Part 10

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.