第19章 ON THE FRENCH SCHOOL OF PAINTING:(2)

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

"Who is that monstrous pleasant fellow?" said one of the squires.

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

I thought he had been a gentleman!"

Another instance: M.Guizot, when he was Minister here, had the grand hotel of the Ministry, and gave entertainments to all the great de par le monde, as Brantome says, and entertained them in a proper ministerial magnificence.The splendid and beautiful Duchess of Dash was at one of his ministerial parties; and went, a fortnight afterwards, as in duty bound, to pay her respects to M.

Guizot.But it happened, in this fortnight, that M.Guizot was Minister no longer; having given up his portfolio, and his grand hotel, to retire into private life, and to occupy his humble apartments in the house which he possesses, and of which he lets the greater portion.A friend of mine was present at one of the ex-Minister's soirees, where the Duchess of Dash made her appearance.He says the Duchess, at her entrance, seemed quite astounded, and examined the premises with a most curious wonder.

Two or three shabby little rooms, with ordinary furniture, and a Minister en retraite, who lives by letting lodgings! In our country was ever such a thing heard of? No, thank heaven! and a Briton ought to be proud of the difference.

But to our muttons.This country is surely the paradise of painters and penny-a-liners; and when one reads of M.Horace Vernet at Rome, exceeding ambassadors at Rome by his magnificence, and leading such a life as Rubens or Titian did of old; when one sees M.Thiers's grand villa in the Rue St.George (a dozen years ago he was not even a penny-a-liner: no such luck); when one contemplates, in imagination, M.Gudin, the marine painter, too lame to walk through the picture-gallery of the Louvre, accommodated, therefore, with a wheel-chair, a privilege of princes only, and accompanied--nay, for what I know, actually trundled--down the gallery by majesty itself--who does not long to make one of the great nation, exchange his native tongue for the melodious jabber of France; or, at least, adopt it for his native country, like Marshal Saxe, Napoleon, and Anacharsis Clootz? Noble people! they made Tom Paine a deputy; and as for Tom Macaulay, they would make a DYNASTY of him.

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

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

Now, as Nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own too; and yet we, O foolish race!