nant are War and its
misnamed Glory. Here are vast, expensive paintings purporting to
represent innumerable Sieges and Battles in which the French arms were
engaged, many of them so insignificant that the world has wisely
forgotten them, yet here preserved to inflame and poison the minds of
hot-blooded, unreflecting youth, impelling them to rush into the
manufacture of cripples and corpses under the horrible delusion that
needless, aimless Slaughter, if perpetrated by wholesale, can really be
honorable and glorious. These paintings, as a whole, are of moderate
value as works of Art, while their tendency is horrible and their
details to me revolting. Carriages shattered and overturned, animals
transfixed by spear-thrusts and writhing in speechless agony, men
riddled by cannon-shot or pierced by musket-balls and ghastly with
coming death, such are the spectacles which the more favored and
fortunate of the Gallic youth have been called for generations to admire
and enjoy. These battle-pieces have scarcely more Historic than Artistic
value, since the names of at least half of them might be transposed and
the change be undetected by ninety-nine out of every hundred who see
them. If _all_ the French battles were thus displayed, it might be urged
with plausibility that these galleries were historical in their
character; but a full half of the story, that which tells of French
disaster and discomfiture--is utterly suppressed. The Battles of
Ptolemais, of Ivry, of Fontenoy, of Rivoli, of Austerlitz, &c., are here
as imposing as paint can make them, but never a whisper of Agincourt,
Crecy, Poictiers, Blenheim, or Ramillies, nor yet of Salamanca, of
Vittoria, of Leipsic, or Waterloo. Even the wretched succession of
forays which the French have for the last twenty years been prosecuting
in Algerine Africa here shines resplendent, for Vernet has painted, by
Louis Philippe's order and at France's cost, a succession of
battle-pieces wherein French numbers and science are seen prevailing
over Arab barbarism and irregular valor in combats whereof the very
names have been wisely forgotten by mankind, though they occurred but
yesterday. One of these is much the largest painting I ever saw, and is
probably the largest in the world, and it seems to have been got up
merely to exhibit one of Louis Philippe's sons in the thickest of the
fray. Last of all, we have the "Capture of Abd-el-Kader," as imposing as
Vernet could make it, but no whisper