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.
