It has long been a question in the ethics of fiction, whether sympathy with ideal sorrows be beneficial or mischievous. That it is pleasurable we all know. And a distinction has been made between pity as an emotion ending with its own gratification, and pity as a motive, a moving power, passing, by a necessity of its nature, into action and practical performance.
But, without going into the subject, we may give, as a good practical rule, let your moral sense be so clear and healthy as to discern at once the genuine objects of pity; and then, let them be fictitious or real, you may pity them safely with all your might. In either case you will get good, and the good will not end with yourself, even in the first case.
The story of Joseph, for instance, is to us fictitious, or rather, it is ideal; and in weeping over him, or over his heart-broken father, we know we can do them no good, or give them no sympathy; but where will you find a merely human story more salutary, more delightful, more appropriate, to every one of our intellectual, moral, and, let us add, our imaginative and æsthetical faculties?
We are inclined to rank Hogarth and Wilkie as the most thoughtful of British painters, and two of the greatest of all painters.
Some people, even now, speak of Hogarth as being at best a sort of miraculous caricaturist, and a shockingly faithful delineator of low vice, and misery, and mirth, but deficient in knowledge of the human figure, and in academical skill, and as having fallen short of the requirements of "high art."
We thought Charles Lamb had disposed of this untruth long ago; and so he did. But some folks don't know Charles Lamb, and we shall, for their sakes, give them a practical illustration of his meaning, and of ours. If Hogarth did not know the naked human figure (and we deny that he did not), he knew the human face and the naked human heart--he knew what of infinite good and evil, joy and sorrow, life and death, proceeded out of it. Look at the second last of the series of "Mariage à la Mode."
If you would see what are the wages of sin, and how, after being earned, they are beginning to be paid, look on that dying man,--his body dissolving, falling not like his sword, firm and entire, but as nothing but a dying thing could fall, his eyes dim with the shadow of death, in his ears the waters of that tremendous river, all its billows going over him, the life of his comely body flowing out like water, the life of his soul!--who knows what it is doing? Fleeing through the open window, undressed, see the murderer and adulterer vanish into the outer darkness of night, anywhere, rather than remain; and that guilty, beautiful, utterly miserable creature on her knee, her whole soul, her whole life, in her eyes, fixed on her dying husband, dying for and by her! What is in that poor desperate brain, who can tell! Mad desires for life, for death,--prayers, affections, infinite tears,--the past, the future,--her maiden innocence, her marriage, his love, her guilt,--the grim end of it all,--the night-watch with their professional faces,--the weary wind blowing Through the room, the prelude, as it were, of that whirlwind in which that lost soul is soon to pass away. The man who could paint so as to suggest all this, is a great man and a great painter.
Wilkie has, in like manner, been often misunderstood and misplaced. He is not of the Dutch school,--he is not a mere joker upon canvas,--he can move other things besides laughter; and he rises with the unconscious ease of greatness to what ever height he chooses. Look at John Knox's head in "The Administering the Sacrament in Calder House." Was the eye of faith ever so expressed, the seeing things that are invisible?
Hogarth was more akin to Michael Angelo: they both sounded the same depths, and walked the same terrible road. Wilkie has more of Raphael,--his affectionate sweetness, his pleasantness, his grouping, his love of the beautiful.
$THOMAS DUNCAN.
|Duncan possessed certain primary qualities of mind, without which no man, however gifted, can win and keep true fame. He had a vigorous and quick understanding, invincible diligence, a firm will, and that combination, in action, of our intellectual, moral, and physical natures, which all acknowledge, but cannot easily define, manliness.
As an artist, he had true genius, that incommunicable gift, which is born and dies with its possessor, never again to reappear with the same image and superscription. The direction of this faculty in him was towards beauty of colour and form,--its tendency was objective rather than subjective; the outward world came to him, and he noted with singular vigilance and truth all its phenomena. His perception of them was immediate, intense, and exact, and he could reproduce them on his canvas with astonishing dexterity and faithfulness. This made his sketches from nature quite startling, from their direct truth. There are two of them in Mr. Hay's gallery,--one, a girl with her bonnet on, sitting knitting at a Highland fireside; the other, a quaint old vacant room in George Heriot's Hospital.
But his glory, his peculiar excellence, was his colouring; there was a charm about it, a thing that could not be understood, but was felt. How transparent its depth,--how fresh,--how rich to gorgeousness,--how luminous, as from within!
His power over expression was inferior to his colouring. Not that he can be justly said to have failed in his exercise of this faculty; he rather did not attempt its highest range. His mind lingered delighted, at his eye; and if his mind did proceed inwards, it soon returned, and contented itself with that form of expression which, if we may sospeak, lies in closest contact with material beauty. Therefore it is that he often brought out, with great felicity and force, some simple feeling, some fixed type of character common to a class, but did not care to ascend to the highest heaven of invention, or stir the depths of imagination and passion. Nature was perceived by him, rather than imagined; and he transferred rather than transfigured her likeness. As a consequence, his works delight more than move, interest more than arrest. In a remarkable sketch left behind him of an intended picture of Wishart administering the Sacrament before his execution, there is one truly ideal head,--a monk, who is overlooking the touching solemnity, and in whose pinched, withered face are concentrated the uttermost bigotry, malice, and vileness of nature, his cruel small eyes gleaming as if "set on fire of hell." Duncan's mind was romantic, rather than historical. We see this in his fine picture of "Prince Charles's Entry into Edinburgh." He brings that great pageant out of its own time into ours, rather than sends us back to it. This arose, as we have said, from the objective turn of his mind; and would have rendered him unsurpassed in the representation of contemporaneous events. What a picture, had he lived, would he have made of the Queen at Taymouth! the masterly, the inimitable sketch of which is now in the Exhibition. We have an ancient love of one of his early pictures,--"Cuddy Headrig and Jenny Dennistoun." Cuddy has just climbed up with infinite toil; and, breathless with it and love, he is resting on the window-sill on the tips of his toes and fingers, in an attitude of exquisite awkwardness, staring, with open mouth and eyes, and perfect blessedness, on his buxom, saucy Jenny. Duncan's fame will, we are sure, rest chiefly on his portraits. They are unmatched in modern times, except by one or two of Wilkie's, and that most noticeable "Head of a Lady," by Harvey, in the inner octagon. Duncan's portraits are liker than their originals. He puts an epitome of a man's character into one look. The likeness of Dr. Chalmers has something of everything in him,--the unconsciousness of childhood,-- the fervour of victorious manhood,--the wise contemplativeness of old age,--the dreamy inexpressive eye of genius, in which his soul lies, "like music slumbering on its instrument," ready to awake when called--the entire loveableness of the man--the light of his countenance,--his heavenly smile,--are all there, and will carry to after times the express image of his person. How exquisite the head of D. O. Hill's daughter! so full of love and simpleness, the very realization of Wordsworth's lines:--
"Loving she is, and tractable, though wild,
And innocence hath privilege in her
To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes,
And feats of cunning."
There was something mournful and touching in the nature and progress of the last illness of this great artist. His unresting energy, his manly diligence, urged him beyond his powers; his brain gave way, and blindness crept slowly on him. It was a sort of melancholy consolation that, as the disease advanced, his intense susceptibility and activity were subdued, when their exercise must have only produced misery and regret. What is now infinitely more important is, that those who knew him best have little doubt, that while the outward world, with its cares, its honours, its wondrous beauty, its vain shows, was growing dim, and fast vanishing away, the eyes of his understanding became more and more enlightened, and that he died in the faith of the truth. If so, he is, we may rest assured, in a region where his intense perception of beauty, his delight in all lovely forms, and in the goodliness of all visible things, will have full exercise and satisfaction, and where that gift which he carries with him as a part of himself wili be dedicated to the glory of its Giver,--the Father of Lights.
We believe it to be more than a pleasant dream, that in the regions of the blessed each man shall retain for ever his innate gifts, and shall receive and give delight by their specific exercise. Such a thought gives, as it ought, to this life an awful, but not undelightful significance. He who, in his soul, and by a necessity of his nature, is a poet or a painter, will, in a spiritual sense, remain so for ever.
$PALESTRINA.
|We miss Turner's great landscape, "Palestrina," with its airy fulness and freedom,--its heaven and earth making one imagery,--its daylight, its sunlight, its magical shadows,--that city set upon a hill, each house clinging to the rocks like swallows' nests,--its waters murmuring on for ever, and sending up their faint steam into the fragrant air, that oblique bridge, so matchlessly drawn,--those goats browsing heedless of us,--in one word, its reality, and its something more!
One day last year, while waiting for a friend, we sat down in the rooms, and were thinking of absent things; some movement made us raise our eyes, and for that instant we were in Italy. We were in the act of wondering what we should see, when we reached the other end of that cool and silent avenue; and if one of these goats had looked up and stared at us, we should have hardly been surprised. It had, while it lasted, "the freshness and the glory of a dream."
We shall never forget this picture. It gave us a new sensation, a new and a higher notion of what the mind of man can put into, and bring out of, landscape painting; how its representative and suggestive truthfulness may be perfect, forming the material elements,--the body, as it were, of the picture,--while, at the same time, there may be superadded that fine sense of the indefinable relation of the visible world to mental emotion, which is its essence and vivifying soul.
How original, how simple, its composition! That tall tree, so inveterately twisted on itself, dividing the scene into two subjects, each contrasting with and relieving the other; the open country lying under the full power of the flaming mid-day sun; and that long alley, with its witchery of gleam and shadow, its cool air, a twilight of its own, at noon!
Nothing is more wonderful about Turner than the resolute way in which he avoids all imitation, even when the objects are in the foreground and clearly defined. He gives you an oak, or a beech, or an elm, so as to be unmistakable, and yet he never thinks of giving their leaves botanically, so as that we might know the tree from a leaf. He gives us it not as we know it, but as vve should see it from that distance; and he gives us all its characteristics that would carry that length, and no more. He is determined to give an idea, not a copy, of an oak. This is beautifully seen in his "Ivy Bridge,"--a picture, the magical simplicity of which grows upon every look. There is a birch there, the lady of the wood, which any nurseryman would tell you was a birch; and yet look into it, and what do you see? Turner sets down results of sight, not the causes of these results. His way is the true æsthetic, --the other is the scientific.
$HUNT THE SLIPPER.
|We plead guilty to an inveterate, and, it may be, not altogether rational, antipathy to Mr. Maclise's pictures. As vinegar to the teeth, as smoke to the eyes, or as the setting of a saw to the ears, so are any productions of his pencil we have met with to our æsthetic senses. We get no pleasure from them except that of hearty anger and strong contrast. Their hot, raw, garish colour--the chalky dry skin of his women--the grinning leathern faces of his men--and the entire absence of toning--are as offensive to our eyesight as the heartlessness, the grimace, the want of all naturalness in expression or feeling, in his human beings, are to our moral taste.
There is, no doubt, wonderful cleverness and facility in drawing legs and arms in all conceivable positions, considerable dramatic power in placing his figures, and a sort of striking stage effect, that makes altogether a smart, effective scene; and if he had been able to colour like Wilkie, there would have been a certain charm about them. But you don't care--at least we don't care--to look at them again; they in no degree move us out of ourselves into the scene. They are so many automata, and no more. To express shortly, and by example, what we feel about his picture of "Hunt the Slipper," we would say it is in all points the reverse of Wilkie's picture opposite, "The Distraining for Rent," in colour, conception, treatment, bodily expression, spiritual meaning, moral effect. Mr. Maclise's women are pretty, not beautiful; prim, not simple: their coyness, as old Fuller would say, is as different from true modesty as hemlock is from parsley--there is a meretriciousness about them all, which, as it is entirely gratuitous, is very disagreeable. The vicar is not Oliver Goldsmith's Dr. Primrose.
The best thing in the picture is the mantelpiece, with its odds and ends: the china cups and saucers, and that Hindu god, sitting in dropsical dignity--these are imitated marvellously, as also is the old trunk in the right corner. As far as we have seen, Mr. Maclise's gift lies in this small fancy line. We remember some game and a cabinet in his "Robin Hood," that would have made Horace Walpole or our own Kirkpatrick Sharpe's mouth water; the nosegays of the two London ladies are also cleverly painted, but too much of mere fac-similes. Nothing can be worse in colour or in aerial perspective than the quaint old shrubbery seen through the window; it feels nearer our eye than the figures. As to the figures, perhaps the most life-like in feature and movement are the two bad women, Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs and Lady Blarney.
The introduction of them into the story is almost the only blemish of that exquisite piece, and we have still less pleasure in seeing their portraits. How different from Hogarth's terrible pictures of the same miserable class! There you see the truth; you can imagine the past and the future, as well as perceive the present. Beauty, grace, often tenderness, sinking into ruin under the steady influence of a life of sin, make them objects at once of our profoundest compassion--and of our instant reprobation. But we must stay our quarrel with Mr. Maclise. We have perhaps been unlucky in the specimens of his genius that we have seen--the only other two being the "Bohemians" and "Robin Hood the first a picture of great but disagreeable power--a sort of imbroglio of everything sensual and devilish--the very superfluity of naughtiness --as bad, and not so good as the scene in the Brocken in Goethe's Faust. Mr. Maclise may find a list of subjects more grateful to the moral sense, more for his own good and that of his spectators, and certainly not less fitted to bring into full play all the best powers of his mind, and all the craft of his hand, in Phil. iv. 8.
"Robin Hood" was rather better, because there were fewer women in it; but we could never get beyond that universal grin which it seemed the main function of Robin and his "merrie men" to sustain. Of the landscape we may say, as we did of his figures and Wilkie's, that it was in every respect the reverse of Turner's.
We have been assured by those whose taste we know in other matters to be excellent, that Mr. Maclise is a great genius, a man of true imagination; and that his "Sleeping Beauty," his scene from Macbeth, and some others, are the proofs of this. We shall wait till we see them, and hope to be converted when we do; but, meanwhile, we suspect that his Imagination may turn out to be mere Fancy, which are as different, the one from the other, as word-wit is from deep humour, or as Queen Mab (a purely fanciful description) is from Miranda or Ariel. Fancy is aggregative and associative,--Imagination is creative, motive. As Wordsworth in one of his prefaces beautifully says,--"The law under which the processes of Fancy are carried on is as capricious as the accidents of things, and the effects are surprising, playful, ludicrous, or pathetic, as the objects happen to be appositely produced or fortunately combined. Fancy depends upon the rapidity and profusion with which she scatters her thoughts and images, trusting that their numbers, and the felicity with which they are linked together, will make amends for the want of individual value; or she prides herself upon the curious subtlety, and the successful elaboration, with which she can detect their lurking affinities. If she can win you over to her purpose, she cares not how unstable or transitory maybe her influence, knowing that it will not be out of her power to resume it on apt occasion. But Imagination is conscious of an indestructible dominion,--the soul may fall away from it, not being able to sustain its grandeur; but if once felt and acknowledged, by no other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired, or diminished. _Fancy is given to quicken and beguile the temporal parts of our nature,--Imagination to awaken and to support the eternal_." The one is the plaything, the other the food, the elixir of the soul. All great poets, as Homer, Shakspere, Milton, and Burns, have both faculties, and find fit work for each; and so have the great painters, Titian, Veronese, Albert Durer, Hogarth, Wilkie. We suspect Mr. Maclise has little else than fancy, and makes it do the work of both. There must be something radically defective in the higher qualities of poetic sensibility and ideality in any man who could, as he has done in the lately published edition of Moore's Melodies, execute some hundreds of illustrations, without above three or four of them being such as you would ever care to see again, or, indeed, would recognise as having ever seen before.
We would not give such sweet humour, such maidenly simpleness, such exquisite mirth, such "quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles," as we can get in most of the current numbers of "Punch," from the hand of young Richard Doyle (1846), with drawing quite as astonishing, and far more expression,--for this sumptuous three-guinea quarto. Have our readers six-and-sixpence to spare?--then let them furnish wholesome fun and "un-reprovèd pleasure" for the eyes and the minds of the small men and women in the nursery, by buying "The Fairy Ring," illustrated by him.
$THREE LANDSEERS.
|It would not be easy to say which of these three delightful pictures gives the most delight; only, if we were forced to name which we should best like to possess, we would say, "Uncle Tom and his Wife for Sale,"--one of the most wonderful bits of genius and its handiwork we ever had the pleasure of enjoying and being the better of.
The others are "The Maid and the Magpie," and "The Pen, the Brush, and the Chisel,"--the latter presented by Lady Chantrey to Her Majesty, and having for its subjects Chantrey's well-known bust of Sir Walter in the clay, with the sculptor's tools lying beside it, and his finger prints, fresh and soft, full of thought and will, giving a fine realization of work going on. The expression of the then Great Unknown is very noble--he looks like a mighty shade; beside the bust is a terrier, such as only Sir Edwin can give, with a keen look, as if he too smelt some one. Two woodcocks are resting in front in a fold of the table-cloth; doubtless the two famous birds which Sir Francis brought down at one shot, and immortalized in marble. At the corner of the picture, and stealthily peering from behind the table-cloth, is a cat's head, not yet seeing- the game, but nosing it. You can easily imagine the lively scrimmage when puss makes herself and her ends known, and when the unsuspected "Dandie" comes down upon her. The feeling and workmanship of this beautiful conceit is such as no one else could originate and express.
"The Maid and the Magpie" is a rustic tragedy told at a glance. It is milking-time, in a dreamy summer-day. Phillis,
"So buxom, blithe, and debonair,"
is filling her pail, her meek-eyed, lady-like cow--she is a high-bred Alderney--enjoying herself as cows know why during this process of evacuation and relief. Her glum, unsatisfied calf, who has been all the morning protesting and taking instruments, and craving extracts, and in vain, is looking and listening, hungry and sulky; he never can understand why he gets none of his mother's, of his own milk;--the leather muzzle, all bristling with sharp rusty nails, tells his miseries and his mother's too. Thestylis is leaning forward, awkward and eager, at the door, making love to Phillis in his own clumsy and effective way, whittling all the while destructively at the door-post with his knife. It is the old, old story. She has her back turned to him, and is pretending to be very deep in the milking, while her eye--which you see, and he doesn't --says something quite else. In the right corner are two goats, one a magnificent rugged billy. On the green beyond, in the sunshine, may be seen the geese making off on feet and wings to the well-known "henwife," who is at the wicket with her punctual mess. Among the trees, and up in the cloudless, sunny air, is the village spire, whose bells Thestylis doubtless hopes some day soon to set a ringing. All very pretty and innocent and gay. But look in the left corner,--as if he had this moment come in, he is just hopping into their paradise,--is that miscreant magpie, wrho, we all know, was a pilferer from the beginning, and who next moment, you know, will have noiselessly grabbed that fatal silver spoon in the posset-cup,--which Phillis can't see, for her heart is in her eye,--this same spoon, as we all know, bringing by and by death into that little world, and all their woe. We never remember the _amari aliquid_ coming upon us so unawares, ugly and fell, like that old Toad squat at the ear of Eve. The drawing, the expression, the whole management of this little story, is exquisite. Perhaps there is a little overcrowding and huddling together in the byre; but it is a delicious picture, as wholesome and sweet as a cow's breath. You hear the music of the milk playing in the pail; you feel the gentle, rural naturalness of the whole scene.
Of "Uncle Tom and his Wife for Sale," it is not easy to speak in moderation, as assuredly it is impossible to look at it, and keep from bursting into tears and laughter all at once. Anything more saturated, more insufferably overflowing with the best fun and misery, with the oddest, homeliest humour and despair, we never before encountered.