OUR TOURIST IN PARIS.—No. 6.
No Englishman can visit the Picture Galleries at the Louvre without thinking of a building in London devoted to the same purpose, which is neither very beautiful nor very convenient; and it is rather tempting to enlarge on the despicable show the Trafalgar Square collection makes beside the principal Continental ones. The equitable temper, however, of your Correspondent leads him to suggest some reflections which will mitigate that censure. The National Gallery was not built by the luxurious sovereign of an impoverished people, or it might have been larger and more splendid. No curse cleaves to its stones. The pictures are not the fruit of rapine and confiscation, or the collection might have been more extensive and valuable. As it is, it contains less rubbish and more priceless gems than any gallery of its size in the world; and no pillaged aristocracy, no humbled province, claims a canvas there. Such considerations consoled him as he paced up the gilded saloon of Apollo to the square chamber which holds the masterpieces of the collection. Raphael, Paul Veronese, Leonardo, and Titian appear in all their glory; but the star of the room and cynosure of neighbouring eyes, is Madame Soult's Murillo—the Assumption of Mary. A crowd of devout admirers cluster always round this great work and the artist who is employed in copying it. It has the effect of a tender strain from one of Mozart's masses, sweet and sensous, yet not low. Ladies cannot but be charmed to see that a saint can be so pretty, and turn with a shudder from dirty anchorites and unshaven martyrs to gaze again and again at those lovely eyes, and silky hair, and those elegant hands crossed so gracefully on her bosom.
Certainly nothing can be more delightful than to sit on the central ottoman (which by the way is a great deal more comfortable than those backless rout seats that we wot of), and, shifting one's position from time to time, study the various marvels of art that clothe the walls of this saloon. Your Correspondent, like every English gentleman, knows (or wishes to be thought to know) something about pictures, but he is not minded to gratify you with the slang that is usually thought necessary for the proper treatment of this subject. Wherefore he will make no allusions to breadth, or chiaro-scuro, or texture, or bits of colour. Paul Veronese's Marriage at Cana is before him, fresh and varied as a bouquet of flowers, and he wishes to enjoy it as he would digest his dinner, without giving technical reasons for the process. He turns to a group of Raphael's (I beg pardon, Rafaelle's), and would not for the world spoil the pleasure they give him by speculating on the Roman School and the artist's three manners, and the influence of Pietro Perugino or Michael Angelo on his style, and so forth. These fine art critics are a cold-blooded set of fellows, and look at a picture as an attorney does at a lease, to see if they cannot pick a hole in it.
All this time the eyes of the enthusiast have been wandering to a corner of the chamber where an artist is copying a small Rembrandt. It is not the Rembrandt he is regarding, but the artist. How excessively nice! The most charming young lady perched on a pair of steps, like a dear little bird in a tree. She bends over her work and draws her head back, and scans the effect on one side and the other with, really, the most irritating picturesqueness. She wears a blue robe just the colour of her eyes, with a little ermine tippet, and when an ancient dragon, who is reading a novel at the foot of the steps, in a cloak and ugly bonnet, speaks to her, she laughs and shakes her blond chevelure, and is so delightful altogether, that it is quite impossible to attend to the pictures. Let us go into the long gallery where the students are not so fascinating. Dirty, long-haired, and bearded men in blouses, and females in seedy crumpled black, look up as we pass by from their easels.
An English family runs past with the blue catalogues in their hands. A precious bore the whole affair is to them. They must be quick, there is no time to lose. "What a lot of pictures! Isn't that a funny man with a beard? How slippery the floor is! Rubens, ah, really. Come, girls, we must get back to Mewreise's to lunch. There's the Bose Arts, and the Museum of Artillery, and the Bois de Bullown"—"You should say Bulloyne, Pa"—"to be done before dinner."
A long vista of pictures ordered, as all galleries should be, chronologically. As you enter, mystical compositions, or rather apparitions of draped angels and saints gaze at you with sleepy eyes from firmaments of gold. Their limbs are long and gaunt; their looks grimly devout, and their heads are set awry on their shoulders. Is it credible that there should be educated men in the present day who yearn after these barbarisms, and have no sympathy with the struggles made by subsequent artists to get free from their influence? And that clergymen should put up copies of the same in our churches, and almost anathematise as heathens those who prefer better drawing? This period is the very winter of art, and the next is the spring, all life and freshness and beauty. We cannot but here remember the young painters in England who have borrowed a name, if not a principle, from the times before Raphael. Already their works have become the great point of attraction in the Royal Academy; already they have reaped the success of enthusiastic praise, and the still rarer and more precious success of rancorous abuse. What does our friend Ortolan say on this subject?
Ortolan has a lively sense of every sort of pleasure. He orders a dinner better than another man, and enjoys it more; he is a good sportsman, and well known as a first-rate wicket-keeper at Lord's. But only his intimate friends are aware how he appreciates literature and art, and how solid his acquirements are in both. He is now quietly analysing the method employed by Titian in painting flesh when he is accosted by your Correspondent. "What do I think of Pre-Raphaelitism? I don't know what it means. Where are you to find out? There was a pamphlet certainly with that title which strongly recommended painting from Nature, but there is nothing very new in that. All artists paint from Nature, and very sick it makes one of the wonderful wigs, and satin, and armour, and plate-glass and china, and fruit and flowers and shiny dogs and deer. I don't speak of landscape painters, because the writer of that pamphlet has already proved that the moderns in this line are very superior, because better imitators than the old. One notion of his may perhaps pretend to novelty, that a painter should 'select nothing and reject nothing' in Nature. But I don't understand what he means by this. How can you avoid selecting and rejecting? I suppose some things are prettier than others, just as some women are prettier than others. He can hardly want a man to shut his eyes to what gives him pleasure. If he does he is wrong, and must know that he's wrong. If not, he must mean that when you are set down to paint the subject you have selected, you ought to paint it as it is. If that is all his discovery, what is the use of making such a fuss about it? Of course you ought, and so every industrious student does, to the best of his ability. But you must distinguish between studies and pictures. The first are merely exercises; the second are, or should be, poems. No one was more aware of this than the landscape painter whom he worships so devoutly, and who is generally thought to have pushed poetical treatment of landscapes to an extreme.
"But, perhaps, this writer does not tell us what we want to know, and we must look for Pre-Raphaelitism in the pictures themselves. Most of them are clever, and some of them show the very highest ability; but this, of course, is not the Pre-Raphaelite part of the work, and must be put out of sight. No new principle can produce genius, though genius may find out the new principles. What then remains? Is there a quaintness of form and manner which reminds one of the early Italian painters? I think there was a good deal, and still is some, but they happily seem to be working themselves free from a peculiarity which, to my mind, is neither more nor less than affectation. Is it an extraordinary fancy for ugly people that seems occasionally to possess them like an evil spirit? If this is the new principle, the sooner it is put down the better. There are quite enough frights in the world without stereotyping them for the delectation of all time. Or is it a toilsome elaboration of detail, which not one man out of a thousand could ever see without a glass? I confess, that even where the minute objects themselves form the subject of the picture, this painful execution is quite oppressive to me. I seem to be looking through an inverted telescope, which gives everything a hard outline that I never see in Nature myself, and never want to see; and further, while there is an atmosphere, I don't believe anybody else can see. But where this minute detail is merely accessory to the subject of the picture, there I hold the system to be wrong and false in the strongest sense. It is, of course, very catching to talk about imitating Nature exactly, but one simple test will show that for dramatic or poetical subjects it won't do. Dress up two models as carefully as you like, put them into appropriate attitudes, take a calotype of the group, copy it exactly on the canvas, call it Hamlet and the Ghost, and then ask yourself what notion it gives you of Shakspere. Imitation of Nature is only an expedient. The end of Art is to please."