French.—I have seen those masters, but there is an objection to passing into that part of the Louvre.
English.—The air is, I own, different.
CHAPTER VII
THE LUXEMBOURG GALLERY
Racine’s poetry, and Shakspeare’s, however wide apart, do not absolutely prove that the French and English are a distinct race of beings, who can never properly understand one another. But the Luxembourg Gallery, I think, settles this point forever—not in our favour, for we have nothing (thank God) to oppose to it, but decidedly against them, as a people incapable of any thing but the little, the affected, and extravagant in works of imagination and the Fine Arts. Poetry is but the language of feeling, and we may convey the same meaning in a different form of words. But in the language of painting, words become things; and we cannot be mistaken in the character of a nation, that, in thus expressing themselves, uniformly leave out certain elements of feeling, and greedily and ostentatiously insert others that they should not. The English have properly no school of art, (though they have one painter at least equal to Molière,)—we have here either done nothing worth speaking of, compared with our progress in other things, or our faults are those of negligence and rusticity. But the French have done their utmost to attain perfection, and they boast of having attained it. What they have done is, therefore, a fair specimen of what they can do. Their works contain undoubted proofs of labour, learning, power; yet they are only the worse for all these, since, without a thorough knowledge of the scientific and mechanical part of their profession, as well as profound study, they never could have immortalized their want of taste and genius in the manner they have done. Their pictures at the Luxembourg are ‘those faultless monsters which the art ne’er saw’ till now—the ‘hand-writing on the wall,’ which nothing can reverse. It has been said, that ‘Vice to be hated needs but to be seen,’ and the same rule holds good in natural as in moral deformity. It is a pity that some kind hand does not take an opportunity of giving to ashes this monument of their glory and their shame, but that it is important to preserve the proofs of such an anomaly in the history of the human mind as a generation of artists painting in this manner, and looking down upon the rest of the world as not even able to appreciate their paramount superiority in refinement and elegance. It is true, strangers know not what to make of them. The ignorant look at them with wonder—the more judicious, with pain and astonishment at the perversion of talents and industry. Still, they themselves go on, quoting one another’s works, and parcelling out the excellences of the several pictures under different heads—pour les coloris, pour le dessein, pour la composition, pour l’expression, as if all the world were of accord on this subject, and Raphael had never been heard of. It is enough to stagger a nation, as well as an individual, in their admiration of their own accomplishments, when they find they have it all to themselves; but the French are blind, insensible, incorrigible to the least hint of any thing like imperfection or absurdity. It is this want of self-knowledge, and incapacity to conceive of any thing beyond a certain conventional circle, that is the original sin—the incurable error of all their works of imagination. If Nature were a French courtezan or Opera-dancer, their poetry and painting would be the finest in the world.[[20]]
The fault, then, that I should find with this Collection of Pictures is, that it is equally defective in the imitation of nature, which belongs to painting in general; or in giving the soul of nature-expression, which belongs more particularly to history-painting. Their style of art is false from beginning to end, nor is it redeemed even by the vices of genius, originality, and splendour of appearance. It is at once tame and extravagant, laboured and without effect, repulsive to the senses and cold to the heart. Nor can it well be otherwise. It sets out on a wrong principle, and the farther it goes, nay, the more completely it succeeds in what it undertakes, the more inanimate, abortive, and unsatisfactory must be the performance. French painting, in a word, is not to be considered as an independent art, or original language, coming immediately from nature, and appealing to it—it is a bad translation of sculpture into a language essentially incompatible with it. The French artists take plaster-casts from the antique, and colour them by a receipt; they take plaster-casts and put them into action, and give expression to the features according to the traditional rules for composition and expression. This is the invariable process: we see the infallible results, which differ only according to the patience, the boldness, and ingenuity of the painter in departing from nature, and caricaturing his subject.
For instance, let us take the Endymion of Girodet, No 57. It is a well-drawn, though somewhat effeminate Academy-figure. All the rest is what I have said. It is a waste of labour, an abuse of power. There is no repose in the attitude; but the body, instead of being dissolved in an immortal sleep, seems half lifted up, so as to produce a balance of form, and to make a display of the symmetry of the proportions. Vanity here presides even over sleep. The head is turned on one side as if it had not belonged to the body (which it probably did not) and discovers a meagre, insignificant profile, hard and pinched up, without any of the genial glow of youth, or the calm, delighted expansion of the heavenly dream that hovered so long over it. The sharp edges of the features, like rims of tin, catch the moonlight, but do not reflect the benign aspect of the Goddess! There is no feeling (not a particle) of the poetry of the subject. Then the colouring is not natural, is not beautiful, is not delicate, but that of a livid body, glittering in the moon-beams, or with a cloud of steel-filings, glimmering round it for a veil of light. It is not left as dead-colouring in an evidently unfinished state, or so as to make a blank for the imagination to fill up (as we see in Fuseli’s pictures); but every part is worked up with malicious industry, not to represent flesh, but to be as like marble or polished steel as possible. There is no variety of tint, no reflected light, no massing, but merely the difference that is produced in a smooth and uniformly coloured surface, by the alterations proper to sculpture, which are given with a painful and oppressive sense of effort and of difficulty overcome.
This is not a natural style. It is foppish and mechanical; or just what might be expected from taking a piece of stone and attempting to colour it, not from nature, not from imagination or feeling, but from a mere wilful determination to supply the impressions of one sense from those of another, by dint of perseverance and a growing conceit of one’s-self. There is, indeed, a progress to perfection; for by the time the work is finished, it is a finished piece of arrogance and folly. If you are copying a yellow colour, and you resolve to make it blue, the more blue you make it, the more perfectly you succeed in your purpose; but it is the less like yellow. So the more perfectly French a work of art is, the less it is like nature! The French artists have imitated the presumption of the tyrant Mezentius, who wished to link dead bodies to living ones.—Again, in the same artist’s picture of Atala at the Tomb (which I think his best, and which would make a fine bas-relief[[21]]) the outline of the countenance of Atala is really noble, with a beautiful expression of calm resignation; and the only fault to be found with it is, that, supported as the head is in the arms of the Priest, it has too much the look of a bust after the antique, that we see carried about the streets by the Italian plaster-cast-makers. Otherwise, it is a classical and felicitous stroke of French genius. They do well to paint Sleep, Death, Night, or to approach as near as they can to the verge of still-life, and leaden-eyed obscurity! But what, I believe, is regarded as the master-piece of this artist, and what I have no objection to consider as the triumph of French sublimity and pathos, is his picture of the Deluge, No. 55. The national talent has here broken loose from the trammels of refinement and pedantry, and soars unconstrained to its native regions of extravagance and bombast. The English are willing to abide by this as a test. If there be in the whole of this gigantic picture of a gigantic subject any thing but distortion, meanness, extreme absurdity and brute force, we are altogether mistaken in our notions of the matter. Was it not enough to place that huge, unsightly skeleton of old age upon the shoulders of the son, who is climbing a tottering, overhanging precipice, but the farce of imposture and improbability must be systematically kept up by having the wife clinging to him in all the agony of the most preposterous theatrical affectation, and then the two children dangling to her like the fag-end of horror, and completing the chain of disgusting, because impracticable and monstrous distress? Quod sic mihi ostendis, incredulus odi. The principle of gravitation must be at an end, to make this picture endurable for a moment. All the effect depends on the fear of falling, and yet the figures could not remain suspended where they are for a single instant (but must be flung ‘with hideous ruin and combustion down,’) if they were any thing else but grisly phantoms. The terror is at once physical and preternatural. Instead of death-like stillness or desperate fortitude, preparing for inevitable fate, or hurrying from it with panic-fear at some uncertain opening, they have set themselves in a picturesque situation, to meet it under every disadvantage, playing off their antics like a family of tumblers at a fair, and exhibiting the horrid grimaces, the vulgar rage, cowardice, and impatience of the most wretched actors on a stage. The painter has, no doubt, ‘accumulated horror on horror’s head,’ in straining the credulity or harrowing up the feelings of the spectator to the utmost, and proving his want of conception no less by the exaggeration, than his want of invention by the monotony of his design. Real strength knows where to stop, because it is founded on truth and nature; but extravagance and affectation have no bounds. They rush into the vacuum of thought and feeling, and commit every sort of outrage and excess.[[22]] Neither in the landscape is there a more historic conception than in the actors on the scene. There is none of the keeping or unity that so remarkably characterizes Poussin’s fine picture of the same subject, nor the sense of sullen, gradually coming fate. The waters do not rise slowly and heavily to the tops of the highest peaks, but dash tumultuously and violently down rocks and precipices. This is not the truth of the history, but it accords with the genius of the composition. I should think the painter might have received some hints from M. Chateaubriand for the conduct of it. It is in his frothy, fantastic, rhodomontade way—‘It out-herods Herod!’
David’s pictures, after this, are tame and trite in the comparison; they are not romantic or revolutionary, but they are completely French; they are in a little, finical manner, without beauty, grandeur, or effect. He has precision of outline and accuracy of costume; but how small a part is this of high history! In a scene like that of the Oath of the Horatii, or the Pass of Thermopylæ, who would think of remarking the turn of an ancle, or the disposition of a piece of drapery, or the ornaments of a shield? Yet one is quite at leisure to do this in looking at the pictures, without having one’s thoughts called off by other and nobler interests. The attempts at expression are meagre and constrained, and the attitudes affected and theatrical. There is, however, a unity of design and an interlacing of shields and limbs, which seems to express one soul in the Horatii, to which considerable praise would be due, if they had more the look of heroes, and less that of petit-maitres. I do not wonder David does not like Rubens, for he has none of the Fleming’s bold, sweeping outline. He finishes the details very prettily and skilfully, but has no idea of giving magnitude or motion to the whole. His stern Romans and fierce Sabines look like young gentlemen brought up at a dancing or fencing school, and taking lessons in these several elegant exercises. What a fellow has he made of Romulus, standing in the act to strike with all the air of a modern dandy! The women are in attitudes, and contribute to the eloquence of the scene. Here is a wife, (as we learn from the Catalogue) there a sister, here a mistress, there a grandmother with three infants. Thus are the episodes made out by a genealogical table of the relations of human life! Such is the nature of French genius and invention, that they can never get out of leading-strings! The figure of Brutus, in the picture of that subject, has a fine, manly, unaffected character. It has shrunk on one side to brood over its act, without any strut or philosophic ostentation, which was much to be dreaded. He is wrapt in gloomy thought, as in a mantle. Mr. Kean might have sat for this figure, for, in truth, it is every way like him. The group of women on the opposite side of the canvass, making a contrast by their lively colours and flimsy expression of grief, might have been spared. These pictures have, as we were told, been objected to for their too great display of the naked figure, in some instances bordering on indecency. The indecency (if so it is) is not in the nakedness of the figures, but in the barrenness of the artist’s resources to clothe them with other attributes, and with genius as with a garment. If their souls had been laid bare as well as their limbs, their spirits would have shone through and concealed any outward deformity. Nobody complains of Michael Angelo’s figures as wanting severity and decorum.
Guerin’s Phædra and Hippolitus I have already treated of, and I see no reason to alter my opinion. It was just painted when I last saw it, and has lost some of its freshness and the gloss of novelty. Modern pictures have the art of very soon becoming old. What remains of it has the merit of very clever studies after the antique, arranged into a subject. The rest is not worth speaking of. A set of school-boys might as well come with their portfolios and chalk-drawings under their arms, and set up for a school of Fine Art. A great nation ought to know better, and either strike out something original for others to imitate, or acknowledge that they have done nothing worthy of themselves. To arch an eye-brow, or to point a finger, is not to paint history. The study of nature can alone form the genuine artist. Any thing but this can only produce counterfeits. The tones and colours that feed the eye with beauty, the effects of light and shade, the soul speaking in the eyes or gasping on the lips, the groups that varying passion blends, these are the means by which nature reveals herself to the inspired gaze of genius, and that, treasured up and stamped by labour and study on the canvass, are the indispensable materials of historical composition. To take plaster-casts and add colour to them by an act of the will; or to take the same brittle, inanimate, inflexible models, and put life and motion into them by mechanical and learned rules, is more than Prometheus or Iris could pretend to do. It is too much for French genius to achieve. To put a statue into motion, or to give appropriate, natural, and powerful expression to set features of any kind, is at all times difficult; but, in the present instance, the difficulty is enhanced, till it amounts to a sort of contradiction in terms; for it is proposed to engraft French character and expression (the only ones with which the artists are acquainted, or to which they can have access as living studies) on Greek forms and features. Two things more abhorrent in nature exist not. One of two consequences necessarily happens: either the original model is given literally and entire, without any attempt to disguise the awkward plagiarism, and inform it with a new character; or if the artist, disdaining such servile trammels, strives to infuse his own conceptions of grace and grandeur into it, then the hero or God of antiquity comes down from his pedestal to strut a French dancing-master or tragedian. For simplicity and unexampled grace, we have impertinence and affectation; for stoic gravity and majestic suffering, we have impatience, rage, womanish hysterics, and the utmost violence of frenzied distortion. French art (like all other national art) is either nothing, or a transcript of the national character. In the Æneas and Dido, of the same artist, the drawing, the costume, the ornaments, are correct and classical; the toilette of the picture is well made; the Æneas is not much more insipid than the hero of Virgil, and there is an exceedingly pretty girl, (like a common French peasant girl,) a supposed attendant on the Queen. The only part of the picture in which he has attempted an extraordinary effect, and in which he has totally failed, is in the expression of enamoured attention on the part of the Queen. Her eyes do not, ‘like stars, shoot madly from their spheres,’ but they seem to have no sort of business in her head, and make the doucereuse in a most edifying manner. You are attracted to the face at a distance by the beauty of the outline (which is Greek) and instantly repelled by the grossness of the filling up of the expression (which is French). The Clytemnestra is, I think, his chef d’œuvre. She is a noble figure, beautiful in person, and deadly of purpose; and there is that kind of breathless suppression of feeling, and noiseless moving on to her end, which the rigid style of French art is not ill-adapted to convey. But there is a strange tone of colouring thrown over the picture, which gives it the appearance of figures done in stained porcelain, or of an optical deception. There is nothing to remind you that the actors of the scene are of flesh and blood. They may be of steel or bronze, or glazed earthenware, or any other smooth, unfeeling substance. This hard, liny, metallic, tangible character is one of the great discriminating features of French painting, which arises partly from their habitual mode of study, partly from the want of an eye for nature, but chiefly, I think, from their craving after precise and definite ideas, in which, if there is the least flaw or inflection, their formal apprehension loses sight of them altogether, and cannot recover the clue. This incrusted, impenetrable, stifling appearance is not only unpleasant to the eye, but repels sympathy, and renders their pictures (what they have been asserted to be) negations equally of the essential qualities both of painting and sculpture.