The Altar, dedicated to twelve Deities, is in form like a Christian font. The twelve busts in alto-relievo surround it like a beautiful wreath. The workmanship is exquisite, and the preservation nearly perfect. The gods are placed in the following order: Jupiter, Minerva, Apollo, Juno, Neptune, Vulcan, Mercury, Vesta, Ceres, Diana, all separate; lastly, Mars and Venus united by Cupid. I wonder that this graceful design has never been executed on a small scale in alabaster, porcelain or glass, for ladies’ bazaars, as the well-known doves and other antique subjects are. Nothing could be better adapted for the purpose; and yet there was not even a plaster cast of it to be found at Jaquet’s (the successor to Getti, ‘mouleur du Musée;’) nor had he any of the subjects I have mentioned, merely because they are not among the most celebrated; though some that are, are certainly not of a very attractive character. Men are terribly like ‘les moutons de Panurge:’ they implicitly follow authority, and suffer that to prescribe to them what they shall like.
In the picture-galleries, the forced restitutions would be considerably less remarked, if the places were not filled by so many pictures of the modern French school, which I confess, with very few exceptions, produce somewhat the effect of caricatures upon me. The theatrical attitudes, the stage dignity, which even David’s pictures frequently exhibit, and the continual exaggeration of passion, appear like the work of learners, compared with the noble fidelity to nature of the Italian masters, and even make us regret the charming truth and reality of the German and Flemish schools. Of all these famous moderns, Girodet displeased me the most: no healthy taste can look at his Deluge without disgust. Gérard’s entry of Henry the Fourth appears to me a picture whose fame will endure. The number of Rubens’ and Lesueur’s pictures which have been brought from the Luxemburg, but ill replace the Raphaels, Leonardo da Vincis, and Vandykes, which have disappeared. In short, all that had been brought here since the Restoration, whether new or old, makes but an unfavourable impression. This is not lessened by the bad busts of painters which have been placed at regular intervals, and which, even were they better as specimens of sculpture, are wholly out of place in a collection of paintings. The magnificent long gallery affords, however, as before, the most agreeable winter walk; and the liberality which leaves it constantly accessible to strangers cannot be sufficiently praised.
When I think how still more deplorable is the state of painting in England, how little Italy and Germany now merit their former fame, I am tempted to fear that this art will share the fate of painting on glass; nay, that its most precious secrets are already irrecoverably lost. The breadth, power, truth and life of the old masters, their technical knowledge of colouring,—where are they now to be found? Thorwaldson, Rauch, Danneker, Canova, rival the antique;[164] but where is the painter who can be placed by the side of the second-rate artists of the golden age of painting?
In a side court of the Museum stands the colossal Sphinx from Drovetti’s collection, destined for the court of the Louvre. It is of pale-red granite, and the sculpture is as grand as the mass is stupendous. It is perfectly intact, except the nose; this had just been replaced by one of plaster of Paris, which had not received its last coat of colouring. The sight of it made me involuntarily laugh; and, thinking of the strange chain of events which had brought this giant hither, I internally exclaimed, “What do you here, you huge Ægyptian, after a lapse of three thousand years,—in this new Babylon, where no sphinx can keep a secret, and where silence never found a home?”
In the evening I went to the Théatre Porte St. Martin to see Faust, which was performed for the eightieth or ninetieth time. The culminating point of this melodrame is a waltz which Mephistopheles dances with Martha; and in truth it is impossible to dance more diabolically. It never fails to call forth thunders of applause,—and in one sense deserves it; for the pantomime is extremely expressive, and affects one in the same manner as jests intermingled with ghost stories. Mephistopheles, though ugly, has the air of a gentleman, which is more than can be said for our German devils.
The most remarkable part of the scenery is the Blocksberg, with all its horrors, which leave those of the Wolf’s Glen far behind. Illumined by lurid lights of all colours, gleaming from behind dark pines and clefts in the rock, it swarmed with living skeletons, glittering snakes, horrible monsters of deformity, headless or bleeding bodies, hideous witches, huge fiery giants’ eyes glaring out of bushes, toads as big as men, and many other agreeable images of the like kind. In the last act, the scene-painter had gone rather too far, having represented heaven and hell at the same time. Heaven, which of course occupied the upper part of the scene, shone with a very beautiful pale-blue radiance; but this was so unbecoming to the complexion of Gretchen’s soul, as well as to that of the angels who pirouetted round her, that they looked more like the corpses on the Blocksberg than the blessed in heaven.—The devils, who danced immediately under the wooden floor of heaven, had a much more advantageous tone of colour, which they certainly deserved for the zeal with which they tore the effigy of Faust into pieces till the curtain fell.
The theatre itself is tastefully decorated with gay paintings and gold on a ground of white satin. The many-coloured flowers, birds and butterflies, have a very lively agreeable effect. The interior of the boxes is light blue, and the lining an imitation of red velvet. Besides the annoying cry of the limonadiers, who, to a German ear, make such singular abbreviations of the words ‘orgeat, limonade, glace,’ there was a Jew who wandered about with ‘lorgnettes,’ which he let at ten sous for the evening;—a trade which I don’t remember to have observed before, and which is very convenient to the public.
This letter will probably travel to you by sledges, for we have a truly Russian climate, though unhappily no Russian stoves. Heaven send you a better temperature in B——!
Your L——