Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/209

Rh M E T M E T 199 Flinck and Eeckhout was also acquainted with the Oriental wardrobe of Rembrandt, and ready to use it, like all his contemporaries. But he probably observed that sacred art was ill suited to his temper, or he found the field too strongly occupied, and happily for himself, as well as for his admirers, he turned to other subjects for which he was better fitted. We may doubt whether he tried the style of allegory as illustrated in a picture of Justice Protecting Virtue and Chastising Vice in the gallery of the Hague. There is every reason to think that this rough and frosty composition was wrought by quite another master. What Metsu undertook and carried out from the first with surprising success was the low life of the market and tavern, contrasted with wonderful versa tility by incidents of high life and the drawing-room. In each of these spheres he combined humour with expres sion, a keen appreciation of nature with feeling, and breadth with delicacy of touch, unsurpassed by any of his contem poraries. In no single instance do the artistic lessons of Rembrandt appear to have been lost upon him. The same principles of light and shade which had marked his school- work in the Woman Taken in Adultery were applied to subjects of quite a different kind. A group in a drawing- room, a series of groups in the market-place, a single figure in the gloom of a tavern or parlour, was treated with the utmost felicity by fit concentration and gradation of light ; a warm flush of tone pervaded every part, and, with that, the study of texture in stuffs was carried as far as it had been by Terburg or Dow, if not with the finish or the brio of De Hooch. Metsu s pictures are all in such admirable keeping, and so warm and harmonious in his middle or so cool and harmonious in his closing time, that they always make a pleasing impression. They are more subtle in modulation than Dow s, more spirited and forcible in touch than Terburg s ; and, if Terburg may of right claim to have first painted the true satin robe, he never painted it more softly or with more judgment as to colour than Metsu. That Metsu married and became a citizen of Amsterdam in 1659 would only prove that his residence in the com mercial capital of the Netherlands was later than historians have generally assumed. But there is no reason to think that Metsu claimed his citizenship at once. The privileges of a burgess were given in exchange for a payment of dues, and these painters had various ways of avoiding unless they married. One of the best pictures of Metsu s manhood is the Market-place of Amsterdam, at the Louvre, respecting which it is difficult to distribute praise in fair proportions, so excellent are the various parts, the characteristic move ment and action of the dramatis persons, the selection of faces, the expression and the gesture, and the texture of the things depicted. A tin can in the arm of a cook is a marvel of imitation, but the cook s face is also a marvel of expression. Equally fine, though earlier, are the Sportsman (dated 1661) and the Tavern (also 1661) at the Hague and Dresden Museums, and the Game-Dealer s Shop, also at Dresden, with the painter s signature and 1662. Metsu is one of the painters of whose skill Holland still pre serves examples, yet whose best pictures are either in England or in France or in the galleries of Germany. The value of his works is large, and at the Pommersfelden sale in 1867 the Jealous Husband Dictating his Wife s Letters, though but one of several replicas, was bought by Lord Hertford for little short of 2000, while for the Ride of the Prince of Orange, in the Gsell collection at Vienna, 3000 was paid by Baron Rothschild in 1873. (J. A. C.) METTERNICH, CLEMENS WENZESLAUS, PEINCE (1773- 1859), first minister of Austria from 1809 to 1848, was the son of a Rhenish nobleman employed in high office by the Austrian court. He was born at Coblentz in 1773. At the age of fifteen he entered the university of Strasburg. The French Revolution was then beginning. Everywhere the spirit of hope gave to men s language an exaltation and a confidence hardly known at any other epoch. But the darker reality soon came into view. Metternich was a witness of the riot in which the town-hall of Strasburg was pillaged by a drunken mob ; his tutor subsequently became a member of the revolutionary tribunal in Alsace. If we are to trust to Metternich s own account of the formation of his opinions, the hatred of innovation, which was the ruling principle of his later life, arose from his experience of the terrible results which followed at this time from the victory of so-called liberal ideas. But in reality Metternich was an aristocrat and a conservative by birth and nature. His sentiment in things political was that of a member of a refined and exclusive society which trusts to no intelli gence but its own, and hardly sympathizes with larger interests. The aggressions and violence of the Revolution from 1789 to 1799 gave Metternich an historical basis for his political theories, but the instinctive preferences of his own mind were the same from first to last. He began life as a young man of fashion and gallantry. His marriage in 1795 with the Princess Kaunitz, a granddaughter of the famous minister, fixed him in the highest circle of Austrian nobility. His first contact with the great political world was at the congress of Rastadt in 1798, where, under the auspices of the victorious French republic, arrangements were made for compensating the German princes and nobles whose possessions on the left bank of the Rhine had been ceded to France by the peace of Campo Formio. Metternich was the accredited agent of a group of Westphalian nobles; his private letters give a vivid picture of the rough and uncourtly diplomatists who had succeeded to the polished servants of the old French monarchy. In 1801 Metternich was appointed Austrian ambassador at Dresden, and in 1803 he was promoted to Berlin; but he had hardly become as yet a prominent man in Europe. His stay at Berlin was the turning-point of bis life. The war of the third coalition was impending. Austria united with England and Russia against Napoleon, and the task of the youthful ambassador was to win over the court of Berlin to the cause of the allies. Metternich seems to have done all that it was possible for him to do ; but Prussia persisted in its neutrality. The earnestness with which Metternich had worked against France did not prevent him from remaining on the friendliest terms with M. Laforest, the French ambassador at Berlin ; and so agreeable an account of him was transmitted to Paris by his rival that, at the close of the conflict, Napoleon himself requested that Metternich might henceforward represent Austria at the Tuileries. Metternich was accordingly sent to Paris in 1806. This was the beginning of the period when Austria, humbled but not exhausted by the blow of Austerlitz and by the losses accompanying the peace of Pressburg, deter mined, under the leadership of Count Stadion, to prepare for another war on a greater scale. But the sudden over throw of Prussia, and the alliance between France and Russia which was made at Tilsit in 1807, added immeasur ably to the difficulties of the court of Vienna. It became clear that Napoleon was intending to dismember Turkey, and to gain for himself some part of the spoils of the Otto man empire. Metternich s advice was that Austria should endeavour to detach the czar from the French alliance, and by this means frustrate the plan of partition ; but, should Russia hold fast to Napoleon, that Austria itself should unite with the two aggressors, and secure its share of Turkey. Oriental affairs, however, fell into the background, and in the summer of 1808 Metternich was convinced that Napoleon was intending to attack Austria, though not im mediately. He warmly supported Count Stadion s policy in raising the forces of Austria to the highest strength; and, although he did not share the minister s hopes in a