SIR JOSHUA AT HOME.
In another instant there entered a fresh, almost chubby-faced gentleman,
with a dint in his nether lip, and an ear-trumpet in his hand. He was
not without a certain dapperness in the unexceptionable brown coat and
spotless ruffles, which he had substituted for his painting-coat and
plain cuffs.
He was the briskest of gentlemen, the most obliging of geniuses who ever
kept sitters in good humour and under control, by the very ease of his
dignity in bearing with their airs and oddities.
The contemporary of the glorious, careless good-fellow Gainsborough, of
Romney in his arrogant, one-sided power, and later of Opie, the most
self-taught and the most self-asserting painter among them—Sir Joshua
beat them all.
It may be true that his art was pervaded with an artificial,
aristocratic flavour, and that he made a little lady of his strawberry
girl, and modern English my lords of every historical personage who
passed under his pencil.
Painters may feel it their duty, from their watch-tower of technical
knowledge, to impress on the world their grieved conviction, that the
president of the old Academy, so widely cultivated, so full of sense and
acumen, in addition to his professional ability, and to the industry
which “never passed a day and lost a line,” the chosen friend of the
most public-spirited men of his time—yet painted deliberately for a
single generation.
He was, according to his brethren, wilful and regardless of the
destructive nature of the pigment which he used, so that they produced a
certain effect to last his time. His accusers point in proof of their
charge to the fading lines and cracking canvas of the very works of
which all Englishmen are proud.
So be it, if it must be so; we have still the poetry (let some hold it
fantastic) of the Tragic Muse, the gallant heroism of Keppel, the
thoughtful benevolence of Johnson, the broad archness of Nelly O’Brien;
and we have following on the dainty playfulness of “Pick-a-back” a long
train of fresh and delicate, lovely and stately, English maids and
matrons, with Sir Joshua’s quaint sweet children bringing up the rear.
In Lady Bell’s day there was no thought, unless it were among the
chemically skilled, that these softly glowing, wonderfully blended
colours would wane, or the fine surface give way. Sir Joshua was
regarded as the quintessence of inspired and courtly painters, treading
in the footsteps of Van-dyck.
Sir Joshua had only a few of his paintings to show the eager,
intelligent young lady, whose grace was so winning to his eye, and her
eloquence so grateful to his ear—through his trumpet—as it reached him.
There were fair ladies sacrificing to the graces and to the muses, very
interesting to Lady Bell. There was Dr. Beattie in his gown as an Oxford
Doctor of Laws, with his book on “The Immutability of Truth” under his
arm, and the Angel of Truth going before him, beating down the gruesome
figures of Sophistry, Scepticism, and Infidelity, said to personify
Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hume, which was carefully studied by Captain Fane.
There was the doom of Count Ugolino and his sons, which enchained with
the fascination of horror both of the gazers. There was the portrait of
a plump little woman, sprightly even on canvas, her high-dressed hair
wreathed with pearls, a shawl girdle binding loosely the short waist and
bodice, which Sir Joshua strove to paint into fashion—a great
improvement on the earlier elongated steel-bound waist and laced-up
bodice.
As Sir Joshua was about to name the original, the real lady ran
unushered, in her hat and cloak, into the room.
The new-comer had not a moment to stay to be introduced to Lady Bell
Trevor and Captain Fane. She was in haste to tell Sir Joshua that she
had just come down from the Burgh, where she had left her master at his
place of business, but nearly as ailing as the Doctor (good lack, what a
load she had on her head and shoulders!). She wished to know whether Sir
Joshua had done the re-touching which he had taken it into his head to
throw away on a barn-door face beyond improvement. Give her joy on the
audacity of complimenting herself; but she did not mean to
compliment—not that she was not well enough pleased with her own, she
would never deny it. She would like the picture packed and sent out
without loss of time. Queeney and the rest of the young fry might care
to look at it one day, when it was all that was left of their mother.
Good day to him and to all.
“You are in luck, Lady Bell,” announced Sir Joshua, returning, briskly
rubbing his hands, from seeing the lady to her coach, “if you have not
had a previous opportunity of meeting my friend. That is Mrs. Thrale,
the wife of the great brewer, who is himself an exceedingly liberal
gentleman and well-read scholar; but his wife excels him in the
classics.”
“She was one of the west country Lynches,” said Lady Bell, showing her
acquaintance with the lady’s antecedents.
“It is she who has made a home for the great Doctor at that pattern of
country houses, Streatham,” continued Sir Joshua. “She has preserved an
invaluable life, madam, years longer to the country, by taking Dr.
Johnson’s health under her care, as she has often told us, and by
nursing him out of some of his worst attacks and most injurious habits.
Would to God her efforts could continue successful, both with him and
Mr. Thrale, who is, I fear, in a bad way, and on the brink of an
apoplexy.”
“She deserves all honour,” said Lady Bell warmly.
“The more so that her cares seem to sit lightly on her.” Captain Fane
could not resist the sly hit.
Lady Bell flashed a little reproach upon him from her eyes, which looked
as if she were condescending to take his manners, as Mrs. Thrale had
taken Dr. Johnson’s health, under her special superintendence.
“A matter of temperament,” pronounced the genially philosophic painter.
Sir Joshua, who enjoyed his own reputation as an urbane and accomplished
man of the world, as he enjoyed most things in the pleasantly prosperous
places in which his lines were cast, began to talk to Captain Fane of
Captain Cook, with whom the painter’s friend, Dr. Burney’s son, had made
a voyage round the world; and of Sir Joseph Banks’s collection of
objects of natural history, which Captain Fane had seen under the care
of young Mr. Jenner, the favourite pupil of Dr. Hunter.
Sir Joshua had made a happy choice of subjects to which Captain Fane was
alive, and in which he was well informed. The gentlemen talked like
kindred spirits, while Lady Bell, to her credit, was content to remain
in the background, and listen with deference and delight. She was
innocently proud of her companion.
How very different was the figure which Captain Fane cut to-day, in
company with a genius who was at the same time a finished gentleman of
any school, from the figure which Captain Fane had presented at the
sailing-party!
What other male friend of Lady Bell’s could have stood so severe a test,
and come out of it so splendidly? Not Sir George Waring, in spite of his
elegance and his musical talents, any more than Master Charles. Lady
Bell was deeply impressed by Captain Fane’s gifts, which he was really
in the habit of hiding under a bushel. She was almost provoked when Sir
Joshua remembered his duty to her, not guessing how well pleased she was
that he should forget it, and began to tell her of the one lady who
belonged to the Royal Society of Artists, Mrs. Angelica Kauffman.
It was not a difficult process to make a digression to those ladies who
were amateur artists, and to render Lady Bell, in spite of her _savoir
faire_, bashfully grateful, by deigning to drop a hint for her benefit
on the mixing and laying-on of colours, and on the drawing of such
slight designs as Sir Joshua had himself afforded to Poggi for his fans.
“I thought t’other morning we spent together was very happy,” Lady Bell
spoke out of the fulness of her heart to her squire when they were in
the square, and he was looking out for a chair that she might get home
in time to keep an appointment with her mantua-maker; “but I shall be
always recalling this day and its lessons when I am busiest and happiest
at Summerhill.”
“Don’t you think I shall recall it, Lady Bell,” asked Harry Fane, “when
for a studio in which to busy myself, I shall be reduced to ‘between
decks,’ and for my fine arts shall be setting men to rig spars and haul
in sails, varied by pointing a gun instead of a telescope, and
submitting to be carried down into the cockpit?”
“Oh, no; you won’t be carried there!” cried Lady Bell, with impetuous
haste.
“At least I did not mean to crave pity from you,” protested Harry with
unconscious tenderness shaking his firm voice. “A grumpy, hulking fellow
who has been so much at sea that he has lost the manœuvre of giving a
wide berth to what displeases his crotchets on shore, is of no good save
to shout orders in a storm, or to keep a look-out against the national
enemy.”
Lady Bell did not contradict him, but she looked in his face, somewhat
set and lined for a man of his age, but an honest and manly face, which
had looked its kindest on her, the hardness in which she could melt, as
she had said, like the melting of a block of ice before a meridian sun.
She gave him a parting look as the chair-men lifted her chair, which
raised a mighty commotion, for which Lady Bell was decidedly answerable,
in the blue-coated breast of the young man—thought so long-headed and
calm-hearted, so rational, discreet, and obdurate, that he could be let
cast stones at all the follies and extravagancies of his time. Lady
Bell’s look said, “You are good for all that is cleverest, truest,
bravest—not to the world, perhaps, for you know, none better, that the
world is a giddy, vicious, Vanity Fair—but to me. You need not tell
others that I say so, but I say it; and you need not forget that I said
it, in the long days during which I am mixing with people whom you
justly despise, or have taken refuge at Summerhill; and when you are
sailing on the high seas, doing your duty like a man, guarding our
shores, and fighting our foes.”