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more vigorous than Turner's. But Tur- Parisian idea, which is Cæsarism, — an ner excels them by his Shakespearian organizing, centralizing, arbitrary spirit, imagination, and the Shakespearian cor--and she is only capable of producing respondence with fact at the same time works especially French. Gérôme, that he exercises a most extraordinary Baudry, Cabanel, to-day; in the past, imagination. He has no peer among Watteau, Boucher, and Mignard. the French landscapists.

It is among the figure-painters that we must go to find the peer of Turner. Delacroix and Turner are the two great epic poets of the nineteenth century; the one French, the other English. Both correspond with the national genius, while they rise above its purely local character. Delacroix seems like the last effort of the genius of painting, while Turner is the magician who covers the whole future of art: from Turner dates the gradual but inevitable ascendency of nature over humanity in the painter's world. The immense fund of human passion, the invention, the unrestrained force, the fecundity of Delacroix's genius is without a modern parallel. He is brother of Tintorett in energy, and a colorist like Velasquez.

Judge, then, how it becomes us to speak carelessly or irreverently of French art; judge, then, if we dare depreciate the work of that versatile, often superficial, but sometimes grand people, who riot in Paris and are ambitious to make themselves the gendarmes of all Europe!

No; that feminine race has the genius of art; and although its average work belongs wholly to the domain of taste, and is meant only to flatter the eye, it has given us great examples, made in its great days, when, nourished by Continental genius, open on every side, it appropriated and aggrandized the ideas that belong to our common humanity; then it produced works that match the best of the great masters of the great age of painting.

Liberate France from imperialism, which shuts her from the play of foreign minds, inundate her with the revolutionary spirit, and she gives us Mirabeau, George Sand, and Delacroix. Imprison her within the bounds of the

It is because England and America have always been so open-minded that their productive force has been so noble and great. Place the French people in the same condition, and their artistic and literary forms must embody ideas and thoughts and sentiments that appeal to the human race, instead of the local taste of the Parisian public, and the luxurious rich corresponding with that public who exist in all large cities.

At this moment we are misled by the mechanical dexterities of a Meissonier, or the delicate sensualities of a Cabanel, or the cruel, passionless, polished nudities of Gérôme, or perhaps we fall down to the tiresome level of Frère. But these are not the masters of French art in the nineteenth century, they are simply the able men of the hour. When you say French art, base your thought upon Delacroix, Millet, Rousseau, and Corot, for they are not local, or Parisian, but French, that is, Continental, universal. When you wish to know Parisian art, you should ask about Cabanel, Baudry, Dejonghe, and, as at its highest intellectual level, Gérôme.

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The traditional or classic of French art remains in the works of David, Ingres, Gleyre; and, at its best, in Flandrin's frescos. We must respect it because it is venerable; we must respect it, because, like a graveyard, it holds a great many dead bodies and a great many melancholy epitaphs. But it would be folly to expect to see it exercising any marked influence upon the modern or democratic form of art. The people do not even sympathize with, much less understand, its frigid, abstract forms, sometimes beautiful, but always disengaged from the passionate, suffering, actual life of men and women in the nineteenth century. It is the official, and therefore false, side of modern French art.

THE

TONELLI'S MARRIAGE.

HERE was no richer man in Venice than Tommaso Tonelli, who had enough on his florin a day; and none younger than he, who owned himself forty-seven years old. He led the cheerfullest life in the world, and was quite a monster of content; but, when I come to sum up his pleasures, I fear that I shall appear to the readers of this magazine to be celebrating a very insipid and monotonous existence. I doubt if even a summary of his duties could be made attractive to the conscientious imagination of hard-working people; for Tonelli's labors were not killing, nor, for that matter, were those of any Venetian that I ever knew. He had a stated employment in the office of the notary Cenarotti; and he passed there so much of every working-day as lies between nine and five o'clock, writing upon deeds and conveyances and petitions, and other legal instruments, for the notary, who sat in an adjoining room, secluded from nearly everything in this world but snuff. He called Tonelli by the sound of a little bell; and, when he turned to take a paper from his safe, he seemed to be abstracting some secret from long-lapsed centuries, which he restored again, and locked back among the dead ages, when his clerk replaced the document in his hands. hands were very soft and pale, and their owner was a colorless old man, whose silvery hair fell down a face nearly as white; but, as he has almost nothing to do with the present affair, I shall merely say that, having been compromised in the last revolution, he had been obliged to live ever since in perfect retirement, and that he seemed to have been blanched in this social darkness as a plant is blanched by growth in a cellar. His enemies said that he was naturally a timid man, but they could not deny that he had seen things to make the brave afraid, or that he had now every reason from the police to be secret and

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cautious in his life. He could hardly be called company for Tonelli, who must have found the day intolerably long but for the visit which the notary's pretty granddaughter contrived to pay every morning in the cheerless mezza. She commonly appeared on some errand from her mother, but her chief business seemed to be to share with Tonelli the modest feast of rumor and hearsay which he loved to furnish forth for her, and from which doubtless she carried back some fragments of gossip to the family apartments. Tonelli called her, with that mingled archness and tenderness of the Venetians, his Paronsina; and, as he had seen her grow up from the smallest possible of Little Mistresses, there was no shyness between them, and they were fully privileged to each other's society by her motifer. When she flitted away again, Tonelli was left to a stillness broken only by the soft breathing of the old man in the next room, and by the shrill discourse of his own loquacious pen, so that he was commonly glad enough when it came five o'clock. At this hour he put on his black coat, that shone with constant use, and his faithful silk hat, worn down to the pasteboard with assiduous brushing, and caught up a very jaunty cane in his hand. Then, saluting the notary, he took his way to the little restaurant where it was his custom to dine, and had his tripe soup, and his risotto, or dish of fried liver, in the austere silence imposed by the presence of a few poor Austrian captains and lieutenants. It was not that the Italians feared to be overheard by these enemies; but it was good dimostrazione to be silent before the oppressor, and not let him know that they even enjoyed their dinners well enough, under his government, to chat sociably over them. To tell the truth, this duty was an irksome one to Tonelli, who liked far better to dine, as he sometimes did,

at a cook-shop, where he met the folk of the people (gente del popolo), as he called them; and where, though himself a person of civil condition, he discoursed freely with the other guests, and ate of their humble but relishing fare. He was known among them as Sior Tommaso; and they paid him a homage, which they enjoyed equally with him, as a person not only learned in the law, but a poet of gift enough to write wedding and funeral verses, and a veteran who had fought for the dead Republic of 'Forty-eight. They honored him as a most travelled gentleman, who had been in the Tyrol, and who could have spoken German, if he had not despised that tongue as the language of the ugly Croats, like one born to it. Who, for example, spoke Venetian more elegantly than Sior Tommaso? or Tuscan, when he chose? And yet he was poor, man of that genius! Patience! When Garibaldi came, we should see! The facchini and gondoliers, who had been. wagging their tongues all day at the church-corners and ferries, were never tired of talking of this gifted friend of theirs, when, having ended some impressive discourse or some dramatic story, he left them with a sudden adieu, and walked quickly away toward the Riva degli Schiavoni.

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Here, whether he had dined at the cook-shop, or at his more genteel and gloomy restaurant of the Bronze Horses, it was his custom to lounge an hour or two over a cup of coffee, and a Virginia cigar, at one of the many caffè, and to watch all the world as it passed to and fro on the quay. Tonelli was gray, he did not disown it; but he always maintained that his heart was still young, and that there was, moreover, a great difference in persons as to age, which told in his favor. So he loved to sit there, and look at the ladies; and he amused himself by inventing a pet name for every face he saw, which he used to teach to certain friends of his, when they joined him over his coffee. These friends were all young enough to be his sons, and wise enough to be his fathers; but they were always VOL. XXII. - - NO. 129. 7

glad to be with him, for he had so cheery a wit and so good a heart that neither his years nor his follies could make any one sad. His kind face beamed with smiles, when Pennellini, chief among the youngsters in his affections, appeared on the top of the nearest bridge, and thence descended directly towards his little table. Then it was that he drew out the straw which ran through the centre of his long Virginia, and lighted the pleasant weed, and gave himself up to the delight of making aloud those comments on the ladies which he had hitherto stifled in his breast. Sometimes he would feign himself too deeply taken with a passing beauty to remain quiet, and would make his friend follow with him in chase of her to the Public Gardens. But he was a fickle lover, and wanted presently to get back to his caffe, where at decent intervals of days or weeks he would indulge himself in discovering a spy in some harmless stranger, who, in going out, looked curiously at the scar Tonelli's cheek had brought from the battle of Vicenza in 1848.

"Something of a spy, no?" he asked at these times of the waiter, who, flattered by the penetration of a frequenter of his caffè, and the implication that it was thought seditious enough to be watched by the police, assumed a pensive importance, and answered, "Something of a spy, certainly."

Upon this Tonelli was commonly encouraged to proceed: "Did I ever tell you how I once sent one of those ugly muzzles out of a caffè? I knew him as soon as I saw him, I am never mistaken in a spy, and I went with my newspaper, and sat down close at his side. Then I whispered to him across the sheet, 'We are two.' 'Eh?' says he. It is a very small caffè, and there is no need of more than one,' and then I stared at him, and frowned. He looks at me fixedly a moment, then gathers up his hat and gloves, and takes his pestilency off."

The waiter, who had heard this story, man and boy, a hundred times, made a quite successful show of enjoying it, as

he walked away with Tonelli's fee of half a cent in his pocket. Tonelli then had left from his day's salary enough to pay for the ice which he ate at ten o'clock, but which he would sometimes forego, in order to give the money in charity, though more commonly he indulged himself, and put off the beggar with, "Another time, my dear. I have no leisure now to discuss those matters with thee."

On holidays this routine of Tonelli's life was varied. In the forenoon he went to mass at St. Mark's, to see the beauty and fashion of the city; and then he took a walk with his four or five young friends, or went with them to play at bowls, or even made an excursion to the main-land, where they hired a carriage, and all those Venetians got into it, like so many seamen, and drove the horse with as little mercy as if he had been a sail-boat. At seven o'clock Tonelli dined with the notary, next whom he sat at table, and for whom his quaint pleasantries had a zest that inspired the Paronsina and her mother to shout them into his dull ears, that he might lose none of them. He laughed a kind of faded laugh at them, and, rubbing his pale hands together, showed by his act that he did not think his best wine too good for his kindly guest. The signora feigned to take the same delight shown by her father and daughter in Tonelli's drolleries; but I doubt if she had a great sense of his humor, or, indeed, cared anything for it save as she perceived that it gave pleasure to those she loved. Otherwise, however, she had a sincere regard for him, for he was most useful and devoted to her in her quality of widowed mother; and if she could not feel wit, she could feel gratitude, which is perhaps the rarer gift, if not the more respectable.

The Little Mistress was dependent upon him for nearly all the pleasures, and for the only excitements, of her life. As a young girl she was at best a sort of caged bird, who had to be guarded against the youth of the other sex as if they, on their part, were so many marauding and ravening cats. During

most days of the year the Paronsina's parrot had almost as much freedom as she. He could leave his gilded prison when he chose, and promenade the notary's house as far down as the marble well in the sunless court, and the Paronsina could do little more. The signora would as soon have thought of letting the parrot walk across their campo alone as her daughter, though the local dangers, either to bird or beauty, could not have been very great. The green-grocer of that sequestered campo was an old woman, the apothecary was gray, and his shop was haunted by none but superannuated physicians; the baker, the butcher, the waiters at the caffe, were all professionally, and as purveyors to her family, out of the question; the sacristan, who sometimes appeared at the perruquier's to get a coal from under the curling-tongs to kindle his censer, had but one eye, which he kept single to the service of the Church, and his perquisite of candle-drippings; and I hazard little in saying that the Paronsina might have danced a polka around Campo San Giuseppe without jeopardy so far as concerned the handsome wood-carver, for his wife always sat in the shop beside him. Nevertheless, a custom is not idly handed down by mother to daughter from the dawn of Christianity to the middle of the nineteenth century; and I cannot deny that the local perruquier, though stricken in years, was still so far kept fresh by the immortal youth of the wax beads in his window as to have something beauish about him; or that, just at the moment the Paronsina chanced to go into the campo alone, a leone from Florian's, might not have been passing through it, when he would certainly have looked boldly at her, perhaps spoken to her, and possibly pounced at once upon her fluttering heart. So by day the Paronsina rarely went out, and she never emerged unattended from the silence and shadow of her grandfather's house.

If I were here telling a story of the Paronsina, or indeed any story at all, I might suffer myself to enlarge some

what upon the daily order of her secluded life, and show how the seclusion of other Venetian girls was the widest liberty as compared with hers; but I have no right to play with the reader's patience in a performance that can promise no excitement of incident, no charm of invention. Let him figure to himself, if he will, the ancient and halfruined palace in which the notary dwelt, with a gallery running along one side of its inner court, the slender pillars supporting upon the corroded sculpture of their capitals a clinging vine, that dappled the floor with palpitant light and shadow in the afternoon sun. The gate, whose exquisite Saracenic arch grew into a carven flame, was surmounted by the armorial bearings of a family that died of its sins against the Serenest Republic long ago; the marble cistern which stood in the middle of the court had still a ducal rose upon either of its four sides, and little lions of stone perched upon the posts at the head of the marble stairway climbing to the gallery,their fierce aspects worn smooth and amiable by the contact of hands that for many ages had mouldered in tombs. Toward the canal the palace windows had been immemorially bricked up for some reason or caprice, and no morning sunlight, save such as shone from the bright eyes of the Paronsina, ever looked into the dim halls. It was a fit abode for such a man as the notary, exiled in the heart of his native city, and it was not unfriendly in its influences to a quiet vegetation like the signora's; but to the Paronsina it was sad as Venice itself, where, in some moods, I have wondered that any sort of youth could have the courage to exist. Nevertheless, the Paronsina had contrived to grow up here a child of the gayest and archest spirit, and to lead a life of due content, till after her return home from the comparative freedom and society of Madame Prateux's school, where she spent three years in learning all polite accomplishments, and whence she came with brilliant hopes, and romances ready imagined for any possible exigency of the future. She adored

all the modern Italian poets, and read their verse with that stately and rhythmical fulness of voice which often made it sublime and always pleasing. She was a relentless patriot, an Italianissima of the vividest green, white, and red; and she could interpret the historical novels of her countrymen in their subtilest application to the modern enemies of Italy. But all the Paronsina's gifts and accomplishments were to poor purpose, if they brought no young men a-wooing under her balcony; and it was to no effect that her fervid fancy peopled the palace's empty halls with stately and gallant company out of Marco Visconti, Nicolò de' Lapi, Margherita Pusterla, and the other romances, since she could not hope to receive any practicable offer of marriage from the heroes thus assembled. Her grandfather invited no guests of more substantial presence to his house. In fact, the police watched him too narrowly to permit him to receive society, even had he been so minded, and for kindred reasons his family paid few visits in the city. To leave Venice, except for the autumnal villeggiatura, was almost out of the question; repeated applications at the Luogotenenza won the two ladies but a tardy and scanty grace; and the use of the passport allowing them to spend a few weeks in Florence was attended with so much vexation, in coming and going, upon the imperial confines, - and when they returned home they were subject to so great fear of perquisition from the police, --that it was after all rather a mortification than a pleasure that the government had given them. The signora received her few acquaintances once a week; but the Paronsina found the old ladies tedious over their cups of coffee or tumblers of lemonade, and declared that her mamma's reception-days were a martyrdom, actually a martyrdom, to her. She was full of life and the beautiful and tender longing of youth; she had a warm heart and a sprightly wit; but she led an existence scarce livelier than a ghost's, and she was so poor in friends and resources that she shud

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