I see in him nothing but
the driest imitation of the classics. It would be too much praise to
call it reproduction. David had neither heart nor soul. How could he
be and artist?--he who coolly took his portfolio to the guillotine to
take lessons on the dying agonies of its victims--how could he ever
paint any thing to touch the heart?
In general, all French artists appear to me to have been very much
injured by a wrong use of classic antiquity. Nothing could be more
glorious and beautiful than the Grecian development; nothing more
unlike it that the stale, wearisome, repetitious imitations of it in
modern times. The Greek productions themselves have a living power to
this day; but all imitations of them are cold and tiresome. These old
Greeks made such beautiful things, because they did _not_
imitate. That mysterious vitality which still imbues their remains,
and which seems to enchant even the fragments of their marbles, is the
mesmeric vitality of fresh, original conception. Art, built upon this,
is just like what the shadow of a beautiful woman is to the woman. One
gets tired in these galleries of the classic band, and the classic
headdress, and the classic attitude, and the endless repetition of the
classic urn, and vase, and lamp, as if nothing else were ever to be
made in the world except these things.
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