The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh Part 5

Awful Justice stops, and, bowing gravely, listens to M. Hugo's verses, and, with true French politeness, says, "Mon cher Monsieur, these verses are charming, ravissans, delicieux, and, coming from such a celebrite litteraire as yourself, shall meet with every possible attention--in fact, had I required anything to confirm my own previous opinions, this charming poem would have done so. Bon jour, mon cher Monsieur Hugo, au revoir!"--and they part:--Justice taking off his hat and bowing, and the author of "Ruy Blas" quite convinced that he has been treating with him d'egal en egal. I can hardly bring my mind to fancy that anything is serious in France--it seems to be all rant, tinsel, and stage-play. Sham liberty, sham monarchy, sham glory, sham justice,--ou diable donc la verite va-t-elle se nicher?

The last rocket of the fete of July has just mounted, exploded, made a portentous bang, and emitted a gorgeous show of blue lights, and then (like many reputations) disappeared totally: the hundredth gun on the Invalid terrace has uttered its last roar--and a great comfort it is for eyes and ears that the festival is over. We shall be able to go about our everyday business again, and not be hustled by the gendarmes or the crowd.

The sight which I have just come away from is as brilliant, happy, and beautiful as can be conceived; and if you want to see French people to the greatest advantage, you should go to a festival like this, where their manners, and innocent gayety, show a very pleasing contrast to the coa.r.s.e and vulgar hilarity which the same cla.s.s would exhibit in our own country--at Epsom racecourse, for instance, or Greenwich Fair. The greatest noise that I heard was that of a company of jolly villagers from a place in the neighborhood of Paris, who, as soon as the fireworks were over, formed themselves into a line, three or four abreast, and so marched singing home. As for the fireworks, squibs and crackers are very hard to describe, and very little was to be seen of them: to me, the prettiest sight was the vast, orderly, happy crowd, the number of children, and the extraordinary care and kindness of the parents towards these little creatures. It does one good to see honest, heavy epiciers, fathers of families, playing with them in the Tuileries, or, as to-night, bearing them stoutly on their shoulders, through many long hours, in order that the little ones too may have their share of the fun. John Bull, I fear, is more selfish: he does not take Mrs. Bull to the public-house; but leaves her, for the most part, to take care of the children at home.

The fete, then, is over; the pompous black pyramid at the Louvre is only a skeleton now; all the flags have been miraculously whisked away during the night, and the fine chandeliers which glittered down the Champs Elysees for full half a mile, have been consigned to their dens and darkness. Will they ever be reproduced for other celebrations of the glorious 29th of July?--I think not; the Government which vowed that there should be no more persecutions of the press, was, on that very 29th, seizing a Legitimist paper, for some real or fancied offence against it: it had seized, and was seizing daily, numbers of persons merely suspected of being disaffected (and you may fancy how liberty is understood, when some of these prisoners, the other day, on coming to trial, were found guilty and sentenced to ONE day's imprisonment, after THIRTY-SIX DAYS' DETENTION ON SUSPICION). I think the Government which follows such a system, cannot be very anxious about any farther revolutionary fetes, and that the Chamber may reasonably refuse to vote more money for them. Why should men be so mighty proud of having, on a certain day, cut a certain number of their fellow-countrymen's throats?

The Guards and the Line employed this time nine years did no more than those who cannonaded the starving Lyonnese, or bayoneted the luckless inhabitants of the Rue Transnounain:--they did but fulfil the soldier's honorable duty:--his superiors bid him kill and he killeth:--perhaps, had he gone to his work with a little more heart, the result would have been different, and then--would the conquering party have been justified in annually rejoicing over the conquered? Would we have thought Charles X. justified in causing fireworks to be blazed, and concerts to be sung, and speeches to be spouted, in commemoration of his victory over his slaughtered countrymen?--I wish for my part they would allow the people to go about their business as on the other 362 days of the year, and leave the Champs Elysees free for the omnibuses to run, and the Tuileries' in quiet, so that the nurse-maids might come as usual, and the newspapers be read for a halfpenny apiece.

Shall I trouble you with an account of the speculations of these latter, and the state of the parties which they represent? The complication is not a little curious, and may form, perhaps, a subject of graver disquisition. The July fetes occupy, as you may imagine, a considerable part of their columns just now, and it is amusing to follow them one by one; to read Tweedledum's praise, and Tweedledee's indignation--to read, in the Debats how the King was received with shouts and loyal vivats--in the Nation, how not a tongue was wagged in his praise, but, on the instant of his departure, how the people called for the "Ma.r.s.eillaise"

and applauded THAT.--But best say no more about the fete. The Legitimists were always indignant at it. The high Philippist party sneers at and despises it; the Republicans hate it: it seems a joke against THEM. Why continue it?--If there be anything sacred in the name and idea of loyalty, why renew this fete? It only shows how a rightful monarch was hurled from his throne, and a dexterous usurper stole his precious diadem. If there be anything n.o.ble in the memory of a day, when citizens, unused to war, rose against practised veterans, and, armed with the strength of their cause, overthrew them, why speak of it now?

or renew the bitter recollections of the bootless struggle and victory?

O Lafayette! O hero of two worlds! O accomplished Cromwell Grandison!

you have to answer for more than any mortal man who has played a part in history: two republics and one monarchy does the world owe to you; and especially grateful should your country be to you. Did you not, in '90, make clear the path for honest Robespierre, and in '30, prepare the way for--

[The Editor of the Bungay Beacon would insert no more of this letter, which is, therefore, for ever lost to the public.]

ON THE FRENCH SCHOOL OF PAINTING:

WITH APPROPRIATE ANECDOTES, ILl.u.s.tRATIONS, AND PHILOSOPHICAL DISQUISITIONS.

IN A LETTER TO MR. MACGILP, OF LONDON.

The three collections of pictures at the Louvre, the Luxembourg, and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, contain a number of specimens of French art, since its commencement almost, and give the stranger a pretty fair opportunity to study and appreciate the school. The French list of painters contains some very good names--no very great ones, except Poussin (unless the admirers of Claude choose to rank him among great painters),--and I think the school was never in so flourishing a condition as it is at the present day. They say there are three thousand artists in this town alone: of these a handsome minority paint not merely tolerably, but well understand their business: draw the figure accurately; sketch with cleverness; and paint portraits, churches, or restaurateurs' shops, in a decent manner.

To account for a superiority over England which, I think, as regards art, is incontestable--it must be remembered that the painter's trade, in France, is a very good one; better appreciated, better understood, and, generally, far better paid than with us. There are a dozen excellent schools which a lad may enter here, and, under the eye of a practised master, learn the apprenticeship of his art at an expense of about ten pounds a year. In England there is no school except the Academy, unless the student can afford to pay a very large sum, and place himself under the tuition of some particular artist. Here, a young man, for his ten pounds, has all sorts of accessory instruction, models, &c.; and has further, and for nothing, numberless incitements to study his profession which are not to be found in England:--the streets are filled with picture-shops, the people themselves are pictures walking about; the churches, theatres, eating-houses, concert-rooms are covered with pictures: Nature itself is inclined more kindly to him, for the sky is a thousand times more bright and beautiful, and the sun shines for the greater part of the year. Add to this, incitements more selfish, but quite as powerful: a French artist is paid very handsomely; for five hundred a year is much where all are poor; and has a rank in society rather above his merits than below them, being caressed by hosts and hostesses in places where t.i.tles are laughed at and a baron is thought of no more account than a banker's clerk.

The life of the young artist here is the easiest, merriest, dirtiest existence possible. He comes to Paris, probably at sixteen, from his province; his parents settle forty pounds a year on him, and pay his master; he establishes himself in the Pays Latin, or in the new quarter of Notre Dame de Lorette (which is quite peopled with painters); he arrives at his atelier at a tolerably early hour, and labors among a score of companions as merry and poor as himself. Each gentleman has his favorite tobacco-pipe; and the pictures are painted in the midst of a cloud of smoke, and a din of puns and choice French slang, and a roar of choruses, of which no one can form an idea who has not been present at such an a.s.sembly.

You see here every variety of coiffure that has ever been known. Some young men of genius have ringlets hanging over their shoulders--you may smell the tobacco with which they are scented across the street; some have straight locks, black, oily, and redundant; some have toupets in the famous Louis-Philippe fashion; some are cropped close; some have adopted the present mode--which he who would follow must, in order to do so, part his hair in the middle, grease it with grease, and gum it with gum, and iron it flat down over his ears; when arrived at the ears, you take the tongs and make a couple of ranges of curls close round the whole head,--such curls as you may see under a gilt three-cornered hat, and in her Britannic Majesty's coachman's state wig.

This is the last fashion. As for the beards, there is no end of them; all my friends the artists have beards who can raise them; and Nature, though she has rather stinted the bodies and limbs of the French nation, has been very liberal to them of hair, as you may see by the following specimen. Fancy these heads and beards under all sorts of caps--Chinese caps, Mandarin caps, Greek skull-caps, English jockey-caps, Russian or Kuzzilbash caps, Middle-age caps (such as are called, in heraldry, caps of maintenance), Spanish nets, and striped worsted nightcaps. Fancy all the jackets you have ever seen, and you have before you, as well as pen can describe, the costumes of these indescribable Frenchmen.

In this company and costume the French student of art pa.s.ses his days and acquires knowledge; how he pa.s.ses his evenings, at what theatres, at what guinguettes, in company with what seducing little milliner, there is no need to say; but I knew one who p.a.w.ned his coat to go to a carnival ball, and walked abroad very cheerfully in his blouse for six weeks, until he could redeem the absent garment.

These young men (together with the students of sciences) comport themselves towards the sober citizen pretty much as the German bursch towards the philister, or as the military man, during the empire, did to the pekin:--from the height of their poverty they look down upon him with the greatest imaginable scorn--a scorn, I think, by which the citizen seems dazzled, for his respect for the arts is intense. The case is very different in England, where a grocer's daughter would think she made a misalliance by marrying a painter, and where a literary man (in spite of all we can say against it) ranks below that cla.s.s of gentry composed of the apothecary, the attorney, the wine-merchant, whose positions, in country towns at least, are so equivocal. As, for instance, my friend the Rev. James Asterisk, who has an undeniable pedigree, a paternal estate, and a living to boot, once dined in Warwickshire, in company with several squires and parsons of that enlightened county. Asterisk, as usual, made himself extraordinarily agreeable at dinner, and delighted all present with his learning and wit. "Who is that monstrous pleasant fellow?" said one of the squires.

"Don't you know?" replied another. "It's Asterisk, the author of so-and-so, and a famous contributor to such and such a magazine." "Good heavens!" said the squire, quite horrified! "a literary man! I thought he had been a gentleman!"

Another instance: M. Guizot, when he was Minister here, had the grand hotel of the Ministry, and gave entertainments to all the great de par le monde, as Brantome says, and entertained them in a proper ministerial magnificence. The splendid and beautiful d.u.c.h.ess of Dash was at one of his ministerial parties; and went, a fortnight afterwards, as in duty bound, to pay her respects to M. Guizot. But it happened, in this fortnight, that M. Guizot was Minister no longer; having given up his portfolio, and his grand hotel, to retire into private life, and to occupy his humble apartments in the house which he possesses, and of which he lets the greater portion. A friend of mine was present at one of the ex-Minister's soirees, where the d.u.c.h.ess of Dash made her appearance. He says the d.u.c.h.ess, at her entrance, seemed quite astounded, and examined the premises with a most curious wonder. Two or three shabby little rooms, with ordinary furniture, and a Minister en retraite, who lives by letting lodgings! In our country was ever such a thing heard of? No, thank heaven! and a Briton ought to be proud of the difference.

But to our muttons. This country is surely the paradise of painters and penny-a-liners; and when one reads of M. Horace Vernet at Rome, exceeding amba.s.sadors at Rome by his magnificence, and leading such a life as Rubens or t.i.tian did of old; when one sees M. Thiers's grand villa in the Rue St. George (a dozen years ago he was not even a penny-a-liner: no such luck); when one contemplates, in imagination, M.

Gudin, the marine painter, too lame to walk through the picture-gallery of the Louvre, accommodated, therefore, with a wheel-chair, a privilege of princes only, and accompanied--nay, for what I know, actually trundled--down the gallery by majesty itself--who does not long to make one of the great nation, exchange his native tongue for the melodious jabber of France; or, at least, adopt it for his native country, like Marshal Saxe, Napoleon, and Anacharsis Clootz? n.o.ble people! they made Tom Paine a deputy; and as for Tom Macaulay, they would make a DYNASTY of him.

Well, this being the case, no wonder there are so many painters in France; and here, at least, we are back to them. At the Ecole Royale des Beaux Arts, you see two or three hundred specimens of their performances; all the prize-men, since 1750, I think, being bound to leave their prize sketch or picture. Can anything good come out of the Royal Academy? is a question which has been considerably mooted in England (in the neighborhood of Suffolk Street especially). The hundreds of French samples are, I think, not very satisfactory. The subjects are almost all what are called cla.s.sical: Orestes pursued by every variety of Furies; numbers of little wolf-sucking Romuluses; Hectors and Andromaches in a complication of parting embraces, and so forth; for it was the absurd maxim of our forefathers, that because these subjects had been the fashion twenty centuries ago, they must remain so in saecula saeculorum; because to these lofty heights giants had scaled, behold the race of pigmies must get upon stilts and jump at them likewise! and on the canvas, and in the theatre, the French frogs (excuse the pleasantry) were instructed to swell out and roar as much as possible like bulls.

What was the consequence, my dear friend? In trying to make themselves into bulls, the frogs make themselves into jacka.s.ses, as might be expected. For a hundred and ten years the cla.s.sical humbug oppressed the nation; and you may see, in this gallery of the Beaux Arts, seventy years' specimens of the dulness which it engendered.

Now, as Nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches! It is the study of nature, surely, that profits us, and not of these imitations of her. A man, as a man, from a dustman up to aeschylus, is G.o.d's work, and good to read, as all works of Nature are: but the silly animal is never content; is ever trying to fit itself into another shape; wants to deny its own ident.i.ty, and has not the courage to utter its own thoughts. Because Lord Byron was wicked, and quarrelled with the world; and found himself growing fat, and quarrelled with his victuals, and thus, naturally, grew ill-humored, did not half Europe grow ill-humored too? Did not every poet feel his young affections withered, and despair and darkness cast upon his soul?

Because certain mighty men of old could make heroical statues and plays, must we not be told that there is no other beauty but cla.s.sical beauty?--must not every little whipster of a French poet chalk you out plays, "Henriades," and such-like, and vow that here was the real thing, the undeniable Kalon?

The undeniable fiddlestick! For a hundred years, my dear sir, the world was humbugged by the so-called cla.s.sical artists, as they now are by what is called the Christian art (of which anon); and it is curious to look at the pictorial traditions as here handed down. The consequence of them is, that scarce one of the cla.s.sical pictures exhibited is worth much more than two-and-sixpence. Borrowed from statuary, in the first place, the color of the paintings seems, as much as possible, to partic.i.p.ate in it; they are mostly of a misty, stony green, dismal hue, as if they had been painted in a world where no color was. In every picture, there are, of course, white mantles, white urns, white columns, white statues--those oblige accomplishments of the sublime. There are the endless straight noses, long eyes, round chins, short upper lips, just as they are ruled down for you in the drawing-books, as if the latter were the revelations of beauty, issued by supreme authority, from which there was no appeal? Why is the cla.s.sical reign to endure? Why is yonder simpering Venus de' Medicis to be our standard of beauty, or the Greek tragedies to bound our notions of the sublime? There was no reason why Agamemnon should set the fashions, and remain [Greek text omitted]

to eternity: and there is a cla.s.sical quotation, which you may have occasionally heard, beginning Vixere fortes, &c., which, as it avers that there were a great number of stout fellows before Agamemnon, may not unreasonably induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to succeed him. Shakspeare made a better man when his imagination moulded the mighty figure of Macbeth. And if you will measure Satan by Prometheus, the blind old Puritan's work by that of the fiery Grecian poet, does not Milton's angel surpa.s.s aeschylus's--surpa.s.s him by "many a rood?"

In the same school of the Beaux Arts, where are to be found such a number of pale imitations of the antique, Monsieur Thiers (and he ought to be thanked for it) has caused to be placed a full-sized copy of "The Last Judgment" of Michel Angelo, and a number of casts from statues by the same splendid hand. There IS the sublime, if you please--a new sublime--an original sublime--quite as sublime as the Greek sublime. See yonder, in the midst of his angels, the Judge of the world descending in glory; and near him, beautiful and gentle, and yet indescribably august and pure, the Virgin by his side. There is the "Moses," the grandest figure that ever was carved in stone. It has about it something frightfully majestic, if one may so speak. In examining this, and the astonishing picture of "The Judgment," or even a single figure of it, the spectator's sense amounts almost to pain. I would not like to be left in a room alone with the "Moses." How did the artist live amongst them, and create them? How did he suffer the painful labor of invention?

One fancies that he would have been scorched up, like Semele, by sights too tremendous for his vision to bear. One cannot imagine him, with our small physical endowments and weaknesses, a man like ourselves.

As for the Ecole Royale des Beaux Arts, then, and all the good its students have done, as students, it is stark naught. When the men did anything, it was after they had left the academy, and began thinking for themselves. There is only one picture among the many hundreds that has, to my idea, much merit (a charming composition of Homer singing, signed Jourdy); and the only good that the Academy has done by its pupils was to send them to Rome, where they might learn better things. At home, the intolerable, stupid cla.s.sicalities, taught by men who, belonging to the least erudite country in Europe, were themselves, from their profession, the least learned among their countrymen, only weighed the pupils down, and cramped their hands, their eyes, and their imaginations; drove them away from natural beauty, which, thank G.o.d, is fresh and attainable by us all, to-day, and yesterday, and to-morrow; and sent them rambling after artificial grace, without the proper means of judging or attaining it.

A word for the building of the Palais des Beaux Arts. It is beautiful, and as well finished and convenient as beautiful. With its light and elegant fabric, its pretty fountain, its archway of the Renaissance, and fragments of sculpture, you can hardly see, on a fine day, a place more riant and pleasing.

Pa.s.sing from thence up the picturesque Rue de Seine, let us walk to the Luxembourg, where bonnes, students, grisettes, and old gentlemen with pigtails, love to wander in the melancholy, quaint old gardens; where the peers have a new and comfortable court of justice, to judge all the emeutes which are to take place; and where, as everybody knows, is the picture-gallery of modern French artists, whom government thinks worthy of patronage.

A very great proportion of the pictures, as we see by the catalogue, are by the students whose works we have just been to visit at the Beaux Arts, and who, having performed their pilgrimage to Rome, have taken rank among the professors of the art. I don't know a more pleasing exhibition; for there are not a dozen really bad pictures in the collection, some very good, and the rest showing great skill and smartness of execution.

In the same way, however, that it has been supposed that no man could be a great poet unless he wrote a very big poem, the tradition is kept up among the painters, and we have here a vast number of large canvases, with figures of the proper heroical length and nakedness. The anticla.s.sicists did not arise in France until about 1827; and, in consequence, up to that period, we have here the old cla.s.sical faith in full vigor. There is Brutus, having chopped his son's head off, with all the agony of a father, and then, calling for number two; there is aeneas carrying off old Anchises; there are Paris and Venus, as naked as two Hottentots, and many more such choice subjects from Lempriere.

But the chief specimens of the sublime are in the way of murders, with which the catalogue swarms. Here are a few extracts from it:--

7. Beaume, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. "The Grand Dauphiness Dying."

18. Blondel, Chevalier de la, &c. "Zen.o.bia found Dead."

36. Debay, Chevalier. "The Death of Lucretia."

38. Dejuinne. "The Death of Hector."

34. Court, Chevalier de la, &c. "The Death of Caesar."

39, 40, 41. Delacroix, Chevalier. "Dante and Virgil in the Infernal Lake," "The Ma.s.sacre of Scio," and "Medea going to Murder her Children."

43. Delaroche, Chevalier. "Joas taken from among the Dead."

44. "The Death of Queen Elizabeth."

45. "Edward V. and his Brother" (preparing for death).

50. "Hecuba going to be Sacrificed." Drolling, Chevalier.