Chapter II
The road from Dieppe to Rouen is highly interesting. You at first ascend a straight steep hill, which commands a view of the town and harbour behind you, with villas on each side, something between modern cottages and antique castles; and afterwards, from the top of the hill, the prospect spreads out over endless plains, richly cultivated. It has been conjectured that the English borrowed their implements and modes of husbandry from their Norman Conquerors; the resemblance is, indeed, complete to a deception. You might suppose one side of the channel was transported to the other, from the general aspect of the country, from the neatness of the orchard-plots, the gardens, and farm-yards. Every thing has a look of the greatest industry and plenty. There is a scanty proportion of common pasturage; but rich fields of clover, oats, barley, and vetches, with luxuriant crops ready to cut, are presented to the eye in uninterrupted succession; there are no wastes, no barren, thankless enclosures; every foot of ground seems to be cultivated with the utmost success. It is in vain after this to talk of English agriculture, as if no such thing existed anywhere else. Agriculture can do no more than make provision that every part of the soil is carefully tilled, and raise the finest crops from it. The only distinctive feature is, that there are here no hedges along the road-side, their place being supplied by rows of apple-trees or groves of elm and poplar, which stretch out before you in lengthened vistas, as far as the eye can reach. We like this, whatever Mr. Mac-Adam may object; and moreover, the roads here are as good as his. To be sure, they are much broader, and admit of this collateral improvement. Shady plantations open their arms to meet you, closing in a point, or terminated by a turn in the road; and then you enter upon another long hospitable avenue,
‘Bidding the lovely scenes at distance hail;’
the smiling landscape waves on either side to a considerable extent; you pass a shepherd tending his flock, or a number of peasants returning from market in a light long waggon, like a hen-coop; the bells of the horses jingle, the postilion cracks his whip, or speaks to them with a friendly voice, and the Diligence rolls on, at the rate of six miles an hour towards Paris!—Travelling is much cheaper in France than in England. The distance from Dieppe to Rouen is thirty-six miles, and we only paid eight francs, that is, six shillings and eight pence a-piece, with two francs more to the guide and postilion, which is not fourpence a mile, including all expenses. On the other hand, you have not the advantage of taking an outside place at half-price, as a very trifling difference is made in this respect.
The Diligence itself cuts a very awkward figure, compared with our stage-coaches. There is much the same difference as between a barge and a pleasure-boat; but then it is roomy and airy, and remarkably easy in its motion. In the common mechanic arts the French attend to the essential only; we are so fond of elegance and compactness, that we sacrifice ease to show and finish. The harness of the horses is made of ropes or rusty leather, and it is wonderful how they get along so well as they do, three, or sometimes four a-breast. The apples of the orchards hang over the road-side, which speaks well for the honesty of the inhabitants, or the plenty of the country. The women appear to work a good deal out of doors. Some of the older ones have strangely distorted visages, and those horrid Albert-Durer chins and noses, that have been coming together for half a century. The younger ones are handsome, healthy-looking, animated; a better sort of English country girls. The character of French coquetry prevails even here, and you see a young peasant-girl, broiling in the sun, with a blue paper cap on her head, that glitters like the smoothest satin, and that answers the purpose of finery just as well. I observed that one man frequently holds the plough and guides the horses without any one else to assist him, as they do in Scotland, and which in England they hold to be an agricultural heresy. In Surrey, where an English gentleman had hired a Scotch servant to try this method, the boors actually collected round the man in the church-yard on Sunday, and pointed at him, crying, ‘That’s he who ploughs and drives the horses himself!’ Our prejudices are no less on the alert, and quite as obstinate against what is right as what is wrong. I cannot say I was quite pleased with my barber at Dieppe, who inserted a drop of citron juice in the lather I was to shave with, and converted it into a most agreeable perfume. It was an association of ideas, a false refinement, to which I had not been accustomed, and to which I was averse. The best excuse I could find for my reluctance to be pleased, was that at the next place where the same thing was attempted, the operator, by some villainous mixture, almost stunk me to death!
The entrance into Rouen, through extensive archways of tall trees, planted along the margin of the Seine, is certainly delectable. Here the genius of civilized France first began to display itself. Companies of men and women were sitting in the open air, enjoying the cool of the evening, and the serene moonlight, under Chinese lamps, with fruit and confectionery. We arrived rather late, but were well received and accommodated at the Hotel Vatel. My bad French by no means, however, conciliates the regard or increases the civility of the people on the road. They pay particular attention, and are particularly delighted with the English, who speak French well, or with tolerable fluency and correctness, for they think it a compliment to themselves and to the language; whereas, besides their dislike to all difficulty and uncertainty of communication, they resent an obvious neglect on this point as an affront, and an unwarrantable assumption of superiority, as if it were enough for an Englishman to shew himself among them to be well received, without so much as deigning to make himself intelligible. A person, who passes through a country in sullen silence, must appear very much in the character of a spy. Many things (a native is conscious) will seem strange to a foreigner, who can neither ask the meaning, nor understand the explanation of them; and on the other hand, if in these circumstances you are loquacious and inquisitive, you become proportionably troublesome. It would have been better (such is the natural feeling, the dictate at once of self-love and common sense) to have learned the language before you visited the country. An accent, an occasional blunder, a certain degree of hesitation are amusing, and indirectly flatter the pride of foreigners; but a total ignorance or wilful reluctance in speaking shews both a contempt for the people, and an inattention to good manners. To neglect to make one’s self master of a language tacitly implies, that in travelling through a country we have neither wants nor wishes to gratify; that we are quite independent, and have no ambition to give pleasure, or to receive instruction.
At Rouen the walls of our apartment were bare, being mere lath and plaster, a huge cobweb hung in the window, the curtains were shabby and dirty, and the floor without carpeting or matting; but our table was well-furnished, and in the English taste. French cooking comprehends English, and easily condescends to it; so that an Englishman finds himself better off in France than a Frenchman does in England. They complain that our cookery is dry, and our solid, unsavoury morsels, beef-steaks, and mutton chops, must stick in their throats as well as be repulsive to their imaginations; nor can we supply the additional sauces or disguises which are necessary to set them off. On the other hand, we had a dinner at the Hotel Vatel, a roast fowl, greens, and bacon, as plain, as sweet, and wholesome, as we could get at an English farm-house. We had also pigeons, partridges, and other game, in excellent preservation, and kept quite clear of French receipts and odious ragouts. Game or poultry is the half-way house, a sort of middle point, between French and English cookery. The bread here is excellent, the butter admirable, the milk and coffee superior to what we meet with at home. The wine and fruit, too, are delightful, but real French dishes are an abomination to an English palate. Unless a man means to stay all his life abroad, let him beware of making the experiment, or get near enough to the door to make his exit suddenly. The common charges at the inns are much the same as in England; we paid twenty-pence for breakfast, and half a crown, or three shillings, for dinner. The best Burgundy is only three shillings and fourpence a bottle. A green parrot hung in a cage, in a small court under our window, and received the compliments and caresses of every one who passed. It is wonderful how fond the French are of holding conversation with animals of all descriptions, parrots, dogs, monkeys. Is it that they choose to have all the talk to themselves, to make propositions, and fancy the answers; that they like this discourse by signs, by jabbering, and gesticulation, or that the manifestation of the principle of life without thought delights them above all things? The sociableness of the French seems to expand itself beyond the level of humanity, and to be unconscious of any descent. Two boys in the kitchen appeared to have nothing to do but to beat up the white of eggs into froth for salads. The labour of the French costs them nothing, so that they readily throw it away in doing nothing or the merest trifles. A nice-looking girl who officiated as chamber-maid, brought in a ripe melon after dinner, and offering it with much grace and good humour as ‘un petit cadeau’ (a trifling present) was rather hurt we did not accept of it. Indeed it was wrong. A Mr. James Williams acted as our English interpreter while we staid, and procured us places in the Paris Diligence, though it was said to be quite full. We here also heard that the packet we came over in, blew up two days after, and that the passengers escaped in fishing-boats. This has completed my distaste to steam-boats.
The city of Rouen is one of the oldest and finest in France. It contains about a hundred thousand inhabitants, two noble churches; a handsome quay is embosomed in a range of lofty hills, and watered by the Seine, which, proud of its willowy banks and tufted islands, winds along by it. The ascent up the rising grounds behind it, is magnificent beyond description. The town is spread out at your feet (an immense, stately mass of dark grey stone), the double towers of the old Gothic Cathedral, and of the beautiful Church of St. Antoine, rise above it in their majestic proportions, overlooking the rich sunny valleys which stretch away in the distance; you gradually climb an amphitheatre of hills, sprinkled with gardens and villas to the very top, and the walk on Sunday afternoon is crowded with people enjoying the scene, adding to its animation by their intelligent, varying looks, and adorning it by their picturesque and richly-coloured dresses. There is no town in England at the same time so fine, and so finely situated. Oxford is as fine in its buildings and associations, but it has not the same advantages of situation: Bristol is as fine a mass of buildings, but without the same striking accompaniments—
‘The pomp of groves and garniture of fields.’
Edinburgh alone is as splendid in its situation and buildings, and would have even a more imposing and delightful effect if Arthur’s Seat were crowned with thick woods, if the Pentland-hills could be converted into green pastures, if the Scotch people were French, and Leith-walk planted with vineyards! The only blot in this fair scene was the meeting with a number of cripples, whose hideous cries attracted and alarmed attention before their formidable mutilations became visible, and who extorted charity rather from terror than pity. Such objects abound in France and on the Continent. Is it from the want of hospitals, or from the bad care taken of the young and necessitous, to whom some dreadful accident has happened?—The hill that commands this beautiful prospect, and seems the resort of health, of life, of pleasure, is called (as I found on inquiry) Mont des Malades! Would any people but the French think of giving it so inauspicious a title? To the English such a name would spoil the view, and infect the imagination with the recollections of pain and sickness. But a Frenchman’s imagination is proof against such weaknesses; he has no sympathy except with the pleasurable; and provided a hill presents an agreeable prospect, never troubles his head whether the inhabitants are sick or well. The streets of Rouen, like those of other towns in France, are dirty for the same reason. A Frenchman’s senses and understanding are alike inaccessible to pain—he recognises (happily for himself) the existence only of that which adds to his importance or his satisfaction. He is delighted with perfumes, but passes over the most offensive smells,[12] and will not lift up his little finger to remove a general nuisance, for it is none to him. He leaves the walls of his houses unfinished, dilapidated, almost uninhabitable, because his thoughts are bent on adorning his own person—on jewels, trinkets, pomade divine! He is elaborate in his cookery and his dress, because the one flatters his vanity, the other his appetite; and he is licentious in his pleasures, nay gross in his manners, because in the first he consults only his immediate gratification, and in the last annoys others continually, from having no conception that any thing he (a Frenchman) can do can possibly annoy them. He is sure to offend, because he takes it for granted he must please. A great deal of ordinary French conversation might be spared before foreigners, if they knew the pain it gives. Virtue is not only put out of countenance by it, but vice becomes an indifferent common-place in their mouths. The last stage of human depravity is, when vice ceases to shock—or to please. A Frenchman’s candour and indifference to what must be thought of him (combined with his inordinate desire to shine) are curious. The hero of his own little tale carries a load of crimes and misfortunes at his back like a lead of band-boxes, and (light-hearted wretch) sings and dances as he goes! The inconsequentiality in the French character, from extreme facility and buoyancy of impression, is a matter of astonishment to the English. A young man at Rouen was walking briskly along the street to church, all the way tossing his prayer-book into the air, when suddenly on reaching the entrance a priest appeared coming from church, and he fell on his knees on the steps. No wonder the Popish clergy stand up for their religion, when it makes others fall on their knees before them, and worship their appearance as the shadow of the Almighty! The clergy in France present an agreeable and almost necessary foil to the foibles of the national character, with their sombre dress, their gravity, their simplicity, their sanctity. It is not strange they exert such an influence there: their professional pretensions to learning and piety must have a double weight, from having nothing to oppose to them but frivolity and the impulse of the moment. The entering the Cathedral here after the bustle and confusion of the streets, is like entering a vault—a tomb of worldly thoughts and pleasures, pointing to the skies. The slow and solemn movements of the Priests, as grave as they are unmeaning, resemble the spells of necromancers; the pictures and statues of the dead contrast strangely with the faces of the living; the chaunt of the Priests sounds differently from the jargon of the common people; the little oratories and cells, with some lone mourner kneeling before a crucifix, every thing leads the thoughts to another world, to death, the resurrection, and a judgment to come. The walls and ornaments of this noble pile are left in a state of the most lamentable neglect, and the infinite number of paltry, rush-bottomed chairs, huddled together in the aisle, are just like the rubbish of a broker’s shop. The great bell of the Cathedral is the most deep-mouthed I ever heard, ‘swinging slow with sullen roar,’ rich and sonorous, and hoarse with counting the flight of a thousand years. It is worth while to visit France, were it only to see Rouen.
Chapter III
THE ROAD TO PARIS.—They vaunt much of the Lower Road from Rouen to Paris; but it is not so fine as that from Dieppe to Rouen. You have comparatively few trees, the soil is less fertile, and you are (nearly the whole way) tantalized with the vast, marshy-looking plains of Normandy, with the Seine glittering through them like a snake, and a chain of abrupt chalky hills, like a wall or barrier bounding them. There is nothing I hate like a distant prospect without any thing interesting in it—it is continually dragging the eye a wearisome journey, and repaying it with barrenness and deformity. Yet a Frenchman contrived to make a panegyric on this scene, after the fashion of his countrymen, and with that sort of tripping jerk which is peculiar to their minds and bodies—‘Il y a de l’eau, il y a des bois, il y a des montagnes, il y a de la verdure,’ &c. It is true, there were all these things in the abstract, or as so many detached particulars to make a speech about, which was all that he wanted. A Frenchman’s eye for nature is merely nominal. I find that with the novelty, or on farther experience my enthusiasm for the country and the people, palls a little. During a long day’s march (for I was too late, or rather too ill to go by the six o’clock morning Diligence,) I got as tired of toiling on under a scorching sun and over a dusty road, as if I had been in England. Indeed, I could almost have fancied myself there, for I scarcely met with a human being to remind me of the difference. I at one time encountered a horseman mounted on a demipique saddle, in a half military uniform, who seemed determined to make me turn out of the foot-path,[13] or to ride over me. This looked a little English, though the man did not. I should take him for an Exciseman. I suppose in all countries people on horseback give themselves airs of superiority over those who are on foot. The French character is not altogether compounded of the amiable, any more than the English is of the respectable. In judging of nations, it will not do to deal in mere abstractions. In countries, as well as individuals, there is a mixture of good and bad qualities; yet we may attempt to strike a general balance, and compare the rules with the exceptions. Soon after my equestrian adventure (or escape,) I met with another pleasanter one; a little girl, with regular features and dark eyes, dressed in white, and with a large straw bonnet flapping over her face, was mounted behind a youth who seemed to be a relation, on an ass—a common mode of conveyance in this country. The young lad was trying to frighten her, by forcing the animal out of its usual easy pace into a canter, while she, holding fast, and between laughing and crying, called out in a voice of great sweetness and naïveté—‘Il n’est pas bon trotter, il n’est pas bon trotter.’ There was a playfulness in the expression of her terrors quite charming, and quite French. They turned down an avenue to a villa a little way out of the road. I could not help looking after them, and thinking what a delightful welcome must await such innocence, such cheerfulness, and such dark sparkling eyes! Mais allons. These reflections are perhaps misplaced: France is not at present altogether the land of gallantry or sentiment, were one ever so much disposed to them.
Within half a mile of Louviers (which is seven leagues from Rouen) a Diligence passed me on the road at the full speed of a French Diligence, rolling and rumbling on its way over a paved road, with five clumsy-looking horses, and loaded to the top like a Plymouth van. I was to stop at Louviers, at the Hotel de Mouton, and to proceed to Paris by the coach the next day; for I was told there was no conveyance onwards that day, and I own that this apparition of a Diligence in full sail, and in broad day (when I had understood there were none but night coaches) surprised me. I was going to set it down in ‘my tables,’ that there is no faith to be placed in what they say at French inns. I quickened my pace in hopes of overtaking it while it changed horses. The main street of Louviers appeared to me very long and uneven. On turning a corner, the Hotel de Mouton opened its gates to receive me, the Diligence was a little farther on, with fresh horses just put to and ready to start (a critical and provoking dilemma;) I hesitated a moment, and at last resolved to take my chance in the Diligence, and seeing Paris written on the outside, and being informed by Monsieur le Conducteur, that I could stop at Evreux for the night, I took the rest for granted, and mounted in the cabriolet, where sat an English gentleman (one of those with whom I had come over in the steam-boat,) solitary and silent. My seating myself in the opposite corner of the cabriolet (which is that part of a French Diligence which is placed in front, and resembles a post-chaise in form and ease,) did not break the solitude or the silence. In company, two negatives do not make an affirmative. I know few things more delightful than for two Englishmen to loll in a post-chaise in this manner, taking no notice of each other, preserving an obstinate silence, and determined to send their country to Coventry.[14] We pretended not to recognise each other, and yet our saying nothing proved every instant that we were not French. At length, about half way, my companion opened his lips, and asked in thick, broken French, ‘How far it was to Evreux?’ I looked at him, and said in English, ‘I did not know.’ Not another word passed, yet, I dare say, both of us had a very agreeable time of it, as the Diligence moved on to Evreux, making reflections on the national character, and each thinking himself an exception to its absurdities, an instance of its virtues; so easy is it always (and more particularly abroad) to fancy ourselves free from the errors we witness in our neighbours. It is this, indeed, which makes us so eager to detect them, as if to see what is wrong was the same thing as being in the right!
At Evreux, I found I had gone quite out of my road, and that there was no conveyance to Paris till the same hour the next night. I was a good deal mortified and perplexed at this intelligence, but found some consolation at the Office where I obtained it, from casually hearing the name of my companion, which is a great point gained in travelling. Of course, the discovery is pleasant, if it is a name you are acquainted with; or if not, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing it is some one you do not know, and so are made easy on that head. I bespoke a bed, and was shown into the common room, where I took coffee, and had what the Scotch call a brandered fowl for supper. The room was papered with marine landscapes, so that you seemed sitting in the open air with boats and trees and the sea-shore all round you, and Telemachus and Calypso, figures landing or embarking on halcyon seas. Even a country-inn in France is classical. It is a pity that the English are so dull and sluggish, ‘like the fat weed that roots itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf,’ that they cannot lend themselves to these airy fictions, always staring them in the face, but rather turn away from them with an impatience and disgust proportioned to the elegance of the design and the tax levied on their taste. A Frenchman’s imagination, on the contrary, is always at the call of his senses. The latter have but to give the hint, and the former is glad to take it! I tired every one out by inquiring my best mode of getting on to Paris next day; and being slow to believe that my only way was to go back to Louviers, like a fool as I had come, a young Frenchman took compassion on my embarrassment, and offered to be my interpreter, ‘as he spoke both languages.’ He said, ‘I must feel great pain in not being able to express myself.’ I said ‘None but in giving others the trouble to understand me.’ He shook his head, I spoke much too fast for him; he apologized for not being able to follow me from want of habit, though he said, ‘he belonged to a society of twelve at Paris, where they spoke English every evening generally.’ I said, ‘we were well matched,’ and when this was explained to him, he repeated the word ‘matched,’ with a ludicrous air of distress, at finding that there was an English phrase which was not familiarised to him in ‘the society of twelve, where they spoke the English language generally every evening.’ We soon came to a dead stand, and he turned to my English companion in the cabriolet, on whom he bestowed, for the rest of the evening, the tediousness of any ‘society of twelve.’ I could not help laughing to see my luckless fellow-countryman, after one or two attempts to rally and exchange remarks, reduced to the incessant repetition of his melancholy ‘oui,’ and my lively Parisian rioting in the advantage he had obtained over a straggling Englishman, gliding from topic to topic without contradiction or control, passing from the population of Paris to the Beaux-Arts, from the Belles-Lettres to politics, running the circle of knowledge, and finding himself still at home, faltering at the mention of the Allies and the Bourbons, and rising with outstretched arm and continuous voice at the name of Buonopar-r (like the eagle soaring on level wing)—getting nearer and nearer the victim of his volubility, seizing my poor friend by the button, and at last retiring abruptly, as if afraid of a re-action, and wishing him ‘good repose’ for the evening. Happy member of a ‘society of twelve!’ Apt representative of thirty millions of people, who build their self-esteem on the basis of vanity, and weave happiness out of breath, which costs them nothing! Why envy, why wish to interrupt them, like a mischievous school-boy, who throws a great stone into a pond full of frogs, who croak their delights ‘generally every evening,’ and who, the instant the chasm is closed, return to the charge with unabated glee and joyous dissonance!
I must not forget to mention a favourable trait in the common French character. I asked to speak to the Conducteur, and something like a charge of deception was brought, from which he defended himself strenuously. The whole kitchen and stable-yard gathered round to hear a dispute, which was by no means waged with equal war of words. They understood that I was disappointed, and had made a ridiculous mistake. Not a word or look of derision was observable in the whole group; but rather a rising smile, suppressed for fear of giving pain, and a wish to suggest some expedient on the occasion. In England, I will venture to say, that a Frenchman, in similar circumstances, stammering out a grave charge of imposition against a coachman, and evidently at a loss how to proceed, would have been hooted out of the place, and it would have been well for him if he had escaped without broken bones. If the French have the vices of artificial refinement and effeminacy, the English still retain too many of those which belong to a barbarous and savage state.
I returned to Louviers the next morning under the safe conduct of my former guide, where I arrived half an hour before the necessary time, found myself regularly booked for Paris, with five francs paid on account; and after a very comfortable breakfast, where I was waited on by a pretty, modest-looking brunette (for the French country-girls are in general modest-looking,) I took my seat in the fourth place of the Diligence. Here I met with every thing to annoy an Englishman. There was a Frenchman in the coach, who had a dog and a little boy with him, the last having a doll in his hands, which he insisted on playing with; or cried and screamed furiously if it was taken from him. It was a true French child; that is, a little old man, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Laughing Boy, with eyes glittering like the glass ones of his favourite doll, with flaxen ringlets like hers, with cheeks as smooth and unhealthy, and a premature expression of cunning and self-complacency. A disagreeable or ill-behaved child in a stage coach is a common accident, and to be endured. But who but a Frenchman would think of carrying his dog? He might as well drag his horse into the coach after him. A Frenchman (with leave be it spoken) has no need to take a dog with him to ventilate the air of a coach, in which there are three other Frenchmen. It was impossible to suffer more from heat, from pressure, or from the periodical ‘exhalation of rich-distilled perfumes.’ If the French have lost the sense of smell, they should reflect (as they are a reflecting people) that others have not. Really, I do not see how they have a right in a public vehicle to assault one in this way by proxy, any more than to take one literally by the nose. One does not expect from the most refined and polished people in Europe grossnesses that an Esquimaux Indian would have too much sense and modesty to be guilty of. If the presence of their dogs is a nuisance, the conversation of their masters is often no less offensive to another sense—both are suffocating to every body but themselves, and worthy of each other. Midas whispered his secret to the reeds, that whispered it again. The French, if they are wise, ought not to commit the national character on certain delicate points in the manner they do. While they were triumphant, less caution might be necessary: but no people can afford at the same time to be odious as well as contemptible in the eyes of their enemies. We dined at Mantes, where the ordinary was plentiful and excellent, and where a gentleman of a very prepossessing appearance took up the conversation (descanting on the adventures of a shooting-party the day before) in that gay, graceful, and animated tone, which I conceive to be characteristic of the best French society. In talking and laughing, he discovered (though a young man) the inroads which hot soups and high-seasoned ragouts had made in his mouth, with the same alacrity and good-humour as if he had to shew a complete set of the whitest teeth. We passed an interesting village, situated on the slope of a hill, with a quaint old tower projecting above it, and over-hanging the Seine. Not far from the high road stands Rosny, once the seat of the celebrated Sully. The approach to the capital on the side of St. Germain’s is one continued succession of imposing beauty and artificial splendour, of groves, of avenues, of bridges, of palaces, and of towns like palaces, all the way to Paris, where the sight of the Thuilleries completes the triumph of external magnificence, and oppresses the soul with recollections not to be borne or to be expressed!—Of them, perhaps, hereafter.
In the coach coming along, a Frenchman was curious to learn of a Scotch gentleman, who spoke very respectable French, whether Lord Byron was much regretted in England? He said there was much beauty in his writings, but too much straining after effect. He added, that there was no attempt at effect in Racine. This with the French is a final appeal in matters of poetry and taste. A translation of Lord Byron’s Works complete is common in all the shops here. I am not sure whether an English Poet ought to be proud of this circumstance or not. I also saw an Elegy on his Death advertised, said to be written by his friend, Sir Thomas More. How oddly the French combine things! There is a Sir Thomas More in English History and Letters; but that Sir Thomas More is not this Mr. Thomas Moore—‘let their discreet hearts believe it!’
Chapter IV
The first thing I did when I got to Paris was to go to the Louvre. It was indeed ‘first and last and midst’ in my thoughts. Well might it be so, for it had never been absent from them for twenty years. I had gazed myself almost blind in looking at the precious works of art it then contained—should I not weep myself blind in looking at them again, after a lapse of half a life—or on finding them gone, and with them gone all that I had once believed and hoped of human kind? What could ever fill up that blank in my heart, fearful to think upon—fearful to look upon? I was no longer young; and he who had collected them, and ‘worn them as a rich jewel in his Iron Crown,’ was dead, a captive and vanquished; and with him all we who remained were ‘thrown into the pit,’ the lifeless bodies of men, and wore round our necks the collar of servitude, and on our foreheads the brand, and in our flesh and in our souls the stain of thraldom and of the born slaves of Kings. Yet thus far had I come once more ‘to dream and be an Emperour!’ Thou sacred shrine of God-like magnificence, must not my heart fail and my feet stumble, as I approach thee? How gladly would I kneel down and kiss thy threshold; and crawl into thy presence, like an Eastern slave! For here still linger the broken remains and the faded splendour of that proud monument of the triumphs of art and of the majesty of man’s nature over the mock-majesty of thrones! Here Genius and Fame dwell together; ‘School calleth unto School,’ and mighty names answer to each other; that old gallery points to the long, dim perspective of waning years, and the shadow of Glory and of Liberty is seen afar off. In pacing its echoing floors, I hear the sound of the footsteps of my youth, and the dead start from their slumbers!... In all the time that I had been away from thee, and amidst all the changes that had happened in it, did I ever forget, did I ever profane thee? Never for a moment or in thought have I swerved from thee, or from the cause of which thou wert the pledge and crown. Often have I sought thee in sleep, and cried myself awake to find thee, with the heart-felt yearnings of intolerable affection. Still didst thou haunt me, like a passionate dream—like some proud beauty, the queen and mistress of my thoughts. Neither pain nor sickness could wean me from thee—
‘My theme in crowds, my solitary pride.’
In the tangled forest or the barren waste—in the lowly hovel or the lofty palace, thy roofs reared their vaulted canopy over my head, a loftier palace, an ampler space—a ‘brave o’er-hanging firmament,’ studded with constellations of art. Wherever I was, thou wert with me, above me and about me; and didst ‘hang upon the beatings of my heart,’ a vision and a joy unutterable. There was one chamber of the brain (at least) which I had only to unlock and be master of boundless wealth—a treasure-house of pure thoughts and cherished recollections. Tyranny could not master, barbarism slunk from it; vice could not pollute, folly could not gainsay it. I had but to touch a certain spring, and lo! on the walls the divine grace of Guido appeared free from blemish—there were the golden hues of Titian, and Raphael’s speaking faces, the splendour of Rubens, the gorgeous gloom of Rembrandt, the airy elegance of Vandyke, and Claude’s classic scenes lapped the senses in Elysium, and Poussin breathed the spirit of antiquity over them. There, in that fine old lumber-room of the imagination, were the Transfiguration, and the St. Peter Martyr, with its majestic figures and its unrivalled landscape background. There also were the two St. Jeromes, Domenichino’s and Correggio’s—there ‘stood the statue that enchants the world’—there were the Apollo and the Antinous, the Laocoon, the Dying Gladiator, Diana and her Fawn, and all the glories of the antique world—
‘There was old Proteus coming from the sea, And aged Triton blew his wreathed horn.’
But Legitimacy did not ‘sit squat, like a toad,’ in one corner of it, poisoning the very air, and keeping the free-born spirit aloof from it!
There were one or two pictures (old favourites) that I wished to see again, and that I was told still remained. I longed to know whether they were there, and whether they would look the same. It was fortunate I arrived when I did; for a week later the doors would have been shut against me, on occasion of the death of the King. His bust is over the door, which I had nearly mistaken for a head of Memnon—or some Egyptian God. After passing through the modern French Exhibition (where I saw a picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and a vile farrago of Bourbon-Restoration pictures,) I came within sight of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, which is at present only railed off. One or two English stragglers alone were in it. The coolness and stillness were contrasted with the bustle, the heat, and the smell of the common apartments. My thoughts rushed in and filled the empty space. Instead of the old Republican door-keepers, with their rough voices and affectation of equality, a servant in a court-livery stood at the gate. On presenting myself, I inquired if a Monsieur Livernois (who had formerly ushered me into this region of enchantment) were still there; but he was gone or dead. My hesitation and foreign accent, with certain other appeals, procured me admittance. I passed on without further question. I cast a glance forward, and found that the Poussins were there. At the sight of the first, which I distinctly recollected (a fine green landscape, with stately ruins,) the tears came into my eyes, and I passed an hour or two in that state of luxurious enjoyment, which is the highest privilege of the mind of man, and which perhaps makes him amends for many sorrows. To my surprise, instead of finding the whole changed, I found every thing nearly in its place, as I proceeded through the first compartments, which I did slowly, and reserving the Italian pictures for a bon bouche. The colours even seemed to have been mellowed, and to have grown to the walls in the last twenty years, as if the pictures had been fixed there by the cramping-irons of Victory, instead of hanging loose and fluttering, like so much tattered canvass, at the sound of English drums, and breath of Prussian manifestoes. Nothing could be better managed than the way in which they had blended the Claudes and Poussins alternately together—the ethereal refinement and dazzling brilliancy of the one relieving and giving additional zest to the sombre, grave, massive character of the other. Claude Lorraine pours the spirit of air over all objects, and new-creates them of light and sunshine. In several of his master-pieces which are shewn here, the vessels, the trees, the temples and middle distances glimmer between air and solid substance, and seem moulded of a new element in nature. No words can do justice to their softness, their precision, their sparkling effect. But they do not lead the mind out of their own magic circle. They repose on their own beauty; they fascinate with faultless elegance. Poussin’s landscapes are more properly pictures of time than of place. They have a fine moral perspective, not inferior to Claude’s aërial one. They carry the imagination back two or four thousand years at least, and bury it in the remote twilight of history. There is an opaqueness and solemnity in his colouring, assimilating with the tone of long-past events: his buildings are stiff with age; his implements of husbandry are such as would belong to the first rude stages of civilization; his harvests are such (as in the Ruth and Boaz) as would yield to no modern sickle; his grapes (as in the Return from the Promised Land) are a load to modern shoulders; there is a simplicity and undistinguishing breadth in his figures; and over all, the hand of time has drawn its veil. Poussin has his faults; but, like all truly great men, there is that in him which is to be found nowhere else; and even the excellences of others would be defects in him. One picture of his in particular drew my attention, which I had not seen before. It is an addition to the Louvre, and makes up for many a flaw in it. It is the Adam and Eve in Paradise, and it is all that Mr. Martin’s picture of that subject is not. It is a scene of sweetness and seclusion ‘to cure all sadness but despair.’ There is the freshness of the first dawn of creation, immortal verdure, the luxuriant budding growth of unpruned Nature’s gifts, the stillness and the privacy, as if there were only those two beings in the world, made for each other, and with this world of beauty for the scene of their delights. It is a Heaven descended upon earth, as if the finger of God had planted the garden with trees and fruits and flowers, and his hand had watered it! One fault only can be found by the critical eye. Perhaps the scene is too flat. If the ‘verdurous wall of Paradise’ had upreared itself behind our first parents, it would have closed them in more completely, and would have given effect to the blue hills that gleam enchantment in the distance. Opposite, ‘in darkness visible,’ hangs the famous landscape of the Deluge by the same master-hand, a leaden weight on the walls with the ark ‘hulling’ on the distant flood, the sun labouring, wan and faint, up the sky, and the heavens, ‘blind with rain,’ pouring down their total cisterns on the weltering earth. Men and women and different animals are struggling with the wide-spread desolation; and trees, climbing the sides of rocks, seem patiently awaiting it above. One would think Lord Byron had transcribed his admirable account of the Deluge in his Heaven and Earth from this noble picture, which is in truth the very poetry of painting.—One here finds also the more unequivocal productions of the French school (for Claude and Poussin[15] were in a great measure Italian,) Le Brun, Sebastian Bourdon, some of Le Sueur’s expressive faces, and the bland expansive style of Philip Champagne—no mean name in the history of art. See, in particular, the exquisite picture of the Sick Nun, (the Nun was his own daughter, and he painted this picture as a present to the Convent, in gratitude for her recovery,)—and another of a Religious Communion, with attendants in rich dresses.
One finds no considerable gap, till one comes to the Antwerp pictures; and this yawning chasm is not ill supplied by the Luxembourg pictures, those splendid solecisms of Rubens’s art. Never was exhibited a greater union of French flutter and Gothic grace, of borrowed absurdity and inherent power. He has made a strange jumble of the Heathen mythology, his own wives, and the mistresses of Louis XIII. His youthful Gods are painted all light and air, and figure in quaintly enough, with some flaunting Dowager dressed in the height of the fashion in the middle of the 17th century, or with some strapping quean (his queens are queans) with her robes of rich stuffs slipping off her shoulders, and displaying limbs that, both for form and hue, provoke any feeling but indifference. His groups spring from the bold licentious hand of genius; and decorated in the preposterous finery of courtly affectation, puzzle the sense. I do not think with David (the celebrated French painter) that they ought to be burnt, but he has himself got possession of their old places in the Luxembourg, and perhaps he is tolerably satisfied with this arrangement. A landscape with a rainbow by Rubens (a rich and dazzling piece of colouring) that used to occupy a recess half-way down the Louvre, was removed to the opposite side. The singular picture (the Defeat of Goliath, by Daniel Volterra,) painted on both sides on slate, still retained its station in the middle of the room. It had hung there for twenty years unmolested. The Rembrandts keep their old places, and are as fine as ever, with their rich enamel, their thick lumps of colour, their startling gloom, and bold execution—their ear-rings, their gold-chains, and fur-collars, on which one is disposed to lay furtive hands, so much have they the look of wealth and substantial use! The Vandykes are more light and airy than ever. There is a whole heap of them; and among the rest that charming portrait of an English lady with a little child (as fine and true a compliment as was ever paid to the English female character,) sustained by sweetness and dignity, but with a mother’s anxious thoughts passing slightly across her serene brow. The Cardinal Bentivoglio (which I remember procuring especial permission to copy, and left untouched, because, after Titian’s portraits, there was a want of interest in Vandyke’s which I could not get over,) is not there.[16] But in the Dutch division, I found Weenix’s game, the battle-pieces of Wouvermans, and Ruysdael’s sparkling woods and waterfalls without number. On these (I recollect as if it were yesterday) I used, after a hard day’s work, and having tasked my faculties to the utmost, to cast a mingled glance of surprise and pleasure, as the light gleamed upon them through the high casement, and to take leave of them with a non equidem invideo, miror magis.
In the third or Italian division of the Gallery, there is a profusion of Albanos, with Cupids and naked Nymphs, which are quite in the old French taste. They are certainly very pleasing compositions, but from the change produced by time, the figures shew like beauty-spots on a dark ground. How inferior is he to Guido, the painter of grace and sentiment, two of whose master-pieces enchanted me anew, the Annunciation and the Presentation in the Temple. In each of these there is a tenderness, a delicacy of expression like the purest affection, and every attitude and turn of a limb is conscious elegance and voluptuous refinement. The pictures, the mind of the painter, are instinct and imbued with beauty. It is worth while to have lived to have produced works like these, or even to have seen and felt their power! Painting of old was a language which its disciples used not merely to denote certain objects, but to unfold their hidden meaning, and to convey the finest movements of the soul into the limbs or features of the face. They looked at nature with a feeling of passion, with an eye to expression; and this it was that, while they sought for outward forms to communicate their feelings, moulded them into truth and beauty, and that surrounds them with an atmosphere of thought and sentiment. To admire a fine old picture is itself an act of devotion, and as we gaze, we turn idolaters. The moderns are chiefly intent on giving certain lines and colours, the mask or material face of painting, and leave out the immortal part of it. Thus a modern Exhibition Room (whether French or English) has a great deal of shew and glitter, and a smell of paint in it. In the Louvre we are thrown back into the presence of our own best thoughts and feelings, the highest acts and emanations of the mind of man breathe from the walls, shadowy tears and sighs there keep vigils, and the air within it is divine!
The ideal is no less observable in the portraits than in the histories here. Look at the portrait of a man in black, by Titian (No. 1210). There is a tongue in that eye, a brain beneath that forehead. It is still; but the hand seems to have been just placed on its side; it does not turn its head, but it looks towards you to ask, whether you recognise it or not? It was there to meet me, after an interval of years, as if I had parted with it the instant before. Its keen, steadfast glance staggered me like a blow. It was the same—how was I altered! I pressed towards it, as it were, to throw off a load of doubt from the mind, or as having burst through the obstacles of time and distance that had held me in torturing suspense. I do not know whether this is not the most striking picture in the room—the least common-place. There may be other pictures more delightful to look at; but this seems, like the eye of the Collection, to be looking at you and them. One might be tempted to go up and speak to it! The allegorical portrait of the Marchioness of Guasto is still here, transparent with tenderness and beauty—Titian’s Mistress, that shines like a crystal mirror—the Entombing of Christ, solemn, harmonious as the coming on of evening—the Disciples at Emmaus—and the Crowning with Thorns, the blood here and there seeming ready to start through the flesh-colour, which even English artists have not known enough how to admire. The Young Man’s Head, with a glove that used so much to delight, I confess, disappointed me, and I am convinced must have been painted upon. There are other Titians, and a number of Raphaels—the Head of a Student muffled in thought—his own delightful Head (leaning on its hand) redolent of youthful genius, and several small Holy Families, full of the highest spirit and unction. There are also the three Marys with the Dead Body of Christ, by L. Caracci; the Salutation by Sebastian del Piombo; the noble Hunting-piece, by Annibal Caracci; the fine Landscapes of Domenichino (that in particular of the story of Hercules and Achelous, with the trunk of a tree left in the bed of a mountain-torrent); and a host besides, ‘thick as the autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa,’ and of the same colour! There are so many of these select and favourite pictures left, that one does not all at once feel the loss of others which are more common in prints and in the mouth of fame; and the absence of which may be considered as almost an advantage for a first recognition and revival of old associations. But afterwards we find a want of larger pictures to answer to the magnitude of the Collection, and to sustain the balance of taste between the Italian and the other schools. We have here as fine Claudes and Poussins as any in the world, but not as fine Raphaels, Correggios, Domenichinos, as there are elsewhere,—as were once here. There are wanting, to make the gallery complete, six or eight capital pictures, the Transfiguration, the St. Peter Martyr, &c.; and among others (not already mentioned,) the Altarpiece of St. Mark, by Tintoret, and Paul Veronese’s Marriage at Cana. With these it had been perfect, ‘founded as the rock, as broad and general as the casing air;’ without these it is ‘coop’d and cabin’d in by saucy doubts and fears.’ The largest Collection in the world ought to be colossal, not only in itself, but in its component parts. The Louvre is a quarter of a mile in length, and equal (as it is) to Mr. Angerstein’s, the Marquess of Stafford’s, the Dulwich Gallery, and Blenheim put together. It was once more than equal to them in every circumstance to inspire genius or console reflection. We still see the palace of the Thuilleries from the windows, with the white flag waving over it: but we look in vain for the Brazen Horses on its gates, or him who placed them there, or the pale bands of warriors that conquered in the name of liberty and of their country!
Chapter V
The gravity of the French character is a no less remarkable (though a less obvious) feature in it than its levity. The last is the quality that strikes us most by contrast to ourselves, and that comes most into play in the intercourse of common life; and therefore we are generally disposed to set them down as an altogether frivolous and superficial people. It is a mistake which we shall do well to correct on farther acquaintance with them; or if we persist in it, we must call to our aid an extraordinary degree of our native blindness and obstinacy. We ought never to visit their Theatres, to walk along their streets, to enter their houses, to look in their faces (when they do not think themselves observed,) to open their books, or take a view of their picture-galleries. Sterne seems to have been the first, as well as last traveller, who found out their weak side in this respect. ‘If the French have a fault, Monsieur le Comte,’ says he, ‘it is that they are too serious.’ This contradiction in their character has been little noticed, and they have never had the credit of it, though it stares one in the face everywhere. How we are to piece the two extremes together is another question. Is it that their whole character is a system of inconsequentiality? Or are they gay and trifling in serious matters, serious only in trifles? Or are their minds more of the cameleon-cast, that reflects all objects alike, whether grave or gay, and give themselves up entirely, and without resistance, to the prevailing impulse? Or is it owing to a want of comprehension, so that they are incapable of correcting one feeling by another, and thus run into extremes? Or that they have a greater scope and variety of resources, excelling us as much in gravity as in want of thought, outdoing us in tragedy and comedy, as they betake themselves to each, in the poetical or in the prosaic departments of life, only that they sometimes make a transposition of the two characters a little oddly, and pass from the one to the other without our well knowing why?
I have been frequently puzzled with this exception to the butterfly, airy, thoughtless, fluttering character of the French (on which we compliment ourselves,) and never more so than the first night I went to the theatre. The order, the attention, the decorum were such as would shame any London audience. The attention was more like that of a learned society to a lecture on some scientific subject, than of a promiscuous crowd collected together merely for amusement, and to pass away an idle hour. There was a professional air, an unvarying gravity in the looks and demeanour of the whole assembled multitude, as if every one had an immediate interest in the character of the national poetry, in the purity of the French accent, in the propriety of the declamation, in the conceptions of the actor, and the developement of the story, instead of its presenting a mob of idle boys and girls, of ignorant gaping citizens, or supercilious box-lobby loungers, affecting a contempt for the performance, and for every one around them. The least noise or irregularity called forth the most instant and lively disapprobation; and the vivacity of the French character displayed itself to advantage in earnest gesticulations and expressions of impatience. Not only was the strictest silence observed, as soon as the curtain drew up, but no one moved or attempted to move. The spell thrown over the customary or supposed restlessness and volatility of the French was in this respect complete. The uniformity of the appearance was indeed almost ridiculous; for the rows of heads in the seats of the pit no more stirred or projected the breadth of a finger beyond the line, than those of a regiment of recruits on parade, or than if a soldier were stationed to keep each chin in its place. They may be reduced to the state of automatons; but there were no traces of the monkey character left.[17] If the performance had been at Court, greater propriety could not have been maintained; but it was a French play (one of Racine’s) and acted before a Parisian audience: this seemed to be enough to ensure it a proper reception. One would suppose, from their interest in dramatic representations, that the French were a nation of actors. Perhaps it may be asked, ‘Is not that the case? and is it not their vanity, their own desire to shine, or their sympathy with whatever or whoever is a candidate for applause, that accounts for their behaviour?’ At least, their vanity makes them grave; and if it is this which rivets their attention, and silences their eternal loquacity, it must be allowed to produce effects which others would do well to imitate from better motives, if they have them![18]
The play was not much; but there seemed to be an abstract interest felt in the stage as such, in the sound of the verse, in the measured step of the actors, in the recurrence of the same pauses, and of the same ideas; in the correctness of the costume, in the very notion of the endeavour after excellence, and in the creation of an artificial and imaginary medium of thought. If the French are more susceptible of immediate, sensible impressions, it would appear, judging from their behaviour at their own theatres, that they are also more sensible of reflex and refined ones. The bare suggestion of an interesting topic is to them interesting: it may be said, on the most distant intimation, to excite the most lively concern, and to collect their scattered spirits into a focus. Their sensibility takes the alarm more easily; their understanding is quicker of hearing. With them, to the sublime or pathetic there is but one step—the name; the moment the subject is started, they ‘jump at’ the catastrophe and all the consequences. We are slow, and must have a thing made out to us in striking instances, and by successive blows. We are sluggish, and must be lifted up to the heights of a factitious enthusiasm by the complicated machinery of a powerful imagination: we are obstinate, not to say selfish, and require to be urged over the abyss of mental anguish by the utmost violence of terror and pity. But with the French, all this is a matter of course, a verbal process. Tears, as well as smiles, cost them less than they do us. Words are more nearly allied to things in their minds; the one have a more vital being, though it does not follow that the other are altogether empty and barren of interest. But the French seem (in their dramatic exhibitions) not to wish to get beyond, or (shall I speak it more plainly?) to have no faculty for getting beyond the abstract conception, the naked proposition of the subject. They are a people (I repeat it) void and bare of the faculty of imagination, if by this we mean the power of placing things in the most novel and striking point of view; and they are so for this reason, that they have no need of it. It is to them a superfluity—a thankless toil. Their quick, discursive apprehension runs on before, and anticipates and defeats the efforts of the highest poetry. They are contented to indulge in all the agony or ecstacy of sounding and significant common-places. The words charming, delicious, indescribable, &c. excite the same lively emotions in their minds as the most vivid representations of what is said to be so; and hence verbiage and the cant of sentiment fill the place, and stop the road to genius—a vague, flaccid, enervated rhetoric being too often substituted for the pith and marrow of truth and nature. The greatest facility to feel or to comprehend will not produce the most intense passion, or the most electrical expression of it. There must be a resistance in the matter to do this—a collision, an obstacle to overcome. The torrent rushes with fury from being impeded in its course: the lightning splits the gnarled oak. There is no malice in this statement; but I should think they may themselves allow it to be an English version of the truth, containing a great deal that is favourable to them, with a saving clause for our own use. The long (and to us tiresome) speeches in French tragedy consist of a string of emphatic and well-balanced lines, announcing general maxims and indefinite sentiments applicable to human life. The poet seldom commits any excesses by giving way to his own imagination, or identifying himself with individual situations and sufferings. We are not now raised to the height of passion, now plunged into its lowest depths; the whole finds its level, like water, in the liquid, yielding susceptibility of the French character, and in the unembarrassed scope of the French intellect. The finest line in Racine, that is, in French poetry, is by common consent understood to be the following:—
Craignez Dieu, mon cher Abner, et ne craignez que Dieu.
That is, Fear God, my dear Abner, and fear only him. A pious and just exhortation, it is true; but, when this is referred to as the highest point of elevation to which their dramatic genius has aspired, though we may not be warranted in condemning their whole region of poetry as a barren waste, we may consider it as very nearly a level plain, and assert, that though the soil contains mines of useful truths within its bosom and glitters with the graces of a polished style, it does not abound in picturesque points of view or romantic interest! It is certain that a thousand such lines would have no effect upon an English audience but to set them to sleep, like a sermon, or to make them commence a disturbance to avoid it. Yet, though the declamation of the French stage is as monotonous as the dialogue, the French listen to it with the tears in their eyes, holding in their breath, beating time to the cadence of the verse, and following the actors with a book in their hands for hours together. The English most assuredly do not pay the same attention to a play of Shakspeare’s, or to any thing but a cock-fight or a sparring-match. This is no great compliment to them; but it makes for the gravity of the French, who have mistaken didactic for dramatic poetry, who can sit out a play with the greatest patience and complacency, that an Englishman would hoot off the stage, or yawn over from beginning to end for its want of striking images and lively effect, and with whom Saturn is a God no less than Mercury! I am inclined to suspect the genius of their religion may have something to do with the genius of their poetry. The first absorbs in a manner their powers of imagination, their love of the romantic and the marvellous, and leaves the last in possession of their sober reason and moral sense. Their churches are theatres; their theatres are like churches. Their fancies are satiated with the mummeries and pageantry of the Catholic faith, with hieroglyphic obscurity and quaint devices; and, when they come to the tangible ground of human affairs, they are willing to repose alike from ornament and extravagance, in plain language and intelligible ideas. They go to mass in the morning to dazzle their senses, and bewilder their imagination, and inflame their enthusiasm; and they resort to the theatre in the evening to seek relief from superstitious intoxication in the prose of poetry, and from Gothic mysteries and gloom, in classic elegance and costume. Be this as it may, the love of the French for Racine is not a feeling of the moment, or left behind them at the theatres; they can quote him by heart, and his sententious, admirable lines occupy the next place in their minds to their amatory poetry. There is nothing unpleasant in a French theatre but a certain infusion of soup-maigre into the composition of the air, (so that one inhales a kind of thin pottage,) and an oily dinginess in the complexions both of the men and women, which shews more by lamp-light. It is not true (as has been said) that their theatres are nearly dark, or that the men stand in the pit. It is true, none but men are admitted into it, but they have seats just the same as with us, and a curious custom of securing their places when they go out, by binding their handkerchiefs round them, so that at the end of the play the benches presented nothing but a row of knotted pocket handkerchiefs. Almost every one returned and sat out the entertainment, which was not a farce, but a sentimental comedy, and a very charming one too, founded on the somewhat national subject of a seduction by an English nobleman in France, and in which the fair sufferer was represented by a young debutante, in natural expression and pathos little inferior to Miss Kelly, (as far as we can translate French into English nature,) but fatter and prettier. So much for their taste in theatricals, which does not incline wholly to puppet-shows and gew-gaws. The Theatre, in short, is the Throne of the French character, where it is mounted on its pedestal of pride, and seen to every advantage. I like to contemplate it there, for it reconciles me to them and to myself. It is a common and amicable ground on which we meet. Their tears are such as others shed—their interest in what happened three thousand years ago is not exclusively French. They are no longer a distinct race or caste, but human beings. To feel towards others as of a different species, is not the way to increase our respect for ourselves or human nature. Their defects and peculiarities, we may be almost sure, have corresponding opposite vices in us—the excellences are confined pretty much to what there is in common.
The ordinary prejudice entertained on this subject in England is, that the French are little better than grown children—
‘Pleas’d with a feather—tickled with a straw—’
full of grimace and noise and shew, lively and pert, but with no turn or capacity for serious thought or continued attention of any kind, and hardly deserving the name of rational beings, any more than apes or jackdaws. They may laugh and talk more than the English; but they read, and, I suspect, think more, taking them as a people. You see an apple-girl in Paris, sitting at a stall with her feet over a stove in the coldest weather, or defended from the sun by an umbrella, reading Racine or Voltaire. Who ever saw such a thing in London as a barrow-woman reading Shakspeare or Fielding? You see a handsome, smart grisette at the back of every little shop or counter in Paris, if she is not at work, reading perhaps one of Marmontel’s Tales, with all the absorption and delicate interest of a heroine of romance. Yet we make doleful complaints of the want of education among the common people, and of the want of reflection in the female character in France. There is something of the same turn for reading in Scotland; but then where is the gaiety or the grace? They are more sour and formal even than the English. The book-stalls all over Paris present a very delightful appearance. They contain neatly-bound, cheap, and portable editions of all their standard authors, which of itself refutes the charge of a want of the knowledge or taste for books. The French read with avidity whenever they can snatch the opportunity. They read standing in the open air, into which they are driven by the want of air at home. They read in garrets and in cellars. They read at one end of a counter, when a person is hammering a lock or a piece of cabinet-work at the other, without taking their eye from the book, or picking a quarrel with the person who is making the noise. Society is the school of education in France; there is a transparency in their intellects as in their atmosphere, which makes the communication of thought or sound more rapid and general. The farina of knowledge floats in the air, and circulates at random. Alas! it ‘quickens, even with blowing.’ A periwig-maker is an orator; a fish-woman is a moralist; a woman of fashion is a metaphysician, armed with all the topics; a pretty woman in Paris, who was not also a blue-stocking, would make little figure in the circles. It would be in vain for her to know how to dispose a knot of ribands or a bunch of flowers in her hair, unless she could arrange a critical and analytical argument in all the forms. It is nothing against her, if she excels in personal and mental accomplishments at the same time. This turn for literary or scientific topics in the women may indeed be accounted for in part from the modes of social intercourse in France; but what does this very circumstance prove, but that an interchange of ideas is considered as one great charm in the society between men and women, and that the thirst of knowledge is not banished by a grosser passion? Knowledge and reason, however, descend; and where the women are philosophers, the men are not quite block-heads or petit-maitres. They are far from being the ignorant smatterers that we pretend. They are not backward at asking for reasons, nor slow in giving them. They have a theory for every thing, even for vice and folly. Their faces again are grave and serious when they are by themselves, as they are gay and animated in society. Their eyes have a vacant, absent stare; their features set or lengthen all at once into ‘the melancholy of Moorditch.’ The Conducteur of the Diligence from Rouen confirmed me agreeably in my theory of the philosophical character of the French physiognomy. With large grey eyes and drooping eye-lids, prominent distended nostrils, a fine Fenelon expression of countenance, and a mouth open and eloquent, with furrowed lines twisted round it like whip-cord, he stood on the steps of the coach, and harangued to the gentlemen within on the bêtise of some voyageur Anglois with the air of a professor, and in a deep sonorous voice, worthy of an oration of Bossuet. I should like to hear a Yorkshire guard, with his bluff, red face, bristly bullet head, little peering eyes, round shoulders, and squeaking voice, ascend into an imaginary rostrum in this manner, wave a florid speculation in one hand, and hold fast by the coach-door with the other, or get beyond an oath, a hearty curse, or his shrewd country gibberish! The face of the French soldiery is a face of great humanity—it is manly, sedate, thoughtful—it is equally free from fierceness and stupidity; and it seems to bear in its eye defeat and victory, the eagle and the lilies! I cannot help adding here, that a French gentleman (un Rentier) who lodges in the hotel opposite to me, passes his time in reading all the morning, dines, plays with his children after dinner, and takes a hand at backgammon with an old gouvernante in the evening. He does not figure away with a couple of horses in the streets like our English jockeys (who really are nothing without a footman behind them,) nor does his wife plague his life out to run after all the new sights. And yet they are from the country. This looks like domestic comfort and internal resources. How many disciples of Rousseau’s Emilius are there in France at the present day? I knew one twenty years ago.
The French are a people who practise the arts and sciences naturally. A shoe-black is the artiste du jour (artist of the day,) and a rat-catcher approaches you under some insidious nom de guerre. Every thing is with them imposing, grave, important. ‘Except (it may be said) what really is so;’ and it may be insinuated, that all their pretensions are equally idly mockery and grimace. Look, then, at their works of science and of art—the one the most comprehensive and exact, the other the most laborious and finished in the world. What are their chemists, their astronomers, their naturalists, their painters, their sculptors? If not the greatest and most inventive geniuses, the most accurate compilers, and the most severe students in their several departments. La Place, Lavoisier, Cuvier, David, Houdon, are not triflers or pretenders. In science, if we have discovered the principles, they have gone more into the details—in art we accuse them of being over-laboured, and of finishing too minutely and mechanically; and they charge us (justly enough) with a want of finesse, and with producing little more than rude sketches and abortive caricatures. Their frigid, anatomical inquiries—their studies after the antique, and acquaintance with all the professional and scientific branches of their art, are notorious—and the care with which they work up their draperies and back-grounds is obvious to every one, and a standing subject of complaint and ridicule to English artists and critics. Their refinement in art, I confess, consists chiefly in an attention to rules and details, but then it does imply an attention to these, which is contrary to our idea of the flighty French character. I remember, some years ago, a young French artist in the Louvre, who was making a chalk-drawing of a small Virgin and Child, by Leonardo da Vinci, and he took eleven weeks to complete it, sitting with his legs astride over a railing, looking up and talking to those about him—consulting their opinion as to his unwearied imperceptible progress—going to the fire to warm his hands, and returning to perfectionate himself! There was a good deal of ‘laborious foolery’ in all this, but still he kept on with it, and did not fly to fifty things one after the other. Another student had undertaken to copy the Titian’s Mistress, and the method he took to do it was to parcel out his canvass into squares like an engraver; after which he began very deliberately, not with the face or hair, but with the first square in the right-hand corner of the picture, containing a piece of an old table. He did not care where he began, so that he went through the whole regularly. C’est égal, is the common reply in all such cases. This continuity of purpose, without any great effort or deep interest, surprises an Englishman. We can do nothing without a strong motive, and without violent exertion. But it is this very circumstance probably that enables them to proceed: they take the matter quite easily, and have not the same load of anxious thought to bear up against, nor the same impatient eagerness to reach perfection at a single stride, to stop them midway. They have not the English air hanging at their backs, like the Old Man of the Sea at Sinbad’s! The same freedom from any thing like morbid humour assists them to plod on like the Dutch from mere phlegm, or to diverge into a variety of pursuits, which is still more natural to them. Horace Vernet has in the present Exhibition a portrait of a lady, (a rival to Sir T. Lawrence’s) and close to it, a battle-piece, equal to Ward or Cooper. Who would not be a Parisian born, to attain excellence with the wish to succeed from mere confidence or indifference to success, to unite such a number of accomplishments, or be equally satisfied without a single one!
The English are over-hasty in supposing a certain lightness and petulance of manner in the French to be incompatible with sterling thought or steady application, and flatter themselves that not to be merry is to be wise. A French lady who had married an Englishman remarkable for his dullness, used to apologise for his silence in company by incessantly repeating ‘C’est toujours Locke, toujours Newton,’ as if these were the subjects that occupied his thoughts. It is well we have these names to appeal to in all cases of emergency; and as far as mere gravity is concerned, let these celebrated persons have been as wise as they would, they could not for the life of them have appeared duller or more stupid than the generality of their countrymen. The chief advantage I can find in the English over the French comes to this, that though slower, if they once take a thing up, they are longer in laying it down, provided it is a grievance or a sore subject. The reason is, that the French do not delight in grievances or in sore subjects; and that the English delight in nothing else, and battle their way through them most manfully. Their forte is the disagreeable and repulsive. I think they would have fought the battle of Waterloo over again! The English, besides being ‘good haters,’ are dogged and downright, and have no salvos for their self-love. Their vanity does not heal the wounds made in their pride. The French, on the contrary, are soon reconciled to fate, and so enamoured of their own idea, that nothing can put them out of conceit with it. Whatever their attachment to their country, to liberty or glory, they are not so affected by the loss of these as to make any desperate effort or sacrifice to recover them. Their continuity of feeling is such, as to be no enemy to a whole skin. They over-ran Europe like tigers, and defended their own territory like deer. They are a nation of heroes—on this side of martyrdom!
VI. DIALOGUE, FRENCH AND ENGLISH
French.—Have you seen the whole of our Exposition of the present year?—
English.—No, but I have looked over a good part of it. I have been much pleased with many of the pictures. As far as I can judge, or have a right to say so, I think your artists have improved within these few years.
French.—Perhaps so, occasionally, but we have not David and some others.
English.—I cannot say that I miss him much. He had, I dare say, many excellences, but his faults were still more glaring, according to our insular notions of the art. Have you Guerin now? He had just brought out his first picture of Phædra and Hippolitus when I was in Paris formerly. It made a prodigious sensation at the time, and very great things were expected from him.
French.—No, his works are not much spoken of.
English.—The Hippolitus in the picture I speak of was very beautiful; but the whole appeared too much cast in the mould of the antique, and it struck me then that there was a mannerism about it that did not augur favourably for his future progress, but denoted a premature perfection. What I like in your present Exhibition is, that you seem in a great measure to have left this academic manner, and to have adopted a more natural style.
French.—I do not exactly comprehend.
English.—Why, you know the English complain of French art as too laboured and mechanical, as not allowing scope enough for genius and originality, as you retort upon us for being coarse and rustic.
French.—Ah! I understand. There is a picture in the English style; the subject is a Greek massacre, by Rouget. It is an ébauche. It is for effect. There is much spirit in the expression, and a boldness of execution, but every part is not finished. It is like a first sketch, or like the painting of the scenes at our theatres. He has another picture here.
English.—Yes, of great merit in the same style of dashing, off-hand, explosive effect. He is something between our Ward and Haydon. But that is not what I mean. I do not wish you to exchange your vices for ours. We are not as yet models in the FINE ARTS. I am only glad that you imitate us, as it is a sign you begin to feel a certain deficiency in yourselves. There is no necessity for grossness and extravagance, any more than for being finical or pedantic. Now there is a picture yonder, which I think has broken through the trammels of the modern French school, without forfeiting its just pretensions to classical history. It has the name of Drölling on it. What, pray, is the subject of it?
French.—It is Ulysses conducting Polyxena to the sacrifice. He has one much better at the Luxembourg.
English.—I don’t know; I have not seen that, but this picture appears to me to be a very favourable specimen of the present French school. It has great force, considerable beauty, symmetry of form, and expression; and it is animated flesh, not coloured stone. The action and gestures into which the figures throw themselves, seem the result of life and feeling, and not of putting casts after the antique into Opera attitudes.
French.—We do not think much of that picture. It has not been perfected.
English.—Perhaps it passes a certain conventional limit, and is borne away by the impulse of the subject; and of that the most eminent among the French artists might be thought to be as much afraid as the old lady at Court was that her face would fall in pieces, if her features relaxed into a smile. The Ulysses is poor and stiff: the nurse might be finer; but I like the faces of the two foremost figures much; they are handsome, interesting, and the whole female group is alive and in motion.
French.—What do you think of the picture by Gerard, No. 745, of the Meeting between Louis XIV. and the Spanish Ambassador? It is greatly admired here.
English.—It appeared to me (as I passed it just now) to be a picture of great bustle and spirit; and it looks as if Iris had dipped her woof in it, the dresses are so gay and fine. Really, the show of variegated colours in the principal group is like a bed of tulips. That is certainly a capitally painted head of a priest stooping forward in a red cap and mantle.
French.—And the youth near him no less.
English.—The complexion has too much the texture of fruit.
French.—But for the composition—the contrast between youth and age is so justly marked. Are you not struck with the figure of the Spanish Ambassador? His black silk drapery is quite in the Italian style.
English.—I thought Gerard had been chiefly admired for a certain delicacy of expression, more than for his colouring or costume. He was a favourite painter of the Empress Josephine.
French.—But in the present subject there is not much scope for expression.
English.—It is very true; but in a picture of the same crowded and courtly character (The last Moments of Henry IV.,) the painter has contrived to introduce a great deal of beauty and tenderness of expression in the appearance of some of the youthful attendants. This is a more shewy and finely painted drawing-room picture; but that appears to me to have more character in it. It has also the merit of being finished with great care. I think the French excel in small histories of the domestic or ornamental kind. Here, for instance, is a very pretty picture by Madame Hersent, 897, Louis XIV. taking leave of his Grand-child. It is well painted, the dresses are rich and correct—the monarch has a great deal of negligent dignity mixed with the feebleness of age, the contrast of innocence and freshness in the child is well-managed, and the attendants are decayed beauties and very confidential-looking persons of that period. One great charm of all historical subjects is, to carry us back to the scene and time, which this picture does. Probably from the Age and Court of Louis XVIII. to that of Louis XIV. it is not far for a French imagination to transport itself.
French.—Monsieur, it is so far that we should never have got from the one to the other, if you had not helped us.
English.—So much the worse! But do you not think that a clever picture of the Interior of a Gothic Ruin, 247, (Bouton.[19]) It seems to me as if the artist had been reading Sir Walter Scott. That lofty, ruinous cave looks out on the wintry sea from one of the Shetland Isles. There is a cold, desolate look of horror pervading it to the utmost extremity. But the finishing is, perhaps, somewhat too exact for so wild a scene. Has not the snow, lodged on the broken ledges of the rocks, a little of the appearance of the coat of candied sugar on a twelfth-cake? But how comes the dog in possession of so smart a kennel? It is said in the Catalogue, that by his barking he alarms his master, who saves the poor woman and her infant from perishing. Who would have thought that such a scene as this had a master?
French.—Dogs are necessary everywhere in France: there is no place that we can keep them out of. They are like the machines in ancient poetry—a part of every plot. Poodles are the true désirs: they have ousted even the priests. They may soon set up a hierarchy of their own. They swarm, and are as filthy as an Egyptian religion.
English.—But this is a house-dog, not a lap-dog.
French.—There is no saying—but pass on. Is there any other picture that you like?
English.—Yes, I am much pleased with the one opposite, the Marriage of the Virgin, 268, by Mons. Caminade. It is both elegant and natural. The Virgin kneels in a simple and expressive attitude; in the children there is a playful and healthy aspect, and the grouping is quite like a classic bas-relief. Perhaps, in this respect, it wants depth. Can you tell me, why French painting so much affects the qualities of sculpture in general,—flatness and formality in the groups, and hardness of outline in the single figures?
French.—I cannot answer that question, as it is some time since I left England, where I remained only ten months to perfect myself in the language. You probably think more highly of the next picture: The Establishment of the Enfans Trouvés, by M——?
English.—I am afraid not; for it has the old French flimsiness and flutter. The face of the Foundress resembles a shower of roseate tints. You may be sure, however, that the English in general will approve mightily of it, who like all subjects of charitable institutions. I heard an English lady just now in raptures with the naked children seated on the blankets, calling them affectionately, ‘poor little dears!’ We like subjects of want, because they afford a relief to our own sense of comfortlessness, and subjects of benevolence, because they soothe our sense of self-importance—a feeling of which we stand greatly in need.
French.—What is your opinion of the portrait of Louis XVIII., by Gerard?
English.—It seems to have been painted after dinner, and as if his Majesty was uneasy in his seat—the boots might have been spared.
French.—We have a picture by one of your compatriots—the Chevalier Lawrence—
English.—Yes, the portrait of a Lady, in the next room. It was accounted one of the best portraits in our Somerset-house Exhibition last summer.
French.—But there is a portrait of a French Lady, placed as a companion to it, by Horace Vernet, which is thought better.
English.—I have no doubt. But I believe, in England, the preference would be given the contrary way.
French.—May I ask on what ground, Sir?
English.—Let me ask, did you ever happen to sit to have a cast of your head taken? Because I conceive that precisely the same heated, smooth, oily, close, stifling feeling that one’s face has just before the mask is taken off, is that which is conveyed by the texture and look of a finished French portrait, generally speaking, and by this in particular. I like the Head of a Lady, by Guerin (838), on the opposite side of the room, better. It is clear, cold, blue and white, with an airy attitude, and firm drawing. There is no attempt to smother one with dingy flesh rouged over.
French.—But have you seen our miniatures? The English miniatures, I imagine, are not good.
English.—At least, we have a good many of them. I know an English critic, who would at least count you up thirty eminent English miniature-painters at a breath,—all first-rate geniuses; so differently do we view these things on different sides of the Channel! In truth, all miniatures must be much alike. There can be no such thing as an English miniature, that is, as a coarse, slovenly daub in little. We finish when we cannot help it. We do not volunteer a host of graces, like you; but we can make a virtue of necessity. There was a Mr. Hayter, who painted resplendent miniatures, perfect mirrors of the highest heaven of beauty; but he preferred the English liberty of sign-post painting in oil. I observe among your miniatures several enamels and copies from the Old Masters in the Louvre. Has not the coming to them the effect of looking through a window? What a breadth, what a clearness, what a solidity? How do you account for this superiority? I do not say this invidiously, for I confess it is the same, whenever copies are introduced by stealth in our English Exhibition.
French.—I perceive, Sir, you have a prejudice in favour of the English style of art.
English.—None at all; but I cannot think our faults any justification of yours, or yours of ours. For instance, here is a landscape by a countryman of mine, Mr. Constable (No. 358). Why then all this affectation of dashing lights and broken tints and straggling lumps of paint, which I dare say give the horrors to a consummate French artist? On the other hand, why do not your artists try to give something of the same green, fresh, and healthy look of living nature, without smearing coats of varnish over raw dabs of colour (as we do), till the composition resembles the ice breaking up in marshy ground after a frosty morning? Depend upon it, in disputes about taste, as in other quarrels, there are faults on both sides.
French.—The English style has effect, but it is gross.
English.—True: yet in the inner rooms there are some water-colour landscapes, by Copley Fielding, which strike me as uniting effect with delicacy, particularly No. 360, with some beautiful trees fringing the fore-ground. I think our painters do best when they are cramped in the vehicle they employ. They are abusers of oil-colours.
French.—I recollect the name; but his works did not seem to me to be finished.
English.—They are finished as nature is finished: that is, the details are to be found in them, though they do not obtrude themselves. You French require every thing to be made out like pin’s points or botanic specimens of leaves and trees. Your histories want life, and your landscapes air. I could have sworn the little fishing-piece (No. —) was English. It is such a daub, and yet has such a feeling of out-of-door scenery in it.
French.—You do not flatter us. But you allow our excellence in sculpture.
English.—There is an admirable study of a little girl going into a bath, by Jacquot. It is so simple, true, and expressive, I thought it might be Chantry’s. I cannot say I saw any others that pleased me. The Eurydice, by Nantreuil, is a French Eurydice. It is an elegantly-formed female, affecting trifling airs and graces in the agonies of death. Suppose we return to the pictures in the Green Room. There is nothing very remarkable here, except the portrait of an artist by himself, which looks for all the world as if it fed upon its own white lead.
French.—Do like the figure of a woman in one corner in the Massacre of the Innocents? The artist has done all he could to propitiate the English taste. He has left his work in a sufficiently barbarous and unfinished state.
English.—But he has taken pains to throw expression, originality, and breadth into it. With us it would be considered as a work of genius. I prefer it much to any thing by our artists of the same kind, both for the tone, the wild lofty character, and the unctuous freedom of the pencilling. There is a strange hurly-burly in the background, and a lurid tone over the whole picture. This is what we mean by imagination—giving the feeling that there is in nature. You mean by imagination the giving something out of it—such as the Nymph (No. —) appearing to the River God. The young lady is a very charming transparency, or gauze-drawing; and the River God is a sturdy wooden statue, painted over; but I would ask you, is there any thing in the picture that takes you beyond a milliner’s shop in the Palais-royal, or a tea-garden in the neighbourhood of St. Cloud? The subject of Locusta poisoning a young slave, by Figalon, is, I think, forcibly and well treated. The old sorceress is not an every day person. The French too seldom resort to the grace of Deformity. Yet how finely it tells! They are more timid and fastidious than the ancients, whom they profess to imitate. There is one other large historical composition in the room which I am partial to; and yet the faces, the manners, the colouring, every thing in it is French. It is the Henry the Fourth pardoning the peasants who have supplied the besieged in Paris with food. That head of a young woman near the middle is particularly fine, and in the happiest style of French art. Its effect against the sky is picturesque; it is handsome, graceful, sensitive, and tinged with an agreeable florid hue.
French.—But what is your opinion of Horace Vernet’s Battle-piece?
English.—May I ask the subject?
French.—It is the battle of Mont-Mirail, after the return from Russia.
English.—Good: I was sadly afraid it was the Battle of Mont St. Jean. We ought to blot it forever from our history, if we have been, or intend to be, free. But I did not know but some Frenchman might be found to stain his canvass with it, and present it to M. le Vicomte Chateaubriand.
French.—But I speak of the painting, Sir.
English.—It is something in the same style, but hardly so clever as the picture of the Queen’s Trial, by Hayter. Did you see that when you were in London?
French.—No, Sir.
English.—Then we cannot enter into the comparison.
French.—That is true.
English.—We never had a school of painting till the present day. Whether we have one at present, will be seen in the course of the winter. Yours flourished one hundred and fifty years ago. For, not to include Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorraine in it, (names that belong to time and nature,) there were Philip Champagne, Jouvenet, Le Sueur, whose works are surely unequalled by the present race of artists, in colouring, in conception of the subject, in the imitation of nature, and in picturesque effect. As a proof of it, they become their places, and look well in the Louvre. A picture of David’s would be an eye-sore there. You are familiar with their works?
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.
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.
Of their want of ideal passion, or of the poetry of painting, and tendency to turn every thing either into comic or tragic pantomime, the picture of Cain after the Murder of Abel, by Paul Guerin, is a striking example. This composition does not want power. It would be disingenuous to say so. The artist has done what he meant in it. What, then, has he expressed? The rage of a wild beast, or of a maniac gnashing his teeth, and rushing headlong down a precipice to give vent to a momentary frenzy; not the fixed inward anguish of a man, withered by the curse of his Maker, and driven out into the wide universe with despair and solitude and unavailing remorse for his portion. The face of his wife, who appears crouched behind him, possesses great beauty and sweetness. But the sweetness and beauty are kept quite distinct. That is, grief absorbs some of the features, while others retain all their softness and serenity. This hypercriticism would not have been possible, if the painter had studied the expression of grief in nature. But he took a plaster-model, and tried to melt it into becoming woe!
I have said enough to explain my objections to the grand style of French art; and I am sure I do not wish to pursue so unpleasant a subject any farther. I only wish to hint to my countrymen some excuse for not admiring these pictures, and to satisfy their neighbours that our want of enthusiasm is not wholly owing to barbarism and blindness to merit. It may be asked then, ‘Is there nothing to praise in this collection?’ Far from it. There are many things excellent and admirable, with the drawbacks already stated, and some others that are free from them. There is Le Thiere’s picture of the Judgment of Brutus; a manly, solid, and powerful composition, which was exhibited some years ago in London, and is, I think, decidedly superior to any of our West’s. In Horace Vernet’s Massacre of the Mamelukes, no English critic will deny the expression of gloomy ferocity in the countenance of the Sultan, or refuse to extol the painting of the drapery of the Negro, with his back to the spectator, which is, perhaps, equal to any thing of the Venetian School, and done (for a wager) from real drapery. Is not ‘the human face divine’ as well worth studying in the original as the dyes and texture of a tunic? A small picture, by Delacroix, taken from the Inferno, Virgil and Dante in the boat, is truly picturesque in the composition and the effect, and shews a real eye for Rubens and for nature. The forms project, the colours are thrown into masses. Gerard’s Cupid and Psyche is a beautiful little picture, and is indeed as beautiful, both in composition and expression, as any thing of the kind can well be imagined; I mean, that it is done in its essential principles as a design from or for sculpture. The productions of the French school make better prints than pictures. Yet the best of them look like engravings from antique groups or cameos.[23] There is also a set of small pictures by Ducis, explaining the effects of Love on the study of Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry, taken from appropriate subjects, and elegantly executed. Here French art appears in its natural character again, courtly and polished, and is proportionably attractive. Perhaps it had better lay aside the club of Hercules, and take up the distaff of Omphale; and then the women might fairly beat the men out of the field, as they threaten almost to do at present. The French excel in pieces of light gallantry and domestic humour, as the English do in interiors and pig-styes. This appears to me the comparative merit and real bias of the two nations, in what relates to the productions of the pencil; but both will scorn the compliment, and one of them may write over the doors of their Academies of Art—‘Magnis excidit ausis.’ The other cannot even say so much.
VIII. NATIONAL ANTIPATHIES
The prejudice we entertain against foreigners is not in the first instance owing to any ill-will we bear them, so much as to the untractableness of the imagination, which cannot admit two standards of moral value according to circumstances, but is puzzled by the diversity of manners and character it observes, and made uneasy in its estimate of the propriety and excellence of its own. It seems that others ought to conform to our way of thinking, or we to theirs; and as neither party is inclined to give up their peculiarities, we cut the knot by hating those who remind us of them. We get rid of any idle, half-formed, teazing, irksome sense of obligation to sympathise with or meet foreigners half way, by making the breach as wide as possible, and treating them as an inferior species of beings to ourselves. We become enemies, because we cannot be friends. Our self-love is annoyed by whatever creates a suspicion of our being in the wrong; and only recovers its level by setting down all those who differ from us as thoroughly odious and contemptible.
It is this consideration which makes the good qualities of other nations, in which they excel us, no set-off to their bad ones, in which they fall short of us; nay, we can forgive the last much sooner than the first. The French being a dirty people is a complaint we very often bring against them. This objection alone, however, would give us very little disturbance; we might make a wry face, an exclamation, and laugh it off. But when we find that they are lively, agreeable, and good-humoured in spite of their dirt, we then know not what to make of it. We are angry at seeing them enjoy themselves in circumstances in which we should feel so uncomfortable; we are baulked of the advantage we had promised ourselves over them, and make up for the disappointment by despising them heartily, as a people callous and insensible to every thing like common decency. In reading Captain Parry’s account of the Esquimaux Indian woman, who so dexterously trimmed his lamp by licking up half the train-oil, and smearing her face and fingers all over with the grease, we barely smile at this trait of barbarism. It does not provoke a serious thought; for it does not stagger us in our opinion of ourselves. But should a fine Parisian lady do the same thing (or something like it) in the midst of an eloquent harangue on the infinite superiority of the French in delicacy and refinement, we should hardly restrain our astonishment at the mixture of incorrigible grossness and vanity. Unable to answer her arguments, we should begin to hate her person: her gaiety and wit, which had probably delighted us before, would be changed into forwardness, flippancy, and impertinence; from seeing it united with so many accomplishments, we should be led to doubt whether sluttishness was not a virtue, and should remove the doubt out of court by indulging a feeling of private resentment, and resorting to some epithet of national abuse. The mind wishes to pass an act of uniformity for all its judgments: in defiance of every day’s experience, it will have things of a piece, and where it cannot have every thing right or its own way, is determined to have it all wrong.
A Frenchman, we will say, drops what we think a frivolous remark, which excites in us some slight degree of impatience: presently after, he makes a shrewd, sensible observation. This rather aggravates the mischief, than mends it; for it throws us out in our calculations, and confounds the distinction between sense and nonsense in our minds. A volley of unmeaning declamation or frothy impertinence causes us less chagrin than a single word that overturns some assertion we had made, or puts us under the necessity of reversing, or imposes on us the still more unwelcome task of revising our conclusions. It is easy in this case to save ourselves the trouble by calling our antagonist knave or fool; and the temptation is too strong, when we have a whole host of national prejudices at our back to justify us in so concise and satisfactory a mode of reasoning. A greater fund of vivacity and agreeable qualities in our neighbours is not sure to excite simple gratitude or admiration; it much oftener excites envy, and we are uneasy till we have quieted the sense of our deficiency by construing the liveliness of temper or invention, with which we cannot keep pace, into an excess of levity, and the continued flow of animal spirits into a species of intoxication or insanity. Because the French are animated and full of gesticulation, they are a theatrical people; if they smile and are polite, they are like monkeys—an idea an Englishman never has out of his head, and it is well if he can keep it between his lips.[24] No one assuredly would appear dull and awkward, who can help it. Many an English belle, who figures at home in the first circles of fashion and is admired for her airy, thoughtless volubility, is struck dumb, and looks a mere dowdy (as if it were a voluntary or assumed transformation of character) the moment she sets foot on French ground; and the whispered sounds, lourde or elle n’est pas spirituelle, lingering in her ears, will not induce her to dissuade her husband (if he is a Lord or Member of Parliament) from voting for a French war, and are answered by the thunders of our cannon on the French coast! We even quarrel with the beauty of French women, because it is not English. If their features are regular, we find fault with their complexions; and as to their expression, we grow tired of that eternal smile upon their faces; though their teeth are white, why should they be always shewing them? Their eyes have an unpleasant glitter about them; and their eye-brows, which are frequently black and arched, are painted and put on! In short, no individual, no nation is liked by another for the advantages it possesses over it in wit or wisdom, in happiness or virtue. We despise others for their inferiority, we hate them for their superiority; and I see no likelihood of an accommodation at this rate. The English go abroad; and when they come back, they brood over the civilities or the insults they have received with equal discontent. The gaiety of the Continent has thrown an additional damp upon their native air, and they wish to clear it by setting fire to a foreign town or blowing up a foreign citadel. We are then easy and comfortable for a while. We think we can do something, that is, violence and wrong; and should others talk of retaliating, we say with Lord Bathurst, ‘Let them come!—our fingers tingling for the fray, and finding that nothing rouses us from our habitual stupor like hard blows. Defeated in the arts of peace, we get in good humour with ourselves by trying those of war. Ashamed to accost a lady, we dare face a bastion—without spirit to hold up our heads, we are too obstinate to turn our backs—and give ourselves credit for being the greatest nation in the world, because our Jack Tars (who defend the wooden walls of Old England—the same that we afterwards see with sore arms and wooden legs, begging and bawling about our streets) are the greatest blackguards on the face of the globe; because our Life Guardsmen, who have no brains to lose, are willing to have them knocked out, and because with the incessant noise and stir of our steam-engines and spinning-jennies (for having no wish to enjoy, we are glad to work ourselves to death) we can afford to pay all costs!
What makes the matter worse, is the idle way in which we abstract upon one another’s characters. We are struck only with the differences, and leave the common qualities out of the question. This renders a mutual understanding hopeless. We put the exceptions for the rule. If we meet with any thing odd and absurd in France, it is immediately set down as French and characteristic of the country, though we meet with a thousand odd and disagreeable things every day in England (that we never met before) without taking any notice of them. There is a wonderful keeping in our prejudices; we reason as consistently as absurdly upon the confined notions we have taken up. We put the good, wholesome, hearty, respectable qualities into one heap and call it English, and the bad, unwholesome, frivolous, and contemptible ones into another heap, and call it French; and whatever does not answer to this pretended sample, we reject as spurious and partial evidence. Our coxcomb conceit stands over the different races of mankind, like a smart serjeant of a regiment, and drills them into a pitiful uniformity, we ourselves being picked out as the élite du corps, and the rest of the world forming the forlorn hope of humanity. One would suppose, to judge from the conversation of the two nations, that all Frenchmen were alike, and that all Englishmen were personified by a particular individual, nicknamed John Bull. The French have no idea that there is any thing in England but roast-beef and plum-pudding, and a number of round, red faces, growing fat and stupid upon such kind of fare; while our traditional notion of the French is that of soup-maigre and wooden shoes, and a set of scare-crow figures corresponding to them. All classes of society and differences of character are by this unfair process consolidated into a sturdy, surly English yeoman on the one side of the Channel, or are boiled down and evaporate into a shivering, chattering valet-de-chambre, or miserable half-starved peasant on the other. It is a pleasant way of settling accounts and taking what we please for granted. It is a very old method of philosophizing, and one that is quite likely to last!
If we see a little old hump-backed withered Frenchman about five feet high, tottering on before us on a pair of spindle-shanks, with white thread stockings, a shabby great-coat, and his hair done up into a queue, his face dry, grey, and pinched up, his cheeks without blood in them, his eyes without lustre, and his body twisted like a corkscrew, we point to this grotesque figure as a true Frenchman, as the very essence of a Parisian, and an edifying vestige of the ancient régime and of the last age, before the French character was sophisticated. It does not signify that just before we had passed a bluff, red-faced, jolly-looking coachman or countryman, six feet four inches high, having limbs in proportion, and able to eat up any two ordinary Englishmen. This thumping make-weight is thrown out of the scale, because it does not help out our argument, or confirm our prejudices. This huge, raw-boned, heavy, knock-kneed, well-fed, shining-faced churl makes no impression on our minds, because he is not French, according to our idea of the word; or we pass him over under the pretext that he ought to be an Englishman. But the other extreme we seize upon with avidity and delight; we dandle it, we doat upon it, we make a puppet of it to the imagination; we speak of it with glee, we quote it as a text, we try to make a caricature of it; our pens itch to describe it as a complete specimen of the French nation, and as a convincing and satisfactory proof, that the English are the only people who are of sound mind and body, strong wind and limb, and free from the infirmities of a puny constitution, affectation, and old age! An old woman in France, with wrinkles and a high-plaited cap, strikes us as being quite French, as if the old women in England did not wear night-caps, and were not wrinkled. In passing along the streets, or through the walks near Paris, we continually meet a gentleman and lady whom we take for English, and they turn out to be French; or we fancy that they are French, and we find on a nearer approach, or from hearing them speak, that they are English. This does not at all satisfy us that there is no such marked difference between the two nations as we are led to expect; but we fasten on the first lusus naturæ we can find out as a striking representative of the universal French nation, and chuckle over and almost hug him to our bosoms as having kindly come to the relief of our wavering prejudices, and as an undoubted proof of our superiority to such a set of abortions as this, and of our right to insult and lord it over them at pleasure! If an object of this kind (as it sometimes happens) asks charity with an air of briskness and politesse, and does not seem quite so wretched as we would have him, this is a further confirmation of our theory of the national conceit and self-sufficiency; and his cheerfulness and content under deformity and poverty are added to his catalogue of crimes![25] We have a very old and ridiculous fancy in England, that all Frenchmen are or ought to be lean, and their women short and crooked; and when we see a great, fat, greasy Frenchman waddling along and ready to burst with good living, we get off by saying that it is an unwholesome kind of fat; or, if a Frenchwoman happens to be tall and straight, we immediately take a disgust at her masculine looks, and ask if all the women in France are giantesses?
It is strange we cannot let other people alone who concern themselves so little about us. Why measure them by our standard? Can we allow nothing to exist for which we cannot account, or to be right which has not our previous sanction? The difficulty seems to be to suspend our judgments, or to suppose a variety of causes to produce a variety of effects. All men must be alike—all Frenchmen must be alike. This is a portable theory, and suits our indolence well. But, if they do not happen to come exactly into our terms, we are angry, and transform them into beasts. Our first error lies in expecting a number of different things to tally with an abstract idea, or general denomination, and we next stigmatize every deviation from this standard by a nickname. A Spaniard, who has more gravity than an Englishman, is an owl; a Frenchman, who has less, is a monkey. I confess, this last simile sticks a good deal in my throat; and at times it requires a stretch of philosophy to keep it from rising to my lips. A walk on the Boulevards is not calculated to rid an Englishman of all his prejudices or of all his spleen. The resemblance to an English promenade afterwards makes the difference more mortifying. There is room to breathe, a footpath on each side of the road, and trees over your head. But presently the appearance of a Bartlemy-fair all the year round, the number of little shabby stalls, the old iron, pastry, and children’s toys; the little white lapdogs, with red eyes, combing and washing; the mud and the green trees, wafting alternate odours; the old women sitting like terra cotta figures; the passengers running up against you, (most of them so taken up with themselves that they seem like a crowd of absent people!) the noise, the bustle, the flutter, the hurry without visible object; the vivacity without intelligible meaning; the loud and incessant cry of ‘Messieurs’ from a bawling charlatan inviting you to some paltry, cheating game, and a broad stare or insignificant grin from the most ill-bred and ill-looking of the motley set at the appearance of an Englishman among them; all this jumble of little teazing, fantastical, disagreeable, chaotic sensations really puts one’s patience a little to the test, and throws one a little off one’s guard. I was in this humour the other day, and wanted some object to conduct off a superfluity of rising irritability, when, at a painted booth opposite, I saw a great lubberly boy in an ecstacy of satisfaction. He had on a red coat, a huge wig of coarse yellow hair, and with his hat was beating a monkey in the face, dressed en militaire—grinning, jabbering, laughing, screaming, frantic with delight at the piteous aspect and peevish gestures of the animal; while a tall showman, in a rusty blue coat and long pig-tail, (which might have been stolen from the monkey) looked on with severe complacency and a lofty pride in the bizarrerie, and the ‘mutually reflected charities’ of the scene. The trio (I am vexed to think it) massed themselves in my imagination, and I was not sorry to look upon them as a little national group, well-matched, and tricked out alike in pretensions to humanity.[26]
I was relieved from this fit of misanthropy, by getting into the shade of the barrier-wall, and by meeting a man, (a common French mechanic,) carrying a child in his arms, and the mother by its side, clapping her hands at it, smiling, and calling out ‘Mon petit ami!’ with unmingled and unwearied delight. There was the same over-animation in talking to the child as there would have been in talking to a dog or a parrot. But here it gave pleasure instead of pain, because our sympathies went along with it. I change my opinion of the French character fifty times a day, because, at every step, I wish to form a theory, which at the next step, is contradicted. The ground seems to me so uncertain—the tenure by which I hold my opinions so frail, that at last I grow ashamed of them altogether—of what I think right, as of what I think wrong.
To praise or to blame is perhaps equally an impertinence. While we are strangers to foreign manners and customs, we cannot be judges; it would take almost a life to understand the reasons and the differences; and by the time we can be supposed to do this, we become used to them, and in some sense parties concerned. The English are the fools of an hypothesis, as the Scotch are of a system. We must have an opinion—right or wrong; but, in that case, till we have the means of knowing whether it is right or wrong, it is as well to have a qualified one. We may at least keep our temper, and collect hints for self-correction; we may amuse ourselves in collecting materials for a decision that may never be passed, or will have little effect, even when it is, and may clear our eyesight from the motes and beams of prejudice by looking at things as they occur. Our opinions have no great influence on others; but the spirit in which we form them has a considerable one on our own happiness. It is of more importance to ourselves than to the French, what we think of them. It would be hard if a mental obliquity on their parts should ‘thrust us from a level consideration,’ or some hasty offence taken at the outset should shut up our eyes, our ears, and understandings for the rest of a journey, that we have commenced for no other purpose than to be spectators of a new and shifting scene, and to have our faculties alike open to impressions of all sorts.
What Englishman has not seen the Cemetery of Père la Chaise? What Englishman will undertake either to condemn or entirely approve it, unless he could enter completely into the minds of the French themselves? The approach to it (a little way out of Paris) is literally ‘garlanded with flowers.’ You imagine yourself in the neighbourhood of a wedding, a fair, or some holiday-festival. Women are sitting by the road-side or at their own doors, making chaplets of a sort of yellow flowers, which are gathered in the fields, baked, and will then last a French ‘Forever.’ They have taken ‘the lean abhorred monster,’ Death, and strewed him o’er and o’er with sweets; they have made the grave a garden, a flower-bed, where all Paris reposes, the rich and the poor, the mean and the mighty, gay and laughing, and putting on a fair outside as in their lifetime. Death here seems life’s playfellow, and grief and smiling content sit at one tomb together. Roses grow out of the clayey ground; there is the urn for tears, the slender cross for faith to twine round; the neat marble monument, the painted wreaths thrown upon it to freshen memory, and mark the hand of friendship. ‘No black and melancholic yew-trees’ darken the scene, and add a studied gloom to it—no ugly death’s heads or carved skeletons shock the sight. On the contrary, some pretty Ophelia, as general mourner, appears to have been playing her fancies over a nation’s bier, to have been scattering ‘pansies for thoughts, rue for remembrances.’ But is not the expression of grief, like hers, a little too fantastical and light-headed? Is it not too much like a childish game of Make-Believe? Or does it not imply a certain want of strength of mind, as well as depth of feeling, thus to tamper with the extremity of woe, and varnish over the most serious contemplation of mortality? True sorrow is manly and decent, not effeminate or theatrical. The tomb is not a baby-house for the imagination to hang its idle ornaments and mimic finery in. To meet sad thoughts, and overpower or allay them by other lofty and tender ones, is right; but to shun them altogether, to affect mirth in the midst of sighing, and divert the pangs of inward misfortune by something to catch the eye and tickle the sense, is what the English do not sympathize with. It is an advantage the French have over us. The fresh plants and trees that wave over our graves; the cold marble that contains our ashes; the secluded scene that collects the wandering thoughts; the innocent, natural flowers that spring up, unconscious of our loss—objects like these at once cherish and soften our regrets; but the petty daily offerings of condolence, the forced liveliness and the painted pride of the scene before us, are like galvanic attempts to recall the fleeting life—they neither flatter the dead nor become the living! One of the most heartless and flimsy extravagances of the New Eloise, is the attempt made to dress up the daughter of Madame d’Orbe like Julia, and set her in her place at the table after her death. Is not the burying-ground of the Père la Chaise tricked out and over-acted much on the same false principle, as if there were nothing sacred from impertinence and affectation? I will not pretend to determine; but to an English taste it is so. We see things too much, perhaps, on the dark side; they see them too much (if that is possible) on the bright. Here is the tomb of Abelard and Eloise—immortal monument, immortal as the human heart and poet’s verse can make it! But it is slight, fantastic, of the olden time, and seems to shrink from the glare of daylight, or as if it would like to totter back to the old walls of the Paraclete, and bury its quaint devices and its hallowed inscriptions in shadowy twilight. It is, however, an affecting sight, and many a votive garland is sprinkled over it. Here is the tomb of Ney, (the double traitor) worthy of his fate and of his executioner;—and of Massena and Kellerman. There are many others of great note, and some of the greatest names—Molière, Fontaine, De Lille. Chancellors and charbottiers lie mixed together, and announce themselves with equal pomp. These people have as good an opinion of themselves after death as before it. You see a bust with a wreath or crown round its head—a strange piece of masquerade—and other tombs with a print or miniature of the deceased hanging to them! Frequently a plain marble slab is laid down for the surviving relatives of the deceased, waiting its prey in expressive silence. This is making too free with death, and acknowledging a claim which requires no kind of light to be thrown upon it. We should visit the tombs of our friends with more soothing feelings, without marking out our own places beside them. But every French thought or sentiment must have an external emblem. The inscriptions are in general, however, simple and appropriate. I only remarked one to which any exception could be taken; it was a plain tribute of affection to some individual by his family, who professed to have ‘erected this modest monument to preserve his memory forever!’ What a singular idea of modesty and eternity! So the French, in the Catalogue of the Louvre, in 1803, after recounting the various transmigrations of the Apollo Belvidere in the last two thousand years (vain warnings of mutability!) observed, that it was at last placed in the Museum at Paris, ‘to remain there forever.’ Alas! it has been gone these ten years.
Chapter IX
Mademoiselle Mars (of whom so much has been said) quite comes up to my idea of an accomplished comic actress. I do not know that she does more than this, or imparts a feeling of excellence that we never had before, and are at a loss how to account for afterwards (as was the case with our Mrs. Jordan and Mrs. Siddons in opposite departments,) but she answers exactly to a preconception in the mind, and leaves nothing wanting to our wishes. I had seen nothing of the kind on our stage for many years, and my satisfaction was the greater, as I had often longed to see it. The last English actress who shone in genteel comedy was Miss Farren, and she was just leaving the stage when I first became acquainted with it. She was said to be a faint copy of Mrs. Abington—but I seem to see her yet, glittering in the verge of the horizon, fluttering, gay, and airy, the ‘elegant turn of her head,’ the nodding plume of feathers, the gloves and fan, the careless mien, the provoking indifference—we have had nothing like it since, for I cannot admit that Miss O’Neil had the Lady-Teazle air at all. Out of tragedy she was awkward and heavy. She could draw out a white, patient, pathetic pocket-handkerchief with great grace and simplicity; she had no notion of flirting a fan. The rule here is to do every thing without effort—
‘Flavia the least and slightest toy Can with resistless art employ.’
This art is lost among us; the French still have it in very considerable perfection. Really, it is a fine thing to see Molière’s Misanthrope, at the Theatre Français, with Mademoiselle Mars as Celimène. I had already seen some very tolerable acting at the minor French Theatres, but I remained sceptical; I still had my English scruples hanging about me, nor could I get quite reconciled to the French manner. For mannerism is not excellence. It might be good, but I was not sure of it. Whatever one hesitates about in this way, is not the best. If a thing is first-rate, you see it at once, or the fault is yours. True genius will always get the better of our local prejudices, for it has already surmounted its own. For this reason, one becomes an immediate convert to the excellence of the French school of serious comedy. Their actors have lost little or nothing of their spirit, tact, or skill in embodying the wit and sense of their favourite authors. The most successful passages do not interfere with our admiration of the best samples of English acting, or run counter to our notions of propriety. That which we thought well done among ourselves, we here see as well or better done; that which we thought defective, avoided. The excellence or even superiority of the French over us only confirms the justness of our taste. If the actor might feel some jealousy, the critic can feel none. What Englishman does not read Molière with pleasure? Is it not a treat then to see him well acted? There is nothing to recall our national antipathies, and we are glad to part with such unpleasant guests.
The curtain is scarcely drawn up, when something of this effect is produced in the play I have mentioned, and the entrance of Mademoiselle Mars decides it. Her few first simple sentences—her ‘Mon Ami’ at her lover’s first ridiculous suggestion, the mingled surprise, displeasure, and tenderness in the tone—her little peering eyes, full of languor and archness of meaning—the peaked nose and thin compressed lips, opening into an intelligent, cordial smile—her self-possession—her slightest gesture—the ease and rapidity of her utterance, every word of which is perfectly distinct—the playful, wondering good-nature with which she humours the Misanthrope’s eccentricities throughout, and the finer tone of sense and feeling in which she rejects his final proposal, must stamp her a favourite with the English as well as with the French part of the audience. I cannot see why that should not be the case. She is all life and spirit. Would we be thought entirely without them? She has a thorough understanding and relish of her author’s text. So, we think, have we. She has character, expression, decision—they are the very things we pique ourselves upon. Ease, grace, propriety—we aspire to them, if we have them not. She is free from the simagrées, the unmeaning petulance and petty affectation that we reproach the French with, and has none of the awkwardness, insipidity, or vulgarity that we are so ready to quarrel with at home. It would be strange if the English did not admire her as much as they profess to do. I have seen but one book of travels in which she was abused, and that was written by a Scotchman! Mademoiselle Mars is neither handsome nor delicately formed. She has not the light airy grace, nor the evanescent fragility of appearance that distinguished Miss Farren, but more point and meaning, or more of the intellectual part of comedy.
She was admirably supported in Celimène. Monsieur Damas played the hero of the Misanthrope, and played it with a force and natural freedom which I had no conception of as belonging to the French stage. If they drawl out their tragic rhymes into an endless sing-song, they cut up their comic verses into mincemeat. The pauses, the emphasis, are left quite ad libitum, and are as sudden and varied as in the most familiar or passionate conversation. In Racine they are obliged to make an effort to get out of themselves, and are solemn and well-behaved; in Molière they are at home, and commit all sorts of extravagances with wonderful alacrity and effect. Heroes in comedy, pedants in tragedy, they are greatest on small occasions; and their most brilliant efforts arise out of the ground of common life. Monsieur Damas’s personification of the Misanthrope appeared to me masterly. He had apparently been chosen to fill the part for his ugliness; but he played the lover and the fanatic with remarkable skill, nature, good-breeding, and disordered passion. The rapidity, the vehemence of his utterance and gestures, the transitions from one feeling to another, the fond rapture, the despair, the rage, the sarcastic coolness, the dignified contempt, were much in the style of our most violent tragic representations, and such as we do not see in our serious comedy or in French tragedy. The way in which this philosophic madman gave a loose to the expression of his feelings, when he first suspects the fidelity of his mistress, when he quarrels with her, and when he is reconciled to her, was strikingly affecting. It was a regular furious scolding-bout, with the ordinary accompaniments of tears, screams, and hysterics. A comic actor with us would have made the part insipid and genteel; a tragic one with them pompous and affected. At Drury-lane, Mr. Powell would take the part. Our fine gentlemen are walking suits of clothes; their tragic performers are a professor’s gown and wig: the Misanthrope of Molière, as Monsieur Damas plays it, is a true orator and man of genius. If they pour the oil of decorum over the loftier waves of tragedy, their sentimental comedy is like a puddle in a storm. The whole was admirably cast, and ought to make the English ashamed of themselves, if they are not above attending to any thing that can give pleasure to themselves or other people. Arsinoe, the friend and rival of Celimène, was played by Madame ——, a ripe, full-blown beauty, a prude, the redundancies of whose person and passions are kept in due bounds by tight lacing and lessons of morality. Eliante was a Mademoiselle Menjaud, a very amiable-looking young person, and exactly fitted to be an élève in this School for Scandal. She smiled and blushed and lisped mischief in the prettiest manner imaginable. The man who comes to read his Sonnet to Alceste was inimitable. His teeth had an enamel, his lips a vermilion, his eyes a brilliancy, his smile a self-complacency, such as never met in poet or in peer, since Revolutions and Reviews came into fashion. He seemed to have been preserved in a glass-case for the last hundred and fifty years, and to have walked out of it in these degenerate days, dressed in brocade, in smiles and self-conceit, to give the world assurance of what a Frenchman was! Philinte was also one of those prosing confidants, with grim features, and profound gravity, that are to be found in all French plays, and who, by their patient attention to a speech of half an hour long, acquire an undoubted right to make one of equal length in return. When they were all drawn up in battle-array, in the scene near the beginning, which Sheridan has copied, it presented a very formidable aspect indeed, and the effect was an historical deception. You forgot you were sitting at a play at all, and fancied yourself transported to the court or age of Louis XIV.!—Blest period!—the triumph of folly and of France, when, instead of poring over systems of philosophy, the world lived in a round of impertinence—when to talk nonsense was wit, to listen to it politeness—when men thought of nothing but themselves, and turned their heads with dress instead of the affairs of Europe—when the smile of greatness was felicity, the smile of beauty Elysium—and when men drank the brimming nectar of self-applause, instead of waiting for the opinion of the reading public! Who would not fling himself back to this period of idle enchantment? But as we cannot, the best substitute for it is to see a comedy of Molière’s acted at the Theatre Français. The thing is there imitated to the life.
After all, there is something sufficiently absurd and improbable in this play. The character from which it takes its title is not well made out. A misanthrope and a philanthropist are the same thing, as Rousseau has so well shewn in his admirable criticism on this piece. Besides, what can be so nationally characteristic as the voluntary or dramatic transfers of passion in it? Alceste suspects his mistress’s truth, and makes an abrupt and violent declaration of love to another woman in consequence, as if the passion (in French) went along with the speech, and our feelings could take any direction at pleasure which we bethought ourselves of giving them. And then again, when after a number of outrages and blunders committed by himself, he finds he is in the wrong, and that he ought to be satisfied with Celimène and the world, which turns out no worse than he always thought it; he takes, in pure spite and the spirit of contradiction, the resolution to quit her forever, unless she will agree to go and live with him in a wilderness. This is not misanthropy, but sheer ‘midsummer madness.’ It is a mere idle abstract determination to be miserable, and to make others so, and not the desperate resource of bitter disappointment (for he has received none) nor is it in the least warranted by the proud indignation of a worthy sensible man at the follies of the world (which character Alceste is at first represented to be). It is a gratuitous start of French imagination, which is still in extremes, and ever in the wrong. Why, I would ask, must a man be either a mere courtier and man of the world, pliant to every custom, or a mere enthusiast and maniac, absolved from common sense and reason? Why could not the hero of the piece be a philosopher, a satirist, a railer at mankind in general, and yet marry Celimène, with whom he is in love, and who has proved herself worthy of his regard? The extravagance of Timon is tame and reasonable to this, for Timon had been ruined by his faith in mankind, whom he shuns. Yet the French would consider Timon as a very farouche and outré sort of personage. To be hurried into extremities by extreme suffering and wrong, is with them absurd and shocking: to play the fool without a motive or in virtue of making a set speech, they think in character and keeping. So far, to be sure, we differ in the first principles of dramatic composition. A similar remark might be made on the Tartuffe. This character is detected over and over again in acts of the most barefaced profligacy and imposture; he makes a fine speech on the occasion, and Orgon very quietly puts the offence in his pocket. This credulity to verbal professions would be tolerated on no stage but the French, as natural or probable. Plain English practical good sense would revolt at it as a monstrous fiction. But the French are so fond of hearing themselves talk, that they take a sort of interest (by proxy) in whatever affords an opportunity for an ingenious and prolix harangue, and attend to the dialogue of their plays, as they might to the long-winded intricacies of a law-suit. Mr. Bartolino Saddletree would have assisted admirably at a genuine prosing French Comedy.
Mademoiselle Mars played also in the afterpiece, a sort of shadowy Catherine and Petruchio. She is less at home in the romp than in the fine lady. She did not give herself up to the ‘whole loosened soul’ of farce, nor was there the rich laugh, the sullen caprice, the childish delight and astonishment in the part, that Mrs. Jordan would have thrown into it. Mrs. Orger would have done it almost as well. There was a dryness and restraint, as if there was a constant dread of running into caricature. The outline was correct, but the filling up was not bold or luxuriant. There is a tendency in the lighter French comedy to a certain jejuneness of manner, such as we see in lithographic prints. They do not give full swing to the march of the humour, just as in their short, tripping walk they seem to have their legs tied. Madame Marsan is in this respect superior. There was an old man and woman in the same piece, in whom the quaint drollery of a couple of veteran retainers in the service of a French family was capitally expressed. The humour of Shakspeare’s play, as far as it was extracted, hit very well.—The behaviour of the audience was throughout exemplary. There was no crowd at the door, though the house was as full as it could hold; and indeed most of the places are bespoke, whenever any of their standard pieces are performed. The attention never flags; and the buzz of eager expectation and call for silence, when the curtain draws up, is just the same as with us when an Opera is about to be performed, or a song to be sung. A French audience are like flies caught in treacle. Their wings are clogged, and it is all over with their friskings and vagaries. Their bodies and their minds set at once. They have, in fact, a national theatre and a national literature, which we have not. Even well-informed people among us hardly know the difference between Otway and Shakspeare; and if a person has a fancy for any of our elder classics, he may have it to himself for what the public cares. The French, on the contrary, know and value their best authors. They have Molière and Racine by heart—they come to their plays as to an intellectual treat; and their beauties are reflected in a thousand minds around you, as you see your face at every turn in the Café des Milles-Colonnes. A great author or actor is really in France what one fancies them in England, before one knows any thing of the world as it is called. It is a pity we should set ourselves up as the only reading or reflecting people—ut lucus a non lucendo.[27] But we have here no oranges in the pit, no cry of porter and cider, no jack-tars to encore Mr. Braham three times in ‘The Death of Abercrombie,’ and no play-bills. This last is a great inconvenience to strangers, and is what one would not expect from a play-going people; though it probably arises from that very circumstance, as they are too well acquainted with the actors and pieces to need a prompter. They are not accidental spectators, but constant visitors, and may be considered as behind the scenes.
I saw three very clever comic actors at the Theatre des Variétés on the Boulevards, all quite different from each other, but quite French. One was Le Peintre, who acted a master-printer; and he was a master-printer, so bare, so dingy, and so wan, that he might be supposed to have lived on printer’s ink and on a crust of dry bread cut with an oniony knife. The resemblance to familiar life was so complete and so habitual, as to take away the sense of imitation or the pleasure of the deception. Another was Odry, (I believe,) who with his blue coat, gold-laced hat, and corpulent belly, resembled a jolly, swaggering, good-humoured parish-officer, or the boatswain of an English man-of-war. His éclats de rire, the giddy way in which he ran about the stage (like an overgrown school-boy), his extravagant noises, and his gabbling and face-making were, however, quite in the French style. A fat, pursy Englishman, acting the droll in this manner, would be thought drunk or mad; the Frenchman was only gay! Monsieur Potier played an old lover, and, till he was drest, looked like an old French cook-shop keeper. The old beau transpired through his finery afterwards. But, though the part was admirably understood, the ridicule was carried too far. This person was too meagre, his whisper too inaudible, his attempts at gallantry too feeble and vapid, and the whole too much an exhibition of mere physical decay to make the satire pleasant. There should be at least some revival of the dead; the taper of love ought to throw out an expiring gleam. In the song in praise of Love he threw a certain romantic air into the words, warbling them in a faint demi-voix, and with the last sigh of a youthful enthusiasm fluttering on his lips. This was charming. I could not help taking notice, that during his breakfast, and while he is sipping his coffee, he never once ceases talking to his valet the whole time. The concluding scene, in which, after kneeling to his mistress, he is unable to rise again without the help of his nephew, who surprises him in this situation, and who is also his rival, is very amusing.[28] The songs at this theatre are very pleasing and light, but so short, that they are over almost as soon as begun, and before your ears have a mouthful of sound. This is very tantalizing to us; but the French seem impatient to have the dialogue go on again, in which they may suppose themselves to have a share. I wanted to see Brunet, but did not.
Talma and Mademoiselle Georges (the great props of French tragedy) are not at present here. Talma is at Lyons, and Mademoiselle Georges has retired on a pique into the country, in the manner of some English actresses. I had seen them both formerly, and should have liked to see them again. Talma has little of the formal automaton style in his acting. He has indeed that common fault in his countrymen of speaking as if he had swallowed a handful of snuff; but in spite of this, there is great emphasis and energy in his enunciation, a just conception, and an impressive representation of character. He comes more in contact with nature than our Kemble-school, with more of dignity than the antagonist one. There is a dumb eloquence in his gestures. In Œdipus, I remember his raising his hands above his head, as if some appalling weight were falling on him to crush him; and in the Philoctetes, the expression of excruciating pain was of that mixed mental and physical kind, which is so irresistibly affecting in reading the original Greek play, which Racine has paraphrased very finely. The sounds of his despair and the complaints of his desolate situation were so thrilling, that you might almost fancy you heard the wild waves moan an answer to them. Mademoiselle Georges (who gave recitations in London in 1817) was, at the time I saw her, a very remarkable person. She was exceedingly beautiful, and exceedingly fat. Her fine handsome features had the regularity of an antique statue, with the roundness and softness of infancy. Her well-proportioned arms (swelled out into the largest dimensions) tapered down to a delicate baby-hand. With such a disadvantage there was no want of grace or flexibility in her movements. Her voice had also great sweetness and compass. It either sunk into the softest accents of tremulous plaintiveness, or rose in thunder. The effect was surprising; and one was not altogether reconciled to it at first. She plays at the Odeon, and has a rival at the Theatre Français, Madame Paradol, who is very like her in person. She is an immense woman; when I saw her, I thought it was Mademoiselle Georges fallen away! There are some other tragic actresses here, with the prim airs of a French milliner forty years ago, the hardiesse of a battered gouvernante, and the brazen lungs of a drum-major. Mademoiselle Duchesnois I have not had an opportunity of seeing.
Chapter X
Paris is a beast of a city to be in—to those who cannot get out of it. Rousseau said well, that all the time he was in it, he was only trying how he should leave it. It would still bear Rabelais’ double etymology of Par-ris and Lutetia.[29] There is not a place in it where you can set your foot in peace or comfort, unless you can take refuge in one of their hotels, where you are locked up as in an old-fashioned citadel, without any of the dignity of romance. Stir out of it, and you are in danger of being run over every instant. Either you must be looking behind you the whole time, so as to be in perpetual fear of their hackney-coaches and cabriolets; or, if you summon resolution, and put off the evil to the last moment, they come up against you with a sudden acceleration of pace and a thundering noise, that dislocates your nervous system, till you are brought to yourself by having the same startling process repeated. Fancy yourself in London with the footpath taken away, so that you are forced to walk along the middle of the streets with a dirty gutter running through them, fighting your way through coaches, waggons, and handcarts trundled along by large mastiff-dogs, with the houses twice as high, greasy holes for shop-windows, and piles of wood, green-stalls, and wheelbarrows placed at the doors, and the contents of wash-hand basins pouring out of a dozen stories—fancy all this and worse, and, with a change of scene, you are in Paris. The continual panic in which the passenger is kept, the alarm and the escape from it, the anger and the laughter at it, must have an effect on the Parisian character, and tend to make it the whiffling, skittish, snappish, volatile, inconsequential, unmeaning thing it is. The coachmen nearly drive over you in the streets, because they would not mind being driven over themselves—that is, they would have no fear of it the moment before, and would forget it the moment after. If an Englishman turns round, is angry, and complains, he is laughed at as a blockhead; and you must submit to be rode over in your national character. A horseman makes his horse curvet and capriole right before you, because he has no notion how an English lady, who is passing, can be nervous. They run up against you in the street out of mere heedlessness and hurry, and when you expect to have a quarrel (as would be the case in England) make you a low bow and slip on one side, to shew their politeness. The very walk of the Parisians, that light, jerking, fidgetting trip on which they pride themselves, and think it grace and spirit, is the effect of the awkward construction of their streets, or of the round, flat, slippery stones, over which you are obliged to make your way on tiptoe, as over a succession of stepping-stones, and where natural ease and steadiness are out of the question. On the same principle, French women shew their legs (it is a pity, for they are often handsome, and a stolen glimpse of them would sometimes be charming) sooner than get draggle-tailed; and you see an old French beau generally walk like a crab nearly sideways, from having been so often stuck up in a lateral position between a coach-wheel, that threatened the wholeness of his bones, and a stone-wall that might endanger the cleanliness of his person. In winter, you are splashed all over with the mud; in summer, you are knocked down with the smells. If you pass along the middle of the street, you are hurried out of breath; if on one side, you must pick your way no less cautiously. Paris is a vast pile of tall and dirty alleys, of slaughter-houses and barbers’ shops—an immense suburb huddled together within the walls so close, that you cannot see the loftiness of the buildings for the narrowness of the streets, and where all that is fit to live in, and best worth looking at, is turned out upon the quays, the boulevards, and their immediate vicinity.
Paris, where you can get a sight of it, is really fine. The view from the bridges is even more imposing and picturesque than ours, though the bridges themselves and the river are not to compare with the Thames, or with the bridges that cross it. The mass of public buildings and houses, as seen from the Pont Neuf, rises around you on either hand, whether you look up or down the river, in huge, aspiring, tortuous ridges, and produces a solidity of impression and a fantastic confusion not easy to reconcile. The clearness of the air, the glittering sunshine, and the cool shadows add to the enchantment of the scene. In a bright day, it dazzles the eye like a steel mirror. The view of London is more open and extensive; it lies lower, and stretches out in a lengthened line of dusky magnificence. After all, it is an ordinary town, a place of trade and business. Paris is a splendid vision, a fabric dug out of the earth, and hanging over it. The stately, old-fashioned shapes and jutting angles of the houses give it the venerable appearance of antiquity, while their texture and colour clothe it in a robe of modern splendour. It looks like a collection of palaces, or of ruins! They have, however, no single building that towers above and crowns the whole, like St. Paul’s, (the Pantheon is a stiff, unjointed mass to it)—nor is Notre-Dame at all to be compared to Westminster-Abbey with its Poets’ Corner, that urn full of noble English ashes, where Lord Byron was ashamed to lie. The Chamber of Deputies (formerly the residence of the Dukes of Bourbon) presents a brilliant frontispiece, but it is a kind of architectural abstraction, standing apart, and unconnected with every thing else, not burrowing, like our House of Commons (that true and original model of a Representative Assembly House!) almost underground, and lost among the rabble of streets. The Tuileries is also a very noble pile of buildings, if not a superb piece of architecture. It is a little heavy and monotonous, a habitation for the bodies or for the minds of Kings, but it goes on in a laudable jog-trot, right-lined repetition of itself, without much worth or sense in any single part (like the accumulation of greatness in an hereditary dynasty). At least it ought to be finished (for the omen’s sake), to make the concatenation of ideas inviolable and complete! The Luxembourg, the Hospital of Invalids, the Hall of Justice, and innumerable other buildings, whether public or private, are far superior to any of the kind we have in London, except Whitehall, on which Inigo Jones laid his graceful hands; or Newgate, where we English shine equally in architecture, morals, and legislation. Our palaces (within the bills of mortality) are dog-holes, or receptacles for superannuated Abigails, and tabbies of either species. Windsor (whose airy heights are placed beyond them) is, indeed, a palace for a king to inhabit, or a poet to describe, or to turn the head of a prose-writer. (See Gray’s Ode, and the famous passage in Burke about it.) Buonaparte’s Pillar, in the Place Vendôme, cast in bronze, and with excellent sculptures, made of the cannon taken from the Allies in their long march to Paris, is a fine copy of the antique. A white flag flaps over it. I should like to write these lines at the bottom of it. Probably, Mr. Jerdan will know where to find them.
‘The painful warrior, famoused for fight After a thousand victories once foiled, Is from the book of honour razed quite, And all the rest forgot, for which he toiled.’
The new streets and squares in this neighbourhood are also on an improved plan—there is a double side-path to walk on, the shops are more roomy and richer, and you can stop to look at them in safety. This is as it should be—all we ask is common sense. Without this practical concession on their parts, in the dispute whether Paris is not better than London, it would seem to remain a question, whether it is better to walk on a mall or in a gutter, whether airy space is preferable to fetid confinement, or whether solidity and show together are not better than mere frippery? But for a real West End, for a solid substantial cut into the heart of a metropolis, commend me to the streets and squares on each side of the top of Oxford-street—with Grosvenor and Portman squares at one end, and Cavendish and Hanover at the other, linked together by Bruton, South-Audley, and a hundred other fine old streets, with a broad airy pavement, a display of comfort, of wealth, of taste, and rank all about you, each house seeming to have been the residence of some respectable old English family for half a century past, and with Portland-place looking out towards Hampstead and Highgate, with their hanging gardens and lofty terraces, and Primrose-hill nestling beneath them, in green, pastoral luxury, the delight of the Cockney, the aversion of Sir Walter and his merry-men! My favourite walk in Paris is to the Gardens of the Tuileries. Paris differs from London in this respect, that it has no suburbs. The moment you are beyond the barriers, you are in the country to all intents and purposes. You have not to wade through ten miles of straggling houses to get a breath of fresh air, or a peep at nature. It is a blessing to counterbalance the inconveniences of large cities built within walls, that they do not extend far beyond them. The superfluous population is pared off, like the pie-crust by the circumference of the dish—even on the court side, not a hundred yards from the barrier of Neuilly, you see an old shepherd tending his flock, with his dog and his crook and sheep-skin cloak, just as if it were a hundred miles off, or a hundred years ago. It was so twenty years ago. I went again to see if it was the same yesterday. The old man was gone; but there was his flock by the road-side, and a dog and a boy, grinning with white healthy teeth, like one of Murillo’s beggar-boys. It was a bright frosty noon; and the air was, in a manner, vitreous, from its clearness, its coolness, and hardness to the feeling. The road I speak of, frequented by English jockeys and French market-women, riding between panniers, leads down to the Bois de Boulogne on the left, a delicious retreat, covered with copse-wood for fuel, and intersected by greensward paths and shady alleys, running for miles in opposite directions, and terminating in a point of inconceivable brightness. Some of the woods on the borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire present exactly the same appearance, with the same delightful sylvan paths through them, and are covered in summer with hyacinths and primroses, sweetening the air, enamelling the ground, and with nightingales loading every bough with rich music. It was winter when I used to wander through the Bois de Boulogne formerly, dreaming of fabled truth and good. Somehow my thoughts and feet still take their old direction, though hailed by no friendly greetings:—
‘What though the radiance which was once so bright, Be now for ever vanished from my sight; Though nothing can bring back the hour Of glory in the grass—of splendour in the flower:’—
yet the fever and the agony of hope is over too, ‘the burden and the mystery;’ the past circles my head, like a golden dream; it is a fine fragment of an unfinished poem or history; and the ‘worst,’ as Shakspeare says, ‘returns to good!’ I cannot say I am at all annoyed (as I expected) at seeing the Bourbon court-carriages issuing out with a flourish of trumpets and a troop of horse. It looks like a fantoccini procession, a State mockery. The fine moral lesson, the soul of greatness, is wanting. The legitimate possessors of royal power seem to be playing at Make-Believe; the upstarts and impostors are the true Simon Pures and genuine realities. Bonaparte mounted a throne from the top of the pillar of Victory. People ask who Charles X. is? But to return from this digression.
Through the arch-way of the Tuileries, at the end of the Champs Elysées, you see the Barrier of Neuilly, like a thing of air, diminished by a fairy perspective. The effect is exquisitely light and magical. You pass through the arch-way, and are in the gardens themselves. Milton should have written those lines abroad, and in this very spot—
‘And bring with thee retired Leisure, That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.’
True art is ‘nature to advantage drest;’ it is here a powdered beau. The prodigality of littleness, the excess of ornament, the superficial gloss, the studied neatness, are carried to a pitch of the romantic. The Luxembourg gardens are more extensive, and command a finer view; but are not kept in the same order, are dilapidated and desultory. This is an enclosure of all sweet sights and smells, a concentration of elegance. The rest of the world is barbarous to this ‘paradise of dainty devices,’ where the imagination is spell-bound. It is a perfectly-finished miniature set in brilliants. It is a toilette for nature to dress itself; where every flower seems a narcissus! The smooth gravel-walks, the basin of water, the swans (they might be of wax), the golden fishes, the beds of flowers, chine-asters, larkspur, geraniums, bright marigolds, mignonette (‘the Frenchman’s darling’) scenting the air with a faint luscious perfume, the rows of orange-trees in boxes, blooming verdure and vegetable gold, the gleaming statues, the raised terraces, the stately avenues of trees, and the gray cumbrous towers of the Tuileries overlooking the whole, give an effect of enchantment to the scene. This and the man in black by Titian, in the Louvre just by (whose features form a sombre pendant to the gay parterres) are the two things in Paris I like best. I should never tire of walking in the one, or of looking at the other. Yet no two things can be more opposite.[30] The one is the essence of French, the other of Italian art. By following the windings of the river in this direction, you come to Passy—a delightful village, half-way to St. Cloud, which is situated on a rich eminence that looks down on Paris and the Seine, and so on to Versailles, where the English reside. I have not been to see them, nor they me. The whole road is interspersed with villas, and lined with rows of trees. This last is a common feature in foreign scenery. Whether from the general love of pleasurable sensations, or from the greater warmth of southern climates making the shelter from the heat of the sun more necessary, or from the closeness of the cities making a promenade round them more desirable, the approach to almost all the principal towns abroad is indicated by shady plantations, and the neighbourhood is a succession of groves and arbours.
The Champ de Mars (the French Runnymede) is on the opposite side of the river, a little above the Champs Elysées. It is an oblong square piece of ground immediately in front of the École Militaire, covered with sand and gravel, and bare of trees or any other ornament. It is left a blank, as it should be. In going to and returning from it, you pass the fine old Invalid Hospital, with its immense gilded cupola and outer-walls overgrown with vines, and meet the crippled veterans who have lost an arm or leg, fighting the battles of the Revolution, with a bit of white ribbon sticking in their button-holes, which must gnaw into their souls worse than the wounds in their flesh, if Frenchmen did not alike disregard the wounds both of their bodies and minds.
The Jardin des Plantes, situated at the other extremity of Paris, on the same side of the river, is well worth the walk there. It is delightfully laid out, with that mixture of art and nature, of the useful and ornamental, in which the French excel all the world. Every plant of every quarter of the globe is here, growing in the open air; and labelled with its common and its scientific name on it. A prodigious number of animals, wild and tame, are enclosed in separate divisions, feeding on the grass or shrubs, and leading a life of learned leisure. At least, they have as good a title to this ironical compliment as most members of colleges and seminaries of learning; for they grow fat and sleek on it. They have a great variety of the simious tribe. Is this necessary in France? The collection of wild beasts is not equal to our Exeter-‘Change; nor are they confined in iron cages out of doors under the shade of their native trees (as I was told), but shut up in a range of very neatly-constructed and very ill-aired apartments.
I have already mentioned the Père la Chaise—the Catacombs I have not seen, nor have I the least wish. But I have been to the top of Mont-Martre, and intend to visit it again. The air there is truly vivifying, and the view inspiring. Paris spreads out under your feet on one side, ‘with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned,’ and appears to fill the intermediate space, to the very edge of the horizon, with a sea of hazy or sparkling magnificence. All the different striking points are marked as on a map. London nowhere presents the same extent or integrity of appearance. This is either because there is no place so near to London that looks down upon it from the same elevation, or because Paris is better calculated for a panoramic view from the loftier height and azure tone of its buildings. Its form also approaches nearer to a regular square. London, seen either from Highgate and Hampstead, or from the Dulwich side, looks like a long black wreath of smoke, with the dome of St. Paul’s floating in it. The view on the other side Mont-Martre is also fine, and an extraordinary contrast to the Paris side—it is clear, brown, flat, distant, completely rustic, full of ‘low farms and pelting villages.’ You see St. Denis, where the Kings of France lie buried, and can fancy you see Montmorenci, where Rousseau lived, whose pen was near being as fatal to their race as the scythe of death. On this picturesque site, which so near London would be enriched with noble mansions, there are only a few paltry lodging-houses and tottering windmills. So little prone are the Parisians to extricate themselves from the sty of Epicurus; so fond of cabinets of society, of playing at dominoes in the coffee-houses, and of practising the art de briller dans les Salons; so fond are they of this, that even when the Allies were at Mont-Martre, they ran back to be the first to give an imposing account of the attack, to finish the game of the Revolution, and make the éloge of the new order of things. They shew you the place where the affair with the Prussians happened, as—a brilliant exploit. When will they be no longer liable to such intrusions as these, or to such a result from them? When they get rid of that eternal smile upon their countenances, or of that needle-and-thread face, that is twisted into any shape by every circumstance that happens,[31] or when they can write such lines as the following, or even understand their meaning, their force or beauty, as a charm to purge their soil of insolent foes—theirs only, because the common foes of man!
‘But let thy spiders that suck up thy venom, And heavy-gaited toads, lie in their way; Doing annoyance to the feet of them That with usurping steps do trample thee; Yield stinging-nettles to mine enemies; And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower, Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder, Whose double tongue may, with a mortal touch, Throw death upon thy baffled enemies.’
No Parisian’s sides can ‘bear the beating of so strong a passion,’ as these lines contain; nor have they it in them to ‘endure to the end for liberty’s sake.’ They can never hope to defend the political principles which they learnt from us, till they understand our poetry, both of which originate in the same cause, the strength of our livers and the stoutness of our hearts.
Chapter XI
Statuary does not affect me like painting. I am not, I allow, a fair judge, having paid a great deal more attention to the one than to the other. Nor did I ever think of the first as a profession; and it is that perhaps which adds the sting to our love of excellence, the hope of attaining it ourselves in any particular walk. We strain our faculties to the utmost to conceive of what is most exquisite in any art to which we devote ourselves, and are doubly sensitive to it when we see it attained. Knowledge may often beget indifference, but here it begets zeal. Our affections kindled and projected forward by the ardour of pursuit, we come to the contemplation of truth and beauty with the passionate feeling of lovers; the examples of acknowledged excellence before us are the steps by which we scale the path of distinction, the spur which urges us on; and the admiration which we fondly cherish for them is the seed of future fame. No wonder that the youthful student dwells with delight and rapture on the finished works of art, when they are to his heated fancy the pledge and foretaste of immortality; when at every successful stroke of imitation he is ready to cry out with Correggio—‘I also am a painter!’—when every heightening flush of his enthusiasm is a fresh assurance to him of congenial powers—and when overlooking the million of failures (that all the world have forgot) or names of inferior note, Raphael, Titian, Guido, Salvator are each another self. Happy union of thoughts and destinies, lovelier than the hues of the rainbow! Why can it not last and span our brief date of life?
One reason, however, why I prefer painting to sculpture is, that painting is more like nature. It gives one entire and satisfactory view of an object at a particular moment of time, which sculpture never does. It is not the same in reality, I grant; but it is the same in appearance, which is all we are concerned with. A picture wants solidity, a statue wants colour. But we see the want of colour as a palpably glaring defect, and we do not see the want of solidity, the effects of which to the spectator are supplied by light and shadow. A picture is as perfect an imitation of nature as is conveyed by a looking-glass; which is all that the eye can require, for it is all it can take in for the time being. A fine picture resembles a real living man; the finest statue in the world can only resemble a man turned to stone. The one is an image, the other a cold abstraction of nature. It leaves out half the visible impression. There is therefore something a little shocking and repulsive in this art to the common eye, that requires habit and study to reconcile us completely to it, or to make it an object of enthusiastic devotion. It does not amalgamate kindly and at once with our previous perceptions and associations. As to the comparative difficulty or skill implied in the exercise of each art, I cannot pretend to judge: but I confess it appears to me that statuary must be the most trying to the faculties. The idea of moulding a limb into shape, so as to be right from every point of view, fairly makes my head turn round, and seems to me to enhance the difficulty to an infinite degree. There is not only the extraordinary circumspection and precision required (enough to distract the strongest mind, as I should think), but if the chisel, working in such untractable materials, goes a hair’s-breadth beyond the mark, there is no remedying it. It is not as in painting, where you may make a thousand blots, and try a thousand experiments, efface them all one after the other, and begin anew: the hand always trembles on the brink of a precipice, and one step over is irrecoverable. There is a story told, however, of Hogarth and Roubilliac, which, as far as it goes, may be thought to warrant a contrary inference. These artists differed about the difficulty of their several arts, and agreed to decide it by exchanging the implements of their profession with each other, and seeing which could do best without any regular preparation. Hogarth took a piece of clay, and succeeded in moulding a very tolerable bust of his friend; but when Roubilliac, being furnished with paints and brushes, attempted to daub a likeness of a human face, he could make absolutely nothing out, and was obliged to own himself defeated. Yet Roubilliac was a man of talent, and no mean artist. It was he who, on returning from Rome where he had studied the works of Bernini and the antique, and on going to see his own performances in Westminster Abbey, exclaimed, that ‘they looked like tobacco-pipes, by G—d! ‘What sin had this man or his parents committed, that he should forfeit the inalienable birthright of every Frenchman—imperturbable, invincible self-sufficiency? The most pleasing and natural application of sculpture is, perhaps, to the embellishment of churches and the commemoration of the dead. I don’t know whether they were Roubilliac’s or not, but I remember seeing many years ago in Westminster Abbey (in the part that is at present shut up) two figures of angels bending over a tomb, that affected me much in the same manner that these lines of Lord Byron’s have done since—
‘And when I think that his immortal wings Shall one day hover o’er the sepulchre Of the poor child of clay that so adored him As he adores the highest, Death becomes Less terrible!’
It appears to me that sculpture, though not proper to express health or life or motion, accords admirably with the repose of the tomb; and that it cannot be better employed than in arresting the fleeting dust in imperishable forms, and in embodying a lifeless shadow. Painting, on the contrary, from what I have seen of it in Catholic countries, seems to be out of its place on the walls of churches; it has a flat and flimsy effect contrasted with the solidity of the building, and its rich flaunting colours harmonize but ill with the solemnity and gloom of the surrounding scene.
I would go a pilgrimage to see the St. Peter Martyr, or the Jacob’s Dream by Rembrandt, or Raphael’s Cartoons, or some of Claude’s landscapes;—but I would not go far out of my way to see the Apollo, or the Venus, or the Laocoon. I never cared for them much; nor, till I saw the Elgin Marbles, could I tell why, except for the reason just given, which does not apply to these particular statues, but to statuary in general. These are still to be found in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, with appropriate descriptive stanzas appended to them;[32] but they are no longer to be found in the Louvre, nor do the French seem to know they ever were there. Out of sight, out of mind, is a happy motto. What is not French, either as done by themselves, or as belonging to them, is of course not worth thinking about. Be this as it may, the place is fairly emptied out. Hardly a trace remains of the old Collection to remind you of what is gone. A short list includes all of distinguished excellence—the admirable bust of Vitellius, the fine fragment of Inopus, a clothed statue of Augustus, the full-zoned Venus, and the Diana and Fawn, whose light, airy grace seems to have mocked removal. A few more are ‘thinly scattered to make up a shew,’ but the bulk, the main body of the Grecian mythology, with the flower of their warriors and heroes, were carried off by the Chevalier Canova on his shoulders, a load for Hercules! The French sculptors have nothing of their own to shew for it to fill up the gap. Like their painters, their style is either literal and rigid, or affected and burlesque. Their merit is chiefly confined to the academic figure and anatomical skill; if they go beyond this, and wander into the regions of expression, beauty, or grace, they are apt to lose themselves. The real genius of French sculpture is to be seen in the curled wigs and swelling folds of the draperies in the statues of the age of Louis XIV. There they shone unrivalled and alone. They are the best man-milliners and friseurs in ancient or modern Europe. That praise cannot be denied them; but it should alarm them for their other pretensions. I recollect an essay in the Moniteur some years ago (very playful and very well written) to prove that a great hair-dresser was a greater character than Michael Angelo or Phidias; that his art was more an invention, more a creation out of nothing, and less a servile copy of any thing in nature. There was a great deal of ingenuity in the reasoning, and I suspect more sincerity than the writer was aware of. It expresses, I verily believe, the firm conviction of every true Frenchman. In whatever relates to the flutter and caprice of fashion, where there is no impulse but vanity, no limit but extravagance, no rule but want of meaning, they are in their element, and quite at home. Beyond that, they have no style of their own, and are a nation of second-hand artists, poets, and philosophers. Nevertheless, they have Voltaire, La Fontaine, Le Sage, Molière, Rabelais, and Montaigne—good men and true, under whatever class they come. They have also Very and Vestris. This is granted. Is it not enough? I should like to know the thing on the face of God’s earth in which they allow other nations to excel them. Nor need their sculptors be afraid of turning their talents to account, while they can execute pieces of devotion for the shrines of Saints, and classical equivoques for the saloons of the old or new Noblesse.
The foregoing remarks are general. I shall proceed to mention a few exceptions to, or confirmations of them in their Exposé[33] of the present year. The Othryadas wounded (No. 1870), by Legendre Heral, is, I think, the least mannered, and most natural. It is a huge figure, powerful and somewhat clumsy (with the calves of the legs as if they had gaiters on), but it has great power and repose in it. It seems as if, without any effort, a blow from it would crush any antagonist, and reminds one of Virgil’s combat of Dares and Entellus. The form of the head is characteristic, and there is a fine mixture of sternness and languor in the expression of the features. The sculptor appears to have had an eye to the countenance of the Dying Gladiator; and the figure, from its ease and massiness, has some resemblance to the Elgin Marbles. It is a work of great merit. The statue of Othryadas erecting the Trophy to his Companions (No. 1774) is less impressive, and aims at being more so. It comes under the head of theatrical art, that is of French art proper. They cannot long keep out of this. They cannot resist an attitude, a significant effect. They do not consider that the definition of Sculpture is, or ought to be, nearly like their own celebrated one of Death—an eternal repose! This fault may in some measure be found with the Hercules recovering the body of Icarus from the Sea (No. 1903), by Razzi. The body of Icarus can hardly be said to have found a resting-place. Otherwise, the figure is finely designed, and the face is one of considerable beauty and expression. The Hercules is a man-mountain. From the size and arrangement of this group, it seems more like a precipice falling on one’s head, than a piece of sculpture. The effect is not so far pleasant. If a complaint lies against this statue on the score of unwieldy and enormous size, it is relieved by No. 1775, A Zephyr thwarting the loves of a Butterfly and a Rose, Boyer. Here French art is on its legs again, and in the true vignette style. A Zephyr, a Butterfly, and a Rose, all in one group—Charming! In such cases the lightness, the prettiness, the flutter, and the affectation are extreme, and such as no one but themselves will think of rivalling. One of their greatest and most successful attempts is the Grâce aux Prisonniers. No. 1802, by David. Is it not the Knife-grinder of the ancients, thrown into a more heroic attitude, and with an impassioned expression? However this may be, there is real boldness in the design, and animation in the countenance, a feeling of disinterested generosity contending with the agonies of death. I cannot give much praise to their religious subjects in general. The French of the present day are not bigots, but sceptics in such matters; and the cold, formal indifference of their artists appears in their works. The Christ confounding the incredulity of St. Thomas (by Jacquot) is not calculated to produce this effect on anybody else. They treat classical subjects much more con amore; but the mixture of the Christian Faith and of Pagan superstitions is at least as reprehensible in the present Collection as in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Among pieces of devotion, The Virgin and Child, and the St. Catherine of Cortot (Nos. 1791–22) struck me as the best. There is a certain delicacy of finishing and graceful womanhood about both, which must make them very acceptable accompaniments to Catholic zeal. The French excel generally in emblematic subjects, or in whatever depends on accuracy and invention in costume, of which there are several examples here. What I liked best, however, were some of their studies of the naked figure, which have great simplicity and ease, such as a Nymph making a Garland of Flowers, No. 1888 (Parmentier), and a Youth going to bathe, No. 1831 (Espercieux). This last figure, in particular, appears to be really sliding down into the bath. Cupid tormenting the Soul (after Chaudet) is a very clever and spirited design, in bronze. Their busts, in general, are not excellent. There are, however, a few exceptions, one especially of a Mademoiselle Hersilie de F——, by Gayrard, which is a perfect representation of nature. It is an unaffected, admirable portrait, with good humour and good sense playing over every feature of the face.
In fine, I suspect there is nothing in the French Saloon of Sculpture greatly to stagger or entirely to overset the opinion of those who have a prejudice against the higher pretensions of French art. They have no masterpieces equal to Chantry’s busts, nor to Flaxman’s learned outlines, nor to the polished elegance of Canova; to say nothing of the exquisite beauty and symmetry of the antique, nor of the Elgin Marbles, among which the Theseus sits in form like a demi-god, basking on a golden cloud. If ever there were models of the Fine Arts fitted to give an impulse to living genius, these are they.[34] With enough to teach the truest, highest style in art, they are not in sufficient numbers or preservation to distract or discourage emulation. With these and Nature for our guides, we might do something in sculpture, if we were not indolent and unapt. The French, whatever may be their defects, cannot be charged with want of labour and study. The only charge against them (a heavy one, if true) is want of taste and genius.
Chapter XII
The French themselves think less about their music than any other of their pretensions. It is almost a sore subject with them; for it interrupts their talking, and they had rather hear nothing about it, except as an accompaniment to a jig. Their ears are, in this respect, in their heels, and it is only the light and giddy that they at all endure. They have no idea of cadence in any of the arts—of the rise and fall of the passions—of the elevations or depressions of hope or fear in poetry—of alternate light or shade in pictures—all is reduced (as nearly as possible) in their minds to the level of petty, vapid self-satisfaction, or to dry and systematic prosing for the benefit of others. But they must be more particularly at a loss in music, which requires the deepest feeling, and admits the least of the impertinence of explanation, which mounts on its own raptures and is dissolved in its own tenderness; which has no witness or vouchers but the inward sense of delight, and rests its faith on the speechless eloquence, the rich, circling intoxication of inarticulate but heart-felt sounds. The French have therefore no national music, except a few meagre chansons, and their only idea of musical excellence is either rapidity or loudness of execution. You perceive the effect of this want of enthusiasm even in the streets,—they have neither barrel-organs nor blind fiddlers as with us, who are willing to pay for the encouragement of the arts, however indifferently we may practise them; nor does the national spirit break out from every strolling party or village group, as it is said to do in Italy. A French servant-girl, while she is cleaning out a room, lays down her brush to dance—she takes it up to finish her work, and lays it down again to dance, impelled by the lightness of her head and of her heels. But you seldom hear her sing at her work, and never, if there is any one within hearing to talk to.—The French Opera is a splendid, but a comparatively empty theatre. It is nearly as large (I should think) as the King’s Theatre in the Hay-market, and is in a semi-circular form. The pit (the evening I was there) was about half full of men, in their black, dingy sticky-looking dresses; and there were a few plainly-dressed women in the boxes. But where was that blaze of beauty and fashion, of sparkling complexions and bright eyes, that streams like a galaxy from the boxes of our Opera-house—like a Heaven of loveliness let half-way down upon the earth, and charming ‘the upturned eyes of wondering mortals,’ before which the thrilling sounds that circle through the House seem to tremble with delight and drink in new rapture from its conscious presence, and to which the mimic Loves and Graces are proud to pay their distant, smiling homage? Certainly it was not here; nor do I know where the sun of beauty hides itself in France. I have seen but three rays of it since I came, gilding a dark and pitchy cloud! It was not so in Rousseau’s time, for these very Loges were filled with the most beautiful women of the Court, who came to see his Devin du Village, and whom he heard murmuring around him in the softest accents—‘Tous ces sons là vont au cœur!’ The change is, I suppose, owing to the Revolution; but whatever it is owing to, the monks have not, by their return, banished this conventual gloom from their theatres; nor is there any of that airy, flaunting, florid, butterfly, gauzy, variegated appearance to be found in them that they have with us. These gentlemen still keep up the farce of refusing actors burial in consecrated ground; the mob pelt them, and the critics are even with them by going to see the representation of the Tartuffe!
I found but little at the Royal Academy of Music (as it is affectedly called) to carry off this general dulness of effect, either through the excellence or novelty of the performances. A Mademoiselle Noel (who seems to be a favourite) made her debut in Dido. Though there was nothing very striking, there was nothing offensive in her representation of the character. For any thing that appeared in her style of singing or acting, she might be a very pleasing, modest, unaffected English girl performing on an English stage. There was not a single trait of French bravura or grimace. Her execution, however, seldom rose higher than an agreeable mediocrity; and with considerable taste and feeling, her powers seemed to be limited. She produced her chief effect in the latter and more pathetic scenes, and ascended the funeral pile with dignity and composure. Is it not strange (if contradictions and hasty caprices taken up at random, and laid down as laws, were strange in this centre of taste and refinement) that the French should raise such an outcry against our assaults at arms and executions on the stage, and yet see a young and beautiful female prepare to give herself the fatal blow, without manifesting the smallest repugnance or dissatisfaction?—Æneas and Iarbas were represented by Messrs. Mourritt and Derivis. The first was insipid, the last a perfect Stentor. He spoke or sung all through with an unmitigated ferocity of purpose and manner, and with lungs that seemed to have been forged expressly for the occasion. Ten bulls could not bellow louder, nor a whole street-full of frozen-out gardeners at Christmas. His barbarous tunic and accoutrements put one strongly in mind of Robinson Crusoe, while the modest demeanour and painted complexion of the pious Æneas bore a considerable analogy to the submissive advance and rosy cheeks of that usual accompaniment of English travelling, who ushers himself into the room at intervals, with awkward bows, and his hat twirled round in his hands, ‘to hope you’ll remember the coachman.’ The Æneas of the poet, however, was a shabby fellow, and had but justice done him.
I had leisure during this otiose performance to look around me, and as ‘it is my vice to spy into abuses,’ the first thing that struck me was the prompter. Any Frenchman who has that sum at his disposal, should give ten thousand francs a year for this situation. It must be a source of ecstasy to him. For not an instant was he quiet—tossing his hands in the air, darting them to the other side of the score which he held before him in front of the stage, snapping his fingers, nodding his head, beating time with his feet; and this not mechanically, or as if it were a drudgery he was forced to go through, and would be glad to have done with, but with unimpaired glee and vehemence of gesture, jerking, twisting, fidgeting, wriggling, starting, stamping, as if the incessant motion had fairly turned his head, and every muscle in his frame were saturated with the spirit of quicksilver. To be in continual motion for four hours, and to direct the motions of others by the wagging of a finger, to be not only an object of important attention to the stage and orchestra, but (in his own imagination) to pit, boxes, and gallery, as the pivot on which the whole grand machinery of that grandest of all machines, the French Opera, turns—this is indeed, for a Parisian, the acme of felicity! Every nerve must thrill with electrical satisfaction, and every pore into which vanity can creep tingle with self-conceit! Not far from this restless automaton (as if extremes met, or the volatility of youth subsided into a sort of superannuated still-life) sat an old gentleman in front of the pit, with his back to me, a white powdered head, the curls sticking out behind, and a coat of the finest black. This was all I saw of him for some time—he did not once turn his head or shift his position, any more than a wig and coat stuck upon a barber’s block—till I suddenly missed him, and soon after saw him seated on the opposite side of the house, his face as yellow and hard as a piece of mahogany, but without expressing either pleasure or pain. Neither the fiddlers’ elbows nor the dancers’ legs moved him one jot. His fiddling fancies and his dancing-days were flown, and had left this shadow, this profile, this mummy of a French gentleman of the old régime behind. A Frenchman has no object in life but to talk and move with éclat, and when he ceases to do either, he has no heart to do any thing. Deprived of his vivacity, his thoughtlessness, his animal spirits, he becomes a piece of costume, a finely-powdered wig, an embroidered coat, a pair of shoe-buckles, a gold cane, or a snuff-box. Drained of mere sensations and of their youthful blood, the old fellows seem like the ghosts of the young ones, and have none of their overweening offensiveness, or teasing officiousness. I can hardly conceive of a young French gentleman, nor of an old one who is otherwise. The latter come up to my ideal of this character, cut, as it were, out of pasteboard, moved on springs, amenable to forms, crimped and starched like a cravat, without a single tart ebullition, or voluntary motion. Some of them may be seen at present gliding along the walks of the Tuileries, and the sight of them is good for sore eyes. They are also thinly sprinkled through the play-house; for the drama and the belles-lettres were in their time the amusement and the privilege of the Court, and the contrast of their powdered heads and pale faces makes the rest of the audience appear like a set of greasy, impudent mechanics. A Frenchman is nothing without powder, an Englishman is nothing with it. The character of the one is artificial, that of the other natural. The women of France do not submit to the regular approaches and the sober discipline of age so well as the men. I had rather be in company with an old French gentleman than a young one; I prefer a young Frenchwoman to an old one. They aggravate the encroachments of age by contending with them, and instead of displaying the natural graces and venerable marks of that period of life, paint and patch their wrinkled faces, and toupee and curl their grizzled locks, till they look like Friesland hens, and are a caricature and burlesque of themselves. The old women in France that figure at the theatre or elsewhere, have very much the appearance of having kept a tavern or a booth at a fair, or of having been mistresses of a place of another description, for the greater part of their lives. A mannish hardened look and character survives the wreck of beauty and of female delicacy.
Of all things that I see here, it surprises me the most that the French should fancy they can dance. To dance is to move with grace and harmony to music. But the French, whether men or women, have no idea of dancing but that of moving with agility, and of distorting their limbs in every possible way, till they really alter the structure of the human form. By grace I understand the natural movements of the human body, heightened into dignity or softened into ease, each posture or step blending harmoniously into the rest. There is grace in the waving of the branch of a tree or in the bounding of a stag, because there is freedom and unity of motion. But the French Opera-dancers think it graceful to stand on one leg or on the points of their toes, or with one leg stretched out behind them, as if they were going to be shod, or to raise one foot at right angles with their bodies, and twirl themselves round like a te-totum, to see how long they can spin, and then stop short all of a sudden; or to skim along the ground, flat-footed, like a spider running along a cobweb, or to pop up and down like a pea on a tobacco-pipe, or to stick in their backs till another part projects out behind comme des volails, and to strut about like peacocks with infirm, vain-glorious steps, or to turn out their toes till their feet resemble apes, or to raise one foot above their heads, and turn swiftly round upon the other, till the petticoats of the female dancers (for I have been thinking of them) rise above their garters, and display a pair of spindle-shanks, like the wooden ones of a wax-doll, just as shapeless and as tempting. There is neither voluptuousness nor grace in a single attitude or movement, but a very studious and successful attempt to shew in what a number of uneasy and difficult positions the human body can be put with the greatest rapidity of evolution. It is not that they do all this with much more to redeem it, but they do all this, and do nothing else. It would be very well as an exhibition of tumbler’s tricks, or as rope-dancing (which are only meant to surprise), but it is bad as Opera-dancing, if opera-dancing aspires to be one of the Fine Arts, or even a handmaid to them; that is, to combine with mechanical dexterity a sense of the beautiful in form and motion, and a certain analogy to sentiment. ‘The common people,’ says the Author of Waverley, ‘always prefer exertion and agility to grace.’ Is that the case also with the most refined people upon earth? These antics and vagaries, this kicking of heels and shaking of feet as if they would come off, might be excusable in the men, for they shew a certain strength and muscular activity; but in the female dancers they are unpardonable. What is said of poetry might be applied to the sex. Non sat[is] est pulchra poemata esse, dulcia sunto. So women who appear in public, should be soft and lovely as well as skilful and active, or they ought not to appear at all. They owe it to themselves and others. As to some of the ridiculous extravagances of this theatre, such as turning out their toes and holding back their shoulders, one would have thought the Greek statues might have taught their scientific professors better—if French artists did not see every thing with French eyes, and lament all that differs from their established practice as a departure from the line of beauty. They are sorry that the Venus does not hold up her head like a boarding-school miss—
‘And would ask the Apollo to dance!’
In three months’ practice, and with proper tuition, Greek forms would be French, and they would be perfect!—Mademoiselles Fanny and Noblet, I kiss your hands; but I have no pardon to beg of Madame Le Gallois, for she looked like a lady (very tightly laced) in the ballet, and played like a heroine in the pantomime part of La Folle par Amour. There was a violent start at the first indication of her madness, that alarmed me a little, but all that followed was natural, modest, and affecting in a high degree. The French turn their Opera-stage into a mad-house; they turn their mad-houses (at least they have one constructed on this principle) into theatres of gaiety, where they rehearse ballets, operas, and plays. If dancing were an antidote to madness, one would think the French would be always in their right senses.
I was told I ought to see Nina, or La Folle par Amour at the Salle Louvois, or Italian Theatre. If I went for that purpose, it would be rather with a wish than from any hope of seeing it better done. I went however.
‘Oh for a beaker full of the warm South!’
It was to see the Gazza Ladra. The house was full, the evening sultry, a hurry and bustle in the lobbies, an eagerness in the looks of the assembled crowd. The audience seemed to be in earnest, and to have imbibed an interest from the place. On the stage there were rich dresses and voices, the tones of passion, ease, nature, animation; in short, the scene had a soul in it. One wondered how one was in Paris, with their pasteboard maps of the passions, and thin-skinned, dry-lipped humour. Signora Mombelli played the humble, but interesting heroine charmingly, with truth, simplicity, and feeling. Her voice is neither rich nor sweet, but it is clear as a bell. Signor Pellegrini played the intriguing Magistrate, with a solemnity and farcical drollery, that I would not swear is much inferior to Liston. But I swear, that Brunet (whom I saw the other night, and had seen before without knowing it) is not equal to Liston. Yet he is a feeble, quaint diminutive of that original. He squeaks and gibbers oddly enough at the Théâtre des Variétés, like a mouse in the hollow of a musty cheese, his small eyes peering out, and his sharp teeth nibbling at the remains of some faded joke. The French people of quality go to the Italian Opera, but they do not attend to it. The tabbies of the Court are tabbies still; and took no notice of what was passing on the stage on this occasion, till the tolling of the bell made a louder and more disagreeable noise than themselves; this they seemed to like. They behave well at their own theatres, but it would be a breach of etiquette to do so anywhere else. A girl in the gallery (an Italian by her complexion, and from her interest in the part) was crying bitterly at the story of the Maid and the Magpie, while three Frenchmen, in the Troisième Loge, were laughing at her the whole time. I said to one of them, ‘It was not a thing to laugh at, but to admire.’ He turned away, as if the remark did not come within his notions of sentiment. This did not stagger me in my theory of the French character; and when one is possessed of nothing but a theory, one is glad, not sorry to keep it, though at the expense of others.[35]
Chapter XIII
We left Paris in the Diligence, and arrived at Fontainbleau the first night. The accommodations at the inn were indifferent, and not cheap. The palace is a low straggling mass of very old buildings, having been erected by St. Louis in the 12th century, whence he used to date his Rescripts, ‘From my Deserts of Fontainbleau!’ It puts one in mind of Monkish legends, of faded splendour, of the leaden spouts and uncouth stone-cherubim of a country church-yard. It is empty or gaudy within, stiff and heavy without. Henry IV. figures on the walls with the fair Gabrielle, like the Tutelary Satyr of the place, keeping up the remembrance of old-fashioned royalty and gallantry. They here shew you the table (a plain round piece of mahogany) on which Buonaparte in 1814 signed the abdication of the human race, in favour of the hereditary proprietors of the species. We walked forward a mile or two before the coach the next day on the road to Montargis. It presents a long, broad, and stately avenue without a turning, as far as the eye can reach, and is skirted on each side by a wild, woody, rocky scenery. The birch-trees, with their grey stems and light glittering branches, silvered over the darker back-ground, and afforded a striking contrast to the brown earth and green moss beneath. There was a stillness in the woods, which affects the mind the more in objects whose very motion is gentleness. The day was dull, but quite mild, though in the middle of January. The situation of Fontainbleau is certainly interesting and fine. It stands in the midst of an extensive forest, intersected with craggy precipices and rugged ranges of hills; and the various roads leading to or from it are cut out of a wilderness, which a hermit might inhabit. The approach to the different towns in France has, in this respect, the advantage over ours; for, from burning wood instead of coal, they must have large woods in the neighbourhood, which clothe the country round them, and afford, as Pope expresses it,
‘In summer shade, in winter fire.’
We dig our fuel out of the bowels of the earth, and have a greater portion of its surface left at our disposal, which we devote not to ornament, but use. A copse-wood or an avenue of trees however, makes a greater addition to the beauty of a town than a coal-pit or a steam-engine in its vicinity.
When the Diligence came up, and we took our seats in the coupé (which is that part of a French stage-coach which resembles an old shattered post-chaise, placed in front of the main body of it) we found a French lady occupying the third place in it, whose delight at our entrance was as great as if we had joined her on some desert island, and whose mortification was distressing when she learnt we were not going the whole way with her. She complained of the cold of the night air; but this she seemed to dread less than the want of company. She said she had been deceived, for she had been told the coach was full, and was in despair that she should not have a soul to speak to all the way to Lyons. We got out, notwithstanding, at the inn at Montargis, where we met with a very tolerable reception, and were waited on at supper by one of those Maritorneses that perfectly astonish an English traveller. Her joy at our arrival was as extreme as if her whole fortune depended on it. She laughed, danced, sung, fairly sprung into the air, bounced into the room, nearly overset the table, hallooed and talked as loud as if she had been alternately ostler and chamber-maid. She was as rough and boisterous as any country bumpkin at a wake or statute-fair; and yet so full of rude health and animal spirits, that you were pleased instead of being offended. In England, a girl with such boorish manners would not be borne; but her good-humour kept pace with her coarseness, and she was as incapable of giving as of feeling pain. There is something in the air in France that carries off the blue devils!
The mistress of the inn, however, was a little peaking, pining woman, with her face wrapped up in flannel, and not quite so inaccessible to nervous impressions; and when I asked the girl, ‘What made her speak so loud?’ she answered for her, ‘To make people deaf!’ This side-reproof did not in the least moderate the brazen tones of her help-mate, but rather gave a new fillip to her spirits; though she was less on the alert than the night before, and appeared to the full as much bent on arranging her curls in the looking-glass when she came into the room, as on arranging the breakfast things on the tea-board.
We staid here till one o’clock on Sunday (the 16th,) waiting the arrival of the Lyonnais, in which we had taken our places forward, and which I thought would never arrive. Let no man trust to a placard stuck on the walls of Paris, advertising the cheapest and most expeditious mode of conveyance to all parts of the world. It may be no better than a snare to the unwary. The Lyonnais, I thought from the advertisement, was the Swift-sure of Diligences. It was to arrive ten hours before any other Diligence; it was the most compact, the most elegant of modern vehicles. From the description and the print of it, it seemed ‘a thing of life,’ a minion of the fancy. To see it stand in a state of disencumbered abstraction, it appeared a self-impelling machine; or if it needed aid, was horsed, unlike your Paris Diligences, by nimble, airy Pegasuses. To look at the fac-simile of it that was put into your hand, you would say it might run or fly—might traverse the earth, or whirl you through the air, without let or impediment, so light was it to outward appearance in structure ‘fit for speed succinct’—a chariot for Puck or Ariel to ride in! This was the account I had (or something like it) from Messieurs the Proprietors at the Cour des Fontaines. ‘Mark how a plain tale shall put them down.’ Those gentlemen came to me after I had paid for two places as far as Nevers, to ask me to resign them in favour of two Englishmen, who wished to go the whole way, and to re-engage them for the following evening. I said I could not do that; but as I had a dislike to travelling at night, I would go on to Montargis by some other conveyance, and proceed by the Lyonnais, which would arrive there at eight or nine on Sunday morning, as far as I could that night. I set out on the faith of this understanding. I had some difficulty in finding the Office sur la place, to which I had been directed, and which was something between a stable, a kitchen, and a cook-shop. I was led to it by a shabby double or counterpart of the Lyonnais, which stood before the door, empty, dirty, bare of luggage, waiting the Paris one, which had not yet arrived. It drove into town four hours afterwards, with three foundered hacks, with the postilion and Conducteur for its complement of passengers, the last occupying the left hand corner of the coupé in solitary state, with a whisp of straw thrust through a broken pane of one of the front windows, and a tassel of blue and yellow fringe hanging out of the other; and with that mixture of despondency and fierté in his face, which long and uninterrupted pondering on the state of the way-bill naturally produces in such circumstances. He seized upon me and my trunks as lawful prize; he afterwards insisted on my going forward in the middle of the night to Lyons, (contrary to my agreement,) and I was obliged to comply, or to sleep upon trusses of straw in a kind of out-house. We quarrelled incessantly, but I could not help laughing, for he sometimes looked like my old acquaintance, Dr. S., and sometimes like my friend, A—— H——, of Edinburgh. He said we should reach Lyons the next evening, and we got there twenty-four hours after the time. He told me for my comfort, the reason of his being so late was, that two of his horses had fallen down dead on the road. He had to raise relays of horses all the way, as if we were travelling through a hostile country; quarrelled with all the postilions about an abatement of a few sous; and once our horses were arrested in the middle of the night by a farmer who refused to trust him; and he had to go before the Mayor, as soon as day broke. We were quizzed by the post-boys, the innkeepers, the peasants all along the road, as a shabby concern; our Conducteur bore it all, like another Candide. We stopped at all the worst inns in the outskirts of the towns, where nothing was ready; or when it was, was not eatable. The second morning we were to breakfast at Moulins; when we alighted, our guide told us it was eleven: the clock in the kitchen pointed to three. As he laughed in my face when I complained of his misleading me, I told him that he was ‘un impudent,’ and this epithet sobered him the rest of the way. As we left Moulins, the crimson clouds of evening streaked the west, and I had time to think of Sterne’s Maria. The people at the inn, I suspect, had never heard of her. There was no trace of romance about the house. Certainly, mine was not a Sentimental Journey. Is it not provoking to come to a place, that has been consecrated by ‘famous poet’s pen,’ as a breath, a name, a fairy-scene, and find it a dull, dirty town? Let us leave the realities to shift for themselves, and think only of those bright tracts that have been reclaimed for us by the fancy, where the perfume, the sound, the vision, and the joy still linger, like the soft light of evening skies! Is the story of Maria the worse, because I am travelling a dirty road in a rascally Diligence? Or is it an injury done us by the author to have invented for us what we should not have met with in reality? Has it not been read with pleasure by thousands of readers, though the people at the inn had never heard of it? Yet Sterne would have been vexed to find that the fame of his Maria had never reached the little town of Moulins. We are always dissatisfied with the good we have, and always punished for our unreasonableness.
At Palisseau (the road is rich in melodramatic recollections) it became pitch-dark; you could not see your hand; I entreated to have the lamp lighted; our Conducteur said it was broken (cassé). With much persuasion, and the ordering a bottle of their best wine, which went round among the people at the inn, we got a lantern with a rushlight in it, but the wind soon blew it out, and we went on our way darkling; the road lay over a high hill, with a loose muddy bottom between two hedges, and as we did not attempt to trot or gallop, we came safe to the level ground on the other side. We breakfasted at Rouane, where we were first shewn into the kitchen, while they were heating a suffocating stove in a squalid salle à manger. There, while I was sitting half dead with cold and fatigue, a boy came and scraped a wooden dresser close at my ear, with a noise to split one’s brain, and with true French nonchalance; and a portly landlady, who had risen just as we had done breakfasting, ushered us to our carriage with the airs and graces of a Madame Maintenon. In France you meet with the court address in a stable-yard. In other countries you may find grace in a cottage or a wilderness; but it is simple, unconscious grace, without the full-blown pride and strut of mannered confidence and presumption. A woman in France is graceful by going out of her sphere; not by keeping within it.—In crossing the bridge at Rouane, the sun shone brightly on the river and shipping, which had a busy cheerful aspect; and we began to ascend the Bourbonnois under more flattering auspices. We got out and walked slowly up the sounding road. I found that the morning air refreshed and braced my spirits; and that even the continued fatigue of the journey, which I had dreaded as a hazardous experiment, was a kind of seasoning to me. I was less exhausted than the first day. I will venture to say, that for an invalid, sitting up all night is better than lying in bed all day. Hardships, however dreadful to nervous apprehensions, by degrees give us strength and resolution to endure them: whereas effeminacy softens and renders us less and less capable of encountering pain or difficulty. It is the love of indulgence, or the shock of the first privation or effort, that confirms almost all the weaknesses of body or mind. As we loitered up the long, winding ascent of the road from Rouane, we occasionally approached the brink of some Alpine declivity tufted with pine trees, and noticed the white villas, clustering [or] scattered, which in all directions spotted the very summits of that vast and gradual amphitheatre of hills which overlooked the neighbouring town. The Bourbonnois is the first large chain of hills piled one upon another, and extending range beyond range, that you come to on the route to Italy, and that occupy a wide-spread district, like a mighty conqueror, with uniform and growing magnificence. To those who have chiefly seen detached mountains or abrupt precipices rising from the level surface of the ground, the effect is exceedingly imposing and grand. The descent on the other side into Tarare is more sudden and dangerous; and you avoid passing over the top of the mountain (along which the road formerly ran) by one of those fine, broad, firmly-cemented roads with galleries and bridges, which bespeak at once the master-hand that raised them. Tarare is a neat little town, famous for the manufacture of serges and calicoes. We had to stop here for three-quarters of an hour, waiting for fresh horses; and as we sat in the coupé in this helpless state, the horses taken out, the sun shining in, and the wind piercing through every cranny of the broken panes and rattling sash-windows, the postilion came up and demanded to know if we were English, as there were two English gentlemen who would be glad to see us. I excused myself from getting out, but said I should be happy to speak to them. Accordingly, my informant beckoned to a young man in black, who was standing at a little distance in a state of anxious expectation, and who coming to the coach-door said, he presumed we were from London, and that he had taken the liberty to pay his respects to us. His friend, he said, who was staying with him, was ill in bed, or he would have done himself the same pleasure. He had on a pair of wooden clogs, turned up and pointed at the toes in the manner of the country (which he recommended to me as useful for climbing the hills if ever I should come into those parts) warm worsted mittens, and had a thin, genteel, shivering aspect. I expected every moment he would tell me his name or business; but all I learnt was that he and his friend had been here some time, and that they could not get away till spring, that there were no entertainments, that trade was flat, and that the French seemed to him a very different people from the English. The fact is, he found himself quite at a loss in a French country-town, and had no other resource or way of amusing himself, than by looking out for the Diligences as they passed, and trying to hear news from England. He stood at his own door, and waved his hand with a melancholy air as we rode by, and no doubt instantly went up stairs to communicate to his sick friend, that he had conversed with two English people.
Our delay at Tarare had deprived us of nearly an hour of daylight; and, besides, the miserable foundered jades of horses, that we had to get on with in this paragon of Diligences, were quite unequal to the task of dragging it up and down the hills on the road to Lyons, which was still twenty miles distant. The night was dark, and we had no light. I found it was quite hopeless when we should reach our journey’s end (if we did not break our necks by the way) and that both were matters of very great indifference to Mons. le Conducteur, who was only bent on saving the pockets of Messieurs his employers, and who had no wish, like me, to see the Vatican! He affected to make bargains for horses, which always failed and added to our delay; and lighted his lantern once or twice, but it always went out. At last I said that I had intended to give him a certain sum for himself, but that if we did not arrive in Lyons by ten o’clock at night, he might depend upon it I would not give him a single farthing. This had the desired effect. He got out at the next village we came to, and three stout horses were fastened to the harness. He also procured a large piece of candle (with a reserve of another piece of equal length and thickness in his lantern) and held it in his hand the whole way, only shifting it from one hand to the other, as he grew tired, and biting his lips and making wry faces at this new office of a candelabrum, which had been thrust upon him much against his will. I was not sorry, for he was one of the most disagreeable Frenchmen I ever met with, having all the indifference and self-sufficiency of his countrymen with none of their usual obligingness. He seemed to me a person out of his place (a thing you rarely discover in France)—a broken-down tradesman, or ‘one that had had misfortunes,’ and who neither liked nor was fit for his present situation of Conducteur to a Diligence without funds, without horses, and without passengers. We arrived in safety at Lyons at eleven o’clock at night, and were conducted to the Hotel des Couriers, where we, with some difficulty, procured a lodging and a supper, and were attended by a brown, greasy, dark-haired, good-humoured, awkward gypsey of a wench from the south of France, who seemed just caught; stared and laughed, and forgot every thing she went for; could not help exclaiming every moment—‘Que Madame a le peau blanc!’ from the contrast to her own dingy complexion and dirty skin, took a large brass-pan of scalding milk, came and sat down by me on a bundle of wood, and drank it; said she had had no supper, for her head ached, and declared the English were braves gens, and that the Bourbons were bons enfans, started up to look through the key-hole, and whispered through her broad strong-set teeth, that a fine Madam was descending the staircase, who had been to dine with a great gentleman, offered to take away the supper things, left them, and called us the next morning with her head and senses in a state of even greater confusion than they were over-night. The familiarity of common servants in France surprises the English at first; but it has nothing offensive in it, any more than the good natured gambols and freedoms of a Newfoundland dog. It is quite natural.
Lyons is a fine, dirty town. The streets are good, but so high and narrow, that they look like sinks of filth and gloom. The shops are mere dungeons. Yet two noble rivers water the city, the Rhone and the Saone—the one broad and majestic, the other more confined and impetuous in its course, and join a little below the town to pour their friendly streams into the Mediterranean. The square is spacious and handsome, and the heights of St. Just, that overlook it, command a fine view of the town, the bridges, both rivers, the hills of Provence, the road to Chambery, and the Alps, with their snowy tops propping the clouds. The sight of them effectually deterred me from attempting to go by Geneva and the Simplon; and we were contented (for this time) with the humbler passage of Mount Cenis. Here is the Hotel de Notre Dâme de Piété, which is shewn you as the inn where Rousseau stopped on his way to Paris, when he went to overturn the French Monarchy by the force of style. I thought of him, as we came down the mountain of Tarare, in his gold-laced hat, and with his jet d’eau playing. If they could but have known who was coming, how many battalions would have been sent out to meet him; what a ringing of alarm-bells, what a beating of drums, what raising of drawbridges, what barring of gates, what examination of passports, what processions of priests, what meetings of magistrates, what confusion in the towns, what a panic through the country, what telegraphic despatches to the Court of Versailles, what couriers posting to all parts of Europe, what manifestoes from armies, what a hubbub of Holy Alliances, and all for what? To prevent one man from speaking what he and every other man felt, and whose only fault was that the beatings of the human heart had found an echo in his pen! At Lyons I saw this inscription over a door: Ici on trouve le seul et unique depôt de l’encre sans pareil et incorruptible—which appeared to me to contain the whole secret of French poetry. I went into a shop to buy M. Martine’s Death of Socrates, which I saw in the window, but they would neither let me have that copy nor get me another. The French are not ‘a nation of shopkeepers.’ They had quite as lieve see you walk out of their shops as come into them. While I was waiting for an answer, a French servant in livery brought in four volumes of the History of a Foundling, an improved translation, in which it was said the morceaux omitted by M. de la Place were restored. I was pleased to see my old acquaintance Tom Jones, with his French coat on. The poetry of M. Alphonse Martine and of M. Casimir de la Vigne circulates in the provinces and in Italy, through the merit of the authors and the favour of the critics. L. H. tells me that the latter is a great Bonapartist, and talks of ‘the tombs of the brave.’ He said I might form some idea of M. Martine’s attempts to be great and unfrenchified by the frontispiece to one of his poems, in which a young gentleman in an heroic attitude is pointing to the sea in a storm, with his other hand round a pretty girl’s waist. I told H. this poet had lately married a lady of fortune. He said, ‘That’s the girl.’ He also said very well, I thought, that ‘the French seemed born to puzzle the Germans.’ Why are there not salt-spoons in France? In England it is a piece of barbarism to put your knife into a salt-cellar with another. But in France the distinction between grossness and refinement is done away. Every thing there is refined!