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 Meduse, by
Gericault, 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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 178 of 455
Words from 47353 to 47606
of 120793
