Again: in regard to this whole French gallery, there is much of a
certain quality which I find it very difficult to describe in any one
word--a dramatic smartness, a searching for striking and peculiar
effects, which render the pictures very likely to please on first
sight, and to weary on longer acquaintance. It seems to me to be the
work of a race whose senses and perceptions of the outward have been
cultivated more than the deep inward emotions. Few of the pictures
seem to have been the result of strong and profound feeling, of habits
of earnest and concentrated thought. There is an abundance of
beautiful little phases of sentiment, pointedly expressed; there is a
great deal of what one should call the picturesque of the
_morale;_ but few of its foundation ideas. I must except from
these remarks the very strong and earnest painting of the Meduse, by
Gericault, which C. has described. That seems to me to be the work of
a man who had not seen human life and suffering merely on the outside,
but had felt, in the very depths of his soul, the surging and
earthquake of those mysteries of passion and suffering which underlie
our whole existence in this world.
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