Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/235

Rh voluptuousness, ease, tune, and Berlioz growing harsh with rage and running away to hide from these effeminate notions in the stern poetry of Beethoven's harmonies. Imagine them crossing over into literature and coming there at the height to the same name, Shakespeare. What different Shakespeares they are. Berlioz, entranced, losing self-control for days, feeling with passion the glowing life of the poet's words, would turn, as from something unclean, from the man whose love for Macbeth showed itself mostly in the citation of passages that give fineness to the feelings which the school of Racine thought unsuited to poetry. "You use it as a thesis," the enthusiast might cry. "The grandeur, the wealth, the terror of it escape you. You see his delicacy, his proportion, a deeper taste than the classic French taste, and it forges you a weapon. But you are not swept on by him, you never get into the torrent of him, you are cool and shallow, and your praise is profanation." Stendhal read Shakespeare with some direct pleasure, no doubt, but he was always on the look-out for quotations to prove some thesis, and he read Scott and Richardson, probably all the books he read in any language, in the same unabandoned restricted way.

In painting it is the same. It is with a narrow and dilettante intelligence that he judges pictures. The painter who feeds certain sentiments, he loves and thinks great. Guido Reni is suave; therefore only one or two in the world's history can compare with him. One of them is Correggio, for his true voluptuousness. These are the artists he loves. Others he must praise, as he praised Shakespeare, to support some attack on French canons of art. Therefore is Michelangelo one of the gods. The effort is apparent throughout, and as he recalls the fact that Mme. du Deffand and Voltaire saw in Michelangelo nothing but ugliness, and notes that such is the attitude of all true Frenchmen, the lover