| INTRODUCTORY AND CRITICAL.
So does France continue to enrich it. The lucidity, the clearness
of intent oh and expression, characteristic of the French mind, makes
this nation unrivalled in presenting a statement within narrow bounds,
wherein any distracting feature is eliminated, and serves them at once
in constructing either a drama or a picture, both expressed in terms
of unmixed poetry. It is indifferent whether this drama is history or
pure invention. Gerome tries either impartially, still dwelling on the
poetic thread that goes through the theme. It was for French art,
continuing the vein which may turn to ballad or to epic with the
dignity of the topic, to adopt the splendid subject of " Octavia Fainting at the Reading of Marcellus' Elegy by Virgil," an incident before
unthought of by art, and so treated as to bring a rare and difficult
tear into Roman history. Virgil in the Brussels painting by Ingres, pronounces the " Tu Marcellus Eris;" Octavia listens, about to swoon;
Maecenas hears with a scholar's grief and Augustus drinks darkly the
praise of his race, chanted from a tomb. This treatment of history is
purest song.
But Gerome rises from elegy and from ballad into unequalled
tragedy. There are teeth and talons in his grip of a subject. One
day he chooses to make us pity the gladiators. Educated in brutality,
deprived of noble culture on system, carefully schooled to be wild animals,'
chosen from the ergastulan of a venal master, they know but one nobility,
a brave death; just before their fate—a majestic outburst thrown before
from the grave—this dignity finds a cry: "Hail, Emperor, those about
to die salute thee!" Vitellius, bridling and content, withdraws himself
into his creases of fat, and leans on a flabby wrist to hear the homage.
It is the work, I think, of a great tragic poet to select for this corrupt
horde, whom we are accustomed to respect only physically, their one
great opportunity, in which we can respect them for their instant of
magnanimity. The appeal of whole worlds of oppressed classes rings
in their shout, with its perfection of unselfishness. It is too long a story
this subject: how his lines of architecture, his peak of a gigantic awning
overhead, affect and still the mind with a breathless sense of majesty,
to tell what a thing of beauty the artist makes out of his treatment of
like the grandest scenery of mountains. Again, the painter wills that we
shall consider the Vestals. Rome invents religious celibacy, a summit
of purity never imagined by Greece; but in perfecting this chaste ideal,
her votaresses are Romans still. As the beautiful youth in the arena is
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