the issue of
these melancholy chromo-lithographs. Under the pretext of realism, of
information acquired on the spot, of authenticated costumes--all
extremely doubtful, since we should be forced to conclude that nothing
has changed in Palestine in the course of nineteen centuries--Monsieur
Tissot has given us the basest masquerade that anyone has yet dared
present as an illustration of the Scriptures. Look at that disreputable
trull, a street slut tired of shouting "This way to the boats!" till she
falls fainting. This is the _Magnificat_, the Blessed Virgin. That
epileptic boy with outstretched arms is Jesus in the Temple. Look at the
Baptism, the Pharisee and the Publican, the Massacre of the Innocents,
the Saint Peter walking on the Sea, the Magdalen at the feet of Jesus,
the ridiculous _Consummatum est_--look at them all: these prints are
matchless for platitude, effeteness, poverty of spirit. They might have
been designed by the first-comer, and are painted with muck, wine-sauce,
mud!

Certainly the hapless Catholics have no luck when once they try to
meddle with what they do not understand; their incurable lack of
artistic sense is once more displayed in this attempt over which the
whole world of art and letters is laughing in their sleeve.

"Then is there nothing, absolutely nothing, to the credit side for the
Church?" exclaimed Durtal. "And yet some attempts at ascetic art have
been made in this century. A few years since, the Benedictine House at
Beuron, in Bavaria, tried to revive ecclesiastical art"; and Durtal
remembered having looked through some reproductions of mural frescoes
painted by these monks in a tower at Monte Cassino.

These frescoes had gone back to the types of Assyria and Egypt, with
their crowned gods, their sphynx-headed angels having fan-shaped wings
behind their heads, their old men with plaited beards playing on
stringed instruments; and then the Friars of Beuron had given up this
hieratic style, in which, it must be owned, they succeeded but ill, and
in certain later works--especially in a volume of the Way of the Cross,
published at Freiburg in Breisgau--they had adopted a strange medley of
other styles.

The Roman soldiers who figured in those pages were huge firemen, a
bequest from the schools of Guerin and David; and then, unexpectedly, in
certain plates where the Magdalen and the Holy women appeared, a younger
spirit seemed to prevail among the commonplace groups--Greek female
t