of a simple plodding life; and in the midst of airy reverie, he still preserved a sober, scrutinising eye for the actual world around him. The wisdom of the man was great, and his knowledge, like his sympathy, extended. His whole nature seems to have been given to noble aspiration, either for humanity at large, or for the advance of that art to which he was so ardently devoted. The uneventful epoch of the Restoration, though little to his taste, offered at least no great distraction to the quiet development of his genius. For ten whole years we find him silently working for a livelihood, steadfastly striving to mature his powers, and to make the pictures which he so laboriously executed, the pure expression of the noblest thought. Already he had secured in his art a high position, when the even tenor of his life was again broken, and he was called once more, by the Revolution of 1830, to become an actor upon the stage of public politics-to lay aside for a time his pencil, and gird on his sword to fight for his country's rights. In that year of overturning, Paris is in ferment, and hostile parties are likely to come into violent collision. Early on the morning of the 28th July, Scheffer is in the public streets. "The game," he exclaims to a friend, "is begun, and we must play it out." The conflict, indeed, soon commenced, and "Scheffer was among those who fought unceasingly through two of the glorious days' which crowned resistance with victory." On the morrow of the third and decisive day, Scheffer, fairly tired out, was resting at his own house in the Rue Chaptal, when he was surprised by the entrance of Monsieur Thiers. The dialogue which ensued is so graphic, that we give Mrs Grote's own words: "Well, Scheffer,' exclaims Thiers, 'here I am! I want you: I have done everything that was necessary.' 'How! done everything?' calmly inquired Scheffer. Well, I mean that I have been to the Hôtel de Ville-seen the members of the Municipal Committeeseen the 'chefs de partis' at Lafitte'sand, in short, I am the bearer of a communication to the Duke of Orleans, which you must assist me in conveying to Neuilly.' Hey-day,' replied Scheffer, so you mean that I am to go with you as a kind of commissioner from the leaders of the party?' 'I do,' rejoined M. Thiers, and for this reason, among others, that you are known to keep good horses in your stable; for, look you, we can go in no other way than by riding on horseback.' 'That is certain,' quoth Scheffer; the barricades would render the passage of a carriage impossible.' 'But, stay,' said Thiers; how shall I manage about my monture? I shall never be able to sit on one of your great beasts.' Thereupon Scheffer hastened to the stables of young Ney (son of the Marshal), with whom he was on intimate terms, and, borrowing a small nimble nag for his friend, they started on their im portant errand. "The barricades presented, in truth, some obstacles to their progress; but Scheffer being a practised horseman, leaped his horse over them. M. Thiers could not manage matters quite so actively. The mob, however, good-naturedly aided him to scramble through, lifting him almost bodily over the piles of stones, &c., horse and all, laughing horsemanship. As M. Thiers rode in heartily at 'le petit commis' for his bad white stockings and shoes, and wore spectacles, I suspect,' observes Mrs Grote, that his personal appearance did afford some scope for the light-hearted jokes of 'le peuple' on that morning." The two envoys quickly arrive at the Château de Neuilly. The Duchess of Orleans reproves Scheffer for presuming that her husband could accept the proposals offered; but after some debate and delay, the negotiation is ended, and Louis Philippe in due time is proclaimed King of the French. Ary Scheffer becomes, during the ensuing reign, a frequent visitor at the palace. He receives from the King commissions for the painting of pictures for Versailles; he is the constant instructor to the young and gifted Princess Marie; he is sent as the companion of the King's eldest son to the siege of Antwerp; and yet, in the midst of all this royal favour, we find, as ever, that he preserves intact his independence; that his conscience cannot be bought; and that his tongue refuses to flatter. He speaks the truth boldly, and warns the King, when troublous times are threatening, of the impend ing fate. But he will not anticipate the current of events. The Orleans dynasty had disappointed Scheffer's too sanguine expectations. He felt discouraged, if not indeed disgusted, by the conduct of the Government, and deliberately held himself aloof from all public affairs. But during these eighteen years, lying in the very prime of his artistic life, he had at least this satisfaction, that in undisturbed rest he was able to labour at his profession. Then it was that were matured some of the highest efforts of his genius. Let us pause in this lull of party strife, and examine at calm leisure the progress which he made. Scheffer in his Art seems to have exemplified Wordsworth's leading axiom, that poetry is the recollection of excitement in moments of tranquillity. Scheffer felt deeply-acted courageously; his life was often in tumult and disappointment, and even bitter anguish at times filled his cup to overflowing. His art then came as a haven of rest after life's troublous tossings; the storm-dashed bark lay in grateful rest-the heaving and the moaning of the distant sea breaking in ripples, and dying in echoes on the sheltered shore. Howling winds were, in the realms of his tranquil art, softened into gentle whispers; and angry waves, which rose beneath the storm-cloud, sank into rest on the hushed cradle of the deep -a mirror to the sunset and the stars of twilight. After the fever and the heat of day, the art of Scheffer came as the pale, pure moonlight, with silver clouds sailing before the queen of night. It is as if, wearied, outworn, and disheartened, he said to the world, Vex me no more. Let me shut the study-door upon the strife and the uproar, the jealousy and the ambition, which I too have found vanity and vexation. Let art be to me all that I have sought for in life; but, alas! sought in vain. Let it be to me that ineffable beauty which I have loved and cherished in the silent chamber of my thoughts-have seen, it may be, as a fleeting shadow, and then for ever lost. Let it be to me the soul's sweet calm; let it be the promised peace and the bright reward. Shattered wrecks of forlorn hopes lie scattered on every shore; but there is a sky above, cloudless and serene, and sister spirits seem to call and beckon to a blessed abode. Such appears to us to have been the language of Scheffer, and such his faith in art. Other painters there have been who, mingling in life, and fighting in the world, pointed through their works to a widely different moral. The art of Salvator Rosa was not a reaction and revulsion, but a reflex. His pictures in their stormtossed clouds gloried in the war of the elements; and his bandit-haunted caves rejoiced in plunder and conspiracy. Rubens, indeed, as Scheffer, mingled in political action, and was intrusted with state confidence; but he, too, in his art, like Salvator, gloried in the life which he found in contest around him. His works show no misgiving or distrust. He revelled in all the pomp and circumstance of wealth and high position; his colours are the transport of enjoyment, and the lines of his composition seem to dance for delight. But the pictures of Scheffer tell, as we have seen, a very different tale. Sober and chastened, they seem to say: I have seen, all the works that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. I will seek for myself in the world of art a more abiding trust. Great eternal verities cannot change. Essential truths, and forms, and beauties, cannot die away. I will make my art a foretaste of those heavens where the weary may find rest. In the midst of much discouragement, and oft with a wounded spirit, there was at least one person who could sympathise with Scheffer in his dreams. The Princess Marie, the sculptor of "Joan of Arc," "the finest modern figure to be found at Versailles," had been his pupil from childhood. The life and early death of this gifted daughter of the King comes as a touching episode in the memoirs of Scheffer. From her earliest years, her only delight had been in works of art, and in the best of books. The sudden exaltation of her family seemed to have alarmed her; she was filled with misgiving, she had a contempt for "the official tribe" around her, and all that was daily passing before her eyes inspired her with disgust. She absented herself from the splendid "fêtes" by which Louis Philippe hoped to sustain his waning popularity, and loved rather to retire within her modest studio. "One evening," we are told, during which she was working in her atelier, in company with Scheffer, there were 5000 people thronging the salons below, wherein dancing and feasting were going on. 'When I reflect,' said the princess to Scheffer, upon what is passing down there what ambition, what avidity for gain, what flatteries-and upon the way in which my father is cheated and deceived by them, I feel happy to be out of it all." Such hold, indeed, had her art obtained upon the ardour of her youthful mind, that she would sit up by night, unknown to her parents, in order to pursue her studies. In a simple, heartfelt sketch, written by Scheffer on her death, he tells us that "her settled dream was, to lead the life of an elevated conscientious artist, and thus to exercise a beneficial influence over high art in France. She chose for her studies books calculated to ripen and develop her intellectual faculties. Scientific treatises, imaginative works, everything was read, and read with profit by her. All that seemed great and worthy of admiration she prized at its full value." Death came, as we know, at an early age, and Scheffer mourned her loss. In his studio he placed a bust to her memory in a retired recess, where few were permitted to enter. Scheffer, as we have seen, made of his transcendental art a kind of quiet refuge; yet even in this his chosen sphere he was for many years tossed about ere he gained a steadfast anchorage. Among his earlier compositions-battles with warriors and bristling lances, and tempests of dashing wave and stormy shipwreck -we find indications of that mental tumult and dramatic conflict which have often marked the salient works of great minds still heaving in unrest. We have seen that in his outset upon life, Scheffer had wellnigh lost his way in political tumults and conspir acies. He had sought in false paths for an impossible ideal, and had beer, we fear, misled, in the too generous confidence of youth, into vulgar and noisy democracy. His pictures of this period show a like unsatisfactory conflict. He was beating about without sure guidance. A mere mundane materialism having for the moment seized him by the hand, he walked with unsteady steps, as if uncertain of his footing. Here and there, however, we see indications that the clouds were opening on his future sky; that the star had risen_which should guide him on his way. During this doubtful period as of interreg num, when this world and a better were contending for the mastery of his art, his pictures seem, we must confess, unsatisfactory. On the one hand, they are assuredly wanting in the fling, the vigour, and passion which give command to many an inferior artist; and on the other, they stand as yet far off from that pure spirituality which at a subsequent time shone so supremely in his works. Of this intermediate stage of transition, the well-known picture in the Luxembourg, "Les Femmes Souliotes," is the most important example. In this great work, Scheffer for the moment allies himself to the allurements of that romantic school of which the more carnal Delacroix is still the admitted chief. Here we have the tumult of a disordered composition, the vigorous blackness of deep shadows into which asphaltum has been freely flooded, the intoxication of glowing golden colour which the solemn blue of distant mountains heightens the more into warm and passionate harmonies. This work, indeed, would seem to show that Scheffer might have indulged in the glitter and glory of intensest colour, had he not, as we think, unreasonably deemed that the sacred mission of spiritual art called him to surrender what falsely seemed to him a mere sensuous allurement. Yet, ever and anon thrown in among these more intense compositions of his earlier youth, do we see the dawn of that pale, silvery, shadowy spiritualism, which cast its moonlight pallor over his latent ideal. His theory on the subject of colour would seem to have obtained for once explicit expression in the picture of "Divine and Terrestrial Love." The love of earth is here seen in golden hair, the flesh flushed in the amorous glow of youth and passion, the flaunting drapery hot with the blaze of restless red. By the side of the terrestrial Venus stands, in silvery light and tempered grey, with upraised hand of admonition, her spiritual sister, thickly draped in the chaste folds of white raiment, as in the statues of "Pudicitia." Ary Scheffer, in this his cherished theory, that colour is basely allied to the flesh, was guilty, we are persuaded, of an error alike false to nature and pernicious to art. Perhaps the most solemn and, we may say, the most spiritual, moment which nature knows, is that hour of blushing sunset, when sky, and cloud, and lake are sapphire, and emerald, and ruby. The life of Nature, in her opening spring of promise, and in her closing autumn harvest, is rich in gay and glad attire; it is death only, aged and crowned with snow-wreath, that puts on a garb of solemn sadness, and totters forth in shadowed grey. And again, as sky and rainbow glories, and the sun's dazzling splendour, excel the sober hues of earth, so does heaven show itself more resplendent than the lower world. Hence Revelation ever paints the Eternal City with precious gates and streets of gold, and saints in gorgeous apparel. And hence, in like manner, did the great religious painters of ItalyPerugino, Francia, Bellini, and others -use the richness and fulness of lustrous colour, bright with the light of gems, to enhance to the utmost that hallowed expression for which they sought. There is no doubt Scheffer, in his theory and practice, was wholly wrong; nature and authority are indeed against him. The want of colour, it must be admitted, in some degree mars his works; his pictures are proportionably cold in their religion, and their worship is without rapture. Thus we see that Scheffer was, by a somewhat strange anomaly, at once an ardent patriot and a cold painter. The action which he threw into the world became, in his art, reaction, and, by a law known in dynamics, rebounded in the opposite direction. Thus, within the sphere of his profession, an ascetic, he deliberately adopted an austere, self-denying manner, and sought to satisfy the soul's vision through the mortification of the bodily eye. Hence have his works a uniform and, we believe, a studied hardness of line and dryness of handling-a want of roundness and relief, as if the figures were marble bas-reliefs rather than flowing liquid pictures. By a like anomaly and contradiction, while he was bold in political action, he was timid in art execution. It is as if, in religious art, he felt that he had entered on a wholly different region; as if all that belongs to animal courage and self-help was to be laid aside, and that henceforth he had simply to wait for instruction with humbled soul and trembling hand, faltering and stumbling when it did not come. In the quiet retreat of his studio, where, sometimes for days, he sat secluded from the world, which had grown to him a weariness, he would brood in the depths of his highly wrought consciousness, and seem lost save to the vision of his own creations. Hence do we find him powerless to seize with dramatic force a character foreign to his own; and hence even his portraits are often feeble, and his works in general deficient in the vigorous grasp and pointed purpose of a man who could lay firm hold upon the actual. As a consequence, or at least by a natural connection, we find him great and sustained only in the quiescence of repose-incapable, indeed, of force in action, or swiftness in motion. He was, doubtless, the chief among spiritual artists; but yet it must be laid to his charge that he failed in that highest philosophy, which knows how rightly to unite this actual world to the ideal which lies beyond, and looks for the sane mind and the healthful art as the issue of a sound physique. It seems to us evident, indeed, that physicial and political action was with Scheffer not so much the result of bodily vigour as of mental aspiration. His character and his paintings seem alike to point to this conclusion; and thus considered, his life and his works present no conflicting anomalies. Political contest was, we conceive, with him no mere outburst of restless and turbulent power-no rude animal passion, which loved in democracy an unruly riot; it was rather a holy striving for the true, the beautiful, and the good; it was a duty which his conscience required of him to perform a service which he owed to his country, and to humanity itself. Thus, at certain periods in his life, at the call of patriotism, he came forth and sacrificed his peace, his safety, and his beloved art, to fight in the cause of freedom; and then, when the urgent necessity had passed, or disappointment dashed his hopes, he relapsed once again into his habitual repose, and, in the quiet of the studio, strove to fashion with the painter's pencil that ideal perfection which his sword had failed to win. Thus, rightly considered, his art and his life compose, we think, into completest harmony. But though in this sense the artist and his works are united, yet in another aspect they were too widely severed. It had been well, indeed, for the world had Scheffer found it possible to infuse into its rude discord the harmony and the beauty of his heaven-born art; and, on the other hand, for his art it would, as we have seen, have been salutary could he have taken from actual life somewhat more of nature and of vigour. But, as often befalls the artistic temperament, his mind proved too sensitive to sustain the shocks, and to bear up against the reverses, which the conflict for political progression necessarily involves. From the fight, which appeared to him hopeless, he beat a retreat, heartbroken, and turned for refuge, as we have seen, to, painting; his wounded spirit uttering its anguish in chastened forms of pathos. This, too, had its charm-the joy which lies in sorrow. "The tendency," says Mrs Grote, "to depression of spirits which latterly bespread itself over his life, would seem to have had its share in disposing Scheffer to seek, in the speculative and spiritual, a refuge from the poignant disappointments of the everyday world. To this source I conceive that we are in great measure indebted for the peculiar charm which distinguishes his later works, to which this same 'sombre' tone of mind doubtlessly gave the 'key-note' of religious, thoughtful melancholy." The arts are, after all, for men endowed like Scheffer, the fitting sphere. There will always be rude hands found to do the rougher work of life; always men in abundance for the politics of the world-men whose breath is agitation-moulded in coarse, tough clay, expressly "to bear the whips and scorns of time," "the oppressor's wrong," the "insolence of office." We confess it is with sincere regret that we ever see a sensitive and refined intellect, gifted with literary or artistic power, descend into the arena of party or social strife. Let such modes of action be left for others. Men of these finer faculties, when thrown upon a tumultuous stage, are for the most part wholly misunderstood, and their subtler qualities lying beyond general appreciation, serve only for the slighting talk of idle tongues. An artist and a literary man may promote the best interests of his country and his kind in his own appointed way. Labour enough, disappointment enough, in his own peculiar line of duty, he will doubtless have to bear; yet for him comes the recompense in a joy and a bright reward, with which no stranger shall intermeddle. The poet and the artist find in nature, and in the created beauty of imagination, "Another gift, of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, And this " serene and blessed mood" was to Scheffer as sweet rest after sore conflict-as healing balm for a wounded spirit. His later works, at least, show that his troubled eye had at length been "made quiet by the |