and the human soul in all the richness and variety of its sentiments.
But the artpar excellence, that which surpasses all others, because it is incomparably the most expressive, is poetry.
Speech is the instrument of poetry; poetry fashions it to its use, and idealizes it, in order to make it express ideal beauty.Poetry gives to it the charm and power of measure; it makes of it something intermediary between the ordinary voice and music, something at once material and immaterial, finite, clear, and precise, like contours and forms the most definite, living and animated like color, pathetic and infinite like sound. A word in itself, especially a word chosen and transfigured by poetry, is the most energetic and universal symbol. Armed with this talisman, poetry reflects all the images of the sensible world, like sculpture and painting; it reflects sentiment like painting and music, with all its varieties, which music does not attain, and in their rapid succession that painting cannot follow, as precise and immobile as sculpture; and it not only expresses all that, it expresses what is inaccessible to every other art, I mean thought, entirely distinct from the senses and even from sentiment,—thought that has no forms,—thought that has no color, that lets no sound escape, that does not manifest itself in any way,—thought in its highest flight, in its most refined abstraction.
Think of it. What a world of images, of sentiments, of thoughts at once distinct and confused, are excited within us by this one word—country! and by this other word, brief and immense,—God! What is more clear and altogether more profound and vast!
Tell the architect, the sculptor, the painter, even the musician, to call forth also by a single stroke all the powers of nature and the soul! They cannot, and by that they acknowledge the superiority of speech and poetry.
They proclaim it themselves, for they take poetry for their own measure; they esteem their own works, and demand that they should be esteemed, in proportion as they approach the poetic ideal. And the human race does as artists do: a beautiful picture, a noble melody, a living and expressive statue, gives rise to the exclamation—How poetical! This is not an arbitrary comparison; it is a natural judgment which makes poetry the type of the perfection of all the arts,—the artpar excellence, whichcomprises all others, to which they aspire, which none can reach.
When the other arts would imitate the works of poetry, they usually err, losing their own genius, without robbing poetry of its genius. But poetry constructs according to its own taste palaces and temples, like architecture; it makes them simple or magnificent; all orders, as well as all systems, obey it; the different ages of art are the same to it; it reproduces, if it pleases, the classic or the Gothic, the beautiful or the sublime, the measured or the infinite. Lessing has been able, with the exactest justice, to compare Homer to the most perfect sculptor; with such precision are the forms which that marvellous chisel gives to all beings determined! And what a painter, too, is Homer! and, of a different kind, Dante! Music alone has something more penetrating than poetry, but it is vague, limited, and fugitive. Besides its clearness, its variety, its durability, poetry has also the most pathetic accents. Call to mind the words that Priam utters at the feet of Achilles while asking him for the dead body of his son, more than one verse of Virgil, entire scenes of theCidand thePolyeucte, the prayer of Esther kneeling before the Lord, the choruses ofEstherandAthalie. In the celebrated song of Pergolese,Stabat Mater Dolorosa, we may ask which moves most, the music or the words. TheDies iræ, Dies illa, recited only, produces the most terrible effect. In those fearful words, every blow tells, so to speak; each word contains a distinct sentiment, an idea at once profound and determinate. The intellect advances at each step, and the heart rushes on in its turn. Human speech idealized by poetry has the depth and brilliancy of musical notes; it is luminous as well as pathetic; it speaks to the mind as well as to the heart; it is in that inimitable, unique, and embraces all extremes and all contraries in a harmony that redoubles their reciprocal effect, in which, by turns, appear and are developed, all images, all sentiments, all ideas, all the human faculties, all the inmost recesses of the soul, all the forms of things, all real and all intelligible worlds!
Expression not only serves to appreciate the different arts, but the different schools of art. Example:—French art in the seventeenth century. French poetry:—Corneille. Racine. Molière. La Fontaine. Boileau.—Painting:—Lesueur. Poussin. Le Lorrain. Champagne.—Engraving.—Sculpture:—Sarrazin. The Anguiers. Girardon. Pujet.—Le Nôtre.—Architecture.
Expression not only serves to appreciate the different arts, but the different schools of art. Example:—French art in the seventeenth century. French poetry:—Corneille. Racine. Molière. La Fontaine. Boileau.—Painting:—Lesueur. Poussin. Le Lorrain. Champagne.—Engraving.—Sculpture:—Sarrazin. The Anguiers. Girardon. Pujet.—Le Nôtre.—Architecture.
We believe that we have firmly established that all kinds of beauty, although most dissimilar in appearance, may, when subjected to a serious examination, be reduced to spiritual and moral beauty; that expression, therefore, is at once the true object and the first law of art; that all arts are such only so far as they express the idea concealed under the form, and are addressed to the soul through the senses; finally, that in expression the different arts find the true measure of their relative value, and the most expressive art must be placed in the first rank.
If expression judges the different arts, does it not naturally follow, that by the same title it can also judge the different schools which, in each art, dispute with each other the empire of taste?
There is not one of these schools that does not represent in its own way some side of the beautiful, and we are disposed to embrace all in an impartial and kindly study. We are eclectics in the arts as well as in metaphysics. But, as in metaphysics, the knowledge of all systems, and the portion of truth that is in each, enlightens without enfeebling our convictions; so, in the history of arts, while holding the opinion that no school must be disdained, that even in China some shade of beauty can be found, our eclecticism does not make us waver in regard to the sentiment of true beauty and the supreme rule of art. What we demandof the different schools, without distinction of time or place, what we see in the south as well as in the north, at Florence, Rome, Venice, and Seville, as well as at Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Paris,—wherever there are men, is something human, is the expression of a sentiment or an idea.
A criticism that should be founded on the principle of expression, would somewhat derange, it must be confessed, received judgments, and would carry some disorder into the hierarchy of the renowned. We do not undertake such a revolution; we only propose to confirm, or at least elucidate our principle by an example, and by an example that is at our hand.
There is in the world a school formerly illustrious, now very lightly treated:—this school is the French school of the seventeenth century. We would replace it in honor, by recalling attention to the qualities that make its glory.
We have worked with constancy to reinstate among us the philosophy of Descartes, unworthily sacrificed to the philosophy of Locke, because with its defects it possesses in our view the incomparable merit of subordinating the senses to the mind, of elevating and ennobling man. So we profess a serious and reflective admiration for our national art of the seventeenth century, because, without disguising what is wanting to it, we find in it what we prefer to every thing else, grandeur united to good sense and reason, simplicity and force, genius of composition, especially that of expression.
France, careless of her glory, does not appear to have the least notion that she reckons in her annals perhaps the greatest century of humanity, that which embraces the greatest number of extraordinary men of every kind. When, I pray you, have politicians like Henry IV., Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, Louis XIV. been seen giving each other the hand? I do not pretend that each of them has no rival, even superiors. Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, perhaps excel them. But Alexander has but a single contemporary that can be compared with him, his father Philip; Cæsar cannot even have suspected that Octavius would one day beworthy of him; Charlemagne is a colossus in a desert; whilst among us these five men succeed each other without an interval, press upon each other, and have, thus to speak, a single soul. And by what officers were they served! Is Condé really inferior to Alexander, Hannibal, and Cæsar; for among his predecessors we must not look for other rivals? Who among them surpasses him in the extent and justness of his conceptions, in quickness of sight, in rapidity of manœuvres, in the union of impetuosity and firmness, in the double glory of taker of cities and gainer of battles? Add that he dealt with generals like Merci and William, that he had under him Turenne and Luxemburg, without speaking of so many other soldiers who were reared in that admirable school, and at the hour of reverse still sufficed to save France.
What other time, at least among the moderns, has seen flourishing together so many poets of the first order? We have, it is true, neither Homer, nor Dante, nor Milton, nor even Tasso. The epic, with its primitive simplicity, is interdicted us. But in the drama we scarcely have equals. It is because dramatic poetry is the poetry that is adapted to us, moral poetrypar excellence, which represents man with his different passions armed against each other, the violent contentions between virtue and crime, the freaks of fortune, the lessons of providence, and in a narrow compass, too, in which the events press upon each other without confusion, in which the action rapidly progresses towards the crisis that must reveal what is most intimate to the heart of the personages.
Let us dare to say what we think, that, in our opinion, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, together, do not equal Corneille; for none of them has known and expressed like him what is of all things most truly touching, a great soul at war with itself, between a generous passion and duty. Corneille is the creator of a new pathetic unknown to antiquity and to all the moderns before him. He disdains to address common and subaltern passions; he does not seek to rouse terror and pity, as demands Aristotle, who limits himself to erecting into maxims the practiceof the Greeks. Corneille seems to have read Plato, and followed his precepts:—he addresses a most elevated part of human nature, the noblest passion, the one nearest virtue,—admiration; and from admiration carried to its culmination he draws the most powerful effects. Shakspeare, we admit, is superior to Corneille in extent and richness of dramatic genius. Entire human nature seems at his disposal, and he reproduces the different scenes of life in their beauty and deformity, in their grandeur and baseness. He excels in painting the terrible or the gentle passions. Othello is jealousy, Lady Macbeth is ambition, as Juliet and Desdemona are the immortal names of youthful and unfortunate love. But if Corneille has less imagination, he has more soul. Less varied, he is more profound. If he does not put upon the stage so many different characters, those that he does put on it are the greatest that can be offered to humanity. The scenes that he gives are less heart-rending, but at once more delicate and more sublime. What is the melancholy of Hamlet, the grief of King Lear, even the disdainful intrepidity of Cæsar, in comparison with the magnanimity of Augustus striving to be master of himself as well as the universe, in comparison with Chimène sacrificing love to honor, especially in comparison with Pauline, not suffering even at the bottom of her heart an involuntary sigh for the one that she must not love? Corneille always confines himself to the highest regions. He is by turns Roman and Christian. He is the interpreter of heroes, the chanter of virtue, the poet of warriors and politicians.[128]And it must not be forgotten that Shakspeare is almost alone in his times, whilst after Corneille comes Racine, who would suffice for the poetical glory of a nation.
Racine assuredly cannot be compared with Corneille for dramatic genius; he is more the man of letters; he has not the tragic soul; he neither loves nor understands politics and war. When he imitates Corneille, for example, in Alexander, and even in Mithridates, he imitates him badly enough. The scene, so vaunted, of Mithridates exposing his plan of campaign to his sons is a morsel of the finest rhetoric, which cannot be compared with the political and military scenes of Cinna and Sertorius, especially with that first scene of the Death of Pompey, in which you witness a counsel as true, as grand, as profound as ever could have been one of the counsels of Richelieu or Mazarin. Racine was not born to paint heroes, but he paints admirably man with his natural passions, and the most natural as well as the most touching of all, love. So he particularly excels in feminine characters. For men he has need of being sustained by Tacitus or holy Scripture.[129]With woman he is at his ease, and he makes them think and speak with perfect truth, set off by exquisite art. Demand of him neither Emilie, Cornélie, nor Pauline; but listen to Andromaque, Monime, Bérénice, and Phèdre! There, even in imitating, he is original, and leaves the ancients very far behind him. Who has taught him that charming delivery, those graceful troubles, that purity even in feebleness, that melancholy, sometimes even that depth, with that marvellous language which seems the natural accent of woman's heart? It is continually repeated that Racine wrote better than Corneille:—say only that the two wrote very differently, and like men in very different epochs. One has two sovereign qualities, which belong to his own natureand his times, anaïvetéand grandeur, the other is notnaïve, but he has too much taste not to be always simple, and he supplies the place of grandeur, forever lost, with consummate elegance. Corneille speaks the language of statesmen, soldiers, theologians, philosophers, and clever women; of Richelieu, Rohan, Saint-Cyran, Descartes, and Pascal; of mother Angélique Arnaud and mother Madeleine de Saint-Joseph; the language which Molière still spoke, which Bossuet preserved to his last breath. Racine speaks that of Louis XIV. and the women who were the ornament of his court. I suppose that thus spoke Madame, the amiable, sprightly, and unfortunate Henriette; thus wrote the author of thePrincesse de Clèvesand the author ofTélémaque. Or, rather, this language is that of Racine himself, of that feeble and tender soul, which passed quickly from love to devotion, which uttered its complaints in lyric poetry, which was wholly poured out in the choruses ofEstherandAthalie, and in theCantiques Spirituels; that soul, so easy to be moved, that a religious ceremony or a representation ofEstherat Saint-Cyr touched to tears, that pitied the misfortunes of the people, that found in its pity and its charity the courage to speak one day the truth to Louis XIV., and was extinguished by the first breath of disgrace.
Molière is, in comparison with Aristophanes, what Corneille is, in comparison with Shakspeare. The author ofPlutus, theWasps, and theClouds, has doubtless an imagination, an explosive buffoonery, a creative power, above all comparison. Molière has not as great poetical conceptions: he has more, perhaps; he has characters. His coloring is less brilliant, his graver is more penetrating. He has engraved in the memory of men a certain number of irregularities and vices which will ever be calledl'Avare(the Miser),le Malade Imaginaire(theHypochondriac),les Femmes Savantes(theLearned Women),le Tartufe(theHypocrite), andDon Juan, not to speak of theMisanthrope, a piece apart, touching as pleasant, which is not addressed to the crowd, and cannot be popular, because it expresses a ridicule rare enough, excess in the passion of truth and honor.
Of all fabulists, ancient and modern, does any one, even the ingenious, the pure, the elegant Phædrus, approach our La Fontaine? He composes his personages, and puts them in action with the skill of Molière; he knows how to take on occasion the tone of Horace, and mingle an ode with a fable; he is at once the most naïve, and the most refined of writers, and his art disappears in its very perfection. We do not speak of the tales, first, because we condemn the kind, then, because La Fontaine displays in them qualities more Italian than French, a narrative full of nature, malice, and grace, but without any of those profound, tender, melancholy traits, that place among the greatest poets of all time the author of theTwo Pigeons(Deux Pigeons), theOld Man(Vieillard), and theThree Young Persons(Gens).
We do not hesitate to put Boileau among these great men. He comes after them, it is true, but he belongs to their company: he comprehends them, loves them, sustains them. It was he, who, in 1663, after theSchool of Women(l'Ecole des Femmes) and long before theHypocrite(le Tartufe), and theMisanthrope, proclaimed Molière the master in the art of verse. It was he who, in 1677, after the failure ofPhèdre, defended the vanquisher of Euripides against the successes of Pradon. It was he who, in advance of posterity, first put in light what is new and entirely original in the plays of Corneille.[130]He saved the pension of the old tragedian by offering the sacrifice of his own. Louis XIV. asking him what writer most honored his reign, Boileau answered, that it was Molière; and when the great king in his decline persecuted Port-Royal, and wished to lay hands on Arnaud, he encountered a man of letters, who said to the face of the imperious monarch,—"Your Majesty in vain seeks M. Arnaud, you are too fortunate to find him." Boileau is somewhat wanting in imagination and invention; but he is great in the energetic sentiment of truth and justice; he carries to the extent of passiontaste for the beautiful and the honest; he is a poet by force of soul and good sense. More than once his heart dictated to him the most pathetic verses:
"In vain against the Cid a minister is leagued,[131]All Paris for Chimène the eyes of Rodrique," etc.* * * * *"After a little spot of earth, obtained by prayer,Forever in the tomb had inclosed Molière," etc.
"In vain against the Cid a minister is leagued,[131]All Paris for Chimène the eyes of Rodrique," etc.
* * * * *
"After a little spot of earth, obtained by prayer,Forever in the tomb had inclosed Molière," etc.
And this epitaph of Arnaud, so simple and so grand:[132]
"At the feet of this altar of structure gross,Lies without pomp, inclosed in a coffin vile,The most learned mortal that ever wrote;Arnaud, who in grace instructed by Jesus Christ,Combating for the Church, has, in the Church itself,Suffered more than one outrage and more than one anathema," etc.* * * * *"Wandering, poor, banished, proscribed, persecuted;And even by his death their ill-extinguished rageHad never left his ashes in repose,If God himself here by his holy flockFrom these devouring wolves had not concealed his bones."[133]
"At the feet of this altar of structure gross,Lies without pomp, inclosed in a coffin vile,The most learned mortal that ever wrote;Arnaud, who in grace instructed by Jesus Christ,Combating for the Church, has, in the Church itself,Suffered more than one outrage and more than one anathema," etc.
* * * * *
"Wandering, poor, banished, proscribed, persecuted;And even by his death their ill-extinguished rageHad never left his ashes in repose,If God himself here by his holy flockFrom these devouring wolves had not concealed his bones."[133]
These are, I think, poets sufficiently great, and we have more of them still: I mean those charming or sublime minds whohave elevated prose to poetry. Greece alone, in her most beautiful days, offers, perhaps, such a variety of admirable prose writers. Who can enumerate them? At first, Rabelais and Montaigne; later, Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche; La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère; Retz and Saint-Simon; Bourdaloue, Fléchier, Fénelon, and Bossuet; add to these so many eminent women, at their head Madame de Sévigné; while Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Buffon are still to come.[134]
By what strange diversity could a country, in which the mentalarts were carried to such perfection, remain ordinary in the other arts? Was the sentiment of the beautiful wanting, then, to that society so polished, to that magnificent court, to those great lords and those great ladies passionately loving luxury and elegance, to that public of theélite, enamored of every kind of glory, whose enthusiasm defended theCidagainst Richelieu? No; France in the seventeenth century was a whole, and produced artists that she can place by the side of her poets, her philosophers, her orators.
But, in order to admire our artists, it is necessary to comprehend them.
We do not believe that imagination has been less freely imparted to France than to any other nation of Europe. It has even had its reign among us. It is fancy that rules in the sixteenth century, and inspires the literature and the arts of theRenaissance. But a great revolution intervened at the commencement of the seventeenth century. France at that moment seems to pass from youth to virility. Instead of abandoning imagination to itself, we apply ourselves from that moment to restrain it without destroying it, to moderate it, as the Greeks did by the aid of taste; as in the progress of life and society we learn to repress or conceal what is too individual in character. An end is made of the literature of the preceding age. A new poetry, a new prose, begin to appear, which, during an entire century, bear fruits sufficiently beautiful. Art follows the general movement; after having been elegant and graceful, it becomes in its turn serious; it no longer aims at originality and extraordinary effects; it neither flashes nor dazzles; it speaks, above all, to the mind and the soul. Hence its good qualities and also its defects. In general, it is somewhat wanting in brilliancy and coloring, but it is in the highest degree expressive.
Some time since we have changed all that. We have discovered, somewhat late, that we have not sufficient imagination; we are in training to acquire it, it is true, at the expense of reason, alas! also at the expense of soul, which is forgotten, repudiated,proscribed. At this moment, color and form are the order of the day, in poetry, in painting, in every thing. We are beginning to run mad with Spanish painting. The Flemish and Venetian schools are gaining ground on the schools of Florence and Rome. Rossini equals Mozart, and Gluck will soon seem to us insipid.
Young artists, who, rightly disgusted with the dry and inanimate manner of David, undertake to renovate French painting, who would rob the sun of its heat and splendor, remember that of all beings in the world, the greatest is still man, and that what is greatest in man is his intelligence, and above all, his heart; that it is this heart, then, which you must put and develop on your canvas. This is the most elevated object of art. In order to reach it, do not make yourselves disciples of Flemings, Venetians, and Spaniards; return, return to the masters of our great national school of the seventeenth century.
We bow with respectful admiration before the schools of Rome and Florence, at once ideal and living; but, those excepted, we maintain that the French school equals or surpasses all others. We prefer neither Murillo, Rubens, Corregio, nor Titian himself to Lesueur and Poussin, because, if the former have an incomparable hand and color, our two countrymen are much greater in thought and expression.
What a destiny was that of Eustache Lesueur![135]He was born at Paris about 1617, and he never went out of it. Poor and humble, he passed his life in the churches and convents where he worked. The only sweetness of his sad days, his only consolation was his wife: he loses her, and goes to die, at thirty-eight, in that cloister of Chartreux, which his pencil has immortalized. What resemblance at once, and what difference between his life and that of Raphael, who also died young, but in the midst of pleasures, in honors, and already almost in purple! Our Raphael was not the lover of Fornarina and the favorite of a pope: he was Christian; he is Christianity in art.
Lesueur is a genius wholly French. Scarcely having escaped from the hands of Simon Vouët, he formed himself according to the model which he had in the soul. He never saw the sky of Italy. He knew some fragments of the antique, some pictures of Raphael, and the designs that Poussin sent him. With these feeble resources, and guided by a happy instinct, in less than ten years he mounted by a continual progress to the perfection of his talent, and expired at the moment when, finally sure of himself, he was about to produce new and more admirable master-pieces. Follow him from theSt. Brunocompleted in 1648, through theSt. Paulof 1649, to theVision of St. Benedictin 1651, and to theMuses, scarcely finished before his death. Lesueur went on adding to his essential qualities which he owed to his own genius, and to the national genius, I mean composition and expression, qualities which he had dreamed of, or had caught glimpses of. His design from day to day became more pure, without ever being that of the Florentine school, and the same is true of his coloring.
In Lesueur every thing is directed towards expression, every thing is in the service of the mind, every thing is idea and sentiment. There is no affectation, no mannerism; there is a perfectnaïveté; his figures sometimes would seem even a little common, so natural are they, if a Divine breath did not animate them. It must not be forgotten that his favorite subjects do not exact a brilliant coloring: he oftenest retraces scenes mournful or austere. But as in Christianity by the side of suffering and resignation is faith with hope, so Lesueur joins to the pathetic sweetness and grace; and this man charms me at the same time that he moves me.
The works of Lesueur are almost always great wholes that demanded profound meditation, and the most flexible talent, in order to preserve in them unity of subject, and to give them variety and harmony. TheHistory of St. Bruno, the founder of the orderdes Chartreux, is a vast melancholy poem, in which are represented the different scenes of monastic life. TheHistory of St. Martin and St. Benedicthas not come down to us entire; but the two fragments of it that we possess, theMass of St. Martin, and theVision of St. Benedict, allow us to compare that great work with every better thing of the kind that has been done in Italy, as, to speak sincerely, theMusesand theHistory of Love, appear to us to equal at least the Farnesina.
In theHistory of St. Bruno, it is particularly necessary to remark St. Bruno, prostrated before a crucifix, the saint reading a letter of the pope, his death, his apotheosis. Is it possible to carry meditation, humiliation, rapture farther?St. Paul preaching at Ephesusreminds one of theSchool of Athens, by the extent of the scene, the employment of architecture, and the skilful distribution of groups. In spite of the number of personages, and the diversity of episodes, the picture wholly centres in St. Paul. He preaches, and upon his words hang those who are listening, of every sex, of every age, in the most varied attitudes. In that we behold the grand lines of the Roman school, its design full of nobleness and truth at the same time. What charming and grave heads! What graceful, bold, and always natural movements! Here, that child with ringlets, full ofnaïveenthusiasm; there, that old man with bended knees, and hands joined. Are not all those beautiful heads, and those draperies, too, worthy of Raphael? But the marvel of the picture is the figure of St. Paul,[136]—it is that of the Olympic Jupiter, animated by a new spirit. TheMass of St. Martincarries into the soul an impression of peace and silence. TheVision of St. Benedicthas the character of simplicity full of grandeur. A desert, the saint on his knees, contemplating his sister, St. Scholastique, who is ascending to heaven, borne up by angels, accompanied by two young girls, crowned with flowers, and bearing the palm, the symbol of virginity. St. Peter and St. Paul show St. Benedict the abode whither his sister is going to enjoy eternal peace. A slight ray of the sun pierces the cloud. St. Benedict is as it werelifted up from the earth by this ecstatic vision. One scarcely desires a more lively color, and the expression is divine. Those two virgins, a little too tall, perhaps, how beautiful and pure they are! How sweet are those forms! How grave and gentle are those faces! The person of the holy monk, with all the material accessories, is perfectly natural, for it remains on the earth; whilst his face, where his soul shines forth, is wholly ideal, and already in heaven.
But thechef-d'œuvreof Lesueur is, in our opinion, theDescent from the Cross, or rather the enshrouding of Jesus Christ, already descended from the cross, whom Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and St. John are placing in the shroud. On the left, Magdalen, in tears, kisses the feet of Jesus; on the right, are the holy women and the Virgin. It is impossible to carry the pathetic farther and preserve beauty. The holy women, placed in front, have each their particular grief. While one of them abandons herself to despair, an immense but internal and thoughtful sadness is upon the face of the mother of the crucified. She has comprehended the divine benefit of the redemption of the human race, and her grief, sustained by this thought, is calm and resigned. And then what dignity in that head! It, in some sort, sums up the whole picture, and gives to it its character, that of a profound and subdued emotion. I have seen manyDescents from the Cross; I have seen that of Rubens at Antwerp, in which the sanctity of the subject has, as it were, constrained the great Flemish painter to join sensibility and sentiment to color; none of those pictures have touched me like that of Lesueur. All the parts of art are there in the service of expression. The drawing is severe and strong; even the color, without being brilliant, surpasses that of theSt. Bruno, theMass of St. Martin, theSt. Paul, and even that of theVision of St. Benedict; as if Lesueur had wished to bring together in it all the powers of his soul, all the resources of his talent![137]
Now, regard theMuses,—other scenes, other beauties, the same genius. Those are Pagan pictures, but Christianity is in them also, by reason of the adorable chastity with which Lesueur has clothed them. All critics have emulously shown the mythological errors into which poor Lesueur fell, and they have not wanted occasion to deplore that he had not made the journey to Italy and studied antiquity more. But who can have the strange idea of searching in Lesueur for an archeology? I seek and find in him the very genius of painting. Is not that Terpsichore, well or ill named, with a harp a little too strong, it is said, as if the Muse had no particular gift, in her modest attitude the symbol of becoming grace? In that group of three Muses, to which one may give what name he pleases, is not the one that holds upon her knees a book of music, who sings or is about to sing, the most ravishing creature, a St. Cecilia that preludes just before abandoning herself to the intoxication of inspiration? And in those pictures there is brilliancy and coloring; the landscape is beautifully lighted, as if Poussin had guided the hand of his friend.
Poussin! What a name I pronounce. If Lesueur is the painter of sentiment, Poussin is the painter of thought. He is in some sort the philosopher of painting. His pictures are religious or moral lectures that testify a great mind as well as a great heart. It is sufficient to recall theSeven Sacraments, theDeluge, theArcadia, theTruth that Time frees from the Taints of Envy, theWill of Eudamidas, and theDance of Human Life. And the style is equal to the conception. Poussin draws like a Florentine, composes like a Frenchman, and often equals Lesueur in expression; coloring alone is sometimes wanting to him. As well as Racine, he is smitten with the antique beauty, and imitates it; but, like Racine, he always remains original. In place of the naïveté and unique charm of Lesueur, he has asevere simplicity, with a correctness that never abandons him. Remember, too, that he cultivated every kind of painting. He is at once a great historical painter and a great landscape painter,—he treats religious subjects as well as profane subjects, and by turns is inspired by antiquity and the Bible. He lived much at Rome, it is true, and died there; but he also worked in France, and almost always for France. Scarcely had he become known, when Richelieu attracted him to Paris and retained him there, loading him with honors, and giving him the commission of first painter in ordinary to the king, with the general direction of all the works of painting, and all the ornaments of the royal houses. During that sojourn of two years in Paris, he made theLast Supper(Cène), theSt. François Xavier, theTruth that Time frees from the Taints of Envy. It was also to France, to his friend M. de Chantelou, that from Rome he addressed theInspiration of St. Paul, as well as the second series of theSeven Sacraments, an immense composition that, for grandeur of thought, can vie with theStanzeof Raphael. I speak of it from the engravings; for theSeven Sacramentsare no longer in France. Eternal shame of the eighteenth century! It was at least necessary to wrest from the Greeks the pediments of the Parthenon,—we, we delivered up to strangers, we sold all those monuments of French genius which Richelieu and Mazarin, with religious care, had collected. Public indignation did not avert the act! And there has not since been found in France a king, a statesman, to interdict letting the master-pieces of art that honor the nation depart without authorization from the national territory![138]There has not been found a government which has undertaken at least to repurchase those that we have lost, to get back again the great works of Poussin, Lesueur, and so many others, scattered in Europe, instead of squandering millions toacquire the baboons of Holland, as Louis XIV. said, or Spanish canvasses, in truth of an admirable color, but without nobleness and moral expression.[139]I know and I love the Dutch pastorals and the cows of Potter; I am not insensible to the sombre and ardent coloring of Zurbaran, to the brilliant Italian imitations of Murillo and Velasquez; but in fine, what is all that in comparison with serious and powerful compositions like theSeven Sacraments, for example, that profound representation of Christian rites, a work of the highest faculties of the intellect and the soul, in which the intellect and the soul will ever find an exhaustless subject of study and meditation! Thank God, the graver of Pesne has saved them from our ingratitude and barbarity. Whilst the originals decorate the gallery of a great English lord,[140]the love and the talent of a Pesne, of a Stella, have preserved for us faithful copies in those expressive engravings that one never grows tired of contemplating, that every time we examine them, reveal to us some new side of the genius of our great countryman. Regard especially theExtreme Unction!What a sublime and at the same time almost graceful scene! One would call it an antique bas-relief, so many groups are properly distributed in it, with natural and varied attitudes. The draperies are as admirable as those of a fragment of thePanathenæa, which is in the Louvre. The figures are all beautiful. Beauty of figures belongs to sculpture, one is about to say:—yes, but it also belongs to painting, if you have yourself the eye of the painter, if you have been struck with the expression of those postures, those heads, those gestures, and almost those looks; for every thing lives, every thing breathes, even in those engravings, and if it were the place, we would endeavor to make the reader penetrate with us into those secrets of Christian sentiment which are also the secrets of art.
We endeavor to console ourselves for having lost theSeven Sacraments, and for not having known how to keep from England and Germany so many productions of Poussin, now buried in foreign collections,[141]by going to see at the Louvre what remains to us of the great French artist,—thirty pictures produced at different epochs of his life, which, for the most part, worthily sustain his renown,—the portrait ofPoussin, one of theBacchanalsmade for Richelieu,Mars and Venus, theDeath of Adonis, theRape of the Sabines,[142]Eliezer and Rebecca,Moses saved from the Waters, theInfant Jesus on the Knees of the Virgin and St. Joseph standing by,[143]especially theManna in the Desert, theJudgment of Solomon, theBlind Men of Jericho, theWoman taken in Adultery, theInspiration of St. Paul, theDiogenes, theDeluge, theArcadia. Time has turned the color, which was never very brilliant; but it has not been able to disturb what will make them live forever,—the design, the composition, and the expression. TheDelugehas remained, and in fact will always be, the most striking. After so many masters who have treated the same subject, Poussin has found the secret of being original, and more pathetic than his predecessors, in representing the solemn moment when the race is about to disappear. There are few details; some dead bodies are floating upon the abyss; a sinister-looking moon has scarcely risen; a few moments and mankind will be no more; the last mother uselessly extends her last child to the last father, who cannot take it, and the serpent that has destroyed mankind darts forth triumphant. We try in vain to find in the Deluge some signs of a trembling hand: thesoul that sustained and conducted that hand makes itself felt by our soul, and profoundly moves it. Stop at that scene of mourning, and almost by its side let your eyes rest upon that fresh landscape and upon those shepherds that surround a tomb. The most aged, with a knee on the ground, reads these words graven upon the stone:Et in Arcadia ego, and I also lived in Arcadia. At the left a shepherd listens with serious attention. At the right is a charming group, composed of a shepherd in the spring-time of life, and a young girl of ravishing beauty. An artless admiration is painted on the face of the young peasant, who looks with happiness on his beautiful companion. As for her, her adorable face is not even veiled with the slightest shade; she smiles, her hand resting carelessly upon the shoulder of the young man, and she has no appearance of comprehending that lecture given to beauty, youth, and love. I confess that, for this picture alone, of so touching a philosophy, I would give many master-pieces of coloring, all the pastorals of Potter, all the badinages of Ostade, all the buffooneries of Teniers.
Lesueur and Poussin, by very different but nearly equal titles, are at the head of our great painting of the seventeenth century. After them, what artists again are Claude Lorrain and Philippe de Champagne?
Do you know in Italy or Holland a greater landscape painter than Claude? And seize well his true character. Look at those vast and beautiful solitudes, lighted by the first or last rays of the sun, and tell me whether those solitudes, those trees, those waters, those mountains, that light, that silence,—whether all that nature has a soul, and whether those luminous and pure horizons do not lift you involuntarily, in ineffable reveries, to the invisible source of beauty and grace! Lorrain is, above all, the painter of light, and his works might be called the history of light and all its combinations, in small and great, when it is poured out over large plains or breaks in the most varied accidents, on land, on waters, in the heavens, in its eternal source. The human scenes thrown into one corner have no other objectthan to relieve and make appear to advantage the scenes of nature by harmony or contrast. In theVillage Fête, life, noise, movement are in front,—peace and grandeur are at the foundation of the landscape, and that is truly the picture. The same effect is in theCattle Crossing a River. The landscape placed immediately under your eyes has nothing in it very rare, we can find such a one anywhere; but follow the perspective,—it leads you across flowering fields, a beautiful river, ruins, mountains that overlook these ruins, and you lose yourself in infinite distances. That Landscape crossed by a river, where a peasant waters his herd, means nothing great at first sight. Contemplate it some time, and peace, a sort of meditativeness in nature, a well-graduated perspective, will, little by little, gain your heart, and give you in that small picture a penetrating charm. The picture called aLandscaperepresents a vast champagne filled with trees, and lighted by the rising sun,—in it there is freshness and—already—warmth, mystery, and splendor, with skies of the sweetest harmony.A Dance at Sunsetexpresses the close of a beautiful day. One sees in it, one feels in it the decline of the heat of the day; in the foreground are some shepherds and shepherdesses dancing by the side of their flocks.[144]
Is it not strange, that Champagne has been put in the Flemish school?[145]He was born at Brussels, it is true, but he came very early to Paris, and his true master was Poussin, who counselled him. He devoted his talent to France, lived there, died there, and what is decisive, his manner is wholly French. Will it besaid that he owes to Flanders his color? We respond that this quality is balanced by a grave defect that he also owes to Flanders, the want of ideality in the figures; and it was from France that he learned how to repair this defect by beauty of moral expression. Champagne is inferior to Lesueur and Poussin, but he is of their family. He was, also, of those artists contemporaneous with Corneille, simple, poor, virtuous, Christian.[146]Champagne worked both for the convent of the Carmelites in theRue St. Jacques, that venerable abode of ardent and sublime piety, and Port-Royal, that place of all others that contained in the smallest space the most virtue and genius, so many admirable men and women worthy of them. What has become of that famous crucifix that he painted for the Church of the Carmelites, a master-piece of perspective that upon a horizontal plane appeared perpendicular? It perished with the holy house. TheLast Supper(Cène) is a living picture, on account of the truth of all the figures, movements, and postures, but to my eyes it is blemished by the absence of the ideal. I am obliged to say as much of theRepast with Simon the Pharisee. Thechef-d'œuvreof Champagne is theApparition of St. Gervais and St. Protais to St. Ambrose in a Basilica of Milan. All the qualities of French art are seen in it,—simplicity and grandeur in composition, with a profound expression. On that canvas are only four personages, the two martyrs and St. Paul, who presents them to St. Ambrose. Those four figures fill the temple, lighted above all in the obscurity ofthe night, by the luminous apparition. The two martyrs are full of majesty. St. Ambrose, kneeling and in prayer, is, as it were, seized with terror.[147]
I certainly admire Champagne as an historical painter, and even as a landscape painter; but he is perhaps greatest as a portrait painter. In portraits truth and nature are particularly in their place, relieved by coloring, and idealized in proper measure by expression. The portraits of Champagne are so many monuments in which his most illustrious contemporaries will live forever. Every thing about them is strikingly real, grave, and severe, with a penetrating sweetness. Should the records of Port-Royal be lost, all Port-Royal might be found in Champagne. Among those portraits we see the inflexible Saint-Cyran,[148]as well as his persecutor, the imperious Richelieu.[149]We see, too, the learned, the intrepid Antoine Arnaud, to whom the contemporaries of Bossuet decreed the name of Great;[150]and Mme. Angélique Arnaud, with her naïve and strong figure.[151]Among them is mother Agnes and the humble daughter of Champagne himself, sister St. Suzanne.[152]She has just been miraculously cured, and her whole prostrated person bears still the impress of a relic of suffering. Mother Agnes, kneeling before her, regards her with a look of grateful joy. The place of the scene is a poor cell; a wooden cross hanging on the wall, and some straw chairs, are all the ornaments. On the picture is the inscription,—Christo uni medico animarum et corporum, etc. There is possessed theChristian stoicism of Port-Royal in its imposing austerity. Add to all these portraits that of Champagne;[153]for the painter may be put by the side of his personages.
Had France produced in the seventeenth century only these four great artists, it would be necessary to give an important place to the French school; but she counts many other painters of the greatest merit. Among these we may distinguish P. Mignard, so much admired in his times, so little known now, and so worthy of being known. How have we been able to let fall into oblivion the author of the immense fresco ofVal-de-grâce, so celebrated by Molière, which is perhaps the greatest page of painting in the world![154]What strikes at first, in this gigantic work, is the order and harmony. Then come a thousand charming details and innumerable episodes which form themselves important compositions. Remark also the brilliant and sweet coloring which should at least obtain favor for so many other beauties of the first order. Again, it is to the pencil of Mignard that we owe that ravishing ceiling of a small apartment of the King at Versailles, a master-piece now destroyed, but of which there remains to us a magnificent translation in the beautiful engraving of Gerard Audran. What profound expression in thePlague of Æacus,[155]and in theSt. Charles giving the Communionto the Plague-infected of Milan! Mignard is recognized as one of our best portrait painters: grace, sometimes a little too refined, is joined in him to sentiment. The French school can also present with pride Valentin, who died young and was so full of promise; Stella, the worthy friend of Poussin, the uncle of Claudine, Antoinette, and Françoise Stella; Lahyre, who has so much spirit and taste;[156]Sébastien Bourdon, so animated and elevated;[157]the Lenains, who sometimes have thenaïvetéof Lesueur and the color of Champagne; Bourguignon, full of fire and enthusiasm; Jouvenet, whose composition is so good;[158]finally, besides so many others, Lebrun, whom it is now the fashion to treat cavalierly, who received from nature, with perhaps an immoderate passion for fame, passion for the beautiful of every kind, and a talent of admirable flexibility,—the true painter of a great king by the richness and dignity of his manner, who, like Louis XIV., worthily closes the seventeenth century.[159]