Chapter 14

An acquaintance begun under such circumstances grows into friendship with amazing rapidity; and many are the joyous hours the foragers spend together, in spite of intolerable weather and storms of sleet and snow, which bear a far greater resemblance to the climate of Lochaber than to that of Syria, "land of roses." Reinforced with the count and his companions, Colonel Napier pushes on--gets into the vicinity of Ibrahim--his rabble rout turn tail, in case of being swallowed alive by the ferocious pasha, whose reputation for cruelty and all manner of iniquities seems well deserved, and having ascertained the movements of that formidable ruffian, he returned to Naplouse to take the command of 1500 half-tamed, undisciplined savages, with whom to oppose his retreat. Luckily, the ratification of the convention come in the nick of time; for it is very evident that the best cudgels that were ever cut in "the classic woods of Hawthornden," could not have awakened a spark of military ardour in the wretched riff-raff assemblage appointed for this service--and of all the abortive efforts at generalship we have ever read of, the attempt of the Turkish commanders was infinitely the worse--no foresight in providing for difficulties--no valour in fighting their way out of them; but, to compensate for these trifling deficiencies, a plentiful supply of pride and cruelty, with a due admixture of dishonesty. We heartily join, with Colonel Napier, in wondering where the deuce the "integrity of the Ottoman empire" is to be found, as, beyond all doubt, not a particle of it exists in any of its subjects. The pashas of Egypt, bad as they undoubtedly are, have redeeming points about them, which the Hassans, and Izzets, and Reschids of the Turks have no conception of; and, lively and sparkling as the gallant colonel's narrative is, we confess it leaves a sadder impression on our minds of the hopelessness and the degeneracy of the Moslems, than any book we have met with. Turk and Egyptian should equally be whipped back into the desert, and the fairest portions of the world be won over to civilization, wealth, and happiness. The present volumes close at the end of January 1841, and perhaps they are among the best results of the campaign. We shall be glad to see the proceedings at Alexandria sketched off in the same pleasant style.

THE FATE OF POLYCRATES.--_Herod._ iii. 124-126.

"Oh! go not forth, my father dear--oh! I go not forth to-day, And trust not thou that Satrap dark, for he fawns but to betray; His courteous smiles are treacherous wiles, his foul designs to hide; Then go not forth, my father dear--in thy own fair towers abide."

"Now, say not so, dear daughter mine--I pray thee, say not so! Where glory calls, a monarch's feet should never fear to go; And safe to-day will be my way through proud Magnesia's halls, As if I stood 'mid my bowmen good beneath my Samian walls.

"The Satrap is my friend, sweet child--my trusty friend is he-- The ruddy gold his coffers hold he shares it all with me; No more amid these clustering isles alone shall be my sway, But Hellas wide, from side to side, thy empire shall obey!

"And of all the maids of Hellas, though they be rich and fair, With the daughter of Polycrates, oh! who shall then compare? Then dry thy tears--no idle fears should damp our joy to-day-- And let me see thee smile once more before I haste away!"

"Oh! false would be the smile, my sire, that I should wear this morn, For of all my country's daughters I shall soon be most forlorn; I know, I know,--ah, thought of woe!--I ne'er shall see again My father's ship come sailing home across the Icarian main.

"Each gifted seer, with words of fear, forbids thee to depart, And their warning strains an echo find in every faithful heart; A maiden weak, e'en I must speak--ye gods, assist me now! The characters of doom and death are graven on thy brow!

"Last night, my sire, a vision dire thy daughter's eyes did see, Suspended in mid air there hung a form resembling thee; Nay, frown not thus, my father dear; my tale will soon be done-- Methought that form was bathed by Jove, and anointed by the sun!"

"My child, my child, thy fancies wild I may not stay to hear. A friend goes forth to meet a friend--then wherefore should'st thou fear? Though moonstruck seers with idle fears beguile a maiden weak, They cannot stay thy father's hand, or blanch thy father's cheek.

"Let cowards keep within their holds, and on peril fear to run! Such shame," quoth he, "is not for me, fair Fortune's favourite son!" Yet still the maiden did repeat her melancholy strain-- "I ne'er shall see my father's fleet come sailing home again!"

The monarch call'd his seamen good, they muster'd on the shore, Waved in the gale the snow-white sail, and dash'd the sparkling oar; But by the flood that maiden stood--loud rose her piteous cry-- "Oh! go not forth, my dear, dear sire--oh, go not forth to die!"

A frown was on that monarch's brow, and he said as he turn'd away, "Full soon shall Samos' lord return to Samos' lovely bay; But thou shalt aye a maiden lone within my courts abide-- No chief of fame shall ever claim my daughter for his bride!

"A long, long maidenhood to thee thy prophet tongue hath given--" "Oh would, my sire," that maid replied, "such were the will of Heaven! Though I a loveless maiden lone must evermore remain, Still let me hear that voice so dear in my native isle again!"

'Twas all in vain that warning strain--the king has crost the tide-- But never more off Samos shore his bark was seen to ride! The Satrap false his life has ta'en, that monarch bold and free, And his limbs are black'ning in the blast, nail'd to the gallows-tree!

That night the rain came down apace, and wash'd each gory stain, But the sun's bright ray, the next noonday, glared fiercely on the slain; And the oozing gore began once more from his wounded sides to run; Good-sooth, that form was bathed by Jove, and anointed by the Sun!

MODERN PAINTERS.[16]

[16] Modern Painters--their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters, &c. &c. By a Graduate of Oxford.

We read this title with some pain, not doubting but that our modern landscape painters were severely handled in an ironical satire; and we determined to defend them. "Their superiority to _all_ the ancient masters"--that was too hard a hit to come from any but an enemy! We must measure our man--a graduate of Oxford! The "scholar armed," without doubt. He comes, too, vauntingly up to us, with his contempt for us and all critics that ever were, or will be; we are all little Davids in the eye of this Goliath. Nevertheless, we will put a pebble in our sling. We saw this contempt of us, in dipping at hap-hazard into the volume. But what was our astonishment to find, upon looking further, that we had altogether mistaken the intent of the author, and that we should probably have not one Goliath, but many, to encounter; while our own particular friends, to whom we might look for help, were, alas! all dead men. We found that there were not "giants" in those days, but in these days--that the author, in his most superlative praise, is not ironical at all, but a most serious panegyrist, who never laughs, but does sometimes make his readers laugh, when they see his very unbecoming, mocking grimaces against the "old masters"--not that it can be fairly asserted that it is a laughable book. It has much conceit, and but little merriment; there is nothing really funny after you have got over, (vide page 6,) that he "looks with contempt on Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin." This contempt, however, being too limited for the "graduate of Oxford," in the next page he enlarges the scope of his enmity; "speaking generally of the old masters, I refer only to Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Cuyp, Berghem, Both, Ruysdael, Hobbima, Teniers (in his landscapes,) P. Potter, Canaletti, and the various Van Somethings and Back Somethings, more especially and malignantly those who have libelled the sea." Self-convicted of malice, he has not the slightest suspicion of his ignorance; whereas he _knows_ nothing of these masters whom he maligns. Still is he ready to be their general accuser--has not the slightest respect for the accumulated opinions of the best judges for these two or three hundred years--he puts them by with the wave of his hand, very like the unfortunate gentleman in an establishment of "unsound opinions," who gravely said--"The world and I differed in opinion--I was right, the world wrong; but they were too many for me, and put me here." We daresay that, in such establishments may be found many similar opinions to those our author promulgates, though, as yet, none of our respectable publishers have been convicted of a congenial folly. We said, that he suspects not his ignorance of the masters he maligns. Let it not hence be inferred that it is the work of an ignorant man. He is only ignorant with a prejudice. We will not say that it is not the work of a man who thinks, who has been habituated to a sort of scholastic reasoning, which he brings to bear, with no little parade and display, upon technicalities and distinctions. He can tutor _secundum artem_, lacking only, in the first point, that he has not tutored himself. With all his arrangements and distinctions laid down, as the very grammar of art, he confuses himself with his "truths," forgetting that, in matters of art, truths of fact must be referable to truths of mind. It is not what things in all respects really are, but what they appear, and how they are convertible by the mind into what they are not in many ways, respects, and degrees, that we have to consider, before we can venture to draw rules from any truths whatever. For art is something besides nature; and taste and feeling are first--precede practical art; and though greatly enhanced by that practical cultivation, might exist without it--nay, often do; and true taste always walks a step in advance of what has been done, and ever desires to do, and from itself, more than it sees. We discover, therefore, a fallacy in the very proposal of his undertaking, when he says that he is prepared "to advance nothing which does not, at least in his own conviction, _rest on surer ground than mere feeling or taste_." Notwithstanding, however, that our graduate of Oxford puts his "demonstrations" upon an equality with "the demonstrations of Euclid," and "thinks it proper for the public to know, that the writer is no mere theorist, but has been devoted from his youth to the laborious study of practical art," and that he is "a graduate of Oxford;" we do not look upon him as a bit the better judge for all that, seeing that many have practised it too fondly and too ignorantly all their lives, and that Claude, and Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin must, according to him, have been in this predicament, and more especially do we decline from bowing down at his dictation, when we find him advocating _any_ "_surer ground than feeling or taste_." Now, considering that thus, _in initio_, he sets aside feeling and taste, the reader will not be astonished to find a very substantial reason given for his contempt of the afore-mentioned old masters; it is, he says, "because I look with the most devoted veneration upon Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, that I do not distrust the principles which induce me to look with contempt," &c. We do not exactly see how these great men, who were not landscape painters, can very well be compared with those who were, but from some general principles of art, in which the world have not as yet found any very extraordinary difference. But we do humbly suggest, that Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, are in their practice, and principles, if you please, quite as unlike Messrs David Cox, Copley Fielding, J. D. Harding, Clarkson Stanfield, and Turner--the very men whom our author brings forward as the excellent of the earth, in opposition _to all_ old masters whatever, excepting only Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, to whom nevertheless, by a perverse pertinacity of their respective geniuses, they bear no resemblance whatever--as they are to Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin. We do not by any means intend to speak disrespectfully of these our English artists, but we must either mistrust those principles which cause them to stand in opposition to the great Italians, or to conceive that our author has really discovered no such differing principles, and which possibly may not exist at all. Nor will we think so meanly of the taste, the good feeling, and the good sense of these men, as to believe that they think themselves at all flattered by any admiration founded on such an irrational contempt. They well know that Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, have been admired, together with Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin, and they do not themselves desire to be put upon a separate list. The author concludes his introduction with a very bad reason for his partiality to modern masters, and it is put in most ambitious language, very readily learned in the "Fudge School,"--a style of language with which our author is very apt to indulge himself; but the argument it so ostentatiously clothes, and which we hesitate not to call a bad one, is nothing more than this, (if we understand it,)--that the dead are dead, and cannot hear our praise; that the living are living, and therefore our love is not lost; in short, as a _non-sequitur_, "that if honour be for the dead, gratitude can only be for the living." This might have been simply said; but we are taken to the grave--with "He who has once stood beside the grave," &c. &c.; we have "wild love--keen sorrow--pleasure to pulseless hearts--debt to the heart--to be discharged to the dust--the garland--the tombstone--the crowned brow--the ashes and the spirit--heaven-toned voices and heaven-lighted lamps--the learning--sweetness by silence--and light by decay;" all which, we conceive, might have been very excusable in a young curate's sermon during his first year of probation, and might have won for him more nosegays and favours than golden opinions, but which we here feel inclined to put our pen across, as so we remember many similarly ambitious passages to have been served, before we were graduate of Oxford, with the insignificant signification from the pen of our informator of _nihil ad rem_. As the author threatens the public with another, or more volumes, we venture to throw out a recommendation, that at least one volume may serve the purpose and do the real work of two, if he will check this propensity to unnecessary redundancy. His numerous passages of this kind are for the most part extremely unintelligible; and when we have unraveled the several coatings, we too often find the ribs of the mummy are not human. We think it right to object, in this place, to an affectation in phraseology offensive to those who think seriously of breaking the third commandment--he scarcely speaks of mountains without taking the sacred name in vain; there is likewise a constant repetition of expressions of very doubtful meaning in the first use, for the most part quite devoid of meaning in their application. One of these is "palpitating." Light is "palpitating," darkness is "palpitating"--every conceivable thing is "palpitating." We must, however, in justice say, that by far the best part of the book, the laying down rules and the elucidating principles, is clearly and expressively written. In this part of the work there is greater expansion than the student will generally find in books on art. Not that we are aware of the advancement of any thing new; but the admitted maxims of art are, as it were, grammatically analysed, and in a manner to assist the beginner in thinking upon art. To those who have already _thought_, this very studied analysis and arrangement will be tedious enough.