At last I have come into dreamland; into the lotus-eater's paradise;
into the land where it is always afternoon. I am released from care; I
am unknown, unknowing; I live in a house whose arrangements seem to me
strange, old, and dreamy. In the heart of a great city I am as still
as if in a convent; in the burning heats of summer our rooms are
shadowy and cool as a cave. My time is all my own. I may at will lie
on a sofa, and dreamily watch the play of the leaves and flowers, in
the little garden into which my room opens; or I may go into the
parlor adjoining, whence I hear the quick voices of my beautiful and
vivacious young friends. You ought to see these girls. Emma might look
like a Madonna, were it not for her wicked wit; and as to Anna and
Lizzie, as they glance by me, now and then, I seem to think them a
kind of sprite, or elf, made to inhabit shady old houses, just as
twinkling harebells grow in old castles; and then the gracious mamma,
who speaks French, or English, like a stream of silver--is she not,
after all, the fairest of any of them? And there is Caroline, piquant,
racy, full of conversation--sharp as a quartz crystal: how I like to
hear her talk! These people know Paris, as we say in America, "like a
book." They have studied it aesthetically, historically, socially.
They have studied French people and French literature,--and studied it
with enthusiasm, as people ever should, who would truly understand.
They are all kindness to me. Whenever I wish to see any thing, I have
only to speak; or to know, I have only to ask. At breakfast every
morning we compare notes, and make up our list of wants. My first, of
course, was the Louvre. It is close by us. Think of it. To one who has
starved all a life, in vain imaginings of what art might be, to know
that you are within a stone's throw of a museum full of its miracles,
Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian, Roman sculptors and modern painting, all
there!
I scarcely consider myself to have seen any thing of art in England.
The calls of the living world were so various and _exigeant_, I
had so little leisure for reflection, that, although I saw many
paintings, I could not study them; and many times I saw them in a
state of the nervous system too jaded and depressed to receive the
full force of the impression. A day or two before I left, I visited
the National Gallery, and made a rapid survey of its contents. There
were two of Turner's masterpieces there, which he presented on the
significant condition that they should hang side by side with their
two finest Claudes. I thought them all four fine pictures, but I liked
the Turners best. Yet I did not think any of them fine enough to form
an absolute limit to human improvement. But, till I had been in Paris
a day or two, perfectly secluded, at full liberty to think and rest, I
did not feel that my time for examining art had really come.
It was, then, with a thrill almost of awe that I approached the
Louvre. Here, perhaps, said I to myself, I shall answer, fully, the
question that has long wrought within my soul, What is art? and what
can it do? Here, perhaps, these yearnings for the ideal will meet
their satisfaction. The ascent to the picture gallery tends to produce
a flutter of excitement and expectation. Magnificent staircases, dim
perspectives of frescoes and carvings, the glorious hall of Apollo,
rooms with mosaic pavements, antique vases, countless spoils of art,
dazzle the eye of the neophyte, and prepare the mind for some grand
enchantment. Then opens on one the grand hall of paintings arranged by
schools, the works of each artist by themselves, a wilderness of
gorgeous growths.
I first walked through the whole, offering my mind up aimlessly to see
if there were any picture there great and glorious enough to seize and
control my whole being, and answer, at once, the cravings of the
poetic and artistic element. For any such I looked in vain. I saw a
thousand beauties, as also a thousand enormities, but nothing of that
overwhelming, subduing nature which I had conceived. Most of the men
there had painted with dry eyes and cool hearts, thinking only of the
mixing of their colors and the jugglery of their art, thinking little
of heroism, faith, love, or immortality. Yet when I had resigned this
longing; when I was sure I should not meet there what I sought, then I
began to enjoy very heartily what there was.
In the first place, I now saw Claudes worthy of the reputation he
bore. Three or four of these were studied with great delight; the
delight one feels, who, conscientiously bound to be delighted,
suddenly comes into a situation to be so. I saw, now, those
atmospheric traits, those reproductions of the mysteries of air, and
of light, which are called so wonderful, and for which all admire
Claude, but for which so few admire Him who made Claude, and who every
day creates around us, in the commonest scenes, effects far more
beautiful. How much, even now, my admiration of Claude was genuine, I
cannot say. How can we ever be sure on this point, when we admire what
has prestige and sanction, not to admire which is an argument against
ourselves? Certainly, however, I did feel great delight in some of
these works.
One of my favorites was Rembrandt. I always did admire the gorgeous
and solemn mysteries of his coloring. Rembrandt is like Hawthorne. He
chooses simple and everyday objects, and so arranges light and shadow
as to give them a sombre richness and a mysterious gloom. The House of
Seven Gables is a succession of Rembrandt pictures, done in words
instead of oils. Now, this pleases us, because our life really is a
haunted one; the simplest thing in it is a mystery, the invisible
world always lies round us like a shadow, and therefore this dreamy
golden gleam of Rembrandt meets somewhat in our inner consciousness to
which it corresponds. There were no pictures in the gallery which I
looked upon so long, and to which I returned so often and with such
growing pleasure, as these. I found in them, if not a commanding, a
drawing influence, a full satisfaction for one part of my nature.
There were Raphaels there, which still disappointed me, because from
Raphael I asked and expected more. I wished to feel his hand on my
soul with a stronger grasp; these were too passionless in their
serenity, and almost effeminate in their tenderness.
But Rubens, the great, joyous, full-souled, all-powerful
Rubens!--there he was, full as ever of triumphant, abounding life;
disgusting and pleasing; making me laugh and making me angry; defying
me to dislike him; dragging me at his chariot wheels; in despite of my
protests forcing me to confess that there was no other but he.
This Medici gallery is a succession of gorgeous allegoric paintings,
done at the instance of Mary of Medici, to celebrate the praise and
glory of that family. I was predetermined not to like them for two
reasons: first, that I dislike allegorical subjects; and second, that
I hate and despise that Medici family and all that belongs to them. So
no sympathy with the subjects blinded my eyes, and drew me gradually
from all else in the hall to contemplate these. It was simply the love
of power and of fertility that held me astonished, which seemed to
express with nonchalant ease what other painters attain by laborious
efforts. It occurred to me that other painters are famous for single
heads, or figures, and that were the striking heads and figures with
which these pictures abound to be parcelled out singly, any one of
them would make a man's reputation. Any animal of Rubens, alone, would
make a man's fortune in that department. His fruits and flowers are
unrivalled for richness and abundance; his old men's Leads are
wonderful; and when he chooses, which he does not often, he can even
create a pretty woman. Generally speaking his women are his worst
productions. It would seem that he had revolted with such fury from
the meagre, pale, cadaverous outlines of womankind painted by his
predecessors, the Van Eyks, whose women resembled potato sprouts grown
in a cellar, that he altogether overdid the matter in the opposite
direction. His exuberant soul abhors leanness as Nature abhors a
vacuum; and hence all his women seem bursting their bodices with
fulness, like overgrown carnations breaking out of their green
calyxes. He gives you Venuses with arms fit to wield the hammer of
Vulcan; vigorous Graces whose dominion would be alarming were they
indisposed to clemency. His weakness, in fact, his besetting sin, is
too truly described by Moses:--
"But Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked;
Thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick,
Thou art covered with fatness."
Scornfully he is determined upon it; he will none of your scruples;
his women shall be fat as he pleases, and you shall like him
nevertheless.
In this Medici gallery the fault appears less prominent than
elsewhere. Many of the faces are portraits, and there are specimens
among them of female beauty, so delicate as to demonstrate that it was
not from any want of ability to represent the softer graces that he so
often becomes hard and coarse. My friend, M. Belloc, made the remark
that the genius of Rubens was somewhat restrained in these pictures,
and chastened by the rigid rules of the French school, and hence in
them he is more generally pleasing.
I should compare Rubens to Shakspeare, for the wonderful variety and
vital force of his artistic power. I know no other mind he so nearly
resembles. Like Shakspeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a
thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords,
only to enhance the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some use
even in defects. A faultless style sends you to sleep. Defects rouse
and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellences. Some of
Shakspeare's finest passages explode all grammar and rhetoric like
skyrockets--the thought blows the language to shivers.
As to Murillo, there are two splendid specimens of his style here, as
exquisite as any I have seen; but I do not find reason to alter the
judgment I made from my first survey.
Here is his celebrated picture of the Assumption of the Virgin, which
we have seen circulated in print shops in America, but which appears
of a widely different character in the painting. The Virgin is rising
in a flood of amber light, surrounded by clouds and indistinct angel
figures. She is looking upward with clasped hands, as in an ecstasy:
the crescent moon is beneath her feet. The whole tone of the picture--
the clouds, the drapery, her flowing hair--are pervaded with this
amber tint, sublimated and spiritual. Do I, then, like it? No. Does it
affect me? Not at all. Why so? Because this is a subject requiring
earnestness; yet, after all, there is no earnestness of religious
feeling expressed. It is a _surface_ picture, exquisitely
painted--the feeling goes no deeper than the canvas. But how do I know
Murillo has no earnestness in the religious idea of this piece? How do
I know, when reading Pope's Messiah, that _he_ was not in
earnest--that he was only most exquisitely reproducing what others had
thought? Does he not assume, in the most graceful way, the language of
inspiration and holy rapture? But, through it all, we feel the
satisfied smirk of the artist, and the fine, sharp touch of his
diamond file. What is done from a genuine, strong, inward emotion,
whether in writing or painting, always mesmerizes the paper, or the
canvas, and gives it a power which every body must feel, though few
know why. The reason why the Bible has been omnipotent, in all ages,
has been because there were the emotions of GOD in it; and of
paintings nothing is more remarkable than that some preserve in them
such a degree of genuine vital force that one can never look on them
with indifference; while others, in which every condition of art seems
to be met, inspire no strong emotion.
Yet this picture is immensely popular. Hundreds stand enchanted before
it, and declare it imbodies their highest ideal of art and religion;
and I suppose it does. But so it always is. The man who has exquisite
gifts of expression passes for more, popularly, than the man with
great and grand ideas who utters but imperfectly. There are some
pictures here by Correggio--a sleeping Venus and Cupid--a marriage of
the infant Jesus and St. Catharine. This Correggio is the poet of
physical beauty. Light and shadow are his god. What he lives for is,
to catch and reproduce fitting phases of these. The moral is nothing
to him, and, in his own world, he does what he seeks. He is a great
popular favorite, since few look for more in a picture than exquisite
beauty understood between us that his sphere is to be earth, and not
heaven; were he to attempt, profanely, to represent heavenly things, I
must rebel. I should as soon want Tom Moore to write me a prayer book.
A large saloon is devoted to the masters of the French school. The
works of no living artists are admitted. There are some large
paintings by David. He is my utter aversion. I see in him nothing but
the driest imitation of the classics. It would be too much praise to
call it reproduction. David had neither heart nor soul. How could he
be and artist?--he who coolly took his portfolio to the guillotine to
take lessons on the dying agonies of its victims--how could he ever
paint any thing to touch the heart?
In general, all French artists appear to me to have been very much
injured by a wrong use of classic antiquity. Nothing could be more
glorious and beautiful than the Grecian development; nothing more
unlike it that the stale, wearisome, repetitious imitations of it in
modern times. The Greek productions themselves have a living power to
this day; but all imitations of them are cold and tiresome. These old
Greeks made such beautiful things, because they did _not_
imitate. That mysterious vitality which still imbues their remains,
and which seems to enchant even the fragments of their marbles, is the
mesmeric vitality of fresh, original conception. Art, built upon this,
is just like what the shadow of a beautiful woman is to the woman. One
gets tired in these galleries of the classic band, and the classic
headdress, and the classic attitude, and the endless repetition of the
classic urn, and vase, and lamp, as if nothing else were ever to be
made in the world except these things.
Again: in regard to this whole French gallery, there is much of a
certain quality which I find it very difficult to describe in any one
word--a dramatic smartness, a searching for striking and peculiar
effects, which render the pictures very likely to please on first
sight, and to weary on longer acquaintance. It seems to me to be the
work of a race whose senses and perceptions of the outward have been
cultivated more than the deep inward emotions. Few of the pictures
seem to have been the result of strong and profound feeling, of habits
of earnest and concentrated thought. There is an abundance of
beautiful little phases of sentiment, pointedly expressed; there is a
great deal of what one should call the picturesque of the
_morale;_ but few of its foundation ideas. I must except from
these remarks the very strong and earnest painting of the Méduse, by
Géricault, which C. has described. That seems to me to be the work of
a man who had not seen human life and suffering merely on the outside,
but had felt, in the very depths of his soul, the surging and
earthquake of those mysteries of passion and suffering which underlie
our whole existence in this world. To me it was a picture too mighty
and too painful--whose power I confessed, but which I did not like to
contemplate.
On the whole, French painting is to me an exponent of the great
difficulty and danger of French life; that passion for the outward and
visible, which all their education, all the arrangements of their
social life, every thing in their art and literature, tends
continually to cultivate and increase. Hence they have become the
leaders of the world in what I should call the minor artistics--all
those little particulars which render life beautiful. Hence there are
more pretty pictures, and popular lithographs, from France than from
any other country in the world; but it produces very little of the
deepest and highest style of art.
In this connection I may as well give you my Luxembourg experience, as
it illustrates the same idea. I like Paul de la Roche, on the whole,
although I think he has something of the fault of which I speak. He
has very great dramatic power; but it is more of the kind shown by
Walter Scott than of the kind shown by Shakspeare. He can reproduce
historical characters with great vividness and effect, and with enough
knowledge of humanity to make the verisimilitude admirably strong; but
as to the deep knowledge with which Shakspeare searches the radical
elements of the human soul, he has it not. His Death of Queen
Elizabeth is a strong Walter Scott picture; so are his Execution of
Strafford, and his Charles I., which I saw in England.
As to Horace Vernet, I do not think he is like either Scott or
Shakspeare. In him this French capability for rendering the outward is
wrought to the highest point; and it is outwardness as pure from any
touch of inspiration or sentiment as I ever remember to have seen. He
is graphic to the utmost extreme. His horses and his men stand from
the canvas to the astonishment of all beholders. All is vivacity,
bustle, dazzle, and show. I think him as perfect, of his kind, as
possible; though it is a _kind_ of art with which I do not
sympathize.
The picture of the Décadence de Rome indicates to my mind a painter
who has studied and understood the classical forms; vitalizing them,
by the reproductive force of his own mind, so as to give them the
living power of new creations. In this picture is a most grand and
melancholy moral lesson. The classical forms are evidently not
introduced because they are classic, but in subservience to the
expression of the moral. In the orgies of the sensualists here
represented he gives all the grace and beauty of sensuality without
its sensualizing effect. Nothing could be more exquisite than the
introduction of the busts of the departed heroes of the old republic,
looking down from their pedestals on the scene of debauchery below. It
is a noble picture, which I wish was hung up in the Capitol of our
nation to teach our haughty people that as pride, and fulness of
bread, and laxness of principle brought down the old republics, so
also ours may fall. Although the outward in this painting, and the
classical, is wrought to as fine a point as in any French picture, it
is so subordinate to the severity of the thought, that while it
pleases it does not distract.
But to return to the Louvre. The halls devoted to paintings, of which
I have spoken, give you very little idea of the treasures of the
institution. Gallery after gallery is filled with Greek, Roman,
Assyrian, and Egyptian sculptures, coins, vases, and antique remains
of every description. There is, also, an apartment in which I took a
deep interest, containing the original sketches of ancient masters.
Here one may see the pen and ink drawings of Claude, divided into
squares to prepare them for the copyist. One compares here with
interest the manners of the different artists in jotting down their
ideas as they rose; some by chalk, some by crayon, some by pencil,
some by water colors, and some by a heterogeneous mixture of all.
Mozart's scrap bag of musical jottings could not have been more
amusing.
On the whole, cravings of mere ideality have come nearer to meeting
satisfaction by some of these old mutilated remains of Greek sculpture
than any thing which I have met yet. In the paintings, even of the
most celebrated masters, there are often things which are excessively
annoying to me. I scarcely remember a master in whose works I have not
found a hand, or foot, or face, or feature so distorted, or coloring
at times so unnatural, or something so out of place and proportion in
the picture as very seriously to mar the pleasure that I derived from
it. In this statuary less is attempted, and all is more harmonious,
and one's ideas of proportion are never violated.
My favorite among all these remains is a mutilated statue which they
call the Venus de Milon. This is a statue which is so called from
having been dug up some years ago, piecemeal, in the Island of Milos.
There was quite a struggle for her between a French naval officer, the
English, and the Turks. The French officer carried her off like
another Helen, and she was given to Paris, old Louis Philippe being
bridegroom by proxy. _Savans_ refer the statue to the time of
Phidias; and as this is a pleasant idea to me, I go a little further,
and ascribe her to Phidias himself.
The statue is much mutilated, both arms being gone, and part of the
foot. But there is a majesty and grace in the head and face, a union
of loveliness with intellectual and moral strength, beyond any thing
which I have ever seen. To me she might represent Milton's glorious
picture of unfallen, perfect womanhood, in his Eve:--
"Yet when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems,
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded; wisdom, in discourse with her,
Loses discountenanced, and like folly shows.
Authority and reason on her wait,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally; and to consummate all,
Greatness of mind, and nobleness, their seat
Build in her, loveliest, and create an awe
About her, like a guard angelic placed."
Compared with this matchless Venus, that of Medici seems as inane and
trifling as mere physical beauty always must by the side of beauty
baptized, and made sacramental, as the symbol of that which alone is
truly fair.
With regard to the arrangements of the Louvre, they seem to me to be
admirable. No nation has so perfectly the qualifications to care for,
keep, and to show to best advantage a gallery of art as the French.
During the heat of the outburst that expelled Louis Philippe from the
throne, the Louvre was in some danger of destruction. Destructiveness
is a native element of human nature, however repressed by society; and
hence every great revolutionary movement always brings to the surface
some who are for indiscriminate demolition. Moreover there is a strong
tendency in the popular mind, where art and beauty have for many years
been monopolized as the prerogative of a haughty aristocracy, to
identify art and beauty with oppression; this showed itself in England
and Scotland in the general storm which wrecked the priceless beauty
of the ecclesiastical buildings. It was displaying itself in the same
manner in Germany during the time of the reformation, and had not
Luther been gifted with a nature as strongly aesthetic as progressive,
would have wrought equal ruin there. So in the first burst of popular
enthusiasm that expelled the monarchy, the cry was raised by some
among the people, "We shall never get rid of kings till we pull down
the palaces;" just the echo of the old cry in Scotland, "Pull down the
nests, and the rooks will fly away." The populace rushed in to the
splendid halls and saloons of the Louvre, and a general encampment was
made among the pictures. In this crisis a republican artist named
Jeanron saved the Louvre; saved the people the regret that must have
come over them had they perpetrated barbarisms, and Liberty the shame
of having such outrages wrought in her name. Appointed by the
provisional government to the oversight of the Louvre, and well known
among the people as a republican, he boldly came to the rescue. "Am I
not one of you?" he said. "Am I not one of the people? These splendid
works of art, are they not ours? Are they not the pride and glory of
our country? Shall we destroy our most glorious possession in the
first hour of its passing into our hands?"
Moved by his eloquence the people decamped from the building, and left
it in his hands. Empowered to make all such arrangements for its
renovation and embellishment as his artistic taste should desire, he
conducted important repairs in the building, rearranged the halls, had
the pictures carefully examined, cleaned when necessary, and
distributed in schools with scientific accuracy. He had an apartment
prepared where are displayed those first sketches by distinguished
masters, which form one of the most instructive departments of the
Louvre to a student of art. The government seconded all his measures
by liberal supplies of money; and the Louvre is placed in its present
perfect condition by the thoughtful and cherishing hand of the
republic.
These facts have been communicated to me from a perfectly reliable
source. As an American, and a republican, I cannot but take pleasure
in them. I mention them because it is often supposed, from the
destructive effects which attend the first advent of democratic
principles where they have to explode their way into existence through
masses of ancient rubbish, that popular liberty is unfavorable to art.
It never could be so in France, because the whole body of the people
are more thoroughly artistic in their tastes and feelings than in most
countries. They are almost slaves to the outwardly beautiful, taken
captive by the eye and the ear, and only the long association of
beauty with tyranny, with suffering, want, and degradation to
themselves, could ever have inspired any of them with even a momentary
bitterness against it.