these weavers were men, and when we encounter men we may expect soon to encounter the arts. At the end of the fourteenth century Flanders, with Italy, is the most industrious, the wealthiest, the most flourishing country in Europe. A Flemish renaissance underneath Christian ideas,- such in effect is the twofold nature of art under Hubert and John Van Eyck, Roger Van der Weyde, Hemling, and Quintin Matsys; and from these two characteristics proceed all the others. On the one hand, artists take interest in actual life; their figures are no longer symbols like the illuminations of ancient missals, nor purified spirits like the Madonnas of the school of Cologne, but living beings and bodies. They attend to anatomy, the perspective is exact, the minutest details are rendered of stuffs, of architecture, of accessories, and of landscape; the relief is strong, and the entire scene stamps itself on the eye and on the mind with extraordinary force and sense of stability; the greatest masters of coming times are not to surpass them in all this, nor even go so far. Nature evidently is now discovered by them. The scales fall from their eyes: they have just mastered, almost in a flash, the proportions, the structure, and the coloring of visible realities; and moreover they delight in them. Consider the superb copes wrought in gold and decked with diamonds, the embroidered silks, the flowered and dazzling diadems, with which they ornament their saints and divine personages, all of which represents the pomp of the Burgundian court. Look at the calm and transparent water, the bright meadows, the red and white flowers, the blooming trees, the sunny distances, of their admirable landscapes. Observe their coloring,- the strongest and richest ever seen,- -the pure and full tones side by side in a Persian carpet, and united solely through their harmony, the superb breaks in the folds of purple mantles, the azure recesses of long falling robes, the green draperies like a summer field permeated with sunshine, the display of gold skirts trimmed with black, the strong light which warms and enlivens the whole scene: you have a concert in which each instrument sounds its proper note, and the more true because the more sonorous. They see the world on the bright side and make a holiday of it, a genuine fête, similar to those of this day, glowing under a more bounteous sunlight; and not a heavenly Jerusalem suffused with supernatural radiance, such as Fra Angelico painted. They 14424 copy the real with scrupulous accuracy, and all that is real: the ornaments of armor, the polished glass of a window, the scrolls of a carpet, the hairs of fur, the undraped body of an Adam and an Eve, a canon's massive, wrinkled, and obese features, a burgomaster's or soldier's broad shoulders, projecting chin, and prominent nose, the spindling shanks of a hangman, the overlarge head and diminutive limbs of a child, the costumes and furniture of the age; their entire work being a glorification of this present life. But on the other hand, it is a glorification of Christian belief. When a great change is effected in human affairs, it brings. on by degrees a corresponding change in human conceptions. After the discovery of the Indies and of America, after the invention of printing and the multiplication of books, after the restoration of classic antiquity and the Reformation of Luther, any conception of the world then formed could no longer remain. monastic and mystic. The tender and melancholy aspiration of a soul sighing for the celestial kingdom, and humbly subjecting its conduct to the authority of an undisputed Church, gave way to free inquiry nourished on so many fresh conceptions, and disappeared at the admirable spectacle of this real world which man now began to comprehend and to conquer. . While the mind is expanding, the temperature around it becomes modified and establishes the conditions of a new growth. Society, ideas, and tastes, have undergone a transformation, and there is room for a new art. Already in the preceding epoch we see premonitory symptoms of the coming change. From Hubert Van Eyck to Quintin Matsys, the grandeur and gravity of religious conceptions have diminished. Nobody now dreams of portraying the whole of Christian faith and doctrine in a single picture; scenes are selected from the Gospel and from history,-Annunciations, shepherd adorations, Last Judgments, martyrdoms, and moral legends. Painting, which is epic in the hands of Hubert Van Eyck, becomes idyllic in those of Hemling, and almost worldly in those of Quintin Matsys. It gets to be pathetic, interesting, and pleasing. The charming saints, the beautiful Herodias, and the little Salome of Quintin Matsys, are richly attired noble dames, and already laic: the artist loves the world as it is and for itself, and does not subordinate it to the representation of the supernatural world; he does not employ it as a means but as an end. Scenes ( of profane life multiply: he paints townspeople in their shops, money-changers, amorous couples, and the attenuated features and stealthy smiles of a miser. Lucas of Leyden, his contemporary, is an ancestor of the painters whom we call the lesser Flemings: his Presentation of Christ' and 'The Magdalen's Dance' have nothing religious about them but their titles; the evangelical subject is lost in the accessories: that which the picture truly presents is a rural Flemish festival, or a gathering of Flemings on an open field. Jerome Bosch, of the same period, paints grotesque, infernal scenes. Art, it is clear, falls from heaven to earth; and is no longer to treat divine but human incidents. Artists in other respects lack no process and no preparation: they understand perspective, they know the use of oil, and are masters of modeling and relief; they have studied actual types; they know how to paint dresses, accessories, architecture, and landscape, with wonderful accuracy and finish; their manipulative skill is admirable. One defect only still chains them to hieratic art, which is the immobility of their faces, and the rigid folds of their stuffs. They have but to observe the rapid play of physiognomies and the easy movement of loose drapery, and the renaissance is complete; the breeze of the age is behind them, and already fills their sails. On looking at their portraits, their interiors, and even their sacred personages, as in the 'Entombment' of Quintin Matsys, one is tempted to address them thus: "You are alive - one effort more! Come, bestir yourselves! Shake off the Middle Age entirely! Depict the modern man for us as you find him within you and outside of you. Paint him vigorous, healthy, and content with existence. Forget the meagre, ascetic, and pensive spirit, dreaming in the chapels of Hemling. If you choose a religious scene for the motive of your picture, compose it, like the Italians, of active and healthy figures, only let these figures proceed from your national and personal taste. You have a soul of your own, which is Flemish and not Italian: let the flower bloom; judging by the bud it will be a beautiful one." And indeed when we regard the sculptures of the time, such as the chimney of the Palais de Justice, the tomb of Charles the Bold at Bruges, and the church and monuments of Brou, we see the promise of an original and complete art, less sculptural and less refined than the Italian, but more varied, more expressive, and closer to nature; less subject to rule but nearer to the real; more capable of manifesting spirit and personality, the impulses, the unpremeditated, the diversities, the lights and darks of education, temperament, and age, of the individual; in short, a Germanic art which indicates remote successors to the Van Eycks and remote predecessors of Rubens. They never appeared; or at all events, they imperfectly fulfilled their task. No nation, it must be noted, lives alone in the world: alongside of the Flemish renaissance there existed the Italian renaissance, and the large tree stifled the small plant. It flourished and grew for a century: the literature, the ideas, and the masterpieces of precocious Italy imposed themselves on sluggish Europe; and the Flemish cities through their commerce, and the Austrian dynasty through its possessions and its Italian affairs, introduced into the North the tastes and models of the new civilization. Towards 1520 the Flemish painters began to borrow from the artists of Florence and Rome. John of Mabuse is the first one who, in 1513, on returning from Italy, introduced the Italian into the old style, and the rest followed. It is so natural in advancing into an unexplored country to take the path already marked out! This path, however, is not made for those who follow it; the long line of Flemish carts is to be delayed and stuck fast in the disproportionate ruts which another set of wheels has worn. There are two traits characteristic of Italian art, both of which run counter to the Flemish imagination. On the one hand, Italian art centres on the natural body: healthy, active, and vigorous,-endowed with every athletic aptitude, that is to say,-naked or semi-draped, frankly pagan, enjoying freely and nobly in full sunshine every limb, instinct, and animal faculty, the same as an ancient Greek in his city or palæstrum; or, as at this very epoch, a Cellini on the Italian streets and highways. Now a Fleming does not easily enter into this conception. He belongs to a cold and humid climate; a man there in a state of nudity shivers. The human form here does not display the fine proportions nor the easy attitudes required by classic art: it is often dumpy or too gross; the white, soft, yielding flesh, easily flushed, requires to be clothed. When the painter returns from Rome and strives to pursue Italian art, his surroundings oppose his education; his sentiment being no longer renewed through his contact with living nature, he is reduced to his souvenirs. Moreover, he is of Germanic race: in other terms, he is organically good in his moral nature, and modest as well: he has difficulty in appreciating the pagan idea of nudity; and still greater difficulty in comprehending the fatal and magnificent idea which governs civilization and stimulates the arts beyond the Alps,namely, that of the complete and sovereign individual, emancipated from every law, subordinating all else, men and things, to the development of his own nature and the growth of his own faculties. Translated by J. Durand. T THE COMEDY OF MANNERS AT VERSAILLES NO APPROACH the King, to be a domestic in his household, an usher, a cloak-bearer, a valet, is a privilege that is purchased, even in 1789, for thirty, forty, or a hundred thousand livres; so much greater the reason why it is a privilege to form a part of his society,- the most honorable, the most useful, and the most coveted of all. In the first place, it is a proof of race. A man to follow the King in the chase, and a woman to be presented to the Queen, must previously satisfy the genealogist, and by authentic documents, that his or her nobility goes back to the year 1400. In the next place, it insures good fortune. This drawing-room is the only place within reach of royal favors; accordingly, up to 1789, the great families never stir away from Versailles, and day and night they lie in ambush. The valet of the Marshal de Noailles says to him one night on closing his curtains, "At what hour will Monseigneur be awakened?" "At ten o'clock, if no one dies during the night." Old courtiers are again found who, "eighty years of age, have passed forty-five on their feet in the antechambers of the King, of the princes, and of the ministers." "You have only three things to do," says one of them to a débutant: "speak well of everybody, ask for every vacancy, and sit down when you can." Hence the King always has a crowd around him. The Comtesse du Barry says, on presenting her niece at court, the first of August, 1773, "The crowd is so great at a presentation, one can scarcely get through the antechambers." In December 1774, at Fontainebleau, when the Queen plays at her own table every evening, "the apartment, though vast, is never empty. The crowd is so great that one can talk only to the two or three persons with whom one is playing." The fourteen apartments, |