“Εν δε φαει και ολεσσον.”
GRATIAN.—I give up that picture; it is not a pleasing subject.
LYDIA.—I am sure you must like his “Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time.”
AQUILIUS.—What! with its wholesale slaughter of fish, flesh, and fowl,
to feed the gross feeders of the convent? I take no pleasure in it: I
could take part with the “melancholy Jacques,” and rate “the fat and
greasy” ones in good round terms. Who wishes a picture of a larder?
LYDIA.—Here is his “Hawking Party;” will not this please you? You at
least see the health and joy of the sporting: are not the hawkers
delighted?
AQUILIUS.—So much the worse, for their part in the transaction is quite
subordinate—in the background. What is the prominent subject?—the bloody
murder of the poor heron. It should have been the accident; it is made
the cruel principal: without being squeamishly tender-hearted, I shall
never look upon that picture with pleasure. In how different a manner
did Wouverman paint his hawking parties! He represented them as scenes
in which ladies might participate—the domain, the mansion-gate, the
retinue, the grace, the beauty, the cheering exercise, the pleasure of
all, even the animals engaged: he does not make the bloody death the
subject.
GRATIAN.—I must confess Wouverman’s was the better choice. You seem
prepared with a collection of examples.
AQUILIUS.—In this I am only taking what is before me; but worse remains
for more severe remarks. You have, I see, the “Otter Hunt,”—is it
possible that picture can give you any pleasure? What is the sentiment
of it?—debasing cruelty. I say debasing, because it puts human nature in
the very worst position: the dogs are using their instinct, and are even
then defrauded of their game, which the huntsman holds up conspicuously
in the picture, (and which is in fact the subject), stuck through with
his spear, and writhing in agony. Surely this cannot be
“The dainty dish
To set before the Queen.”
It is said to be in her Majesty’s possession. There is in Lucian a
description of a picture of a Centaur and his family, a magnificent
group: the father centaur is holding up a lion’s skin to the gaze of his
young progeny, to excite them to deeds of courage. If this poor agonised
death-writhing otter is to be perpetually before the eyes of our young
princes, they will not learn much good from the lesson. For my own part,
I look upon the picture with entire disgust, and would on no account
have it before my eyes. I know not in what mood I could be to endure it.
LYDIA.—I think we really may dispense with the hanging up this picture
anywhere. I cannot bear to look at it. It is a picture to teach cruelty.
As a test of its impropriety, imagine it placed as an ornament in our
Sunday school: we should have the children brought up savages.
CURATE.—Thanks, dearest Lydia. I well knew this picture would not be to
your taste; we will, at all events, set it aside. Happy are we, that our
women of England can be mothers of heroes, without being inured to the
cruelty of bull-fights. A Spanish lady, describing an exhibition of the
kind, remarked how glorious was the sight, for there were thirteen
horses and one man killed. I suspect Aquilius will not quite approve of
the “Deer-Stalking” lately exhibited at the Academy.
AQUILIUS.—Certainly not; and for the same reason. It puts man in a
degrading position; and our sympathy is for the poor creatures who fly
terrified, not seeing their skulking enemies; and one poor creature is
knocked over in his wild flight. It is admirably painted; the scene all
we could wish; but the story is bad—the moral bad. You look at the
picture without feeling a common desire with the hunters: you wish them
away. You have their object put before you basely: their attitudes are
mean. It is not a work, great as it is in art, that ought to give
pleasure.
GRATIAN.—And yet you are not displeased reading Mr Scrope’s
“Deer-Stalking?” It is only putting his words on canvass.
CURATE.—True; but are they faithfully put? and even so, words and paint
are not the same; their power is different. The description of language
passes on; you are not allowed to dwell too long on what, if seen
embodied, would but shock you, by its being arrested, and made
permanent. I remember the description. You at first scarcely know if
there is a deer or not; it is only the experienced eye can discover the
motion of the ear, or some speck of the creature, at a distance. You
enter into the breathless caution of the hunter—his steady and earnest
hope; but you see not, or only for a moment, the skulking attitude. The
poet—for the prose is poetry—touches with a light and delicate hand that
which the less discriminating painter grasps, holds firm, and fixes as
his subject.
AQUILIUS.—A just remark. The sentiment is thus made both cruel and mean.
GRATIAN.—Come, then, let us have something we can entirely praise, by
the hand of this prince of animal painters. You will at least admire his
“Peace” and “War,” those two most beautiful and poetical pictures.
AQUILIUS.—The “Peace”—yes. It is most happy; and perhaps the “War,” if
we take the moral rightly. It might be bought by the Peace Society.
Every one must acknowledge the great beauty and feeling of these
pictures. I confess, however, I seldom look upon battle-pieces with much
pleasure. The horrors of war are not for the drawing-room; and where
they are painted for public position, they are generally in very bad
taste. I do not mean here to allude to the companion to Mr Landseer’s
“Peace.”
GRATIAN.—How seldom you see a battle-piece,—that is, a battle! You have
some one or more incidents of a battle; but, as a whole, it is not
represented. I have no idea of a battle, on which depends the fate of
empires, from the exhibition of a grenadier running his bayonet through
a prostrate foe, a few dead men, and a couple of horses, one rearing and
one dead. Such are the usual representations of battles.
AQUILIUS.—Yes—vulgar battles; vulgarising the most important events in
history: and yet I do not believe it to be impossible to represent a
battle poetically, and more truly, than by such incident as Gratian has
described, though the regimentals be most accurately painted—and the
gold lace has a great charm for the multitude. And perhaps it was in
deference to this common taste, that the chief prize was given to the
“Battle of Meeanee” in Westminster Hall.
LYDIA.—I rejoice to listen to the criticism. We will not have
battle-pieces in our boudoir; Curates and their wives are for peace. I
go with the poet—
“Le lance rotte, gli scudi spezzati,
L’insigne polverose, e le bandiere,
I destrier morti, i corpi arrovesciati
Fan spettacolo orribile a vedere!
I combattenti insieme mescolati,
Senza governo, o ordine di schiere,
Veder sossopra andare, or questi, or quelle,
A’riguardanti arricciar fa i capelli.”
CURATE.—I take my old part of translator, and thus render it, perhaps
Aquilius will think too freely, at least in the conclusion—
Lances and shields of broken chivalry,
Banners and ensigns trampled from their glory
Down in the dust—Oh! woe too sad to see,
Rider and horse fallen dead in heaps all gory;
Leaderless squadrons, one tumultuous sea
Of ruin! Death sole hero of the story.
And such is war—oh sight the heart to rend,
And make our rooted hair to stand on end!
AQUILIUS.—Your verse shall not disenchant me of my criticism upon this
bad habit of seeing his subject, into which so great a painter has
fallen. After what has been said, I shall not surprise you by objecting
to his “Van Amburgh and his Beasts,” painted for his Grace the Duke of
Wellington—the shrinking, retreating, cowed animals, whom one would wish
to see in their wilder or nobler natures. And certainly the painter has
made a very poor figure of the tamer: you are angry with the lions and
tigers for being afraid of him. He should have been less conspicuous.
Poor beasts! within bars, no escape from the hot iron! I had rather see
a representation of the tamer within the bars, and the beasts out,
longing to get at him. There is a very happy subject for a picture of
this kind in the hymn to Aphrodite—where the goddess descends on Ida,
and all the savage beasts come fawning about her, when, with a motion of
her hand, she dismisses them to pair in the forests. Such noble animals,
crouching in obeisance and willing servitude to a divinity, to beauty,
and to innocence, make a picture of a finer sentiment. This taming
reduces the dignity of the brute, without raising the man.
CURATE.—The tamed animals are not honoured in their portraiture; nor is
it much consolation that the great duke beholds their quailing. Statius
attempted a consoling compliment of this kind, upon the occasion of a
much admired beast, “Leo Mansuetus,” being killed by the blow of a
flying tigress, in the presence of the emperor. After describing the
scene, he adds—
“Magna tamen subiti tecum solatia lethi
Victe feres, quod te mœsti, Populusque Patresque,
Ceu notus caderes tristi Gladiator arena,
Ingemuere mori: magni quod Cæsaris ora
Inter tot Scythias, Libyeasque, et littore Rheni,
Et Pharia de gente feras, quas perdere vile est,
Unius amissi tetigit jactura leonis.”
AQUILIUS.—We are rivals in rhyme, and you know I freely translate:
perhaps you will admit this as a version—
Yet this your consolation, ye poor beasts,
Whene’er the duke his guests illustrious feasts,
Th’ illustrious guests, as an uncommon treat,
Shall see the lions, while they talk and eat.
Oft from their plates shall lift their half-filled jaws,
To wonder at your whiskers, manes, and, claws,
And only wish, the painter to rebuke,
To see Van Amburgh killed before the duke.
GRATIAN.—I am umpire: that is not a version, but a perversion.
AQUILIUS.—Then it the better suits the picture. I must, however, admit
that, to criticise at all, there is need to be out of the fascination of
the work. It is quite marvellous in power. We are treating of subjects
for pictures, and consequently their sentiment—the why they should, or
should not please. It is to be regretted that so great an artist should,
not _always_ well conceive the poetry of sentiment.
CURATE.—We are, not yet really lovers of art, or we should not be so
confined in our taste. The excellence of this one painter excludes
others from their due praise, and patronage too. Go to our exhibitions,
you are surprised at the number of our artists: look at the
printsellers’ windows, and you would wonder at their fewness. I cannot
remember, at this moment, a print from a work of any modern British
painter, of moral importance and dignified sentiment.
LYDIA.—There is one of Mr Eastlake’s, his beautiful scriptural subject.
AQUILIUS.—True; but we have not yet emancipated the nation from their
puritan horror of sacred subjects—which are, after all, the greatest and
best. We import these from the Germans.
GRATIAN.—We have been a nation, of country gentlemen—fond of
field-sports: and this our national character has had much to do with
our taste in art. Hence nothing answers so well as horses and dogs.
CURATE.—Yet I am inclined to say “cave canem.” By the bye, why do the
old painters, Paul Veronese, for instance, in his celebrated large
picture of the marriage feast, introduce great dogs, where they
evidently should not be? I have met lately, somewhere, with the
supposition that the bones which the painters calcined to make dryers
were the bones thrown under the tables for the dogs, and that such was
the practice. But there is passage in “Laurentius Pignorius de servis,”
which seems altogether to contradict the notion, and indeed to reprove
painters who introduced these large dogs in their pictures; and
particularly, it should seem, one who represented Lazarus and the dogs
in the same room with Dives. His argument is curious—that the dogs which
were admitted upon these occasions were little pet animals, and that it
is so shown by the passage in chap. xv. verse 27, of St Matthew, where
they are said to pick up the _crumbs_, and that it is shown to have been
so by ancient sculpture. He says that this introduction is become such
an admitted taste, that whoever would be bold enough to set himself
against it would in vain endeavour to correct the bad taste of the
painter. It is a curious passage,—I have the book here, and will turn to
it: I read it only the other day. Here it is, and I more readily offer
it as it speaks sensibly of a disgusting subject, unfit for painting.
“Erant autem et qui pone januam canem pictum haberent, ut apud Petronium
Trimalcio. At quid ad hæc pictores nostri qui in triclinio divitis
Lazarum delineant? Potestne quidquam ineptius aut cogitari aut fingi?
scilicet janitores admisissent hominem scatentem ulceribus, dorso ipsi
luituri quidquid oculos nauseabundi domini offendisset. Canes vero
immanes illi Villatici et Venatici, num oblectabant cœnantem dominum?
Apage! Catelli quidem in delicus tricliniaribus habiti sunt, ut testatur
mulier Chananœa apud Mattheum, et indicant sculpturæ antiquorum
marmorum: Cæterum. Molossos, et ejus generis reliquos, nemo in
convictum, nisi amens aut rusticus recepisset. At quisquis pictorum
nostrorum pene omnium pravitatem corrigere voluerit, otium desperaverit
omnino: adeo ineruditi sunt, adeo cognitionem omnem antiquitatis
turpiter abjecerunt.”
GRATIAN.—I suppose the little pets admitted to the table were the small
Melitan dogs, such as Lucian speaks of in his “Private Tutor.” The Greek
philosopher and teacher was requested by the lady of the house in which
he was tutor to take charge of her dear little pet, which, being carried
in his arms as he was stuffed into the back carriage with the packages
and lady’s maids, disgraced the philosopher by watering his beard.
AQUILIUS.—A kind of King Charles’s breed. I remember a gentleman telling
me, many years ago, that he was dining in Rome with Cardinal York, and
one of these little creatures was handed round after dinner, upon which
occasion the cardinal said, “Take care of him, for he and I are the last
of the breed.”
LYDIA.—Poor creatures! that is a touching anecdote. It ought to be
written under Vandyke’s celebrated picture of the unfortunate Charles
and his family, in which the breed are so conspicuous. I think my sweet,
Pompey is one of them, notwithstanding the cardinal’s protest, and I
shall love the little pet the more for the royal familiarity of his
race. I must have his portrait.
CURATE.—Or his statue, that he may rival Pompey the Great. Why his
picture? has not Landseer painted him to the life in that fine picture
where he is all play, with the ribbon about him to show whose pet he is,
and the great mastiff lying so quiet, stretched out below him? It is,
his very portrait, and when he dies you should get the print, and I have
his epitaph for you to write under it.—
In marble statue the Great Pompey lives,
Life to the little Pompey Landseer gives.
And little Pompey play’d the Roman’s part,
And almost won a world—his Lydia’s heart:
Then died, to prove that dogs shall have their day,
And men no more, whatever parts they play.
Great Cæsar at his feet in painted state—
Shall little Pompey envy Pompey great.
How true the pencil, and no truer pen,
Alike the history paints of dogs and men.
AQUILIUS.—Do you mean to be the general epitaph-maker for your
church-yard? Take care you infringe not on the sexton’s privilege.
GRATIAN.—If we discuss this matter farther, we shall have Aquilius and
the Curate diverging into their poetics; so, my dear good lady, I must
look at your flower-garden: here now, an arm for an old man; and—have
you an orchard?—I can help you there a little. And a word in your
ear—depend upon it, wherever there is an orchard there should be a pig
or two in it. Come, I must look at your stock; we’ll talk about pictures
after tea. See, my friend Curate, I’m off with your wife; not quite so
active as a harlequin, but you and Aquilius may follow as pantaloon and
clown. So let us keep up the merry farce: no,—entertainment of life, and
I don’t care who best plays the fool.
Now, Eusebius, what shall I do? will you have an interlude? Your wit
will reply that you have had one already. Will you have music? Yes, I
think you said, but your’s is all on one string. Shall it be as a chorus
in a Greek play? Why do dogs howl at music? They have an intuitive
suspicion of what the strings are made, and think they might as well
begin by tolling the bell for themselves, or rehearse the howl! The
interlude is over—while we are asking about it, the bell rings, the
tea-things are removed—and the prints laid on chairs round the room. We
resume the discussion.
AQUILIUS.—I have been considering what are the most popular subjects as
we see them exhibited in the shop windows, and I find that even Landseer
has his rival in the popular approbation. Go where you will you see
specimens of the style—mawkish sentimentality, Goody Families,
Benevolent Visitors, Teaching Children. There is nothing more detestable
than these milk-and-water affectations of human kindnesses; all the
personages are fools, and as far as their little senses will let them,
hypocrites. Whence do these Puritan performances come?—the lamentable
thought is, where do they go?—a man cannot paint above himself. A soft
artist paints soft things.
LYDIA.—Don’t mention the things! I am sure they make hypocrites. I saw
one the other day in a cottage; it was of the “Benevolent Visitors”—I am
not sure of the title; if any good ladies gave it, it was a vile vanity;
if bought as a compliment, it was a worse corruption.
GRATIAN.—Do you know that we have historical painters for modern
saintology, and that a picture was actually painted of St Joanna
Southcote, for the chapel at Newington Butts, in a sky-blue dress,
leading the devil with a long chain, like a dancing bear, surrounded by
adoring angels? I met with the anecdote in a very amusing book of Mr
Duncan’s, the “Literary Conglomerate,” wherein he treats of the subjects
of pictures.
AQUILIUS.—I know it; I only quarrel with him for classing Hogarth with
the comic painters. To me, he is the most tragic of all modern, I would
almost say of all painters. The tragic power of two of the series of
“Marriage á la mode,” is not surpassed in art. The murdered husband, the
one: the other, the death of the adulteress. They are too tragic for any
position but a public gallery. He was the greatest of moral painters;
and the most serious, the gravest of satirists. He is so close to the
real tragedies of life, and his moral is so distinct, that he seems to
have aimed at teaching rather than pleasing. And perhaps, if the truth
were known, it might be that he has in no small degree improved the
world in its humanities. He has pictured vice odious in the eyes of the
pure, but not so as to quench their pity; and has made it so wonderfully
human, that we shudder as we acknowledge the liabilities of our nature.
He exhibited strongly that man is the instrument of his own punishment,
and that there was no need of painted monsters and demons to persecute
him. He showed the scorpion that stings himself to death. He brought the
thunder and lightning, the whirlwind, not from the clouds to expend
their power on the fair face of the earth, but out of the heart, to
drive and crush the criminals with their own tempestuous passions. And
is not this tragic power? Is such a man to be classed among the painters
of drolls? His pictures would convert into sermons, and would you call
the preacher of them a buffoon?
GRATIAN.—There is, indeed, little drollery in Hogarth: even his wit was
a sharp sword, so sharp that the spectator is wounded, and dangerously,
before he is aware of it.
CURATE.—I could not live comfortably in a room with his prints. I would
possess them in my library as I would Crabbe’s Tales, but would not have
them always before my eye. Nor would I, indeed, some of the finest works
of man’s genius—as Raffaele’s “Incendio.” I would have them to refer to,
but a home is, or ought to be, too gentle for such disturbance.
GRATIAN.—There is an anecdote told of Fuseli, that when on a visit to
some friend at Birmingham, a lady in a party said to him—“Oh, Mr
Fuseli, you should have been here last week, there was such a subject
for your pencil, a man was taken up for eating a live cat.”—“Madam,”
said the veritable Fuseli, “I paint terrors, not horrors.” For my own
part, life has so many terrors, and horrors too, that I should prefer
mitigating their effect, by having more constantly before me the
agreeabilities—pleasant domestic scenes, soft landscapes, or such gay
scenes and figures as my favourite Teniers occasionally painted, or
the sunny De Hooge; or why not bring forward some of our pleasant
home-scene English painters? Did you not see, and quite love, that
little delight of a picture, the hay-making scene in the Vicar of
Wakefield, by our own, and who will be the wide world’s own, Mulready?
Such scenes ravish me. Did you not long to walk quietly round and look
in the vicar’s face, as he and Mrs Primrose sat apart with their backs
to you? Mulready, you see, had the sense to leave something to the
imagination.
AQUILIUS.—Yes, pictures of this kind have a very great charm: they are
for us in our domestic mood, and that is our general mood—they should
gently move our love and pity. But I cannot conceive a greater mistake
than to make “familiar life” as it is called, doleful, uncheerful
subjects, that are out of the rule of love and pity, very easily run
into the class of terror; there is scarcely a between, and if one—it is
insipidity.
GRATIAN.—Now, I shall probably commit an offence against general taste
if I confess that, in my eyes, Wilkie is very apt to paint insipid
subjects. He seems too often to have been led to a matter of fact,
because it had some accessories that would paint rather well, than
because the fact was worth telling, either for its moral or its
amusement. Some of his pieces, notwithstanding their excellent painting
and perfectly graphic power, rather displease me. I never could take any
interest in his celebrated “Blind Fiddler.” It may be nature, but there
is nothing to touch the feelings in it: had I been present, I should not
have given the man a sixpence. And as for the hideous grimace-making
boy, I could have laid the stick with pleasure on his back. I don’t
think I could ever have kissed the ugly child.
AQUILIUS.—Wilkie was a man of great observation, great good sense,
manifest proof of which his correspondence sets forth; but that
necessary virtue of a painter of familiar life, which he possessed in so
great a degree, observation, led him oftener to look for character than
beauty. Oddity would strike him before regularity. Nor was he a cheerful
painter. His “Blind Man’s Buff,” is contrived to be without hilarity,
and it is singularly unfortunate in the sharp angles of hips and elbows.
His best picture of this kind is certainly the “Chelsea Pensioners”—or
“Battle of Waterloo,” very finely painted; but there is an acting joy in
it,—it is joy staid in its motion, and bid sit for its portrait. So his
“Village Wake” in our national gallery, is not joyous as a whole; the
figures are spots, and the mass of the picture is dingy. Pictures, like
poems, should not only be fair but touching, “dulcia sunto,” and this is
more imperatively essential to domestic scenes. The story should always
be worth telling. Painters seem to have taken it into their heads that
any thing, which presents a good means for exhibiting light and shade
and colour, makes a picture. If an incident or a scene be not worth
_seeing_, it is not worth painting.
GRATIAN.—That is never more true than when they are figure pieces. Our
likings and our antipathies are stronger in all representations of the
ways and manners of men, than in all the varieties of other nature. We
can bear a low and mean landscape, but degraded humanity seldom is, and
never ought to be pleasing.
CURATE.—Aristotle determines that brutishness is worse than vice. Vice
is a part of our nature, but brutishness unhumanises the whole nature.
It is certainly astonishing that painters can take a delight, not having
a moral end in the performances, to select the low scenes—the utter
degradation of civilisation, and therefore worse than any savage
state—as subjects for pictures. How is it that in a drawing-room a
connoisseur will look with complacency—more than complacency—upon a
painted representation of beastly boors drinking, whose presence, and
the whole odour of which scene, in the reality, he would rush from with
entire disgust?
AQUILIUS.—Yet I must, in a great measure, acquit the Dutch and Flemish
school of such an accusation. The painters who worked these abominations
were really but few,—the majority aim to represent innocent
cheerfulness. How often is Teniers delightful in his clear refreshing
skies, cheerful as the music to which his happy party are dancing, in
the brightness of a day as vigorous as themselves. Cheerfulness,
rational repose, and sweetest home affections, often make the subjects
of their pictures; and these impart a like pleasantness, a like
sympathy, in the mind of the spectator. Having such a variety of these
pleasantries and sympathies to choose from, it is astonishing that any
artist should select for his canvass a subject unpleasing and even
disgusting. I remember, a great many years ago, a picture exhibited, I
think at the Academy, which at the time was thought a wonder, and, I
believe, sold for a great deal of money. It was “The Sore Leg,” by
Heaphy;—there was the drawing off of the plaster, and the horrors of the
disease painted to the life, and the pain. Is it possible that, for the
mere art of the doing, any human being, unless he were a surgeon, should
receive the slightest pleasure from such a picture? It is enough to
mention one of the kind; but there have been many.
LYDIA.—I dare say, then, you will, with me, disapprove of such a subject
as “The Cut Finger.” Surely it is very disagreeable.
GRATIAN.—Entirely so; but he painted a much worse thing than that. I do
not see why any country gentleman should take pleasure in seeing such a
“Rent Day,” as this celebrated artist has painted. There is a painful
embarrassment, uncomfortable miscalculation, reluctant payments, much
more dissatisfaction than joy. I really cannot quite forgive him for
making the principal figure hump-backed. This is not the characteristic
of toil, labour, and industry. Doubtless the figure is from nature; but
he never preferred beauty of form, when character stood by. But there is
one of his pictures I consider perfectly brutish—for it is a scene
arising out of that brutishness which is the necessary result of
artificial and civilised life; which, unless for a moral purpose, it is
best to keep out of sight,—at least in all that pertains to the ornament
of domestic life. I allude to his picture, “Distraining for Rent.” It is
a subject only fit for the contemplation of a bailiff, to keep his heart
in its proper case-hardened state, by familiarising him with the
miseries of his profession. I have been told that Wilkie did not approve
of this subject, but that it was given him as a commission, which he
could not well refuse.
AQUILIUS.—I would have all such subjects prohibited by Act of
Parliament. Have a committee of humanity, (we can do nothing now without
committees,) and fine the offending artists. Is the man of business, in
this weary turmoil of the daily world, to return to his house, after his
labour is over, and see upon his walls nothing but scenes of distress,
of poverty, of misery, of hard-heartedness—when he should indulge his
sight and his mind with every thing that would tend to refresh his worn
spirits, avert painful fears, either for himself or others, and should
tune himself, by visible objects of rational hilarity, into the full and
free harmonies of a vigorous courage, and health of social nature? His
eye should not rest upon the miseries of “Distraining for Rent,”
Heaphy’s “Sore Legs,” no, nor even “Cut Fingers.” In this wayfaring
world of many mishaps, however homely be the inns, let them be clean and
cheerful, that we may set out again in an uncertain sky, where we must
expect storms, with beautiful thoughts for our companions; that, by
encouragement of a confiding reception, become winged angels, with a
radiant plumage, brightening all before our path, and seen brightest and
most heavenly under a lowering cloud.
LYDIA.—Thanks, Aquilius, you are poetical, and therefore most true; so
low and mean thoughts—what! are they to accompany us, whether they show
themselves in words or in pictures? I fear me, they are bad angels, and
are doing their evil mission in our hearts, alas! and in our actions. It
has been said, as an encouragement to our charity, that “men have
received angels unawares.” It may be said, too, as a warning lest we
receive evil, that men may receive demons unawares. Beautiful Una—the
lion licked your feet because you were so pure, so good.
Shall I tell it to you, Eusebius? Yes, your eyes will glisten as they
read, for dearly do you love happiness. Here the Curate drew his bride,
his wife, closer to him, kissed her honest forehead, and rested his
cheek upon it for a little space, and with a low voice murmured,—“My
beautiful Una.” He then turned to us with a smile, and I think the
smallest indication of moisture in his eye, which might have been more
but that the bright angel of his thought had cleared it away, and
said,—Excuse me; yet, to be honest, excuse is not needed: my two dearest
of friends must and do rejoice in the loving truth of my happiness.
GRATIAN.—No, no, my good friend, don’t make excuse, it would be our
shame were it needed. You have given us one subject for a picture, whose
interest should set my brushes in motion were I twenty years younger,
and might hope to succeed. But this I will say, my memory has a picture
gallery of her own, and in it will this little piece have a good place.
Now, I like this conversation on art, because you know I have been all
my life a dauber of canvass—dauber! even Aquilius, who has so much
addicted himself to the art, has praised some of my performances. I have
painted many a sign for good-natured landlords, in odd places, where my
fishing excursions have led me; and old Hill, honest old Hill, the
fisher of Millslade, has a bit of canvass of mine, the remembrance of a
day, which I believe he will treasure a little for my sake, and more for
its truth, to his last day. I must show the Curate’s wife old Hill. I
hit him off well,—am proud of that portrait, and often look at my old
companion from my easy chair. I sometimes now dabble with my tube
colours, and make a dash at my remembrances of river scenes. Nature and
I have been familiar many a long year. I love the breezy hill, and the
free large moor, that takes up the winds and tosses them down the
grooved sides, to go off in their own communing with the waterfalls. I
love, too, the quiet brook, and rivers stealing their way by green
meadows, and the elms, that stand like outposts on the banks, keepers of
the river. Have we not, in our discussion, too much omitted to speak of
landscape,—even including the sea-shores? And in landscape we certainly
have painters that please. As a true fisherman and painter-naturalist I
could not resist, the other day, purchasing Lewis’s river scenes. How
happily—the more happily because his execution is so unstudied, so
accidental—does Lewis, with his etching and mezzotint effects, put you
into the very heart of river scenery; and then how truly do you trace it
upwards and downwards. We have some good landscape painters.
AQUILIUS.—We have; and of late years they have greatly improved in
subjects. They at least now look for what is beautiful. The old dead
stump, the dunghill, and horse and cart, the pig and the donkey, are no
longer considered to be the requisites for English landscape. One has
seen publications called English landscape, which must give foreigners a
very miserable idea of our country. Cottage scenery, too, has had its
day. The old well is dry—the girl married, it is to be hoped, and the
pitcher broken. The lane and gipsies, the cross sticks and the crock,
are not dissolving but dissolved views. In time, the turnpike road and
ruddled sheep going to the butcher will be thought but ill to represent
the pastoral. When the mutton has been eaten up—and I hope the artists
get their fair share—I wish they would be satisfied, and know when they
have had enough. The Act of Parliament we spoke of, should exclude
creatures with the ruddle on their backs, and butcher-boys, and men in
smock-frocks and low hats, and pitchforks. We have had enough of this
kind of pastoral; they are not the “gentle shepherds,” that should
people the Arcadia within England, or any other. I would have Rosalind
and her farm, without the clown. The French and Dresden china shepherds
and shepherdesses, as we see them prettily smiling, and garlanding their
pet lambs, as something extra parochial, and _sui generis_, show at
least this happiness, that they do not eat their bread by the sweat of
their brows. All landscape that reminds you of “the curse of the earth,
of the dire necessity of toil, of the beggarly destitution test,” of
dingy earths and dirty weather, are, you may be sure, far out of the
hearing of Pan’s pipe. He does not adjust his lips to music for the
overseer and exciseman, nor rate collectors. Nay, when Pan retires to
visit his estate in Arcadia, and Robin Hood reigns, he will have no such
ink-horn gentry partake of his venison. The freedom of nature loves not
the visible restrictions of law. I would be bold enough to lay it down
as a truth, that it is as possible to get poetry out of the earth, as
swedes and mangel-wurzel. Let landscape painters look to it, lest they
get into bad habits before the act is out, and, of a hard necessity,
incur the penalty.
GRATIAN.—Stay, stay,—where are you running to? Surely if a painter takes
a _bonâ fide_ view, you would not have him turn the milk-maid out of the
field, to bring in Diana and her train.
AQUILIUS.—Views! oh, I thought we were speaking of Pastoral. That is
quite another thing; I am somewhat of Fuseli’s opinion, who said,
speaking contemptuously, “I mean those things called Views.”
CURATE.—But you will admit, Aquilius, that we have real scenes that are
very beautiful, always pleasing to look at, and therefore fit to be
painted. Is there not our lake scenery?
AQUILIUS.—There is; and as our subject is art, I should say such scenery
is more valuable for what it suggests, than for what it actually
represents in the painter’s mirror. In fact, nature offers with both
hands: it requires a nice discretion to tell which hand holds the true
treasure. She may purposely show you the ornament to deceive.
“So may the outward shows be least themselves,
The world is still deceived with ornament.”
It was the leaden casket, in which was hidden the perfect beauty of
Portia; there was the choice, and made with a judgment that won the
prize, and took the inheritance of Belmont.
“You that choose not by the _view_,
Chance as fair, and choose as true.”
Would you take away from landscape painters the high privilege of
genius?—invention—which you allow to historical painters? You do this,
if you do not grant to the fullest extent the suggestive character of
nature. The musician takes music from the air, which is his raw
material; the conception, which works from mere sounds the perfect
mystery of power, to shake, to raise, and melt to pity and to love the
whole soul, belongs to the mind. And so, for the more perfect work of
landscape, the mind must add of its own immortal store, the keeper and
dispenser of which is genius.
CURATE.—You would raise landscape painting to the dignity of a creative,
from the lower grade of an imitative art.
AQUILIUS.—I would do more; I would make it creative, not only in things
like, but, to speak boldly at once, in things unlike itself; but,
nevertheless, perfectly congenial; and to be adopted as a recognised
mark of submission of all matter to mind, which alone is privileged to
diffuse itself over and into all nature, and to animate it with a
soul—life; and when that is superadded, and then only, is the sympathy
complete between external nature and ourselves. I care not for art that
is not creative, that does not construct poetry. From all that is most
soft and tender, to all that is most great and rugged, from the sweet to
the awful and sublime, there is in all art, whether it be of landscape
or historical, (which embraces the poetical), a dominion bounded only by
the limitations of the original power with which genius is gifted. Why
may there not be a Michael Angelo for trees, as for the human form? Nay,
I verily believe, that those landscapes would have the greatest
fascination, where there would be, in fact, the greatest unlikeness to
usually recognised nature, both in form and colour, provided one part
were in keeping with another, so as to bring the whole within the idea
of the natural; and where the conception is clearly expressed, and is
worthy the dignity of feeling. Hence, suggestive nature is the best
nature. We want not height and magnitude, vast distances: if we have the
science of form and colour, the materials need not be vast, let them
only be suggestive.
GRATIAN.—You laid down some such theory with regard to colour, as a
means of telling the story, in your late paper on Rubens. I could not
but agree with you there. I see now how you would extend the subject. We
certainly do talk too much about “_the_ truth of nature,” not
considering sufficiently how many truths there are.
CURATE.—And what a great truth there is that is of our own making,
greater than all the others; for, according to the showing of Aquilius,
it comes of a divine gift, of the creative faculty, under a higher
power; works the wonders in poetry, painting, music, and architecture,
fittest for our admiration and our improvement. It is surprising that
our landscape painters have not seen this walk within their reach;
nearly all confine themselves to the imitative.
GRATIAN.—But in that they have raised their pretensions. We had nothing
great or poetical in the least degree in landscape, before Wilson; nay,
to a late period, our landscape subjects were of the most limited range.
They do now go at least to beautiful nature, and while we have such
painters of landscape as Creswick and Stanfield, and Lee, and Danby,
(but there you will say is an advance into a higher walk,) for my own
part, I shall hesitate before I give my vote for your more perfect
ideal.
AQUILIUS.—The works of the painters you mention are beautiful,
fascinatingly so, both from the character of their chosen scenery, and
their agreeable manner of representing it. And I rejoice to see, that
even these are advancing, are discarding something or other of the old
recipes every year. We have at last some better English scenery. We must
no longer refer to Gainsborough as _the_ painter of English landscape;
we find it not, that is, true English scenery, in his pictures, nor in
his “studies.”
GRATIAN.—And yet he painted nature, and came upon the world that began
to be sick of the attempts at your ideal compositions, the prince of
whom, and who won the prize over Wilson, was Smith of Chichester.
AQUILIUS.—Oh, do not dignify his presumptions with the name of ideal.
GRATIAN.—I can’t give up Gainsborough, his sweet cottage scenery, with
his groups of rustic figures.
AQUILIUS.—Was there nothing better within the realms of England than
beggary and poverty, rags and brambles,—her highest industry, the cart
and the plough,—her wealth in stock, the pig, poultry, and donkey?
GRATIAN.—But it was the taste of the day; even our aristocracy were
painted not as ideal, but as real shepherds and shepherdesses. A few
years ago, there was a picture fished out of some lumber room, where it
ought to have been buried till it had rotted, of George the Third’s
family group, as cottagers’ children, playing in the dirt before a mud
hovel. It was by Gainsborough, and I believe was held at a high price.
AQUILIUS.—This was a descent from the non-natural pastoral of the
by-gone age, to the low natural, from which art derived but little
benefit. Goldsmith very aptly and wittily satirised the transition state
in the Primrose family-group, in which each individual adopted a
singular independence. Venus, Cupids, an Amazon, and Alexander the
Great, with Dr Primrose, holding his books on the Whistonian
controversy.
CURATE.—One would rather imagine that Goldsmith was severe upon the
practice of an earlier date. There are several pictures at Hampton
Court, and one large one, if I remember, on the stair-wall, in which the
statesmen of the day represent the deities of the heathen mythology.
LYDIA.—Yes, and I remember a very ridiculous smaller picture, a portrait
of Queen Elizabeth—but it affects the historical. The queen and her
train enter on one side of the piece, and on the other Juno, Venus, and
Minerva. The goddesses are in every respect outdone, and start with
astonishment,—Juno at the superior power, Minerva, the superior wisdom,
and Venus the superior beauty of the queen. There must be something very
curious in the nature of taste: seeing such pictures, one cannot but
reflect, that though they are now perfectly ridiculous, they could not
have been so when they were painted. They were men of understanding who
sat for their portraits in these whimsical characters; and the queen—it
is surprising!—there is surely something involved in it, that history
does not touch.
GRATIAN.—It is the more surprising, as Holbein had painted, and his
works were before their eyes.
AQUILIUS.—It would be not undeserving curiosity to sift the history of
allegory—what is the cause that it was then so generally accepted in
Europe; infected the poetry and painting of every civilised country. The
new aspect of religion had much to do with it: images, pictures,
particularly the earlier, representing the Deity, and the Virgin, had
become objects of hatred—of persecution. And thus the arts made their
escape into the regions of allegory.
CURATE.—Chilling regions, in which even genius with all his natural glow
was frost-bitten. An escape from what was believed to what could not be
believed. It was the cold fit of the ague of superstition.
GRATIAN.—The devotion of the early painters produced, what nothing but
devotion could produce; theirs was a true devotion, notwithstanding the
superstition contained in it. The iconoclast spirit has scarcely been
yet laid. As we rise from the prostrate position of our fears, the more
readily shall we acknowledge the spirituality of the early painters.
They are daily approximating a more just estimation. But we are
wandering; we were speaking of landscape: surely, it is difficult to
find a subject that shall be altogether unpleasing. I do not remember
ever to have seen an outdoor scene, unless it might have been in a town,
that did not please with some beauty or other.
AQUILIUS.—Indeed! then I think you must have been led away by some
associations, in which art had but little share. You have loved “A
southerly wind and a cloudy sky,” as the song says, for the sport
offered. Be not shocked, Gratian, at the confession, but the truth is,
that I see very many outward scenes, that not only give me no pleasure
but pain. Shall I confess a still more shocking heterodoxy; I have but
little love for the scenery of the country!—am very often displeased
with what offers itself, and becomes the common picture. Even in what is
denominated a beautiful country, I look more for its suggestive
materials in form and colour than for whole scenes. If pictures are to
be no more than what we see—even landscapes, the art is not creative;
and an imitative, uncreative art, leaves the best faculties of the mind
unemployed. What is art without enthusiasm?—and you may be sure that no
painter of views, and nothing more, was ever an enthusiast. It is the
part of enthusiasm not to copy, but to make. Is it more startling if I
assert, that the ideal is more true than the natural? Yet am I convinced
that it is so. The natural requires the comparison of the eye; the
ideal, as it is the work of the mind, will not be controlled by any
comparison, but such as mind can bring. It commands the organ of sight,
and teaches it. We all have more or less of this creative faculty; the
education of the world is against it, for it is a world of much
business, more of doing than of thinking, and more of thinking about
what is foreign to feeling, than what cherishes it till it embodies
itself in imagination. The rising faculty becomes suppressed. More or
less all are born poets—to make, to combine, to imagine, to create; but
very early does the time come with most of us, when we are commanded to
put away, as the world calls it, the “childish things.”
LYDIA.—Oh, I believe it—the infant’s dream is a creation, and perhaps as
beautiful as we know it must be pleasing, for there are no smiles like
infant smiles.
CURATE.—And past that age, when the external world has given its lessons
in pictures, which in practice and education we only imitate, do we not
find the impressions then made of a goodness, a beauty, not realised and
acknowledged in advanced life, as existing actually in the scenes
themselves?
AQUILIUS.—At the earlier time, we take up little but what is consonant
to our affections; the minor detail is an after lesson: but, as to this
“natural” of landscapes, which seems to have so long held our artists
and amateurs under an infatuation—as they construe it—this mindless
thing,—after all what is its petty truth? Could the boy who hides
himself under a hedge to read his Robinson Crusoe, put on canvass the
pictures his imagination paints, do you think they would be exactly of
the skies and the fields every day before his eyes? A year or two older,
when he shall feel his spirit begin to glow with a sense of beauty, with
the incessant love and heroism of best manhood—see him under the shade
of some wide-spreading oak devouring the pages of befitting romance,
“The Seven Champions of Christendom,” the tale of castles, of
enchantments, of giants, and forlorn damsels to be rescued. Do you not
credit his mind’s painting for other scenes, in colour and design, than
any he ever saw? The fabulous is in him, and he must create, or look on
nothing. He will take no sheep for a dragon, nor farmer Plod-acre for an
enchanter, nor the village usher for an armed knight. The overseer will
not be his redresser of wrongs. There is vision in his day-dream, but it
is painting to the mind’s eye; and imagination must be the great
enchanter to conjure up a new country, raise rocks, and build him
castles; nay, in his action to run to the rescue, he has a speed beyond
his limbs’ power, an arm that has been charmed with new strength. Now is
he not quite out of the locality, the movement and power of any world he
ever saw, of any world to whose laws of motion and of willing he has
ever yet been subject? Take his pictures—look at them well; for I will
suppose them painted to your sight: nay, put yourself in his place and
paint them yourself—forgetting before you do so all you have ever heard
said about landscape painting. Have you them? then tell me, are they
untrue? No, no, you will admit they are beautiful truth. The lover
paints with all a poet’s accuracy, but not like Denner. Now, if this
mind-vision be not destroyed,—if the man remain the poet, he will not be
satisfied with the common transcript of what, as far as enjoyment goes,
he can more fully enjoy without art. He will have a craving for the
ideal painting, for more truths and perhaps higher truths than the
sketch-book can afford. And if he cultivate his taste, and practise the
art too, he will find in nature a thousand beauties before hidden, that
while he was the view-seeker, he saw not; he will be cognisant of the
suggestive elements, the grammar of his mind and of his art, by which he
will express thoughts and feelings, of a truth that is in him, and in
all, only to be embodied by a creation.
CURATE.—I fear the patrons of art are not on your side. Does not
encouragement go in a contrary direction?
GRATIAN.—Patrons of art are too often mere lovers of furniture,—have not
seriously considered art, nor cultivated taste. And if it be a fault, it
is not altogether their own; it is in character with genius to be in
advance, and to teach, and by its own works. It is that there is a want
of cultivation, of serious study, among artists themselves. If the
patron could dictate, he would himself be the maker, the poet, the
painter, the musician,—excellence of every kind precedes the taste to
appreciate it. It makes the taste as well as the work: my friend
Aquilius has made me a convert. I had not considered art, as it should
be viewed, as a means of, as one of the languages of poetry. In truth, I
have loved pictures more for their reminiscences than their independent
power; and have therefore chiefly fixed my attention on views—actual
scenery, with all its particulars.
AQUILIUS.—What is high, what is great enough wholly to possess the mind,
is not of particulars; like our religion, in this it is for all ages,
all countries, and must not by adopting the particular, the peculiar
one, diminish the catholicity of its empire. “The golden age” is,
wherever or however embodied, a creation; and as no present age ever
showed any thing like it, that is, visibly so,—what is seen must be
nothing more than the elements out of which it may be made.—The golden
age—where all is beauty, all is perfect! Purest should be the mind that
would desire to see it.
CURATE.—The golden age, if you mean by it the happy age, is but one
field for art; you seem for the moment to forget, that we are so
constituted as to feel a certain pleasure from terror, from fear—from
the deepest tragedy—from what moves us to shed tears of pity, as well as
what soothes to repose, or excites to gaiety.
AQUILIUS.—Not so—but as we commenced to discuss chiefly the agreeability
of subjects for pictures, let me be allowed to add, that I question if
what is disgusting should not be excluded from even the tragic, perhaps
chiefly from what is tragic. Cruelty even is not necessarily disgusting;
it becomes so when meanness is added to it, and there is not a certain
greatness in it. There might be a greatness even in deformity, and where
it is not gratuitously given, but for a purpose.
CURATE.—Yet, has not Raffaele been censured for the painfully distorted
features of the Possessed Boy in his “Transfiguration.”
AQUILIUS.—And it has with some show of truth (for who would like to
speak more positively against the judgment of Raffaele) been thought
that Domenichino, who borrowed this subject from him, has improved the
interest by rendering the face of the lunatic one of extreme beauty!
The Curate was here called away upon his parochial duties, and our
discussion for the present terminated. Will it amuse you, Eusebius? If
not, you have incurred the penalty of reading it, by not making one of
our party. Yours ever,