It is perhaps too much praise. All these moderns are poets who have determined to be painters. One has sought out dramas in history, another scenes of manners; one translates religions, another a philosophy. Such an one imitates Raphael, such another the early Italian masters; the landscapist employs trees and clouds to compose odes or elegies. No one is simply a painter; they are all archaeologists, psychologists, giving setting to { 519}some memory or theory. They please our learning, our philosophy. Like ourselves, they are full and overflowing with general ideas, Parisians uneasy and curious. They live too much by the brain, and too little by the senses; they have too much wit and too little artlessness. They do not love a form for its own sake, but for what it expresses; and if they chance to love it, it is voluntarily, with an acquired taste, from an antiquary's superstition.
They are children of a wise generation, harassed and thoughtful, in which men who have won equality and the freedom of thought, and of shaping each for himself his religion, rank, { 520}and fortune, wish to find in art the expression of their anxieties and meditations. They are a thousand leagues away from the first masters, workmen or cavaliers, who lived out-of-doors, scarcely read at all, and thought only of giving a feast for their eyes. It is for that that I love them; I feel like them because I am of their century. Sympathy is the best source of admiration and pleasure.
Below the museum is a square tower enclosed by a gallery of slender columns, which towards the top bend and are cut into trefoils, forming a border of arcades. They have gathered under this gallery all the antiquities of the country: fragments of Roman statues, severe busts of emperors, ascetic virgins of the middle ages, bas-reliefs from churches and temples, knights of stone lying all armed upon their tombs. The court was deserted and silent; tall slender trees, tufted shrubbery, were bright with the loveliest green. A dazzling sunlight fell on the red tiles of the gallery; an old fountain, loaded with little columns and heads of animals, murmured near to a bench of rose-veined marble. A statue of a young man was seen amidst the branches; stems of green hops climbed up around broken columns.{ 521}