I have just come home after accompanying my Father and Lusia to their
starting place in the City: they are off for Suffolk for some days. I
should have written to you by them: but I only just now found your letter
on the mantelpiece: there it has lain some days during which I have been
ruralising in Bedfordshire. Delicious has it been there: such weather,
such meadows, to enjoy: and the Ouse still wandering along at his ease
through pretty villages and vales of his own beautifying. I am much in
love with Bedfordshire: it beats our part of the world: and I am sure you
would like it. But here I am come back to London for another three weeks
I suppose. . . .
I should much like to see your Platonic Brother. By your account he must
have a very perfect mental organization: or, phrenologically speaking, he
must be fully and equally furnished with the bumps of ideality and
causality: which, as Bacon would say, are the two extreme poles on which
the perfect 'sound and roundabout' intellect is balanced. A great
deficiency of the causality bump causes me to break short in a long
discussion which I meant to have favoured you with on this subject. I
hope to meet your Brother one of these days: and to learn much from him.
'Guesses at Truth' I know very well: the two Brothers are the Hares: one
a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; the other Author of some Sermons
which I think you had from me this winter. 'The Guesses' are well worth
reading; nay, buying: very ingenious, with a good deal of pedantry and
_onesidedness_ (do you know this German word?), which, I believe, chiefly
comes from the Trinity Fellow, who was a great pedant. I have just read
Mrs. Austin's Characteristics of Goethe: which I will bring for you when
I come. It is well worth knowing something of the mind of certainly a
great man, and who has had more effect on his age than any one else.
There is something almost fearful in the energy of his intellect. I wish
indeed you were in London to see all these pictures: I am sure their
greatness would not diminish your pleasure in your own small collection.
Why should it? There is as genuine a feeling of Nature in one of
Nursey's sketches as in the Rubenses and Claudes here: and if that is
evident, and serves to cherish and rekindle one's own sympathy with the
world about one, the great end is accomplished. I do not know very much
of Salvator: is he not rather a melodramatic painter? No doubt, very
fine in his way. But Claude and the two Poussins are the great ideal
painters of Landscape. Nature looks more stedfast in them than in other
painters: all is wrought up into a quietude and harmony that seem
eternal. This is also one of the mysterious charms in the Holy Families
of Raffaelle and of the early painters before him: the faces of the
Madonnas are beyond the discomposure of passion, and their very draperies
betoken an Elysian atmosphere where wind never blew. The best painter of
the unideal Christ is, I think, Rembrandt: as one may see in his picture
at the National Gallery, and that most wonderful one of our Saviour and
the Disciples at Emmaus in the Louvre: there they sit at supper as they
might have sat. Rubens and the Venetian Painters did neither one thing
nor the other: their Holy figures are neither ideal nor real: and it is
incongruous to see one of Rubens' brawny boors dressed up in the ideal
red and blue drapery with which the early Italians clothed their figures
of Christ. But enough of all this. I have seen Trench's Sabbation, and
like it much: how do you like those centuries of couplets, which are a
German fashion? They are very much in the style of Quarles' Emblems, and
other pithy epigrams of that time: only doubtless more artistically
polished: perhaps profounder. There were some of the same kind in
Blackwood some months ago. My paper is out: and I must again say Good
Bye.
_To John Allen_.
LOWESTOFT, SUFFOLK.
_August_ 28 [1838.]