The Idler in France

by Countess of Marguerite Blessington

Spent several hours yesterday in the gallery of the Louvre. The collection of antiquities, though a very rich, one, dwindles into insignificance when compared with that of the Vatican, and the halls in which it is arranged appear mean in the eyes of those accustomed to see the numerous and splendid ones of the Roman edifice. Nevertheless, I felt much satisfaction in lounging through groups of statues, and busts of the remarkable men and women of antiquity, with the countenances of many of whom I had made myself familiar in the Vatican, the Musée of the Capitol, or in the collection at Naples, where facsimiles of several of them are to be found.

Nor had I less pleasure in contemplating the personifications of the beau idéal of the ancient sculptors, exhibited in their gods and goddesses, in whose faultless faces the expression of all passion seems to have been carefully avoided. Whether this peculiarity is to be accounted for by the desire of the artist to signify the superiority of the Pagan divinities over mortals, by this absence of any trace of earthly feelings, or whether it was thought that any decided expression might deteriorate from the character of repose and beauty that marks the works of the great sculptors of antiquity, I know not, but the effect produced on my mind by the contemplation of these calm and beautiful faces, has something so soothing in it, that I can well imagine with what pleasure those engaged in the turmoils of war, or the scarcely less exciting arena of politics, in former ages, must have turned from their mundane cares to look on these personations of their fabled deities, whose tranquil beauty forms so soothing a contrast to mortal toils.

I have observed this calmness of expression in the faces of many of the most celebrated statues of antiquity, in the Aristides at Naples, I remember being struck with it, and noticing that he who was banished through the envy excited by his being styled the Just, was represented as unmoved as if the injustice of his countrymen no more affected the even tenour of his mind, than the passions of mortals disturb those of the mythological divinities of the ancients.

A long residence in Italy, and a habit of frequenting the galleries containing the finest works of art there, engender a love of sculpture and painting, that renders it not only a luxury but almost a necessary of life to pass some hours occasionally among the all but breathing marbles and glorious pictures bequeathed to posterity by the mighty artists of old. I love to pass such hours alone, or in the society of some one as partial, but more skilled in such studies than myself; and such a companion I have found in the Baron de Cailleux, an old acquaintance, and now Under-Director of the Musée, whose knowledge of the fine arts equals his love for them.

The contemplation of the chefs-d'uvre of the old masters begets a tender melancholy in the mind, that is not without a charm for those addicted to it. These stand the results of long lives devoted to the developement of the genius that embodied these inspirations, and left to the world the fruit of hours of toil and seclusion,—hours snatched from the tempting pleasures that cease not to court the senses, but which they who laboured for posterity resisted. The long vigils, the solitary days, the hopes and fears, the fears more frequent than the hopes, the depression of spirits, and the injustice or the indifference of contemporaries, endured by all who have ever devoted their lives to art, are present to my mind when I behold the great works of other times.

What cheered these men of genius during their toils and enabled them to finish their glorious works? Was it not the hope that from posterity they would meet with the admiration, the sympathy, denied them by their contemporaries?—as the prisoner in his gloomy dungeon, refused all pity, seeks consolation by tracing a few lines on its dreary walls, in appeal to the sympathy of some future inhabitant who may be doomed to take his place.

I seem to be paying a portion of the debt due by posterity to those who laboured long and painfully for it, when I stand rapt in admiration before the works of the great masters of the olden time, my heart touched with a lively sympathy for their destinies; nor can I look on the glorious faces or glowing landscapes that remain to us, evincing the triumph of genius over even time itself, by preserving on canvass the semblance of all that charmed in nature, without experiencing the sentiment so naturally and beautifully expressed in the celebrated picture, by Nicolas Poussin, of a touching scene in Arcadia, in which is a tomb near to which two shepherds are reading the inscription. "I, too, was an Arcadian."

Yes, that which delighted the artists of old, they have transmitted to us with a tender confidence that when contemplating these bequests we would remember with sympathy that they, like us, had felt the charms they delineated.

CHAPTER XIII.

Went to see the Hôtel d'Orsay, to-day. Even in its ruin it still retains many of the vestiges of its former splendour. The salle à manger, for the decoration of which its owner bought, and had conveyed from Rome, the columns of the Temple of Nero, is now—hear it, ye who have taste!—converted into a stable; the salons, once filled with the most precious works of art, are now crumbled to decay, and the vast garden where bloomed the rarest exotics, and in which were several of the statues that are now in the gardens of the Tuileries, is now turned into paddocks for horses.