great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick,
in 1794. His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of Gray’s
Inn and Hatton Garden. His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr.
Griffiths, the editor and founder of the _Monthly Review_, the partner in
another literary speculation of Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of
whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller, but ‘a gentleman who
dealt in books,’ the friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the
most well-known men of his day. Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him
birth, at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_ tells us of her ‘amiable disposition and numerous
accomplishments,’ and adds somewhat quaintly that ‘she is supposed to
have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any person
of either sex now living.’ His father did not long survive his young
wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his
grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle George
Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned. His boyhood was passed
at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of those many fine Georgian mansions
that have unfortunately disappeared before the inroads of the suburban
builder, and to its lovely gardens and well-timbered park he owed that
simple and impassioned love of nature which never left him all through
his life, and which made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual
influences of Wordsworth’s poetry. He went to school at Charles Burney’s
academy at Hammersmith. Mr. Burney was the son of the historian of
music, and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turn
out his most remarkable pupil. He seems to have been a man of a good
deal of culture, and in after years Mr. Wainewright often spoke of him
with much affection as a philosopher, an archæologist, and an admirable
teacher who, while he valued the intellectual side of education, did not
forget the importance of early moral training. It was under Mr. Burney
that he first developed his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us
that a drawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displays
great talent and natural feeling. Indeed, painting was the first art
that fascinated him. It was not till much later that he sought to find
expression by pen or poison.
Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish dreams
of the romance and chivalry of a soldier’s life, and to have become a
young guardsman. But the reckless dissipated life of his companions
failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made
for other things. In a short time he wearied of the service. ‘Art,’ he
tells us, in words that still move many by their ardent sincerity and
strange fervour, ‘Art touched her renegade; by her pure and high
influence the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and
tarnished, were renovated with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to
the simple-hearted.’ But Art was not the only cause of the change. ‘The
writings of Wordsworth,’ he goes on to say, ‘did much towards calming the
confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations. I wept over
them tears of happiness and gratitude.’ He accordingly left the army,
with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle, and
returned to Linden House, full of this new-born enthusiasm for culture.
A severe illness, in which, to use his own words, he was ‘broken like a
vessel of clay,’ prostrated him for a time. His delicately strung
organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain
on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain. He shrank from
suffering as a thing that mars and maims human life, and seems to have
wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many
great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged. But he was
young—only twenty-five years of age—and he soon passed out of the ‘dead
black waters,’ as he called them, into the larger air of humanistic
culture. As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost
to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up literature as
an art. ‘I said with John Woodvil,’ he cries, ‘it were a life of gods to
dwell in such an element,’ to see and hear and write brave things:—
‘These high and gusty relishes of life
Have no allayings of mortality.’
It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance
of a man who had a true passion for letters. ‘To see and hear and write
brave things,’ this was his aim.
Scott, the editor of the _London Magazine_, struck by the young man’s
genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he
exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of
articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonym
he began to contribute to the literature of his day. _Janus
Weathercock_, _Egomet Bonmot_, and _Van Vinkvooms_, were some of the
grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to
reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These disguises
intensified his personality. In an incredibly short time he seems to
have made his mark. Charles Lamb speaks of ‘kind, light-hearted
Wainewright,’ whose prose is ‘capital.’ We hear of him entertaining
Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet
John Clare, and others, at _a petit-dîner_. Like Disraeli, he determined
to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique
cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well
known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new
manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite
white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being
different from others. There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de
Rubempré. At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De Quincey saw him
once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s. ‘Amongst the company, all
literary men, sat a murderer,’ he tells us, and he goes on to describe
how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of man and woman,
and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table
at the young writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to
him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on ‘what sudden
growth of another interest’ would have changed his mood, had he known of
what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even
then guilty.
His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr.
Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside his
achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us
hardly justifies his reputation.
But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by
the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody,
rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is in art,
and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.
Nor is his work without interest. We hear of William Blake stopping in
the Royal Academy before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be
‘very fine.’ His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been
realised. He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern
culture that are regarded by many as true essentials. He writes about La
Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance. He loves
Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of _Cupid
and Psyche_, and the _Hypnerotomachia_, and book-binding and early
editions, and wide-margined proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value
of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the
rooms in which he lived, or would have liked to live. He had that
curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a
subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity,
if not a decadence of morals. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of
cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that ‘sweet marble monster’
of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.
There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions for
decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himself from the
false taste of his time. But it is clear that he was one of the first to
recognise what is, indeed, the very keynote of æsthetic eclecticism, I
mean the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age
or place, of school or manner. He saw that in decorating a room, which
is to be, not a room for show, but a room to live in, we should never aim
at any archæological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves
with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In this artistic
perception he was perfectly right. All beautiful things belong to the
same age.
And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate
fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted figures and the
faint ΚΑΛΟΣ finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving
of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michael Angelo, or of the ‘Pastoral’ of
Giorgione. Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp
from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours, ‘cased in a
cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded with
small brilliants and rubies,’ and close by it ‘squats a little ugly
monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn-bearing
Sicily.’ Some dark antique bronzes contrast with the pale gleam of two
noble _Christi Crucifixi_, one carved in ivory, the other moulded in
wax.’ He has his trays of Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze
_bonbonnière_ with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized
‘brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,’ his citron morocco letter-case,
and his ‘pomona-green’ chair.
One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts and
engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning over his fine
collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which
he was a warm admirer, or examining with a magnifier some of his antique
gems and cameos, ‘the head of Alexander on an onyx of two strata,’ or
‘that superb _altissimo relievo_ on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus.’ He was
always a great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful
suggestions as to the best means of forming a collection. Indeed, while
fully appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance of
reproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all that he says
about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable.
As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex
impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step in
æsthetic criticism is to realise one’s own impressions. He cared nothing
for abstract discussions on the nature of the Beautiful, and the
historical method, which has since yielded such rich fruit, did not
belong to his day, but he never lost sight of the great truth that Art’s
first appeal is neither to the intellect nor to the emotions, but purely
to the artistic temperament, and he more than once points out that this
temperament, this ‘taste,’ as he calls it, being unconsciously guided and
made perfect by frequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a
form of right judgment. Of course there are fashions in art just as
there are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free
ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of novelty. He
certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is to
form any fair estimate of contemporary work. But, on the whole, his
taste was good and sound. He admired Turner and Constable at a time when
they were not so much thought of as they are now, and saw that for the
highest landscape art we require more than ‘mere industry and accurate
transcription.’ Of Crome’s ‘Heath Scene near Norwich’ he remarks that it
shows ‘how much a subtle observation of the elements, in their wild
moods, does for a most uninteresting flat,’ and of the popular type of
landscape of his day he says that it is ‘simply an enumeration of hill
and dale, stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses;
little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in which
rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through rifted
clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of the real
painter, are not.’ He had a thorough dislike of what is obvious or
commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to entertain Wilkie at
dinner, he cared as little for Sir David’s pictures as he did for Mr.
Crabbe’s poems. With the imitative and realistic tendencies of his day
he had no sympathy and he tells us frankly that his great admiration for
Fuseli was largely due to the fact that the little Swiss did not consider
it necessary that an artist should paint only what he sees. The
qualities that he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and
dignity of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power. Upon the
other hand, he was not a doctrinaire. ‘I hold that no work of art can be
tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be
consistent with itself is the question.’ This is one of his excellent
aphorisms. And in criticising painters so different as Landseer and
Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a phrase now classical,
he is trying ‘to see the object as in itself it really is.’
However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease in his
criticisms of contemporary work. ‘The present,’ he says, ‘is about as
agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first perusal. . . . Modern
things dazzle me. I must look at them through Time’s telescope. Elia
complains that to him the merit of a MS. poem is uncertain; “print,” as
he excellently says, “settles it.” Fifty years’ toning does the same
thing to a picture.’ He is happier when he is writing about Watteau and
Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and
Michael Angelo; happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things.
What is Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of
the Renaissance were always dear to him. He saw what our English school
could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies of pointing
out to the young student the artistic possibilities that lie dormant in
Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work. In his judgments on the
great Italian Masters, says De Quincey, ‘there seemed a tone of sincerity
and of native sensibility, as in one who spoke for himself, and was not
merely a copier from books.’ The highest praise that we can give to him
is that he tried to revive style as a conscious tradition. But he saw
that no amount of art lectures or art congresses, or ‘plans for advancing
the fine arts,’ will ever produce this result. The people, he says very
wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have ‘the
best models constantly before their eyes.’
As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often extremely
technical in his art criticisms. Of Tintoret’s ‘St. George delivering
the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,’ he remarks:—
The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved from
the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and the full hues
of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower key by the
purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of the saint,
besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on the foreground
in the indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding the castle.
And elsewhere he talks learnedly of ‘a delicate Schiavone, various as a
tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,’ of ‘a glowing portrait, remarkable
for _morbidezza_, by the scarce Moroni,’ and of another picture being
‘pulpy in the carnations.’
But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an artistic
whole, and tries to translate those impressions into words, to give, as
it were, the literary equivalent for the imaginative and mental effect.
He was one of the first to develop what has been called the
art-literature of the nineteenth century, that form of literature which
has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning, its two most perfect exponents.
His description of Lancret’s _Repas Italien_, in which ‘a dark-haired
girl, “amorous of mischief,” lies on the daisy-powdered grass,’ is in
some respects very charming. Here is his account of ‘The Crucifixion,’
by Rembrandt. It is extremely characteristic of his style—
Darkness—sooty, portentous darkness—shrouds the whole scene: only
above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky
ceiling, a rainy deluge—‘sleety-flaw, discoloured water’—streams down
amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than
that palpable night. Already the Earth pants thick and fast! the
darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt—the air is stagnant—a
muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and some of that
miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill. The horses snuff the
coming terror, and become unmanageable through fear. The moment
rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder by His own weight,
fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in narrower rivulets from
His slit veins, His temples and breast drowned in sweat, and His
black tongue parched with the fiery death-fever, Jesus cries, ‘I
thirst.’ The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him.
His head sinks, and the sacred corpse ‘swings senseless of the
cross.’ A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air and
vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea
rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves. Earth yawns,
and the graves give up their dwellers. The dead and the living are
mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy
city. New prodigies await them there. The veil of the temple—the
unpierceable veil—is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that
dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries—the fatal ark with the
tables and seven-branched candelabrum—is disclosed by the light of
unearthly flames to the God-deserted multitude.
Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right. It
would have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexing veil
of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the doubting
imagination may speculate. At present it is like a thing in another
world. A dark gulf is betwixt us. It is not tangible by the body.
We can only approach it in the spirit.
In this passage, written, the author tells us, ‘in awe and reverence,’
there is much that is terrible, and very much that is quite horrible, but
it is not without a certain crude form of power, or, at any rate, a
certain crude violence of words, a quality which this age should highly
appreciate, as it is its chief defect. It is pleasanter, however, to
pass to this description of Giulio Romano’s ‘Cephalus and Procris’:—
We should read Moschus’s lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd, before
looking at this picture, or study the picture as a preparation for
the lament. We have nearly the same images in both. For either
victim the high groves and forest dells murmur; the flowers exhale
sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale mourns on the craggy
lands, and the swallow in the long-winding vales; ‘the satyrs, too,
and fauns dark-veiled groan,’ and the fountain nymphs within the wood
melt into tearful waters. The sheep and goats leave their pasture;
and oreads, ‘who love to scale the most inaccessible tops of all
uprightest rocks,’ hurry down from the song of their wind-courting
pines; while the dryads bend from the branches of the meeting trees,
and the rivers moan for white Procris, ‘with many-sobbing streams,’
Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.
The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling
horn of Aurora’s love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight on
the top of Hymettus. The foreground of our subject is a grassy
sunburnt bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of
land-breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot-tripping roots and
stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again throwing
out light-green shoots. This bank rises rather suddenly on the right
to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the entrance of
which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between his knees
that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone, parting the
rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading alike on thorns
and flowers with jealousy-stung foot—now helpless, heavy, void of all
motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery.
From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press
forward with loud cries—
And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;
And put strange pity in their horned countenance.
Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of
death. On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with ‘vans
dejected’ holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan
people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressing their
children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along from the
left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on
whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her
grief-telling waters. Above and more remote than the Ephidryad,
another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festooned
pillars of an unshorn grove. The centre of the picture is filled by
shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is ‘the vast
strength of the ocean stream,’ from whose floor the extinguisher of
stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-washed steeds to
behold the death-pangs of her rival.
Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite admirable.
The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent. Much of
the best modern literature springs from the same aim. In a very ugly and
sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In everything connected
with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely interested, and
strongly upheld the necessity for archæological accuracy in costume and
scene-painting. ‘In art,’ he says in one of his essays, ‘whatever is
worth doing at all is worth doing well’; and he points out that once we
allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where
the line is to be drawn. In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on
a famous occasion, he was ‘on the side of the angels.’ He was one of the
first to admire Keats and Shelley—‘the tremulously-sensitive and poetical
Shelley,’ as he calls him. His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and
profound. He thoroughly appreciated William Blake. One of the best
copies of the ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ that is now in
existence was wrought specially for him. He loved Alain Chartier, and
Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, and
Petrarch. And to him all the arts were one. ‘Our critics,’ he remarks
with much wisdom, ‘seem hardly aware of the identity of the primal seeds
of poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement in the serious
study of one art co-generates a proportionate perfection in the other’;
and he says elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo
talks of his love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or his
listeners. To his fellow-contributors in the _London Magazine_ he was
always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham,
Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a
friend. Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their way,
and, with the art of the true comedian, borrow their style from their
subject:—
What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the gaiety
of a boy with the knowledge of a man: as gentle a heart as ever sent
tears to the eyes.