PARIS.*
WE have always a certain difficulty in dealing with an illus- trated book, from the necessity of solving a question which is sometimes designedly obscured, whether the writer or the illustrator is the real director of the enterprise. This is a, point which it is extremely important for the reviewer to know, but which is by no means always revealed to him, especially as it is possible for the mere illustrator or the mere letterpress-writer to outshine his legitimate superior, and thus reverse the proper order of things. Strange precautions are sometimes taken to avoid risks of this kind. We knew one case where a leading firm of publishers, being about to produce a work of local history—the locality being a city as famous as Paris itself—made a previous stipulation that the illustrator should not see the text, nor the writer the illus- trations, till each was ready for publication. The result, as may be imagined, was equally unsatisfactory to all parties. It may, however, we think, be safely assumed that in the pre- sent undertaking Mr. Hamerton is the senior partner ; and Mr. Hamerton is, as we know, a man with a mission. It is his part to act as a kind of national Boswell, and attempt to make two great nations better known to each other. "My friends," says Mr. Hamerton, in fact, to his public on both sides of the Channel, "you regard the French as a frog-eating nation who wear wooden shoes ; you, on the other hand, imagine the Englishman to live on rosbif and pile de, and to buy his wife at Smithfield, with the consent of M. le Lord- ?naive. You are both entirely deceived ; come with me and I will unfold to you the truth." In vain the unprejudiced Englishman or Frenchman protests that he never had any ideas of the kind. Mr. Hamerton, whose stronghold is the mutual ignorance of England and France—without which his occupation would be gone—holds him with his glittering pen, and proceeds to discourse at length to him in a manner which we will admit is in most cases sufficiently entertaining.
The subject Mr. Hamerton has at present to deal with is one of which Englishmen are certainly quite ignorant enough. Their idea of Paris, he complains, refers only to "that con- veniently central space" which includes "the Louvre, the Luxembourg, Notre Dame, the Madeleine, the Opera, and the Palais de l'Industrie." We might say that, bar the South Kensington districts—a knowledge of which stony wilderness can benefit no one but a cabman—the ordinary Englishman's knowledge of London does not extend over a much wider space, and certainly implies quite as small an acquaintance with its antiquities, which are rarely revealed to him unless through the occasional accounts provided by American illus- trated magazines. But this would be an insufficient answer, unless we could prove that the travelled Frenchman was equally ignorant. We are rather glad to find our countrymen credited with so much knowledge ; we ourselves should have been a little doubtful about including the Luxembourg. Mr. Hamerton does tell us of a Yorkshire manufacturer who said he did not know that there were any pictures in the Louvre, and this statement, as it is in print, we are bound to believe ; but we have some hope that this honest gentleman was only exhibiting a sample of a Yorkshire manufacture which is specially em. ployed in conversation with guileless strangers from other counties. The curious point is, that almost all the archi- tectural and other beauties and curiosities described by Mr. Hamerton are included within that limited space which bounds the Englishman's knowledge.
We do not suppose that the ordinary visitor does know much of what is to be seen in Paris. Under the beading of the ordinary visitor we do not include the man of culture, whose profession is to know more than other men ; nor, again, do we refer to the people who go to Paris for society, if any still do so, or the gentlemen who have pressing business there about the time of the Grand Prix ; for the two latter classes, of course, do not want to see anything in the way of sights. The ordinary traveller is certainly too much inclined to regard Paris as a, place to stop a night or two at, on his way some- where else. Probably, in spite of the new facilities for avoiding it, he would rather feel that he was shirking his duty if he did not stop there. Then be will probably pay a duty-visit to Notre Dame and the Louvre—if the traveller is a lady, she may also visit the other Louvre over the way— look at the shops in the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue de la
• Paris, in Old and Present Ttmes. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. New Edition. London : Seeley and Co. 1292.
Pair, walk along the Champs lilysees, and possibly go to the Bois. This will more or less represent in his eyes the whole duty of man under the circumstances. To many people, the Champs Elysees, the Rue de Rivoli, and the Pekin Royal are haunts of enjoyment which it is impossible to get beyond. Mr. Hamerton says that the new Paris has practically stamped out the old one, and this is true, even in a sense which he probably does not intend to imply. There is so much that is pleasant to see in the mere brightness and fresh- ness of life as it appears to the casual visitor, that he does not care to search for further beauties. We are not referring, of course, to the man who knows Paris and can amuse himself as the Parisians do, but to the outside onlooker, the mere sight- seer who finds here in the streets, the shops, and the crowd, too much interest to let him go farther afield.
Mr. Hamerton devotes his attention with perfect im- partiality to Paris, past and present. The beginning of his book is almost painfully historical, tracing the fortunes of the Island of Notre Dame from the strange days when the Parisians were a barbarous tribe—perhaps this was only an invention of envious neighbours—and built their first rude fort in the middle of the Seine. Valuable historical and architectural descriptions are given of the origin and growth of Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, and the Hotel de Ville. Of the Louvre especially the account is very full and interesting, through all the various vicissi- tudes of its history, from the strong castle built by Philippe Auguste outside the wall of the city, to the building as it stands in the present day. One of the most curious incidents recorded is that which accounts for the remarkable fact that the buildings on the river side of the quadrangle are so much broader than those facing the Rue de Rivoli. When Louis XIV. first turned his attention to the Louvre, he found only the western and southern aides of the great quadrangle finished, his father, who had pro- jected a gigantic palace four times as large as the present one, having, in fact, accomplished little beyond pulling down the beautiful old Gothic work that he found there. Louis XIV. employed Le Vau, an architect of great ability, to continue the work and build the eastern front. All went well for a while, till Colbert came into office and began finding fault with everything, as was his wont. He sent Le Van's plans to other eminent French architects, and asked if they were not bad ; and each of the persons consulted replied that they were atrocious, and that he had never been able to understand how the King had not employed himself instead of an idiot like Le Vau. Each man also sent his own design of what he thought ought to be built, and Colbert, being con- fused among all the rival suggestions, sent the lot to Rome, to be inspected and decided upon by the great authorities there. The Roman critics replied unanimously that, as no Frenchman bad ever had the slightest notion of the rudiments of architecture, it was not surprising that the designs were all equally bad ; obviously only an Italian could be expected to carry out properly a work of such magnitude. So Louis XIV. engaged the Italian architect Bernini, who came to Paris and was feted and made much of, but somehow did not please the King with his work, and was finally sent back to Italy, "con- soled with a sum of three thousand Ionia d'or, and a life- pension of twelve thousand livres for himself and twelve hundred for his son." Matters were therefore much in the same position as they were when poor Le Van's work had been taken out of his hands. At this point comes upon the scene Claude Perrault, doctor of medicine, with a design of the front as it exists at present, facing St. Germain l'Auxerrois. The imposing aspect of the great colonnade was just the thing to take the fancy of Louis xrv.., who ordered the plan to be put into execution at once. Perrault, who was presumably stronger in medicine than in geometry, had made his façade seventy feet too long ; but he was not going to abate an inch of it for such a mere trifle as suiting it to the position of the older buildings ; so a new front was erected on the river side outside the old southern buildings, in order to fit in with Perrault's new façade. The latter was found to be too long on the north side also, as is shown by the pro- jecting clump of building which still exists at tbe north-east corner of the Louvre.
Regarding the Hotel de Ville, Mr. Hamerton absolutely whoops with enthusiasm. It is "the most perfectly beautiful of modern edifices," "the fairest palace ever erected in the world." This is because it has been constructed rapidly as a whole conception, designed and executed at one time, upon the old model improved by the new lights of modern architec- ture. "The intention has been to preserve the traditional forms, but quietly to take every opportunity of improving
them. It is a new edition of an old book, not revised by the author, but by a respectful editor more skilful than the author himself." We are always a little nervous about the result of editing by an editor "more skilful than the author himself," and the improvement of ancient art by the clearer knowledge of modern days always brings to our mind an uneasy reminiscence of a story which was told Us some years ago at Florence. A con- ceited young artist arrived there with letters of introduction to a well-known connoisseur, who was to be his guide, philosopher, and friend during his stay. The two went about together, and the young man talked at large about the present and future of Art with the biggest of capital "A's." In time they came to San Marco; and the connoisseur pointed out the beauties of Fra Angelico's frescoes, and asked his young friend if he thought he could do as well as that. The young man sim- pered and hesitated, but finally admitted that, considering the extent of modern knowledge and the progress of Art, one ought to be able to do a little better than that nowadays. We do not insinuate that Mr. Hamerton would advance such a proposition, but his enthusiasm about modern French archi- tecture is occasionally rather alarming. To be sure, the fact that a builder of mere houses in a mere street should in the nineteenth century think about architecture at all, does in it- self open up the most dazzling possibilities to the astounded Englishman.
The illustrations, which contain some reproductions of in- teresting old prints, are of high average merit, especially some clever sketches of M. Maxime Lalanne, who has, however, con- tributed one picture of "Children in the Garden of the Tuileries," which we would gladly have been without. Some one—whether Mr. Hamerton or the publisher or who, we know not—has managed to place the illustrations very awkwardly. In more than one case, we have a detailed description of a picture which does not come till some ten pages later, other irrelevant illustrations intervening in the meantime. To the chapter on the Pantheon, the Invalides, and the Madeleine, is appended a note, saying that. "although our engraving does not illustrate the present chapter on Paris, it belongs to the same series," there following a full description of the engraving in question. After a long futile search, we discovered this illustration in a totally different chapter, ninety pages further on. This careless arrangement seriously detracts from the usefulness of the book. Mr. Hamerton has not quite brought his new edition up to date in some cases ; for instance, in his meditations on the Champ de Mars, he does not mention the Exhibition of 1889, which was at least as important as the two previous ones. Perhaps he was afraid that he would be obliged to speak of the Tour Eiffel.
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