Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/36

---

tate before the greatest names. Still, it is a consolation that it is the same with all the arts. The painters here are no better; it is terrible to see them at their Café Greco. I seldom go there, for I am rather afraid of them and the place they haunt. It is a small dark room about eight paces wide; on one side it is permitted to smoke tobacco, on the other not. They sit round on the benches with their brigand-hats and their big bloodhounds; their throats, chins, and faces are entirely covered with hair, and they pour out dense volumes of smoke and exchange incivilities with one another while the dogs are exchanging their insects. A necktie or a frock-coat would be a modern weakness; all the face that’s left by the beard is concealed by their spectacles; they swill their coffee and discourse of Titian and Pordenone as though these persons were sitting there with beards and brigand-hats like themselves. Their business is to paint sickly madonnas, rickety saints and effeminate knights, things one longs to dash one’s fist through. As for Titian’s picture in the Vatican, which you ask about, these infernal critics have no respect for it. According to them it has neither subject nor conception, and it never occurs to one of them that a master who gave laborious days of love and reverence to a picture, may still have seen as far as they can through their glistening spectacles, and if all my life I never contrive to do anything else, I am resolved, at least, to be as rude as I can to people who have no respect for the great masters; that will be one good work accom-