Apart from repairs, what is being done in the present day? So little that historians of the future are going to find scant pickings for their record.
The Gobelins factory being the last one to make a permanent contribution to art, the impulse is to ask what it is doing now. That is easily answered, but there is no man so optimistic that he can find therein matter for hope.
France is commendably determined not to let the great industry die. It would seem a loss of ancient glory to shut down the Gobelins. Yet why does it live? It lives because a body of men have the patriotic pride to keep it alive. But as for its products, they are without inspiration, without beauty to the eye trained to higher expressions of art.
The Gobelins to-day is almost purely a museum, not only in the treasures it exposes in its collection of ancient "toiles," but because here is preserved the use of the high-warp loom, and the same method of manufacture as in other and better times. A crowd of interested folk drift in and out between the portals, survey the Pavilion of Louis XIV and the court, the garden and the stream, then, turning inside, the modern surveys the work of the ancient, the remnants of time. And no less curious and no less remote do the old tapestries seem than the atelier where the high looms rear their cylinders and mute men play their colour harmonies on the warp. It all seems of other times; it all seems dead. And it is a dead art.
[Illustration: GOBELINS TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
[Illustration: GOBELINS TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The tapestries on the looms are garish, crude, modern art in its cheapest expression; or else they are brilliant-hued copies of time-softened paintings that were never meant to be translated into wool and silk.
The looms are always busy, nevertheless. There is always preserved a staff of officers, the director, the chemist of dyes, and all that; and the tapissiers are careful workmen, with perfection, not haste, in view. The State directs the work, the State pays for it, the State consumes the products. That is the Republic's way of continuing the craft that was the serious pleasure of kings. But there is now no personal element to give it the vital touch. There is no Gabrielle d'Estrées, nor Henri IV; no Medici, no Louis XIV, no Pompadour. All is impersonal, uninspired.
