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"Wandering, poor, banished, proscribed, persecuted;
And even by his death their ill-extinguished rage
Had never left his ashes in repose,
If God himself here by his holy flock
From these devouring wolves had not concealed his bones."[133]
These are, I think, poets sufficiently great, and we have more of them still: I mean those charming or sublime minds who have elevated prose to poetry. Greece alone, in her most beautiful days, offers, perhaps, such a variety of admirable prose writers. Who can enumerate them? At first, Rabelais and Montaigne; later, Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche; La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère; Retz and Saint-Simon; Bourdaloue, Fléchier, Fénelon, and Bossuet; add to these so many eminent women, at their head Madame de Sévigné; while Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Buffon are still to come.[134]
By what strange diversity could a country, in which the mental arts were carried to such perfection, remain ordinary in the other arts? Was the sentiment of the beautiful wanting, then, to that society so polished, to that magnificent court, to those great lords and those great ladies passionately loving luxury and elegance, to that public of the élite, enamored of every kind of glory, whose enthusiasm defended the Cid against Richelieu? No; France in the seventeenth century was a whole, and produced artists that she can place by the side of her poets, her philosophers, her orators.
But, in order to admire our artists, it is necessary to comprehend them.
We do not believe that imagination has been less freely imparted to France than to any other nation of Europe. It has even had its reign among us. It is fancy that rules in the sixteenth century, and inspires the literature and the arts of the Renaissance. But a great revolution intervened at the commencement of the seventeenth century. France at that moment seems to pass from youth to virility. Instead of abandoning imagination to itself, we apply ourselves from that moment to restrain it without destroying it, to moderate it, as the Greeks did by the aid of taste; as in the progress of life and society we learn to repress or conceal what is too individual in character. An end is made of the literature of the preceding age. A new poetry, a new prose, begin to appear, which, during an entire century, bear fruits sufficiently beautiful. Art follows the general movement; after having been elegant and graceful, it becomes in its turn serious; it no longer aims at originality and extraordinary effects; it neither flashes nor dazzles; it speaks, above all, to the mind and the soul. Hence its good qualities and also its defects. In general, it is somewhat wanting in brilliancy and coloring, but it is in the highest degree expressive.
Some time since we have changed all that. We have discovered, somewhat late, that we have not sufficient imagination; we are in training to acquire it, it is true, at the expense of reason, alas! also at the expense of soul, which is forgotten, repudiated, proscribed. At this moment, color and form are the order of the day, in poetry, in painting, in every thing. We are beginning to run mad with Spanish painting. The Flemish and Venetian schools are gaining ground on the schools of Florence and Rome. Rossini equals Mozart, and Gluck will soon seem to us insipid.
Young artists, who, rightly disgusted with the dry and inanimate manner of David, undertake to renovate French painting, who would rob the sun of its heat and splendor, remember that of all beings in the world, the greatest is still man, and that what is greatest in man is his intelligence, and above all, his heart; that it is this heart, then, which you must put and develop on your canvas. This is the most elevated object of art. In order to reach it, do not make yourselves disciples of Flemings, Venetians, and Spaniards; return, return to the masters of our great national school of the seventeenth century.
We bow with respectful admiration before the schools of Rome and Florence, at once ideal and living; but, those excepted, we maintain that the French school equals or surpasses all others. We prefer neither Murillo, Rubens, Corregio, nor Titian himself to Lesueur and Poussin, because, if the former have an incomparable hand and color, our two countrymen are much greater in thought and expression.
What a destiny was that of Eustache Lesueur![135] He was born at Paris about 1617, and he never went out of it. Poor and humble, he passed his life in the churches and convents where he worked. The only sweetness of his sad days, his only consolation was his wife: he loses her, and goes to die, at thirty-eight, in that cloister of Chartreux, which his pencil has immortalized. What resemblance at once, and what difference between his life and that of Raphael, who also died young, but in the midst of pleasures, in honors, and already almost in purple! Our Raphael was not the lover of Fornarina and the favorite of a pope: he was Christian; he is Christianity in art.