With regard to the arrangements of the Louvre, they seem to me to be
admirable. No nation has so perfectly the qualifications to care for,
keep, and to show to best advantage a gallery of art as the French.
During the heat of the outburst that expelled Louis Philippe from the
throne, the Louvre was in some danger of destruction. Destructiveness
is a native element of human nature, however repressed by society; and
hence every great revolutionary movement always brings to the surface
some who are for indiscriminate demolition. Moreover there is a strong
tendency in the popular mind, where art and beauty have for many years
been monopolized as the prerogative of a haughty aristocracy, to
identify art and beauty with oppression; this showed itself in England
and Scotland in the general storm which wrecked the priceless beauty
of the ecclesiastical buildings. It was displaying itself in the same
manner in Germany during the time of the reformation, and had not
Luther been gifted with a nature as strongly aesthetic as progressive,
would have wrought equal ruin there. So in the first burst of popular
enthusiasm that expelled the monarchy, the cry was raised by some
among the people, "We shall never get rid of kings till we pull down
the palaces;" just the echo of the old cry in Scotland, "Pull down the
nests, and the rooks will fly away.
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