O, ye Fine Arts--why were ye once so Fine,
So dingy now, and working sore disaster;
As that my best of pigments look like plaster,
Compared with those of "Raphael the divine,"
That grow by time still brighter like old wine,
And seem to renovate a dead old master.
Better had I been born to wield a mallet,
A hod, a plough--than sables, hogs and fitches;
If ye must mock and mark your fool your valet,
With motley livery on my coats and breeches;
Making me sit upon my well-set palette,
With merry jeers the whilst I hear you titter,
And compliment me on my only sitter.
Look, Eusebius, as I dare to say you have often done, into the smudge
of a colour-maker's shop, and imagine a personification of it in a
young amateur aspirant. What a ludicrously serious Harlequin he is
made! At last, in despair of acquirement of cleanliness, I plunged, as
it were, into the very mud and smudge of paint, and did not hesitate
to wipe a brush upon my sleeves.
Thus, I acquired a bad habit--and as I often had the fit to paint when
my better dress was on, I now and then seized an unlucky moment of
desire, and the better soon came to be the worse. By degrees I fell
into a despair of mending; and so I became a confirmed sloven.
One who fastens his knapsack on his back, that is to hold his
temporary all, including materials for art, and pedestrianises over a
roughish country, may acquire an exquisite taste; but he will not be
personally an exquisite. He will be characteristic in look, of the
picturesque which he hunts after. He will be very unlike the man I
have described to you, whom dust would not soil, or rain wet, or sun
burn. The geologist who walks forth, armed to tomahawk the mountains,
and bag their bones, will, in a month or so, acquire a strange and
stony look; and be, on his first return, and sitting in civil society,
little better than the "Man Mountain" himself. Our pursuits are in us
and about us, soil our dress and chisel our features. We look in the
glass, easily reconcile ourselves to any metamorphosis, and think no
one has a right to quarrel with that, which we think, in our
self-satisfaction, makes up our beloved identity. No man can be every
thing--not all "Admirable Crichtons"--it is the diversity and the
difference that makes the pleasing motley in the masquerade of the
world. Though you might dance more like the brutes, it does not at all
follow but that you may fiddle like Orpheus. Johnson defended Kit
Smart, the sloven, (mockery of a name,) having himself no great
predilection for clean linen. Dionysius was more happy in the "inky
cloak" of the slovenly schoolmaster, than in the golden mantle which
his father took from the statue of Jupiter.
Let us both be content to remain as we are. For be assured, Eusebius,
that if we make the attempt to change our habits, either of person or
of mind, and put on the more trim, and of more fashionable cut, we
shall but amuse the spectators by becoming ridiculous; and in making
up the characters that are to figure on the stage of the drama of
life, insignificant though we be, there will be found wanting two good
slovens.