CHAPTER V

‘My theme in crowds, my solitary pride.’

In the tangled forest or the barren waste—in the lowly hovel or the lofty palace, thy roofs reared their vaulted canopy over my head, a loftier palace, an ampler space—a ‘brave o’er-hanging firmament,’ studded with constellations of art. Wherever I was, thou wert with me, above me and about me; and didst ‘hang upon the beatings of my heart,’ a vision and a joy unutterable. There was one chamber of the brain (at least) which I had only to unlock and be master of boundless wealth—a treasure-house of pure thoughts and cherished recollections. Tyranny could not master, barbarism slunk from it; vice could not pollute, folly could not gainsay it. I had but to touch a certain spring, and lo! on the walls the divine grace of Guido appeared free from blemish—there were the golden hues of Titian, and Raphael’s speaking faces, the splendour of Rubens, the gorgeous gloom of Rembrandt, the airy elegance of Vandyke, and Claude’s classic scenes lapped the senses in Elysium, and Poussin breathed the spirit of antiquity over them. There, in that fine old lumber-room of the imagination, were the Transfiguration, and the St. Peter Martyr, with its majestic figures and its unrivalled landscape background. There also were the two St. Jeromes, Domenichino’s and Correggio’s—there ‘stood the statue that enchants the world’—there were the Apollo and the Antinous, the Laocoon, the Dying Gladiator, Diana and her Fawn, and all the glories of the antique world—

‘There was old Proteus coming from the sea,And aged Triton blew his wreathed horn.’

‘There was old Proteus coming from the sea,

And aged Triton blew his wreathed horn.’

But Legitimacy did not ‘sit squat, like a toad,’ in one corner of it, poisoning the very air, and keeping the free-born spirit aloof from it!

There were one or two pictures (old favourites) that I wished to see again, and that I was told still remained. I longed to know whether they were there, and whether they would look the same. It was fortunate I arrived when I did; for a week later the doorswould have been shut against me, on occasion of the death of the King. His bust is over the door, which I had nearly mistaken for a head of Memnon—or some Egyptian God. After passing through the modern French Exhibition (where I saw a picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and a vile farrago ofBourbon-Restorationpictures,) I came within sight of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, which is at present only railed off. One or two English stragglers alone were in it. The coolness and stillness were contrasted with the bustle, the heat, and the smell of the common apartments. My thoughts rushed in and filled the empty space. Instead of the old Republican door-keepers, with their rough voices and affectation of equality, a servant in a court-livery stood at the gate. On presenting myself, I inquired if a Monsieur Livernois (who had formerly ushered me into this region of enchantment) were still there; but he was gone or dead. My hesitation and foreign accent, with certain other appeals, procured me admittance. I passed on without further question. I cast a glance forward, and found that the Poussins were there. At the sight of the first, which I distinctly recollected (a fine green landscape, with stately ruins,) the tears came into my eyes, and I passed an hour or two in that state of luxurious enjoyment, which is the highest privilege of the mind of man, and which perhaps makes him amends for many sorrows. To my surprise, instead of finding the whole changed, I found every thing nearly in its place, as I proceeded through the first compartments, which I did slowly, and reserving the Italian pictures for abon bouche. The colours even seemed to have been mellowed, and to have grown to the walls in the last twenty years, as if the pictures had been fixed there by the cramping-irons of Victory, instead of hanging loose and fluttering, like so much tattered canvass, at the sound of English drums, and breath of Prussian manifestoes. Nothing could be better managed than the way in which they had blended the Claudes and Poussins alternately together—the ethereal refinement and dazzling brilliancy of the one relieving and giving additional zest to the sombre, grave, massive character of the other. Claude Lorraine pours the spirit of air over all objects, and new-creates them of light and sunshine. In several of his master-pieces which are shewn here, the vessels, the trees, the temples and middle distances glimmer between air and solid substance, and seem moulded of a new element in nature. No words can do justice to their softness, their precision, their sparkling effect. But they do not lead the mind out of their own magic circle. They repose on their own beauty; they fascinate with faultless elegance. Poussin’s landscapes are more properly pictures of time than of place. They have a finemoralperspective, not inferior to Claude’s aërialone. They carry the imagination back two or four thousand years at least, and bury it in the remote twilight of history. There is an opaqueness and solemnity in his colouring, assimilating with the tone of long-past events: his buildings are stiff with age; his implements of husbandry are such as would belong to the first rude stages of civilization; his harvests are such (as in the Ruth and Boaz) as would yield to no modern sickle; his grapes (as in the Return from the Promised Land) are a load to modern shoulders; there is a simplicity and undistinguishing breadth in his figures; and over all, the hand of time has drawn its veil. Poussin has his faults; but, like all truly great men, there is that in him which is to be found nowhere else; and even the excellences of others would be defects in him. One picture of his in particular drew my attention, which I had not seen before. It is an addition to the Louvre, and makes up for many a flaw in it. It is the Adam and Eve in Paradise, and it is all that Mr. Martin’s picture of that subject is not. It is a scene of sweetness and seclusion ‘to cure all sadness but despair.’ There is the freshness of the first dawn of creation, immortal verdure, the luxuriant budding growth of unpruned Nature’s gifts, the stillness and the privacy, as if there were only those two beings in the world, made for each other, and with this world of beauty for the scene of their delights. It is a Heaven descended upon earth, as if the finger of God had planted the garden with trees and fruits and flowers, and his hand had watered it! One fault only can be found by the critical eye. Perhaps the scene is too flat. If the ‘verdurous wall of Paradise’ had upreared itself behind our first parents, it would have closed them in more completely, and would have given effect to the blue hills that gleam enchantment in the distance. Opposite, ‘in darkness visible,’ hangs the famous landscape of the Deluge by the same master-hand, a leaden weight on the walls with the ark ‘hulling’ on the distant flood, the sun labouring, wan and faint, up the sky, and the heavens, ‘blind with rain,’ pouring down their total cisterns on the weltering earth. Men and women and different animals are struggling with the wide-spread desolation; and trees, climbing the sides of rocks, seem patiently awaiting it above. One would think Lord Byron had transcribed his admirable account of the Deluge in hisHeaven and Earthfrom this noble picture, which is in truth the very poetry of painting.—One here finds also the more unequivocal productions of the French school (for Claude and Poussin[15]were ina great measure Italian,) Le Brun, Sebastian Bourdon, some of Le Sueur’s expressive faces, and the bland expansive style of Philip Champagne—no mean name in the history of art. See, in particular, the exquisite picture of the Sick Nun, (the Nun was his own daughter, and he painted this picture as a present to the Convent, in gratitude for her recovery,)—and another of a Religious Communion, with attendants in rich dresses.

One finds no considerable gap, till one comes to the Antwerp pictures; and this yawning chasm is not ill supplied by the Luxembourg pictures, those splendid solecisms of Rubens’s art. Never was exhibited a greater union of French flutter and Gothic grace, of borrowed absurdity and inherent power. He has made a strange jumble of the Heathen mythology, his own wives, and the mistresses of Louis XIII. His youthful Gods are painted all light and air, and figure in quaintly enough, with some flaunting Dowager dressed in the height of the fashion in the middle of the 17th century, or with some strapping quean (his queens are queans) with her robes of rich stuffs slipping off her shoulders, and displaying limbs that, both for form and hue, provoke any feeling but indifference. His groups spring from the bold licentious hand of genius; and decorated in the preposterous finery of courtly affectation, puzzle the sense. I do not think with David (the celebrated French painter) that they ought to be burnt, but he has himself got possession of their old places in the Luxembourg, and perhaps he is tolerably satisfied with this arrangement. A landscape with a rainbow by Rubens (a rich and dazzling piece of colouring) that used to occupy a recess half-way down the Louvre, was removed to the opposite side. The singular picture (the Defeat of Goliath, by Daniel Volterra,) painted on both sides on slate, still retained its station in the middle of the room. It had hung there for twenty years unmolested. The Rembrandts keep their old places, and are as fine as ever, with their rich enamel, their thick lumps of colour, their startling gloom, and bold execution—theirear-rings, their gold-chains, and fur-collars, on which one is disposed to lay furtive hands, so much have they the look of wealth and substantial use! The Vandykes are more light and airy than ever. There is a whole heap of them; and among the rest that charming portrait of an English lady with a little child (as fine and true a compliment as was ever paid to the English female character,) sustained by sweetness and dignity, but with a mother’s anxious thoughts passing slightly across her serene brow. The Cardinal Bentivoglio (which I remember procuring especial permission to copy, and left untouched, because, after Titian’s portraits, there was a want of interest in Vandyke’s which I could not get over,) is not there.[16]But in the Dutch division, I found Weenix’s game, the battle-pieces of Wouvermans, and Ruysdael’s sparkling woods and waterfalls without number. On these (I recollect as if it were yesterday) I used, after a hard day’s work, and having tasked my faculties to the utmost, to cast a mingled glance of surprise and pleasure, as the light gleamed upon them through the high casement, and to take leave of them with anon equidem invideo, miror magis.

In the third or Italian division of the Gallery, there is a profusion of Albanos, with Cupids and naked Nymphs, which are quite in the old French taste. They are certainly very pleasing compositions, but from the change produced by time, the figures shew like beauty-spots on a dark ground. How inferior is he to Guido, the painter of grace and sentiment, two of whose master-pieces enchanted me anew, the Annunciation and the Presentation in the Temple. In each of these there is a tenderness, a delicacy of expression like the purest affection, and every attitude and turn of a limb is conscious elegance and voluptuous refinement. The pictures, the mind of the painter, are instinct and imbued with beauty. It is worth while to have lived to have produced works like these, or even to have seen and felt their power! Painting of old was a language which its disciples used not merely to denote certain objects, but to unfold their hidden meaning, and to convey the finest movements of the soul into the limbs or features of the face. They looked at nature with a feeling of passion, with an eye to expression; and this it was that, while they sought for outward forms to communicate their feelings, moulded them into truth and beauty, and that surrounds them with an atmosphere of thought and sentiment. To admire a fine old picture is itself an act of devotion, and as we gaze, we turn idolaters. The moderns are chiefly intent on giving certain lines and colours, themaskor material face of painting, and leave out the immortal part of it. Thus a modern Exhibition Room (whether French or English)has a great deal of shew and glitter, and a smell of paint in it. In the Louvre we are thrown back into the presence of our own best thoughts and feelings, the highest acts and emanations of the mind of man breathe from the walls, shadowy tears and sighs there keep vigils, and the air within it is divine!

Theidealis no less observable in the portraits than in the histories here. Look at the portrait of a man in black, by Titian (No. 1210). There is a tongue in that eye, a brain beneath that forehead. It is still; but the hand seems to have been just placed on its side; it does not turn its head, but it looks towards you to ask, whether you recognise it or not? It was there to meet me, after an interval of years, as if I had parted with it the instant before. Its keen, steadfast glance staggered me like a blow. It was the same—how was I altered! I pressed towards it, as it were, to throw off a load of doubt from the mind, or as having burst through the obstacles of time and distance that had held me in torturing suspense. I do not know whether this is not the most striking picture in the room—the leastcommon-place. There may be other pictures more delightful to look at; but this seems, like the eye of the Collection, to be looking at you and them. One might be tempted to go up and speak to it! The allegorical portrait of the Marchioness of Guasto is still here, transparent with tenderness and beauty—Titian’s Mistress, that shines like a crystal mirror—the Entombing of Christ, solemn, harmonious as the coming on of evening—the Disciples at Emmaus—and the Crowning with Thorns, the blood here and there seeming ready to start through the flesh-colour, which even English artists have not known enough how to admire. The Young Man’s Head, with a glove that used so much to delight, I confess, disappointed me, and I am convinced must have been painted upon. There are other Titians, and a number of Raphaels—the Head of a Student muffled in thought—his own delightful Head (leaning on its hand) redolent of youthful genius, and several small Holy Families, full of the highest spirit and unction. There are also the three Marys with the Dead Body of Christ, by L. Caracci; the Salutation by Sebastian del Piombo; the noble Hunting-piece, by Annibal Caracci; the fine Landscapes of Domenichino (that in particular of the story of Hercules and Achelous, with the trunk of a tree left in the bed of a mountain-torrent); and a host besides, ‘thick as the autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa,’ and of the same colour! There are so many of these select and favourite pictures left, that one does not all at once feel the loss of others which are more common in prints and in the mouth of fame; and the absence of which may be considered as almost an advantage for a first recognition andrevival of old associations. But afterwards we find a want of larger pictures to answer to the magnitude of the Collection, and to sustain the balance of taste between the Italian and the other schools. We have here as fine Claudes and Poussins as any in the world, but not as fine Raphaels, Correggios, Domenichinos, as there are elsewhere,—as were once here. There are wanting, to make the gallery complete, six or eight capital pictures, the Transfiguration, the St. Peter Martyr, &c.; and among others (not already mentioned,) the Altarpiece of St. Mark, by Tintoret, and Paul Veronese’s Marriage at Cana. With these it had been perfect, ‘founded as the rock, as broad and general as the casing air;’ without these it is ‘coop’d and cabin’d in by saucy doubts and fears.’ The largest Collection in the world ought to be colossal, not only in itself, but in its component parts. The Louvre is a quarter of a mile in length, and equal (as it is) to Mr. Angerstein’s, the Marquess of Stafford’s, the Dulwich Gallery, and Blenheim put together. It was once more than equal to them in every circumstance to inspire genius or console reflection. We still see the palace of the Thuilleries from the windows, with the white flag waving over it: but we look in vain for the Brazen Horses on its gates, or him who placed them there, or the pale bands of warriors that conquered in the name of liberty and of their country!

The gravity of the French character is a no less remarkable (though a less obvious) feature in it than its levity. The last is the quality that strikes us most by contrast to ourselves, and that comes most into play in the intercourse of common life; and therefore we are generally disposed to set them down as an altogether frivolous and superficial people. It is a mistake which we shall do well to correct on farther acquaintance with them; or if we persist in it, we must call to our aid an extraordinary degree of our native blindness and obstinacy. We ought never to visit their Theatres, to walk along their streets, to enter their houses, to look in their faces (when they do not think themselves observed,) to open their books, or take a view of their picture-galleries. Sterne seems to have been the first, as well as last traveller, who found out their weak side in this respect. ‘If the French have a fault, Monsieur le Comte,’ says he, ‘it is that they are too serious.’ This contradiction in their character has been little noticed, and they have never had the credit of it, though it stares one in the face everywhere. How we are to piece the two extremes together is another question. Is it that their wholecharacter is a system ofinconsequentiality? Or are they gay and trifling in serious matters, serious only in trifles? Or are their minds more of the cameleon-cast, that reflects all objects alike, whether grave or gay, and give themselves up entirely, and without resistance, to the prevailing impulse? Or is it owing to a want of comprehension, so that they are incapable of correcting one feeling by another, and thus run into extremes? Or that they have a greater scope and variety of resources, excelling us as much in gravity as in want of thought, outdoing us in tragedy and comedy, as they betake themselves to each, in the poetical or in the prosaic departments of life, only that they sometimes make a transposition of the two characters a little oddly, and pass from the one to the other without our well knowing why?

I have been frequently puzzled with this exception to the butterfly, airy, thoughtless, fluttering character of the French (on which we compliment ourselves,) and never more so than the first night I went to the theatre. The order, the attention, the decorum were such as would shame any London audience. The attention was more like that of a learned society to a lecture on some scientific subject, than of a promiscuous crowd collected together merely for amusement, and to pass away an idle hour. There was a professional air, an unvarying gravity in the looks and demeanour of the whole assembled multitude, as if every one had an immediate interest in the character of the national poetry, in the purity of the French accent, in the propriety of the declamation, in the conceptions of the actor, and the developement of the story, instead of its presenting a mob of idle boys and girls, of ignorant gaping citizens, or supercilious box-lobby loungers, affecting a contempt for the performance, and for every one around them. The least noise or irregularity called forth the most instant and lively disapprobation; and the vivacity of the French character displayed itself to advantage in earnest gesticulations and expressions of impatience. Not only was the strictest silence observed, as soon as the curtain drew up, but no one moved or attempted to move. The spell thrown over the customary or supposed restlessness and volatility of the French was in this respect complete. The uniformity of the appearance was indeed almost ridiculous; for the rows of heads in the seats of the pit no more stirred or projected the breadth of a finger beyond the line, than those of a regiment of recruits on parade, or than if a soldier were stationed to keep each chin in its place. They may be reduced to the state of automatons; but there were no traces of themonkeycharacter left.[17]If the performance had beenatCourt, greater propriety could not have been maintained; but it was a French play (one of Racine’s) and acted before a Parisian audience: this seemed to be enough to ensure it a proper reception. One would suppose, from their interest in dramatic representations, that the French were a nation of actors. Perhaps it may be asked, ‘Is not that the case? and is it not their vanity, their own desire to shine, or their sympathy with whatever or whoever is a candidate for applause, that accounts for their behaviour?’ At least, their vanity makes themgrave; and if it is this which rivets their attention, and silences their eternal loquacity, it must be allowed to produce effects which others would do well to imitate from better motives, if they have them![18]

The play was not much; but there seemed to be an abstract interest felt in the stage as such, in the sound of the verse, in the measured step of the actors, in the recurrence of the same pauses, and of the same ideas; in the correctness of the costume, in the very notion of the endeavour after excellence, and in the creation of an artificial and imaginary medium of thought. If the French are more susceptible of immediate, sensible impressions, it would appear, judging from their behaviour at their own theatres, that they are also more sensible of reflex and refined ones. The bare suggestion of an interesting topic is to them interesting: it may be said, on the most distant intimation, to excite the most lively concern, and to collect their scattered spirits into a focus. Their sensibility takes the alarm more easily; their understanding is quicker of hearing. With them, to the sublime or pathetic there is but one step—thename; the moment the subject is started, they ‘jump at’ the catastrophe and all the consequences. We are slow, and must have a thing made out to us in striking instances, and by successive blows. We are sluggish, and must be lifted up to the heights of a factitious enthusiasm by the complicated machinery of a powerful imagination: we are obstinate, not to say selfish, and require to be urged over the abyss of mental anguish by the utmost violence of terror and pity. But with the French, all this is a matter of course, a verbal process. Tears, as well as smiles, cost them less than they do us. Words are more nearly allied to things in their minds; the one have a more vital being, though it does not follow that the other are altogether empty and barren of interest. But the French seem (in their dramatic exhibitions) not to wish to get beyond, or (shall I speak it more plainly?) to have no faculty for getting beyond the abstract conception, the naked proposition of the subject. They are a people(I repeat it) void and bare of the faculty of imagination, if by this we mean the power of placing things in the most novel and striking point of view; and they are so for this reason, that they have no need of it. It is to them a superfluity—a thankless toil. Their quick, discursive apprehension runs on before, and anticipates and defeats the efforts of the highest poetry. They are contented to indulge in all the agony or ecstacy of sounding and significant common-places. The wordscharming,delicious,indescribable, &c. excite the same lively emotions in their minds as the most vivid representations of what is said to be so; and hence verbiage and the cant of sentiment fill the place, and stop the road to genius—a vague, flaccid, enervated rhetoric being too often substituted for the pith and marrow of truth and nature. The greatest facility to feel or to comprehend will not produce the most intense passion, or the most electrical expression of it. There must be a resistance in the matter to do this—a collision, an obstacle to overcome. The torrent rushes with fury from being impeded in its course: the lightning splits the gnarled oak. There is no malice in this statement; but I should think they may themselves allow it to be an English version of the truth, containing a great deal that is favourable to them, with a saving clause for our own use. The long (and to us tiresome) speeches in French tragedy consist of a string of emphatic and well-balanced lines, announcing general maxims and indefinite sentiments applicable to human life. The poet seldom commits any excesses by giving way to his own imagination, or identifying himself with individual situations and sufferings. We are not now raised to the height of passion, now plunged into its lowest depths; the whole finds its level, like water, in the liquid, yielding susceptibility of the French character, and in the unembarrassed scope of the French intellect. The finest line in Racine, that is, in French poetry, is by common consent understood to be the following:—

Craignez Dieu, mon cher Abner, et ne craignez que Dieu.

That is,Fear God, my dear Abner, and fear only him. A pious and just exhortation, it is true; but, when this is referred to as the highest point of elevation to which their dramatic genius has aspired, though we may not be warranted in condemning their whole region of poetry as a barren waste, we may consider it as very nearly a level plain, and assert, that though the soil contains mines of useful truths within its bosom and glitters with the graces of a polished style, it does not abound in picturesque points of view or romantic interest! It is certain that a thousand such lines would have no effect upon an English audience but to set them to sleep, like a sermon, or to makethem commence a disturbance to avoid it. Yet, though the declamation of the French stage is as monotonous as the dialogue, the French listen to it with the tears in their eyes, holding in their breath, beating time to the cadence of the verse, and following the actors with a book in their hands for hours together. The English most assuredly do not pay the same attention to a play of Shakspeare’s, or to any thing but a cock-fight or a sparring-match. This is no great compliment to them; but it makes for the gravity of the French, who have mistaken didactic for dramatic poetry, who can sit out a play with the greatest patience and complacency, that an Englishman would hoot off the stage, or yawn over from beginning to end for its want of striking images and lively effect, and with whom Saturn is a God no less than Mercury! I am inclined to suspect the genius of their religion may have something to do with the genius of their poetry. The first absorbs in a manner their powers of imagination, their love of the romantic and the marvellous, and leaves the last in possession of their sober reason and moral sense. Their churches are theatres; their theatres are like churches. Their fancies are satiated with the mummeries and pageantry of the Catholic faith, with hieroglyphic obscurity and quaint devices; and, when they come to the tangible ground of human affairs, they are willing to repose alike from ornament and extravagance, in plain language and intelligible ideas. They go to mass in the morning to dazzle their senses, and bewilder their imagination, and inflame their enthusiasm; and they resort to the theatre in the evening to seek relief from superstitious intoxication in the prose of poetry, and from Gothic mysteries and gloom, in classic elegance and costume. Be this as it may, the love of the French for Racine is not a feeling of the moment, or left behind them at the theatres; they can quote him by heart, and his sententious, admirable lines occupy the next place in their minds to theiramatory poetry. There is nothing unpleasant in a French theatre but a certain infusion ofsoup-maigreinto the composition of the air, (so that one inhales a kind of thin pottage,) and an oily dinginess in the complexions both of the men and women, which shews more by lamp-light. It is not true (as has been said) that their theatres are nearly dark, or that the men stand in the pit. It is true, none but men are admitted into it, but they have seats just the same as with us, and a curious custom of securing their places when they go out, by binding their handkerchiefs round them, so that at the end of the play the benches presented nothing but a row of knotted pocket handkerchiefs. Almost every one returned and sat out the entertainment, which was not a farce, but a sentimental comedy, and a very charming one too, founded on the somewhat national subject ofa seduction by an English nobleman in France, and in which the fair sufferer was represented by a youngdebutante, in natural expression and pathos little inferior to Miss Kelly, (as far as we can translate French into English nature,) but fatter and prettier. So much for their taste in theatricals, which does not incline wholly to puppet-shows and gew-gaws. The Theatre, in short, is the Throne of the French character, where it is mounted on its pedestal of pride, and seen to every advantage. I like to contemplate it there, for it reconciles me to them and to myself. It is a common and amicable ground on which we meet. Their tears are such as others shed—their interest in what happened three thousand years ago is not exclusively French. They are no longer a distinct race orcaste, but human beings. To feel towards others as of a different species, is not the way to increase our respect for ourselves or human nature. Their defects and peculiarities, we may be almost sure, have corresponding opposite vices in us—the excellences are confined pretty much to what there is in common.

The ordinary prejudice entertained on this subject in England is, that the French are little better than grown children—

‘Pleas’d with a feather—tickled with a straw—’

full of grimace and noise and shew, lively and pert, but with no turn or capacity for serious thought or continued attention of any kind, and hardly deserving the name of rational beings, any more than apes or jackdaws. They may laugh and talk more than the English; but they read, and, I suspect, think more, taking them as a people. You see an apple-girl in Paris, sitting at a stall with her feet over a stove in the coldest weather, or defended from the sun by an umbrella, reading Racine or Voltaire. Who ever saw such a thing in London as a barrow-woman reading Shakspeare or Fielding? You see a handsome, smartgrisetteat the back of every little shop or counter in Paris, if she is not at work, reading perhaps one of Marmontel’s Tales, with all the absorption and delicate interest of a heroine of romance. Yet we make doleful complaints of the want of education among the common people, and of the want of reflection in the female character in France. There is something of the same turn for reading in Scotland; but then where is the gaiety or the grace? They are more sour and formal even than the English. The book-stalls all over Paris present a very delightful appearance. They contain neatly-bound, cheap, and portable editions of all their standard authors, which of itself refutes the charge of a want of the knowledge or taste for books. The French read with avidity whenever they can snatch the opportunity. They read standing in the open air, intowhich they are driven by the want of air at home. They read in garrets and in cellars. They read at one end of a counter, when a person is hammering a lock or a piece of cabinet-work at the other, without taking their eye from the book, or picking a quarrel with the person who is making the noise. Society is the school of education in France; there is a transparency in their intellects as in their atmosphere, which makes the communication of thought or sound more rapid and general. Thefarinaof knowledge floats in the air, and circulates at random. Alas! it ‘quickens, even with blowing.’ A periwig-maker is an orator; a fish-woman is a moralist; a woman of fashion is a metaphysician, armed with all the topics; a pretty woman in Paris, who was not also ablue-stocking, would make little figure in the circles. It would be in vain for her to know how to dispose a knot of ribands or a bunch of flowers in her hair, unless she could arrange a critical and analytical argument in all the forms. It is nothing against her, if she excels in personal and mental accomplishments at the same time. This turn for literary or scientific topics in the women may indeed be accounted for in part from the modes of social intercourse in France; but what does this very circumstance prove, but that an interchange of ideas is considered as one great charm in the society between men and women, and that the thirst of knowledge is not banished by a grosser passion? Knowledge and reason, however, descend; and where the women are philosophers, the men are not quite block-heads orpetit-maitres. They are far from being the ignorant smatterers that we pretend. They are not backward at asking for reasons, nor slow in giving them. They have a theory for every thing, even for vice and folly. Their faces again are grave and serious when they are by themselves, as they are gay and animated in society. Their eyes have a vacant, absent stare; their features set or lengthen all at once into ‘the melancholy of Moorditch.’ TheConducteurof the Diligence from Rouen confirmed me agreeably in my theory of the philosophical character of the French physiognomy. With large grey eyes and drooping eye-lids, prominent distended nostrils, a fine Fenelon expression of countenance, and a mouth open and eloquent, with furrowed lines twisted round it like whip-cord, he stood on the steps of the coach, and harangued to the gentlemen within on thebêtiseof somevoyageur Angloiswith the air of a professor, and in a deep sonorous voice, worthy of an oration of Bossuet. I should like to hear a Yorkshire guard, with his bluff, red face, bristly bullet head, little peering eyes, round shoulders, and squeaking voice, ascend into an imaginary rostrum in this manner, wave a florid speculation in one hand, and hold fast by the coach-door with the other, or get beyond an oath, a hearty curse, or his shrewdcountry gibberish! The face of the French soldiery is a face of great humanity—it is manly, sedate, thoughtful—it is equally free from fierceness and stupidity; and it seems to bear in its eye defeat and victory, the eagle and the lilies! I cannot help adding here, that a French gentleman (un Rentier) who lodges in the hotel opposite to me, passes his time in reading all the morning, dines, plays with his children after dinner, and takes a hand at backgammon with an oldgouvernantein the evening. He does not figure away with a couple of horses in the streets like our Englishjockeys(who really are nothing without a footman behind them,) nor does his wife plague his life out to run after all the new sights. And yet they are from the country. This looks like domestic comfort and internal resources. How many disciples of Rousseau’sEmiliusare there in France at the present day? I knew one twenty years ago.

The French are a people who practise the arts and sciences naturally. A shoe-black is theartiste du jour(artist of the day,) and a rat-catcher approaches you under some insidiousnom de guerre. Every thing is with them imposing, grave, important. ‘Except (it may be said) what really is so;’ and it may be insinuated, that all their pretensions are equally idly mockery and grimace. Look, then, at their works of science and of art—the one the most comprehensive and exact, the other the most laborious and finished in the world. What are their chemists, their astronomers, their naturalists, their painters, their sculptors? If not the greatest and most inventive geniuses, the most accurate compilers, and the most severe students in their several departments. La Place, Lavoisier, Cuvier, David, Houdon, are not triflers or pretenders. In science, if we have discovered the principles, they have gone more into the details—in art we accuse them of being over-laboured, and of finishing too minutely and mechanically; and they charge us (justly enough) with a want offinesse, and with producing little more than rude sketches and abortive caricatures. Their frigid, anatomical inquiries—their studies after the antique, and acquaintance with all the professional and scientific branches of their art, are notorious—and the care with which they work up their draperies and back-grounds is obvious to every one, and a standing subject of complaint and ridicule to English artists and critics. Their refinement in art, I confess, consists chiefly in an attention to rules and details, but then it does imply an attention to these, which is contrary to our idea of the flighty French character. I remember, some years ago, a young French artist in the Louvre, who was making a chalk-drawing of a smallVirgin and Child, by Leonardo da Vinci, and he took eleven weeks to complete it, sitting with his legs astride over a railing, looking up and talking to thoseabout him—consulting their opinion as to his unwearied imperceptible progress—going to the fire to warm his hands, and returning toperfectionate himself! There was a good deal of ‘laborious foolery’ in all this, but still he kept on with it, and did not fly to fifty things one after the other. Another student had undertaken to copy theTitian’s Mistress, and the method he took to do it was to parcel out his canvass into squares like an engraver; after which he began very deliberately, not with the face or hair, but with the first square in the right-hand corner of the picture, containing a piece of an old table. He did not care where he began, so that he went through the whole regularly.C’est égal, is the common reply in all such cases. This continuity of purpose, without any great effort or deep interest, surprises an Englishman. We can do nothing without a strong motive, and without violent exertion. But it is this very circumstance probably that enables them to proceed: they take the matter quite easily, and have not the same load of anxious thought to bear up against, nor the same impatient eagerness to reach perfection at a single stride, to stop them midway. They have not the English air hanging at their backs, like the Old Man of the Sea at Sinbad’s! The same freedom from any thing like morbid humour assists them to plod on like the Dutch from mere phlegm, or to diverge into a variety of pursuits, which is still more natural to them. Horace Vernet has in the present Exhibition a portrait of a lady, (a rival to Sir T. Lawrence’s) and close to it, a battle-piece, equal to Ward or Cooper. Who would not be a Parisian born, to attain excellence with the wish to succeed from mere confidence or indifference to success, to unite such a number of accomplishments, or be equally satisfied without a single one!

The English are over-hasty in supposing a certain lightness and petulance of manner in the French to be incompatible with sterling thought or steady application, and flatter themselves that not to be merry is to be wise. A French lady who had married an Englishman remarkable for his dullness, used to apologise for his silence in company by incessantly repeating ‘C’est toujours Locke, toujours Newton,’ as if these were the subjects that occupied his thoughts. It is well we have these names to appeal to in all cases of emergency; and as far as mere gravity is concerned, let these celebrated persons have been as wise as they would, they could not for the life of them have appeared duller or more stupid than the generality of their countrymen. The chief advantage I can find in the English over the French comes to this, that though slower, if they once take a thing up, they are longer in laying it down, provided it is a grievance or asore subject. The reason is, that the French do not delight ingrievances or in sore subjects; and that the English delight in nothing else, and battle their way through them most manfully. Theirforteis the disagreeable and repulsive. I think they would have fought the battle of Waterloo over again! The English, besides being ‘good haters,’ are dogged and downright, and have no salvos for their self-love. Their vanity does not heal the wounds made in their pride. The French, on the contrary, are soon reconciled to fate, and so enamoured of their own idea, that nothing can put them out of conceit with it. Whatever their attachment to their country, to liberty or glory, they are not so affected by the loss of these as to make any desperate effort or sacrifice to recover them. Their continuity of feeling is such, as to be no enemy to a whole skin. They over-ran Europe like tigers, and defended their own territory like deer. They are a nation of heroes—on this side of martyrdom!

DIALOGUE, FRENCH AND ENGLISH

French.—Have you seen the whole of ourExpositionof the present year?—

English.—No, but I have looked over a good part of it. I have been much pleased with many of the pictures. As far as I can judge, or have a right to say so, I think your artists have improved within these few years.

French.—Perhaps so, occasionally, but we have not David and some others.

English.—I cannot say that I miss him much. He had, I dare say, many excellences, but his faults were still more glaring, according to our insular notions of the art. Have you Guerin now? He had just brought out his first picture of Phædra and Hippolitus when I was in Paris formerly. It made a prodigious sensation at the time, and very great things were expected from him.

French.—No, his works are not much spoken of.

English.—The Hippolitus in the picture I speak of was very beautiful; but the whole appeared too much cast in the mould of the antique, and it struck me then that there was amannerismabout it that did not augur favourably for his future progress, but denoted a premature perfection. What I like in your present Exhibition is, that you seem in a great measure to have left this academic manner, and to have adopted a more natural style.

French.—I do not exactly comprehend.

English.—Why, you know the English complain of French art as too laboured and mechanical, as not allowing scope enough for genius and originality, as you retort upon us for being coarse and rustic.

French.—Ah! I understand.Thereis a picture in the English style; the subject is a Greek massacre, by Rouget. It is anébauche. It is for effect. There is much spirit in the expression, and a boldness of execution, but every part is not finished. It is like a first sketch, or like the painting of the scenes at our theatres. He has another picture here.

English.—Yes, of great merit in the same style of dashing, off-hand, explosive effect. He is something between our Ward and Haydon. But that is not what I mean. I do not wish you to exchange your vices for ours. We are not as yet models in theFine Arts. I am only glad that you imitate us, as it is a sign you begin to feel a certain deficiency in yourselves. There is no necessity for grossness and extravagance, any more than for being finical or pedantic. Now there is a picture yonder, which I think has broken through the trammels of the modern French school, without forfeiting its just pretensions to classical history. It has the name of Drölling on it. What, pray, is the subject of it?

French.—It isUlysses conducting Polyxena to the sacrifice. He has one much better at the Luxembourg.

English.—I don’t know; I have not seen that, but this picture appears to me to be a very favourable specimen of the present French school. It has great force, considerable beauty, symmetry of form, and expression; and it is animated flesh, not coloured stone. The action and gestures into which the figures throw themselves, seem the result of life and feeling, and not of putting casts after the antique into Opera attitudes.

French.—We do not think much of that picture. It has not been perfected.

English.—Perhaps it passes a certain conventional limit, and is borne away by the impulse of the subject; and of that the most eminent among the French artists might be thought to be as much afraid as the old lady at Court was that her face would fall in pieces, if her features relaxed into a smile. The Ulysses is poor and stiff: the nurse might be finer; but I like the faces of the two foremost figures much; they are handsome, interesting, and the whole female group is alive and in motion.

French.—What do you think of the picture by Gerard, No. 745, of theMeeting between Louis XIV. and the Spanish Ambassador? It is greatly admired here.

English.—It appeared to me (as I passed it just now) to be a picture of great bustle and spirit; and it looks as if Iris had dipped her woof in it, the dresses are so gay and fine. Really, the show of variegated colours in the principal group is like a bed of tulips. That is certainly a capitally painted head of a priest stooping forward in a red cap and mantle.

French.—And the youth near him no less.

English.—The complexion has too much the texture of fruit.

French.—But for the composition—the contrast between youth and age is so justly marked. Are you not struck with the figure of the Spanish Ambassador? His black silk drapery is quite in the Italian style.

English.—I thought Gerard had been chiefly admired for a certain delicacy of expression, more than for his colouring or costume. He was a favourite painter of the Empress Josephine.

French.—But in the present subject there is not much scope for expression.

English.—It is very true; but in a picture of the same crowded and courtly character (The last Moments of Henry IV.,) the painter has contrived to introduce a great deal of beauty and tenderness of expression in the appearance of some of the youthful attendants.Thisis a more shewy and finely painted drawing-room picture; butthatappears to me to have more character in it. It has also the merit of being finished with great care. I think the French excel in small histories of the domestic or ornamental kind. Here, for instance, is a very pretty picture by Madame Hersent, 897,Louis XIV. taking leave of his Grand-child. It is well painted, the dresses are rich and correct—the monarch has a great deal of negligent dignity mixed with the feebleness of age, the contrast of innocence and freshness in the child is well-managed, and the attendants are decayed beauties and very confidential-looking persons of that period. One great charm of all historical subjects is, to carry us back to the scene and time, which this picture does. Probably from the Age and Court of LouisXVIII.to that of LouisXIV.it is not far for a French imagination to transport itself.

French.—Monsieur, it is so far that we should never have got from the one to the other, if you had not helped us.

English.—So much the worse! But do you not think that a clever picture of theInterior of a Gothic Ruin, 247, (Bouton.[19]) It seems to me as if the artist had been reading Sir Walter Scott. That lofty, ruinous cave looks out on the wintry sea from one of the Shetland Isles. There is a cold, desolate look of horror pervading itto the utmost extremity. But the finishing is, perhaps, somewhat too exact for so wild a scene. Has not the snow, lodged on the broken ledges of the rocks, a little of the appearance of the coat of candied sugar on a twelfth-cake? But how comes the dog in possession of so smart a kennel? It is said in the Catalogue, that by his barking he alarms his master, who saves the poor woman and her infant from perishing. Who would have thought that such a scene as this had a master?

French.—Dogs are necessary everywhere in France: there is no place that we can keep them out of. They are like the machines in ancient poetry—a part of every plot. Poodles are the truedésirs: they have ousted even the priests. They may soon set up a hierarchy of their own. They swarm, and are as filthy as an Egyptian religion.

English.—But this is a house-dog, not a lap-dog.

French.—There is no saying—but pass on. Is there any other picture that you like?

English.—Yes, I am much pleased with the one opposite, theMarriage of the Virgin, 268, by Mons. Caminade. It is both elegant and natural. The Virgin kneels in a simple and expressive attitude; in the children there is a playful and healthy aspect, and the grouping is quite like a classic bas-relief. Perhaps, in this respect, it wants depth. Can you tell me, why French painting so much affects the qualities of sculpture in general,—flatness and formality in the groups, and hardness of outline in the single figures?

French.—I cannot answer that question, as it is some time since I left England, where I remained only ten months to perfect myself in the language. You probably think more highly of the next picture:The Establishment of the Enfans Trouvés, by M——?

English.—I am afraid not; for it has the old French flimsiness and flutter. The face of the Foundress resembles a shower of roseate tints. You may be sure, however, that the English in general will approve mightily of it, who like all subjects of charitable institutions. I heard an English lady just now in raptures with the naked children seated on the blankets, calling them affectionately, ‘poor little dears!’ We like subjects of want, because they afford a relief to our own sense of comfortlessness, and subjects of benevolence, because they soothe our sense of self-importance—a feeling of which we stand greatly in need.

French.—What is your opinion of the portrait of LouisXVIII., by Gerard?

English.—It seems to have been painted after dinner, and as if his Majesty was uneasy in his seat—the boots might have been spared.

French.—We have a picture by one of your compatriots—the Chevalier Lawrence—

English.—Yes, the portrait of a Lady, in the next room. It was accounted one of the best portraits in our Somerset-house Exhibition last summer.

French.—But there is a portrait of a French Lady, placed as a companion to it, by Horace Vernet, which is thought better.

English.—I have no doubt. But I believe, in England, the preference would be given the contrary way.

French.—May I ask on what ground, Sir?

English.—Let me ask, did you ever happen to sit to have a cast of your head taken? Because I conceive that precisely the same heated, smooth, oily, close, stifling feeling that one’s face has just before the mask is taken off, is that which is conveyed by the texture and look of a finished French portrait, generally speaking, and by this in particular. I like the Head of a Lady, by Guerin (838), on the opposite side of the room, better. It is clear, cold, blue and white, with an airy attitude, and firm drawing. There is no attempt to smother one with dingy fleshrougedover.

French.—But have you seen our miniatures? The English miniatures, I imagine, are not good.

English.—At least, we have a good many of them. I know an English critic, who would at least count you up thirty eminent English miniature-painters at a breath,—all first-rate geniuses; so differently do we view these things on different sides of the Channel! In truth, all miniatures must be much alike. There can be no such thing as anEnglish miniature, that is, as a coarse, slovenly daub in little. We finish when we cannot help it. We do not volunteer a host of graces, like you; but we can make a virtue of necessity. There was a Mr. Hayter, who painted resplendent miniatures, perfect mirrors of the highest heaven of beauty; but he preferred the English liberty of sign-post painting in oil. I observe among your miniatures several enamels and copies from the Old Masters in the Louvre. Has not the coming to them the effect of looking through a window? What a breadth, what a clearness, what a solidity? How do you account for this superiority? I do not say this invidiously, for I confess it is the same, whenever copies are introduced by stealth in our English Exhibition.

French.—I perceive, Sir, you have a prejudice in favour of the English style of art.

English.—None at all; but I cannot think our faults any justification of yours, or yours of ours. For instance, here is a landscape by a countryman of mine, Mr. Constable (No. 358). Why then allthis affectation of dashing lights and broken tints and straggling lumps of paint, which I dare say give the horrors to a consummate French artist? On the other hand, why do not your artists try to give something of the same green, fresh, and healthy look of living nature, without smearing coats of varnish over rawdabsof colour (as we do), till the composition resembles the ice breaking up in marshy ground after a frosty morning? Depend upon it, in disputes about taste, as in other quarrels, there are faults on both sides.

French.—The English style has effect, but it is gross.

English.—True: yet in the inner rooms there are some water-colour landscapes, by Copley Fielding, which strike me as uniting effect with delicacy, particularly No. 360, with some beautiful trees fringing the fore-ground. I think our painters do best when they are cramped in the vehicle they employ. They are abusers of oil-colours.

French.—I recollect the name; but his works did not seem to me to be finished.

English.—They are finished as nature is finished: that is, the details are to be found in them, though they do not obtrude themselves. You French require every thing to be made out like pin’s points or botanic specimens of leaves and trees. Your histories want life, and your landscapes air. I could have sworn the little fishing-piece (No. —) was English. It is such a daub, and yet has such a feeling of out-of-door scenery in it.

French.—You do not flatter us. But you allow our excellence in sculpture.

English.—There is an admirable study of a little girl going into a bath, by Jacquot. It is so simple, true, and expressive, I thought it might be Chantry’s. I cannot say I saw any others that pleased me. The Eurydice, by Nantreuil, is a French Eurydice. It is an elegantly-formed female, affecting trifling airs and graces in the agonies of death. Suppose we return to the pictures in the Green Room. There is nothing very remarkable here, except the portrait of an artist by himself, which looks for all the world as if it fed upon its own white lead.

French.—Do like the figure of a woman in one corner in theMassacre of the Innocents? The artist has done all he could to propitiate the English taste. He has left his work in a sufficiently barbarous and unfinished state.

English.—But he has taken pains to throw expression, originality, and breadth into it. With us it would be considered as a work of genius. I prefer it much to any thing by our artists of the same kind, both for the tone, the wild lofty character, and the unctuousfreedom of the pencilling. There is a strange hurly-burly in the background, and a lurid tone over the whole picture. This is what we mean by imagination—giving the feeling that there is in nature. You mean by imagination the giving somethingout ofit—such as theNymph(No. —)appearing to the River God. The young lady is a very charming transparency, or gauze-drawing; and the River God is a sturdy wooden statue, painted over; but I would ask you, is there any thing in the picture that takes you beyond a milliner’s shop in the Palais-royal, or a tea-garden in the neighbourhood of St. Cloud? The subject ofLocusta poisoning a young slave, by Figalon, is, I think, forcibly and well treated. The old sorceress is not an every day person. The French too seldom resort to the grace of Deformity. Yet how finely it tells! They are more timid and fastidious than the ancients, whom they profess to imitate. There is one other large historical composition in the room which I am partial to; and yet the faces, the manners, the colouring, every thing in it is French. It is theHenry the Fourth pardoning the peasants who have supplied the besieged in Paris with food. That head of a young woman near the middle is particularly fine, and in the happiest style of French art. Its effect against the sky is picturesque; it is handsome, graceful, sensitive, and tinged with an agreeable florid hue.

French.—But what is your opinion of Horace Vernet’s Battle-piece?

English.—May I ask the subject?

French.—It is the battle of Mont-Mirail, after the return from Russia.

English.—Good: I was sadly afraid it was the Battle of Mont St. Jean.Weought to blot it forever from our history, if we have been, or intend to be, free. But I did not know but some Frenchman might be found to stain his canvass with it, and present it to M. le Vicomte Chateaubriand.

French.—But I speak of the painting, Sir.

English.—It is something in the same style, but hardly so clever as the picture of the Queen’s Trial, by Hayter. Did you see that when you were in London?

French.—No, Sir.

English.—Then we cannot enter into the comparison.

French.—That is true.

English.—We never had a school of painting till the present day. Whether we have one at present, will be seen in the course of the winter. Yours flourished one hundred and fifty years ago. For, not to include Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorraine in it, (namesthat belong to time and nature,) there were Philip Champagne, Jouvenet, Le Sueur, whose works are surely unequalled by the present race of artists, in colouring, in conception of the subject, in the imitation of nature, and in picturesque effect. As a proof of it, they become their places, and look well in the Louvre. A picture of David’s would be an eye-sore there. You are familiar with their works?

French.—I have seen those masters, but there is an objection to passing into that part of the Louvre.

English.—The air is, I own, different.

THE LUXEMBOURG GALLERY

Racine’s poetry, and Shakspeare’s, however wide apart, do not absolutely prove that the French and English are a distinct race of beings, who can never properly understand one another. But the Luxembourg Gallery, I think, settles this point forever—not in our favour, for we have nothing (thank God) to oppose to it, but decidedly againstthem, as a people incapable of any thing but the little, the affected, and extravagant in works of imagination and theFine Arts. Poetry is but the language of feeling, and we may convey the same meaning in a different form of words. But in the language of painting, words becomethings; and we cannot be mistaken in the character of a nation, that, in thus expressing themselves, uniformly leave out certain elements of feeling, and greedily and ostentatiously insert others that they should not. The English have properly no school of art, (though they have one painter at least equal to Molière,)—we have here either done nothing worth speaking of, compared with our progress in other things, or our faults are those of negligence and rusticity. But the French have done their utmost to attain perfection, and they boast of having attained it. What they have done is, therefore, a fair specimen of what they can do. Their works contain undoubted proofs of labour, learning, power; yet they are only the worse for all these, since, without a thorough knowledge of the scientific and mechanical part of their profession, as well as profound study, they never could have immortalized their want of taste and genius in the manner they have done. Their pictures at the Luxembourg are ‘those faultless monsters which theartne’er saw’ till now—the ‘hand-writing on the wall,’ which nothing canreverse. It has been said, that ‘Vice to be hated needs but to be seen,’ and the same rule holds good in natural as in moral deformity. It is a pity that some kind hand does not take an opportunity of giving to ashes this monument of their glory and their shame, but that it is important to preserve the proofs of such an anomaly in the history of the human mind as a generation of artists painting in this manner, and looking down upon the rest of the world as not even able to appreciate their paramount superiority in refinement and elegance. It is true, strangers know not what to make of them. The ignorant look at them with wonder—the more judicious, with pain and astonishment at the perversion of talents and industry. Still, they themselves go on, quoting one another’s works, and parcelling out the excellences of the several pictures under different heads—pour les coloris,pour le dessein,pour la composition,pour l’expression, as if all the world were of accord on this subject, and Raphael had never been heard of. It is enough to stagger a nation, as well as an individual, in their admiration of their own accomplishments, when they find they have it all to themselves; but the French are blind, insensible, incorrigible to the least hint of any thing like imperfection or absurdity. It is this want of self-knowledge, and incapacity to conceive of any thing beyond a certain conventional circle, that is the original sin—the incurable error of all their works of imagination. If Nature were a French courtezan or Opera-dancer, their poetry and painting would be the finest in the world.[20]

The fault, then, that I should find with this Collection of Pictures is, that it is equally defective in the imitation of nature, which belongs to painting in general; or in giving the soul of nature-expression, which belongs more particularly to history-painting. Their style of art is false from beginning to end, nor is it redeemed even by the vices of genius, originality, and splendour of appearance. It is at once tame and extravagant, laboured and without effect, repulsive to the senses and cold to the heart. Nor can it well be otherwise. It sets out on a wrong principle, and the farther it goes, nay, the more completely it succeeds in what it undertakes, the more inanimate, abortive, and unsatisfactory must be the performance. French painting, in a word, is not to be considered as an independent art, or original language, coming immediately from nature, and appealing to it—it is a badtranslationof sculpture into a language essentiallyincompatible with it. The French artists take plaster-casts from the antique, and colour them by a receipt; they take plaster-casts and put them into action, and give expression to the features according to the traditional rules for composition and expression. This is the invariable process: we see the infallible results, which differ only according to the patience, the boldness, and ingenuity of the painter in departing from nature, and caricaturing his subject.

For instance, let us take theEndymionof Girodet, No 57. It is a well-drawn, though somewhat effeminate Academy-figure. All the rest is what I have said. It is a waste of labour, an abuse of power. There is no repose in the attitude; but the body, instead of being dissolved in an immortal sleep, seems half lifted up, so as to produce a balance of form, and to make a display of the symmetry of the proportions. Vanity here presides even over sleep. The head is turned on one side as if it had not belonged to the body (which it probably did not) and discovers a meagre, insignificant profile, hard and pinched up, without any of the genial glow of youth, or the calm, delighted expansion of the heavenly dream that hovered so long over it. The sharp edges of the features, like rims of tin, catch the moonlight, but do not reflect the benign aspect of the Goddess! There is no feeling (not a particle) of the poetry of the subject. Then the colouring is not natural, is not beautiful, is not delicate, but that of a livid body, glittering in the moon-beams, or with a cloud of steel-filings, glimmering round it for a veil of light. It is not left asdead-colouringin an evidently unfinished state, or so as to make a blank for the imagination to fill up (as we see in Fuseli’s pictures); but every part is worked up with malicious industry, not to represent flesh, but to be as like marble or polished steel as possible. There is no variety of tint, no reflected light, no massing, but merely the difference that is produced in a smooth and uniformly coloured surface, by the alterations proper to sculpture, which are given with a painful and oppressive sense of effort and of difficulty overcome.

This is not a natural style. It is foppish and mechanical; or just what might be expected from taking a piece of stone and attempting to colour it, not from nature, not from imagination or feeling, but from a mere wilful determination to supply the impressions of one sense from those of another, by dint of perseverance and a growing conceit of one’s-self. There is, indeed, a progress to perfection; for by the time the work is finished, it is a finished piece of arrogance and folly. If you are copying a yellow colour, and you resolve to make it blue, the more blue you make it, the more perfectly you succeed in your purpose; but it is the less like yellow. So the more perfectly French a work of art is, the less it is like nature!The French artists have imitated the presumption of the tyrant Mezentius, who wished to link dead bodies to living ones.—Again, in the same artist’s picture ofAtala at the Tomb(which I think his best, and which would make a fine bas-relief[21]) the outline of the countenance of Atala is really noble, with a beautiful expression of calm resignation; and the only fault to be found with it is, that, supported as the head is in the arms of the Priest, it has too much the look of a bust after the antique, that we see carried about the streets by the Italian plaster-cast-makers. Otherwise, it is a classical and felicitous stroke of French genius. They do well to paint Sleep, Death, Night, or to approach as near as they can to the verge ofstill-life, and leaden-eyed obscurity! But what, I believe, is regarded as the master-piece of this artist, and what I have no objection to consider as the triumph of French sublimity and pathos, is his picture of theDeluge, No. 55. The national talent has here broken loose from the trammels of refinement and pedantry, and soars unconstrained to its native regions of extravagance and bombast. The English are willing to abide by this as a test. If there be in the whole of this gigantic picture of a gigantic subject any thing but distortion, meanness, extreme absurdity and brute force, we are altogether mistaken in our notions of the matter. Was it not enough to place that huge, unsightly skeleton of old age upon the shoulders of the son, who is climbing a tottering, overhanging precipice, but the farce of imposture and improbability must be systematically kept up by having the wife clinging to him in all the agony of the most preposterous theatrical affectation, and then the two children dangling to her like thefag-endof horror, and completing the chain of disgusting, because impracticable and monstrous distress?Quod sic mihi ostendis, incredulus odi.The principle of gravitation must be at an end, to make this picture endurable for a moment. All the effect depends on the fear of falling, and yet the figures could not remain suspended where they are for a single instant (but must be flung ‘with hideous ruin and combustion down,’) if they were any thing else but grisly phantoms. The terror is at once physical and preternatural. Instead of death-like stillness or desperate fortitude, preparing for inevitable fate, or hurrying from it with panic-fear at some uncertain opening, they have set themselves in a picturesque situation, to meet it under every disadvantage, playing off their antics like a family of tumblers at a fair, and exhibiting the horrid grimaces, the vulgar rage, cowardice, and impatience of the most wretched actors on a stage. The painter has, no doubt, ‘accumulated horror on horror’s head,’ in strainingthe credulity or harrowing up the feelings of the spectator to the utmost, and proving his want of conception no less by the exaggeration, than his want of invention by the monotony of his design. Real strength knows where to stop, because it is founded on truth and nature; but extravagance and affectation have no bounds. They rush into the vacuum of thought and feeling, and commit every sort of outrage and excess.[22]Neither in the landscape is there a more historic conception than in the actors on the scene. There is none of the keeping or unity that so remarkably characterizes Poussin’s fine picture of the same subject, nor the sense of sullen, gradually coming fate. The waters do not rise slowly and heavily to the tops of the highest peaks, but dash tumultuously and violently down rocks and precipices. This is not the truth of the history, but it accords with the genius of the composition. I should think the painter might have received some hints from M. Chateaubriand for the conduct of it. It is in his frothy, fantastic, rhodomontade way—‘It out-herods Herod!’

David’s pictures, after this, are tame and trite in the comparison; they are not romantic orrevolutionary, but they are completelyFrench; they are in a little, finical manner, without beauty, grandeur, or effect. He has precision of outline and accuracy of costume; but how small a part is this of high history! In a scene like that of theOath of the Horatii, or thePass of Thermopylæ, who would think of remarking the turn of an ancle, or the disposition of a piece of drapery, or the ornaments of a shield? Yet one is quite at leisure to do this in looking at the pictures, without having one’s thoughts called off by other and nobler interests. The attempts at expression are meagre and constrained, and the attitudes affected and theatrical. There is, however, a unity of design and an interlacing of shields and limbs, which seems to express one soul inthe Horatii, to which considerable praise would be due, if they had more the look of heroes, and less that ofpetit-maitres. I do not wonder David does not like Rubens, for he has none of the Fleming’s bold, sweeping outline. He finishes the details very prettily and skilfully, but has no idea of giving magnitude or motion to the whole. His stern Romans and fierce Sabines look like young gentlemen brought up at a dancing or fencing school, and taking lessons in these several elegant exercises. What a fellow has he made of Romulus, standing in the act to strike with all the air of a modern dandy! The women are in attitudes, and contribute to the eloquence of the scene. Here is a wife, (as we learn from the Catalogue) there a sister, here a mistress, there a grandmother with three infants. Thus are the episodes made out by a genealogical table of the relations of human life! Such is the nature of French genius and invention, that they can never get out of leading-strings! The figure of Brutus, in the picture of that subject, has a fine, manly, unaffected character. It has shrunk on one side to brood over its act, without any strut or philosophic ostentation, which was much to be dreaded. He is wrapt in gloomy thought, as in a mantle. Mr. Kean might have sat for this figure, for, in truth, it is every way like him. The group of women on the opposite side of the canvass, making a contrast by their lively colours and flimsy expression of grief, might have been spared. These pictures have, as we were told, been objected to for their too great display of the naked figure, in some instances bordering on indecency. The indecency (if so it is) is not in the nakedness of the figures, but in the barrenness of the artist’s resources to clothe them with other attributes, and with genius as with a garment. If their souls had been laid bare as well as their limbs, their spirits would have shone through and concealed any outward deformity. Nobody complains of Michael Angelo’s figures as wanting severity and decorum.

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