To me it was a picture too mighty
and too painful--whose power I confessed, but which I did not like to
contemplate.
On the whole, French painting is to me an exponent of the great
difficulty and danger of French life; that passion for the outward and
visible, which all their education, all the arrangements of their
social life, every thing in their art and literature, tends
continually to cultivate and increase. Hence they have become the
leaders of the world in what I should call the minor artistics--all
those little particulars which render life beautiful. Hence there are
more pretty pictures, and popular lithographs, from France than from
any other country in the world; but it produces very little of the
deepest and highest style of art.
In this connection I may as well give you my Luxembourg experience, as
it illustrates the same idea. I like Paul de la Roche, on the whole,
although I think he has something of the fault of which I speak. He
has very great dramatic power; but it is more of the kind shown by
Walter Scott than of the kind shown by Shakspeare. He can reproduce
historical characters with great vividness and effect, and with enough
knowledge of humanity to make the verisimilitude admirably strong; but
as to the deep knowledge with which Shakspeare searches the radical
elements of the human soul, he has it not.
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