Part 14

“I send you the engraving, and have only to wish that it may sometimes remind you of the original. You are associated in my memory with some of my happiest days; you were the friend, and the highly-valued friend, of my dear and lamented husband, and as such, even without any of the numberless claims you have to my regard, you could not be otherwise than highly esteemed. It appears to me that I have not quite lost him, who made life dear to me, when I am near those he loved[19] and that knew how to value him. Five fleeting years have gone by since our delicious evenings on the lovely Arno, evenings never to be forgotten, and the recollections of which ought to cement the friendships then formed. This effect I can, in truth, say has been produced on me, and I look forward, with confidence, to keeping alive, by a frequent correspondence, the friendship you owe me, no less for that I feel for you, but as the widow of one you loved, and that truly loved you. We, or more properly speaking I, live in a world where friendship is little known, and were it not for one or two individuals like yourself, I might be tempted to exclaim with Socrates: ‘My friends, there are no friends.’ Let us prove that the philosopher was wrong, and if Fate has denied us the comfort of meeting, let us by letters keep up our friendly intercourse. You will tell me what you think and feel in your Tuscan retirement, and I will tell you what I do, in this modern Babylon, where thinking and feeling are almost unknown. Have I not reason to complain that in your sojourn in London you do not give me a single day? And yet methinks you promised to stay a week, and that of that week I should have my share. I rely on your promise of coming to see me again before you leave London, and I console myself for the disappointment of seeing so little of you, by recollecting the welcome and the happiness that await you at home. Long may you enjoy it, is the sincere wish of your attached friend,

“M. BLESSINGTON.”

He to her, in the shape of “bits” out of a long letter written from Florence in March 1835:—

“Poor Charles Lamb, what a tender, good, joyous heart had he! What playfulness! what purity of style and thought! His sister is yet living, much older than himself. One of her tales is, with the sole exception of the _Bride of Lammermoor_, the most beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern. A young girl has lost her mother, the father marries again, and marries a friend of his former wife. The child is ill reconciled to it, but being dressed in new clothes for the marriage, she runs up to her mother’s chamber, filled with the idea how happy that dear mother would be at seeing her in all her glory—not reflecting, poor soul, that it was only by her mother’s death that she appeared in it. How natural, how novel is all this! Did you ever imagine that a fresh source of the pathetic would burst forth before us in this trodden and hardened world? I never did, and when I found myself upon it, I pressed my temples with both hands, and tears ran down to my elbows.

“The Opium-eater calls Coleridge ‘the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive that has yet existed among men.’ Impiety to Shakespeare! treason to Milton! I give up the rest, even Bacon. Certainly, since their day, we have seen nothing at all comparable to him. Byron and Scott were but as gun-flints to a granite mountain; Wordsworth has one angle of resemblance; Southey has written more, and all well, much admirably.…

“Let me add a few verses as usual:—

‘Pleasures—away, they please no more: Friends—are they what they were before? Loves—they are very idle things, The best about them are their wings. The dance—’tis what the bear can do; Music—I hate your music too. Whene’er these witnesses that time Hath snatch’d the chaplet from our prime And called by nature (as we go With eyes more wary, step more slow), And will be heard, and noted down, However we may fret or frown; Shall we desire to leave the scene Where all our former joys have been? No! ’twere ungrateful and unwise: But when die down our charities For human weal and human woes, ’Tis then the hour our days should close.’”

And this:—

“D’Orsay’s mind is always active. I wish it would put his pen in motion. At this season of the year (January) I fancied he was at Melton. Does not he lament that this bitter frost allows him no chance of breaking his neck over gates and double hedges? Pray offer him my kind remembrances.”

And here a chatty little note from D’Orsay:—

“It is a fact, that my brave nephew has been acting the part of Adonis, with a _sacré cochon_, who nearly opened his leg;[20] his presence of mind was great, he was on his lame leg in time to receive the second attack of the infuriated beast, and killed him on the spot, plunging a _couteau de chasse_ through his heart—luckily the wild boar had one. The romantic scene would have been complete, if there had been another Gabrielle de Vergy looking at this modern Raoul de Courcy. We think and speak of you often, and are in hopes that you will pay us a visit soon. Poor Forster is ill and miserable at the loss of his brother. I am sure that Forster is one of the best, honestest and kindest men that ever lived. I had yesterday a letter from Eugene Sue, who is in raptures with Macready as an actor and as a man. We saw lately that good, warm-hearted Dickens—he spoke of you very affectionately.… —Most affectionately,

“D’ORSAY.”

XXI

THE ARTIST

It behoves us now to pay some attention to D’Orsay’s claims as an artist; if he had posed simply as an amateur, silence would be possible, but he worked for money, entered the lists with other artists, and therefore laid himself open to judgment. In his own day he was highly thought of by many—here we have what was written of him in _La Presse_ on November 10th, 1850, when D’Orsay’s bust of Lamartine was exhibited:—

“M. le comte d’Orsay est un amateur de l’art plutôt qu’un artiste. Mais qu’est-ce qu’un amateur? C’est un volontaire parmi les artistes; ce sont souvent les volontaires qui font les coup d’éclat dans l’atelier comme sur les champs de bataille. Qu’est ce qu’un amateur? C’est un artiste dont le génie seul fait la vocation. Il est vrai qu’il ne reçoit pas dans son enfance et pendant les premières années de sa vie cette éducation du métier d’où sort Michel Ange, d’où sort Raphaél … mais s’il doit moins au maître, il doit plus à la nature. Il est son œuvre.… M. d’Orsay exerça dans les salons de Paris et de Londres la dictature Athénienne du goût et de l’élégance. C’est un de ces hommes qu’on aurait cru préoccupé de succès futiles,—parce que la nature semble les avoir créés uniquement pour son plaisir—mais qui trompent la nature, et qui, après avoir recueilli les légères admirations des jeunes gens et des femmes de leur âge, échappent à cette atmosphère de légèreté avant le temps où ils laissent ses idoles dans le vide, et se transforment par l’étude et par le travail en hommes nouveaux, en hommes de mérite acquis et sérieux. M. d’Orsay a habité longtemps l’Angleterre ou il donnait l’exemple et le ton à cette société aristocratique, un peu raide et déforme, qui admire surtout ce qui lui manque, la grâce et l’abandon des manières.…

“Dès cet époque, il commenca à jouer avec l’argile, le marbre, le ciseau, liè par un attachement devenu une parenté d’esprit, avec une des plus belles et des plus splendides femmes de son époque, il fit son buste pendant qu’elle vivait; il le fit idéal et plus touchant après sa mort. Il moula en formes après, rudes, sauvages, de grandeur fruste, les traits paysanesque d’O’Connell. Ces bustes furent à l’instant vulgarisés en millièrs d’exemplaires en Angleterre et à Paris. C’étaient des créations neuves.…

“Ces premiers succès furent des plus complets. Il cherchait un visage. Il en trouva un. Lord Byron, dont il fut l’ami et avec lequel il voyagea pendant deux ans[21] en Italie, n’était plus qu’un souvenir aimé dans son cœur.… Il fit le buste de Lamartine,…” and then there is something approaching very closely to a rhapsody on this work of art, and then a set of verses by Lamartine himself!

Debt drove D’Orsay to seek in art a means of adding to his income; in the case of Mr. Mitchell of Bond Street, who published a series of portrait drawings, it is even possible that he used his art to cancel his debt for Opera boxes, etc.! These portraits were 14 inches high and 10½ inches wide and were sold at 5s. each. The set must have been almost a pictorial “Who’s Who,” and among those honoured with inclusion may be named Byron, Disraeli, Theodore Hook, Carlyle, Liszt, D’Orsay himself, the Duke of Wellington, Greville, Louis Napoleon, Bulwer Lytton, Trelawney, Landor, Dickens, Lady Blessington, Henry Bulwer, Captain Marryat and Sir Edwin Landseer.

Richard James Lane, the engraver and lithographer, saw much of D’Orsay, and judging by the following letter held him in esteem:—

“As a patron, his kind consideration for my interest, and prompt fulfilment of every engagement, never failed me for the more than twenty years of my association with him; and the friendship that arose out of our intercourse (and which I attest with gratitude) proceeded at a steady pace, without the smallest check, during the same period; and remained unbroken, when on his final departure from England, he continued to give me such evidence of the constancy of his regard, as will be found conveyed in his letters.

“In the sketches of the celebrities of Lady Blessington’s _salons_, which he brought to me (amounting to some hundred and fifty, or more), there was generally an appropriate expression and character, that I found difficult to retain in the process of elaboration; and although I may have improved upon them in the qualities for which I was trained, I often found that the final touches of his own hand alone made the work satisfactory.

“Of the amount and character of the assistance of which the Count availed himself, in the production of his pictures and models, I have a clear notion.…

“When a gentleman would rush into the practice of that which, in its mechanism, demands experience and instruction, he avails himself of the help of a craftsman, whose services are sought for painting-in the subordinate parts, and working out his rude beginnings. In the first rank of art, at this day, are others who, like the Count d’Orsay, have been unprepared, excepting by the possession of taste and genius, for the practice of art, and whose merits are in no way obscured by the assistance which they _also_ freely seek in the manipulation of their works; and it is no less easy to detect, in the pictures of the Count, the precise amount of mechanical aid which he has received from another hand, than the graces of character and feeling that are superadded by his own. I have seen a rough model, executed entirely by himself, of such extraordinary power and simplicity of design, that I begged him to have it _moulded_, and not to proceed to the details of the work, until he could first place this model side by side with the cast in clay, to be worked up. He took my advice, and his equestrian statue of the first Napoleon may fairly justify my opinion.

“In art, he had a heartfelt sympathy, a searching eye, and a critical taste, fostered by habitual intercourse with some of our first artists.”

This letter from D’Orsay to Lane shows the Count in an amiable light:—

“PARIS, _21st February 1850_.

“MY DEAR LANE,—I cannot really express to you the extent of my sorrow about your dear and good family. You know that my heart is quite open to sympathy with the sorrows of others. But judge therefore, how it must be, when so great a calamity strikes a family like yours, which family I always considered one of the best I ever had the good fortune to know. What a trial for dear Mrs Lane, after so many cares, losing a son like yours, just at the moment that he was to derive the benefit of the good education you gave him.… There is no consolation to offer. The only one that I can imagine, is to think continually of the person lost, and to make oneself more miserable by thinking. It is, morally speaking, an homœopathic treatment, and the only one which can give some relief.… Give my most affectionate regards to your dear family, and believe me always—far or near. Your sincere friend,

“D’ORSAY.”

In 1843 D’Orsay writes jestingly of himself: “I am poetising, modelling, etc., etc. In fact, I begin to believe that I am a Michael Angelo _manqué_.”

Concerning the Wellington statuette, D’Orsay writes to Madden: “You must have seen by the newspapers that I have completed a great work, which creates a revolution in the Duke of Wellington’s own mind, and that of his family. It is a statuette on horseback of himself, in the costume and at the age of the Peninsular war. They say that it will be a fortune for me, as every regiment in the service will have one, as the Duke says publicly, that it is the only work by which he desires to be known, physically, by portraits. They say that he is very popular in Portugal and Spain. I thought possibly that you could sell for me the copyright at Lisbon, to some speculator to whom I could send the mould.”

Shortly before his death he completed a smaller equestrian statuette of the Duke, an account of which was given in the _Morning Chronicle_ of 23rd December 1852:—

“One of the last of the late lamented Count d’Orsay’s studies was a statuette of the Duke on horseback, the first copy of which, in bronze, was carefully retouched and polished by the artist. The work is remarkable for its mingled grace and sprightliness. The Duke, sitting firmly back in his saddle, is reining in a pawing charger, charmingly modelled, and a peculiar effect is obtained by the rider dividing the reins, and stretching that on the left side completely back over the thigh. The portrait is good, particularly that of the full face, and very carefully finished, and the costume is a characteristic closely-fitting military undress, with hanging cavalry sabre. Altogether, indeed, the statuette forms a most agreeable memorial, not only of the Duke, but, in some degree, of the gifted artist.”

Henry Vizetelly roundly states that there was no secrecy about the help rendered to D’Orsay in his equestrian statuettes, etc., by T. H. Nicholson, a draughtsman of horses, and that the faces of these works of art were modelled by Behnes. He goes on to say: “The statuette of the Duke of Wellington on horseback was undoubtedly Nicholson’s, and that famous bust of the Iron Duke which was to make the fortune of the lucky manufacturer who reproduced it in porcelain, is said to have been his and Behnes’ joint work.”

Then follows this amusing story:—

“Sir Henry Cole—Old King Cole of the Brompton toilers,[22] and Felix Flummery of the art-manufacture craze—used to tell an amusing story of the high estimate, artistic and pecuniary, which D’Orsay set upon this production. The Count had written to ask him to call at Gore House, and on his proceeding there, after handing his card through the wicket, he was cautiously admitted to the grounds and safely piloted between two enormous mastiffs to the door of the house. He was then conducted to the Count, whom he found pacing up and down Lady Blessington’s drawing-room in a gorgeous dressing-gown.

“D’Orsay, Cole used to say, at once broke out with—‘You are a friend of Mr Minton’s! I can make his fortune for him!’ Then turning to his servant, ‘François,’ said he, ‘go to my studio and in the corner you will find a bust. Cover it over with your handkerchief and bring it carefully here.’ François soon returned carrying his burthen as tenderly as though it were a baby, and when he had deposited it on the table, the Count removed the handkerchief and posing before the bust with looks of rapt admiration, he promptly asked Cole—

“‘What do you think of that?’

“‘It’s a close likeness,’ Cole cautiously replied.

“‘Likeness! indeed it is a likeness!’ shouted the Count, ‘why, Douro when he saw it exclaimed: “D’Orsay, you quite appal me with the likeness to my father!”’

“The Count then confided to Cole that the Duke had given him four sittings, after refusing, said he, a single sitting to ‘that fellow Landseer.’

“The Duke it seems came to inspect the bust after it was completed. In D’Orsay’s biassed eyes he was as great in art as he was in war, and he always went, the Count maintained, straight up to the finest thing in the room to look at it. Naturally, therefore, he at once marched up to the bust, paused, and shouted:—

“’”By God, D’Orsay, you have done what those damned busters never could do.“’

“The puff preliminary over, the Count next proceeded to business.

“‘The old Duke will not live for ever,’ he sagely remarked; ‘he must die one of these days. Now, what I want you to do is to advise your friend Minton to make ten thousand copies of that bust, to pack them up in his warehouse and on the day of the Duke’s death to flood the country with them, and heigh presto! his fortune is made.’

“The Count hinted that he expected a trifle of £10,000 for his copyright, but Cole’s friend, Minton, did not quite see this, and proposed a royalty upon every copy sold. D’Orsay, who was painfully hard up for ready cash, indignantly spurned the offer.…”

D’Orsay is most generally known as an artist by reason of his large portrait of the Duke of Wellington now in the National Portrait Gallery, upon the completion of which the Duke is said to have shaken hands with the painter, saying: “At last I have been painted like a gentleman! I’ll never sit to anyone else.” And he certainly did write to Lady Blessington:—“You are quite right. Count d’Orsay’s work is of a higher description of art than is described by the word portrait! But I described it by that word, because the likeness is so remarkably good, and so well executed as a painting, and that this is the truest of all artistic ability, truest of all in this country.” Which last sentence is rather enigmatical.

Anent the statuette of O’Connell, referred to already, may be quoted a letter written by D’Orsay on 16th March 1847 to John Forster:—

“Prince Napoleon told me to-night at the French play, that he read in an evening paper, the _Globe_, I think, an article copied from an Irish paper, stating that I had made a statuette of O’Connell, and praising it, etc. I suppose that it is from Osborne Bernal,[23] who is in Ireland. But I would be glad it were known that I have associated him in the composition with the Catholic Emancipation, and also that I intend to make a present of the copyright to Ireland, for the benefit of the subscription for the poor.”

Of other works from his hand we may name the bust of Emile de Girardin, a portrait of Sir Robert Peel, and the picture of which some details have already been given, showing a group in the garden of Gore House.

We have already quoted an account of one visit paid by D’Orsay to Haydon, here is that of a second, from an entry in the painter’s Diary, dated 31st June 1838:—

“About seven, D’Orsay called, whom I had not seen for long. He was much improved, and looking the glass of fashion and the mould of form; really a complete Adonis, not made up at all. He made some capital remarks, all of which must be attended to. They were sound impressions, and grand. He bounded into his cab, and drove off like a young Apollo, with a fiery Pegasus. I looked after him. I like to see such specimens.”

In conclusion on this subject, from the _New Monthly Magazine_ of August 1845, this:—

“Whatever Count d’Orsay undertakes, seems invariably to be well done. As the arbiter elegantiarum he has reigned supreme in matters of taste and fashion, confirming the attempts of others by his approbation, or gratifying them by his example. To dress, or drive, to shine in the gay world like Count d’Orsay was once the ambition of the youth of England, who then discovered in this model no higher attributes. But if time, who ‘steals our years away,’ steals also our pleasures, he replaces them with others, or substitutes a better thing; and thus it has befallen with Count d’Orsay.

“If the gay equipage, or the well-apparelled man be less frequently seen than formerly, that which causes more lasting satisfaction, and leaves an impression of a far more exalted nature, comes day by day into higher relief, awakening only the regret that it should have been concealed so long. When we see what Count d’Orsay’s productions are, we are tempted to ask, with Malvolio’s feigned correspondent, ‘Why were these things hid?’”

All things considered we may write down Count d’Orsay as a quite first-rate amateur, as skilful in the arts as any dandy has ever been. What more fitting than that his skill and accomplishment were best shown in his bust of Lady Blessington?

XXII

LETTERS

D’Orsay, had he devoted his time and his mind to the matter, could doubtless have attained high eminence as a painter and sculptor, but he was wise and refused to be bitten by the temptation; he well knew that there are many artists, but few dandies. The gifts that other men would have cultivated exclusively, he used to heighten and perfect his genius as a master of dandyship. It is perhaps the highest attribute of genius to be able to recognise genius—in oneself; only mediocre men are modest. Modesty is a sign of incompetency or stupidity.

Could D’Orsay have achieved greatness as a writer? Byron thought very highly of the journal which, it will be remembered, D’Orsay wrote during his first visit to London, but we cannot accept this criticism as final, for the poet’s literary judgment was often faulty.

He is reputed to have been a contributor to some of the journals of the day and he was put forward as the “editor” of the translation published in London in 1847 of a French novel, _Marie, Histoire d’une Jeune Fille_. But other men have gained fame with as little regular literary baggage as the Count, literature in the form of familiar letters, written always, or almost always, without a thought that they would meet the public eye. Of casual letters we have a fair number of D’Orsay’s, and some of them make quite pleasant reading. At any rate they are as good as those which are not written by dandies, which is saying much, for dandies have many important affairs to fill their time. They are chatty epistles, serve to shed a light upon their writer’s character; by his letters to his friends you may know the man.

Here is a note from him to Landor, written in September 1828:—

“I have received, dear Mr Landor, your letter. It has given us great pleasure. You ought to feel sure that we should particularly appreciate a letter from you, and it will appear that our intimacy in Florence counted for nothing with you if you doubt the pleasure that your news arouses in us. As soon as I have received the pictures I will carry out your commission carefully. I do wish you would come to Paris, for we have some fine things to show you, particularly pictures. Apropos, I am sending you herewith the portrait of Prince Borghese, which I hope you will find to be a good likeness.… We talk and think often of you. It is really strange that you are in the odour of sanctity in this family, for it seems to me it is not exactly this sort of reputation you pique yourself on possessing.

“Lady B. and all our ladies send you a thousand good wishes and I renew the assurance of the sincerity of mine.—Yours very affectionately,

“D’ORSAY.”

“All our ladies,” included Lady d’Orsay.