CHAPTER IV

THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN FRANCE

In France also modern art began with a stream of antiquarianism which flowed from the same archæological source. De Brosses published a history of the Roman Republic, and wrote on Herculaneum. Leroy produced his _Ruines des plus anciens monuments de la Grèce_ in 1758. Shortly afterwards the _Recueils d'Antiquité_ of Caylus and Hamilton were published. The former undertook his great journeys, and presented the Academy of Inscriptions with a succession of archæological treatises. He is perhaps the first since Batteux and Coypel who again makes of the modern painter a positive demand for a quiet beauty of lines after the "_manière simple et noble du bel antique_." The architects begin to take counsel of Vitruvius, and to work after some model borrowed from the antique. Soufflot rebuilt the Pantheon, and produced the Temple of Pæstum.

Even in 1763 Grimm could write: "For some years past we have been making keen inquiry for antique ornaments and forms. The predilection for them has become so universal that now everything is to be done _à la Grecque_. The interior and exterior decorations of houses, furniture, dress material, and goldsmiths' work all bear alike the stamp of the Greeks. The fashion passes from architecture to millinery: our ladies have their hair dressed _à la Grecque_, our fine gentlemen would think themselves dishonoured if they did not hold in their hands _une boîte à la Grecque_." Even Diderot's preference for the ethical and emotional, as Greuze had painted it--and as Diderot himself had dramatised it--veered round at the commencement of the sixties into an enthusiasm for the antique. After 1761 he carried on in the salons a war of extermination against poor old Boucher, and lectured him in a menacing voice upon the "great and severe taste of antiquity." He twitted him with possessing neither reality nor taste, and produced in proof the fact that, in the whole catalogue of Boucher's figures, not four could be found which could be employed in relief, or even as statues. The new taste demanded pure and simple lines, the beauty of sculpture; it went back to the antique. When a French translation of Winckelmann appeared in 1765 he spoke out, on the occasion of a review of the book, clearly and plainly: "_Il me semble qu'il faudrait étudier l'antique pour apprendre à voir la nature_." In the same vein Watelet pronounced on Boucher: "_Jamais artiste n'a plus ouvertement témoigné son mépris pour la vraie beauté telle qu'elle a été sentie et exprimée par les statuaires_ _de l'ancienne Grèce_." Thus the change in the artistic outlook was heralded long before the curtain went up upon the events of 1789.

_Madame Vigée-Lebrun_, the French Angelica Kauffmann, possessed of a tender, soft, sympathetic talent, is perhaps the truest representative of this gracious, entirely French transition style, over which like a breath, but only like a breath, hovers the antique. She has in her portraits, in an especially refined manner, fixed that age when noble ladies desired to forget the Marquise and Duchess, to exhibit only the wife and mother, and believed that by unconstraint of attitude in their simple white robe, the scarf thrown modestly over the shoulders, they had effected a return to antique simplicity. Boucher, moved to the depths of his consciousness by Diderot, resolved to paint a picture taken from ancient history. Greuze painted "Severus and Caracalla," Fragonard "Choereas and Callirhöe." Hubert Robert grew more and more archæological, and played in his landscapes with ancient remains and classical ruins. Vien became enthusiastic over antique gems, and thought he must draw the conclusion, from the noble calm of these figures, that the amiable coquetry and capricious garments of _rococo_ were without nobility. His plan was "to study the antique--Raphael, the Caracci, Domenichino, Michael Angelo, and, in one word, all those masters whose works convey the character of truth and grandeur."

But what gave far other significance to the French classicism of the ensuing period was that great event in the world's history, of which France became the theatre at the close of the eighteenth century. In the secluded gardens of Versailles, where the goat-footed Pan embraced the tall, white nymphs by an artificial water-fall, the noble lords and ladies, clad as Pierrots and Columbines, overheard in the midst of their whispered flirtations the menacing earthquake which was announced in thunder from Paris. Soon they beheld the earth crack and burst asunder, as that time came when the air was filled with the smoke of powder, when the first notes of the Marseillaise rang out, and in the Place de la Concorde, where to-day the loveliest fountains in the world are playing, blood ran from a dozen guillotines. That "_après nous le deluge_" of the Marquise de Pompadour had become a dire, prophetic truth, and in that flood of blood and horrors the artistic ideal of the eighteenth century was also washed away. The Revolution gave the death-blow to _rococo_. At one stroke it overthrew the most pleasant of all French periods, the truest presentiment of French grace and _esprit_, the noble and amiable art of Louis XV, which the melancholy, life-emitting Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard cause to hover before us as in the clouds of a dream. Classicism, however, attained through it a new and stronger basis, a certain connection with modern life, since it was transposed by it from the Museum of Antiquity into the middle of the Place de la Concorde beneath the guillotine.

What the age of the Revolution demanded of art was at all events not a "noble style," as Vien had required of it, but rather in the first place a Spartan virtue. Various philosophical writers had drawn a parallel between the organisation of the old and the modern state; they had exerted themselves to show that the old Republics were models of an almost absolute perfection, which the modern should, in so far as it was possible, imitate. They had contrasted the moral conditions of Sparta and the Roman Republic with the moral constitution of contemporary, monarchical France. They had quoted on every opportunity the acts of virtue, renunciation, courage, and patriotic sacrifice of the great men of antiquity; they had used these deeds as a means of proving their thesis, and their ideas aroused deep echoes in men's hearts.

[Illustration: ELISABETH VIGÉE-LEBRUN. PORTRAIT OF THE PAINTER WITH HER DAUGHTER.]

The sentiment of Rome had entered into the people as a thing of flesh and blood even before the catastrophe had ensued. "We were more prepared," wrote Nodier, "for the particular tone of the language of the Revolution than people would have believed, and it cost us little pains to pass from the studies of our _gymnases_ to the strife of the forum. In the schools we had prize compositions set of this kind: Who stands higher, the elder Brutus who judged his children, or the younger Brutus who judged his father? And so Livy and Tacitus have done more to overthrow the monarchical system than Voltaire and Rousseau." It was evident then that France, so soon as she had freed herself from her kings, so soon as she had spoken the word "Republic," must take the _Roman_ Republic as her pattern. People lived in an atmosphere of antiquity; the great citizens of Rome and Athens were ranged with the French National Convention; Scævola, Scipio, Cato, Cincinnatus, were the idols of the populace. The speakers in the council cited the ancients in preference; Madame Vigée-Lebrun gave _soupers à la Grecque_. "Everything was ordered according to the _Voyage d'Anacharsis_--garments, viands, amusements, and the table, all were Athenian. Madame Lebrun herself was Aspasia; M. l'Abbé Barthélémy, in a Greek dress with a laurel wreath on his head, recited a poem; M. de Cabierès played the golden lyre as Memnon, and young boys waited at table as slaves. The table itself was set entirely with Greek utensils, and all the viands were actually those of ancient Greece." Children were given Greek and Roman names. People called themselves "Romans." "_Mais, je l'aimais, Romains!_" cried Coulon at the death of Mirabeau. Paris is Rome. In the theatre the bust of Brutus is set opposite that of Voltaire, and the actor says: "_O buste réveré de Brutus, d'un grand homme, transporté dans Paris tu n'as point quitté Rome_." And as with the bust of Brutus in the theatre, that of Mucius Scævola appears in the cafés, which Parisian journalists, still full of remembrances of ancient history studied in the gymnasium, liken to the Lyceum and the Porch. In every case ancient Rome is set up as the exemplar. The Parisian collection of engravings on copper possesses a reproduction of the guillotine, with the inscription: _A similar machine was used for the execution of the Roman, Titus Manlius_. A valet committed suicide, and quoted the illustrious example of Seneca. Had it been possible, people would have gladly thrown themselves back eighteen hundred years into the past, with all its grandeur, its simplicity, and its ruthlessness. Political and social forms did not suffice; even the implements and costume of the ancients were again brought into honour. Furniture put on antiquarian shapes; the walls were decorated _à la Grecque_. The lively frivolity of _rococo_, with its freaks and fancies, was no longer adapted to the boudoir of the age of revolution, now transformed into the political council-room. Twists and curves were no longer permitted: everything had to be straightforward, logical, ungenerous, inexorable. Men went clad wretchedly, with red Phrygian caps and no breeches. Women and girls cast aside their ordinary attire and put on straight, falling drapery, discarded their heeled shoes and bound sandals round their feet, shook the powder from their locks and tied their hair in a Greek knot. "Dressed in white raiment without adornment, but decked in the virtue of simplicity," they appeared in the cabinet of the president, in order to surrender their jewels for the salvation of their country, like those Roman matrons in the time of Camillus.

And, in co-operation with the building up of this new world, painting also advanced. It was only when it assisted to arouse civic virtue, it was said at a sitting of the jury at the Salon of 1793, that painting could possess a right to exist in the new state, and as the handmaid of this patriotism might fulfil an even higher mission than it had done in ancient Greece and Rome. "The Greeks and Romans were indeed only slaves, but we French are by nature free, philosophers in character, virtuous in our every perception, and artists through our taste." In proportion as the French Republic transcended the old free states, so too must French art take the lead of the antique. "All that stimulated art in Greece, the gymnastic exercises, the public games, the national festivals, is also accessible to the French, who possess above all that which the Greeks lacked, the feeling for true liberty. To depict the history of a free people is indeed quite another mission for the true genius than to embody scenes out of mythology."

Through this fresh _nuance_, which classicism thus acquired, the ground was cut from under the feet of those who devoted themselves to the study of the antique as conceived by Diderot. The new moral age would have no traffic with those artists in whom the last smile of the eighteenth century was personified. Their pictures, full of grace and caprice, fell into the same disrepute into which everything of yesterday had come, and it was only with a bitter smile that they followed the course of events. The younger Moreau, that animated master of _rococo_, became academically cold and tedious when he designed his book on the French costume of the Revolution. The good Fragonard, who was only fifty-nine in 1789, and lived till 1806, saw himself hooted in spite of his "Choereas." He, the true representative of frivolous tenderness, of fair and roseate hues, had lost every right to exist in the new world, and ended his life by a sad death when, after the Reign of Terror, there was no longer a place for _fêtes galantes_. A delightful portrait of himself, which he painted in the first period of the Revolution, shows us an old man, clothed entirely in black, softly melancholy, standing in a formal, dusky-brown salon. On the table on which his arm rests lies a guitar, at his feet a portfolio of engravings; but he neither plays the guitar nor looks at the prints. In the shadows of the falling evening he reminds himself forlornly of past days, and his bald forehead, where so many rose-coloured dreams have passed, is overcast with gloomy shadows.

Greuze, too, outlived himself. It was no use for him to pretend more and more to the utmost virtue, and to paint an "Ariadne at Naxos." He died in misery and oblivion in 1805. The demands which this new classicism made were able to be satisfied by no one any longer, not even by Vien. However loudly he might proclaim himself a student of the Greeks, he, nevertheless, remained a very timid and lukewarm revolutionary. An old man, cold and peaceful and stolid, moderate in everything, he had neither the energy nor the audacity of the reformer. He had been the Court painter of Louis XVI, a most monarchically disposed and loyal man, and was a suspect on this ground alone to those who were in power in 1789. His pictures, too, describe no more than the end of a world. Greuze, Fragonard, and Vien, in spite of their assumed seriousness, survived only as gallant phantoms in the new age, by the side of those men of more rugged countenance who inaugurated the nineteenth century.

[Illustration: JACQUES LOUIS DAVID. _L'Art._]

_Jacques Louis David_ first satisfied the new requirements, and in so doing lent to French classicism, if only for a few years, a certain touch of far greater vivacity. He it was who carried through, in all its consequence, that reformation in taste which Vien had sought in externals, in costume, furniture and decoration; who inspired the gems painted by Vien with republican pathos, and became in this way the great herald of that age which read Plutarch and made Paris into a modern Sparta. David, _Prix de Rome_ after three successive failures, still came from that "corrupt epoch" against which Republican prudery was so excited. At the age of twenty-six he had already painted Soffits, in the manner of his kinsman "Boucher, to say it with respect." But the journey to Rome converted Saul into Paul. In 1775 Vien, on his appointment as director of the Roman Academy, had taken him to Italy as his best pupil, and hardly dreamt at that time that this young man would strike out on such an entirely new path from his Roman studies. He did not wait for the Revolution to be converted; when the hour struck he was ready. Thus his first pictures were in a manner the prelude to the Revolution. In them he had already quite consciously entered upon the road along which he was to go later. His "Oath of the Horatii" and his "Brutus," both painted in Rome in 1784, proclaimed his programme. The little, rosy loves, the doves of Venus, and all the charming frivolity and gallantry of _rococo_, received their final dismissal, and rough men walked in their stead. He broke his staff over all that he had previously venerated, and declared loudly that he had sinned when in his youth he had believed in the flowery palette of _rococo_, and completed in tender tones those ceiling frescoes which Fragonard had commenced in the house of Mdlle. Guimard. Capricious frivolities had to make way for a manlier art, matter "that was worthy to rivet the gaze of a free nation upon itself." Already, long before the taking of the Bastille, the painting of young David was valued by the rising generation as the artistic embodiment of their political ideas, imbibed while they were still at school. When the "Horatii" was completed it was not only old Pompeo Battoni who exclaimed, when he saw the picture in David's Roman studio, "_Tu ed io soli siamo pittori, pel rimanente si puo gettarlo nel fiume._" In Paris his success was universal; all the critics were unanimous in praise; David was the man after the heart of the age, for his picture was the first which spoke clearly and perceptibly of the pathos of the revolution which stood at the threshold. People saw in it an "example of patriotism which knew no obstacles," since not even love for their sister, who was betrothed to the enemy, prevailed upon the Horatii to refrain from combat with the Curiati. His next picture, "Brutus" as he received the lictors, when they bring him the bodies of his sons who have been implicated in a monarchical conspiracy, was greeted as allegorical of the incorruptible justice of republicanism. The populace saw in it the "glorification of the chastisement of all traitors to liberty," and acclaimed David because he "had founded the sinewy style which should characterise the heroic deeds of the revolutionaries, children of liberty, equality, and fraternity." And one understands--when one also adds the influence of Napoleon--this reaction of military simplicity against the effeminacy of _rococo_.

[Illustration: DAVID. MADAME RÉCAMIER.]

David, at the outbreak of the Revolution, no longer a young man, but forty years old, was the terrible painter of the age, its despotic dictator. As a deputy in the Convention he not only ruled over painting, but also imposed his taste upon sculpture, ivory work, goldsmiths' work, and decoration. He designed the new costumes for the deputies and ministers. As organiser of public fêtes, he brought to life again the whole of republican Rome. He was one of those rare artists who are the men of their hour. To a new plebeian race, to whose feverishly excited patriotism the soft, luxurious, aristocratically reprehensible art of _rococo_ must seem as a mockery of all the rights of men, he showed, for the first time, the man, the hero who died for an idea or for his country; and he gave this man huge and elastic muscles, like those of a gladiator who struggles in the arena. He was a second Hercules, cleansing the Augæan stables; with his own strong shoulders he thrust back the petulant band of painters who had tarried too long in the island of Cythera. He applied art to the heroism of the day, gave it the martial attitude of patriotism, inspired it with the spirit of Robespierre, St. Just, and Danton. The more obtrusively his heroes paraded their patriotism, the more people saw in them a picture of the French nation, as true as a transposition could hope to be. This strained rhetorical pathos dwelt in the mind of the age. Talma moved the people to enthusiasm when he played the "Horatii" of Corneille in the classic cothurnus. When David painted, the state declamations of the orators still rang in his ears. Robespierre is said to have spoken from the tribune slowly, rhythmically, artistically: a Bossuet in his rostrum, a Boileau in his chair, while the volcano quivered beneath his very feet: his philippics were carefully divided into three sections, like academic discourses: his patriotism resolved itself into tirades with correctly composed periods. In David's pictures we have an exact correspondence with all this: the rigid classicality of his composition, figures grouped as though on parade; his cold pathos, the counterpart to that of the orators' fine sentiments set forth in fine phrases.

The great distinction between the beginning of modern art in Germany and in France is that in France the new style was not only called forth by the influence of a scientific programme from outside, but stood in conjunction with a great transformation in culture, and that it was compelled at first to concern itself not only with imitation and philological retrospect, but with the free expression of the characteristically modern spirit. German art had no new pronouncement to make through the medium of the antique; it followed, on the other hand, the programme of an artistically barren scholar who forgot that archæology is not art, recommended imitation as the path to perfection, and perpetually reminded the artists who followed him how widely they deviated from the correct lines of the model. "Afterwards they rebuke it, and say it is not antique and consequently not good art," as Albrecht Dürer had complained of such people. In the earnest sentiment, the exalted Roman spirit, the declaiming over rugged, masculine virtues, freedom and patriotism, that found expression in David's first pictures, there lived something of the Catonian spirit of the Terror; and that still gives them historical value. His enthusiasm was not, first and foremost, for antique art, but for the ideas of country, duty, freedom, progress. The words antiquity and democracy were of like meaning to him.

[Illustration: DAVID. THE OATH OF THE HORATII.]

And how thoroughly this man was permeated with the spirit of his age is shown still more when he discarded the cothurnus, boldly attacked the present, and gave himself up entirely to the delineation of what came under his direct observation in his own life and experience. There he became not only a rhetorician, a revolutionary agitator, but a really great painter. Lepelletier on his death-bed, the assassinated Marat, and the dead Barre, are works of a mighty _naturalist_. Lepelletier, one of the many deputies who had voted for the death of Louis XVI, was treacherously assassinated in Paris, on 20th January 1793, by a valet of the king's. The body was publicly exhibited; David painted it, and on 29th March presented the picture to the Convention. As the portrait of the "first Martyr of Liberty," it was hung in the Convention chamber. On 13th July 1793 Marat, the man-of-terror, fell a victim to the knife of Charlotte Corday. David was presiding at the Jacobin Club when the news was brought him, and he embraced the citizen who had arrested the girl. Deputations of the people appeared in the Convention to express their grief for the heavy loss. Suddenly a voice was heard to cry: "_Où es tu, David? Tu as transmis à la posterité l'image de Lepelletier mourant pour la patrie, il te reste encore un tableau à faire._" Silence succeeded in the Assembly. Then David started up: "_Je le ferai._" On 11th October he informed the Convention that his "Marat" was finished. "The people asked for their murdered man back again, longed to look once more on the features of their truest friend. They cried to me: 'David, take up your brush, avenge Marat, so that the enemy may blanch when they perceive the distorted countenance of the man who became the victim of his love for freedom.' I heard the voice of the people, and obeyed." Thus David spoke in the Assembly when he presented the Republic with the picture of the murdered man--one of the most thrilling representations of that awful age. The body is lying in the bath. Only the naked upper part of the body, and the head, with a dirty cloth tied round it, and fallen back upon the right shoulder, are visible; one hand, resting back on the side of the bath, still holds a paper in a convulsive grip; the other hangs down limp and dead to the ground. Over this head, with the half-closed eyelids, and the mouth distorted from the death-throes, Caravaggio would have rejoiced, there is such keen naturalism in every stroke of the brush. Like Géricault, in later times, David was then a regular visitor at the Morgue, attended at executions, and took an interest in the convulsive muscular movements of the guillotined. And the colour, too, like the drawing, is of a naturalistic strength to which he never again attained. The light falls slantingly on the corpse from above and throws the head, shoulder, and one arm into strong relief, while all the rest is left in obscurity. In this awful _still-life_ of uncompromising reality and tragical grandeur he has created a work in the midst of an age of storm which will survive all storms and all changes of taste.

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

DAVID. THE RAPE OF THE SABINES.]

[Illustration: DAVID. HELEN AND PARIS.]

His portraits have no less strikingly survived the fiery ordeal of time. In them, too, he is neither rhetorical nor cold, but full of fire and the freshness of youth. Face to face with his model, he forgot the Greeks and Romans, saw life alone, was rejuvenated in the youth-giving fount of nature, and painted--almost alone of the painters of his generation--the truth. Here his effect, when otherwise he was lacking in all naïveté, is actually naïve and intimate. The best painters have never treated flesh better. He had an aversion to palette tones, and sought after nature with unexampled attention. The fine pearl-grey of his colouring is as delicate as it is distinguished; in his portraits, especially, the relief-tones of blue and light rose seem almost to anticipate the delicate, toned-down tints of modern Impressionism. Himself an ardent Revolutionist, he was, as it were, created to be the portrayer of those men of an austerity like Cato's, and those women with their free, masculine, proud gaze; that valiant generation that felt within itself a desire to begin civilisation again and found religion anew. The portrait of Lavoisier and his wife reminds one in its refinement of Madame Vigée-Lebrun. The chemist is sitting by a table covered with instruments; his wife, in an elegant light gown, bends attentively over him. The picture dates from 1788, and it still looks like some good work of the age of Louis XVI. Again, how intimate is the effect of the marvellous portrait of Michael Gérard and his family. The good man, in his shirt-sleeves, seems to feel really at home; a small boy is leaning against his knee, a girl is playing on the clavicorde. There is not the slightest suggestion of pose or a conventional type of beauty in this stout old gentleman sitting so comfortably in his _bourgeois négligé_, and with honest eyes gazing out so inquisitively round him. In a few other pictures the spiritual life of women is portrayed with remarkable tenderness. One of the earliest is the exceptionally fine portrait of his mother-in-law, Madame Pécoult, in 1783; then, in 1790, the portrait of the Marquise d'Orvilliers, with that expression of dreamy languor which plays round the eyes of the beautiful woman. The Louvre possesses, in the portrait of Madame Récamier, perhaps the most charming and attractive woman's portrait that David ever painted. The beautiful Juliette lies stretched on a divan of antique pattern. She wears a white dress, her soft rosy feet are bare. The arrangement of the room coquettes primly with that simplicity which was paraded at the time. Apart from the divan, there is only a huge bronze candelabra to be seen. Then there is Barere's portrait. He stands on the tribune, and delivers the speech which is to cost Louis XVI his life. The face is small and insignificant, the gaze cold and harsh, and on the mouth there is a shadow of bitter hate and narrow fanaticism. But the triumph of these portraits of men is that of Bonaparte. David was one of the first of the men of the Revolution to come beneath the spell of the Little Corporal. One day, while he was working in his studio at the Louvre, a pupil rushed in breathlessly: "General Bonaparte is outside the door!" Napoleon entered in a dark-blue coat "that made his lean yellow face look leaner and yellower than ever." David dismissed his pupils, and drew, in a sitting of barely two hours, the stern head of the Corsican. Thus he passed into the service of Napoleon.

This man, who viewed himself only as the coping-stone of the Republic--after the example of Augustus when he transformed the Roman Republic into the Empire--was unwilling to show any opposition to the republican tastes. The first painter of the Republic was appointed to be the Imperial Court painter. What he had been under Robespierre he was under Napoleon: the dictator of his age, who maintained a supremacy over the whole of art similar to that which Lebrun held beneath Louis XIV. The "Marat" was the great work of his revolutionary, the "Coronation" of his monarchical period,--that colossal picture which, completed between 1806 and 1807, has handed down to posterity a true representation of the ceremonial pageants that took place in Notre Dame on 2nd December 1804. The moment selected is when Napoleon places the crown, which is carried on a velvet cushion by the Duc de Berg, upon the head of the Empress, who kneels before him in a white robe and a crimson mantle. The picture contains portraits of all the personages present at the ceremony, amongst them being David himself, as he stands on a platform and sketches at a small table. The whole composition of this picture and the grouping of the figures is full of stately gravity. Real energy and patience must have been required to paint this immense picture, though it shows not the least sign of fatigue. With the exception of Menzel's "Coronation of William I," I know of no historical picture of the century of as high an artistic value, with the like noble sublimity of colour, with so tender, quivering a light. There are certain portions of the "Coronation" in which the white robes, the deep-red velvet of the mantles, and gold embroideries affect us like a symphony in colours. When the picture was completed Napoleon visited David's studio, accompanied by the Empress, his ministers, and his staff. The Court drew up, and the Emperor moved up and down in front of the picture, hat in hand, for more than half an hour, examining it in all its details. Finally, with one of those dramatic effects of which he was so fond, he lightly raised his hat: "_C'est bien, très bien; David, je vous salue_."

[Illustration: DAVID. BELISARIUS ASKING ALMS.]

David had now still better opportunities than at an earlier period of proving his great capacity as a portrait painter. His portraits of the Emperor, of the Pope, of Cardinal Caprara, and of Murat symbolise the brutal greatness of an age which worshipped strength. Even at the close of his life, when the Restoration had exiled him from France, there resulted in Brussels graceful and tenderly observed portraits, such as that of the daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, which will perpetuate his name. One, in the Praet Collection at Brussels--three women of indescribable ugliness--marks the pinnacle of his pictorial strength and keen naturalism. They are the "Three Fates" of 1810, and he has painted them with the true artist's delight, and with a massiveness like that of Frans Hals.

When these works were brought together at the Paris Exhibition of 1889, universal astonishment prevailed when it was discovered what a great painter this Louis David was. He appeared in these pictures as an artist who stood completely within his age, who shared its passions and was permeated by its greatness; he even appeared as a _charmeur_ who handled the phenomena of colour and light as few others have done. It is true, David showed himself in this favourable light at the exhibition only because the entirely archæological side of his talent was not represented. For at the bottom of his heart he too was an archæologist. Many of his works, such as "The Death of Socrates," "Brutus," "The Oath in the Tennis Court," and "The Rape of the Sabines," are specimens of a barren theory.

Against all the caprice of the eighteenth century, with its charming, alluring grace, he opposed a strict, inexorable system, as he believed he saw it in the antique. Simplicity, however, beneath his hands became dryness, nobility formal. He saw in painting a sort of abstract geometry for which there existed hard-and-fast forms. There was something mathematical in his effort after dry correctness and erudite accuracy. The infinite variety of life with its eternal changes was hidden from his sight. The beautiful, he taught with Winckelmann, does not exist in a single individual; it is only possible to create a type of it by comparison and through composition. The human being of art ought always to be a copy of that perfect being, primitive man, whom the Roman sculptors had still before their eyes, but who had deteriorated in the course of ages. Thus in France, too, the sensuous art of painting was converted into an abstract science of æsthetics. The classic ideal weighed upon French art and prescribed for all alike the same "heroic style," the same elevation, the same marble coldness and monotony of colour. _Jean-Baptiste Regnault_, and _François André Vincent_, whose studios were most frequented after David's, worshipped the same gods. After David's departure, _Guérin_, in particular, endeavoured to bequeath to the students those genuinely academic rules which his pupil, Delacroix, has summed up in these words: "In order to make an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinous, and then say, 'We have done our utmost; if he is, nevertheless, not beautiful, we must altogether abstain from this freak of nature, with his squat nose and thick lips, so unendurable to the eyes.'" When he had to paint his "Insurrection in Cairo," therefore, Egyptians as well as Arabs must first be supplied with heads of Antinous and transformed from modern soldiers into ancient warriors, Romans of the time of Romulus, before they could enter into the kingdom of art. Everything was sacrificed to line,--an inflexible, inexorable, correct, and icy line, the conventional, ideal line,--not the true line which follows from observation of the infinite variety of nature.

Nevertheless, even in works constructed as these were by rule and line, we cannot fail to be impressed by the technical ability displayed by the artist.

[Illustration: _Baschet._

DAVID. THE DEATH OF MARAT.]

France, who in her outward relations has generally had a feverish longing for change, has been in literary and artistic respects, as a rule, exceedingly conservative, has upheld authority, supported an academy, and prized limitations and proportion above everything. They had upset the monarchy, murdered the hated aristocrats, built up the republic, done away with Christianity before they ever thought of touching the three unities of the drama. Voltaire, who had a reverence for nothing in heaven or earth, respected the received treatment of the Alexandrine verse. And David, the great painter of the Revolution, who cast the pictures of Boucher out of the Louvre, and whose pupils used to shoot bread-crumbs at Watteau's masterpiece, the "Voyage à Cythère," yet conveyed with him into the new age, as an inheritance from _rococo_, its prodigious knowledge. The good old traditions of the technique of French painting were little shaken by him and his school. The Academy described by Quatremère as the "eternal nursery garden of incurable prejudices," was indeed overthrown, but David became immediately the head of a new one. This age of absorption in politics developed an art to correspond, more disciplined than ever, girt round by an iron cuirass; and this art, notwithstanding multifarious phases, at no time lost its touch, technically, with the acquisitions of former epochs, but evolved itself in its various directions from one centre, distracted from its path by nothing brought into it from outside. Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet, widely as they differ from one another, are links in one chain of evolution. Art comes from knowledge. This maxim, which David held in honour, has remained to the present day a dominant force in French art, and by virtue of this knowledge, which David received from the old masters and guarded as a sacred trust, France became in the nineteenth century the chief school of technique for all other nations. From the French the other nations learned their grammar and syntax; through them they acquired a wider horizon and a deeper insight into the great mystery of nature.

[Decoration]

## BOOK II

THE ESCAPE INTO THE PAST

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