Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 13

"At the feet of this altar of structure gross, Lies without pomp, inclosed in a coffin vile, The most learned mortal that ever wrote; Arnaud, who in grace instructed by Jesus Christ, Combating for the Church, has, in the Church itself, Suffered more than one outrage and more than one anathema," etc.

"Wandering, poor, banished, proscribed, persecuted; And even by his death their ill-extinguished rage Had never left his ashes in repose, If G.o.d 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 Bruyere; Retz and Saint-Simon; Bourdaloue, Flechier, Fenelon, and Bossuet; add to these so many eminent women, at their head Madame de Sevigne; 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 pa.s.sionately loving luxury and elegance, to that public of the _elite_, 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 pa.s.s 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 surpa.s.ses all others. We prefer neither Murillo, Rubens, Corregio, nor t.i.tian 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 pa.s.sed 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.

Lesueur is a genius wholly French. Scarcely having escaped from the hands of Simon Vouet, he formed himself according to the model which he had in the soul. He never saw the sky of Italy. He knew some fragments of the antique, some pictures of Raphael, and the designs that Poussin sent him. With these feeble resources, and guided by a happy instinct, in less than ten years he mounted by a continual progress to the perfection of his talent, and expired at the moment when, finally sure of himself, he was about to produce new and more admirable master-pieces. Follow him from the _St. Bruno_ completed in 1648, through the _St. Paul_ of 1649, to the _Vision of St. Benedict_ in 1651, and to the _Muses_, scarcely finished before his death. Lesueur went on adding to his essential qualities which he owed to his own genius, and to the national genius, I mean composition and expression, qualities which he had dreamed of, or had caught glimpses of. His design from day to day became more pure, without ever being that of the Florentine school, and the same is true of his coloring.

In Lesueur every thing is directed towards expression, every thing is in the service of the mind, every thing is idea and sentiment. There is no affectation, no mannerism; there is a perfect _navete_; his figures sometimes would seem even a little common, so natural are they, if a Divine breath did not animate them. It must not be forgotten that his favorite subjects do not exact a brilliant coloring: he oftenest retraces scenes mournful or austere. But as in Christianity by the side of suffering and resignation is faith with hope, so Lesueur joins to the pathetic sweetness and grace; and this man charms me at the same time that he moves me.

The works of Lesueur are almost always great wholes that demanded profound meditation, and the most flexible talent, in order to preserve in them unity of subject, and to give them variety and harmony. The _History of St. Bruno_, the founder of the order _des Chartreux_, is a vast melancholy poem, in which are represented the different scenes of monastic life. The _History of St. Martin and St. Benedict_ has not come down to us entire; but the two fragments of it that we possess, the _Ma.s.s of St. Martin_, and the _Vision of St. Benedict_, allow us to compare that great work with every better thing of the kind that has been done in Italy, as, to speak sincerely, the _Muses_ and the _History of Love_, appear to us to equal at least the Farnesina.

In the _History of St. Bruno_, it is particularly necessary to remark St. Bruno, prostrated before a crucifix, the saint reading a letter of the pope, his death, his apotheosis. Is it possible to carry meditation, humiliation, rapture farther? _St. Paul preaching at Ephesus_ reminds one of the _School of Athens_, by the extent of the scene, the employment of architecture, and the skilful distribution of groups. In spite of the number of personages, and the diversity of episodes, the picture wholly centres in St. Paul. He preaches, and upon his words hang those who are listening, of every s.e.x, of every age, in the most varied att.i.tudes. In that we behold the grand lines of the Roman school, its design full of n.o.bleness and truth at the same time. What charming and grave heads! What graceful, bold, and always natural movements! Here, that child with ringlets, full of _nave_ enthusiasm; there, that old man with bended knees, and hands joined. Are not all those beautiful heads, and those draperies, too, worthy of Raphael? But the marvel of the picture is the figure of St. Paul,[136]--it is that of the Olympic Jupiter, animated by a new spirit. The _Ma.s.s of St. Martin_ carries into the soul an impression of peace and silence. The _Vision of St.

Benedict_ has the character of simplicity full of grandeur. A desert, the saint on his knees, contemplating his sister, St. Scholastique, who is ascending to heaven, borne up by angels, accompanied by two young girls, crowned with flowers, and bearing the palm, the symbol of virginity. St. Peter and St. Paul show St. Benedict the abode whither his sister is going to enjoy eternal peace. A slight ray of the sun pierces the cloud. St. Benedict is as it were lifted up from the earth by this ecstatic vision. One scarcely desires a more lively color, and the expression is divine. Those two virgins, a little too tall, perhaps, how beautiful and pure they are! How sweet are those forms! How grave and gentle are those faces! The person of the holy monk, with all the material accessories, is perfectly natural, for it remains on the earth; whilst his face, where his soul shines forth, is wholly ideal, and already in heaven.

But the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of Lesueur is, in our opinion, the _Descent from the Cross_, or rather the enshrouding of Jesus Christ, already descended from the cross, whom Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and St.

John are placing in the shroud. On the left, Magdalen, in tears, kisses the feet of Jesus; on the right, are the holy women and the Virgin. It is impossible to carry the pathetic farther and preserve beauty. The holy women, placed in front, have each their particular grief. While one of them abandons herself to despair, an immense but internal and thoughtful sadness is upon the face of the mother of the crucified. She has comprehended the divine benefit of the redemption of the human race, and her grief, sustained by this thought, is calm and resigned. And then what dignity in that head! It, in some sort, sums up the whole picture, and gives to it its character, that of a profound and subdued emotion. I have seen many _Descents from the Cross_; I have seen that of Rubens at Antwerp, in which the sanct.i.ty of the subject has, as it were, constrained the great Flemish painter to join sensibility and sentiment to color; none of those pictures have touched me like that of Lesueur.

All the parts of art are there in the service of expression. The drawing is severe and strong; even the color, without being brilliant, surpa.s.ses that of the _St. Bruno_, the _Ma.s.s of St. Martin_, the _St. Paul_, and even that of the _Vision of St. Benedict_; as if Lesueur had wished to bring together in it all the powers of his soul, all the resources of his talent![137]

Now, regard the _Muses_,--other scenes, other beauties, the same genius.

Those are Pagan pictures, but Christianity is in them also, by reason of the adorable chast.i.ty with which Lesueur has clothed them. All critics have emulously shown the mythological errors into which poor Lesueur fell, and they have not wanted occasion to deplore that he had not made the journey to Italy and studied antiquity more. But who can have the strange idea of searching in Lesueur for an archeology? I seek and find in him the very genius of painting. Is not that Terpsich.o.r.e, well or ill named, with a harp a little too strong, it is said, as if the Muse had no particular gift, in her modest att.i.tude the symbol of becoming grace?

In that group of three Muses, to which one may give what name he pleases, is not the one that holds upon her knees a book of music, who sings or is about to sing, the most ravishing creature, a St. Cecilia that preludes just before abandoning herself to the intoxication of inspiration? And in those pictures there is brilliancy and coloring; the landscape is beautifully lighted, as if Poussin had guided the hand of his friend.

Poussin! What a name I p.r.o.nounce. If Lesueur is the painter of sentiment, Poussin is the painter of thought. He is in some sort the philosopher of painting. His pictures are religious or moral lectures that testify a great mind as well as a great heart. It is sufficient to recall the _Seven Sacraments_, the _Deluge_, the _Arcadia_, the _Truth that Time frees from the Taints of Envy_, the _Will of Eudamidas_, and the _Dance of Human Life_. And the style is equal to the conception.

Poussin draws like a Florentine, composes like a Frenchman, and often equals Lesueur in expression; coloring alone is sometimes wanting to him. As well as Racine, he is smitten with the antique beauty, and imitates it; but, like Racine, he always remains original. In place of the navete and unique charm of Lesueur, he has a severe simplicity, with a correctness that never abandons him. Remember, too, that he cultivated every kind of painting. He is at once a great historical painter and a great landscape painter,--he treats religious subjects as well as profane subjects, and by turns is inspired by antiquity and the Bible. He lived much at Rome, it is true, and died there; but he also worked in France, and almost always for France. Scarcely had he become known, when Richelieu attracted him to Paris and retained him there, loading him with honors, and giving him the commission of first painter in ordinary to the king, with the general direction of all the works of painting, and all the ornaments of the royal houses. During that sojourn of two years in Paris, he made the _Last Supper_ (_Cene_), the _St.

Francois Xavier_, the _Truth that Time frees from the Taints of Envy_.

It was also to France, to his friend M. de Chantelou, that from Rome he addressed the _Inspiration of St. Paul_, as well as the second series of the _Seven Sacraments_, an immense composition that, for grandeur of thought, can vie with the _Stanze_ of Raphael. I speak of it from the engravings; for the _Seven Sacraments_ are no longer in France. Eternal shame of the eighteenth century! It was at least necessary to wrest from the Greeks the pediments of the Parthenon,--we, we delivered up to strangers, we sold all those monuments of French genius which Richelieu and Mazarin, with religious care, had collected. Public indignation did not avert the act! And there has not since been found in France a king, a statesman, to interdict letting the master-pieces of art that honor the nation depart without authorization from the national territory![138] There has not been found a government which has undertaken at least to repurchase those that we have lost, to get back again the great works of Poussin, Lesueur, and so many others, scattered in Europe, instead of squandering millions to acquire the baboons of Holland, as Louis XIV. said, or Spanish canva.s.ses, in truth of an admirable color, but without n.o.bleness and moral expression.[139] I know and I love the Dutch pastorals and the cows of Potter; I am not insensible to the sombre and ardent coloring of Zurbaran, to the brilliant Italian imitations of Murillo and Velasquez; but in fine, what is all that in comparison with serious and powerful compositions like the _Seven Sacraments_, for example, that profound representation of Christian rites, a work of the highest faculties of the intellect and the soul, in which the intellect and the soul will ever find an exhaustless subject of study and meditation! Thank G.o.d, the graver of Pesne has saved them from our ingrat.i.tude and barbarity. Whilst the originals decorate the gallery of a great English lord,[140] the love and the talent of a Pesne, of a Stella, have preserved for us faithful copies in those expressive engravings that one never grows tired of contemplating, that every time we examine them, reveal to us some new side of the genius of our great countryman. Regard especially the _Extreme Unction!_ What a sublime and at the same time almost graceful scene! One would call it an antique bas-relief, so many groups are properly distributed in it, with natural and varied att.i.tudes. The draperies are as admirable as those of a fragment of the _Panathenaea_, which is in the Louvre. The figures are all beautiful. Beauty of figures belongs to sculpture, one is about to say:--yes, but it also belongs to painting, if you have yourself the eye of the painter, if you have been struck with the expression of those postures, those heads, those gestures, and almost those looks; for every thing lives, every thing breathes, even in those engravings, and if it were the place, we would endeavor to make the reader penetrate with us into those secrets of Christian sentiment which are also the secrets of art.

We endeavor to console ourselves for having lost the _Seven Sacraments_, and for not having known how to keep from England and Germany so many productions of Poussin, now buried in foreign collections,[141] by going to see at the Louvre what remains to us of the great French artist,--thirty pictures produced at different epochs of his life, which, for the most part, worthily sustain his renown,--the portrait of _Poussin_, one of the _Baccha.n.a.ls_ made for Richelieu, _Mars and Venus_, the _Death of Adonis_, the _Rape of the Sabines_,[142]

_Eliezer and Rebecca_, _Moses saved from the Waters_, the _Infant Jesus on the Knees of the Virgin and St. Joseph standing by_,[143] especially the _Manna in the Desert_, the _Judgment of Solomon_, the _Blind Men of Jericho_, the _Woman taken in Adultery_, the _Inspiration of St. Paul_, the _Diogenes_, the _Deluge_, the _Arcadia_. Time has turned the color, which was never very brilliant; but it has not been able to disturb what will make them live forever,--the design, the composition, and the expression. The _Deluge_ has remained, and in fact will always be, the most striking. After so many masters who have treated the same subject, Poussin has found the secret of being original, and more pathetic than his predecessors, in representing the solemn moment when the race is about to disappear. There are few details; some dead bodies are floating upon the abyss; a sinister-looking moon has scarcely risen; a few moments and mankind will be no more; the last mother uselessly extends her last child to the last father, who cannot take it, and the serpent that has destroyed mankind darts forth triumphant. We try in vain to find in the Deluge some signs of a trembling hand: the soul that sustained and conducted that hand makes itself felt by our soul, and profoundly moves it. Stop at that scene of mourning, and almost by its side let your eyes rest upon that fresh landscape and upon those shepherds that surround a tomb. The most aged, with a knee on the ground, reads these words graven upon the stone: _Et in Arcadia ego_, and I also lived in Arcadia. At the left a shepherd listens with serious attention. At the right is a charming group, composed of a shepherd in the spring-time of life, and a young girl of ravishing beauty. An artless admiration is painted on the face of the young peasant, who looks with happiness on his beautiful companion. As for her, her adorable face is not even veiled with the slightest shade; she smiles, her hand resting carelessly upon the shoulder of the young man, and she has no appearance of comprehending that lecture given to beauty, youth, and love. I confess that, for this picture alone, of so touching a philosophy, I would give many master-pieces of coloring, all the pastorals of Potter, all the badinages of Ostade, all the buffooneries of Teniers.

Lesueur and Poussin, by very different but nearly equal t.i.tles, are at the head of our great painting of the seventeenth century. After them, what artists again are Claude Lorrain and Philippe de Champagne?

Do you know in Italy or Holland a greater landscape painter than Claude?

And seize well his true character. Look at those vast and beautiful solitudes, lighted by the first or last rays of the sun, and tell me whether those solitudes, those trees, those waters, those mountains, that light, that silence,--whether all that nature has a soul, and whether those luminous and pure horizons do not lift you involuntarily, in ineffable reveries, to the invisible source of beauty and grace!

Lorrain is, above all, the painter of light, and his works might be called the history of light and all its combinations, in small and great, when it is poured out over large plains or breaks in the most varied accidents, on land, on waters, in the heavens, in its eternal source. The human scenes thrown into one corner have no other object than to relieve and make appear to advantage the scenes of nature by harmony or contrast. In the _Village Fete_, life, noise, movement are in front,--peace and grandeur are at the foundation of the landscape, and that is truly the picture. The same effect is in the _Cattle Crossing a River_. The landscape placed immediately under your eyes has nothing in it very rare, we can find such a one anywhere; but follow the perspective,--it leads you across flowering fields, a beautiful river, ruins, mountains that overlook these ruins, and you lose yourself in infinite distances. That Landscape crossed by a river, where a peasant waters his herd, means nothing great at first sight. Contemplate it some time, and peace, a sort of meditativeness in nature, a well-graduated perspective, will, little by little, gain your heart, and give you in that small picture a penetrating charm. The picture called a _Landscape_ represents a vast champagne filled with trees, and lighted by the rising sun,--in it there is freshness and--already--warmth, mystery, and splendor, with skies of the sweetest harmony. _A Dance at Sunset_ expresses the close of a beautiful day. One sees in it, one feels in it the decline of the heat of the day; in the foreground are some shepherds and shepherdesses dancing by the side of their flocks.[144]

Is it not strange, that Champagne has been put in the Flemish school?[145] He was born at Brussels, it is true, but he came very early to Paris, and his true master was Poussin, who counselled him. He devoted his talent to France, lived there, died there, and what is decisive, his manner is wholly French. Will it be said that he owes to Flanders his color? We respond that this quality is balanced by a grave defect that he also owes to Flanders, the want of ideality in the figures; and it was from France that he learned how to repair this defect by beauty of moral expression. Champagne is inferior to Lesueur and Poussin, but he is of their family. He was, also, of those artists contemporaneous with Corneille, simple, poor, virtuous, Christian.[146]

Champagne worked both for the convent of the Carmelites in the _Rue St.

Jacques_, that venerable abode of ardent and sublime piety, and Port-Royal, that place of all others that contained in the smallest s.p.a.ce the most virtue and genius, so many admirable men and women worthy of them. What has become of that famous crucifix that he painted for the Church of the Carmelites, a master-piece of perspective that upon a horizontal plane appeared perpendicular? It perished with the holy house. The _Last Supper_ (_Cene_) is a living picture, on account of the truth of all the figures, movements, and postures, but to my eyes it is blemished by the absence of the ideal. I am obliged to say as much of the _Repast with Simon the Pharisee_. The _chef-d'oeuvre_ of Champagne is the _Apparition of St. Gervais and St. Protais to St. Ambrose in a Basilica of Milan_. All the qualities of French art are seen in it,--simplicity and grandeur in composition, with a profound expression.

On that canvas are only four personages, the two martyrs and St. Paul, who presents them to St. Ambrose. Those four figures fill the temple, lighted above all in the obscurity of the night, by the luminous apparition. The two martyrs are full of majesty. St. Ambrose, kneeling and in prayer, is, as it were, seized with terror.[147]

I certainly admire Champagne as an historical painter, and even as a landscape painter; but he is perhaps greatest as a portrait painter. In portraits truth and nature are particularly in their place, relieved by coloring, and idealized in proper measure by expression. The portraits of Champagne are so many monuments in which his most ill.u.s.trious contemporaries will live forever. Every thing about them is strikingly real, grave, and severe, with a penetrating sweetness. Should the records of Port-Royal be lost, all Port-Royal might be found in Champagne. Among those portraits we see the inflexible Saint-Cyran,[148]

as well as his persecutor, the imperious Richelieu.[149] We see, too, the learned, the intrepid Antoine Arnaud, to whom the contemporaries of Bossuet decreed the name of Great;[150] and Mme. Angelique Arnaud, with her nave and strong figure.[151] Among them is mother Agnes and the humble daughter of Champagne himself, sister St. Suzanne.[152] She has just been miraculously cured, and her whole prostrated person bears still the impress of a relic of suffering. Mother Agnes, kneeling before her, regards her with a look of grateful joy. The place of the scene is a poor cell; a wooden cross hanging on the wall, and some straw chairs, are all the ornaments. On the picture is the inscription,--_Christo uni medico animarum et corporum_, etc. There is possessed the Christian stoicism of Port-Royal in its imposing austerity. Add to all these portraits that of Champagne;[153] for the painter may be put by the side of his personages.

Had France produced in the seventeenth century only these four great artists, it would be necessary to give an important place to the French school; but she counts many other painters of the greatest merit. Among these we may distinguish P. Mignard, so much admired in his times, so little known now, and so worthy of being known. How have we been able to let fall into oblivion the author of the immense fresco of _Val-de-grace_, so celebrated by Moliere, which is perhaps the greatest page of painting in the world![154] What strikes at first, in this gigantic work, is the order and harmony. Then come a thousand charming details and innumerable episodes which form themselves important compositions. Remark also the brilliant and sweet coloring which should at least obtain favor for so many other beauties of the first order.

Again, it is to the pencil of Mignard that we owe that ravishing ceiling of a small apartment of the King at Versailles, a master-piece now destroyed, but of which there remains to us a magnificent translation in the beautiful engraving of Gerard Audran. What profound expression in the _Plague of aeacus_,[155] and in the _St. Charles giving the Communion to the Plague-infected of Milan_! Mignard is recognized as one of our best portrait painters: grace, sometimes a little too refined, is joined in him to sentiment. The French school can also present with pride Valentin, who died young and was so full of promise; Stella, the worthy friend of Poussin, the uncle of Claudine, Antoinette, and Francoise Stella; Lahyre, who has so much spirit and taste;[156]

Sebastien Bourdon, so animated and elevated;[157] the Lenains, who sometimes have the _navete_ of Lesueur and the color of Champagne; Bourguignon, full of fire and enthusiasm; Jouvenet, whose composition is so good;[158] finally, besides so many others, Lebrun, whom it is now the fashion to treat cavalierly, who received from nature, with perhaps an immoderate pa.s.sion for fame, pa.s.sion for the beautiful of every kind, and a talent of admirable flexibility,--the true painter of a great king by the richness and dignity of his manner, who, like Louis XIV., worthily closes the seventeenth century.[159]

Since we have spoken somewhat extensively of painting, would it not be unjust to pa.s.s in silence over engraving, its daughter, or its sister?

Certainly it is not an art of ordinary importance; we have excelled in it; we have above all carried it to its perfection in portraits. Let us be equitable to ourselves. What school--and we are not unmindful of those of Marc' Antonio, Albert Durer, and Rembrandt--can present such a succession of artists of this kind? Thomas de Leu and Leonard Gautier make in some sort the pa.s.sage from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Then come a crowd of men of the most diverse talents,--Mellan, Michel Lasne, Morin, Daret, Huret, Ma.s.son, Nanteuil, Drevet, Van Schupen, the Poillys, the Edelincks, and the Audrans. Gerard Edelinck and Nanteuil alone have a popular renown, and they merit it by the delicacy, splendor, and charm of their graver. But the connoisseurs of elevated taste find at least their rivals in engravers now less admired, because they do not flatter the eye so much, but have, perhaps, more truth and vigor. It must also be said, that the portraits of these two masters have not the historic importance of those of their predecessors.

The _Conde_ of Nanteuil is justly admired; but if we wish to know the great Conde, the conqueror of Rocroy and Lens, we must not demand him from Nanteuil, but from Huret, Michel Lasne, and Daret,[160] who designed and engraved him in all his force and heroic beauty. Edelinck and Nanteuil himself scarcely knew and retraced the seventeenth century, except at the approach of its decline.[161] Morin and Mellan were able to see it, and transmit it in its glorious youth. Morin is the Champagne of engraving: he does not engrave, he paints. It is he who represents and transmits to posterity the ill.u.s.trious men of the first half of the great century--Henry IV., Louis XIII., the de Thous, Berulle, Jansenius, Saint-Cyran, Marillac, Bentivoglio, Richelieu, Mazarin, still young, and Retz, when he was only a coadjutor.[162] Mellan had the same advantage. He is the first in date of all the engravers of the seventeenth century, and perhaps is also the most expressive. With a single line, it seems that from his hands only shades can spring; he does not strike at first sight; but the more we regard him, the more he seizes, penetrates, and touches, like Lesueur.[163]

Christianity, that is to say, the reign of the spirit, is favorable to painting, is particularly expressive. Sculpture seems to be a pagan art; for, if it must also contain moral expression, it is always under the imperative condition of beauty of form. This is the reason why sculpture is as it were natural to antiquity, and appeared there with an incomparable splendor, before which painting somewhat paled,[164] whilst among the moderns it has been eclipsed by painting, and has remained very inferior to it, by reason of the extreme difficulty of bringing stone and marble to express Christian sentiment, without which, material beauty suffers; so that our sculpture is too insignificant to be beautiful, too mannered to be expressive. Since antiquity, there have scarcely been two schools of sculpture:[165]--one at Florence, before Michael Angelo, and especially with Michael Angelo; the other in France, at the _Renaissance_, with Jean Cousin, Goujon, Germain Pilon.

We may say that these three artists have, as it were, shared among themselves grandeur and grace: to the first belong n.o.bility and force, with profound knowledge;[166] to the other two, an elegance full of charm. Sculpture changes its character in the seventeenth century as well as every thing else: it no longer has the same attraction, but it finds moral and religious inspiration, which the skilful masters of the _Renaissance_ too much lacked. Jean Cousin excepted, is there one of them that is superior to Jacques Sarazin? That great artist, now almost forgotten, is at once a disciple of the French school and the Italian school, and to the qualities that he borrows from his predecessors, he adds a moral expression, touching and elevated, which he owes to the spirit of the new school. He is, in sculpture, the worthy contemporary of Lesueur and Poussin, of Corneille, Descartes, and Pascal. He belongs entirely to the reign of Louis XIII., Richelieu, and Mazarin; he did not even see that of Louis XIV.[167] Called into France by Richelieu, who had also called there Poussin and Champagne, Jacques Sarazin in a few years produced a mult.i.tude of works of rare elegance and great character. What has become of them? The eighteenth century pa.s.sed over them without regarding them. The barbarians that destroyed or scattered them, were arrested before the paintings of Lesueur and Poussin, protected by a remnant of admiration: while breaking the master-pieces of the French chisel, they had no suspicion of the sacrilege they were committing against art as well as their country. I was at least able to see, some years ago, at the Museum of French Monuments, collected by the piety of a friend of the arts, beautiful parts of a superb mausoleum erected to the memory of Henri de Bourbon, second of the name, Prince of Conde, father of the great Conde, the worthy support, the skilful fellow-laborer of Richelieu and Mazarin. This monument was supported by four figures of natural grandeur,--_Faith, Prudence, Justice, Charity_.

There were four bas-reliefs in bronze, representing the _Triumphs of Renown, Time, Death_, and _Eternity_. In the _Triumph of Death_, the artist had represented a certain number of ill.u.s.trious moderns, among whom he had placed himself by the side of Michael Angelo.[168] We can still contemplate in the court of the Louvre, in the pavilion of the Horloge, those caryatides of Sarazin at once so majestic and so graceful, which are detached with admirable relief and lightness. Have Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon done any thing more elegant and lifelike?

Those females breathe, and are about to move. Take the pains to go a short distance[169] to visit the humble chapel that now occupies the place of that magnificent church of the Carmelites, once filled with the paintings of Champagne, Stella, Lahire, and Lebrun; where the voice of Bossuet was heard, where Mlle. de Lavalliere and Mme. de Longueville were so often seen prostrated, their long hair shorn, and their faces bathed in tears. Among the relics that are preserved of the past splendor of the holy monastery, consider the n.o.ble statue of the kneeling Cardinal de Berulle. On those meditative and penetrating features, in those eyes raised to heaven, breathes the soul of that great servant of G.o.d, who died at the altar like a warrior on the field of honor. He prays G.o.d for his dear Carmelites. That head is perfectly natural, as Champagne might have painted it, and has a severe grace that reminds one of Lesueur and Poussin.[170]

Below Sarazin, the Anguiers are still artists that Italy would admire, and to whom there is wanting, since the great century, nothing but judges worthy of them. These two brothers covered Paris and France with the most precious monuments. Look at the tomb of Jacques-Auguste de Thou, by Francois Anguier: the face of the great historian is reflective and melancholy, like that of a man weary of the spectacle of human things; and nothing is more amiable than the statues of his two wives, Marie Barbancon de Cany, and Gasparde de la Chatre.[171] The mausoleum of Henri de Montmorency, beheaded at Toulouse in 1632, which is still seen at Moulins, in the church of the ancient convent of the daughters of Sainte-Marie, is an important work of the same artist, in which force is manifest, with a little heaviness.[172] To Michel Anguier are attributed the statues of the duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Tresmes, and that of their ill.u.s.trious son, Potier, Marquis of Gevres.[173] Behold in him the intrepid companion of Conde, arrested in his course at thirty-two years of age before Thionville, after the battle of Rocroy, already lieutenant-general, and when Conde was demanding for him the baton of a marshal of France, deposited on his tomb; behold him young, beautiful, brave, like his comrades cut down also in the flower of life, Laval, Chatillon, La Moussaye. One of the best works of Michel Anguier is the monument of Henri de Chabot, that other companion, that faithful friend of Conde, who by the splendor of his valor, especially by the graces of his person, knew how to gain the heart, the fortune, and the name of the beautiful Marguerite, the daughter of the great Duke of Rohan. The new duke died, still young, in 1655, at thirty-nine years of age. He is represented lying down, the head inclined and supported by an angel; another angel is at his feet. The whole is striking, and the details are exquisite. The face of Chabot has every beauty, as if to answer to its reputation, but the beauty is that of one dying. The body has already the languor of death, _longuescit moriens_, with I know not what antique grace. This morsel, if the drawing were more severe, would rival the _Dying Gladiator_, of which it reminds one, which it perhaps even imitates.[174]

In truth, I wonder that men now dare speak so lightly of Puget and Girardon. To Puget qualities of the first order cannot be refused. He has the fire, the enthusiasm, the fecundity of genius. The caryatides of the Hotel de Ville of Toulon, which have been brought to the Museum of Paris, attest a powerful chisel. The _Milon_ reminds one of the manner of Michael Angelo; it is a little overstrained, but it cannot be denied that the effect is striking. Do you want a talent more natural, and still having force and elevation? Take the trouble to search in the Tuileries, in the gardens of Versailles, in several churches of Paris, for the scattered works of Girardon, here for the mausoleum of the Gondis,[175] there for that of the Castellans,[176] that of Louvois,[177] etc.; especially go to see in the church of the Sorbonne the mausoleum of Richelieu. The formidable minister is there represented in his last moments, sustained by religion and wept by his country. The whole person is of a perfect n.o.bility, and the figure has the fineness, the severity, the superior distinction given to it by the pencil of Champagne, and the gravers of Morin, Michel Lasne, and Mellan.

Finally, I do not regard as a vulgar sculptor Coysevox, who, under the influence of Lebrun, unfortunately begins the theatrical style, who still has the facility, movement, and elegance of Lebrun himself. He reared worthy monuments to Mazarin, Colbert, and Lebrun,[178] and thus to speak, sowed busts of the ill.u.s.trious men of his time. For, remark it well, artists then took scarcely any arbitrary and fanciful subjects.

They worked upon contemporaneous subjects, which, while giving them proper liberty, inspired and guided them, and communicated a public interest to their works. The French sculpture of the seventeenth century, like that of antiquity, is profoundly natural. The churches and the monasteries were filled with the statues of those who loved them during life, and wished to rest in them after death. Each church of Paris was a popular museum. The sumptuous residences of the aristocracy--for at that period, there was one in France, like that of England at the present time--possessed their secular tombs, statues, busts, and portraits of eminent men whose glory belonged to the country as well as their own family. On its side, the state did not encourage the arts in detail, and, thus to speak, in a small way; it gave them a powerful impulse by demanding of them important works, by confiding to them vast enterprises. All great things were thus mingled together, reciprocally inspired and sustained each other.

One man alone in Europe has left a name in the beautiful art that surrounds a chateau or a palace with graceful gardens or magnificent parks,--that man is a Frenchman of the seventeenth century, is Le Notre.

Le Notre may be reproached with a regularity that is perhaps excessive, and a little mannerism in details; but he has two qualities that compensate for many defects, grandeur and sentiment. He who designed the park of Versailles, who to the proper arrangement of parterres, to the movement of fountains, to the harmonious sound of waterfalls, to the mysterious shades of groves, has known how to add the magic of infinite perspective by means of that s.p.a.cious walk where the view is extended over an immense sheet of water to be lost in the limitless distances,--he is a landscape-painter worthy of having a place by the side of Poussin and Lorrain.

We had in the middle age our Gothic architecture, like all the nations of northern Europe. In the sixteenth century what architects were Pierre Lescot, Jean Bullant, and Philibert Delorme! What charming palaces, what graceful edifices, the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville of Paris, Chambord, and Ecouen! The seventeenth century also had its original architecture, different from that of the middle age and that of the _Renaissance_, simple, austere, n.o.ble, like the poetry of Corneille and the prose of Descartes. Study without scholastic prejudice the Luxembourg of de Brosses,[179] the portal of Saint-Gervais, and the great hall of the Palais de Justice, by the same architect; the Palais Cardinal and the Sorbonne of Lemercier;[180] the cupola of Val-de-Grace by Lemuet;[181]

the triumphal arch of the Porte Saint-Denis by Francois Blondel; Versailles, and especially the Invalides, of Mansart.[182] Consider with attention the last edifice, let it make its impression on your mind and soul, and you will easily succeed in recognizing in it a particular beauty. It is not a Gothic monument, neither is it an almost Pagan monument of the sixteenth century,--it is modern, and also Christian; it is vast with measure, elegant with gravity. Contemplate at sunset that cupola reflecting the last rays of day, elevating itself gently towards the heavens in a slight and graceful curve; cross that imposing esplanade, enter that court admirably lighted in spite of its covered galleries, bow beneath the dome of that church where Vauban and Turenne sleep,--you will not be able to guard yourself from an emotion at once religious and military; you will say to yourself that this is indeed the asylum of warriors who have reached the evening of life and are prepared for eternity!

Since then, what has French architecture become? Once having left tradition and national character, it wanders from imitation to imitation, and without comprehending the genius of antiquity, it unskilfully reproduces its forms. This b.a.s.t.a.r.d architecture, at once heavy and mannered, is, little by little, subst.i.tuted for the beautiful architecture of the preceding century, and everywhere effaces the vestiges of the French spirit. Do you wish a striking example of it? In Paris, near the Luxembourg, the Condes had their _hotel_,[183]

magnificent and severe, with a military aspect, as it was fitting for the dwelling-place of a family of warriors, and within of almost royal splendor. Beneath those lofty ceilings had been some time suspended the Spanish flags taken at Rocroy. In those vast saloons had been a.s.sembled the _elite_ of the grandest society that ever existed. In those beautiful gardens had been seen promenading Corneille and Madame de Sevigne, Moliere, Bossuet, Boileau, Racine, in the company of the great Conde. The oratory had been painted by the hand of Lesueur.[184] It had been easy to repair and preserve the n.o.ble habitation. At the end of the eighteenth century, a descendant of the Condes sold it to a dismal company to build that palace without character and taste which is called the Palais-Bourbon. Almost at the same epoch there was a movement made to construct a church to the patroness of Paris, to that Genevieve, whose legend is so touching and so popular. Was there ever a better chance for a national and Christian monument? It was possible to return to the Gothic style and even to the Byzantine style. Instead of that there was made for us an immense Roman basilica of the Decline. What a dwelling for the modest and holy virgin, so dear to the fields that bordered upon Lutece, whose name is still venerated by the poor people who inhabit these quarters! Behold the church which has been placed by the side of that of Saint-Etienne du Mont, as if to make felt all the differences between Christianity and Paganism! For here, in spite of a mixture of the most different styles, it is evident that the Pagan style predominates. Christian worship cannot be naturalized in this profane edifice, which has so many times changed its destination. It is in vain to call it anew Saint-Genevieve,--the revolutionary name of Pantheon will stick to it.[185] The eighteenth century treated the Madeleine no better than Saint-Genevieve. In vain the beautiful sinner wished to renounce the joys of the world and attach herself to the poverty of Jesus Christ. She has been brought back to the pomp and luxury that she repudiated; she has been put in a rich palace, all shining with gold, which might very well be a temple of Venus, for certainly it has not the severe grace of the Pantheon, of which it is the most vulgar copy. How far we are from the Invalides, from Val-de-Grace, and the Sorbonne, so admirably appropriated to their object, wherein appears so well the hand of the century and the country which reared them!

While architecture thus strays, it is natural that painting should seek above every thing color and brilliancy, that sculpture should apply itself to become Pagan again, that poetry itself, receding for two centuries, should abjure the worship of thought for that of fancy, that it should everywhere go borrowing images from Spain, Italy, and Germany, that it should run after subaltern and foreign qualities which it will not attain, and abandon the grand qualities of the French genius.

It will be said that the Christian sentiment which animated Lesueur and the artists of the seventeenth century is wanting to those of ours; it is extinguished, and cannot be rekindled. In the first place, is that very certain? Native faith is dead, but cannot reflective faith take its place? Christianity is exhaustless; it has infinite resources, and admirable flexibility; there are a thousand ways of arriving at it and returning to it, because it has itself a thousand phases that answer to the most different dispositions, to all the wants, to all the mobility of the heart. What it loses on one side, it gains on another; and as it has produced our civilization, it is called to follow it in all its vicissitudes. Either every religion will perish in this world, or Christianity will endure, for it is not in the power of thought to conceive a more perfect religion. Artists of the nineteenth century, do not despair of G.o.d and yourselves. A superficial philosophy has thrown you far from Christianity considered in a strict sense; another philosophy can bring you near it again by making you see it with another eye. And then, if the religious sentiment is weakened, are there not other sentiments that can make the heart of man beat, and fecundate genius? Plato has said, that beauty is always old and always new. It is superior to all its forms, it belongs to all countries and all times; it belongs to all beliefs, provided these beliefs be serious and profound, and the need be felt of expressing and spreading them. If, then, we have not arrived at the boundary a.s.signed to the grandeur of France, if we are not beginning to descend into the shade of death, if we still truly live, if there remain to us convictions, of whatever kind they may be, thereby even remains to us, or at least may remain to us, what made the glory of our fathers, what they did not carry with them to the tomb, what had already survived all revolutions, Greece, Rome, the Middle Age, what does not belong to any temporary or ephemeral accident, what subsists and is continually found in the focus of consciousness--I mean moral inspiration, immortal as the soul.

Let us terminate here, and sum up this defence of the national art.

There are in arts, as well as in letters and philosophy, two contrary schools. One tends to the ideal in all things,--it seeks, it tries to make appear the spirit concealed under the form, at once manifested and veiled by nature; it does not so much wish to please the senses and flatter the imagination as to enlarge the intellect and move the soul.

The other, enamored of nature, stops there and devotes itself to imitation,--its princ.i.p.al object is to reproduce reality, movement, life, which are for it the supreme beauty. The France of the seventeenth century, the France of Descartes, Corneille, and Bossuet, highly spiritual in philosophy, poetry, and eloquence, was also highly spiritual in the arts. The artists of that great epoch partic.i.p.ate in its general character, and represent it in their way. It is not true that they lacked imagination, more than Pascal and Bossuet lacked it.

But inasmuch as they do not suffer imagination to usurp the dominion that does not belong to it, inasmuch as they subject its order, even its impetuosity, to the reign of reason and the inspirations of the heart, it seems that it is not so strong when it is only disciplined and regulated. As we have said, they excel in composition, especially in expression. They always have a thought, and a moral and elevated thought. For this reason they are dear to us, their cause interests us, is in some sort our own cause, and so this homage rendered to their misunderstood glory naturally crowns these lectures devoted to true beauty, that is to say, moral beauty.

May these lectures be able to make it known, and, above all, loved! May they be able also to inspire some one of you with the idea of devoting himself to studies so beautiful, of devoting to them his life, and attaching to them his name! The sweetest recompense of a professor who is not too unworthy of that t.i.tle, is to see rapidly following in his footsteps young and n.o.ble spirits who easily pa.s.s him and leave him far behind them.[186]