[20]. It is the same idle, inveterate self-complacency, the same limited comprehension, that has been their ruin in every thing. Parisian exquisites could not conceive that it snowed in Russia, nor how it was possible for barbarians to bivouac in the Champs Elysées. But they have forgotten the circumstance altogether. Why should I remind them of it?
[21]. French pictures, to be thoroughly and unexceptionably good, ought to be translated back again into sculpture, from which they are originally taken.
[22]. Yet they tax Shakspeare with grossness and barbarity. There is nothing like this scene in all his plays, except Titus Andronicus, which is full of the same tragic exaggeration and tautology. I was walking out (this 1st of October—a clear grey autumnal morning) in the gardens of the Tuileries, and seeing the long, tall avenue of trees before me that leads up to the barrier of Neuilly, it put me in mind of former times, of prints and pictures of the scenery and roads in foreign countries which I had been used to from a child, with the old-fashioned look of every thing around Paris, as if it were the year 1724, instead of 1824, till the view before me seemed to become part of a dream, or to transport me into past time, or to raise itself up in my imagination, like a picture in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ I wondered whether Buonaparte sometimes thought of this view when he was at St. Helena. I checked myself in this strain of speculation as overcharged and disproportioned to the occasion, according to the correct and elegant taste of the people where I was, when on a post opposite, I saw stuck up in large letters, ‘Pension de l’Univers,’ meaning a tenpenny ordinary. These are the people that are continually crying out against the extravagance and bombast of their neighbours. Their imagination runs to the ends of the universe, when it has nothing but words to carry—no people so magnificent, so prodigal of professions, so hyperbolical as they—add but meaning or a weight of feeling to them, and they complain bitterly of the load, and throw it off as barbarous, intolerable, Gothic, and uncouth. It is not the extravagance of the style, then, with which they quarrel, but the palpableness of the imagery which gives a blow to their slender intellectual stamina, or the accumulation of feeling about it with which they have not firmness or comprehension to grapple. ‘Dip it in the ocean, and it will stand’—says Sterne’s barber of the buckle of his wig. They magnify trifles, con amore; it is only when a poor struggling attempt is to be made to gain relief from the ‘perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart,’ or to embody the swelling conceptions of the soul in remote and lofty images, that they shrink back with the timidity of women and the formality of pedants.
[23]. The Orpheus and Eurydice of Drölling is a performance of great merit. The females, floating in the air before Orpheus, are pale as lilies, and beautiful in death. But he need hardly despair, or run wild as he does. He may easily overtake them; and as to vanishing, they have no appearance of it. Their figures are quite solid and determined in their outline.
[24]. See the admirably-drawn, but painful scene in Evelina between Captain Mervin and Monsieur Dubois.
[25]. A French dwarf, exhibited in London some years ago, and who had the misfortune to be born a mere trunk, grew enraged at the mention of another dwarf as a rival in bodily imperfection, and after insisting that the other had both hands and feet, exclaimed emphatically, ‘Mais moi, je suis unique.’ My old acquaintance (Dr. Stoddart) used formerly to recount this trait of French character very triumphantly, but then it was in war-time. He may think it indecent to have here hinted any such thing of an individual of a nation with whom we are at peace. At present, he seems to have become a sort of portent and by-word himself among English politicians; and without head or heart may exclaim—‘Mais moi, je suis unique!‘—See his late articles on the Spanish Refugees, &c. Would such a man have been any better, had he never turned renegade, or had he become (his first ambition) a revolutionary leader? Would he not have been as blood-thirsty, as bigoted, as perverse and ridiculous on the side of the question he left, as on the one he has come over to? It imports little what men are, so long as they are themselves. The great misfortune of a certain class of persons (both for their own sake and that of others) is ever to have been born or heard of!
[26]. I remember being once much amused with meeting, in a hot dusty day, between Blenheim and Oxford, some strolling Italians with a troop of dancing dogs, and a monkey in costume mounted on the back of one of them. He rode en cavalier, and kept his countenance with great gravity and decorum, and turned round with a certain look of surprise and resentment, that I, a foot-passenger, should seem to question his right to go on horseback. This seemed to me a fine piece of practical satire in the manner of Swift.
[27]. Mr. Wordsworth, in some fine lines, reproaches the French with having ‘no single volume paramount, no master-spirit’—
‘But equally a want of books and men.’
I wish he would shew any single author that exercises such a ‘paramount’ influence over the minds of the English, as four or five ‘master-spirits’ do on those of the French. The merit is not here the question, but the effect produced. He himself is not a very striking example of the sanguine enthusiasm with which his countrymen identify themselves with works of great and original genius!