It is an inestimable advantage to an idle man to have such a place as
the Louvre ever open to him. The book-stalls and print-shops of the
quays, those never-failing sources of pleasure and of extravagance in a
small way, cannot be visited with any satisfaction under the meridian
sun; the shop windows, a perpetual industrial exhibition, grow tiresome
at times; the streets are too crowded, the gardens too empty; the
reading rooms are close; the newspapers are stupid; and what remains?
Why, the Louvre opens its hospitable doors, and, blessing the memory of
Francis I., the tired wanderer enters, and drinks in the refreshing
coolness of those quiet and spacious halls. If he is an antiquarian, he
plunges deep into the arcana of ancient Egypt, and emulates the great
Champollion; if he is a student of history, he muses on the sceptre of
Charlemagne, or the old gray coat and coronation robes of the first
Napoleon; if he is devoted to art, he travels through that wilderness of
paintings and statuary, and thinks and talks about _chiaro 'scuro_,
"breadth of colour," or "bits of foreshortening." But if he be a man of
simple tastes, who detests technicalities, and enjoys all such things in
a quiet, general sort of way, without knowing exactly what it is that
pleases him,--he goes through room after room, now stopping for an
instant before a set of antique china, now speculating on the figure he
should cut in one of those old suits of armour, and finally settling
down in a chair before some landscape by Cuyp or Claude, in which the
artist seems to have imprisoned the sunbeams and the warm, fragrant
atmosphere of early June; or else he seats himself on that comfortable
sofa before Murillo's masterpiece, and contemplates the supernal beauty
and holy exaltation of the face of her whom Dante calls the "Virgin
Mother, daughter of her Son." He is surrounded by artists, engaged in a
work that seems to verify the old maxim, _Laborare est orare_,--each one
striving to reproduce on his canvas the effects of the angel-guided
pencil of Murillo.
I find it useless for me to attempt to visit the Louvre systematically,
as most people do. I have frequently tried to do it, but it has ended by
my walking through one or two rooms, and then taking up my position
before Murillo's Conception, and holding it until the hour came for
closing the gallery. When I was young, I used to think what a glorious
thing it would have been to have felt the thrill of joy that filled the
heart of the discoverer of America, or the satisfaction of Shakspeare
when he had finished Hamlet or Macbeth, or of Beethoven when he had
completed his seventh symphony; but all that covetousness of the
impossible is blotted out by my envy of the great Spanish painter. What
must have been the deep transport of his heart, when he gazed upon the
heavenly vision his own genius had created! He must have felt
"----like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet sails into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes,
He stared at the Pacific.----"
In spite of all my natural New England prejudice, I cannot help admiring
and loving that old Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Its
humanizing effects can be seen in the history of the middle ages, and
they are felt amid all the bustle and roar of this irreverent nineteenth
century. Woman cannot again be thought the soulless being heathen
philosophy considered her; she cannot again become a slave, for she is
recognized as the sister of her who was chosen to make reparation for
the misdeeds of Mother Eve. I am strongly tempted to transcribe here
some lines written in pencil on the fly-leaf of an old catalogue of the
museum of the Louvre, and found on the sofa before Murillo's picture.
The writer seems to have had in mind the beautiful conclusion of the
life of Agricola by Tacitus, where the great historian says that he
would not forbid the making of likenesses in marble or bronze, but would
only remind us that such images, like the forms of their originals, are
frail and unenduring, while the beauty of the mind is eternal, and can
be perpetuated in the manners of succeeding generations better than by
ignoble materials and the art of the sculptor. The lines appear to be a
paraphrase of this idea.
O blest Murillo! what a task was thine,
That Mother to portray whose beauty mild
Combined earth's comeliness with grace divine,--
To whom our God and Saviour as a child
Was subject--upon whom so oft He smiled!
Yet not less happy also in my part,--
For I, though in a world by sin defiled,
Though lacking genius and unskilled in art,
May paint that blessed likeness in a contrite heart.
Art is the surest and safest civilizer. Popular education may be so
perverted as only to minister to new forms of corruption, but art
purifies itself; it has no Voltaires, and Rousseaus, and Eugene
Sues,--for painting and sculpture, like poetry, refuse to be made the
handmaids of vice or unbelief. Open your galleries of art to the people,
and you confer on them a greater benefit than mere book education; you
give them a refinement to which they would otherwise be strangers. The
boor, turned loose into civilized society, soon catches something of its
tone of politeness; and those who are accustomed to the contemplation of
forms of ideal beauty will not easily be won by the grossness and
deformity of vice. A fine picture daily looked at becomes by degrees a
part of our own souls, and exerts an influence over us of which we are
little aware. Some English writer--Hazlitt, I think--has said, that if a
man were thinking of committing some wicked or disgraceful action, and
were to stop short and look for a moment at some fine picture with which
he had been familiar, he would inevitably be turned thereby from his
purpose. It is to be hoped that the time is not far distant when each of
our great American cities shall possess its gallery of art, which (on
certain days of the week, at least) shall be as free to all well-behaved
persons as the public parks themselves. We may not boast the artistic
wealth of Rome, Florence, Paris, Dresden, or any of the old capitals of
Europe; but the sooner we make a beginning, the better it will be for
our galleries and our mob. We need some more effectual humanizer than
our educational system. Reading, writing, and ciphering are great
things, but they are powerless to overcome the rudeness and irreverence
of our people. Our populace seems to lack entirely the sense of the
beautiful or the sublime. As Charles Lamb said, "They have, alas! no
passion for antiquities--for the tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet.
If they had, they would no longer be the rabble." It is too true that
the attempts which have been made to open private gardens to the
enjoyment of the public have resulted in the most shameful abuses of
privilege, and that flowers are stolen from the graves in our
cemeteries; but there is no reason for giving our people up as past
praying for, on the score of politeness and common decency. They must be
educated up to it: some abuses may occur at first, but a few salutary
lessons on the necessity of submission to authority will rectify it all,
and our people will, in the course of time, become as well-behaved as
the people of France or Italy.
I am no antiquarian. I do not love the antique for antiquity's sake. It
must appeal to me through the medium of history, or not at all. Etruscan
relics have no other charm for me than their beauty of form. I care but
little for Egyptian sarcophagi or their devices and hieroglyphics, and I
would not go half a mile to see a wilderness of mummies. Whenever I feel
a longing for any thing in the Egyptian or heathen line, I can resort to
Mount Auburn, with its gateway--and this thought satisfies me; so that I
pass by all such things without feeling that I am a loser. With such
feelings, there are many of the halls of the Louvre which I only walk
through with an admiring glance at their elegance of arrangement. A few
days since, in wandering about there, I found a room which I had never
seen before, and which touched me more nearly than any thing there,
except the paintings. It has been opened recently. I had been looking
through the relics of royalty with a considerable degree of
pleasure,--meditating on the armour of Henry the Great, the breviary of
St. Louis, and the worn satin shoe which once covered the little foot of
Marie Antoinette,--and was about to leave, when I noticed that a door
was open which in past years I had seen closed. I pushed in, and found
myself in a vast and magnificent apartment, on the gorgeously frescoed
ceiling of which was emblazoned the name--which is a tower of strength
to every Frenchman--_Napoleon_. Around the room, in elegant glass cases,
were disposed the relics of the saint whom Mr. Abbott's bull of
canonization has placed in red letters in the calendar of Young America.
Leaving aside all joking upon the attempts to prove that much-slandered
monarch a saint, there was his history, written as Sartor Resartus would
have written it, in his clothes. There was a crayon sketch of him at the
age of sixteen; there was a mathematical book which he had studied, the
case of mathematical instruments he had used; there was the coat in
which he rode up and down the lines of Marengo, inspiring every heart
with heroism, and every arm with vigour; the sword and coat he wore as
First Consul; the glittering robes which decked him when he sat in the
chair of Clovis and Charlemagne, the idol of his nation, and the terror
of all the world besides; the stirrups in which he stood at Waterloo,
and saw his brave legions cut up and dispersed; and, though last, not
least, there was the old gray coat and hat in which he walked about at
St. Helena, and the very handkerchief which in his dying hour wiped the
chill dew of eternity from his brow. There were many things
besides--there were his table and chair; his camp bed on which he rested
during those long campaigns; his gloves, his razor strap, his comb, the
clothes of his little son, the "King of Rome," and the bow he played
with; the saddles and other presents which he received during his
expedition to the East, and his various court dresses--but the old gray
coat was the most attractive of all. It was a consolation to notice that
it had lost a button, for it showed that though its wearer was an
anointed emperor, he was not exempt from the vicissitudes of common
humanity. I sat down and observed the people who visited the room, and I
noticed that they all lingered around the old coat. It made no
difference whether they spoke English, French, German, or any other
tongue; there was something which appealed to them all; there was a
common ground, where the student and the enthusiastic lover of high art
could join in harmonious feeling, even with the practical man, who would
not have cared a three-cent piece if Praxiteles and Canova had never
sculptured, or Raphael and Murillo had never seen a brush. It required
but a slight effort to fill the room up of the absent hero, and to
"stuff out his vacant garments with his form," and perhaps this very
thing tended to make the entire exhibition a sad one. It was the most
melancholy commentary on human glory that can be imagined. It ought to
be placed in the vestibule of a church, or in some more public place,
and it would purge a community of ambition. What a sermon might
Lacordaire preach on the temporal and the eternal, with the sword and
the coronation robes of Napoleon I. before him!
The interest which I have seen manifested by so many people in the
relics of Napoleon I. has afforded me considerable amusement. I have
lately seen so much ridicule cast upon the relics of the saints
preserved in many of the churches of Italy, by people of the same class
as those who lingered so reverentially before the glass cases of the
Napoleon room in the Louvre, that I cannot help thinking how rare a
virtue consistency is.
Perhaps it may be owing to some weakness in my mental organization, but
I cannot acknowledge the propriety of honouring the burial-places of
successful generals, and, at the same time, think the shrines of the
saints worthy of nothing but ridicule and desecration. I found myself, a
few years ago, looking with grave interest at an old coat of General
Jackson's, which is preserved in the Patent Office at Washington; and I
cannot wonder at the reverence which some people pay to the garments of
a martyr in the cause of religion. I cannot understand how it may be
right and proper to celebrate the birthdays of worldly heroes, and "rank
idolatry" to commemorate the self-denying heroes of Christianity. I
cannot join in the setting-up of statues of generals and statesmen, and
condemn a similar homage to the saints by any allusions to the enormity
of making a "graven image." In fine, if it is right to adorn and
reverence the tomb of the Father of his Country, (and what American
heart does not acknowledge its propriety?) it certainly cannot be wrong
to beautify and venerate the tomb of the chief apostle, and the shrines
of saints and martyrs who achieved for themselves and their fellow-men
an independence from a tyranny infinitely worse than that from which
Washington liberated America.
I have recently been visiting the three great monuments of the reign of
Napoleon III.--the completed Louvre, the Bois de Boulogne, and the
Halles Centrales. As to the first, those who remember those narrow,
nasty streets, which within six years were the approaches to the Louvre
and the Palais Royal, and those rickety old buildings reminding one too
strongly of cheese in an advanced stage of mouldiness, that used to
intrude their unsightly forms into the very middle of the Place du
Carrousel,--those who recollect the junk shops that seemed more fitting
to the neighbourhood of the docks than to the entrance to a palace and a
gallery of art,--feel in a manner lost, when they walk about the
courtyards of the noble edifice which has taken the place of so much
deformity. If the new wings of the Louvre had been built in one range
instead of quadrangles, they would extend more than half a mile! Half a
mile of palace, and a palace, too, which in building has occupied one
hundred and fifty sculptors for the past five years! Those who have not
visited Paris within five years will recollect the Bois de Boulogne only
as a vast neglected tract of woodland, which seemed a great waste of the
raw material in a place where firewood is so expensive as it is here. It
is now laid out in beautiful avenues and walks, the extent of which is
said to be nearly two hundred miles. You are refreshed by the sound of
waterfalls and the coolness of grottos, the rocks for the formation of
which were brought from Fontainebleau, more than forty miles distant
from Paris. You walk on, and find yourself on the shores of a lake, a
mile or two in length, with two or three lovely islands in it, and in
whose bright blue waters thousands of trout are sporting. That wild
waste, the old Bois de Boulogne, which few persons but duellists ever
visited, has passed away, and in its place you find the most magnificent
park in the world. It is indeed a perfect triumph of landscape
gardening. It is nature itself, not in miniature, but on such a scale as
to deceive you entirely, and fill you with the same feeling of
admiration that is awakened by any striking natural beauty. The old
French notions of landscape gardening seem to have been entirely cast
aside. The carriage roads and paths go winding about so that the view is
constantly changing, and the trees are allowed to grow as they please,
without being tortured into fantastic shapes by the pruning knife. The
banks of the lake have been made irregular, now steep, now sloping
gently to the water's edge, and in some places huge jagged rocks have
been most naturally worked in, while ivy has been planted around them,
and in their crevices those weeds and shrubs which commonly grow in such
places. You would about as readily take Jamaica Pond to be artificial as
this lovely sheet of water and its surroundings. The Avenue de
l'Imperatrice is the road from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de
Boulogne. It is half or three quarters of a mile in length, and is
destined to be one of the most striking features of Paris. It is laid
out with spacious grass plots, with carriage ways and ways for
equestrians and foot passengers, with regular double rows of trees on
either side. Many elegant chateau-like private residences already adorn
it, and others are rapidly rising. An idea of its majestic appearance
may be had from the fact that its entire width from house to house is
about four hundred feet. The large space around the Arc de Triomphe is
already laid out in a square, to be called the Place de l'Europe, and
the work has already been commenced of reducing the buildings around it
to symmetry. The Halles Centrales, the great central market-house of
Paris, has just been opened to the public. It is built mainly of iron
and glass. As nearly as I could judge of its size, I should think it
would leave but little spare room if it were placed in Union Park, New
York. It is about a hundred feet in height, and so well ventilated that
it is hard to realize when there that one is under cover. A wide street
for vehicles runs through its whole length, crossed by others at equal
intervals. I have called these three public improvements the great
monuments of the reign of Napoleon III.; not that I would limit his good
works to these, but because these may be taken as conspicuous
illustrations of his care, no less for the amusements than for the
bodily wants of his people, and of his zeal for the promotion of art and
the adornment of his capital. But these noble characteristics of the
Emperor deserve something more than a mere passing notice, and may well
form the subject of my next letter.