The firm of Mame has completed this artist’s treason by the issue of these melancholy chromo-lithographs.  Under the pretext of realism, of information acquired on the spot, of authenticated costumes—­all extremely doubtful, since we should be forced to conclude that nothing has changed in Palestine in the course of nineteen centuries—­Monsieur Tissot has given us the basest masquerade that anyone has yet dared present as an illustration of the Scriptures.  Look at that disreputable trull, a street slut tired of shouting “This way to the boats!” till she falls fainting.  This is the Magnificat, the Blessed Virgin.  That epileptic boy with outstretched arms is Jesus in the Temple.  Look at the Baptism, the Pharisee and the Publican, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Saint Peter walking on the Sea, the Magdalen at the feet of Jesus, the ridiculous Consummatum est—­look at them all:  these prints are matchless for platitude, effeteness, poverty of spirit.  They might have been designed by the first-comer, and are painted with muck, wine-sauce, mud!

Certainly the hapless Catholics have no luck when once they try to meddle with what they do not understand; their incurable lack of artistic sense is once more displayed in this attempt over which the whole world of art and letters is laughing in their sleeve.

“Then is there nothing, absolutely nothing, to the credit side for the Church?” exclaimed Durtal.  “And yet some attempts at ascetic art have been made in this century.  A few years since, the Benedictine House at Beuron, in Bavaria, tried to revive ecclesiastical art”; and Durtal remembered having looked through some reproductions of mural frescoes painted by these monks in a tower at Monte Cassino.

These frescoes had gone back to the types of Assyria and Egypt, with their crowned gods, their sphynx-headed angels having fan-shaped wings behind their heads, their old men with plaited beards playing on stringed instruments; and then the Friars of Beuron had given up this hieratic style, in which, it must be owned, they succeeded but ill, and in certain later works—­especially in a volume of the Way of the Cross, published at Freiburg in Breisgau—­they had adopted a strange medley of other styles.

The Roman soldiers who figured in those pages were huge firemen, a bequest from the schools of Guerin and David; and then, unexpectedly, in certain plates where the Magdalen and the Holy women appeared, a younger spirit seemed to prevail among the commonplace groups—­Greek female types derived from the Renaissance, pretty and elegant, evidently imported from the works of the pre-Raphaelites, and strongly recalling Walter Crane’s illustrations.

Thus the ideal at Beuron had developed into an alloy of the French art of the First Empire and contemporary English work.