‘Some demon whisper’d, Visto, have a taste!’
‘Some demon whisper’d, Visto, have a taste!’
‘Some demon whisper’d, Visto, have a taste!’
‘Some demon whisper’d, Visto, have a taste!’
I said I thought L—’s pictures might do very well as mirrors for personal vanity to contemplate itself in (as you looked in the glass to see how you were dressed), but that it was a mistake to suppose they would interest any one else or were addressed to the world at large. They were private, not public property. They never caught the eye in a shop window; but were (as it appeared to me) a kind oflithographicpainting, or thin, meagre outlines without the depth and richness of the art. I mentioned to Northcote the pleasure I had formerly taken in a little print ofGadshillfrom a sketch of his own, which I used at one time to pass a certain shop-window on purpose to look at. He said, ‘It was impossible to tell beforehand what would hit the public. You might as well pretend to say what ticket would turn up a prize in the lottery. It was not chance neither, but some unforeseen coincidence between the subject and the prevailing taste,that you could not possibly be a judge of. I had once painted two pictures; one of a Fortune-teller (a boy with a monkey), and another called ‘The Visit to the Grandmother;’ and Raphael Smith came to me and wanted to engrave them, being willing to give a handsome sum for the first, but only to do the last as an experiment. He sold ten times as many of the last as of the first, and told me that there were not less than five different impressions done of it in Paris; and once when I went to his house to get one to complete a set of engravings after my designs, they asked me six guineas for a proof-impression! This was too much, but I was delighted that I could not afford to pay for my own work, from the value that was set upon it!’—I said, people were much alarmed at the late failures, and thought there would be a ‘blow-up,’ in the vulgar phrase.—‘Surely you can’t suppose so? A blow-up! Yes, of adventurers and upstarts, but not of the country, if they mean that. This is like the man who thought that gin-drinking would put an end to the world. Oh! no—the country will go on just as before, bating the distress to individuals. You may form an idea on the subject if you ever go to look at the effects of a fire the day after: you see nothing but smoke and ruins and bare walls, and think the damage can never be repaired; but if you pass by the same way a week after, you will find the houses all built up just as they were before or even better than ever! No, there is the same wealth, the same industry and ingenuity in the country as there was before; and till you destroy that, you cannot destroy the country. These temporary distresses are only like disorders in the body, that carry off its bad and superfluous humours.
‘My neighbour Mr. Rowe, the bookseller, informed me the other day that Signora Cecilia Davies frequently came to his shop, and always inquired after me. Did you ever hear of her?’ No never! ‘She must be very old now. Fifty years ago, in the time of Garrick, she made a vast sensation. All England rang with her name. I do assure you, that in this respect Madame Catalani was not more talked of. Afterwards she had retired to Florence, and was thePrima Donnathere, when Storace first came out. This was at the time when Mr. Hoare and myself were in Italy; and I remember we went to call upon her. She had then in a great measure fallen off, but she was still very much admired. What a strange thing a reputation of this kind is, that the person herself survives, and sees the meteors of fashion rise and fall one after another, while she remains totally disregarded as if there had been no such person, yet thinking all the while that she was better than any of them! I have hardly heard her name mentioned in the last thirty years, though in her time she was quite as famous as any one since.’ I said, anOpera-reputationwas after all but a kind ofPrivate Theatricalsand confined to a small circle, compared with that of the regular stage, which all the world were judges of and took an interest in. It was but the echo of a sound, or like the blaze of phosphorus that did not communicate to the surrounding objects. It belonged to a fashionablecoterie, rather than to the public, and might easily die away at the end of the season. I then observed I was more affected by the fate of players than by that of any other class of people. They seemed to me more to be pitied than any body—the contrast was so great between the glare, the noise, and intoxication of their first success, and the mortifications and neglect of their declining years. They were made drunk with popular applause; and when this stimulus was withdrawn, must feel the insignificance of ordinary life particularly vapid and distressing. There were no sots like thesots of vanity. There were no traces left of what they had been, any more than of a forgotten dream; and they had no consolation but in their own conceit, which, when it was without other vouchers, was a very uneasy comforter. I had seen some actors who had been favourites in my youth and ‘cried up in the top of the compass,’ treated, from having grown old and infirm, with the utmost indignity and almost hooted from the stage. I had seen poor — come forward under these circumstances to stammer out an apology with the tears in his eyes (which almost brought them into mine) to a set of apprentice-boys and box-lobby loungers, who neither knew nor cared what a fine performer and a fine gentleman he was thought twenty years ago. Players were so far particularly unfortunate. The theatrical public have a very short memory. Every four or five years there is a new audience, who know nothing but of what they have before their eyes, and who pronounce summarily upon this, without any regard to past obligations or past services, and with whom the veterans of the stage stand a bad chance indeed, as their former triumphs are entirely forgotten, while they appear as living vouchers against themselves. ‘Do you remember,’ said Northcote, ‘Sheridan’s beautiful lines on the subject in hisMonody on Garrick?’ I said, I did; and that it was probably the reading them early that had impressed this feeling so strongly on my mind. Northcote then remarked, ‘I think a great beauty is most to be pitied. She completely outlives herself. She has been used to the most bewitching homage, to have the highest court paid and the most flattering things said to her by all those who approach her, and to be received with looks of delight and surprise wherever she comes; and she afterwards not only finds herself deprived of all this and reduced to a cypher, but sees it all transferred to another, who has become the reigning toast and beauty of the dayin her stead. It must be a most violent shock. It is like a king who is dethroned and reduced to serve as a page in his own palace. I remember once being struck with seeing the Duchess of —, the same that Sir Joshua painted, and who was a miracle of beauty when she was young, and followed by crowds wherever she went—I was coming out of Mrs. W—’s; and on the landing-place, there was she standing by herself, and calling over the bannister for her servant to come to her. If she had been as she once was, a thousand admirers would have flown to her assistance; but her face was painted over like a mask, and there was hardly any appearance of life left but the restless motion of her eyes. I was really hurt.’ I answered, the late Queen had much the same painful look that he described—her face highlyrouged, and her eyes rolling in her head like an automaton, but she had not the mortification of having ever been a great beauty. ‘There was a Miss —, too,’ Northcote added, ‘who was a celebrated beauty when she was a girl, and who also sat to Sir Joshua. I saw her not long ago and she was grown as coarse and vulgar as possible; she was like an apple-woman or would do to keep theThree Tuns. The change must be very mortifying. To be sure, there is one thing, it comes on by degrees. The ravages of the small-pox must formerly have been a dreadful blow!’ He said, literary men or men of talent in general were the best off in this respect. The reputation they acquired was not only lasting, but gradually grew stronger, if it was deserved. I agreed they were seldom spoiled by flattery, and had no reason to complainafter they were dead. ‘Nor while they are living,’ said N—, ‘if it is not their own fault.’ He mentioned an instance of a trial about an engraving where he, West, and others had to appear, and of the respect that was shown them. Erskine after flourishing away, made an attempt to puzzle Stothard by drawing two angles on a piece of paper, an acute and an obtuse one, and asking, ‘Do you mean to say these two are alike?’ ‘Yes, I do,’ was the answer. ‘I see,’ said Erskine, turning round, ‘there is nothing to be got byanglinghere!’ West was then called upon to give his evidence, and there was immediately a lane made for him to come forward, and a stillness that you could hear a pin drop. The Judge (Lord Kenyon) then addressed him, ‘Sir Benjamin, we shall be glad to hear your opinion!’ Mr. West answered, ‘He had never received the honour of a title from his Majesty;’ and proceeded to explain the difference between the two engravings which were charged with being copies the one of the other, with such clearness and knowledge of the art, though in general he was a bad speaker, that Lord Kenyon said when he had done, ‘I suppose, gentlemen, you are perfectly satisfied—I perceivethere is much more in this than I had any idea of, and am sorry I did not make it more my study when I was young!’ I remarked that I believed corporations of art or letters might meet with a certain attention; but it was the stragglers and candidates that were knocked about with very little ceremony. Talent or merit only wanted a frame of some sort or other to set it off to advantage. Those of my way of thinking were ‘bitter bad judges’ on this point. A Tory scribe who treated mankind as rabble andcanaille, was regarded by them in return as a fine gentleman: a reformer like myself, who stood up for liberty and equality, was taken at his word by the very journeymen that set up his paragraphs, and could not get a civil answer from the meanest shop-boy in the employ of those on his own side of the question. N— laughed and said, I irritated myself too much about such things. He said it was one of Sir Joshua’s maxims that the art of life consisted in not being overset by trifles. We should look at the bottom of the account, not at each individual item in it, and see how the balance stands at the end of the year. We should be satisfied if the path of life is clear before us, and not fret at the straws or pebbles that lie in our way. What you have to look to is whether you can get what you write printed, and whether the public will read it, and not to busy yourself with the remarks of shop-boys or printers’ devils. They can do you neither harm nor good. The impertinence of mankind is a thing that no one can guard against.
Northcote shewed me a poem with engravings of Dartmoor, which were too fine by half. I said I supposed Dartmoor would look more gay and smiling after having been thus illustrated, like a dull author who has been praised by a Reviewer. I had once been nearly benighted there and was delighted to get to the inn at Ashburton. ‘That,’ said N—, ‘is the only good of such places that you are glad to escape from them, and look back to them with a pleasing horror ever after. Commend me to the Valdarno or Vallambrosa, where you are never weary of new charms, and which you quit with a sigh of regret. I have, however, told my young friend who sent me the poem, that he has shown his genius in creating beauties where there were none, and extracting enthusiasm from rocks and quagmires. After that, he may write a very interesting poem on Kamschatka!’ He then spoke of the Panorama of the North Pole which had been lately exhibited, of the ice-bergs, the seals lying asleep on the shore, and the strange twilight as well worth seeing. He said, it would becurious to know the effect, if they could get to the Pole itself, though it must be impossible: the veins, he should suppose, would burst, and the vessel itself go to pieces from the extreme cold. I asked if he had ever read an account of twelve men who had been left all the winter in Greenland, and of the dreadful shifts to which they were reduced? He said, he had not.—They were obliged to build two booths of wood one within the other; and if they had to go into the outer one during the severity of the weather, unless they used great precaution, their hands were blistered by whatever they took hold of as if it had been red-hot iron. The most interesting part was the account of their waiting for the return of light at the approach of spring, and the delight with which they first saw the sun shining on the tops of the frozen mountains. N— said, ‘This is the great advantage of descriptions of extraordinary situations by uninformed men: Nature as it were holds the pen for them; they give you what is most striking in the circumstances, and there is nothing to draw off the attention from the strong and actual impression, so that it is the next thing to the reality. G— was here the other day, and I showed him the note from my bookseller about theFables, with which you were so much pleased, but he saw nothing in it. I then said G— is not one of those who look attentively at nature or draw much from that source. Yet the rest is but like building castles in the air, if it is not founded in observation and experience. Or it is like the enchanted money in theArabian Nights, which turned to dry leaves when you came to make use of it. It is ingenious and amusing, and so far it is well to be amused when you can; but you learn nothing from the fine hypothesis you have been reading, which is only a better sort of dream, bright and vague and utterly inapplicable to the purposes of common life. G— does not appeal to nature, but to art and execution. There is another thing (which it seems harsh and presumptuous to say, but) he appears to me not always to perceive the difference between right and wrong. There are many others in the same predicament, though not such splendid examples of it. He is satisfied to make out a plausible case, to give theprosandconslike a lawyer; but he has no instinctive bias or feeling one way or other, except as he can give a studied reason for it. Common sense is out of the question: such people despise common sense, and the quarrel between them is a mutual one. Caleb Williams, notwithstanding, is a decidedly original work: the rest are the sweepings of his study. That is but one thing, to be sure; but no one does more than one thing. Northcote said that Sir Joshua used to say that no one produced more than six original things. I always said it was wrong to fix upon this number—five out of the six would befound upon examination to be repetitions of the first. A man can no more produce six original works than he can be six individuals at once. Whatever is the strong and prevailing bent of his genius, he will stamp upon some master-work; and what he does else, will be only the same thing over again, a little better or a little worse; or if he goes out of his way in search of variety and to avoid himself, he will merely become a common-place man or an imitator of others. You see this plainly enough in Cervantes—that he has exhausted himself in the Don Quixote. He has put his whole strength into it: his other works are no better than what other people could write. If there is any exception, it is Shakspeare: he seems to have had the faculty of dividing himself into a number of persons. His writings stand out from every thing else, and from one another. Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff are striking and original characters; but they die a natural death at the end of the fifth act, and no more come to life again than the people themselves would. He is not reduced to repeat himself or revive former inventions under feigned names. This is peculiar to him; still it is to be considered that plays are short works and only allow room for the expression of a part. But in a work of the extent of Don Quixote, the writer had scope to bring in all he wanted; and indeed there is no point of excellence which he has not touched from the highest courtly grace and most romantic enthusiasm down to the lowest ribaldry and rustic ignorance, yet carried off with such an air that you wish nothing away, and do not see what can be added to it. Every bit is perfect; and the author has evidently given his whole mind to it. That is why I believe that theScotch Novelsare the production of several hands. Some parts are careless, others straggling: it is only where there is an opening for effect that the master-hand comes in, and in general he leaves his work for others to get on with it. But in Don Quixote there is not a single line that you may not swear belongs to Cervantes.’—I inquired if he had readWoodstock? He answered, No, he had not been able to get it. I said, I had been obliged to pay five shillings for the loan of it at a regular bookseller’s shop (I could not procure it at the circulating libraries), and that from the understood feeling about Sir Walter no objection was made to this proposal, which would in ordinary cases have been construed into an affront. I had well nigh repented my bargain, but there were one or two scenes that repaid me (though none equal to his best,) and in general it was very indifferent. The plot turned chiefly on English Ghost-scenes, a very mechanical sort of phantoms who dealt in practical jokes and personal annoyances, turning beds upside down and sousing you all over with water, instead of supernatural and visionaryhorrors. It was very bad indeed, but might be intended to contrast the literal, matter-of-fact imagination of theSouthronwith the loftier impulses of Highland superstition. CharlesII.was not spared, and was brought in admirably (when in disguise) as a raw, awkward Scotch lad, Master Kerneguy. Cromwell was made a fine, bluff, overbearing blackguard, who exercised a personal superiority wherever he came, but was put in situations which I thought wholly out of character, and for which I apprehended there was no warrant in the history of the times. They were therefore so far improper. A romance-writer might take an incident and work it out according to his fancy or might build an imaginary superstructure on the ground of history, but he had no right to transpose the facts. For instance, he had made Cromwell act as his own tip-staff and go to Woodstock to take CharlesII.in person. To be sure, he had made him display considerable firmness and courage in the execution of this errand (as Lavender might in being the first to enter a window to secure a desperate robber)—but the plan itself, to say nothing of the immediate danger, was contrary to Cromwell’s dignity as well as policy. Instead of wishing to seize Charles with his own hand, he would naturally keep as far aloof from such a scene as he could, and be desirous to have it understood that he was anxious to shed as little more blood as possible. Besides, he had higher objects in view, and would, I should think, care not much more about Charles than about Master Kerneguy. He would be glad to let him get away. In another place, he had made Cromwell start back in the utmost terror at seeing a picture of CharlesI.and act all the phrenzy of Macbeth over again at the sight of Banquo’s ghost. This I should also suppose to be quite out of character in a person of Cromwell’s prosaic, determined habitsto fear a painted devil. ‘No,’ said N—, ‘that is not the way he would look at it; it is seeing only a part: but Cromwell was a greater philosopher than to act so. The other story is more probable of his visiting the dead body of Charles in a mask, and exclaiming in great agitation as he left the room,Cruel necessity! Yet even this is not sufficiently authenticated. No; he knew that it was come to this, that it was gone too far for either party to turn back, and that it must be final with one of them. The only question was whether he should give himself up as the victim, and so render all that had been done useless, or exact the penalty from what he thought the offending party. It was like a battle which must end fatally either way, and no one thought of lamenting, because he was not on the losing side. In a great public quarrel there was no room for these domestic and personal regards: all you had to do was to consider well the justice of the cause, before you appealed to the sword. Would CharlesI.ifhe had been victorious, have started at the sight of a picture of Cromwell? Yet Cromwell was as much of a man as he, and as firm as the other was obstinate.’ Northcote said, he wished he could remember the subject of a dispute he had with G— to see if I did not think he had the best of it. I replied, I should be more curious to hear something in which G— was right, for he generally made it a rule to be in the wrong when speaking of any thing. I mentioned having once had a very smart debate with him about a young lady, of whom I had been speaking as very much like her aunt, a celebrated authoress, and as what the latter, I conceived, might have been at her time of life. G— said, when Miss — did any thing like Evelina or Cecilia, he should then believe she was as clever as Madame d’Arblay. I asked him whether he did not think Miss Burney was as clever before she wrote those novels as she was after; or whether in general an author wrote a successful work for being clever, or was clever because he had written a successful work! Northcote laughed and said, ‘That was so like G—.’ I observed that it arose out of his bigoted admiration of literature, so that he could see no merit in any thing else; nor trust to any evidence of talent but what was printed. It was much the same fallacy that had sometimes struck me in the divines, who deduced original sin from Adam’s eating the apple, and not his eating the apple from original sin or a previous inclination to do something, that he should not. Northcote remarked, that speaking of Evelina put him in mind of what Opie had once told him, that when Dr. Johnson sat to him for his picture, on his first coming to town, he asked him if it was true that he had sat up all night to read Miss Burney’s new novel, as it had been reported? And he made answer, ‘I never read it through at all, though I don’t wish this to be known.’ Sir Joshua also pretended to have read it through at a sitting, though it appeared to him (Northcote) affectation in them both, who were thorough-paced men of the world, and hackneyed in literature, to pretend to be so delighted with the performance of a girl, in which they could find neither instruction nor any great amusement, except from the partiality of friendship. So Johnson cried up Savage, because they had slept on bulks when they were young; and lest he should be degraded into a vagabond by the association, had elevated the other into a genius. Such prevarication or tampering with his own convictions was not consistent with the strict and formal tone of morality which he assumed on other and sometimes very trifling occasions, such as correcting Mrs. Thrale for saying that a bird flew in at the door, instead of the window. I said, Savage, in my mind, was one of those writers (like Chatterton) whose vices and misfortunes the world made aset-offto their genius, because glad to connect these ideas together. They were only severe upon those who attacked their prejudices or their consequence. Northcote replied, ‘Savage the architect was here the other day, and asked me why I had abused his name-sake, and called him an impostor. I answered, I had heard that character of him from a person in an obscure rank of life, who had known him a little before his death.’ Northcote proceeded: ‘People in that class are better judges than poets and moralists, who explain away every thing by fine words and doubtful theories. The mob are generally right in their summary judgments upon offenders. A man is seldom ducked or pumped upon or roughly handled by them, unless he has deserved it. You see that in the galleries at the play-house. They never let any thing pass that is immoral; and they are even fastidious judges of wit. I remember there was some gross expression in Goldsmith’s comedy the first night it came out; and there was a great uproar in the gallery, and it was obliged to be suppressed. Though rude and vulgar themselves, they do not like vulgarity on the stage; they come there to be taught manners.’ I said, they paid more attention than any body else; and after the curtain drew up (though somewhat noisy before) were the best-behaved part of the audience, unless something went wrong. As the common people sought for refinement as atreat, people in high life were fond of grossness and ribaldry as a relief to their overstrained affectation of gentility. I could account in no other way for their being amused with the wretchedslangin certain magazines and newspapers. I asked Northcote if he had seen the third series of —? He had not. I said they were like the composition of a footman, and I believed greatly admired in the upper circles, who were glad to see an author arrange a side-board for them over again with servile alacrity. He said, ‘They delight in low, coarse buffoonery, because it sets off their own superiority: whereas the rabble resent it when obtruded upon them, because they think it is meant against themselves. They require the utmost elegance and propriety for their money: as the showman says in Goldsmith’s comedy—“My bear dances to none but the genteelest of tunes,Water parted from the Sea, or the minuet inAriadne!”’
Northcote then alluded to a new novel he had been reading. He said he never read a book so full of words; which seemed ridiculous enough to say, for a book was necessarily composed of words, but here there was nothing else but words, to a degree that was surprising. Yet he believed it was sought after, and indeed he could not get it at the common library. ‘You are to consider, there must be books for all tastes and all ages. You may despise it, but the world do not. There are books for children till the time they are sixyears of age, such as Jack-the-Giant-Killer, the Seven Champions of Christendom, Guy of Warwick and others.[96]From that to twelve they like to read the Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and then Fielding’s Novels and Don Quixote: from twenty to thirty books of poetry, Milton, Pope, Shakspeare: and from thirty history and philosophy—what suits us then will serve us for the rest of our lives. For boarding-school girlsThomson’s Seasonshas an immense attraction, though I never could read it. Some people cannot get beyond a newspaper or a geographical dictionary. What I mean to infer is that we ought not to condemn too hastily, for a work may be approved by the public, though it does not exactly hit our taste; nay, those may seem beauties to others which seem faults to us. Why else do we pride ourselves on the superiority of our judgment, if we are not more advanced in this respect than the majority of readers? But our very fastidiousness should teach us toleration. You have said very well of this novel, that it is a mixture of genteel and romantic affectation. One objection to the excessive rhodomontade which abounds in it is that you can learn nothing from such extravagant fictions:—they are like nothing in the known world. I remember once speaking to Richardson (Sheridan’s friend) about Shakspeare’s want of morality, and he replied—“What! Shakspeare not moral? He is the most moral of all writers, because he is the most natural!” And in this he was right: for though Shakspeare did not intend to be moral, yet he could not be otherwise as long as he adhered to the path of nature. Morality only teaches us our duty by showing us the natural consequences of our actions; and the poet does the same while he continues to give us faithful and affecting pictures of human life—rewarding the good and punishing the bad. So far truth and virtue are one. But that kind of poetry which has not its foundation in nature, and is only calculated to shock and surprise, tends to unhinge our notions of morality and of every thing else in the ordinary course of Providence.’
Something being said of an artist who had attempted to revive the great style in our times, and the question being put, whether Michael Angelo and Raphael, had they lived now, would not have accommodated themselves to the modern practice, I said, it appeared to me that (whether this was the case or not) they could not have done what they did without the aid of circumstances; that for an artist to raise himself above all surrounding opinions, customs, and institutions by a mere effort of the will, was affectation and folly, like attempting to fly in the air; and that, though great genius might exist withoutthe opportunities favourable to its development, yet it must draw its nourishment from circumstances, and suck in inspiration from its native air. There was Hogarth—he was surely a genius; still the manners of his age were necessary to him: teeming as his works were with life, character, and spirit, they would have been poor and vapid without the night-cellars of St. Giles’s, the drawing-rooms of St. James’s! Would he in any circumstances have been a Raphael or a Phidias? I think not. But had he been twenty times a Raphael or a Phidias, I am quite sure it would never have appeared in the circumstances in which he was placed. Two things are necessary to all great works and great excellence, the mind of the individual and the mind of the age or country co-operating with his own genius. The last brings out the first, but the first does not imply or supersede the last. Pictures for Protestant churches are a contradiction in terms, where they are not objects of worship but of idle curiosity:—where there is not the adoration, the enthusiasm in the spectator, how can it exist in the artist? The spark of genius is only kindled into a flame by sympathy.—Northcote spoke highly of Vanbrugh and of the calm superiority with which he bore the attacks of Swift, Pope, and that set who made a point of decrying all who did not belong to their party. He said Burke and Sir Joshua thought his architecture far from contemptible; and his comedies were certainly first-rate. Richards (the scene-painter) had told him, the players thought the Provoked Husband the best acting play on the stage; and Godwin said the City-Wives’ Confederacy (taken from an indifferent French play) was the best written one. I ventured to add, that the Trip to Scarborough (altered but not improved by Sheridan) was not inferior to either of the others. I should doubt whether the direction given at Sir Tunbelly’s castle on the arrival of Young Fashion—‘Let loose the grey-hound, and lock up Miss Hoyden!’—would be in Sheridan’s version, who, like most of his countrymen, had a prodigious ambition of elegance. Northcote observed, that talking of this put him in mind of a droll speech that was made when the officers got up a play on board the vessel that went lately to find out the North-West passage:—one of the sailors, who was admiring the performance, and saying how clever it was, was interrupted by the boatswain, who exclaimed—‘Clever! did you say? I call itphilosophy, by G—d!’ He asked, if he had ever mentioned to me that anecdote of Lord Mansfield, who, when an old woman was brought before him as a witch, and was charged, among other improbable things, with walking through the air, attended coolly to the evidence, and then dismissed the complaint by saying, ‘My opinion is that this good woman be suffered to return home, andwhether she shall do this, walking on the ground or riding through the air, must be left entirely to her own pleasure, for there is nothing contrary to the laws of England in either!’ I mentioned a very fine dancer at the Opera (Mademoiselle Brocard) with whom I was much delighted; and Northcote observed that where there was grace and beauty accompanying the bodily movements, it was very hard to deny the mental refinement or the merit of this art. He could not see why that which was so difficult to do, and which gave so much pleasure to others, was to be despised. He remembered seeing some young people at Parma (though merely in a country-dance) exhibit a degree of perfection in their movements that seemed to be inspired by the very genius of grace and gaiety. Miss Reynolds used to say that perfection was much the same in everything—nobody could assign the limits. I said authors alone were privileged to suppose that all excellence was confined to words. Till I was twenty I thought there was nothing in the world but books: when I began to paint I found there were two things, both difficult to do and worth doing; and I concluded from that time there might be fifty. At least I was willing to allow every one his own choice. I recollect a certain poet saying ‘he should like toham-stringthose fellows at the Opera’—I suppose because the Great would rather see them dance than readKehama. Whatever can be done in such a manner that you can fancy a God to do it, must have something in its nature divine. The ancients had assigned Gods to dancing as well as to music and poetry, to the different attributes and perfections both of body and mind; and perhaps the plurality of the heathen deities was favourable to a liberality of taste and opinion.Northcote: ‘The most wretched scribbler looks down upon the greatest painter as a mere mechanic: but who would compare Lord Byron with Titian?’
I went to Northcote in the evening to consult about hisFables. He was downstairs in the parlour, and talked much as usual: but the difference of the accompaniments, the sitting down, the preparations for tea, the carpet and furniture, and a little fat lap-dog interfered with old associations and took something from the charm of his conversation. He spoke of a Mr. Laird who had been employed to see hisLife of Sir Joshuathrough the press, and whom he went to call upon in an upper story in Peterborough-Court, Fleet-street, where he was surrounded by his books, his implements of writing, a hand-organ, and his coffee-pots; and he said he envied him this retreatmore than any palace he had ever happened to enter. Northcote was not very well, and repeated his complaints. I said I thought the air (now summer was coming on) would do him more good than physic. His apothecary had been describing the dissection of the elephant, which had just been killed at Exeter ‘Change. It appeared that instead of the oil which usually is found in the joints of animals, the interstices were in this case filled up with a substance resembling a kind of white paint. This Northcote considered as a curious instance of the wise contrivance of nature in the adaptation of means to ends; for even in pieces of artificial mechanism, though they use oil to lubricate the springs and wheels of clocks and other common-sized instruments, yet in very large and heavy ones, such as steam-engines, &c. they are obliged to use grease, pitch, and other more solid substances, to prevent the friction. If they could dissect a flea, what a fine, evanescent fluid would be found to lubricate its slender joints and assist its light movements! Northcote said the bookseller wished to keep the original copy of theFablesto bind up as a literary curiosity. I objected to this proceeding as unfair. There were several slips of the pen and slovenlinesses of style (for which I did not think him at all accountable, since an artist wrote with his left hand, and painted with his right) and I did not see why these accidental inadvertences, arising from diffidence and want of practice, should be as it were enshrined and brought against him. He said, ‘Mr. P— H— tasked me the hardest in what I wrote in theArtist. He pointed out where I was wrong, and sent it back to me to correct it. After all, what I did there was thought the best!’ I said Mr. H— was too fastidious, and spoiled what he did from a wish to have it perfect. He dreaded that a shadow of objection should be brought against any thing he advanced, so that his opinions at last amounted to a kind of genteel truisms. One must risk something in order to do any thing. I observed that this was remarkable in so clever a man; but it seemed as if there were some fatality by which the most lively and whimsical writers, if they went out of their own eccentric path and attempted to be serious, became exceedingly grave and even insipid. His farces were certainly very spirited and original:No Song no Supperwas the first play I had ever seen, and I felt grateful to him for this. Northcote agreed that it was very delightful; and said there was a volume of it when he first read it to them one night at Mrs. Rundle’s, and that the players cut it down a good deal and supplied a number of things. There was a great piece of work to alter the songs for Madame Storace, who played in it and who could not pronounce half the English terminations.My Grandmother, too, was a laughable idea, very ingeniouslyexecuted; and some of the songs in this had an equal portion of elegance and drollery, such as that in particular—
For alas! long before I was born,My fair one had died of old age!
For alas! long before I was born,My fair one had died of old age!
For alas! long before I was born,My fair one had died of old age!
For alas! long before I was born,
My fair one had died of old age!
Still some of his warmest admirers were hurt at their being farces—if they had been comedies, they would have been satisfied, for nothing could be greater than their success. They were the next to O’Keefe’s, who in that line was the English Moliere.
Northcote asked if I remembered the bringing out of any of O’Keefe’s? I answered, No. He said ‘It had the oddest effect imaginable—at one moment they seemed on the point of being damned, and the next moment you were convulsed with laughter. Edwin was inimitable in some of them. He was one of those actors, it is true, who carried a great deal off the stage with him, that he would willingly have left behind, and so far could not help himself. But his awkward, shambling figure in Bowkitt the dancing-master, was enough to make one die with laughing. He was also unrivalled inLingo, where he was admirably supported by Mrs. Wells in Cowslip, when she prefers “a roast duck” to all the birds in the Heathen Mythology—and inPeeping Tom, where he merely puts his head out, the faces that he made threw the audience into a roar.’ I said, I remembered no further back than B—, who used to delight me excessively inLenitivein the Prize, when I was a boy. Northcote said, he was an imitator of Edwin, but at a considerable distance. He was a good-natured, agreeable man; and the audience were delighted with him, because he was evidently delighted with them. In some respects he was a caricaturist: for instance, in Lenitive he stuck his pigtail on end, which he had no right to do, for no one had ever done it but himself. I said Liston appeared to me to have more comic humour than any one in my time, though he was not properly an actor. Northcote asked if he was not low-spirited; and told the story (I suspect an old one) of his consulting a physician on the state of his health, who recommended him to go and see Liston. I said he was grave and prosing, but I did not know there was any thing the matter with him, though I had seen him walking along the street the other day with his face as fixed as if had a lock-jaw, a book in his hand, looking neither to the right nor the left, and very much like his own Lord Duberly. I did not see why he and Matthews should both of them be sohipped, except from their havingthe player’s melancholy, arising from their not seeing six hundred faces on the broad grin before them at all other times as well as when they were acting. He was, however, exceedingly unaffected, and remarkably candid injudging of other actors. He always spoke in the highest terms of Munden, whom I considered as overdoing his parts.[97]Northcote said, ‘Munden was excellent but an artificial actor. You should have seen Weston,’ he continued. ‘It was impossible, from looking at him, for any one to say that he was acting. You would suppose they had gone out and found the actual character they wanted, and brought him upon the stage without his knowing it. Even when they interrupted him with peals of laughter and applause, he looked about him as if he was not at all conscious of having any thing to do with it, and then went on as before. In Scrub, Dr. Last, and other parts of that kind, he was perfection itself. Garrick would never attempt Abel Drugger after him. There was something peculiar in his face; for I knew an old school-fellow of his who told me he used to produce the same effect when a boy, and when the master asked what was the matter, his companions would make answer—‘Weston lookedat me, Sir!’ Yet he came out in tragedy, as indeed they all did! Northcote inquired if I had seen Garrick? I answered, ‘No—I could not very well, as he died the same year I was born!’ I mentioned having lately met with a striking instance of genealogical taste in a family, the grandfather of which thought nothing of Garrick, the father thought nothing of Mrs. Siddons, and the daughter could make nothing of the Scotch Novels, but admired Mr. Theodore Hook’s ‘Sayings and Doings!’
Northcote then returned to the subject of his book and said, ‘Sir Richard Phillips once wished me to do a very magnificent work indeed on the subject of art. He was like Curil, who had a number of fine title-pages, if any one could have written books to answer them. He came here once with Godwin to shew me a picture which they had just discovered of Chaucer, and which was to embellish Godwin’sLifeof him. I told them it was certainly no picture of Chaucer, nor was any such picture painted at that time.’ I said, Godwin had got a portrait about a year ago which he wished me to suppose was a likeness of President Bradshaw: I saw no reason for his thinking so, but that in that case it would be worth a hundred pounds to him! Northcote expressed a curiosity to have seen it, as he knew the descendants of the family at Plymouth. He remembered one of them, an old lady of the name of Wilcox, who used to walk about in Gibson’s-Field near the town, so prim and starched, holding up her fan spread out like a peacock’s tail with suchan air, on account of her supposed relationship to one of the Regicides! They paid, however (in the vulgar opinion) for this distinction; for others of them bled to death at the nose, or died of the bursting of a blood-vessel, which their wise neighbours did not fail to consider as a judgment upon them.
Speaking of Dr. M—, he said, he had such a feeling of beauty in his heart, that it made angels of every one around him. To check a person who was running on against another, he once said, ‘You should not speak in that manner, for you lead me to suppose you have the bad qualities you are so prone to dwell upon in others.’—A transition was here made to Lord Byron, who used to tell a story of a little red-haired girl, who, when countesses and ladies of fashion were leaving the room where he was in crowds (tocuthim after his quarrel with his wife) stopped short near a table against which he was leaning, gave him a familiar nod, and said, ‘You should have married me, and then this would not have happened to you!’ A question being started whether Dr. M— was handsome, Northcote answered, ‘I could see no beauty in him as to his outward person, but there was an angelic sweetness of disposition that spread its influence over his whole conversation and manner. He had not wit, but a fine romantic enthusiasm which deceived himself and enchanted others. I remember once his describing a picture by Rosa de Tivoli (at Saltram) ofTwo Bulls fighting, and he gave such an account of their rage and manner of tearing up the ground that I could not rest till we went over to see it—when we came there, it was nothing but a coarse daub like what might be expected from the painter: but he had made the rest out of a vivid imagination. So my father told him a story of a bull-bait he had seen in which the bull had run so furiously at the dog that he broke the chain and pitched upon his head and was killed. Soon after, he came and told us the same story as an incident he himself had witnessed. He did not mean to deceive, but the image had made such an impression on his fancy, that he believed it to be one that he had himself been an eye-witness of.’ I was much amused with this account and I offered to get him a copy of a whimsical production, of which a new edition had been printed. I also recommended to him theSpanish Rogue, as a fine mixture of drollery and grave moralizing. He spoke ofLazarillo de Tormesand of theCheats of Scapin, the last of which he rated rather low. The work was written by Scarron, whose widow, the famous Madame de Maintenon, afterwards became mistress to LouisXIV.
PART THE SECOND
N.—That is your diffidence, which I can’t help thinking you carry too far. For any one of real strength, you are the humblest person I ever knew.
H.—It is owing to pride.
N.—You deny you have invention too. But it is want of practice. Your ideas run on before your executive power. It is a common case. There was Ramsay, of whom Sir Joshua used to say that he was the most sensible among all the painters of his time; but he has left little to show it. His manner was dry and timid. He stopped short in the middle of his work, because he knew exactly how much it wanted. Now and then we find hints and sketches which show what he might have been, if his hand had been equal to his conceptions. I have seen a picture of his of the Queen, soon after she was married—a profile, and slightly done; but it was a paragon of elegance. She had a fan in her hand: Lord! how she held that fan! It was weak in execution and ordinary in features—all I can say of it is, that it was the farthest possible removed from everything like vulgarity. A professor might despise it; but in the mental part, I have never seen any thing of Vandyke’s equal to it. I could have looked at it forever. I showed it to J—n; and he, I believe, came into my opinion of it. I don’t know where it is now; but I saw in it enough to convince me that Sir Joshua was right in what he said of Ramsay’s great superiority. His own picture of the King, which is at the Academy, is a finer composition and shows greater boldness and mastery of hand; but I should find it difficult to produce any thing of Sir Joshua’s that conveys an idea of more grace and delicacy than the one I have mentioned. Reynolds would have finished it better: the other was afraid of spoiling what he had done, and so left it a mere outline. He was frightened before he was hurt.
H.—Taste and even genius is but a misfortune, without a correspondent degree of manual dexterity or power of language to make it manifest.
N.—W— was here the other day. I believe you met him going out. He came, he said, to ask me about the famous people of the last age, Johnson, Burke, &c. (as I was almost the only person left who remembered them), and was curious to know what figure Sir Walter Scott would have made among them.
H.—That is so like a North-Briton—‘to make assurance doubly sure,’ and to procure a signature to an acknowledged reputation as if it were a receipt for the delivery of a bale of goods.
N.—I told him it was not for me to pronounce upon such men as Sir Walter Scott: they came before another tribunal. They were of that height that they were seen by all the world, and must stand or fall by the verdict of posterity. It signified little what any individual thought in such cases, it being equally an impertinence to set one’s self against or to add one’s testimony to the public voice; but as far as I could judge, I told him, that Sir Walter would have stood his ground in any company: neither Burke nor Johnson nor any of their admirers would have been disposed or able to set aside his pretensions. These men were not looked upon in their day as they are at present: Johnson had hisLexiphanes, and Goldsmith was laughed at—their merits were to the full as much called in question, nay, more so, than those of the Author ofWaverleyhave ever been, who has been singularly fortunate in himself or in lighting upon a barren age: but because their names have since become established, and as it were sacred, we think they were always so; and W— wanted me, as a competent witness and as having seen both parties, to affix the same seal to his countryman’s reputation, which it is not in the power of the whole of the present generation to do, much less of any single person in it. No, we must wait for this! Time alone can give the final stamp: no living reputation can ever be of the same value or quality as posthumous fame. We must throw lofty objects to a distance in order to judge of them: if we are standing close under the Monument, it looks higher than St. Paul’s. Posterity has this advantage over us-not that they are really wiser, but they see the proportions better from being placed further off. For instance, I liked Sir Walter, because he had an easy, unaffected manner, and was ready to converse on all subjects alike. He was not like your friends, the L— poets, who talk about nothing but their own poetry. If, on the contrary, he had been stiff and pedantic, I should, perhaps, have been inclined to think less highly of the author from not liking the man; so that we can never judge fairly of men’s abilities till we are no longer liable to come in contact with their persons. Friends are as little to be trusted as enemies: favour or prejudice makes the votes in either case more or less suspected; though ‘the vital signs that a name shall live’ are in some instances so strong, that we can hardly refuse to put faith in them, and I think this is one. I was much pleased with Sir Walter, and I believe he expressed a favourable opinion of me. I said to him, ‘I admire the way in which you begin your novels. You set out so abruptly, that you quite surpriseme. I can’t at all tell what’s coming.’—‘No!’ says Sir Walter, ‘nor I neither.’ I then told him, that when I first readWaverley, I said it was no novel: nobody could invent like that. Either he had heard the story related by one of the surviving parties, or he had found the materials in a manuscript concealed in some old chest: to which he replied, ‘You’re not so far out of the way in thinking so.’ You don’t know him, do you? He’d be a pattern to you. Oh! he has a very fine manner. You would learn to rub off some of your asperities. But you admire him, I believe.
H.—Yes; on this side of idolatry and Toryism.
N.—That is your prejudice.
H.—Nay, it rather shows my liberality, if I am a devoted enthusiast, notwithstanding. There are two things I admire in Sir Walter, his capacity and his simplicity; which indeed I am apt to think are much the same. The more ideas a man has of other things, the less he is taken up with the idea of himself. Every one gives the same account of the author ofWaverleyin this respect. When he was in Paris, and went to Galignani’s, he sat down in an outer room to look at some book he wanted to see: none of the clerks had the least suspicion who it was: when it was found out, the place was in a commotion. Cooper, the American, was in Paris at the same time: his looks and manners seemed to announce a much greater man. He strutted through the streets with a very consequential air; and in company held up his head, screwed up his features, and placed himself on a sort of pedestal to be observed and admired, as if he never relaxed in the assumption nor wished it to be forgotten by others, that he was the American Sir Walter Scott. The real one never troubled himself about the matter. Why should he? He might safely leave that question to others. Indeed, by what I am told, he carries his indifference too far: it amounts to an implied contempt for the public, andmisprision of treasonagainst the commonwealth of letters. He thinks nothing of his works, although ‘all Europe rings with them from side to side.’—If so, he has been severely punished for his infirmity.
N.—Though you do not know Sir Walter Scott, I think I have heard you say you have seen him.
H.—Yes, he put me in mind of Cobbett, with his florid face and scarlet gown, which were just like the other’s red face and scarlet waistcoat. The one is like an English farmer, the other like a Scotchlaird. Both are large, robust men, with great strength and composure of features; but I saw nothing of theidealcharacter in the romance-writer, any more than I looked for it in the politician.
N.—Indeed! But you have a vast opinion of Cobbett too, haven’t you? Oh! he’s a giant! He has such prodigious strength; he tears up a subject by the roots. Did you ever read his Grammar? Or see his attack on Mrs. —? It was like a hawk pouncing on a wren. I should be terribly afraid to get into his hands. And then his homely, familiar way of writing—it is not from necessity or vulgarity, but to show his contempt for aristocratic pride and arrogance. He only has a kitchen-garden; he could have a flower-garden too if he chose. Peter Pindar said his style was like the Horse-Guards, only one story above the ground, while Junius’s had all the airy elegance of Whitehall: but he could raise his style just as high as he pleased; though he does not want to sacrifice strength to elegance. He knows better what he is about.
H.—I don’t think he’ll set up for a fine gentleman in a hurry, though he has for a Member of Parliament; and I fancy he would make no better figure in the one than the other. He appeared to me, when I once saw him, exactly what I expected: in Sir Walter I looked in vain for a million of fine things! I could only explain it to myself in this way, that there was a degree of capacity in that huge double forehead of his, that superseded all effort, made every thing come intuitively and almost mechanically, as if it were merely transcribing what was already written, and by the very facility with which the highest beauty and excellence was produced, left few traces of it in the expression of the countenance, and hardly any sense of it in the mind of the author. Expression only comes into the face as we are at a loss for words, or have a difficulty in bringing forward our ideas; but we may repeat the finest things by rote without any change of look or manner. It is only when the powers are tasked, when the moulds of thought are full, that the effect or thewear-and-tearof the mind appears on the surface. So, in general, writers of the greatest imagination and range of ideas, and who might be said to have all nature obedient to their call, seem to have been most careless of their fame and regardless of their works. They treat their productions not as children, but as ‘bastards of their art;’ whereas those who are more confined in their scope of intellect and wedded to some one theory or predominant fancy, have been found to feel a proportionable fondness for the offspring of their brain, and have thus excited a deeper interest in it in the minds of others. We set a value on things as they have cost us dear: the very limitation of our faculties or exclusiveness of our feelings compels us to concentrate all our enthusiasm on a favourite subject; and strange as it may sound, in order to inspire a perfect sympathy in others or to form a school, men must themselves beegotists! Milton has had fewer readers andadmirers, but I suspect more devoted and bigotted ones, than ever Shakspeare had: Sir Walter Scott has attracted more universal attention than any writer of our time, but you may speak against him with less danger of making personal enemies than if you attack Lord Byron. Even Wordsworth has half a dozen followers, who set him up above everybody else from acommon idiosyncrasyof feeling and the singleness of the elements of which his excellence is composed. Before we can take an author entirely to our bosoms, he must be another self; and he cannot be this, if he is ‘not one, but all mankind’s epitome.’ It was this which gave such an effect to Rousseau’s writings, that he stamped his own character and the image of his self-love on the public mind—thereit is, and there it will remain in spite of every thing. Had he possessed more comprehension of thought or feeling, it would have only have diverted him from his object. But it was the excess of his egotism and his utter blindness to every thing else, that found a corresponding sympathy in the conscious feelings of every human breast, and shattered to pieces the pride of rank and circumstance by the pride of internal worth or upstart pretension. When Rousseau stood behind the chair of the master of thechâteauof —, and smiled to hear the company dispute about the meaning of the motto of the arms of the family, which he alone knew, and stumbled as he handed the glass of wine to his young mistress, and fancied she coloured at being waited upon by so learned a young footman—then was first kindled that spark which can never be quenched, then was formed the germ of that strong conviction of the disparity between the badge on his shoulder and the aspirations of his soul—the determination, in short, that external situation and advantages are but the mask, and that the mind is the man—armed with which, impenetrable, incorrigible, he went forth conquering and to conquer, and overthrew the monarchy of France and the hierarchies of the earth. Till then, birth and wealth and power were all in all, though but the frame-work or crust that envelopes the man; and what there was in the man himself was never asked, or was scorned and forgot. And while all was dark and grovelling within, while knowledge either did not exist or was confined to a few, while material power and advantages were every thing, this was naturally to be expected. But with the increase and diffusion of knowledge, this state of things must sooner or later cease; and Rousseau was the first who held the torch (lighted at the never-dying fire in his own bosom) to the hidden chambers of the mind of man—like another Prometheus, breathed into his nostrils the breath of a new and intellectual life, enraging the Gods of the earth, and made him feel what is due to himself and his fellows. Before,physical force was every thing: henceforward, mind, thought, feeling was a new element—a fourth estate in society. What! shall a man have read Dante and Ariosto, and be none the better for it? Shall he be still judged of only by his coat, the number of his servants in livery, the house over his head? While poverty meant ignorance, that was necessarily the case; but the world of books overturns the world of things, and establishes a new balance of power and scale of estimation. Shall we think only rank and pedigree divine, when we have music, poetry, and painting within us? Tut! we have readOld Mortality; and shall it be asked whether we have done so in a garret or a palace, in a carriage or on foot? Or knowing them, shall we not revere the mighty heirs of fame, and respect ourselves for knowing and honouring them? This is the true march of intellect, and not the erection ofMechanics’ Institutions, or the printing oftwo-penny trash, according to my notion of the matter, though I have nothing to say against them neither.
N.—I thought you never would have done; however, you have come to the ground at last. After this rhapsody, I must inform you that Rousseau is a character more detestable to me than I have power of language to express:—an aristocrat filled with all their worst vices, pride, ambition, conceit and gross affectation: and though endowed with some ability, yet not sufficient ever to make him know right from wrong: witness his novel ofEloisa. His name brings to my mind all the gloomy horrors of a mob-government, which attempted from their ignorance to banish truth and justice from the world. I see you place Sir Walter above Lord Byron. The question is not which keeps longest on the wing, but which soars highest: and I cannot help thinking there are essences in Lord Byron that are not to be surpassed. He is on a par with Dryden. All the other modern poets appear to me vulgar in the comparison. As a lady who comes here said, there is such an air of nobility in what he writes. Then there is such a power in the style, expressions almost like Shakspeare—‘And looked round on them with theirwolfisheyes.’
H.—The expression is in Shakspeare, somewhere inLear.
N.—The line I repeated is inDon Juan. I do not mean to vindicate the immorality or misanthropy in that poem—perhaps his lameness was to blame for this defect—but surely no one can deny the force, the spirit of it; and there is such a fund of drollery mixed up with the serious part. Nobody understood the tragi-comedy of poetry so well. People find fault with this mixture in general, because it is not well managed; there is a comic story and a tragic story going on at the same time, without their having anything to do with one another. But in Lord Byron they are brought together, just as they are in nature. In like manner, if you go to an execution at the very moment when the criminal is going to be turned off, and all eyes are fixed upon him, an old apple-woman and her stall are overturned, and all the spectators fall a-laughing. In real life the most ludicrous incidents border on the most affecting and shocking. How fine that is of the cask of butter in the storm! Some critics have objected to it as turning the whole into burlesque; on the contrary, it is that which stamps the character of the scene more than any thing else. What did the people in the boat care about the rainbow, which he has described in such vivid colours; or even about their fellow-passengers who were thrown overboard, when they only wanted to eat them? No, it was the loss of the firkin of butter that affected them more than all the rest; and it is the mention of this circumstance that adds a hardened levity and a sort of ghastly horror to the scene. It shows the master-hand—there is such a boldness and sagacity and superiority to ordinary rules in it! I agree, however, in your admiration of the Waverley Novels: they are very fine. As I told the author, he and Cervantes have raised the idea of human nature, not as Richardson has attempted, by affectation and a false varnish, but by bringing out what there is really fine in it under a cloud of disadvantages. Have you seen the last?
H.—No.
N.—There is a character of a common smith or armourer in it, which, in spite of a number of weaknesses and in the most ludicrous situations, is made quite heroical by the tenderness and humanity it displays. It is his best, but I had not read it when I saw him. No; all that can be said against Sir Walter is, that he has never made awhole. There is an infinite number of delightful incidents and characters, but they are disjointed and scattered. This is one of Fielding’s merits: his novels are regular compositions, with what the ancients called abeginning, amiddle, and anend: every circumstance is foreseen and provided for, and the conclusion of the story turns round as it were to meet the beginning.Gil Blasis very clever, but it is only a succession of chapters.Tom Jonesis a masterpiece, as far as regards the conduct of the fable.
H.—Do you know the reason? Fielding had a hooked nose, the long chin. It is that introverted physiognomy that binds and concentrates.
N.—But Sir Walter has not a hooked nose, but one that denotes kindness and ingenuity. Mrs. Abington had the pug-nose, who was the perfection of comic archness and vivacity: a hooked nose is my aversion.