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 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. 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 Decadence 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.
