ing, was by them associated with religion. The noblest masterpieces were till eighty years ago safely deposited in the churches where some of them had been conveyed in solemn procession by the pious population. The fame of their artists was a subject of domestic pride to the Italian cities. Almost every one of those old masters is at home in some locality of his own-Correggio in Parma, Guido in Bologna, Perugino in the town of which he bears the name. Not to have stopped at the painter's favoured spot was to be imperfectly acquainted with his real manner and power. Hence the importance attached to many of those dull, decayed, Tuscan, Lombard, and Emilian communities among which a civilized stranger loved to linger. Hence one of the main attractions by which Italy was endeared to her visitors above all other European regions. And the day had now come in which that poor boast of Art was to be taken from the Italians; in which all that was valuable and portable was to be carried across the Alps-carried away not by an enemy making good his right of conquest, but by a friend inaugurating the era of liberty, proclaiming the universal brotherhood of nations, and laying claims to the most advanced civilization. The infatuation of the Italian people for their liberators exceeded all limits, and at first there were among the most ardent republicans men who locked upon their spoliators with something like indulgence. It was natural after all, they urged, that Art should in a free age be used as an ornament to freedom, as in pious times it lent its loftiest charms to religion. It was the claim of the Brave to the Fair. Italy was rich enough in canvas and marble to be able to give a few specimens of her skill to a deserving sister.

Her hand would not for all that forget its cunning, and it would always be in the power of living artists to fill up the void that French greed for the old masters might create behind the main altars of Italian churches or on the walls of Italian mansions. Others again, with heads filled with mock-heroic notions of Roman or even Spartan stoic

ism, declared that the loss of those artistic "baubles" was to be accounted gain to Italy that the Italians had too long been held in just contempt by their neighbours as "mere daubers and fiddlers," and that the removal of their enervating gewgaws would best foster among them those stern, manly Republican virtues which might fit them for companionship with the generous nation that summoned them to a new existence. The work of depredation went, however, beyond the endurance even of these stout believers, and the indignation of the trodden people knew no limits at the sight of the irreparable losses caused by the wanton recklessness and the awful disorder with which the spoliation was accomplished. The thought that what made Italy so much poorer made, after all, France no richer-that so large a part of what was to be only stolen was hopelessly destroyed-wrung every patriotic heart. In many instances conspicuous citizens, aggravated at the havoc made by the brutal soldiery among the treasures of their art-repositories, volunteered their aid in the removal-so offering, like the real mother before Solomon's judgment seat, to give up her own child rather than have it hewn asunder. Their help was not always accepted; but again, in some cases, it was tyrannically enforced. By a decree of the Directory an agent was appointed who should follow the French armies in Italy to "extract" and despatch to France such objects of art, science, &c., as might be found in the "conquered towns," independently of the objects of art already ceded by the Italian Powers in virtue of the treaties of peace and suspensions of hostilities contracted with the Armies of the Republic. By a clause in the decree, whenever the French military authorities were unable to provide their agent with the means necessary for the conveyance of the "property," the said agent was authorized to requisition horses and carriages from the towns in which these tions" should take place. There is only too much evidence that the agent availed himself of the power thus conferred

extrac

upon him without stint. But even by lending a hand, either voluntarily or by compulsion, the Italians failed to save from the wreck a large proportion of the art-treasure which the pioneers of civilization who called them to liberty were conveying into captivity. At times, the surprise of the pillaged population evidently threatened to give way to indignation. It is on record that at Venice and throughout the towns of Venetia the spoilers could not do their work without the protection of a formidable array of bayonets. At Florence, among a gentler and more quick-witted people, popular displeasure found its vent in bitter taunts and jeers. French superior officers who stood wrapt in admiration before Giotto's elegant belfry, were asked by the street urchins whether "they were meditating how they could pack up the Campanile in their military vans ?" And within the Uffizi Gallery, as the Venus de Medici was being taken down from her pedestal, together with Raphaels and Titians, preparatory for her journey to the North, the old conservator to whom that precious marble had been an object of worship for the best part of his life, was so overcome as to burst into tears: whereupon one of the sneering Frenchmen, affecting to console him, observed that "the dear goddess was not so much to be pitied, as she was only going to Paris, where the Belvedere Apollo was already among the recent arrivals, and where preparations would soon be made to marry the Roman to the Florentine statue." The sorrow of the conservator was turned to rage, as he retorted, "Marry the statues as much as you like: out of such a union in your country there will never be issue." The old man meant that all the masterpieces of Phidias and Praxiteles in the world would never make the French a nation of sculptors.

For, after all, what could be the object or the pretext for all these wholesale robberies? "Leave nothing behind of what can be of the least use to us." Such were the general instructions; such the invariable rule and practice. But when France had taken all that could

be taken, what was she to do with it? All Italian art was already in her possession; and, as far as her victories extended, the galleries of Antwerp and Brussels, of Dresden and Munich, of Madrid and Seville, were made to add their tribute to the vast mass of spoils with which the Louvre was encumbered. Paris was the world's museum; was it likely to become the world's school of art? The First Empire was, perhaps, the epoch in France in which genius and taste were at the lowest ebb.1 The nation had as little leisure for thought or feeling as its restless ruler; and one of the most remarkable phenomena of the period was the apparent indifference Iwith which the French looked on the accumulation of all that immense artistic treasure. Beyond a little flourish of gratified vanity, there is, at least, no evidence of any great enthusiasm evinced by the Parisians at the appearance of their new acquisitions; no evidence of any extraordinary frequency of visitors at the Louvre, not even from mere motives of curiosity. It may be suggested that the popular apathy was to be attributed to the varied vicissitudes of those stirring times; that the Empire had toiled not for its own generation, but for after ages; that what its short period had devoured would remain for the digestion of future epochs; so that the issue to be expected from the intermarriage of all the ancient and modern schools in Paris would eventually be a French school combining the merits, and eclipsing the achievements, of all ages and

countries.

But it is very questionable whether, even if France had been able to retain permanent possession of her ill-gotten goods, this sublime conceit of national

1 M. Jules Janin said at a recent meeting of the French Academy: "On ne savait plus guère parmi nous les noms des grands poètes. On eût dit qu'Homère et Virgile étaient morts tout entiers; Athènes et Rome étaient tout au plus un souvenir." Yet that was the age of mock Brutuses and Cæsars, of Plébiscites and Senatus-Consultes, and of all that hodge-podge of pseudo-Roman institutions which have since been made to cloak with grand words the hideousness and repulsiveness of Napoleonic despotism.

selfishness could ever have been realized. Art is not to be more easily transplanted than literature: genius is, in a great measure, a matter of soil and climate; it chooses its own time and place for its peculiar development; it takes its own growth regardless of culture, rebellious against the shelter and restraint of the forcing-house. All the knowledge of Greek in the world would never have made of Shakespeare a Homer; nor could many years' contemplation of the Madonna di San Sisto have made of Jacques Louis David a Raphael. In Italy itself it has been found that too intense a reverence for ancient art is as apt to stunt and cripple modern art as to mature it. Admiration begets imitation; manner is taken for law; religion degenerates into superstition; and with the rise of academies the decline of creative power too generally sets in. Both before and after the first Republic and Empire France had artistic as well as literary instincts of her own; but it may be freely asserted that the bane of French genius in all its efforts has been its exaggerated worship of what it considered classicism.

It may be imagined, however, that neither Bonaparte nor the officers in his suite gave themselves much thought about the remote results of their brigand exploits. They plundered for plunder's sake; a kind of thievish monomania seemed to have seized those lawless warriors; and the demoralization had, at a very early period, reached the lowest ranks. The charming pages of Erckmann-Châtrian describe the eagerness with which men and women from the quietest and most unsophisticated districts, set out in quest of adventure in the train of the armies, under some vague impression that the world was the oyster which the soldier's sword was to open for them; they went forth, they rambled far and wide, and came back to startle their families and friends with the display of toys and trinkets of which they often could tell neither the use nor the value, and when reproached for dishonesty, they claimed it as a merit that they had rifled a mere No. 146.-VOL. XXV.

66 tas de Prêtres et d'Aristocrates," and mulcted a stolid people who "even so many years after the inroad of their armies could not yet utter one word of intelligible French."

As to Napoleon himself he pleaded patriotism in justification of brigandage; and whatever fault might be found with all the other acts of his reign, in the mere spoliation of inoffensive neighbours, he could rely on the complicity of the French people. A whole age had to pass before a few writers of the Lanfrey and Erckmann-Châtrian stamp dared to take up the cause of the outraged nations. But at the dawn of the nineteenth century all France acted upon one impulse. The great point was how Paris could be made everything and the world nothing. The idea of sinking Rome to the rank of a mere "chef-lieu" of a French department might have shocked a very Brennus; but it had nothing to deter the "Brutuses" and "Cæsars," who, as Botta writes, "profaned churches, robbed sacred treasures, pilfered oil-paintings, damaged frescoes, and destroyed the ornaments they could not remove. As Paris was the museum, so it was to become the archive of the world. After the peace of Schönbrunn, all the records and documents of the German Empire were made to travel from Vienna to Paris. They filled altogether 3,139 cases, and the transport cost 400,000f. The archives of Belgium and Holland, those of St. Mark and the Vatican, had gone before. At Simancas, in Spain, the men charged with the execution of the Emperor Napoleon's decrees sent word that the papers to be "enlévés" would require 12,000 carts for their conveyance. The work in this quarter, however, began too late, and was interrupted by the advance of the English, Portuguese, and Spanish Armies ere it had proceeded very far. The plunderers were almost caught in flagrante, and, in the harum-scarum of their precipitate retreat, they did almost greater mischief than, perhaps, they would have done had their work been suffered to proceed undisturbed. For "the presence during four years of a

L

garrison in the castle," says M. Gachard in his account of the Archives of Simancas, published in 1848, "and the free access of the soldiers to all its apartments, threw the papers into the greatest confusion, and caused the most serious losses; nor was this all, for, after the flight of the French, the peasantry of the neighbourhood rushed in; they tore open the parchments, broke the strings, and made confusion worse confounded." Again, when Spain claimed her own at Paris, in 1815, she vainly applied for many of those Simancas documents, the French retaining them as their own, under pretence of their appertaining, "more or less," to the affairs of Burgundy and Lorraine; though many of the deeds thus wrongfully withheld consisted of treaties concluded by Spain with France, or of the correspondence of the Court of Madrid with its ambassadors in the same country. They did not say on what grounds they retained the correspondence of Charles V. and Philip II. with the Viceroys of Aragon, and the despatches addressed to this last Sovereign and his successor by their ambassadors at Venice.

As there was to be in Europe only French art, so there was only to be a French version of history. Men as unbiassed as Count Daru, as unprejudiced as M. Thiers, were to have the monopoly of all the memorials of the past.

Of such events as the Battle of Waterloo or the negotiation of the Spanish marriages there should be only one official account, and that should come from a people whose streets go by ten different names within a quarter of a century; a people who flatter themselves that they can blot out memories when they pull down monuments. There is every reason to believe that the papers taken from all Italy, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands were of as little profit to France as those for which Simancas was ransacked. French Commissions charged with examining and arranging that vast farrago of heterogeneous documents were appointed at various times; but their work, both at home and abroad, stopped short with the

great crash of 1814, and the melancholy result was the hopeless misplacement and dispersion of precious memorials, and the fraudulent or forcible retention of ill-gotten goods on the part of the nation which had been bound to restitution. The incomparable collection of diplomatic reports or "relations" which Venice had treasured up with the greatest care from the earliest dates of its Republic, and which has caused the revision of almost every page of European history, went asunder from the very moment the French laid their hands upon it in 1797, and its fragments had to be picked up here and there with a toil and diligence only rewarded with partial success. As with papers, so with pictures and statues. They were handled as stolen goods, and valued for what they cost. France was never fully aware of the enormous wealth of art which had come to her from every corner of the tributary world. Many of the cases lay for years in store-rooms and cellars, and went back unopened as they had come. Even of what had been publicly taken much was privately abstracted, and we have seen, that most of those who marched with or after the French armies did not suffer their zeal in their country's service to interfere with a little business on their own account. In Spain, for instance, Napoleon's Marshals took the lion's share for themselves, and Soult laid hold of a few Murillos, for one of which France afterwards paid 25,000l., and which Spain would gladly buy back at twice the price.

A proof of the extent to which all feelings of justice had by that long age of violence been blunted throughout Europe may be found in the indifference with which the Allies of 1814 had suffered vanquished France to keep all the spoils of the victorious nations. By the first Treaty of Paris, as M. Thiers says, "Nous conservions les immenses richesses en objets d'Art acquises au prix de notre sang." The patriotic

historian attributes that forbearance to fear; and, certainly, it would be difficult to say how the plundered people would ever have come by their own had

Napoleon never broken from the Isle of Elba. But as the Allies had again to find their ways to Paris, they stipulated in the second Treaty dated from that city, that whatever France had ever got by victory she should now lose by defeat. The thing was, of course, easier said than done, and it is possible that no very great zeal was displayed in the execution of the convention, especially by those among the contracting parties who had no direct interest in it. Poor Italy was only represented by Austria and by Princes who looked upon their subjects as no better than rebels, and who had to struggle against the lingering vestiges of those French sympathies which had powerfully contributed to hurl them from the throne. At all events, the demands of the commissioners sent from the ravaged countries to recover the plunder were in a thousand instances met with blank denial, with arrogant resistance, with evasion or subterfuge. No doubt such a picture had been taken from Italy; but it could not be proved that it had ever reached France. had somehow disappeared half-way: it was hidden somewhere in that huge limbo where unpacked cases lay still pell-mell, mountain high. And when the day of keen search was over, the stolen property came forth from its lurking-places, and was laid out unblushingly and conspicuously:- here the marble Gladiator that ought to be back on its pedestal in the Borghese Garden, near Rome-there the panels of the grand Mantegna picture, only part of which is now to be seen above the desecrated main altar of St. Zeno at Verona.

It

Even of what was rescued not a little still bears evidence of the indignities to which it had to submit during those years of Gallic captivity. There are Correggios and Caraccis at Parma still seamed by the cracks caused by the large canvas being folded up by rough soldiers to fit it to the size of their vans. Of fragments of marbles broken on their way to Paris and back the Vatican and the Museo Borbonico could muster large heaps. But French

restoration was even more fatal than French damage. The Madonna della Seggiola had, on its return to Florence, to be covered with glass to throw a film over the opaque white with which it had been plastered over in Paris, so as in some manner to disguise and soften it. And Señor Madrazo, the conservator of the Madrid Gallery, when the brickdust with which the "Spasimo di Sicilia" is all daubed over is pointed out to him, declares that the disfigurement of that and other masterpieces in the same collection is the result of the treatment the pictures of Spain met with at the hands of their French captors. That the French should leave well alone, that they should not think they knew better than the Italians or the Spaniards of the sixteenth century, was not, indeed, to be expected: and it is only a matter of wonder that the Madonna del Cardellino did not go back to her country graced with a chignon, or that the Moses of Michael Angelo was not "coiffé à la Brutus." Time was not allowed for the solution of the problem whether, after so many years' spoliation, French art was to be modified by its imported treasures, or whether, on the contrary, it was the world's art that was to be Frenchified; for the instinct of French genius is fashion, and art aims at eternity. It is well known that when Napoleon stood before the stolen. works in the Louvre, and some of the bystanders dwelt with rapture on the "immortal" character of those productions, he turned sharply round, and asked, "how long that painted canvas would endure." And, being answered that with care it could be preserved for five hundred years to come, he observed contemptuously "C'est une belle immortalité." Whether even that poor "immortality" could have been secured for captive Art in French hands we may be allowed to doubt: for-terrible to think of had the Commune been less discordant and irresolute, whatever either French genius had ever produced or French "valour" plundered, would equally have gone to feed the blaze of the great Paris bonfire in May 1871.