traveller in France should carry in his portmanteau. I have had
this opportunity more than once, for I have met him at Tours, at Nantes,
at Bourges; and everywhere he is suggestive. But he has the defect that
he is never pictorial, that he never by any chance makes an image, and
that his style is perversely colourless for a man so fond of
contemplation. His taste is often singularly false; it is the taste of
the early years of the present century, the period that produced clocks
surmounted with sentimental "subjects." Stendhal does not admire these
clocks, but he almost does. He admires Domenichino and Guercino, he
prizes the Bolognese school of painters because they "spoke to the
soul." He is a votary of the new classic, is fond of tall, square,
regular buildings, and thinks Nantes, for instance, full of the "air
noble." It was a pleasure to me to reflect that five-and-forty years ago
he had alighted in that city, at the very inn in which I spent a night
and which looks down on the Place Graslin and the theatre. The hotel
that was the best in 1837 appears to be the best to-day. On the subject
of Touraine Stendhal is extremely refreshing; he finds the scenery
meagre and much overrated, and proclaims his opinion with perfect
frankness. He does, however, scant justice to the banks of the Loire;
his want of appreciation of the picturesque--want of the sketcher's
sense--causes him to miss half the charm of a landscape which is nothing
if not "quiet," as a painter would say, and of which the felicities
reveal themselves only to waiting eyes. He even despises the Indre, the
river of Madame Sand. The "Memoires d'un Touriste" are written in the
character of a commercial traveller, and the author has nothing to say
about Chenonceaux or Chambord, or indeed about any of the chateaux of
that part of France; his system being to talk only of the large towns,
where he may be supposed to find a market for his goods. It was his
ambition to pass for an ironmonger. But in the large towns he is usually
excellent company, though as discursive as Sterne and strangely
indifferent, for a man of imagination, to those superficial aspects of
things which the poor pages now before the reader are mainly an attempt
to render. It is his conviction that Alfieri, at Florence, bored the
Countess of Albany terribly; and he adds that the famous Gallophobe died
of jealousy of the little painter from Montpellier. The Countess of
Albany left her property to Fa