Volume Ii Part 32 (1/2)
And now, farewell to Antwerp. Art has satisfied me at last. I have been conquered, and that is enough.
To-morrow for Paris. Adieu.
LETTER XLVIII.
PARIS, Sat.u.r.day, August 20.
MY DEAR:--
I am seated in my snug little room at M. Belloc's. The weather is overpoweringly hot, but these Parisian houses seem to have seized and imprisoned coolness. French household ways are delightful. I like their seclusion from the street, by these deep-paved quadrangles. I like these cool, smooth, waxed floors so much that I one day queried with my friends, the C.'s, whether we could not introduce them into America. L., who is a Yankee housekeeper, answered, with spirit, ”No, indeed; not while the mistress of the house has every thing to do, as in America; I think I see myself, in addition to all my cares, on my knees, waxing up one of these floors.”
”Ah,” says Caroline, ”the thing is managed better in Paris; the _frotteur_ comes in before we are up in the morning, shod with great brushes, and dances over the floors till they s.h.i.+ne.”
”I am sure,” said I, ”here is Fourrier's system in one particular. We enjoy the floors, and the man enjoys the dancing.”
Madame Belloc had fitted up my room with the most thoughtful care. A large bouquet adorns the table; fancy writing materials are displayed; and a waiter, with sirups and an extempore soda fount, one of Parisian household refinements, stands just at my elbow. Above all, my walls are hung with beautiful engravings from Claude and Zuccarelli.
This house pertains to the government, and is held by M. Belloc in virtue of his situation as director of the Imperial School of Design, to which inst.i.tution about one half of it is devoted. A public examination is at hand, in preparing for which M. Belloc is heart and soul engaged. This school is a government provision for the gratuitous instruction of the working cla.s.ses in art. I went into the rooms where the works of the scholars are arranged for the inspection of the judges. The course of instruction is excellent--commencing with the study of nature. Around the room various plants are growing, which serve for models, interspersed with imitations in drawing or modelling, by the pupils. I noticed a hollyhock and thistle, modelled with singular accuracy. As some pupils can come only at evening, M.
Belloc has prepared a set of casts of plants, which he says are plaster daguerreotypes. By pouring warm gelatine upon a leaf, a delicate mould is made, from which these casts are taken. He showed me bunches of leaves, and branches of the vine, executed by them, which were beautiful. In like manner the pupil commences the study of the human figure, with the skeleton, which he copies bone by bone. Gutta percha muscles are added in succession, till finally he has the whole form. Besides, each student has particular objects given him to study for a certain period, after which he copies them from memory. The same course is pursued with prints and engravings.
When an accurate knowledge of forms is gained, the pupil receives lessons in combination. Such subjects as these are given: a vase of flowers, a mediaeval or cla.s.sic vase, s.h.i.+elds, Helmets, escutcheons, &c., of different styles. The first prize composition was a hunting frieze, modelled, in which were introduced fanciful combinations of leaf and scroll work, dogs, hunters, and children. Figures of almost every animal and plant were modelled; the drawings and modellings from memory were wonderful, and showed, in their combination, great richness of fancy. Scattered about the room were casts of the best cla.s.sic figures of the Louvre, placed there, as M. Belloc gracefully remarked, not as models, but as inspirations, to cultivate the sense of beauty.
I was shown, moreover, their books of mathematical studies, which looked intricate and learned, but of which I appreciated only the delicate chirography. ”And where,” said I, ”are these young mechanics taught to read and write?” ”In the brothers' schools,” he said. Paris is divided into regular parishes, centring round different churches, and connected with each church is a parochial school, for boys and girls, taught by ecclesiastics and nuns.
With such thorough training of the sense of beauty, it may be easily seen that the facility of French enthusiasm in aesthetics is not, as often imagined, superficial pretence. The nerves of beauty are so exquisitely tuned and strung that they must thrill at every touch.
One sees this, in French life, to the very foundation of society. A poor family will give, cheerfully, a part of their bread money to buy a flower. The idea of artistic symmetry pervades every thing, from the arrangement of the simplest room to the composition of a picture. At the chateau of Madame V. the whiteheaded butler begged madame to apologize for the central flower basket on the table. He ”had not had time to study the composition.”
The English and Americans, seeing the French so serious and intent on matters of beauty, fancy it to be mere affectation. To be serious on a barrel of flour, or a bushel of potatoes, we can well understand; but to be equally earnest in the adorning of a room or the ”composition”
of a bouquet seems ridiculous. But did not He who made the appet.i.te for food make also that for beauty? and while the former will perish with the body, is not the latter immortal? With all New England's earnestness and practical efficiency, there is a long withering of the soul's more ethereal part,--a crus.h.i.+ng out of the beautiful,--which is horrible. Children are born there with a sense of beauty equally delicate with any in the world, in whom it dies a lingering death of smothered desire and pining, weary starvation. I know, because I have felt it.--One in whom this sense has long been repressed, in coming into Paris, feels a rustling and a waking within him, as if the soul were trying to unfold her wings, long unused and mildewed. Instead of scorning, then, the lighthearted, _mobile_, beauty-loving French, would that we might exchange instructions with them--imparting our severer discipline in religious lore, accepting their thorough methods in art; and, teaching and taught, study together under the great Master of all.
I went with M. Belloc into the gallery of antique sculpture. How wonderful these old Greeks I What set them out on such a course, I wonder--anymore, for instance, than the Sandwich Islanders? This reminds me to tell you that in the Berlin Museum, which the King of Prussia is now finis.h.i.+ng in high style, I saw what is said to be the most complete Egyptian collection in the world; a whole Egyptian temple, word for word--pillars, paintings, and all; numberless sarcophagi, and mummies _ad nauseam!_ They are no more fragrant than the eleven thousand virgins, these mummies! and my stomach revolts equally from the odor of sanct.i.ty and of science.
I saw there a mummy of a little baby; and though it was black as my shoe, and a disgusting, dry thing, nevertheless the little head was covered with fine, soft, auburn hair. Four thousand years ago, some mother thought the poor little thing a beauty. Also I saw mummies of cats, crocodiles, the ibis, and all the other religious _bijouterie_ of Egypt, with many cases of their domestic utensils, ornaments, &c.
The whole view impressed me with quite an idea of barbarism; much more so than the a.s.syrian collection. About the winged bulls there is a solemn and imposing grandeur; they have a mountainous and majestic nature. These Egyptian things give one an idea of inexpressible ungainliness. They had a clumsy, elephantine character of mind, these Egyptians. There was not wanting grace, but they seemed to pick it up accidentally; because among all possible forms some must be graceful.
They had a kind of grand, mammoth civilization, gloomy and goblin.
They seem to have floundered up out of Nile mud, like that old, slimy, pre-Adamite brood, the what's-their-name--_megalosaurus, ichthyosaurus, pterodactyle, iguanodon_, and other misshapen abominations, with now and then wreaths of lotus and water lilies round their tusks.
The human face, as represented in a.s.syrian sculptures, is a higher type of face than even the Greek: it is n.o.ble and princely; the Egyptian faces are broad, flat, and clumsy. If Egypt gave birth to Greece, with her beautiful arts, then truly this immense, clumsy roc's egg hatched a miraculous nest of loves and graces.
Among the antiques here, my two favorites are Venus de Milon, which I have described to you, and the Diane Cha.s.seresse: this G.o.ddess is represented by the side of a stag; and so completely is the marble made alive, that one seems to perceive that a tread so airy would not bend a flower. Every side of the statue is almost equally graceful.
The small, proud head is thrown back with the freedom of a stag; there is a gay, haughty self-reliance, an airy defiance, a rejoicing fulness of health and immortal youth in the whole figure. You see before you the whole Greek conception of an immortal--a creature full of intellect, full of the sparkle and elixir of existence, in whom the principle of life seems to be crystallized and concentrated with a dazzling abundance; light, airy, incapable alike of love and of sympathy; living for self, and self only. Alas for poor souls, who, in the heavy anguish of life, had only such G.o.ddesses to go to! How far in advance is even the idolatry of Christianity! how different the idea of Mary from the Diana!
Yet, as I walked up and down among these remains of Greek art, I could not but wonder at the spectacle of their civilization: no modern development reproduces it, nor ever can or will. It is well to cherish and make much of that ethereal past, as a specimen of one phase of humanity, for it is past _forever_. Those isles of Greece, with their gold and purple haze of light and shadow, their exquisite, half-spiritual, half-bodily formation--islands where flesh and blood became semi-spiritual, and where the sense of beauty was an existence--have pa.s.sed as a vision of glory, never to return. One scarcely realizes how full of poetry was their mythology; all successive ages have drawn on it for images of beauty without exhausting it; and painters and artists, to this day, are fettered and repressed by vain efforts to reproduce it. But as a religion for the soul and the heart, all this is vain and void; all powerless to give repose or comfort. One who should seek repose on the bosom of such a mythology is as one who seeks to pillow himself on the many-tinted clouds of evening; soft and beautiful as they are, there is nothing real to them but their dampness and coldness.
Here M. and Madame Belloc entered, and as he wanted my opinion of the Diane, I let her read this part of the letter to him in French. You ought to have seen M. Belloc, with tears in his eyes, defending the old Greeks, and expounding to me, with all manner of rainbow ill.u.s.trations, the religious meanings of Greek mythology, and the _morale_ of Greek tragedy. Such a whole souled devotion to a nation dead and gone could never be found but in France.
Madame Belloc was the translator of Maria Edgeworth by that lady's desire; corresponded with her for years, and still has many of her letters. Her translation of Uncle Tom has to me all the merit and all the interest of an original composition. In perusing it I enjoy the pleasure of reading the story with scarce any consciousness of its ever having been mine. In the evening Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall called.