For Homer the Rhine existed not; for Virgil it was only a frozen stream--_Frigiora Rheni_; for Shakespeare it was the “beautiful Rhine”; for us it is, and will be to the day when it shall become the grand question of Europe, a picturesque river, the resort of the unemployed of Ems, of Baden, and of Spa.
THE SEINE
A. BOWMAN BLAKE
Few persons outside of France have any acquaintance with, or knowledge of, the rare beauties of Seine scenery. The river has thus far escaped the vulgarity of becoming a common tourist’s high-road. The general impression is current that the Seine, being destitute of the legendary romance of the vine-clad Rhine, the vivid and somewhat spectacular scenic effects of the Italian lakes, or even the lawn-like finish of the Thames, offers no attractions to either amateur or tourist. This opinion only proves the falsity of opinion based upon superficial knowledge. From the artistic point of view, perhaps, no other one river in Europe possesses a character of scenery so preëminently beautiful, or so replete with the charm of contrast, or rich in variety; for the picturesque portions of the noble river are by no means confined to the grandeur and wildness of the Fontainebleau forests, or of the animated quays and crumbling Mediæval houses of the ancient city of Rouen. To one in search of scenes which shall unite the charms of beautiful river scenery with the added note of pastoral and village rusticity, almost every turning of the river will reveal a mine of wealth. It is a characteristic of the scenery of the Seine that it is eminently sketchable at almost every point. For it is more than a purely picturesque, it is an essentially poetic river. A conclusive proof of its superiority in point of artistic resources and suggestivement is, perhaps, that no other European river scenery has had so overwhelming an influence upon modern Art. During the past forty years, in which the Seine and its tributaries have been the principal camping-ground of the best French landscape-painters, the peculiarities of its scenery, and the features of its rustic life, have formed the taste, and developed a wholly original mode of treatment of _genre_ and landscape in the modern French school. The two principal characteristics of the scenery of the Seine are its naturalness, and its possessing in the highest degree that individuality which marks its landscapes as distinctively French. The Seine could never be mistaken at any point for other than a French river. The Parisian masters, in transferring to their canvasses the peculiarities of the river and shore aspects, have produced a school of landscape as essentially national in character as that which marks the Dutch and Flemish masterpieces of two hundred years ago. The low wide meadows, the stately poplars, the reedy shores, and the delicate atmosphere which veils the jumble of roofs, and the quaint towers and turrets that are lanced from the Seine shores, have already become as familiar features of modern French landscape, as the cone-shaped hills of Flanders and the flat windmill-dotted fields of Holland, which makes the character of the landscape in Dutch and Flemish canvasses.
[Illustration: THE SEINE]
I have spoken of the naturalness of the Seine landscape. It is this which makes its lasting charm. Along these banks Nature neither rises to the sublime nor does she appear in too wild or dishevelled a state. There is a happy blending of the cultivated and the uncultivated, of course tamed and yet enjoying the wilder _abandon_ of freedom. Nowhere are the scenes too grand or too wide for the pencil; the hills suggest, but do not attain, the majestic; the wide, flat fields and the long stretches of meadows are broken into possible distances by a gently sloping ground, or an avenue of tall poplars. The villages and farm-houses dotted along its banks wear a thoroughly rustic air; the villas and _châteaux_ crowning its low hills become naturally a part of the landscape by their happy adaptation, architecturally, to the character of their surroundings; while the not infrequent ruins of monastery or ancient castle group charmingly with the fluffy foliage and dense shrubbery.
Perhaps the impressionist’s most ideal landscape would be found among the villages of the upper Seine, that part of the Seine which flows between Fontainebleau and Rouen, as beyond Rouen the river takes on a stronger and bolder character both in its breadth and in the quality of its scenery.
First in point of beauty among the villages contiguous to Fontainebleau, is Grètz, a little village not directly upon the Seine, but upon its tributary, the Loing. Grètz can be reached in an hour’s drive from the town or palace of Fontainebleau. This charming village must have grown here, close to the low sweet level of the winding river’s banks, with a view to its being sketched. Not a feature necessary to the making of a picture is wanting. The village street lies back some distance from the shore, the backs of the houses fronting on the river, the village and river life made one by the straggling rose, fruit, and vegetable gardens running down between their high stone-wall enclosures to the very edges of the swiftly flowing streams. As one views the village from the mid-stream, one has the outlined irregularity of the village houses limned against the sky. To the right, between the tall grenadier-like poplars, or the higher branches of the willow, rises a beautiful group of old buildings; the blue spaces of the sky are seen through the arches and ruins of the old _château_ of La Reine Blanche, that queen having made, centuries ago, Grètz her dwelling place. The massive, simple lines of the castle’s Norman tower contrast finely with the belfry of the still more ancient church close beside it, the dark façades of these old buildings being relieved by the gay touches of colour upon the adjacent houses. A queer old bridge appears to leap directly from the very courtyard of the _château_ to the opposite shore, and on the bridge is constantly moving some picture of rustic life, peasants with loads of grapes or fagots, a herd of oxen laboriously dragging the teeming hay-cart, a group of chattering villagers, or the shepherd leading his flock to richer pastures. The river banks themselves are not wanting in the beauty of human activity. In the gardens, as our boat drifted along the banks, were half-a-dozen bent old women weeding, sowing, and plucking. Farther down, beyond the bridge, is the washerwomen’s stand, the bare arms, short skirts, and gay kerchiefs of these sturdy peasant women, with the bits of colour their home-spun linens yield, making delightful contrasts with the delicate arabesques which light foliage made against the sky.
The upper valley of the Seine, that portion of the river lying between Paris and Rouen, seems at a first glance to be a country as sterile in artistic resources as it is interesting to the average tourist. But the French artist, so far from finding the flat, wide stretches of field and meadow, the scanty foliage, and the scattered group of farm-houses which border the river banks, either too prosaic or too trite for his pencil, has discovered from a close study of this apparently common-place valley scenery a new feature of landscape beauty. This feature has been the present original treatment of the flat surfaces of ground and of large sunlit spaces. The character of all this valley scenery may be summed up in a few words; tilled fields running down to the water’s edge; wild uncultivated fields and rank dank meadows, their flatness broken here and there by a clustering group of low shrubbery, by rows of the slim, straight French poplars, or an avenue of stunted, bulbous-trunk willows, with their straight, reed-like branches. The entire landscape has but two lines, the horizontality of the meadows and the perpendicular uprising of the trees, except that far off in the distance run the waving outlines of the hills of Normandy. Such is the aspect of the country in which some of the first among contemporaneous French artists have found new sources of inspiration. Those wide, sunlit meadows, breathing the rich luxuriance of nature in undisturbed serenity; the golden spaces of the air shimmering like some netted tissue between tree and tree; the shadows cast by a single tree across the length of the field; an intimate knowledge and study of this landscape have taught the French brush the secret of its power in painting a flat picture, and in wresting from sunlight the glory of its gold. The peculiar qualities of the atmosphere at certain seasons of the year make the Seine valley entrancing, especially to Art Students. In the spring, nothing can exceed the delicacy, purity and fineness of the colouring of the foliage, and the tones of light are marvellous in their dainty refinement and suggestiveness. Nature seems to be making a sketch in outline of a picture, which summer is to fill in, so pure are the outlines of foliage and landscape in that wonderful medium of delicately coloured ether. In summer, sunlight fairly drenches the fields. Autumn colours, also, here seem richer, firmer, more glowing than in other parts of France, and the October twilights in their brilliance and duration approach an American tint.