The Collected Works of William Hazlitt Vol. 9

NOTES OF A JOURNEY THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY — BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE — ADVERTISEMENT — CONTENTS — CHAPTER I — CHAPTER II — CHAPTER III — CHAPTER IV — CHAPTER V — CHAPTER VI — CHAPTER VII — CHAPTER VIII — CHAPTER IX — CHAPTER X — CHAPTER XI — CHAPTER XII — CHAPTER XIII — CHAPTER XIV — CHAPTER XV — CHAPTER XVI — CHAPTER XVII — CHAPTER XVIII — CHAPTER XIX — CHAPTER XX — CHAPTER XXI — CHAPTER XXII — CHAPTER XXIII — CHAPTER XXIV — CHAPTER XXV — CHAPTER XXVI — CHAPTER XXVII

Notes of a Journey through France and Italy, By W. Hazlitt, was published in 1826, in an 8vo. volume (9 × 5¼ inches). Printed for Hunt and Clarke, Tavistock-Street, Covent-Garden. The printer’s name is given behind the title-page as ‘William Clowes, Northumberland-court,’ and the following lines from Cymbeline (Act III. 4.) appear underneath the author’s name on the title-page:—

As stated in the Advertisement, the Notes were reprinted from the Morning Chronicle, to which they had been contributed in 1824 and 1825. They are now reprinted for the first time since the publication of the volume of 1826, and as they appeared in that volume. A few passages which appeared in the papers as they came out in the Morning Chronicle, and were omitted when Hazlitt collected the letters in book-form, will be found among the notes at the end of the volume.

The following Notes of a Journey through France and Italy are reprinted from the columns of the Morning Chronicle. The favourable reception they met with there suggested the idea of the present work. My object has been to describe what I saw or remarked myself; or to give the reader some notion of what he might expect to find in travelling the same road. There is little of history or antiquities or statistics; nor do I regret the want of them, as it may be abundantly supplied from other sources. The only thing I could have wished to expatiate upon more at large is the manners of the country: but to do justice to this, a greater length of time and a more intimate acquaintance with society and the language would be necessary. Perhaps, at some future opportunity, this defect may be remedied.

The rule for travelling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind us. The object of travelling is to see and learn; but such is our impatience of ignorance, or the jealousy of our self-love, that we generally set up a certain preconception beforehand (in self-defence, or as a barrier against the lessons of experience,) and are surprised at or quarrel with all that does not conform to it. Let us think what we please of what we really find, but prejudge nothing. The English, in particular, carry out their own defects as a standard for general imitation; and think the virtues of others (that are not their vices) good for nothing. Thus they find fault with the gaiety of the French as impertinence, with their politeness as grimace. This repulsive system of carping and contradiction can extract neither use nor meaning from any thing, and only tends to make those who give way to it uncomfortable and ridiculous. On the contrary, we should be as seldom shocked or annoyed as possible, (it is our vanity or ignorance that is mortified much oftener than our reason!) and contrive to see the favourable side of things. This will turn both to profit and pleasure. The intellectual, like the physical, is best kept up by an exchange of commodities, instead of an ill-natured and idle search after grievances. The first thing an Englishman does on going abroad is to find fault with what is French, because it is not English. If he is determined to confine all excellence to his own country, he had better stay at home.

On arriving at Brighton (in the full season,) a lad offered to conduct us to an inn. ‘Did he think there was room?’ He was sure of it. ‘Did he belong to the inn?’ No, he was from London. In fact, he was a young gentleman from town, who had been stopping some time at the White-Horse Hotel, and who wished to employ his spare time (when he was not riding out on a blood-horse) in serving the house, and relieving the perplexities of his fellow-travellers. No 90one but a Londoner would volunteer his assistance in this way. Amiable land of Cockayne, happy in itself, and in making others happy! Blest exuberance of self-satisfaction, that overflows upon others! Delightful impertinence, that is forward to oblige them!

There is something in being near the sea, like the confines of eternity. It is a new element, a pure abstraction. The mind loves to hover on that which is endless, and forever the same. People wonder at a steam-boat, the invention of man, managed by man, that makes its liquid path like an iron railway through the sea—I wonder at the sea itself, that vast Leviathan, rolled round the earth, smiling in its sleep, waked into fury, fathomless, boundless, a huge world of water-drops—Whence is it, whither goes it, is it of eternity or of nothing? Strange, ponderous riddle, that we can neither penetrate nor grasp in our comprehension, ebbing and flowing like human life, and swallowing it up in thy remorseless womb,—what art thou? What is there in common between thy life and ours, who gaze at thee? Blind, deaf and old, thou seest not, hearest not, understandest not; neither do we understand, who behold and listen to thee! Great as thou art, unconscious of thy greatness, unwieldy, enormous, preposterous twin-birth of matter, rest in thy dark, unfathomed cave of mystery, mocking human pride and weakness. Still is it given to the mind of man to wonder at thee, to confess its ignorance, and to stand in awe of thy stupendous might and majesty, and of its own being, that can question thine! But a truce with reflections.

The Pavilion at Brighton is like a collection of stone pumpkins and pepper-boxes. It seems as if the genius of architecture had at once the dropsy and the megrims. Any thing more fantastical, with a greater dearth of invention, was never seen. The King’s stud (if they were horses of taste) would petition against so irrational a lodging.

Brighton stands facing the sea, on the bare cliffs, with glazed windows to reflect the glaring sun, and black pitchy bricks shining like the scales of fishes. The town is however gay with the influx of London visitors—happy as the conscious abode of its sovereign! Every thing here appears in motion—coming or going. People at a watering-place may be compared to the flies of a summer; or to fashionable dresses, or suits of clothes walking about the streets. The only idea you gain is, of finery and motion. The road between London and Brighton presents some very charming scenery; Reigate is a prettier English country-town than is to be found anywhere—out of England! As we entered Brighton in the evening, a Frenchman was playing and singing to a guitar. It was a relief to the conversation in the coach, which had been chiefly supported in a nasal tone by 91a disciple of Mrs. Fry and amanuensis of philanthropy in general. As we heard the lively musician warble, we forgot the land of Sunday-schools and spinning-jennies. The genius of the South had come out to meet us.

We left Brighton in the steam-packet, and soon saw the shores of Albion recede from us. Out of sight, out of mind. How poor a geographer is the human mind! How small a space does the imagination take in at once! In travelling, our ideas change like the scenes of a pantomime, displacing each other as completely and rapidly. Long before we touched on French ground, the English coast was lost in distance, and nothing remained of it but a dim mist; it hardly seemed ‘in a great pool a swan’s nest.’ So shall its glory vanish like a vapour, its liberty like a dream!

We had a fine passage in the steam-boat (Sept. 1, 1824). Not a cloud, scarce a breath of air; a moon, and then star-light, till the dawn, with rosy fingers, ushered us into Dieppe. Our fellow-passengers were pleasant and unobtrusive, an English party of the better sort: a Member of Parliament, delighted to escape from ‘late hours and bad company;’ an English General, proud of his bad French; a Captain in the Navy, glad to enter a French harbour peaceably; a Country Squire, extending his inquiries beyond his paternal acres; the younger sons of wealthy citizens, refined through the strainers of a University-education and finishing off with foreign travel; a young Lawyer, quoting Peregrine Pickle, and divided between his last circuit and projected tour. There was also a young Dutchman, looking mild through his mustachios, and a new-married couple (a French Jew and Jewess) who grew uxorious from the effects of sea-sickness, and took refuge from the qualms of the disorder in paroxysms of tenderness. We had some difficulty in getting into the harbour, and had to wait till morning for the tide. I grew very tired, and laid the blame on the time lost in getting some restive horses on board, but found that if we had set out two hours sooner, we should only have had to wait two hours longer. The doctrine of Optimism is a very good and often a very true one in travelling. In advancing up the steps to give the officers our passport, I was prevented by a young man and woman, who said they were before me, and on making a second attempt, an elderly gentleman and lady set up the same claim, because they stood behind me. It seemed that a servant was waiting with passports for four. Persons in a certain class of life are so full of their own business and importance, that they imagine every one else must be aware of it—I hope this is the last specimen I shall for some time meet with of city-manners. After a formal custom-house search, we procured 92admittance at Pratt’s Hotel, where they said they had reserved a bed for a Lady. France is a country where they give honneur aux Dames. The window looked out on the bridge and on the river, which reflected the shipping and the houses; and we should have thought ourselves luckily off, but that the bed, which occupied a niche in the sitting-room, had that kind of odour which could not be mistaken for otto of roses.

Dieppe.—This town presents a very agreeable and romantic appearance to strangers. It is cut up into a number of distinct divisions by canals, drawbridges, and bastions, as if to intercept the progress of an enemy. The best houses, too, are shut up in close courts and high walls on the same principle, that is, to stand a further siege in the good old times. There are rows of lime-trees on the quay, and some of the narrow streets running from it look like wells. This town is a picture to look at; it is a pity that it is not a nosegay, and that the passenger who ventures to explore its nooks and alleys is driven back again by ‘a compound of villainous smells,’ which seem to grow out of the ground. In walking the streets, one must take one’s nose with one, and that sense is apt to be offended in France as well as in Scotland. Is it hence called in French the organ of sense? The houses and the dresses are equally old-fashioned. In France one lives in the imagination of the past; in England every thing is new and on an improved plan. Such is the progress of mechanical invention! In Dieppe there is one huge, misshapen, but venerable-looking Gothic Church (a theological fixture,) instead of twenty new-fangled erections, Egyptian, Greek or Coptic. The head-dresses of the women are much the same as those which the Spectator laughed out of countenance a hundred years ago in England, with high plaited crowns, and lappets hanging down over the shoulders. The shape and colours of the bodice and petticoat are what we see in Dutch pictures; the faces of the common people we are familiarized with in Mieris and Jan Steen. They are full and fair like the Germans, and have not the minced and peaked character we attribute to the French. They are not handsome, but good-natured, expressive, placid. They retain the look of peasants more than the town’s-people with us, whether from living more in the open air, or from greater health and temperance, I cannot say. What I like in their expression (so far) is not the vivacity, but the goodness, the simplicity, the thoughtful resignation. The French are full of gesticulation when they speak; they have at other times an equal appearance of repose and content. You see the figure of a girl sitting in the sun, so still that her dress seems like streaks of red and black chalk against the wall; a soldier reading; a group of old 93women (with skins as tough, yellow, and wrinkled as those of a tortoise) chatting in a corner and laughing till their sides are ready to split; or a string of children tugging a fishing-boat out of the harbour as evening goes down, and making the air ring with their songs and shouts of merriment (a sight to make Mr. Malthus shudder!). Life here glows, or spins carelessly round on its soft axle. The same animal spirits that supply a fund of cheerful thoughts, break out into all the extravagance of mirth and social glee. The air is a cordial to them, and they drink drams of sunshine. My particular liking to the French is, however, confined to their natural and unsophisticated character. The good spirits ‘with which they are clothed and fed,’ and which eke out the deficiencies of fortune or good government, are perhaps too much for them, when joined with external advantages, or artificial pretensions. Their vivacity becomes insolence in office; their success, presumption; their gentility, affectation and grimace. But the national physiognomy (taken at large) is the reflection of good temper and humanity. One thing is evident, and decisive in their favour—they do not insult or point at strangers, but smile on them good-humouredly, and answer them civilly.

Nothing shews the contented soul within, so much as our not seeking for amusement in the mortifications of others: we only envy their advantages, or sneer at their defects, when we are conscious of wanting something ourselves. The customs and employments of the people here have a more primitive and picturesque appearance than in England. Is it that with us every thing is made domestic and commodious, instead of being practised in the open air, and subject to the casualties of the elements? For instance, you see the women washing clothes in the river, with their red petticoats and bare feet, instead of standing over a washing-tub. Human life with us is framed and set in comforts: but it wants the vivid colouring, the glowing expression that we meet elsewhere. After all, is not the romantic effect produced partly owing to the novelty of the scene; or do we not attribute to a superiority in others what is merely a greater liveliness of impression in ourselves, arising from curiosity and contrast? If this were all, foreigners ought to be as much delighted with us, but they are not. A man and woman came and sung ‘God save the King,’ before the windows of the Hotel, as if the French had so much loyalty at present that they can spare us some of it. What an opinion must they have formed of the absurd nationality of the English, to suppose that we can expect them to 94feel this sort of mock-sentiment towards our King! What English ballad-singer would dream of flattering the French visitors by a song in praise of Louis le Desiré before a Brighton or a Dover Hotel?

As the door opened just now, I saw the lad or garçon, who waits on us, going up stairs with a looking-glass, and admiring himself in it. If he is pleased with himself, he is no less satisfied with us, and with every thing else.

The road from Dieppe to Rouen is highly interesting. You at first ascend a straight steep hill, which commands a view of the town and harbour behind you, with villas on each side, something between modern cottages and antique castles; and afterwards, from the top of the hill, the prospect spreads out over endless plains, richly cultivated. It has been conjectured that the English borrowed their implements and modes of husbandry from their Norman Conquerors; the resemblance is, indeed, complete to a deception. You might suppose one side of the channel was transported to the other, from the general aspect of the country, from the neatness of the orchard-plots, the gardens, and farm-yards. Every thing has a look of the greatest industry and plenty. There is a scanty proportion of common pasturage; but rich fields of clover, oats, barley, and vetches, with luxuriant crops ready to cut, are presented to the eye in uninterrupted succession; there are no wastes, no barren, thankless enclosures; every foot of ground seems to be cultivated with the utmost success. It is in vain after this to talk of English agriculture, as if no such thing existed anywhere else. Agriculture can do no more than make provision that every part of the soil is carefully tilled, and raise the finest crops from it. The only distinctive feature is, that there are here no hedges along the road-side, their place being supplied by rows of apple-trees or groves of elm and poplar, which stretch out before you in lengthened vistas, as far as the eye can reach. We like this, whatever Mr. Mac-Adam may object; and moreover, the roads here are as good as his. To be sure, they are much broader, and admit of this collateral improvement. Shady plantations open their arms to meet you, closing in a point, or terminated by a turn in the road; and then you enter upon another long hospitable avenue,

the smiling landscape waves on either side to a considerable extent; you pass a shepherd tending his flock, or a number of peasants 95returning from market in a light long waggon, like a hen-coop; the bells of the horses jingle, the postilion cracks his whip, or speaks to them with a friendly voice, and the Diligence rolls on, at the rate of six miles an hour towards Paris!—Travelling is much cheaper in France than in England. The distance from Dieppe to Rouen is thirty-six miles, and we only paid eight francs, that is, six shillings and eight pence a-piece, with two francs more to the guide and postilion, which is not fourpence a mile, including all expenses. On the other hand, you have not the advantage of taking an outside place at half-price, as a very trifling difference is made in this respect.

The Diligence itself cuts a very awkward figure, compared with our stage-coaches. There is much the same difference as between a barge and a pleasure-boat; but then it is roomy and airy, and remarkably easy in its motion. In the common mechanic arts the French attend to the essential only; we are so fond of elegance and compactness, that we sacrifice ease to show and finish. The harness of the horses is made of ropes or rusty leather, and it is wonderful how they get along so well as they do, three, or sometimes four a-breast. The apples of the orchards hang over the road-side, which speaks well for the honesty of the inhabitants, or the plenty of the country. The women appear to work a good deal out of doors. Some of the older ones have strangely distorted visages, and those horrid Albert-Durer chins and noses, that have been coming together for half a century. The younger ones are handsome, healthy-looking, animated; a better sort of English country girls. The character of French coquetry prevails even here, and you see a young peasant-girl, broiling in the sun, with a blue paper cap on her head, that glitters like the smoothest satin, and that answers the purpose of finery just as well. I observed that one man frequently holds the plough and guides the horses without any one else to assist him, as they do in Scotland, and which in England they hold to be an agricultural heresy. In Surrey, where an English gentleman had hired a Scotch servant to try this method, the boors actually collected round the man in the church-yard on Sunday, and pointed at him, crying, ‘That’s he who ploughs and drives the horses himself!’ Our prejudices are no less on the alert, and quite as obstinate against what is right as what is wrong. I cannot say I was quite pleased with my barber at Dieppe, who inserted a drop of citron juice in the lather I was to shave with, and converted it into a most agreeable perfume. It was an association of ideas, a false refinement, to which I had not been accustomed, and to which I was averse. The best excuse I could find for my reluctance to be pleased, was that at the 96next place where the same thing was attempted, the operator, by some villainous mixture, almost stunk me to death!

The entrance into Rouen, through extensive archways of tall trees, planted along the margin of the Seine, is certainly delectable. Here the genius of civilized France first began to display itself. Companies of men and women were sitting in the open air, enjoying the cool of the evening, and the serene moonlight, under Chinese lamps, with fruit and confectionery. We arrived rather late, but were well received and accommodated at the Hotel Vatel. My bad French by no means, however, conciliates the regard or increases the civility of the people on the road. They pay particular attention, and are particularly delighted with the English, who speak French well, or with tolerable fluency and correctness, for they think it a compliment to themselves and to the language; whereas, besides their dislike to all difficulty and uncertainty of communication, they resent an obvious neglect on this point as an affront, and an unwarrantable assumption of superiority, as if it were enough for an Englishman to shew himself among them to be well received, without so much as deigning to make himself intelligible. A person, who passes through a country in sullen silence, must appear very much in the character of a spy. Many things (a native is conscious) will seem strange to a foreigner, who can neither ask the meaning, nor understand the explanation of them; and on the other hand, if in these circumstances you are loquacious and inquisitive, you become proportionably troublesome. It would have been better (such is the natural feeling, the dictate at once of self-love and common sense) to have learned the language before you visited the country. An accent, an occasional blunder, a certain degree of hesitation are amusing, and indirectly flatter the pride of foreigners; but a total ignorance or wilful reluctance in speaking shews both a contempt for the people, and an inattention to good manners. To neglect to make one’s self master of a language tacitly implies, that in travelling through a country we have neither wants nor wishes to gratify; that we are quite independent, and have no ambition to give pleasure, or to receive instruction.

At Rouen the walls of our apartment were bare, being mere lath and plaster, a huge cobweb hung in the window, the curtains were shabby and dirty, and the floor without carpeting or matting; but our table was well-furnished, and in the English taste. French cooking comprehends English, and easily condescends to it; so that an Englishman finds himself better off in France than a Frenchman does in England. They complain that our cookery is dry, and our solid, unsavoury morsels, beef-steaks, and mutton chops, must stick in 97their throats as well as be repulsive to their imaginations; nor can we supply the additional sauces or disguises which are necessary to set them off. On the other hand, we had a dinner at the Hotel Vatel, a roast fowl, greens, and bacon, as plain, as sweet, and wholesome, as we could get at an English farm-house. We had also pigeons, partridges, and other game, in excellent preservation, and kept quite clear of French receipts and odious ragouts. Game or poultry is the half-way house, a sort of middle point, between French and English cookery. The bread here is excellent, the butter admirable, the milk and coffee superior to what we meet with at home. The wine and fruit, too, are delightful, but real French dishes are an abomination to an English palate. Unless a man means to stay all his life abroad, let him beware of making the experiment, or get near enough to the door to make his exit suddenly. The common charges at the inns are much the same as in England; we paid twenty-pence for breakfast, and half a crown, or three shillings, for dinner. The best Burgundy is only three shillings and fourpence a bottle. A green parrot hung in a cage, in a small court under our window, and received the compliments and caresses of every one who passed. It is wonderful how fond the French are of holding conversation with animals of all descriptions, parrots, dogs, monkeys. Is it that they choose to have all the talk to themselves, to make propositions, and fancy the answers; that they like this discourse by signs, by jabbering, and gesticulation, or that the manifestation of the principle of life without thought delights them above all things? The sociableness of the French seems to expand itself beyond the level of humanity, and to be unconscious of any descent. Two boys in the kitchen appeared to have nothing to do but to beat up the white of eggs into froth for salads. The labour of the French costs them nothing, so that they readily throw it away in doing nothing or the merest trifles. A nice-looking girl who officiated as chamber-maid, brought in a ripe melon after dinner, and offering it with much grace and good humour as ‘un petit cadeau’ (a trifling present) was rather hurt we did not accept of it. Indeed it was wrong. A Mr. James Williams acted as our English interpreter while we staid, and procured us places in the Paris Diligence, though it was said to be quite full. We here also heard that the packet we came over in, blew up two days after, and that the passengers escaped in fishing-boats. This has completed my distaste to steam-boats.

The city of Rouen is one of the oldest and finest in France. It contains about a hundred thousand inhabitants, two noble churches; a handsome quay is embosomed in a range of lofty hills, and watered 98by the Seine, which, proud of its willowy banks and tufted islands, winds along by it. The ascent up the rising grounds behind it, is magnificent beyond description. The town is spread out at your feet (an immense, stately mass of dark grey stone), the double towers of the old Gothic Cathedral, and of the beautiful Church of St. Antoine, rise above it in their majestic proportions, overlooking the rich sunny valleys which stretch away in the distance; you gradually climb an amphitheatre of hills, sprinkled with gardens and villas to the very top, and the walk on Sunday afternoon is crowded with people enjoying the scene, adding to its animation by their intelligent, varying looks, and adorning it by their picturesque and richly-coloured dresses. There is no town in England at the same time so fine, and so finely situated. Oxford is as fine in its buildings and associations, but it has not the same advantages of situation: Bristol is as fine a mass of buildings, but without the same striking accompaniments—

Edinburgh alone is as splendid in its situation and buildings, and would have even a more imposing and delightful effect if Arthur’s Seat were crowned with thick woods, if the Pentland-hills could be converted into green pastures, if the Scotch people were French, and Leith-walk planted with vineyards! The only blot in this fair scene was the meeting with a number of cripples, whose hideous cries attracted and alarmed attention before their formidable mutilations became visible, and who extorted charity rather from terror than pity. Such objects abound in France and on the Continent. Is it from the want of hospitals, or from the bad care taken of the young and necessitous, to whom some dreadful accident has happened?—The hill that commands this beautiful prospect, and seems the resort of health, of life, of pleasure, is called (as I found on inquiry) Mont des Malades! Would any people but the French think of giving it so inauspicious a title? To the English such a name would spoil the view, and infect the imagination with the recollections of pain and sickness. But a Frenchman’s imagination is proof against such weaknesses; he has no sympathy except with the pleasurable; and provided a hill presents an agreeable prospect, never troubles his head whether the inhabitants are sick or well. The streets of Rouen, like those of other towns in France, are dirty for the same reason. A Frenchman’s senses and understanding are alike inaccessible to pain—he recognises (happily for himself) the existence only of that which adds to his importance or his satisfaction. He is delighted with perfumes, but passes over the 99most offensive smells,^[12] and will not lift up his little finger to remove a general nuisance, for it is none to him. He leaves the walls of his houses unfinished, dilapidated, almost uninhabitable, because his thoughts are bent on adorning his own person—on jewels, trinkets, pomade divine! He is elaborate in his cookery and his dress, because the one flatters his vanity, the other his appetite; and he is licentious in his pleasures, nay gross in his manners, because in the first he consults only his immediate gratification, and in the last annoys others continually, from having no conception that any thing he (a Frenchman) can do can possibly annoy them. He is sure to offend, because he takes it for granted he must please. A great deal of ordinary French conversation might be spared before foreigners, if they knew the pain it gives. Virtue is not only put out of countenance by it, but vice becomes an indifferent common-place in their mouths. The last stage of human depravity is, when vice ceases to shock—or to please. A Frenchman’s candour and indifference to what must be thought of him (combined with his inordinate desire to shine) are curious. The hero of his own little tale carries a load of crimes and misfortunes at his back like a lead of band-boxes, and (light-hearted wretch) sings and dances as he goes! The inconsequentiality in the French character, from extreme facility and buoyancy of impression, is a matter of astonishment to the English. A young man at Rouen was walking briskly along the street to church, all the way tossing his prayer-book into the air, when suddenly on reaching the entrance 100a priest appeared coming from church, and he fell on his knees on the steps. No wonder the Popish clergy stand up for their religion, when it makes others fall on their knees before them, and worship their appearance as the shadow of the Almighty! The clergy in France present an agreeable and almost necessary foil to the foibles of the national character, with their sombre dress, their gravity, their simplicity, their sanctity. It is not strange they exert such an influence there: their professional pretensions to learning and piety must have a double weight, from having nothing to oppose to them but frivolity and the impulse of the moment. The entering the Cathedral here after the bustle and confusion of the streets, is like entering a vault—a tomb of worldly thoughts and pleasures, pointing to the skies. The slow and solemn movements of the Priests, as grave as they are unmeaning, resemble the spells of necromancers; the pictures and statues of the dead contrast strangely with the faces of the living; the chaunt of the Priests sounds differently from the jargon of the common people; the little oratories and cells, with some lone mourner kneeling before a crucifix, every thing leads the thoughts to another world, to death, the resurrection, and a judgment to come. The walls and ornaments of this noble pile are left in a state of the most lamentable neglect, and the infinite number of paltry, rush-bottomed chairs, huddled together in the aisle, are just like the rubbish of a broker’s shop. The great bell of the Cathedral is the most deep-mouthed I ever heard, ‘swinging slow with sullen roar,’ rich and sonorous, and hoarse with counting the flight of a thousand years. It is worth while to visit France, were it only to see Rouen.

The Road to Paris.—They vaunt much of the Lower Road from Rouen to Paris; but it is not so fine as that from Dieppe to Rouen. You have comparatively few trees, the soil is less fertile, and you are (nearly the whole way) tantalized with the vast, marshy-looking plains of Normandy, with the Seine glittering through them like a snake, and a chain of abrupt chalky hills, like a wall or barrier bounding them. There is nothing I hate like a distant prospect without any thing interesting in it—it is continually dragging the eye a wearisome journey, and repaying it with barrenness and deformity. Yet a Frenchman contrived to make a panegyric on this scene, after the fashion of his countrymen, and with that sort of tripping jerk which is peculiar to their minds and bodies—‘Il y a de l’eau, il y a 101des bois, il y a des montagnes, il y a de la verdure,’ &c. It is true, there were all these things in the abstract, or as so many detached particulars to make a speech about, which was all that he wanted. A Frenchman’s eye for nature is merely nominal. I find that with the novelty, or on farther experience my enthusiasm for the country and the people, palls a little. During a long day’s march (for I was too late, or rather too ill to go by the six o’clock morning Diligence,) I got as tired of toiling on under a scorching sun and over a dusty road, as if I had been in England. Indeed, I could almost have fancied myself there, for I scarcely met with a human being to remind me of the difference. I at one time encountered a horseman mounted on a demipique saddle, in a half military uniform, who seemed determined to make me turn out of the foot-path,^[13] or to ride over me. This looked a little English, though the man did not. I should take him for an Exciseman. I suppose in all countries people on horseback give themselves airs of superiority over those who are on foot. The French character is not altogether compounded of the amiable, any more than the English is of the respectable. In judging of nations, it will not do to deal in mere abstractions. In countries, as well as individuals, there is a mixture of good and bad qualities; yet we may attempt to strike a general balance, and compare the rules with the exceptions. Soon after my equestrian adventure (or escape,) I met with another pleasanter one; a little girl, with regular features and dark eyes, dressed in white, and with a large straw bonnet flapping over her face, was mounted behind a youth who seemed to be a relation, on an ass—a common mode of conveyance in this country. The young lad was trying to frighten her, by forcing the animal out of its usual easy pace into a canter, while she, holding fast, and between laughing and crying, called out in a voice of great sweetness and naïveté—‘Il n’est pas bon trotter, il n’est pas bon trotter.’ There was a playfulness in the expression of her terrors quite charming, and quite French. They turned down an avenue to a villa a little way out of the road. I could not help looking after them, and thinking what a delightful welcome must await such innocence, such cheerfulness, and such dark sparkling eyes! Mais allons. These reflections are perhaps misplaced: France is not at present altogether the land of gallantry or sentiment, were one ever so much disposed to them.

Within half a mile of Louviers (which is seven leagues from Rouen) a Diligence passed me on the road at the full speed of a French Diligence, rolling and rumbling on its way over a paved 102road, with five clumsy-looking horses, and loaded to the top like a Plymouth van. I was to stop at Louviers, at the Hotel de Mouton, and to proceed to Paris by the coach the next day; for I was told there was no conveyance onwards that day, and I own that this apparition of a Diligence in full sail, and in broad day (when I had understood there were none but night coaches) surprised me. I was going to set it down in ‘my tables,’ that there is no faith to be placed in what they say at French inns. I quickened my pace in hopes of overtaking it while it changed horses. The main street of Louviers appeared to me very long and uneven. On turning a corner, the Hotel de Mouton opened its gates to receive me, the Diligence was a little farther on, with fresh horses just put to and ready to start (a critical and provoking dilemma;) I hesitated a moment, and at last resolved to take my chance in the Diligence, and seeing Paris written on the outside, and being informed by Monsieur le Conducteur, that I could stop at Evreux for the night, I took the rest for granted, and mounted in the cabriolet, where sat an English gentleman (one of those with whom I had come over in the steam-boat,) solitary and silent. My seating myself in the opposite corner of the cabriolet (which is that part of a French Diligence which is placed in front, and resembles a post-chaise in form and ease,) did not break the solitude or the silence. In company, two negatives do not make an affirmative. I know few things more delightful than for two Englishmen to loll in a post-chaise in this manner, taking no notice of each other, preserving an obstinate silence, and determined to send their country to Coventry.^[14] We pretended not to recognise each other, and yet our saying nothing proved every instant that we were not French. At length, about half way, my companion opened his lips, and asked in thick, broken French, ‘How far it was to Evreux?’ I looked at him, and said in English, ‘I did not know.’ Not another word passed, yet, I dare say, both of us had a very agreeable time of it, as the Diligence moved on to Evreux, making reflections on the national character, and each thinking himself an exception to its absurdities, an instance of its virtues; so easy is it always (and more particularly abroad) to fancy ourselves free from the errors we witness in our neighbours. It is this, indeed, which makes us so eager to detect them, as if to see what is wrong was the same thing as being in the right!

At Evreux, I found I had gone quite out of my road, and that there was no conveyance to Paris till the same hour the next night. I was a good deal mortified and perplexed at this intelligence, but 103found some consolation at the Office where I obtained it, from casually hearing the name of my companion, which is a great point gained in travelling. Of course, the discovery is pleasant, if it is a name you are acquainted with; or if not, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing it is some one you do not know, and so are made easy on that head. I bespoke a bed, and was shown into the common room, where I took coffee, and had what the Scotch call a brandered fowl for supper. The room was papered with marine landscapes, so that you seemed sitting in the open air with boats and trees and the sea-shore all round you, and Telemachus and Calypso, figures landing or embarking on halcyon seas. Even a country-inn in France is classical. It is a pity that the English are so dull and sluggish, ‘like the fat weed that roots itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf,’ that they cannot lend themselves to these airy fictions, always staring them in the face, but rather turn away from them with an impatience and disgust proportioned to the elegance of the design and the tax levied on their taste. A Frenchman’s imagination, on the contrary, is always at the call of his senses. The latter have but to give the hint, and the former is glad to take it! I tired every one out by inquiring my best mode of getting on to Paris next day; and being slow to believe that my only way was to go back to Louviers, like a fool as I had come, a young Frenchman took compassion on my embarrassment, and offered to be my interpreter, ‘as he spoke both languages.’ He said, ‘I must feel great pain in not being able to express myself.’ I said ‘None but in giving others the trouble to understand me.’ He shook his head, I spoke much too fast for him; he apologized for not being able to follow me from want of habit, though he said, ‘he belonged to a society of twelve at Paris, where they spoke English every evening generally.’ I said, ‘we were well matched,’ and when this was explained to him, he repeated the word ‘matched,’ with a ludicrous air of distress, at finding that there was an English phrase which was not familiarised to him in ‘the society of twelve, where they spoke the English language generally every evening.’ We soon came to a dead stand, and he turned to my English companion in the cabriolet, on whom he bestowed, for the rest of the evening, the tediousness of any ‘society of twelve.’ I could not help laughing to see my luckless fellow-countryman, after one or two attempts to rally and exchange remarks, reduced to the incessant repetition of his melancholy ‘oui,’ and my lively Parisian rioting in the advantage he had obtained over a straggling Englishman, gliding from topic to topic without contradiction or control, passing from the population of Paris to the Beaux-Arts, from the Belles-Lettres to politics, running the circle of knowledge, and finding himself still at home, faltering at the 104mention of the Allies and the Bourbons, and rising with outstretched arm and continuous voice at the name of Buonopar-r (like the eagle soaring on level wing)—getting nearer and nearer the victim of his volubility, seizing my poor friend by the button, and at last retiring abruptly, as if afraid of a re-action, and wishing him ‘good repose’ for the evening. Happy member of a ‘society of twelve!’ Apt representative of thirty millions of people, who build their self-esteem on the basis of vanity, and weave happiness out of breath, which costs them nothing! Why envy, why wish to interrupt them, like a mischievous school-boy, who throws a great stone into a pond full of frogs, who croak their delights ‘generally every evening,’ and who, the instant the chasm is closed, return to the charge with unabated glee and joyous dissonance!

I must not forget to mention a favourable trait in the common French character. I asked to speak to the Conducteur, and something like a charge of deception was brought, from which he defended himself strenuously. The whole kitchen and stable-yard gathered round to hear a dispute, which was by no means waged with equal war of words. They understood that I was disappointed, and had made a ridiculous mistake. Not a word or look of derision was observable in the whole group; but rather a rising smile, suppressed for fear of giving pain, and a wish to suggest some expedient on the occasion. In England, I will venture to say, that a Frenchman, in similar circumstances, stammering out a grave charge of imposition against a coachman, and evidently at a loss how to proceed, would have been hooted out of the place, and it would have been well for him if he had escaped without broken bones. If the French have the vices of artificial refinement and effeminacy, the English still retain too many of those which belong to a barbarous and savage state.

I returned to Louviers the next morning under the safe conduct of my former guide, where I arrived half an hour before the necessary time, found myself regularly booked for Paris, with five francs paid on account; and after a very comfortable breakfast, where I was waited on by a pretty, modest-looking brunette (for the French country-girls are in general modest-looking,) I took my seat in the fourth place of the Diligence. Here I met with every thing to annoy an Englishman. There was a Frenchman in the coach, who had a dog and a little boy with him, the last having a doll in his hands, which he insisted on playing with; or cried and screamed furiously if it was taken from him. It was a true French child; that is, a little old man, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Laughing Boy, with eyes glittering like the glass ones of his favourite doll, with flaxen ringlets 105like hers, with cheeks as smooth and unhealthy, and a premature expression of cunning and self-complacency. A disagreeable or ill-behaved child in a stage coach is a common accident, and to be endured. But who but a Frenchman would think of carrying his dog? He might as well drag his horse into the coach after him. A Frenchman (with leave be it spoken) has no need to take a dog with him to ventilate the air of a coach, in which there are three other Frenchmen. It was impossible to suffer more from heat, from pressure, or from the periodical ‘exhalation of rich-distilled perfumes.’ If the French have lost the sense of smell, they should reflect (as they are a reflecting people) that others have not. Really, I do not see how they have a right in a public vehicle to assault one in this way by proxy, any more than to take one literally by the nose. One does not expect from the most refined and polished people in Europe grossnesses that an Esquimaux Indian would have too much sense and modesty to be guilty of. If the presence of their dogs is a nuisance, the conversation of their masters is often no less offensive to another sense—both are suffocating to every body but themselves, and worthy of each other. Midas whispered his secret to the reeds, that whispered it again. The French, if they are wise, ought not to commit the national character on certain delicate points in the manner they do. While they were triumphant, less caution might be necessary: but no people can afford at the same time to be odious as well as contemptible in the eyes of their enemies. We dined at Mantes, where the ordinary was plentiful and excellent, and where a gentleman of a very prepossessing appearance took up the conversation (descanting on the adventures of a shooting-party the day before) in that gay, graceful, and animated tone, which I conceive to be characteristic of the best French society. In talking and laughing, he discovered (though a young man) the inroads which hot soups and high-seasoned ragouts had made in his mouth, with the same alacrity and good-humour as if he had to shew a complete set of the whitest teeth. We passed an interesting village, situated on the slope of a hill, with a quaint old tower projecting above it, and over-hanging the Seine. Not far from the high road stands Rosny, once the seat of the celebrated Sully. The approach to the capital on the side of St. Germain’s is one continued succession of imposing beauty and artificial splendour, of groves, of avenues, of bridges, of palaces, and of towns like palaces, all the way to Paris, where the sight of the Thuilleries completes the triumph of external magnificence, and oppresses the soul with recollections not to be borne or to be expressed!—Of them, perhaps, hereafter.

In the coach coming along, a Frenchman was curious to learn of a 106Scotch gentleman, who spoke very respectable French, whether Lord Byron was much regretted in England? He said there was much beauty in his writings, but too much straining after effect. He added, that there was no attempt at effect in Racine. This with the French is a final appeal in matters of poetry and taste. A translation of Lord Byron’s Works complete is common in all the shops here. I am not sure whether an English Poet ought to be proud of this circumstance or not. I also saw an Elegy on his Death advertised, said to be written by his friend, Sir Thomas More. How oddly the French combine things! There is a Sir Thomas More in English History and Letters; but that Sir Thomas More is not this Mr. Thomas Moore—‘let their discreet hearts believe it!’

The first thing I did when I got to Paris was to go to the Louvre. It was indeed ‘first and last and midst’ in my thoughts. Well might it be so, for it had never been absent from them for twenty years. I had gazed myself almost blind in looking at the precious works of art it then contained—should I not weep myself blind in looking at them again, after a lapse of half a life—or on finding them gone, and with them gone all that I had once believed and hoped of human kind? What could ever fill up that blank in my heart, fearful to think upon—fearful to look upon? I was no longer young; and he who had collected them, and ‘worn them as a rich jewel in his Iron Crown,’ was dead, a captive and vanquished; and with him all we who remained were ‘thrown into the pit,’ the lifeless bodies of men, and wore round our necks the collar of servitude, and on our foreheads the brand, and in our flesh and in our souls the stain of thraldom and of the born slaves of Kings. Yet thus far had I come once more ‘to dream and be an Emperour!’ Thou sacred shrine of God-like magnificence, must not my heart fail and my feet stumble, as I approach thee? How gladly would I kneel down and kiss thy threshold; and crawl into thy presence, like an Eastern slave! For here still linger the broken remains and the faded splendour of that proud monument of the triumphs of art and of the majesty of man’s nature over the mock-majesty of thrones! Here Genius and Fame dwell together; ‘School calleth unto School,’ and mighty names answer to each other; that old gallery points to the long, dim perspective of waning years, and the shadow of Glory and of Liberty is seen afar off. In pacing its echoing floors, I hear the sound of the 107footsteps of my youth, and the dead start from their slumbers!... In all the time that I had been away from thee, and amidst all the changes that had happened in it, did I ever forget, did I ever profane thee? Never for a moment or in thought have I swerved from thee, or from the cause of which thou wert the pledge and crown. Often have I sought thee in sleep, and cried myself awake to find thee, with the heart-felt yearnings of intolerable affection. Still didst thou haunt me, like a passionate dream—like some proud beauty, the queen and mistress of my thoughts. Neither pain nor sickness could wean me from thee—

In the tangled forest or the barren waste—in the lowly hovel or the lofty palace, thy roofs reared their vaulted canopy over my head, a loftier palace, an ampler space—a ‘brave o’er-hanging firmament,’ studded with constellations of art. Wherever I was, thou wert with me, above me and about me; and didst ‘hang upon the beatings of my heart,’ a vision and a joy unutterable. There was one chamber of the brain (at least) which I had only to unlock and be master of boundless wealth—a treasure-house of pure thoughts and cherished recollections. Tyranny could not master, barbarism slunk from it; vice could not pollute, folly could not gainsay it. I had but to touch a certain spring, and lo! on the walls the divine grace of Guido appeared free from blemish—there were the golden hues of Titian, and Raphael’s speaking faces, the splendour of Rubens, the gorgeous gloom of Rembrandt, the airy elegance of Vandyke, and Claude’s classic scenes lapped the senses in Elysium, and Poussin breathed the spirit of antiquity over them. There, in that fine old lumber-room of the imagination, were the Transfiguration, and the St. Peter Martyr, with its majestic figures and its unrivalled landscape background. There also were the two St. Jeromes, Domenichino’s and Correggio’s—there ‘stood the statue that enchants the world’—there were the Apollo and the Antinous, the Laocoon, the Dying Gladiator, Diana and her Fawn, and all the glories of the antique world—

But Legitimacy did not ‘sit squat, like a toad,’ in one corner of it, poisoning the very air, and keeping the free-born spirit aloof from it!

There were one or two pictures (old favourites) that I wished to see again, and that I was told still remained. I longed to know whether they were there, and whether they would look the same. It was fortunate I arrived when I did; for a week later the doors 108would have been shut against me, on occasion of the death of the King. His bust is over the door, which I had nearly mistaken for a head of Memnon—or some Egyptian God. After passing through the modern French Exhibition (where I saw a picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and a vile farrago of Bourbon-Restoration pictures,) I came within sight of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, which is at present only railed off. One or two English stragglers alone were in it. The coolness and stillness were contrasted with the bustle, the heat, and the smell of the common apartments. My thoughts rushed in and filled the empty space. Instead of the old Republican door-keepers, with their rough voices and affectation of equality, a servant in a court-livery stood at the gate. On presenting myself, I inquired if a Monsieur Livernois (who had formerly ushered me into this region of enchantment) were still there; but he was gone or dead. My hesitation and foreign accent, with certain other appeals, procured me admittance. I passed on without further question. I cast a glance forward, and found that the Poussins were there. At the sight of the first, which I distinctly recollected (a fine green landscape, with stately ruins,) the tears came into my eyes, and I passed an hour or two in that state of luxurious enjoyment, which is the highest privilege of the mind of man, and which perhaps makes him amends for many sorrows. To my surprise, instead of finding the whole changed, I found every thing nearly in its place, as I proceeded through the first compartments, which I did slowly, and reserving the Italian pictures for a bon bouche. The colours even seemed to have been mellowed, and to have grown to the walls in the last twenty years, as if the pictures had been fixed there by the cramping-irons of Victory, instead of hanging loose and fluttering, like so much tattered canvass, at the sound of English drums, and breath of Prussian manifestoes. Nothing could be better managed than the way in which they had blended the Claudes and Poussins alternately together—the ethereal refinement and dazzling brilliancy of the one relieving and giving additional zest to the sombre, grave, massive character of the other. Claude Lorraine pours the spirit of air over all objects, and new-creates them of light and sunshine. In several of his master-pieces which are shewn here, the vessels, the trees, the temples and middle distances glimmer between air and solid substance, and seem moulded of a new element in nature. No words can do justice to their softness, their precision, their sparkling effect. But they do not lead the mind out of their own magic circle. They repose on their own beauty; they fascinate with faultless elegance. Poussin’s landscapes are more properly pictures of time than of place. They have a fine moral perspective, not inferior to Claude’s aërial 109one. They carry the imagination back two or four thousand years at least, and bury it in the remote twilight of history. There is an opaqueness and solemnity in his colouring, assimilating with the tone of long-past events: his buildings are stiff with age; his implements of husbandry are such as would belong to the first rude stages of civilization; his harvests are such (as in the Ruth and Boaz) as would yield to no modern sickle; his grapes (as in the Return from the Promised Land) are a load to modern shoulders; there is a simplicity and undistinguishing breadth in his figures; and over all, the hand of time has drawn its veil. Poussin has his faults; but, like all truly great men, there is that in him which is to be found nowhere else; and even the excellences of others would be defects in him. One picture of his in particular drew my attention, which I had not seen before. It is an addition to the Louvre, and makes up for many a flaw in it. It is the Adam and Eve in Paradise, and it is all that Mr. Martin’s picture of that subject is not. It is a scene of sweetness and seclusion ‘to cure all sadness but despair.’ There is the freshness of the first dawn of creation, immortal verdure, the luxuriant budding growth of unpruned Nature’s gifts, the stillness and the privacy, as if there were only those two beings in the world, made for each other, and with this world of beauty for the scene of their delights. It is a Heaven descended upon earth, as if the finger of God had planted the garden with trees and fruits and flowers, and his hand had watered it! One fault only can be found by the critical eye. Perhaps the scene is too flat. If the ‘verdurous wall of Paradise’ had upreared itself behind our first parents, it would have closed them in more completely, and would have given effect to the blue hills that gleam enchantment in the distance. Opposite, ‘in darkness visible,’ hangs the famous landscape of the Deluge by the same master-hand, a leaden weight on the walls with the ark ‘hulling’ on the distant flood, the sun labouring, wan and faint, up the sky, and the heavens, ‘blind with rain,’ pouring down their total cisterns on the weltering earth. Men and women and different animals are struggling with the wide-spread desolation; and trees, climbing the sides of rocks, seem patiently awaiting it above. One would think Lord Byron had transcribed his admirable account of the Deluge in his Heaven and Earth from this noble picture, which is in truth the very poetry of painting.—One here finds also the more unequivocal productions of the French school (for Claude and Poussin^[15] were in 110a great measure Italian,) Le Brun, Sebastian Bourdon, some of Le Sueur’s expressive faces, and the bland expansive style of Philip Champagne—no mean name in the history of art. See, in particular, the exquisite picture of the Sick Nun, (the Nun was his own daughter, and he painted this picture as a present to the Convent, in gratitude for her recovery,)—and another of a Religious Communion, with attendants in rich dresses.

One finds no considerable gap, till one comes to the Antwerp pictures; and this yawning chasm is not ill supplied by the Luxembourg pictures, those splendid solecisms of Rubens’s art. Never was exhibited a greater union of French flutter and Gothic grace, of borrowed absurdity and inherent power. He has made a strange jumble of the Heathen mythology, his own wives, and the mistresses of Louis XIII. His youthful Gods are painted all light and air, and figure in quaintly enough, with some flaunting Dowager dressed in the height of the fashion in the middle of the 17th century, or with some strapping quean (his queens are queans) with her robes of rich stuffs slipping off her shoulders, and displaying limbs that, both for form and hue, provoke any feeling but indifference. His groups spring from the bold licentious hand of genius; and decorated in the preposterous finery of courtly affectation, puzzle the sense. I do not think with David (the celebrated French painter) that they ought to be burnt, but he has himself got possession of their old places in the Luxembourg, and perhaps he is tolerably satisfied with this arrangement. A landscape with a rainbow by Rubens (a rich and dazzling piece of colouring) that used to occupy a recess half-way down the Louvre, was removed to the opposite side. The singular picture (the Defeat of Goliath, by Daniel Volterra,) painted on both sides on slate, still retained its station in the middle of the room. It had hung there for twenty years unmolested. The Rembrandts keep their old places, and are as fine as ever, with their rich enamel, their thick lumps of colour, their startling gloom, and bold execution—their 111ear-rings, their gold-chains, and fur-collars, on which one is disposed to lay furtive hands, so much have they the look of wealth and substantial use! The Vandykes are more light and airy than ever. There is a whole heap of them; and among the rest that charming portrait of an English lady with a little child (as fine and true a compliment as was ever paid to the English female character,) sustained by sweetness and dignity, but with a mother’s anxious thoughts passing slightly across her serene brow. The Cardinal Bentivoglio (which I remember procuring especial permission to copy, and left untouched, because, after Titian’s portraits, there was a want of interest in Vandyke’s which I could not get over,) is not there.^[16] But in the Dutch division, I found Weenix’s game, the battle-pieces of Wouvermans, and Ruysdael’s sparkling woods and waterfalls without number. On these (I recollect as if it were yesterday) I used, after a hard day’s work, and having tasked my faculties to the utmost, to cast a mingled glance of surprise and pleasure, as the light gleamed upon them through the high casement, and to take leave of them with a non equidem invideo, miror magis.

In the third or Italian division of the Gallery, there is a profusion of Albanos, with Cupids and naked Nymphs, which are quite in the old French taste. They are certainly very pleasing compositions, but from the change produced by time, the figures shew like beauty-spots on a dark ground. How inferior is he to Guido, the painter of grace and sentiment, two of whose master-pieces enchanted me anew, the Annunciation and the Presentation in the Temple. In each of these there is a tenderness, a delicacy of expression like the purest affection, and every attitude and turn of a limb is conscious elegance and voluptuous refinement. The pictures, the mind of the painter, are instinct and imbued with beauty. It is worth while to have lived to have produced works like these, or even to have seen and felt their power! Painting of old was a language which its disciples used not merely to denote certain objects, but to unfold their hidden meaning, and to convey the finest movements of the soul into the limbs or features of the face. They looked at nature with a feeling of passion, with an eye to expression; and this it was that, while they sought for outward forms to communicate their feelings, moulded them into truth and beauty, and that surrounds them with an atmosphere of thought and sentiment. To admire a fine old picture is itself an act of devotion, and as we gaze, we turn idolaters. The moderns are chiefly intent on giving certain lines and colours, the mask or material face of painting, and leave out the immortal part of it. Thus a modern Exhibition Room (whether French or English) 112has a great deal of shew and glitter, and a smell of paint in it. In the Louvre we are thrown back into the presence of our own best thoughts and feelings, the highest acts and emanations of the mind of man breathe from the walls, shadowy tears and sighs there keep vigils, and the air within it is divine!

The ideal is no less observable in the portraits than in the histories here. Look at the portrait of a man in black, by Titian (No. 1210). There is a tongue in that eye, a brain beneath that forehead. It is still; but the hand seems to have been just placed on its side; it does not turn its head, but it looks towards you to ask, whether you recognise it or not? It was there to meet me, after an interval of years, as if I had parted with it the instant before. Its keen, steadfast glance staggered me like a blow. It was the same—how was I altered! I pressed towards it, as it were, to throw off a load of doubt from the mind, or as having burst through the obstacles of time and distance that had held me in torturing suspense. I do not know whether this is not the most striking picture in the room—the least common-place. There may be other pictures more delightful to look at; but this seems, like the eye of the Collection, to be looking at you and them. One might be tempted to go up and speak to it! The allegorical portrait of the Marchioness of Guasto is still here, transparent with tenderness and beauty—Titian’s Mistress, that shines like a crystal mirror—the Entombing of Christ, solemn, harmonious as the coming on of evening—the Disciples at Emmaus—and the Crowning with Thorns, the blood here and there seeming ready to start through the flesh-colour, which even English artists have not known enough how to admire. The Young Man’s Head, with a glove that used so much to delight, I confess, disappointed me, and I am convinced must have been painted upon. There are other Titians, and a number of Raphaels—the Head of a Student muffled in thought—his own delightful Head (leaning on its hand) redolent of youthful genius, and several small Holy Families, full of the highest spirit and unction. There are also the three Marys with the Dead Body of Christ, by L. Caracci; the Salutation by Sebastian del Piombo; the noble Hunting-piece, by Annibal Caracci; the fine Landscapes of Domenichino (that in particular of the story of Hercules and Achelous, with the trunk of a tree left in the bed of a mountain-torrent); and a host besides, ‘thick as the autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa,’ and of the same colour! There are so many of these select and favourite pictures left, that one does not all at once feel the loss of others which are more common in prints and in the mouth of fame; and the absence of which may be considered as almost an advantage for a first recognition and 113revival of old associations. But afterwards we find a want of larger pictures to answer to the magnitude of the Collection, and to sustain the balance of taste between the Italian and the other schools. We have here as fine Claudes and Poussins as any in the world, but not as fine Raphaels, Correggios, Domenichinos, as there are elsewhere,—as were once here. There are wanting, to make the gallery complete, six or eight capital pictures, the Transfiguration, the St. Peter Martyr, &c.; and among others (not already mentioned,) the Altarpiece of St. Mark, by Tintoret, and Paul Veronese’s Marriage at Cana. With these it had been perfect, ‘founded as the rock, as broad and general as the casing air;’ without these it is ‘coop’d and cabin’d in by saucy doubts and fears.’ The largest Collection in the world ought to be colossal, not only in itself, but in its component parts. The Louvre is a quarter of a mile in length, and equal (as it is) to Mr. Angerstein’s, the Marquess of Stafford’s, the Dulwich Gallery, and Blenheim put together. It was once more than equal to them in every circumstance to inspire genius or console reflection. We still see the palace of the Thuilleries from the windows, with the white flag waving over it: but we look in vain for the Brazen Horses on its gates, or him who placed them there, or the pale bands of warriors that conquered in the name of liberty and of their country!

The gravity of the French character is a no less remarkable (though a less obvious) feature in it than its levity. The last is the quality that strikes us most by contrast to ourselves, and that comes most into play in the intercourse of common life; and therefore we are generally disposed to set them down as an altogether frivolous and superficial people. It is a mistake which we shall do well to correct on farther acquaintance with them; or if we persist in it, we must call to our aid an extraordinary degree of our native blindness and obstinacy. We ought never to visit their Theatres, to walk along their streets, to enter their houses, to look in their faces (when they do not think themselves observed,) to open their books, or take a view of their picture-galleries. Sterne seems to have been the first, as well as last traveller, who found out their weak side in this respect. ‘If the French have a fault, Monsieur le Comte,’ says he, ‘it is that they are too serious.’ This contradiction in their character has been little noticed, and they have never had the credit of it, though it stares one in the face everywhere. How we are to piece the two extremes together is another question. Is it that their whole 114character is a system of inconsequentiality? Or are they gay and trifling in serious matters, serious only in trifles? Or are their minds more of the cameleon-cast, that reflects all objects alike, whether grave or gay, and give themselves up entirely, and without resistance, to the prevailing impulse? Or is it owing to a want of comprehension, so that they are incapable of correcting one feeling by another, and thus run into extremes? Or that they have a greater scope and variety of resources, excelling us as much in gravity as in want of thought, outdoing us in tragedy and comedy, as they betake themselves to each, in the poetical or in the prosaic departments of life, only that they sometimes make a transposition of the two characters a little oddly, and pass from the one to the other without our well knowing why?

I have been frequently puzzled with this exception to the butterfly, airy, thoughtless, fluttering character of the French (on which we compliment ourselves,) and never more so than the first night I went to the theatre. The order, the attention, the decorum were such as would shame any London audience. The attention was more like that of a learned society to a lecture on some scientific subject, than of a promiscuous crowd collected together merely for amusement, and to pass away an idle hour. There was a professional air, an unvarying gravity in the looks and demeanour of the whole assembled multitude, as if every one had an immediate interest in the character of the national poetry, in the purity of the French accent, in the propriety of the declamation, in the conceptions of the actor, and the developement of the story, instead of its presenting a mob of idle boys and girls, of ignorant gaping citizens, or supercilious box-lobby loungers, affecting a contempt for the performance, and for every one around them. The least noise or irregularity called forth the most instant and lively disapprobation; and the vivacity of the French character displayed itself to advantage in earnest gesticulations and expressions of impatience. Not only was the strictest silence observed, as soon as the curtain drew up, but no one moved or attempted to move. The spell thrown over the customary or supposed restlessness and volatility of the French was in this respect complete. The uniformity of the appearance was indeed almost ridiculous; for the rows of heads in the seats of the pit no more stirred or projected the breadth of a finger beyond the line, than those of a regiment of recruits on parade, or than if a soldier were stationed to keep each chin in its place. They may be reduced to the state of automatons; but there were no traces of the monkey character left.^[17] If the performance had been at 115Court, greater propriety could not have been maintained; but it was a French play (one of Racine’s) and acted before a Parisian audience: this seemed to be enough to ensure it a proper reception. One would suppose, from their interest in dramatic representations, that the French were a nation of actors. Perhaps it may be asked, ‘Is not that the case? and is it not their vanity, their own desire to shine, or their sympathy with whatever or whoever is a candidate for applause, that accounts for their behaviour?’ At least, their vanity makes them grave; and if it is this which rivets their attention, and silences their eternal loquacity, it must be allowed to produce effects which others would do well to imitate from better motives, if they have them!^[18]

The play was not much; but there seemed to be an abstract interest felt in the stage as such, in the sound of the verse, in the measured step of the actors, in the recurrence of the same pauses, and of the same ideas; in the correctness of the costume, in the very notion of the endeavour after excellence, and in the creation of an artificial and imaginary medium of thought. If the French are more susceptible of immediate, sensible impressions, it would appear, judging from their behaviour at their own theatres, that they are also more sensible of reflex and refined ones. The bare suggestion of an interesting topic is to them interesting: it may be said, on the most distant intimation, to excite the most lively concern, and to collect their scattered spirits into a focus. Their sensibility takes the alarm more easily; their understanding is quicker of hearing. With them, to the sublime or pathetic there is but one step—the name; the moment the subject is started, they ‘jump at’ the catastrophe and all the consequences. We are slow, and must have a thing made out to us in striking instances, and by successive blows. We are sluggish, and must be lifted up to the heights of a factitious enthusiasm by the complicated machinery of a powerful imagination: we are obstinate, not to say selfish, and require to be urged over the abyss of mental anguish by the utmost violence of terror and pity. But with the French, all this is a matter of course, a verbal process. Tears, as well as smiles, cost them less than they do us. Words are more nearly allied to things in their minds; the one have a more vital being, though it does not follow that the other are altogether empty and barren of interest. But the French seem (in their dramatic exhibitions) not to wish to get beyond, or (shall I speak it more plainly?) to have no faculty for getting beyond the abstract conception, the naked proposition of the subject. They are a people 116(I repeat it) void and bare of the faculty of imagination, if by this we mean the power of placing things in the most novel and striking point of view; and they are so for this reason, that they have no need of it. It is to them a superfluity—a thankless toil. Their quick, discursive apprehension runs on before, and anticipates and defeats the efforts of the highest poetry. They are contented to indulge in all the agony or ecstacy of sounding and significant common-places. The words charming, delicious, indescribable, &c. excite the same lively emotions in their minds as the most vivid representations of what is said to be so; and hence verbiage and the cant of sentiment fill the place, and stop the road to genius—a vague, flaccid, enervated rhetoric being too often substituted for the pith and marrow of truth and nature. The greatest facility to feel or to comprehend will not produce the most intense passion, or the most electrical expression of it. There must be a resistance in the matter to do this—a collision, an obstacle to overcome. The torrent rushes with fury from being impeded in its course: the lightning splits the gnarled oak. There is no malice in this statement; but I should think they may themselves allow it to be an English version of the truth, containing a great deal that is favourable to them, with a saving clause for our own use. The long (and to us tiresome) speeches in French tragedy consist of a string of emphatic and well-balanced lines, announcing general maxims and indefinite sentiments applicable to human life. The poet seldom commits any excesses by giving way to his own imagination, or identifying himself with individual situations and sufferings. We are not now raised to the height of passion, now plunged into its lowest depths; the whole finds its level, like water, in the liquid, yielding susceptibility of the French character, and in the unembarrassed scope of the French intellect. The finest line in Racine, that is, in French poetry, is by common consent understood to be the following:—

That is, Fear God, my dear Abner, and fear only him. A pious and just exhortation, it is true; but, when this is referred to as the highest point of elevation to which their dramatic genius has aspired, though we may not be warranted in condemning their whole region of poetry as a barren waste, we may consider it as very nearly a level plain, and assert, that though the soil contains mines of useful truths within its bosom and glitters with the graces of a polished style, it does not abound in picturesque points of view or romantic interest! It is certain that a thousand such lines would have no effect upon an English audience but to set them to sleep, like a sermon, or to make 117them commence a disturbance to avoid it. Yet, though the declamation of the French stage is as monotonous as the dialogue, the French listen to it with the tears in their eyes, holding in their breath, beating time to the cadence of the verse, and following the actors with a book in their hands for hours together. The English most assuredly do not pay the same attention to a play of Shakspeare’s, or to any thing but a cock-fight or a sparring-match. This is no great compliment to them; but it makes for the gravity of the French, who have mistaken didactic for dramatic poetry, who can sit out a play with the greatest patience and complacency, that an Englishman would hoot off the stage, or yawn over from beginning to end for its want of striking images and lively effect, and with whom Saturn is a God no less than Mercury! I am inclined to suspect the genius of their religion may have something to do with the genius of their poetry. The first absorbs in a manner their powers of imagination, their love of the romantic and the marvellous, and leaves the last in possession of their sober reason and moral sense. Their churches are theatres; their theatres are like churches. Their fancies are satiated with the mummeries and pageantry of the Catholic faith, with hieroglyphic obscurity and quaint devices; and, when they come to the tangible ground of human affairs, they are willing to repose alike from ornament and extravagance, in plain language and intelligible ideas. They go to mass in the morning to dazzle their senses, and bewilder their imagination, and inflame their enthusiasm; and they resort to the theatre in the evening to seek relief from superstitious intoxication in the prose of poetry, and from Gothic mysteries and gloom, in classic elegance and costume. Be this as it may, the love of the French for Racine is not a feeling of the moment, or left behind them at the theatres; they can quote him by heart, and his sententious, admirable lines occupy the next place in their minds to their amatory poetry. There is nothing unpleasant in a French theatre but a certain infusion of soup-maigre into the composition of the air, (so that one inhales a kind of thin pottage,) and an oily dinginess in the complexions both of the men and women, which shews more by lamp-light. It is not true (as has been said) that their theatres are nearly dark, or that the men stand in the pit. It is true, none but men are admitted into it, but they have seats just the same as with us, and a curious custom of securing their places when they go out, by binding their handkerchiefs round them, so that at the end of the play the benches presented nothing but a row of knotted pocket handkerchiefs. Almost every one returned and sat out the entertainment, which was not a farce, but a sentimental comedy, and a very charming one too, founded on the somewhat national subject of 118a seduction by an English nobleman in France, and in which the fair sufferer was represented by a young debutante, in natural expression and pathos little inferior to Miss Kelly, (as far as we can translate French into English nature,) but fatter and prettier. So much for their taste in theatricals, which does not incline wholly to puppet-shows and gew-gaws. The Theatre, in short, is the Throne of the French character, where it is mounted on its pedestal of pride, and seen to every advantage. I like to contemplate it there, for it reconciles me to them and to myself. It is a common and amicable ground on which we meet. Their tears are such as others shed—their interest in what happened three thousand years ago is not exclusively French. They are no longer a distinct race or caste, but human beings. To feel towards others as of a different species, is not the way to increase our respect for ourselves or human nature. Their defects and peculiarities, we may be almost sure, have corresponding opposite vices in us—the excellences are confined pretty much to what there is in common.

The ordinary prejudice entertained on this subject in England is, that the French are little better than grown children—

full of grimace and noise and shew, lively and pert, but with no turn or capacity for serious thought or continued attention of any kind, and hardly deserving the name of rational beings, any more than apes or jackdaws. They may laugh and talk more than the English; but they read, and, I suspect, think more, taking them as a people. You see an apple-girl in Paris, sitting at a stall with her feet over a stove in the coldest weather, or defended from the sun by an umbrella, reading Racine or Voltaire. Who ever saw such a thing in London as a barrow-woman reading Shakspeare or Fielding? You see a handsome, smart grisette at the back of every little shop or counter in Paris, if she is not at work, reading perhaps one of Marmontel’s Tales, with all the absorption and delicate interest of a heroine of romance. Yet we make doleful complaints of the want of education among the common people, and of the want of reflection in the female character in France. There is something of the same turn for reading in Scotland; but then where is the gaiety or the grace? They are more sour and formal even than the English. The book-stalls all over Paris present a very delightful appearance. They contain neatly-bound, cheap, and portable editions of all their standard authors, which of itself refutes the charge of a want of the knowledge or taste for books. The French read with avidity whenever they can snatch the opportunity. They read standing in the open air, into 119which they are driven by the want of air at home. They read in garrets and in cellars. They read at one end of a counter, when a person is hammering a lock or a piece of cabinet-work at the other, without taking their eye from the book, or picking a quarrel with the person who is making the noise. Society is the school of education in France; there is a transparency in their intellects as in their atmosphere, which makes the communication of thought or sound more rapid and general. The farina of knowledge floats in the air, and circulates at random. Alas! it ‘quickens, even with blowing.’ A periwig-maker is an orator; a fish-woman is a moralist; a woman of fashion is a metaphysician, armed with all the topics; a pretty woman in Paris, who was not also a blue-stocking, would make little figure in the circles. It would be in vain for her to know how to dispose a knot of ribands or a bunch of flowers in her hair, unless she could arrange a critical and analytical argument in all the forms. It is nothing against her, if she excels in personal and mental accomplishments at the same time. This turn for literary or scientific topics in the women may indeed be accounted for in part from the modes of social intercourse in France; but what does this very circumstance prove, but that an interchange of ideas is considered as one great charm in the society between men and women, and that the thirst of knowledge is not banished by a grosser passion? Knowledge and reason, however, descend; and where the women are philosophers, the men are not quite block-heads or petit-maitres. They are far from being the ignorant smatterers that we pretend. They are not backward at asking for reasons, nor slow in giving them. They have a theory for every thing, even for vice and folly. Their faces again are grave and serious when they are by themselves, as they are gay and animated in society. Their eyes have a vacant, absent stare; their features set or lengthen all at once into ‘the melancholy of Moorditch.’ The Conducteur of the Diligence from Rouen confirmed me agreeably in my theory of the philosophical character of the French physiognomy. With large grey eyes and drooping eye-lids, prominent distended nostrils, a fine Fenelon expression of countenance, and a mouth open and eloquent, with furrowed lines twisted round it like whip-cord, he stood on the steps of the coach, and harangued to the gentlemen within on the bêtise of some voyageur Anglois with the air of a professor, and in a deep sonorous voice, worthy of an oration of Bossuet. I should like to hear a Yorkshire guard, with his bluff, red face, bristly bullet head, little peering eyes, round shoulders, and squeaking voice, ascend into an imaginary rostrum in this manner, wave a florid speculation in one hand, and hold fast by the coach-door with the other, or get beyond an oath, a hearty curse, or his shrewd 120country gibberish! The face of the French soldiery is a face of great humanity—it is manly, sedate, thoughtful—it is equally free from fierceness and stupidity; and it seems to bear in its eye defeat and victory, the eagle and the lilies! I cannot help adding here, that a French gentleman (un Rentier) who lodges in the hotel opposite to me, passes his time in reading all the morning, dines, plays with his children after dinner, and takes a hand at backgammon with an old gouvernante in the evening. He does not figure away with a couple of horses in the streets like our English jockeys (who really are nothing without a footman behind them,) nor does his wife plague his life out to run after all the new sights. And yet they are from the country. This looks like domestic comfort and internal resources. How many disciples of Rousseau’s Emilius are there in France at the present day? I knew one twenty years ago.

The French are a people who practise the arts and sciences naturally. A shoe-black is the artiste du jour (artist of the day,) and a rat-catcher approaches you under some insidious nom de guerre. Every thing is with them imposing, grave, important. ‘Except (it may be said) what really is so;’ and it may be insinuated, that all their pretensions are equally idly mockery and grimace. Look, then, at their works of science and of art—the one the most comprehensive and exact, the other the most laborious and finished in the world. What are their chemists, their astronomers, their naturalists, their painters, their sculptors? If not the greatest and most inventive geniuses, the most accurate compilers, and the most severe students in their several departments. La Place, Lavoisier, Cuvier, David, Houdon, are not triflers or pretenders. In science, if we have discovered the principles, they have gone more into the details—in art we accuse them of being over-laboured, and of finishing too minutely and mechanically; and they charge us (justly enough) with a want of finesse, and with producing little more than rude sketches and abortive caricatures. Their frigid, anatomical inquiries—their studies after the antique, and acquaintance with all the professional and scientific branches of their art, are notorious—and the care with which they work up their draperies and back-grounds is obvious to every one, and a standing subject of complaint and ridicule to English artists and critics. Their refinement in art, I confess, consists chiefly in an attention to rules and details, but then it does imply an attention to these, which is contrary to our idea of the flighty French character. I remember, some years ago, a young French artist in the Louvre, who was making a chalk-drawing of a small Virgin and Child, by Leonardo da Vinci, and he took eleven weeks to complete it, sitting with his legs astride over a railing, looking up and talking to those 121about him—consulting their opinion as to his unwearied imperceptible progress—going to the fire to warm his hands, and returning to perfectionate himself! There was a good deal of ‘laborious foolery’ in all this, but still he kept on with it, and did not fly to fifty things one after the other. Another student had undertaken to copy the Titian’s Mistress, and the method he took to do it was to parcel out his canvass into squares like an engraver; after which he began very deliberately, not with the face or hair, but with the first square in the right-hand corner of the picture, containing a piece of an old table. He did not care where he began, so that he went through the whole regularly. C’est égal, is the common reply in all such cases. This continuity of purpose, without any great effort or deep interest, surprises an Englishman. We can do nothing without a strong motive, and without violent exertion. But it is this very circumstance probably that enables them to proceed: they take the matter quite easily, and have not the same load of anxious thought to bear up against, nor the same impatient eagerness to reach perfection at a single stride, to stop them midway. They have not the English air hanging at their backs, like the Old Man of the Sea at Sinbad’s! The same freedom from any thing like morbid humour assists them to plod on like the Dutch from mere phlegm, or to diverge into a variety of pursuits, which is still more natural to them. Horace Vernet has in the present Exhibition a portrait of a lady, (a rival to Sir T. Lawrence’s) and close to it, a battle-piece, equal to Ward or Cooper. Who would not be a Parisian born, to attain excellence with the wish to succeed from mere confidence or indifference to success, to unite such a number of accomplishments, or be equally satisfied without a single one!

The English are over-hasty in supposing a certain lightness and petulance of manner in the French to be incompatible with sterling thought or steady application, and flatter themselves that not to be merry is to be wise. A French lady who had married an Englishman remarkable for his dullness, used to apologise for his silence in company by incessantly repeating ‘C’est toujours Locke, toujours Newton,’ as if these were the subjects that occupied his thoughts. It is well we have these names to appeal to in all cases of emergency; and as far as mere gravity is concerned, let these celebrated persons have been as wise as they would, they could not for the life of them have appeared duller or more stupid than the generality of their countrymen. The chief advantage I can find in the English over the French comes to this, that though slower, if they once take a thing up, they are longer in laying it down, provided it is a grievance or a sore subject. The reason is, that the French do not delight in 122grievances or in sore subjects; and that the English delight in nothing else, and battle their way through them most manfully. Their forte is the disagreeable and repulsive. I think they would have fought the battle of Waterloo over again! The English, besides being ‘good haters,’ are dogged and downright, and have no salvos for their self-love. Their vanity does not heal the wounds made in their pride. The French, on the contrary, are soon reconciled to fate, and so enamoured of their own idea, that nothing can put them out of conceit with it. Whatever their attachment to their country, to liberty or glory, they are not so affected by the loss of these as to make any desperate effort or sacrifice to recover them. Their continuity of feeling is such, as to be no enemy to a whole skin. They over-ran Europe like tigers, and defended their own territory like deer. They are a nation of heroes—on this side of martyrdom!

DIALOGUE, FRENCH AND ENGLISH

French.—Have you seen the whole of our Exposition of the present year?—

English.—No, but I have looked over a good part of it. I have been much pleased with many of the pictures. As far as I can judge, or have a right to say so, I think your artists have improved within these few years.

French.—Perhaps so, occasionally, but we have not David and some others.

English.—I cannot say that I miss him much. He had, I dare say, many excellences, but his faults were still more glaring, according to our insular notions of the art. Have you Guerin now? He had just brought out his first picture of Phædra and Hippolitus when I was in Paris formerly. It made a prodigious sensation at the time, and very great things were expected from him.

French.—No, his works are not much spoken of.

English.—The Hippolitus in the picture I speak of was very beautiful; but the whole appeared too much cast in the mould of the antique, and it struck me then that there was a mannerism about it that did not augur favourably for his future progress, but denoted a premature perfection. What I like in your present Exhibition is, that you seem in a great measure to have left this academic manner, and to have adopted a more natural style.

123French.—I do not exactly comprehend.

English.—Why, you know the English complain of French art as too laboured and mechanical, as not allowing scope enough for genius and originality, as you retort upon us for being coarse and rustic.

French.—Ah! I understand. There is a picture in the English style; the subject is a Greek massacre, by Rouget. It is an ébauche. It is for effect. There is much spirit in the expression, and a boldness of execution, but every part is not finished. It is like a first sketch, or like the painting of the scenes at our theatres. He has another picture here.

English.—Yes, of great merit in the same style of dashing, off-hand, explosive effect. He is something between our Ward and Haydon. But that is not what I mean. I do not wish you to exchange your vices for ours. We are not as yet models in the Fine Arts. I am only glad that you imitate us, as it is a sign you begin to feel a certain deficiency in yourselves. There is no necessity for grossness and extravagance, any more than for being finical or pedantic. Now there is a picture yonder, which I think has broken through the trammels of the modern French school, without forfeiting its just pretensions to classical history. It has the name of Drölling on it. What, pray, is the subject of it?

French.—It is Ulysses conducting Polyxena to the sacrifice. He has one much better at the Luxembourg.

English.—I don’t know; I have not seen that, but this picture appears to me to be a very favourable specimen of the present French school. It has great force, considerable beauty, symmetry of form, and expression; and it is animated flesh, not coloured stone. The action and gestures into which the figures throw themselves, seem the result of life and feeling, and not of putting casts after the antique into Opera attitudes.

French.—We do not think much of that picture. It has not been perfected.

English.—Perhaps it passes a certain conventional limit, and is borne away by the impulse of the subject; and of that the most eminent among the French artists might be thought to be as much afraid as the old lady at Court was that her face would fall in pieces, if her features relaxed into a smile. The Ulysses is poor and stiff: the nurse might be finer; but I like the faces of the two foremost figures much; they are handsome, interesting, and the whole female group is alive and in motion.

French.—What do you think of the picture by Gerard, No. 745, of the Meeting between Louis XIV. and the Spanish Ambassador? It is greatly admired here.

124English.—It appeared to me (as I passed it just now) to be a picture of great bustle and spirit; and it looks as if Iris had dipped her woof in it, the dresses are so gay and fine. Really, the show of variegated colours in the principal group is like a bed of tulips. That is certainly a capitally painted head of a priest stooping forward in a red cap and mantle.

French.—And the youth near him no less.

English.—The complexion has too much the texture of fruit.

French.—But for the composition—the contrast between youth and age is so justly marked. Are you not struck with the figure of the Spanish Ambassador? His black silk drapery is quite in the Italian style.

English.—I thought Gerard had been chiefly admired for a certain delicacy of expression, more than for his colouring or costume. He was a favourite painter of the Empress Josephine.

French.—But in the present subject there is not much scope for expression.

English.—It is very true; but in a picture of the same crowded and courtly character (The last Moments of Henry IV.,) the painter has contrived to introduce a great deal of beauty and tenderness of expression in the appearance of some of the youthful attendants. This is a more shewy and finely painted drawing-room picture; but that appears to me to have more character in it. It has also the merit of being finished with great care. I think the French excel in small histories of the domestic or ornamental kind. Here, for instance, is a very pretty picture by Madame Hersent, 897, Louis XIV. taking leave of his Grand-child. It is well painted, the dresses are rich and correct—the monarch has a great deal of negligent dignity mixed with the feebleness of age, the contrast of innocence and freshness in the child is well-managed, and the attendants are decayed beauties and very confidential-looking persons of that period. One great charm of all historical subjects is, to carry us back to the scene and time, which this picture does. Probably from the Age and Court of Louis XVIII. to that of Louis XIV. it is not far for a French imagination to transport itself.

French.—Monsieur, it is so far that we should never have got from the one to the other, if you had not helped us.

English.—So much the worse! But do you not think that a clever picture of the Interior of a Gothic Ruin, 247, (Bouton.^[19]) It seems to me as if the artist had been reading Sir Walter Scott. That lofty, ruinous cave looks out on the wintry sea from one of the Shetland Isles. There is a cold, desolate look of horror pervading it 125to the utmost extremity. But the finishing is, perhaps, somewhat too exact for so wild a scene. Has not the snow, lodged on the broken ledges of the rocks, a little of the appearance of the coat of candied sugar on a twelfth-cake? But how comes the dog in possession of so smart a kennel? It is said in the Catalogue, that by his barking he alarms his master, who saves the poor woman and her infant from perishing. Who would have thought that such a scene as this had a master?

French.—Dogs are necessary everywhere in France: there is no place that we can keep them out of. They are like the machines in ancient poetry—a part of every plot. Poodles are the true désirs: they have ousted even the priests. They may soon set up a hierarchy of their own. They swarm, and are as filthy as an Egyptian religion.

English.—But this is a house-dog, not a lap-dog.

French.—There is no saying—but pass on. Is there any other picture that you like?

English.—Yes, I am much pleased with the one opposite, the Marriage of the Virgin, 268, by Mons. Caminade. It is both elegant and natural. The Virgin kneels in a simple and expressive attitude; in the children there is a playful and healthy aspect, and the grouping is quite like a classic bas-relief. Perhaps, in this respect, it wants depth. Can you tell me, why French painting so much affects the qualities of sculpture in general,—flatness and formality in the groups, and hardness of outline in the single figures?

French.—I cannot answer that question, as it is some time since I left England, where I remained only ten months to perfect myself in the language. You probably think more highly of the next picture: The Establishment of the Enfans Trouvés, by M——?

English.—I am afraid not; for it has the old French flimsiness and flutter. The face of the Foundress resembles a shower of roseate tints. You may be sure, however, that the English in general will approve mightily of it, who like all subjects of charitable institutions. I heard an English lady just now in raptures with the naked children seated on the blankets, calling them affectionately, ‘poor little dears!’ We like subjects of want, because they afford a relief to our own sense of comfortlessness, and subjects of benevolence, because they soothe our sense of self-importance—a feeling of which we stand greatly in need.

French.—What is your opinion of the portrait of Louis XVIII., by Gerard?

English.—It seems to have been painted after dinner, and as if his Majesty was uneasy in his seat—the boots might have been spared.

126French.—We have a picture by one of your compatriots—the Chevalier Lawrence—

English.—Yes, the portrait of a Lady, in the next room. It was accounted one of the best portraits in our Somerset-house Exhibition last summer.

French.—But there is a portrait of a French Lady, placed as a companion to it, by Horace Vernet, which is thought better.

English.—I have no doubt. But I believe, in England, the preference would be given the contrary way.

French.—May I ask on what ground, Sir?

English.—Let me ask, did you ever happen to sit to have a cast of your head taken? Because I conceive that precisely the same heated, smooth, oily, close, stifling feeling that one’s face has just before the mask is taken off, is that which is conveyed by the texture and look of a finished French portrait, generally speaking, and by this in particular. I like the Head of a Lady, by Guerin (838), on the opposite side of the room, better. It is clear, cold, blue and white, with an airy attitude, and firm drawing. There is no attempt to smother one with dingy flesh rouged over.

French.—But have you seen our miniatures? The English miniatures, I imagine, are not good.

English.—At least, we have a good many of them. I know an English critic, who would at least count you up thirty eminent English miniature-painters at a breath,—all first-rate geniuses; so differently do we view these things on different sides of the Channel! In truth, all miniatures must be much alike. There can be no such thing as an English miniature, that is, as a coarse, slovenly daub in little. We finish when we cannot help it. We do not volunteer a host of graces, like you; but we can make a virtue of necessity. There was a Mr. Hayter, who painted resplendent miniatures, perfect mirrors of the highest heaven of beauty; but he preferred the English liberty of sign-post painting in oil. I observe among your miniatures several enamels and copies from the Old Masters in the Louvre. Has not the coming to them the effect of looking through a window? What a breadth, what a clearness, what a solidity? How do you account for this superiority? I do not say this invidiously, for I confess it is the same, whenever copies are introduced by stealth in our English Exhibition.

French.—I perceive, Sir, you have a prejudice in favour of the English style of art.

English.—None at all; but I cannot think our faults any justification of yours, or yours of ours. For instance, here is a landscape by a countryman of mine, Mr. Constable (No. 358). Why then all 127this affectation of dashing lights and broken tints and straggling lumps of paint, which I dare say give the horrors to a consummate French artist? On the other hand, why do not your artists try to give something of the same green, fresh, and healthy look of living nature, without smearing coats of varnish over raw dabs of colour (as we do), till the composition resembles the ice breaking up in marshy ground after a frosty morning? Depend upon it, in disputes about taste, as in other quarrels, there are faults on both sides.

French.—The English style has effect, but it is gross.

English.—True: yet in the inner rooms there are some water-colour landscapes, by Copley Fielding, which strike me as uniting effect with delicacy, particularly No. 360, with some beautiful trees fringing the fore-ground. I think our painters do best when they are cramped in the vehicle they employ. They are abusers of oil-colours.

French.—I recollect the name; but his works did not seem to me to be finished.

English.—They are finished as nature is finished: that is, the details are to be found in them, though they do not obtrude themselves. You French require every thing to be made out like pin’s points or botanic specimens of leaves and trees. Your histories want life, and your landscapes air. I could have sworn the little fishing-piece (No. —) was English. It is such a daub, and yet has such a feeling of out-of-door scenery in it.

French.—You do not flatter us. But you allow our excellence in sculpture.

English.—There is an admirable study of a little girl going into a bath, by Jacquot. It is so simple, true, and expressive, I thought it might be Chantry’s. I cannot say I saw any others that pleased me. The Eurydice, by Nantreuil, is a French Eurydice. It is an elegantly-formed female, affecting trifling airs and graces in the agonies of death. Suppose we return to the pictures in the Green Room. There is nothing very remarkable here, except the portrait of an artist by himself, which looks for all the world as if it fed upon its own white lead.

French.—Do like the figure of a woman in one corner in the Massacre of the Innocents? The artist has done all he could to propitiate the English taste. He has left his work in a sufficiently barbarous and unfinished state.

English.—But he has taken pains to throw expression, originality, and breadth into it. With us it would be considered as a work of genius. I prefer it much to any thing by our artists of the same kind, both for the tone, the wild lofty character, and the unctuous 128freedom of the pencilling. There is a strange hurly-burly in the background, and a lurid tone over the whole picture. This is what we mean by imagination—giving the feeling that there is in nature. You mean by imagination the giving something out of it—such as the Nymph (No. —) appearing to the River God. The young lady is a very charming transparency, or gauze-drawing; and the River God is a sturdy wooden statue, painted over; but I would ask you, is there any thing in the picture that takes you beyond a milliner’s shop in the Palais-royal, or a tea-garden in the neighbourhood of St. Cloud? The subject of Locusta poisoning a young slave, by Figalon, is, I think, forcibly and well treated. The old sorceress is not an every day person. The French too seldom resort to the grace of Deformity. Yet how finely it tells! They are more timid and fastidious than the ancients, whom they profess to imitate. There is one other large historical composition in the room which I am partial to; and yet the faces, the manners, the colouring, every thing in it is French. It is the Henry the Fourth pardoning the peasants who have supplied the besieged in Paris with food. That head of a young woman near the middle is particularly fine, and in the happiest style of French art. Its effect against the sky is picturesque; it is handsome, graceful, sensitive, and tinged with an agreeable florid hue.

French.—But what is your opinion of Horace Vernet’s Battle-piece?

English.—May I ask the subject?

French.—It is the battle of Mont-Mirail, after the return from Russia.

English.—Good: I was sadly afraid it was the Battle of Mont St. Jean. We ought to blot it forever from our history, if we have been, or intend to be, free. But I did not know but some Frenchman might be found to stain his canvass with it, and present it to M. le Vicomte Chateaubriand.

French.—But I speak of the painting, Sir.

English.—It is something in the same style, but hardly so clever as the picture of the Queen’s Trial, by Hayter. Did you see that when you were in London?

French.—No, Sir.

English.—Then we cannot enter into the comparison.

French.—That is true.

English.—We never had a school of painting till the present day. Whether we have one at present, will be seen in the course of the winter. Yours flourished one hundred and fifty years ago. For, not to include Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorraine in it, (names 129that belong to time and nature,) there were Philip Champagne, Jouvenet, Le Sueur, whose works are surely unequalled by the present race of artists, in colouring, in conception of the subject, in the imitation of nature, and in picturesque effect. As a proof of it, they become their places, and look well in the Louvre. A picture of David’s would be an eye-sore there. You are familiar with their works?

French.—I have seen those masters, but there is an objection to passing into that part of the Louvre.

English.—The air is, I own, different.

THE LUXEMBOURG GALLERY

Racine’s poetry, and Shakspeare’s, however wide apart, do not absolutely prove that the French and English are a distinct race of beings, who can never properly understand one another. But the Luxembourg Gallery, I think, settles this point forever—not in our favour, for we have nothing (thank God) to oppose to it, but decidedly against them, as a people incapable of any thing but the little, the affected, and extravagant in works of imagination and the Fine Arts. Poetry is but the language of feeling, and we may convey the same meaning in a different form of words. But in the language of painting, words become things; and we cannot be mistaken in the character of a nation, that, in thus expressing themselves, uniformly leave out certain elements of feeling, and greedily and ostentatiously insert others that they should not. The English have properly no school of art, (though they have one painter at least equal to Molière,)—we have here either done nothing worth speaking of, compared with our progress in other things, or our faults are those of negligence and rusticity. But the French have done their utmost to attain perfection, and they boast of having attained it. What they have done is, therefore, a fair specimen of what they can do. Their works contain undoubted proofs of labour, learning, power; yet they are only the worse for all these, since, without a thorough knowledge of the scientific and mechanical part of their profession, as well as profound study, they never could have immortalized their want of taste and genius in the manner they have done. Their pictures at the Luxembourg are ‘those faultless monsters which the art ne’er saw’ till now—the ‘hand-writing on the wall,’ which nothing can 130reverse. It has been said, that ‘Vice to be hated needs but to be seen,’ and the same rule holds good in natural as in moral deformity. It is a pity that some kind hand does not take an opportunity of giving to ashes this monument of their glory and their shame, but that it is important to preserve the proofs of such an anomaly in the history of the human mind as a generation of artists painting in this manner, and looking down upon the rest of the world as not even able to appreciate their paramount superiority in refinement and elegance. It is true, strangers know not what to make of them. The ignorant look at them with wonder—the more judicious, with pain and astonishment at the perversion of talents and industry. Still, they themselves go on, quoting one another’s works, and parcelling out the excellences of the several pictures under different heads—pour les coloris, pour le dessein, pour la composition, pour l’expression, as if all the world were of accord on this subject, and Raphael had never been heard of. It is enough to stagger a nation, as well as an individual, in their admiration of their own accomplishments, when they find they have it all to themselves; but the French are blind, insensible, incorrigible to the least hint of any thing like imperfection or absurdity. It is this want of self-knowledge, and incapacity to conceive of any thing beyond a certain conventional circle, that is the original sin—the incurable error of all their works of imagination. If Nature were a French courtezan or Opera-dancer, their poetry and painting would be the finest in the world.^[20]

The fault, then, that I should find with this Collection of Pictures is, that it is equally defective in the imitation of nature, which belongs to painting in general; or in giving the soul of nature-expression, which belongs more particularly to history-painting. Their style of art is false from beginning to end, nor is it redeemed even by the vices of genius, originality, and splendour of appearance. It is at once tame and extravagant, laboured and without effect, repulsive to the senses and cold to the heart. Nor can it well be otherwise. It sets out on a wrong principle, and the farther it goes, nay, the more completely it succeeds in what it undertakes, the more inanimate, abortive, and unsatisfactory must be the performance. French painting, in a word, is not to be considered as an independent art, or original language, coming immediately from nature, and appealing to it—it is a bad translation of sculpture into a language essentially 131incompatible with it. The French artists take plaster-casts from the antique, and colour them by a receipt; they take plaster-casts and put them into action, and give expression to the features according to the traditional rules for composition and expression. This is the invariable process: we see the infallible results, which differ only according to the patience, the boldness, and ingenuity of the painter in departing from nature, and caricaturing his subject.

For instance, let us take the Endymion of Girodet, No 57. It is a well-drawn, though somewhat effeminate Academy-figure. All the rest is what I have said. It is a waste of labour, an abuse of power. There is no repose in the attitude; but the body, instead of being dissolved in an immortal sleep, seems half lifted up, so as to produce a balance of form, and to make a display of the symmetry of the proportions. Vanity here presides even over sleep. The head is turned on one side as if it had not belonged to the body (which it probably did not) and discovers a meagre, insignificant profile, hard and pinched up, without any of the genial glow of youth, or the calm, delighted expansion of the heavenly dream that hovered so long over it. The sharp edges of the features, like rims of tin, catch the moonlight, but do not reflect the benign aspect of the Goddess! There is no feeling (not a particle) of the poetry of the subject. Then the colouring is not natural, is not beautiful, is not delicate, but that of a livid body, glittering in the moon-beams, or with a cloud of steel-filings, glimmering round it for a veil of light. It is not left as dead-colouring in an evidently unfinished state, or so as to make a blank for the imagination to fill up (as we see in Fuseli’s pictures); but every part is worked up with malicious industry, not to represent flesh, but to be as like marble or polished steel as possible. There is no variety of tint, no reflected light, no massing, but merely the difference that is produced in a smooth and uniformly coloured surface, by the alterations proper to sculpture, which are given with a painful and oppressive sense of effort and of difficulty overcome.

This is not a natural style. It is foppish and mechanical; or just what might be expected from taking a piece of stone and attempting to colour it, not from nature, not from imagination or feeling, but from a mere wilful determination to supply the impressions of one sense from those of another, by dint of perseverance and a growing conceit of one’s-self. There is, indeed, a progress to perfection; for by the time the work is finished, it is a finished piece of arrogance and folly. If you are copying a yellow colour, and you resolve to make it blue, the more blue you make it, the more perfectly you succeed in your purpose; but it is the less like yellow. So the more perfectly French a work of art is, the less it is like nature! 132The French artists have imitated the presumption of the tyrant Mezentius, who wished to link dead bodies to living ones.—Again, in the same artist’s picture of Atala at the Tomb (which I think his best, and which would make a fine bas-relief^[21]) the outline of the countenance of Atala is really noble, with a beautiful expression of calm resignation; and the only fault to be found with it is, that, supported as the head is in the arms of the Priest, it has too much the look of a bust after the antique, that we see carried about the streets by the Italian plaster-cast-makers. Otherwise, it is a classical and felicitous stroke of French genius. They do well to paint Sleep, Death, Night, or to approach as near as they can to the verge of still-life, and leaden-eyed obscurity! But what, I believe, is regarded as the master-piece of this artist, and what I have no objection to consider as the triumph of French sublimity and pathos, is his picture of the Deluge, No. 55. The national talent has here broken loose from the trammels of refinement and pedantry, and soars unconstrained to its native regions of extravagance and bombast. The English are willing to abide by this as a test. If there be in the whole of this gigantic picture of a gigantic subject any thing but distortion, meanness, extreme absurdity and brute force, we are altogether mistaken in our notions of the matter. Was it not enough to place that huge, unsightly skeleton of old age upon the shoulders of the son, who is climbing a tottering, overhanging precipice, but the farce of imposture and improbability must be systematically kept up by having the wife clinging to him in all the agony of the most preposterous theatrical affectation, and then the two children dangling to her like the fag-end of horror, and completing the chain of disgusting, because impracticable and monstrous distress? Quod sic mihi ostendis, incredulus odi. The principle of gravitation must be at an end, to make this picture endurable for a moment. All the effect depends on the fear of falling, and yet the figures could not remain suspended where they are for a single instant (but must be flung ‘with hideous ruin and combustion down,’) if they were any thing else but grisly phantoms. The terror is at once physical and preternatural. Instead of death-like stillness or desperate fortitude, preparing for inevitable fate, or hurrying from it with panic-fear at some uncertain opening, they have set themselves in a picturesque situation, to meet it under every disadvantage, playing off their antics like a family of tumblers at a fair, and exhibiting the horrid grimaces, the vulgar rage, cowardice, and impatience of the most wretched actors on a stage. The painter has, no doubt, ‘accumulated horror on horror’s head,’ in straining 133the credulity or harrowing up the feelings of the spectator to the utmost, and proving his want of conception no less by the exaggeration, than his want of invention by the monotony of his design. Real strength knows where to stop, because it is founded on truth and nature; but extravagance and affectation have no bounds. They rush into the vacuum of thought and feeling, and commit every sort of outrage and excess.^[22] Neither in the landscape is there a more historic conception than in the actors on the scene. There is none of the keeping or unity that so remarkably characterizes Poussin’s fine picture of the same subject, nor the sense of sullen, gradually coming fate. The waters do not rise slowly and heavily to the tops of the highest peaks, but dash tumultuously and violently down rocks and precipices. This is not the truth of the history, but it accords with the genius of the composition. I should think the painter might have received some hints from M. Chateaubriand for the conduct of it. It is in his frothy, fantastic, rhodomontade way—‘It out-herods Herod!’

David’s pictures, after this, are tame and trite in the comparison; they are not romantic or revolutionary, but they are completely 134French; they are in a little, finical manner, without beauty, grandeur, or effect. He has precision of outline and accuracy of costume; but how small a part is this of high history! In a scene like that of the Oath of the Horatii, or the Pass of Thermopylæ, who would think of remarking the turn of an ancle, or the disposition of a piece of drapery, or the ornaments of a shield? Yet one is quite at leisure to do this in looking at the pictures, without having one’s thoughts called off by other and nobler interests. The attempts at expression are meagre and constrained, and the attitudes affected and theatrical. There is, however, a unity of design and an interlacing of shields and limbs, which seems to express one soul in the Horatii, to which considerable praise would be due, if they had more the look of heroes, and less that of petit-maitres. I do not wonder David does not like Rubens, for he has none of the Fleming’s bold, sweeping outline. He finishes the details very prettily and skilfully, but has no idea of giving magnitude or motion to the whole. His stern Romans and fierce Sabines look like young gentlemen brought up at a dancing or fencing school, and taking lessons in these several elegant exercises. What a fellow has he made of Romulus, standing in the act to strike with all the air of a modern dandy! The women are in attitudes, and contribute to the eloquence of the scene. Here is a wife, (as we learn from the Catalogue) there a sister, here a mistress, there a grandmother with three infants. Thus are the episodes made out by a genealogical table of the relations of human life! Such is the nature of French genius and invention, that they can never get out of leading-strings! The figure of Brutus, in the picture of that subject, has a fine, manly, unaffected character. It has shrunk on one side to brood over its act, without any strut or philosophic ostentation, which was much to be dreaded. He is wrapt in gloomy thought, as in a mantle. Mr. Kean might have sat for this figure, for, in truth, it is every way like him. The group of women on the opposite side of the canvass, making a contrast by their lively colours and flimsy expression of grief, might have been spared. These pictures have, as we were told, been objected to for their too great display of the naked figure, in some instances bordering on indecency. The indecency (if so it is) is not in the nakedness of the figures, but in the barrenness of the artist’s resources to clothe them with other attributes, and with genius as with a garment. If their souls had been laid bare as well as their limbs, their spirits would have shone through and concealed any outward deformity. Nobody complains of Michael Angelo’s figures as wanting severity and decorum.

Guerin’s Phædra and Hippolitus I have already treated of, and 135I see no reason to alter my opinion. It was just painted when I last saw it, and has lost some of its freshness and the gloss of novelty. Modern pictures have the art of very soon becoming old. What remains of it has the merit of very clever studies after the antique, arranged into a subject. The rest is not worth speaking of. A set of school-boys might as well come with their portfolios and chalk-drawings under their arms, and set up for a school of Fine Art. A great nation ought to know better, and either strike out something original for others to imitate, or acknowledge that they have done nothing worthy of themselves. To arch an eye-brow, or to point a finger, is not to paint history. The study of nature can alone form the genuine artist. Any thing but this can only produce counterfeits. The tones and colours that feed the eye with beauty, the effects of light and shade, the soul speaking in the eyes or gasping on the lips, the groups that varying passion blends, these are the means by which nature reveals herself to the inspired gaze of genius, and that, treasured up and stamped by labour and study on the canvass, are the indispensable materials of historical composition. To take plaster-casts and add colour to them by an act of the will; or to take the same brittle, inanimate, inflexible models, and put life and motion into them by mechanical and learned rules, is more than Prometheus or Iris could pretend to do. It is too much for French genius to achieve. To put a statue into motion, or to give appropriate, natural, and powerful expression to set features of any kind, is at all times difficult; but, in the present instance, the difficulty is enhanced, till it amounts to a sort of contradiction in terms; for it is proposed to engraft French character and expression (the only ones with which the artists are acquainted, or to which they can have access as living studies) on Greek forms and features. Two things more abhorrent in nature exist not. One of two consequences necessarily happens: either the original model is given literally and entire, without any attempt to disguise the awkward plagiarism, and inform it with a new character; or if the artist, disdaining such servile trammels, strives to infuse his own conceptions of grace and grandeur into it, then the hero or God of antiquity comes down from his pedestal to strut a French dancing-master or tragedian. For simplicity and unexampled grace, we have impertinence and affectation; for stoic gravity and majestic suffering, we have impatience, rage, womanish hysterics, and the utmost violence of frenzied distortion. French art (like all other national art) is either nothing, or a transcript of the national character. In the Æneas and Dido, of the same artist, the drawing, the costume, the ornaments, are correct and classical; the toilette of the picture is well made; the Æneas is not much more insipid than 136the hero of Virgil, and there is an exceedingly pretty girl, (like a common French peasant girl,) a supposed attendant on the Queen. The only part of the picture in which he has attempted an extraordinary effect, and in which he has totally failed, is in the expression of enamoured attention on the part of the Queen. Her eyes do not, ‘like stars, shoot madly from their spheres,’ but they seem to have no sort of business in her head, and make the doucereuse in a most edifying manner. You are attracted to the face at a distance by the beauty of the outline (which is Greek) and instantly repelled by the grossness of the filling up of the expression (which is French). The Clytemnestra is, I think, his chef d’œuvre. She is a noble figure, beautiful in person, and deadly of purpose; and there is that kind of breathless suppression of feeling, and noiseless moving on to her end, which the rigid style of French art is not ill-adapted to convey. But there is a strange tone of colouring thrown over the picture, which gives it the appearance of figures done in stained porcelain, or of an optical deception. There is nothing to remind you that the actors of the scene are of flesh and blood. They may be of steel or bronze, or glazed earthenware, or any other smooth, unfeeling substance. This hard, liny, metallic, tangible character is one of the great discriminating features of French painting, which arises partly from their habitual mode of study, partly from the want of an eye for nature, but chiefly, I think, from their craving after precise and definite ideas, in which, if there is the least flaw or inflection, their formal apprehension loses sight of them altogether, and cannot recover the clue. This incrusted, impenetrable, stifling appearance is not only unpleasant to the eye, but repels sympathy, and renders their pictures (what they have been asserted to be) negations equally of the essential qualities both of painting and sculpture.

Of their want of ideal passion, or of the poetry of painting, and tendency to turn every thing either into comic or tragic pantomime, the picture of Cain after the Murder of Abel, by Paul Guerin, is a striking example. This composition does not want power. It would be disingenuous to say so. The artist has done what he meant in it. What, then, has he expressed? The rage of a wild beast, or of a maniac gnashing his teeth, and rushing headlong down a precipice to give vent to a momentary frenzy; not the fixed inward anguish of a man, withered by the curse of his Maker, and driven out into the wide universe with despair and solitude and unavailing remorse for his portion. The face of his wife, who appears crouched behind him, possesses great beauty and sweetness. But the sweetness and beauty are kept quite distinct. That is, grief absorbs some of the features, while others retain all their softness and serenity. This 137hypercriticism would not have been possible, if the painter had studied the expression of grief in nature. But he took a plaster-model, and tried to melt it into becoming woe!

I have said enough to explain my objections to the grand style of French art; and I am sure I do not wish to pursue so unpleasant a subject any farther. I only wish to hint to my countrymen some excuse for not admiring these pictures, and to satisfy their neighbours that our want of enthusiasm is not wholly owing to barbarism and blindness to merit. It may be asked then, ‘Is there nothing to praise in this collection?’ Far from it. There are many things excellent and admirable, with the drawbacks already stated, and some others that are free from them. There is Le Thiere’s picture of the Judgment of Brutus; a manly, solid, and powerful composition, which was exhibited some years ago in London, and is, I think, decidedly superior to any of our West’s. In Horace Vernet’s Massacre of the Mamelukes, no English critic will deny the expression of gloomy ferocity in the countenance of the Sultan, or refuse to extol the painting of the drapery of the Negro, with his back to the spectator, which is, perhaps, equal to any thing of the Venetian School, and done (for a wager) from real drapery. Is not ‘the human face divine’ as well worth studying in the original as the dyes and texture of a tunic? A small picture, by Delacroix, taken from the Inferno, Virgil and Dante in the boat, is truly picturesque in the composition and the effect, and shews a real eye for Rubens and for nature. The forms project, the colours are thrown into masses. Gerard’s Cupid and Psyche is a beautiful little picture, and is indeed as beautiful, both in composition and expression, as any thing of the kind can well be imagined; I mean, that it is done in its essential principles as a design from or for sculpture. The productions of the French school make better prints than pictures. Yet the best of them look like engravings from antique groups or cameos.^[23] There is also a set of small pictures by Ducis, explaining the effects of Love on the study of Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry, taken from appropriate subjects, and elegantly executed. Here French art appears in its natural character again, courtly and polished, and is proportionably attractive. Perhaps it had better lay aside the club of Hercules, and take up the distaff of Omphale; and then the women might fairly beat the men out of the field, as they threaten almost to do at present. 138The French excel in pieces of light gallantry and domestic humour, as the English do in interiors and pig-styes. This appears to me the comparative merit and real bias of the two nations, in what relates to the productions of the pencil; but both will scorn the compliment, and one of them may write over the doors of their Academies of Art—‘Magnis excidit ausis.’ The other cannot even say so much.

NATIONAL ANTIPATHIES

The prejudice we entertain against foreigners is not in the first instance owing to any ill-will we bear them, so much as to the untractableness of the imagination, which cannot admit two standards of moral value according to circumstances, but is puzzled by the diversity of manners and character it observes, and made uneasy in its estimate of the propriety and excellence of its own. It seems that others ought to conform to our way of thinking, or we to theirs; and as neither party is inclined to give up their peculiarities, we cut the knot by hating those who remind us of them. We get rid of any idle, half-formed, teazing, irksome sense of obligation to sympathise with or meet foreigners half way, by making the breach as wide as possible, and treating them as an inferior species of beings to ourselves. We become enemies, because we cannot be friends. Our self-love is annoyed by whatever creates a suspicion of our being in the wrong; and only recovers its level by setting down all those who differ from us as thoroughly odious and contemptible.

It is this consideration which makes the good qualities of other nations, in which they excel us, no set-off to their bad ones, in which they fall short of us; nay, we can forgive the last much sooner than the first. The French being a dirty people is a complaint we very often bring against them. This objection alone, however, would give us very little disturbance; we might make a wry face, an exclamation, and laugh it off. But when we find that they are lively, agreeable, and good-humoured in spite of their dirt, we then know not what to make of it. We are angry at seeing them enjoy themselves in circumstances in which we should feel so uncomfortable; we are baulked of the advantage we had promised ourselves over them, and make up for the disappointment by despising them heartily, as a people callous and insensible to every thing like common decency. In reading Captain Parry’s account of the Esquimaux Indian woman, 139who so dexterously trimmed his lamp by licking up half the train-oil, and smearing her face and fingers all over with the grease, we barely smile at this trait of barbarism. It does not provoke a serious thought; for it does not stagger us in our opinion of ourselves. But should a fine Parisian lady do the same thing (or something like it) in the midst of an eloquent harangue on the infinite superiority of the French in delicacy and refinement, we should hardly restrain our astonishment at the mixture of incorrigible grossness and vanity. Unable to answer her arguments, we should begin to hate her person: her gaiety and wit, which had probably delighted us before, would be changed into forwardness, flippancy, and impertinence; from seeing it united with so many accomplishments, we should be led to doubt whether sluttishness was not a virtue, and should remove the doubt out of court by indulging a feeling of private resentment, and resorting to some epithet of national abuse. The mind wishes to pass an act of uniformity for all its judgments: in defiance of every day’s experience, it will have things of a piece, and where it cannot have every thing right or its own way, is determined to have it all wrong.

A Frenchman, we will say, drops what we think a frivolous remark, which excites in us some slight degree of impatience: presently after, he makes a shrewd, sensible observation. This rather aggravates the mischief, than mends it; for it throws us out in our calculations, and confounds the distinction between sense and nonsense in our minds. A volley of unmeaning declamation or frothy impertinence causes us less chagrin than a single word that overturns some assertion we had made, or puts us under the necessity of reversing, or imposes on us the still more unwelcome task of revising our conclusions. It is easy in this case to save ourselves the trouble by calling our antagonist knave or fool; and the temptation is too strong, when we have a whole host of national prejudices at our back to justify us in so concise and satisfactory a mode of reasoning. A greater fund of vivacity and agreeable qualities in our neighbours is not sure to excite simple gratitude or admiration; it much oftener excites envy, and we are uneasy till we have quieted the sense of our deficiency by construing the liveliness of temper or invention, with which we cannot keep pace, into an excess of levity, and the continued flow of animal spirits into a species of intoxication or insanity. Because the French are animated and full of gesticulation, they are a theatrical people; if they smile and are polite, they are like monkeys—an idea an Englishman never has out of his head, and it is well if he can keep it between his lips.^[24] No one assuredly would appear dull 140and awkward, who can help it. Many an English belle, who figures at home in the first circles of fashion and is admired for her airy, thoughtless volubility, is struck dumb, and looks a mere dowdy (as if it were a voluntary or assumed transformation of character) the moment she sets foot on French ground; and the whispered sounds, lourde or elle n’est pas spirituelle, lingering in her ears, will not induce her to dissuade her husband (if he is a Lord or Member of Parliament) from voting for a French war, and are answered by the thunders of our cannon on the French coast! We even quarrel with the beauty of French women, because it is not English. If their features are regular, we find fault with their complexions; and as to their expression, we grow tired of that eternal smile upon their faces; though their teeth are white, why should they be always shewing them? Their eyes have an unpleasant glitter about them; and their eye-brows, which are frequently black and arched, are painted and put on! In short, no individual, no nation is liked by another for the advantages it possesses over it in wit or wisdom, in happiness or virtue. We despise others for their inferiority, we hate them for their superiority; and I see no likelihood of an accommodation at this rate. The English go abroad; and when they come back, they brood over the civilities or the insults they have received with equal discontent. The gaiety of the Continent has thrown an additional damp upon their native air, and they wish to clear it by setting fire to a foreign town or blowing up a foreign citadel. We are then easy and comfortable for a while. We think we can do something, that is, violence and wrong; and should others talk of retaliating, we say with Lord Bathurst, ‘Let them come!—our fingers tingling for the fray, and finding that nothing rouses us from our habitual stupor like hard blows. Defeated in the arts of peace, we get in good humour with ourselves by trying those of war. Ashamed to accost a lady, we dare face a bastion—without spirit to hold up our heads, we are too obstinate to turn our backs—and give ourselves credit for being the greatest nation in the world, because our Jack Tars (who defend the wooden walls of Old England—the same that we afterwards see with sore arms and wooden legs, begging and bawling about our streets) are the greatest blackguards on the face of the globe; because our Life Guardsmen, who have no brains to lose, are willing to have them knocked out, and because with the incessant noise and stir of our steam-engines and spinning-jennies (for having no wish to enjoy, we are glad to work ourselves to death) we can afford to pay all costs!

What makes the matter worse, is the idle way in which we abstract upon one another’s characters. We are struck only with the differences, 141and leave the common qualities out of the question. This renders a mutual understanding hopeless. We put the exceptions for the rule. If we meet with any thing odd and absurd in France, it is immediately set down as French and characteristic of the country, though we meet with a thousand odd and disagreeable things every day in England (that we never met before) without taking any notice of them. There is a wonderful keeping in our prejudices; we reason as consistently as absurdly upon the confined notions we have taken up. We put the good, wholesome, hearty, respectable qualities into one heap and call it English, and the bad, unwholesome, frivolous, and contemptible ones into another heap, and call it French; and whatever does not answer to this pretended sample, we reject as spurious and partial evidence. Our coxcomb conceit stands over the different races of mankind, like a smart serjeant of a regiment, and drills them into a pitiful uniformity, we ourselves being picked out as the élite du corps, and the rest of the world forming the forlorn hope of humanity. One would suppose, to judge from the conversation of the two nations, that all Frenchmen were alike, and that all Englishmen were personified by a particular individual, nicknamed John Bull. The French have no idea that there is any thing in England but roast-beef and plum-pudding, and a number of round, red faces, growing fat and stupid upon such kind of fare; while our traditional notion of the French is that of soup-maigre and wooden shoes, and a set of scare-crow figures corresponding to them. All classes of society and differences of character are by this unfair process consolidated into a sturdy, surly English yeoman on the one side of the Channel, or are boiled down and evaporate into a shivering, chattering valet-de-chambre, or miserable half-starved peasant on the other. It is a pleasant way of settling accounts and taking what we please for granted. It is a very old method of philosophizing, and one that is quite likely to last!

If we see a little old hump-backed withered Frenchman about five feet high, tottering on before us on a pair of spindle-shanks, with white thread stockings, a shabby great-coat, and his hair done up into a queue, his face dry, grey, and pinched up, his cheeks without blood in them, his eyes without lustre, and his body twisted like a corkscrew, we point to this grotesque figure as a true Frenchman, as the very essence of a Parisian, and an edifying vestige of the ancient régime and of the last age, before the French character was sophisticated. It does not signify that just before we had passed a bluff, red-faced, jolly-looking coachman or countryman, six feet four inches high, having limbs in proportion, and able to eat up any two ordinary Englishmen. This thumping make-weight is thrown out of the scale, 142because it does not help out our argument, or confirm our prejudices. This huge, raw-boned, heavy, knock-kneed, well-fed, shining-faced churl makes no impression on our minds, because he is not French, according to our idea of the word; or we pass him over under the pretext that he ought to be an Englishman. But the other extreme we seize upon with avidity and delight; we dandle it, we doat upon it, we make a puppet of it to the imagination; we speak of it with glee, we quote it as a text, we try to make a caricature of it; our pens itch to describe it as a complete specimen of the French nation, and as a convincing and satisfactory proof, that the English are the only people who are of sound mind and body, strong wind and limb, and free from the infirmities of a puny constitution, affectation, and old age! An old woman in France, with wrinkles and a high-plaited cap, strikes us as being quite French, as if the old women in England did not wear night-caps, and were not wrinkled. In passing along the streets, or through the walks near Paris, we continually meet a gentleman and lady whom we take for English, and they turn out to be French; or we fancy that they are French, and we find on a nearer approach, or from hearing them speak, that they are English. This does not at all satisfy us that there is no such marked difference between the two nations as we are led to expect; but we fasten on the first lusus naturæ we can find out as a striking representative of the universal French nation, and chuckle over and almost hug him to our bosoms as having kindly come to the relief of our wavering prejudices, and as an undoubted proof of our superiority to such a set of abortions as this, and of our right to insult and lord it over them at pleasure! If an object of this kind (as it sometimes happens) asks charity with an air of briskness and politesse, and does not seem quite so wretched as we would have him, this is a further confirmation of our theory of the national conceit and self-sufficiency; and his cheerfulness and content under deformity and poverty are added to his catalogue of crimes!^[25] We have a very old and ridiculous fancy in England, that all Frenchmen are or ought to be lean, and their women short and crooked; and when we see a great, fat, greasy Frenchman waddling along and ready to burst with good living, we get off by saying that it is an unwholesome kind of fat; or, if a 143Frenchwoman happens to be tall and straight, we immediately take a disgust at her masculine looks, and ask if all the women in France are giantesses?

It is strange we cannot let other people alone who concern themselves so little about us. Why measure them by our standard? Can we allow nothing to exist for which we cannot account, or to be right which has not our previous sanction? The difficulty seems to be to suspend our judgments, or to suppose a variety of causes to produce a variety of effects. All men must be alike—all Frenchmen must be alike. This is a portable theory, and suits our indolence well. But, if they do not happen to come exactly into our terms, we are angry, and transform them into beasts. Our first error lies in expecting a number of different things to tally with an abstract idea, or general denomination, and we next stigmatize every deviation from this standard by a nickname. A Spaniard, who has more gravity than an Englishman, is an owl; a Frenchman, who has less, is a monkey. I confess, this last simile sticks a good deal in my throat; and at times it requires a stretch of philosophy to keep it from rising to my lips. A walk on the Boulevards is not calculated to rid an Englishman of all his prejudices or of all his spleen. The resemblance to an English promenade afterwards makes the difference more mortifying. There is room to breathe, a footpath on each side of the road, and trees over your head. But presently the appearance of a Bartlemy-fair all the year round, the number of little shabby stalls, the old iron, pastry, and children’s toys; the little white lapdogs, with red eyes, combing and washing; the mud and the green trees, wafting alternate odours; the old women sitting like terra cotta figures; the passengers running up against you, (most of them so taken up with themselves that they seem like a crowd of absent people!) the noise, the bustle, the flutter, the hurry without visible object; the vivacity without intelligible meaning; the loud and incessant cry of ‘Messieurs’ from a bawling charlatan inviting you to some paltry, cheating game, and a broad stare or insignificant grin from the most ill-bred and ill-looking of the motley set at the appearance of an Englishman among them; all this jumble of little teazing, fantastical, disagreeable, chaotic sensations really puts one’s patience a little to the test, and throws one a little 144off one’s guard. I was in this humour the other day, and wanted some object to conduct off a superfluity of rising irritability, when, at a painted booth opposite, I saw a great lubberly boy in an ecstacy of satisfaction. He had on a red coat, a huge wig of coarse yellow hair, and with his hat was beating a monkey in the face, dressed en militaire—grinning, jabbering, laughing, screaming, frantic with delight at the piteous aspect and peevish gestures of the animal; while a tall showman, in a rusty blue coat and long pig-tail, (which might have been stolen from the monkey) looked on with severe complacency and a lofty pride in the bizarrerie, and the ‘mutually reflected charities’ of the scene. The trio (I am vexed to think it) massed themselves in my imagination, and I was not sorry to look upon them as a little national group, well-matched, and tricked out alike in pretensions to humanity.^[26]

I was relieved from this fit of misanthropy, by getting into the shade of the barrier-wall, and by meeting a man, (a common French mechanic,) carrying a child in his arms, and the mother by its side, clapping her hands at it, smiling, and calling out ‘Mon petit ami!’ with unmingled and unwearied delight. There was the same over-animation in talking to the child as there would have been in talking to a dog or a parrot. But here it gave pleasure instead of pain, because our sympathies went along with it. I change my opinion of the French character fifty times a day, because, at every step, I wish to form a theory, which at the next step, is contradicted. The ground seems to me so uncertain—the tenure by which I hold my opinions so frail, that at last I grow ashamed of them altogether—of what I think right, as of what I think wrong.

To praise or to blame is perhaps equally an impertinence. While we are strangers to foreign manners and customs, we cannot be judges; it would take almost a life to understand the reasons and the differences; and by the time we can be supposed to do this, we become used to them, and in some sense parties concerned. The English are the fools of an hypothesis, as the Scotch are of a system. We must have an opinion—right or wrong; but, in that case, till we have the means of knowing whether it is right or wrong, it is as well to have a qualified one. We may at least keep our temper, and collect hints for self-correction; we may amuse ourselves in collecting 145materials for a decision that may never be passed, or will have little effect, even when it is, and may clear our eyesight from the motes and beams of prejudice by looking at things as they occur. Our opinions have no great influence on others; but the spirit in which we form them has a considerable one on our own happiness. It is of more importance to ourselves than to the French, what we think of them. It would be hard if a mental obliquity on their parts should ‘thrust us from a level consideration,’ or some hasty offence taken at the outset should shut up our eyes, our ears, and understandings for the rest of a journey, that we have commenced for no other purpose than to be spectators of a new and shifting scene, and to have our faculties alike open to impressions of all sorts.

What Englishman has not seen the Cemetery of Père la Chaise? What Englishman will undertake either to condemn or entirely approve it, unless he could enter completely into the minds of the French themselves? The approach to it (a little way out of Paris) is literally ‘garlanded with flowers.’ You imagine yourself in the neighbourhood of a wedding, a fair, or some holiday-festival. Women are sitting by the road-side or at their own doors, making chaplets of a sort of yellow flowers, which are gathered in the fields, baked, and will then last a French ‘Forever.’ They have taken ‘the lean abhorred monster,’ Death, and strewed him o’er and o’er with sweets; they have made the grave a garden, a flower-bed, where all Paris reposes, the rich and the poor, the mean and the mighty, gay and laughing, and putting on a fair outside as in their lifetime. Death here seems life’s playfellow, and grief and smiling content sit at one tomb together. Roses grow out of the clayey ground; there is the urn for tears, the slender cross for faith to twine round; the neat marble monument, the painted wreaths thrown upon it to freshen memory, and mark the hand of friendship. ‘No black and melancholic yew-trees’ darken the scene, and add a studied gloom to it—no ugly death’s heads or carved skeletons shock the sight. On the contrary, some pretty Ophelia, as general mourner, appears to have been playing her fancies over a nation’s bier, to have been scattering ‘pansies for thoughts, rue for remembrances.’ But is not the expression of grief, like hers, a little too fantastical and light-headed? Is it not too much like a childish game of Make-Believe? Or does it not imply a certain want of strength of mind, as well as depth of feeling, thus to tamper with the extremity of woe, and varnish over the most serious contemplation of mortality? True sorrow is manly and decent, not effeminate or theatrical. The tomb is not a baby-house for the imagination to hang its idle ornaments and mimic finery in. To meet sad thoughts, and overpower or allay them 146by other lofty and tender ones, is right; but to shun them altogether, to affect mirth in the midst of sighing, and divert the pangs of inward misfortune by something to catch the eye and tickle the sense, is what the English do not sympathize with. It is an advantage the French have over us. The fresh plants and trees that wave over our graves; the cold marble that contains our ashes; the secluded scene that collects the wandering thoughts; the innocent, natural flowers that spring up, unconscious of our loss—objects like these at once cherish and soften our regrets; but the petty daily offerings of condolence, the forced liveliness and the painted pride of the scene before us, are like galvanic attempts to recall the fleeting life—they neither flatter the dead nor become the living! One of the most heartless and flimsy extravagances of the New Eloise, is the attempt made to dress up the daughter of Madame d’Orbe like Julia, and set her in her place at the table after her death. Is not the burying-ground of the Père la Chaise tricked out and over-acted much on the same false principle, as if there were nothing sacred from impertinence and affectation? I will not pretend to determine; but to an English taste it is so. We see things too much, perhaps, on the dark side; they see them too much (if that is possible) on the bright. Here is the tomb of Abelard and Eloise—immortal monument, immortal as the human heart and poet’s verse can make it! But it is slight, fantastic, of the olden time, and seems to shrink from the glare of daylight, or as if it would like to totter back to the old walls of the Paraclete, and bury its quaint devices and its hallowed inscriptions in shadowy twilight. It is, however, an affecting sight, and many a votive garland is sprinkled over it. Here is the tomb of Ney, (the double traitor) worthy of his fate and of his executioner;—and of Massena and Kellerman. There are many others of great note, and some of the greatest names—Molière, Fontaine, De Lille. Chancellors and charbottiers lie mixed together, and announce themselves with equal pomp. These people have as good an opinion of themselves after death as before it. You see a bust with a wreath or crown round its head—a strange piece of masquerade—and other tombs with a print or miniature of the deceased hanging to them! Frequently a plain marble slab is laid down for the surviving relatives of the deceased, waiting its prey in expressive silence. This is making too free with death, and acknowledging a claim which requires no kind of light to be thrown upon it. We should visit the tombs of our friends with more soothing feelings, without marking out our own places beside them. But every French thought or sentiment must have an external emblem. The inscriptions are in general, however, simple and appropriate. I only remarked one to 147which any exception could be taken; it was a plain tribute of affection to some individual by his family, who professed to have ‘erected this modest monument to preserve his memory forever!’ What a singular idea of modesty and eternity! So the French, in the Catalogue of the Louvre, in 1803, after recounting the various transmigrations of the Apollo Belvidere in the last two thousand years (vain warnings of mutability!) observed, that it was at last placed in the Museum at Paris, ‘to remain there forever.’ Alas! it has been gone these ten years.

Mademoiselle Mars (of whom so much has been said) quite comes up to my idea of an accomplished comic actress. I do not know that she does more than this, or imparts a feeling of excellence that we never had before, and are at a loss how to account for afterwards (as was the case with our Mrs. Jordan and Mrs. Siddons in opposite departments,) but she answers exactly to a preconception in the mind, and leaves nothing wanting to our wishes. I had seen nothing of the kind on our stage for many years, and my satisfaction was the greater, as I had often longed to see it. The last English actress who shone in genteel comedy was Miss Farren, and she was just leaving the stage when I first became acquainted with it. She was said to be a faint copy of Mrs. Abington—but I seem to see her yet, glittering in the verge of the horizon, fluttering, gay, and airy, the ‘elegant turn of her head,’ the nodding plume of feathers, the gloves and fan, the careless mien, the provoking indifference—we have had nothing like it since, for I cannot admit that Miss O’Neil had the Lady-Teazle air at all. Out of tragedy she was awkward and heavy. She could draw out a white, patient, pathetic pocket-handkerchief with great grace and simplicity; she had no notion of flirting a fan. The rule here is to do every thing without effort—

This art is lost among us; the French still have it in very considerable perfection. Really, it is a fine thing to see Molière’s Misanthrope, at the Theatre Français, with Mademoiselle Mars as Celimène. I had already seen some very tolerable acting at the minor French Theatres, but I remained sceptical; I still had my English scruples hanging about me, nor could I get quite reconciled to the French manner. For mannerism is not excellence. It might be good, but I 148was not sure of it. Whatever one hesitates about in this way, is not the best. If a thing is first-rate, you see it at once, or the fault is yours. True genius will always get the better of our local prejudices, for it has already surmounted its own. For this reason, one becomes an immediate convert to the excellence of the French school of serious comedy. Their actors have lost little or nothing of their spirit, tact, or skill in embodying the wit and sense of their favourite authors. The most successful passages do not interfere with our admiration of the best samples of English acting, or run counter to our notions of propriety. That which we thought well done among ourselves, we here see as well or better done; that which we thought defective, avoided. The excellence or even superiority of the French over us only confirms the justness of our taste. If the actor might feel some jealousy, the critic can feel none. What Englishman does not read Molière with pleasure? Is it not a treat then to see him well acted? There is nothing to recall our national antipathies, and we are glad to part with such unpleasant guests.

The curtain is scarcely drawn up, when something of this effect is produced in the play I have mentioned, and the entrance of Mademoiselle Mars decides it. Her few first simple sentences—her ‘Mon Ami’ at her lover’s first ridiculous suggestion, the mingled surprise, displeasure, and tenderness in the tone—her little peering eyes, full of languor and archness of meaning—the peaked nose and thin compressed lips, opening into an intelligent, cordial smile—her self-possession—her slightest gesture—the ease and rapidity of her utterance, every word of which is perfectly distinct—the playful, wondering good-nature with which she humours the Misanthrope’s eccentricities throughout, and the finer tone of sense and feeling in which she rejects his final proposal, must stamp her a favourite with the English as well as with the French part of the audience. I cannot see why that should not be the case. She is all life and spirit. Would we be thought entirely without them? She has a thorough understanding and relish of her author’s text. So, we think, have we. She has character, expression, decision—they are the very things we pique ourselves upon. Ease, grace, propriety—we aspire to them, if we have them not. She is free from the simagrées, the unmeaning petulance and petty affectation that we reproach the French with, and has none of the awkwardness, insipidity, or vulgarity that we are so ready to quarrel with at home. It would be strange if the English did not admire her as much as they profess to do. I have seen but one book of travels in which she was abused, and that was written by a Scotchman! Mademoiselle Mars is neither handsome 149nor delicately formed. She has not the light airy grace, nor the evanescent fragility of appearance that distinguished Miss Farren, but more point and meaning, or more of the intellectual part of comedy.

She was admirably supported in Celimène. Monsieur Damas played the hero of the Misanthrope, and played it with a force and natural freedom which I had no conception of as belonging to the French stage. If they drawl out their tragic rhymes into an endless sing-song, they cut up their comic verses into mincemeat. The pauses, the emphasis, are left quite ad libitum, and are as sudden and varied as in the most familiar or passionate conversation. In Racine they are obliged to make an effort to get out of themselves, and are solemn and well-behaved; in Molière they are at home, and commit all sorts of extravagances with wonderful alacrity and effect. Heroes in comedy, pedants in tragedy, they are greatest on small occasions; and their most brilliant efforts arise out of the ground of common life. Monsieur Damas’s personification of the Misanthrope appeared to me masterly. He had apparently been chosen to fill the part for his ugliness; but he played the lover and the fanatic with remarkable skill, nature, good-breeding, and disordered passion. The rapidity, the vehemence of his utterance and gestures, the transitions from one feeling to another, the fond rapture, the despair, the rage, the sarcastic coolness, the dignified contempt, were much in the style of our most violent tragic representations, and such as we do not see in our serious comedy or in French tragedy. The way in which this philosophic madman gave a loose to the expression of his feelings, when he first suspects the fidelity of his mistress, when he quarrels with her, and when he is reconciled to her, was strikingly affecting. It was a regular furious scolding-bout, with the ordinary accompaniments of tears, screams, and hysterics. A comic actor with us would have made the part insipid and genteel; a tragic one with them pompous and affected. At Drury-lane, Mr. Powell would take the part. Our fine gentlemen are walking suits of clothes; their tragic performers are a professor’s gown and wig: the Misanthrope of Molière, as Monsieur Damas plays it, is a true orator and man of genius. If they pour the oil of decorum over the loftier waves of tragedy, their sentimental comedy is like a puddle in a storm. The whole was admirably cast, and ought to make the English ashamed of themselves, if they are not above attending to any thing that can give pleasure to themselves or other people. Arsinoe, the friend and rival of Celimène, was played by Madame ——, a ripe, full-blown beauty, a prude, the redundancies of whose person and passions are kept in due bounds by tight lacing and lessons of morality. Eliante was a 150Mademoiselle Menjaud, a very amiable-looking young person, and exactly fitted to be an élève in this School for Scandal. She smiled and blushed and lisped mischief in the prettiest manner imaginable. The man who comes to read his Sonnet to Alceste was inimitable. His teeth had an enamel, his lips a vermilion, his eyes a brilliancy, his smile a self-complacency, such as never met in poet or in peer, since Revolutions and Reviews came into fashion. He seemed to have been preserved in a glass-case for the last hundred and fifty years, and to have walked out of it in these degenerate days, dressed in brocade, in smiles and self-conceit, to give the world assurance of what a Frenchman was! Philinte was also one of those prosing confidants, with grim features, and profound gravity, that are to be found in all French plays, and who, by their patient attention to a speech of half an hour long, acquire an undoubted right to make one of equal length in return. When they were all drawn up in battle-array, in the scene near the beginning, which Sheridan has copied, it presented a very formidable aspect indeed, and the effect was an historical deception. You forgot you were sitting at a play at all, and fancied yourself transported to the court or age of Louis XIV.!—Blest period!—the triumph of folly and of France, when, instead of poring over systems of philosophy, the world lived in a round of impertinence—when to talk nonsense was wit, to listen to it politeness—when men thought of nothing but themselves, and turned their heads with dress instead of the affairs of Europe—when the smile of greatness was felicity, the smile of beauty Elysium—and when men drank the brimming nectar of self-applause, instead of waiting for the opinion of the reading public! Who would not fling himself back to this period of idle enchantment? But as we cannot, the best substitute for it is to see a comedy of Molière’s acted at the Theatre Français. The thing is there imitated to the life.

After all, there is something sufficiently absurd and improbable in this play. The character from which it takes its title is not well made out. A misanthrope and a philanthropist are the same thing, as Rousseau has so well shewn in his admirable criticism on this piece. Besides, what can be so nationally characteristic as the voluntary or dramatic transfers of passion in it? Alceste suspects his mistress’s truth, and makes an abrupt and violent declaration of love to another woman in consequence, as if the passion (in French) went along with the speech, and our feelings could take any direction at pleasure which we bethought ourselves of giving them. And then again, when after a number of outrages and blunders committed by himself, he finds he is in the wrong, and that he ought to be satisfied with Celimène and the world, which turns out no worse than he always 151thought it; he takes, in pure spite and the spirit of contradiction, the resolution to quit her forever, unless she will agree to go and live with him in a wilderness. This is not misanthropy, but sheer ‘midsummer madness.’ It is a mere idle abstract determination to be miserable, and to make others so, and not the desperate resource of bitter disappointment (for he has received none) nor is it in the least warranted by the proud indignation of a worthy sensible man at the follies of the world (which character Alceste is at first represented to be). It is a gratuitous start of French imagination, which is still in extremes, and ever in the wrong. Why, I would ask, must a man be either a mere courtier and man of the world, pliant to every custom, or a mere enthusiast and maniac, absolved from common sense and reason? Why could not the hero of the piece be a philosopher, a satirist, a railer at mankind in general, and yet marry Celimène, with whom he is in love, and who has proved herself worthy of his regard? The extravagance of Timon is tame and reasonable to this, for Timon had been ruined by his faith in mankind, whom he shuns. Yet the French would consider Timon as a very farouche and outré sort of personage. To be hurried into extremities by extreme suffering and wrong, is with them absurd and shocking: to play the fool without a motive or in virtue of making a set speech, they think in character and keeping. So far, to be sure, we differ in the first principles of dramatic composition. A similar remark might be made on the Tartuffe. This character is detected over and over again in acts of the most barefaced profligacy and imposture; he makes a fine speech on the occasion, and Orgon very quietly puts the offence in his pocket. This credulity to verbal professions would be tolerated on no stage but the French, as natural or probable. Plain English practical good sense would revolt at it as a monstrous fiction. But the French are so fond of hearing themselves talk, that they take a sort of interest (by proxy) in whatever affords an opportunity for an ingenious and prolix harangue, and attend to the dialogue of their plays, as they might to the long-winded intricacies of a law-suit. Mr. Bartolino Saddletree would have assisted admirably at a genuine prosing French Comedy.

Mademoiselle Mars played also in the afterpiece, a sort of shadowy Catherine and Petruchio. She is less at home in the romp than in the fine lady. She did not give herself up to the ‘whole loosened soul’ of farce, nor was there the rich laugh, the sullen caprice, the childish delight and astonishment in the part, that Mrs. Jordan would have thrown into it. Mrs. Orger would have done it almost as well. There was a dryness and restraint, as if there was a constant dread of running into caricature. The outline was correct, but the filling up 152was not bold or luxuriant. There is a tendency in the lighter French comedy to a certain jejuneness of manner, such as we see in lithographic prints. They do not give full swing to the march of the humour, just as in their short, tripping walk they seem to have their legs tied. Madame Marsan is in this respect superior. There was an old man and woman in the same piece, in whom the quaint drollery of a couple of veteran retainers in the service of a French family was capitally expressed. The humour of Shakspeare’s play, as far as it was extracted, hit very well.—The behaviour of the audience was throughout exemplary. There was no crowd at the door, though the house was as full as it could hold; and indeed most of the places are bespoke, whenever any of their standard pieces are performed. The attention never flags; and the buzz of eager expectation and call for silence, when the curtain draws up, is just the same as with us when an Opera is about to be performed, or a song to be sung. A French audience are like flies caught in treacle. Their wings are clogged, and it is all over with their friskings and vagaries. Their bodies and their minds set at once. They have, in fact, a national theatre and a national literature, which we have not. Even well-informed people among us hardly know the difference between Otway and Shakspeare; and if a person has a fancy for any of our elder classics, he may have it to himself for what the public cares. The French, on the contrary, know and value their best authors. They have Molière and Racine by heart—they come to their plays as to an intellectual treat; and their beauties are reflected in a thousand minds around you, as you see your face at every turn in the Café des Milles-Colonnes. A great author or actor is really in France what one fancies them in England, before one knows any thing of the world as it is called. It is a pity we should set ourselves up as the only reading or reflecting people—ut lucus a non lucendo.^[27] But we have here no oranges in the pit, no cry of porter and cider, no jack-tars to encore Mr. Braham three times in ‘The Death of Abercrombie,’ and no play-bills. This last is a great inconvenience to strangers, and is what one would not expect from a play-going 153people; though it probably arises from that very circumstance, as they are too well acquainted with the actors and pieces to need a prompter. They are not accidental spectators, but constant visitors, and may be considered as behind the scenes.

I saw three very clever comic actors at the Theatre des Variétés on the Boulevards, all quite different from each other, but quite French. One was Le Peintre, who acted a master-printer; and he was a master-printer, so bare, so dingy, and so wan, that he might be supposed to have lived on printer’s ink and on a crust of dry bread cut with an oniony knife. The resemblance to familiar life was so complete and so habitual, as to take away the sense of imitation or the pleasure of the deception. Another was Odry, (I believe,) who with his blue coat, gold-laced hat, and corpulent belly, resembled a jolly, swaggering, good-humoured parish-officer, or the boatswain of an English man-of-war. His éclats de rire, the giddy way in which he ran about the stage (like an overgrown school-boy), his extravagant noises, and his gabbling and face-making were, however, quite in the French style. A fat, pursy Englishman, acting the droll in this manner, would be thought drunk or mad; the Frenchman was only gay! Monsieur Potier played an old lover, and, till he was drest, looked like an old French cook-shop keeper. The old beau transpired through his finery afterwards. But, though the part was admirably understood, the ridicule was carried too far. This person was too meagre, his whisper too inaudible, his attempts at gallantry too feeble and vapid, and the whole too much an exhibition of mere physical decay to make the satire pleasant. There should be at least some revival of the dead; the taper of love ought to throw out an expiring gleam. In the song in praise of Love he threw a certain romantic air into the words, warbling them in a faint demi-voix, and with the last sigh of a youthful enthusiasm fluttering on his lips. This was charming. I could not help taking notice, that during his breakfast, and while he is sipping his coffee, he never once ceases talking to his valet the whole time. The concluding scene, in which, after kneeling to his mistress, he is unable to rise again without the help of his nephew, who surprises him in this situation, and who is also his rival, is very amusing.^[28] The songs at this theatre are very pleasing and light, but so short, that they are over almost as soon as begun, and before your ears have a mouthful of sound. This is very tantalizing to us; but the French seem impatient to have the dialogue 154go on again, in which they may suppose themselves to have a share. I wanted to see Brunet, but did not.

Talma and Mademoiselle Georges (the great props of French tragedy) are not at present here. Talma is at Lyons, and Mademoiselle Georges has retired on a pique into the country, in the manner of some English actresses. I had seen them both formerly, and should have liked to see them again. Talma has little of the formal automaton style in his acting. He has indeed that common fault in his countrymen of speaking as if he had swallowed a handful of snuff; but in spite of this, there is great emphasis and energy in his enunciation, a just conception, and an impressive representation of character. He comes more in contact with nature than our Kemble-school, with more of dignity than the antagonist one. There is a dumb eloquence in his gestures. In Œdipus, I remember his raising his hands above his head, as if some appalling weight were falling on him to crush him; and in the Philoctetes, the expression of excruciating pain was of that mixed mental and physical kind, which is so irresistibly affecting in reading the original Greek play, which Racine has paraphrased very finely. The sounds of his despair and the complaints of his desolate situation were so thrilling, that you might almost fancy you heard the wild waves moan an answer to them. Mademoiselle Georges (who gave recitations in London in 1817) was, at the time I saw her, a very remarkable person. She was exceedingly beautiful, and exceedingly fat. Her fine handsome features had the regularity of an antique statue, with the roundness and softness of infancy. Her well-proportioned arms (swelled out into the largest dimensions) tapered down to a delicate baby-hand. With such a disadvantage there was no want of grace or flexibility in her movements. Her voice had also great sweetness and compass. It either sunk into the softest accents of tremulous plaintiveness, or rose in thunder. The effect was surprising; and one was not altogether reconciled to it at first. She plays at the Odeon, and has a rival at the Theatre Français, Madame Paradol, who is very like her in person. She is an immense woman; when I saw her, I thought it was Mademoiselle Georges fallen away! There are some other tragic actresses here, with the prim airs of a French milliner forty years ago, the hardiesse of a battered gouvernante, and the brazen lungs of a drum-major. Mademoiselle Duchesnois I have not had an opportunity of seeing.

Paris is a beast of a city to be in—to those who cannot get out of it. Rousseau said well, that all the time he was in it, he was only trying how he should leave it. It would still bear Rabelais’ double etymology of Par-ris and Lutetia.^[29] There is not a place in it where you can set your foot in peace or comfort, unless you can take refuge in one of their hotels, where you are locked up as in an old-fashioned citadel, without any of the dignity of romance. Stir out of it, and you are in danger of being run over every instant. Either you must be looking behind you the whole time, so as to be in perpetual fear of their hackney-coaches and cabriolets; or, if you summon resolution, and put off the evil to the last moment, they come up against you with a sudden acceleration of pace and a thundering noise, that dislocates your nervous system, till you are brought to yourself by having the same startling process repeated. Fancy yourself in London with the footpath taken away, so that you are forced to walk along the middle of the streets with a dirty gutter running through them, fighting your way through coaches, waggons, and handcarts trundled along by large mastiff-dogs, with the houses twice as high, greasy holes for shop-windows, and piles of wood, green-stalls, and wheelbarrows placed at the doors, and the contents of wash-hand basins pouring out of a dozen stories—fancy all this and worse, and, with a change of scene, you are in Paris. The continual panic in which the passenger is kept, the alarm and the escape from it, the anger and the laughter at it, must have an effect on the Parisian character, and tend to make it the whiffling, skittish, snappish, volatile, inconsequential, unmeaning thing it is. The coachmen nearly drive over you in the streets, because they would not mind being driven over themselves—that is, they would have no fear of it the moment before, and would forget it the moment after. If an Englishman turns round, is angry, and complains, he is laughed at as a blockhead; and you must submit to be rode over in your national character. A horseman makes his horse curvet and capriole right before you, because he has no notion how an English lady, who is passing, can be nervous. They run up against you in the street out of mere heedlessness and hurry, and when you expect to have a quarrel (as would be the case in England) make you a low bow and 156slip on one side, to shew their politeness. The very walk of the Parisians, that light, jerking, fidgetting trip on which they pride themselves, and think it grace and spirit, is the effect of the awkward construction of their streets, or of the round, flat, slippery stones, over which you are obliged to make your way on tiptoe, as over a succession of stepping-stones, and where natural ease and steadiness are out of the question. On the same principle, French women shew their legs (it is a pity, for they are often handsome, and a stolen glimpse of them would sometimes be charming) sooner than get draggle-tailed; and you see an old French beau generally walk like a crab nearly sideways, from having been so often stuck up in a lateral position between a coach-wheel, that threatened the wholeness of his bones, and a stone-wall that might endanger the cleanliness of his person. In winter, you are splashed all over with the mud; in summer, you are knocked down with the smells. If you pass along the middle of the street, you are hurried out of breath; if on one side, you must pick your way no less cautiously. Paris is a vast pile of tall and dirty alleys, of slaughter-houses and barbers’ shops—an immense suburb huddled together within the walls so close, that you cannot see the loftiness of the buildings for the narrowness of the streets, and where all that is fit to live in, and best worth looking at, is turned out upon the quays, the boulevards, and their immediate vicinity.

Paris, where you can get a sight of it, is really fine. The view from the bridges is even more imposing and picturesque than ours, though the bridges themselves and the river are not to compare with the Thames, or with the bridges that cross it. The mass of public buildings and houses, as seen from the Pont Neuf, rises around you on either hand, whether you look up or down the river, in huge, aspiring, tortuous ridges, and produces a solidity of impression and a fantastic confusion not easy to reconcile. The clearness of the air, the glittering sunshine, and the cool shadows add to the enchantment of the scene. In a bright day, it dazzles the eye like a steel mirror. The view of London is more open and extensive; it lies lower, and stretches out in a lengthened line of dusky magnificence. After all, it is an ordinary town, a place of trade and business. Paris is a splendid vision, a fabric dug out of the earth, and hanging over it. The stately, old-fashioned shapes and jutting angles of the houses give it the venerable appearance of antiquity, while their texture and colour clothe it in a robe of modern splendour. It looks like a collection of palaces, or of ruins! They have, however, no single building that towers above and crowns the whole, like St. Paul’s, (the Pantheon is a stiff, unjointed mass to it)—nor is Notre-Dame at all to be compared to Westminster-Abbey with its Poets’ Corner, that 157urn full of noble English ashes, where Lord Byron was ashamed to lie. The Chamber of Deputies (formerly the residence of the Dukes of Bourbon) presents a brilliant frontispiece, but it is a kind of architectural abstraction, standing apart, and unconnected with every thing else, not burrowing, like our House of Commons (that true and original model of a Representative Assembly House!) almost underground, and lost among the rabble of streets. The Tuileries is also a very noble pile of buildings, if not a superb piece of architecture. It is a little heavy and monotonous, a habitation for the bodies or for the minds of Kings, but it goes on in a laudable jog-trot, right-lined repetition of itself, without much worth or sense in any single part (like the accumulation of greatness in an hereditary dynasty). At least it ought to be finished (for the omen’s sake), to make the concatenation of ideas inviolable and complete! The Luxembourg, the Hospital of Invalids, the Hall of Justice, and innumerable other buildings, whether public or private, are far superior to any of the kind we have in London, except Whitehall, on which Inigo Jones laid his graceful hands; or Newgate, where we English shine equally in architecture, morals, and legislation. Our palaces (within the bills of mortality) are dog-holes, or receptacles for superannuated Abigails, and tabbies of either species. Windsor (whose airy heights are placed beyond them) is, indeed, a palace for a king to inhabit, or a poet to describe, or to turn the head of a prose-writer. (See Gray’s Ode, and the famous passage in Burke about it.) Buonaparte’s Pillar, in the Place Vendôme, cast in bronze, and with excellent sculptures, made of the cannon taken from the Allies in their long march to Paris, is a fine copy of the antique. A white flag flaps over it. I should like to write these lines at the bottom of it. Probably, Mr. Jerdan will know where to find them.

The new streets and squares in this neighbourhood are also on an improved plan—there is a double side-path to walk on, the shops are more roomy and richer, and you can stop to look at them in safety. This is as it should be—all we ask is common sense. Without this practical concession on their parts, in the dispute whether Paris is not better than London, it would seem to remain a question, whether it is better to walk on a mall or in a gutter, whether airy space is preferable to fetid confinement, or whether solidity and show together are not 158better than mere frippery? But for a real West End, for a solid substantial cut into the heart of a metropolis, commend me to the streets and squares on each side of the top of Oxford-street—with Grosvenor and Portman squares at one end, and Cavendish and Hanover at the other, linked together by Bruton, South-Audley, and a hundred other fine old streets, with a broad airy pavement, a display of comfort, of wealth, of taste, and rank all about you, each house seeming to have been the residence of some respectable old English family for half a century past, and with Portland-place looking out towards Hampstead and Highgate, with their hanging gardens and lofty terraces, and Primrose-hill nestling beneath them, in green, pastoral luxury, the delight of the Cockney, the aversion of Sir Walter and his merry-men! My favourite walk in Paris is to the Gardens of the Tuileries. Paris differs from London in this respect, that it has no suburbs. The moment you are beyond the barriers, you are in the country to all intents and purposes. You have not to wade through ten miles of straggling houses to get a breath of fresh air, or a peep at nature. It is a blessing to counterbalance the inconveniences of large cities built within walls, that they do not extend far beyond them. The superfluous population is pared off, like the pie-crust by the circumference of the dish—even on the court side, not a hundred yards from the barrier of Neuilly, you see an old shepherd tending his flock, with his dog and his crook and sheep-skin cloak, just as if it were a hundred miles off, or a hundred years ago. It was so twenty years ago. I went again to see if it was the same yesterday. The old man was gone; but there was his flock by the road-side, and a dog and a boy, grinning with white healthy teeth, like one of Murillo’s beggar-boys. It was a bright frosty noon; and the air was, in a manner, vitreous, from its clearness, its coolness, and hardness to the feeling. The road I speak of, frequented by English jockeys and French market-women, riding between panniers, leads down to the Bois de Boulogne on the left, a delicious retreat, covered with copse-wood for fuel, and intersected by greensward paths and shady alleys, running for miles in opposite directions, and terminating in a point of inconceivable brightness. Some of the woods on the borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire present exactly the same appearance, with the same delightful sylvan paths through them, and are covered in summer with hyacinths and primroses, sweetening the air, enamelling the ground, and with nightingales loading every bough with rich music. It was winter when I used to wander through the Bois de Boulogne formerly, dreaming of fabled truth and good. Somehow my thoughts and feet still take their old direction, though hailed by no friendly greetings:—

yet the fever and the agony of hope is over too, ‘the burden and the mystery;’ the past circles my head, like a golden dream; it is a fine fragment of an unfinished poem or history; and the ‘worst,’ as Shakspeare says, ‘returns to good!’ I cannot say I am at all annoyed (as I expected) at seeing the Bourbon court-carriages issuing out with a flourish of trumpets and a troop of horse. It looks like a fantoccini procession, a State mockery. The fine moral lesson, the soul of greatness, is wanting. The legitimate possessors of royal power seem to be playing at Make-Believe; the upstarts and impostors are the true Simon Pures and genuine realities. Bonaparte mounted a throne from the top of the pillar of Victory. People ask who Charles X. is? But to return from this digression.

Through the arch-way of the Tuileries, at the end of the Champs Elysées, you see the Barrier of Neuilly, like a thing of air, diminished by a fairy perspective. The effect is exquisitely light and magical. You pass through the arch-way, and are in the gardens themselves. Milton should have written those lines abroad, and in this very spot—

True art is ‘nature to advantage drest;’ it is here a powdered beau. The prodigality of littleness, the excess of ornament, the superficial gloss, the studied neatness, are carried to a pitch of the romantic. The Luxembourg gardens are more extensive, and command a finer view; but are not kept in the same order, are dilapidated and desultory. This is an enclosure of all sweet sights and smells, a concentration of elegance. The rest of the world is barbarous to this ‘paradise of dainty devices,’ where the imagination is spell-bound. It is a perfectly-finished miniature set in brilliants. It is a toilette for nature to dress itself; where every flower seems a narcissus! The smooth gravel-walks, the basin of water, the swans (they might be of wax), the golden fishes, the beds of flowers, chine-asters, larkspur, geraniums, bright marigolds, mignonette (‘the Frenchman’s darling’) scenting the air with a faint luscious perfume, the rows of orange-trees in boxes, blooming verdure and vegetable gold, the gleaming statues, the raised terraces, the stately avenues of trees, and the gray cumbrous towers of the Tuileries overlooking the whole, give an effect of enchantment to the scene. This and the man in black by 160Titian, in the Louvre just by (whose features form a sombre pendant to the gay parterres) are the two things in Paris I like best. I should never tire of walking in the one, or of looking at the other. Yet no two things can be more opposite.^[30] The one is the essence of French, the other of Italian art. By following the windings of the river in this direction, you come to Passy—a delightful village, half-way to St. Cloud, which is situated on a rich eminence that looks down on Paris and the Seine, and so on to Versailles, where the English reside. I have not been to see them, nor they me. The whole road is interspersed with villas, and lined with rows of trees. This last is a common feature in foreign scenery. Whether from the general love of pleasurable sensations, or from the greater warmth of southern climates making the shelter from the heat of the sun more necessary, or from the closeness of the cities making a promenade round them more desirable, the approach to almost all the principal towns abroad is indicated by shady plantations, and the neighbourhood is a succession of groves and arbours.

The Champ de Mars (the French Runnymede) is on the opposite side of the river, a little above the Champs Elysées. It is an oblong square piece of ground immediately in front of the École Militaire, covered with sand and gravel, and bare of trees or any other ornament. It is left a blank, as it should be. In going to and returning from it, you pass the fine old Invalid Hospital, with its immense gilded cupola and outer-walls overgrown with vines, and meet the crippled veterans who have lost an arm or leg, fighting the battles of the Revolution, with a bit of white ribbon sticking in their button-holes, which must gnaw into their souls worse than the wounds in their flesh, if Frenchmen did not alike disregard the wounds both of their bodies and minds.

The Jardin des Plantes, situated at the other extremity of Paris, on the same side of the river, is well worth the walk there. It is delightfully laid out, with that mixture of art and nature, of the useful and ornamental, in which the French excel all the world. Every plant of every quarter of the globe is here, growing in the open air; and labelled with its common and its scientific name on it. A prodigious number of animals, wild and tame, are enclosed in separate divisions, feeding on the grass or shrubs, and leading a life of learned leisure. At least, they have as good a title to this ironical compliment as most members of colleges and seminaries of learning; for they grow fat and sleek on it. They have a great variety of the simious tribe. Is this necessary in France? The collection of wild beasts is not equal to our Exeter-‘Change; nor are they confined in 161iron cages out of doors under the shade of their native trees (as I was told), but shut up in a range of very neatly-constructed and very ill-aired apartments.

I have already mentioned the Père la Chaise—the Catacombs I have not seen, nor have I the least wish. But I have been to the top of Mont-Martre, and intend to visit it again. The air there is truly vivifying, and the view inspiring. Paris spreads out under your feet on one side, ‘with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned,’ and appears to fill the intermediate space, to the very edge of the horizon, with a sea of hazy or sparkling magnificence. All the different striking points are marked as on a map. London nowhere presents the same extent or integrity of appearance. This is either because there is no place so near to London that looks down upon it from the same elevation, or because Paris is better calculated for a panoramic view from the loftier height and azure tone of its buildings. Its form also approaches nearer to a regular square. London, seen either from Highgate and Hampstead, or from the Dulwich side, looks like a long black wreath of smoke, with the dome of St. Paul’s floating in it. The view on the other side Mont-Martre is also fine, and an extraordinary contrast to the Paris side—it is clear, brown, flat, distant, completely rustic, full of ‘low farms and pelting villages.’ You see St. Denis, where the Kings of France lie buried, and can fancy you see Montmorenci, where Rousseau lived, whose pen was near being as fatal to their race as the scythe of death. On this picturesque site, which so near London would be enriched with noble mansions, there are only a few paltry lodging-houses and tottering windmills. So little prone are the Parisians to extricate themselves from the sty of Epicurus; so fond of cabinets of society, of playing at dominoes in the coffee-houses, and of practising the art de briller dans les Salons; so fond are they of this, that even when the Allies were at Mont-Martre, they ran back to be the first to give an imposing account of the attack, to finish the game of the Revolution, and make the éloge of the new order of things. They shew you the place where the affair with the Prussians happened, as—a brilliant exploit. When will they be no longer liable to such intrusions as these, or to such a result from them? When they get rid of that eternal smile upon their countenances, or of that needle-and-thread face, that is twisted into any shape by every circumstance that happens,^[31] or when 162they can write such lines as the following, or even understand their meaning, their force or beauty, as a charm to purge their soil of insolent foes—theirs only, because the common foes of man!

No Parisian’s sides can ‘bear the beating of so strong a passion,’ as these lines contain; nor have they it in them to ‘endure to the end for liberty’s sake.’ They can never hope to defend the political principles which they learnt from us, till they understand our poetry, both of which originate in the same cause, the strength of our livers and the stoutness of our hearts.

Statuary does not affect me like painting. I am not, I allow, a fair judge, having paid a great deal more attention to the one than to the other. Nor did I ever think of the first as a profession; and it is that perhaps which adds the sting to our love of excellence, the hope of attaining it ourselves in any particular walk. We strain our faculties to the utmost to conceive of what is most exquisite in any art to which we devote ourselves, and are doubly sensitive to it when we see it attained. Knowledge may often beget indifference, but here it begets zeal. Our affections kindled and projected forward by the ardour of pursuit, we come to the contemplation of truth and beauty with the passionate feeling of lovers; the examples of acknowledged excellence before us are the steps by which we scale the path of distinction, the spur which urges us on; and the admiration which we fondly cherish for them is the seed of future fame. 163No wonder that the youthful student dwells with delight and rapture on the finished works of art, when they are to his heated fancy the pledge and foretaste of immortality; when at every successful stroke of imitation he is ready to cry out with Correggio—‘I also am a painter!’—when every heightening flush of his enthusiasm is a fresh assurance to him of congenial powers—and when overlooking the million of failures (that all the world have forgot) or names of inferior note, Raphael, Titian, Guido, Salvator are each another self. Happy union of thoughts and destinies, lovelier than the hues of the rainbow! Why can it not last and span our brief date of life?

One reason, however, why I prefer painting to sculpture is, that painting is more like nature. It gives one entire and satisfactory view of an object at a particular moment of time, which sculpture never does. It is not the same in reality, I grant; but it is the same in appearance, which is all we are concerned with. A picture wants solidity, a statue wants colour. But we see the want of colour as a palpably glaring defect, and we do not see the want of solidity, the effects of which to the spectator are supplied by light and shadow. A picture is as perfect an imitation of nature as is conveyed by a looking-glass; which is all that the eye can require, for it is all it can take in for the time being. A fine picture resembles a real living man; the finest statue in the world can only resemble a man turned to stone. The one is an image, the other a cold abstraction of nature. It leaves out half the visible impression. There is therefore something a little shocking and repulsive in this art to the common eye, that requires habit and study to reconcile us completely to it, or to make it an object of enthusiastic devotion. It does not amalgamate kindly and at once with our previous perceptions and associations. As to the comparative difficulty or skill implied in the exercise of each art, I cannot pretend to judge: but I confess it appears to me that statuary must be the most trying to the faculties. The idea of moulding a limb into shape, so as to be right from every point of view, fairly makes my head turn round, and seems to me to enhance the difficulty to an infinite degree. There is not only the extraordinary circumspection and precision required (enough to distract the strongest mind, as I should think), but if the chisel, working in such untractable materials, goes a hair’s-breadth beyond the mark, there is no remedying it. It is not as in painting, where you may make a thousand blots, and try a thousand experiments, efface them all one after the other, and begin anew: the hand always trembles on the brink of a precipice, and one step over is irrecoverable. There is a story told, however, of Hogarth and Roubilliac, which, as far as it goes, may be thought to warrant a contrary inference. These 164artists differed about the difficulty of their several arts, and agreed to decide it by exchanging the implements of their profession with each other, and seeing which could do best without any regular preparation. Hogarth took a piece of clay, and succeeded in moulding a very tolerable bust of his friend; but when Roubilliac, being furnished with paints and brushes, attempted to daub a likeness of a human face, he could make absolutely nothing out, and was obliged to own himself defeated. Yet Roubilliac was a man of talent, and no mean artist. It was he who, on returning from Rome where he had studied the works of Bernini and the antique, and on going to see his own performances in Westminster Abbey, exclaimed, that ‘they looked like tobacco-pipes, by G—d! ‘What sin had this man or his parents committed, that he should forfeit the inalienable birthright of every Frenchman—imperturbable, invincible self-sufficiency? The most pleasing and natural application of sculpture is, perhaps, to the embellishment of churches and the commemoration of the dead. I don’t know whether they were Roubilliac’s or not, but I remember seeing many years ago in Westminster Abbey (in the part that is at present shut up) two figures of angels bending over a tomb, that affected me much in the same manner that these lines of Lord Byron’s have done since—

It appears to me that sculpture, though not proper to express health or life or motion, accords admirably with the repose of the tomb; and that it cannot be better employed than in arresting the fleeting dust in imperishable forms, and in embodying a lifeless shadow. Painting, on the contrary, from what I have seen of it in Catholic countries, seems to be out of its place on the walls of churches; it has a flat and flimsy effect contrasted with the solidity of the building, and its rich flaunting colours harmonize but ill with the solemnity and gloom of the surrounding scene.

I would go a pilgrimage to see the St. Peter Martyr, or the Jacob’s Dream by Rembrandt, or Raphael’s Cartoons, or some of Claude’s landscapes;—but I would not go far out of my way to see the Apollo, or the Venus, or the Laocoon. I never cared for them much; nor, till I saw the Elgin Marbles, could I tell why, except for the reason just given, which does not apply to these particular statues, but to statuary in general. These are still to be found in 165Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, with appropriate descriptive stanzas appended to them;^[32] but they are no longer to be found in the Louvre, nor do the French seem to know they ever were there. Out of sight, out of mind, is a happy motto. What is not French, either as done by themselves, or as belonging to them, is of course not worth thinking about. Be this as it may, the place is fairly emptied out. Hardly a trace remains of the old Collection to remind you of what is gone. A short list includes all of distinguished excellence—the admirable bust of Vitellius, the fine fragment of Inopus, a clothed statue of Augustus, the full-zoned Venus, and the Diana and Fawn, whose light, airy grace seems to have mocked removal. A few more are ‘thinly scattered to make up a shew,’ but the bulk, the main body of the Grecian mythology, with the flower of their warriors and heroes, were carried off by the Chevalier Canova on his shoulders, a load for Hercules! The French sculptors have nothing of their own to shew for it to fill up the gap. Like their painters, their style is either literal and rigid, or affected and burlesque. Their merit is chiefly confined to the academic figure and anatomical skill; if they go beyond this, and wander into the regions of expression, beauty, or grace, they are apt to lose themselves. The real genius of French sculpture is to be seen in the curled wigs and swelling folds of the draperies in the statues of the age of Louis XIV. There they shone unrivalled and alone. They are the best man-milliners and friseurs in ancient or modern Europe. That praise cannot be denied them; but it should alarm them for their other pretensions. I recollect an essay in the Moniteur some years ago (very playful and very well written) to prove that a great hair-dresser was a greater character than Michael Angelo or Phidias; that his art was more 166an invention, more a creation out of nothing, and less a servile copy of any thing in nature. There was a great deal of ingenuity in the reasoning, and I suspect more sincerity than the writer was aware of. It expresses, I verily believe, the firm conviction of every true Frenchman. In whatever relates to the flutter and caprice of fashion, where there is no impulse but vanity, no limit but extravagance, no rule but want of meaning, they are in their element, and quite at home. Beyond that, they have no style of their own, and are a nation of second-hand artists, poets, and philosophers. Nevertheless, they have Voltaire, La Fontaine, Le Sage, Molière, Rabelais, and Montaigne—good men and true, under whatever class they come. They have also Very and Vestris. This is granted. Is it not enough? I should like to know the thing on the face of God’s earth in which they allow other nations to excel them. Nor need their sculptors be afraid of turning their talents to account, while they can execute pieces of devotion for the shrines of Saints, and classical equivoques for the saloons of the old or new Noblesse.

The foregoing remarks are general. I shall proceed to mention a few exceptions to, or confirmations of them in their Exposé^[33] of the present year. The Othryadas wounded (No. 1870), by Legendre Heral, is, I think, the least mannered, and most natural. It is a huge figure, powerful and somewhat clumsy (with the calves of the legs as if they had gaiters on), but it has great power and repose in it. It seems as if, without any effort, a blow from it would crush any antagonist, and reminds one of Virgil’s combat of Dares and Entellus. The form of the head is characteristic, and there is a fine mixture of sternness and languor in the expression of the features. The sculptor appears to have had an eye to the countenance of the Dying Gladiator; and the figure, from its ease and massiness, has some resemblance to the Elgin Marbles. It is a work of great merit. The statue of Othryadas erecting the Trophy to his Companions (No. 1774) is less impressive, and aims at being more so. It comes under the head of theatrical art, that is of French art proper. They cannot long keep out of this. They cannot resist an attitude, a significant effect. They do not consider that the definition of Sculpture is, or ought to be, nearly like their own celebrated one 167of Death—an eternal repose! This fault may in some measure be found with the Hercules recovering the body of Icarus from the Sea (No. 1903), by Razzi. The body of Icarus can hardly be said to have found a resting-place. Otherwise, the figure is finely designed, and the face is one of considerable beauty and expression. The Hercules is a man-mountain. From the size and arrangement of this group, it seems more like a precipice falling on one’s head, than a piece of sculpture. The effect is not so far pleasant. If a complaint lies against this statue on the score of unwieldy and enormous size, it is relieved by No. 1775, A Zephyr thwarting the loves of a Butterfly and a Rose, Boyer. Here French art is on its legs again, and in the true vignette style. A Zephyr, a Butterfly, and a Rose, all in one group—Charming! In such cases the lightness, the prettiness, the flutter, and the affectation are extreme, and such as no one but themselves will think of rivalling. One of their greatest and most successful attempts is the Grâce aux Prisonniers. No. 1802, by David. Is it not the Knife-grinder of the ancients, thrown into a more heroic attitude, and with an impassioned expression? However this may be, there is real boldness in the design, and animation in the countenance, a feeling of disinterested generosity contending with the agonies of death. I cannot give much praise to their religious subjects in general. The French of the present day are not bigots, but sceptics in such matters; and the cold, formal indifference of their artists appears in their works. The Christ confounding the incredulity of St. Thomas (by Jacquot) is not calculated to produce this effect on anybody else. They treat classical subjects much more con amore; but the mixture of the Christian Faith and of Pagan superstitions is at least as reprehensible in the present Collection as in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Among pieces of devotion, The Virgin and Child, and the St. Catherine of Cortot (Nos. 1791–22) struck me as the best. There is a certain delicacy of finishing and graceful womanhood about both, which must make them very acceptable accompaniments to Catholic zeal. The French excel generally in emblematic subjects, or in whatever depends on accuracy and invention in costume, of which there are several examples here. What I liked best, however, were some of their studies of the naked figure, which have great simplicity and ease, such as a Nymph making a Garland of Flowers, No. 1888 (Parmentier), and a Youth going to bathe, No. 1831 (Espercieux). This last figure, in particular, appears to be really sliding down into the bath. Cupid tormenting the Soul (after Chaudet) is a very clever and spirited design, in bronze. Their busts, in general, are not excellent. There are, however, a few exceptions, one especially of a Mademoiselle Hersilie de F——, 168by Gayrard, which is a perfect representation of nature. It is an unaffected, admirable portrait, with good humour and good sense playing over every feature of the face.

In fine, I suspect there is nothing in the French Saloon of Sculpture greatly to stagger or entirely to overset the opinion of those who have a prejudice against the higher pretensions of French art. They have no masterpieces equal to Chantry’s busts, nor to Flaxman’s learned outlines, nor to the polished elegance of Canova; to say nothing of the exquisite beauty and symmetry of the antique, nor of the Elgin Marbles, among which the Theseus sits in form like a demi-god, basking on a golden cloud. If ever there were models of the Fine Arts fitted to give an impulse to living genius, these are they.^[34] With enough to teach the truest, highest style in art, they are not in sufficient numbers or preservation to distract or discourage emulation. With these and Nature for our guides, we might do something in sculpture, if we were not indolent and unapt. The French, whatever may be their defects, cannot be charged with want of labour and study. The only charge against them (a heavy one, if true) is want of taste and genius.

The French themselves think less about their music than any other of their pretensions. It is almost a sore subject with them; for it interrupts their talking, and they had rather hear nothing about it, except as an accompaniment to a jig. Their ears are, in this respect, in their heels, and it is only the light and giddy that they at all endure. They have no idea of cadence in any of the arts—of the rise and fall of the passions—of the elevations or depressions of hope or fear in poetry—of alternate light or shade in pictures—all is reduced (as nearly as possible) in their minds to the level of petty, vapid self-satisfaction, or to dry and systematic prosing for the benefit of others. But they must be more particularly at a loss in music, which requires the deepest feeling, and admits the least of the impertinence of explanation, which mounts on its own raptures and is dissolved in its own tenderness; which has no witness or vouchers but the inward sense of delight, and rests its faith on the speechless eloquence, the rich, circling intoxication of inarticulate but heart-felt sounds. The French have therefore no national music, except a few meagre chansons, and their only idea of musical excellence is either rapidity or loudness of execution. You perceive the effect of this want of enthusiasm even in the streets,—they have neither barrel-organs nor blind fiddlers as with us, who are willing to pay for the encouragement of the arts, however indifferently we may practise them; nor does the national spirit break out from every strolling party or village group, as it is said to do in Italy. A French servant-girl, while she is cleaning out a room, lays down her brush to dance—she takes it up to finish her work, and lays it down again to dance, impelled by the lightness of her head and of her heels. But you seldom hear her sing at her work, and never, if there is any one within hearing to talk to.—The French Opera is a splendid, but a comparatively empty theatre. It is nearly as large (I should think) as the King’s Theatre in the Hay-market, and is in a semi-circular form. The pit (the 170evening I was there) was about half full of men, in their black, dingy sticky-looking dresses; and there were a few plainly-dressed women in the boxes. But where was that blaze of beauty and fashion, of sparkling complexions and bright eyes, that streams like a galaxy from the boxes of our Opera-house—like a Heaven of loveliness let half-way down upon the earth, and charming ‘the upturned eyes of wondering mortals,’ before which the thrilling sounds that circle through the House seem to tremble with delight and drink in new rapture from its conscious presence, and to which the mimic Loves and Graces are proud to pay their distant, smiling homage? Certainly it was not here; nor do I know where the sun of beauty hides itself in France. I have seen but three rays of it since I came, gilding a dark and pitchy cloud! It was not so in Rousseau’s time, for these very Loges were filled with the most beautiful women of the Court, who came to see his Devin du Village, and whom he heard murmuring around him in the softest accents—‘Tous ces sons là vont au cœur!’ The change is, I suppose, owing to the Revolution; but whatever it is owing to, the monks have not, by their return, banished this conventual gloom from their theatres; nor is there any of that airy, flaunting, florid, butterfly, gauzy, variegated appearance to be found in them that they have with us. These gentlemen still keep up the farce of refusing actors burial in consecrated ground; the mob pelt them, and the critics are even with them by going to see the representation of the Tartuffe!

I found but little at the Royal Academy of Music (as it is affectedly called) to carry off this general dulness of effect, either through the excellence or novelty of the performances. A Mademoiselle Noel (who seems to be a favourite) made her debut in Dido. Though there was nothing very striking, there was nothing offensive in her representation of the character. For any thing that appeared in her style of singing or acting, she might be a very pleasing, modest, unaffected English girl performing on an English stage. There was not a single trait of French bravura or grimace. Her execution, however, seldom rose higher than an agreeable mediocrity; and with considerable taste and feeling, her powers seemed to be limited. She produced her chief effect in the latter and more pathetic scenes, and ascended the funeral pile with dignity and composure. Is it not strange (if contradictions and hasty caprices taken up at random, and laid down as laws, were strange in this centre of taste and refinement) that the French should raise such an outcry against our assaults at arms and executions on the stage, and yet see a young and beautiful female prepare to give herself the fatal blow, without manifesting the smallest repugnance or dissatisfaction?—Æneas 171and Iarbas were represented by Messrs. Mourritt and Derivis. The first was insipid, the last a perfect Stentor. He spoke or sung all through with an unmitigated ferocity of purpose and manner, and with lungs that seemed to have been forged expressly for the occasion. Ten bulls could not bellow louder, nor a whole street-full of frozen-out gardeners at Christmas. His barbarous tunic and accoutrements put one strongly in mind of Robinson Crusoe, while the modest demeanour and painted complexion of the pious Æneas bore a considerable analogy to the submissive advance and rosy cheeks of that usual accompaniment of English travelling, who ushers himself into the room at intervals, with awkward bows, and his hat twirled round in his hands, ‘to hope you’ll remember the coachman.’ The Æneas of the poet, however, was a shabby fellow, and had but justice done him.

I had leisure during this otiose performance to look around me, and as ‘it is my vice to spy into abuses,’ the first thing that struck me was the prompter. Any Frenchman who has that sum at his disposal, should give ten thousand francs a year for this situation. It must be a source of ecstasy to him. For not an instant was he quiet—tossing his hands in the air, darting them to the other side of the score which he held before him in front of the stage, snapping his fingers, nodding his head, beating time with his feet; and this not mechanically, or as if it were a drudgery he was forced to go through, and would be glad to have done with, but with unimpaired glee and vehemence of gesture, jerking, twisting, fidgeting, wriggling, starting, stamping, as if the incessant motion had fairly turned his head, and every muscle in his frame were saturated with the spirit of quicksilver. To be in continual motion for four hours, and to direct the motions of others by the wagging of a finger, to be not only an object of important attention to the stage and orchestra, but (in his own imagination) to pit, boxes, and gallery, as the pivot on which the whole grand machinery of that grandest of all machines, the French Opera, turns—this is indeed, for a Parisian, the acme of felicity! Every nerve must thrill with electrical satisfaction, and every pore into which vanity can creep tingle with self-conceit! Not far from this restless automaton (as if extremes met, or the volatility of youth subsided into a sort of superannuated still-life) sat an old gentleman in front of the pit, with his back to me, a white powdered head, the curls sticking out behind, and a coat of the finest black. This was all I saw of him for some time—he did not once turn his head or shift his position, any more than a wig and coat stuck upon a barber’s block—till I suddenly missed him, and soon after saw him seated on the opposite side of the house, his face as yellow and hard as a piece 172of mahogany, but without expressing either pleasure or pain. Neither the fiddlers’ elbows nor the dancers’ legs moved him one jot. His fiddling fancies and his dancing-days were flown, and had left this shadow, this profile, this mummy of a French gentleman of the old régime behind. A Frenchman has no object in life but to talk and move with éclat, and when he ceases to do either, he has no heart to do any thing. Deprived of his vivacity, his thoughtlessness, his animal spirits, he becomes a piece of costume, a finely-powdered wig, an embroidered coat, a pair of shoe-buckles, a gold cane, or a snuff-box. Drained of mere sensations and of their youthful blood, the old fellows seem like the ghosts of the young ones, and have none of their overweening offensiveness, or teasing officiousness. I can hardly conceive of a young French gentleman, nor of an old one who is otherwise. The latter come up to my ideal of this character, cut, as it were, out of pasteboard, moved on springs, amenable to forms, crimped and starched like a cravat, without a single tart ebullition, or voluntary motion. Some of them may be seen at present gliding along the walks of the Tuileries, and the sight of them is good for sore eyes. They are also thinly sprinkled through the play-house; for the drama and the belles-lettres were in their time the amusement and the privilege of the Court, and the contrast of their powdered heads and pale faces makes the rest of the audience appear like a set of greasy, impudent mechanics. A Frenchman is nothing without powder, an Englishman is nothing with it. The character of the one is artificial, that of the other natural. The women of France do not submit to the regular approaches and the sober discipline of age so well as the men. I had rather be in company with an old French gentleman than a young one; I prefer a young Frenchwoman to an old one. They aggravate the encroachments of age by contending with them, and instead of displaying the natural graces and venerable marks of that period of life, paint and patch their wrinkled faces, and toupee and curl their grizzled locks, till they look like Friesland hens, and are a caricature and burlesque of themselves. The old women in France that figure at the theatre or elsewhere, have very much the appearance of having kept a tavern or a booth at a fair, or of having been mistresses of a place of another description, for the greater part of their lives. A mannish hardened look and character survives the wreck of beauty and of female delicacy.

Of all things that I see here, it surprises me the most that the French should fancy they can dance. To dance is to move with grace and harmony to music. But the French, whether men or women, have no idea of dancing but that of moving with agility, and of distorting their limbs in every possible way, till they really alter 173the structure of the human form. By grace I understand the natural movements of the human body, heightened into dignity or softened into ease, each posture or step blending harmoniously into the rest. There is grace in the waving of the branch of a tree or in the bounding of a stag, because there is freedom and unity of motion. But the French Opera-dancers think it graceful to stand on one leg or on the points of their toes, or with one leg stretched out behind them, as if they were going to be shod, or to raise one foot at right angles with their bodies, and twirl themselves round like a te-totum, to see how long they can spin, and then stop short all of a sudden; or to skim along the ground, flat-footed, like a spider running along a cobweb, or to pop up and down like a pea on a tobacco-pipe, or to stick in their backs till another part projects out behind comme des volails, and to strut about like peacocks with infirm, vain-glorious steps, or to turn out their toes till their feet resemble apes, or to raise one foot above their heads, and turn swiftly round upon the other, till the petticoats of the female dancers (for I have been thinking of them) rise above their garters, and display a pair of spindle-shanks, like the wooden ones of a wax-doll, just as shapeless and as tempting. There is neither voluptuousness nor grace in a single attitude or movement, but a very studious and successful attempt to shew in what a number of uneasy and difficult positions the human body can be put with the greatest rapidity of evolution. It is not that they do all this with much more to redeem it, but they do all this, and do nothing else. It would be very well as an exhibition of tumbler’s tricks, or as rope-dancing (which are only meant to surprise), but it is bad as Opera-dancing, if opera-dancing aspires to be one of the Fine Arts, or even a handmaid to them; that is, to combine with mechanical dexterity a sense of the beautiful in form and motion, and a certain analogy to sentiment. ‘The common people,’ says the Author of Waverley, ‘always prefer exertion and agility to grace.’ Is that the case also with the most refined people upon earth? These antics and vagaries, this kicking of heels and shaking of feet as if they would come off, might be excusable in the men, for they shew a certain strength and muscular activity; but in the female dancers they are unpardonable. What is said of poetry might be applied to the sex. Non sat[is] est pulchra poemata esse, dulcia sunto. So women who appear in public, should be soft and lovely as well as skilful and active, or they ought not to appear at all. They owe it to themselves and others. As to some of the ridiculous extravagances of this theatre, such as turning out their toes and holding back their shoulders, one would have thought the Greek statues might have taught their scientific professors better—if French artists did not see 174every thing with French eyes, and lament all that differs from their established practice as a departure from the line of beauty. They are sorry that the Venus does not hold up her head like a boarding-school miss—

In three months’ practice, and with proper tuition, Greek forms would be French, and they would be perfect!—Mademoiselles Fanny and Noblet, I kiss your hands; but I have no pardon to beg of Madame Le Gallois, for she looked like a lady (very tightly laced) in the ballet, and played like a heroine in the pantomime part of La Folle par Amour. There was a violent start at the first indication of her madness, that alarmed me a little, but all that followed was natural, modest, and affecting in a high degree. The French turn their Opera-stage into a mad-house; they turn their mad-houses (at least they have one constructed on this principle) into theatres of gaiety, where they rehearse ballets, operas, and plays. If dancing were an antidote to madness, one would think the French would be always in their right senses.

I was told I ought to see Nina, or La Folle par Amour at the Salle Louvois, or Italian Theatre. If I went for that purpose, it would be rather with a wish than from any hope of seeing it better done. I went however.

It was to see the Gazza Ladra. The house was full, the evening sultry, a hurry and bustle in the lobbies, an eagerness in the looks of the assembled crowd. The audience seemed to be in earnest, and to have imbibed an interest from the place. On the stage there were rich dresses and voices, the tones of passion, ease, nature, animation; in short, the scene had a soul in it. One wondered how one was in Paris, with their pasteboard maps of the passions, and thin-skinned, dry-lipped humour. Signora Mombelli played the humble, but interesting heroine charmingly, with truth, simplicity, and feeling. Her voice is neither rich nor sweet, but it is clear as a bell. Signor Pellegrini played the intriguing Magistrate, with a solemnity and farcical drollery, that I would not swear is much inferior to Liston. But I swear, that Brunet (whom I saw the other night, and had seen before without knowing it) is not equal to Liston. Yet he is a feeble, quaint diminutive of that original. He squeaks and gibbers oddly enough at the Théâtre des Variétés, like a mouse in the hollow of a musty cheese, his small eyes peering out, and his sharp teeth nibbling at the remains of some faded joke. The French people of 175quality go to the Italian Opera, but they do not attend to it. The tabbies of the Court are tabbies still; and took no notice of what was passing on the stage on this occasion, till the tolling of the bell made a louder and more disagreeable noise than themselves; this they seemed to like. They behave well at their own theatres, but it would be a breach of etiquette to do so anywhere else. A girl in the gallery (an Italian by her complexion, and from her interest in the part) was crying bitterly at the story of the Maid and the Magpie, while three Frenchmen, in the Troisième Loge, were laughing at her the whole time. I said to one of them, ‘It was not a thing to laugh at, but to admire.’ He turned away, as if the remark did not come within his notions of sentiment. This did not stagger me in my theory of the French character; and when one is possessed of nothing but a theory, one is glad, not sorry to keep it, though at the expense of others.^[35]

We left Paris in the Diligence, and arrived at Fontainbleau the first night. The accommodations at the inn were indifferent, and not cheap. The palace is a low straggling mass of very old buildings, having been erected by St. Louis in the 12th century, whence he used to date his Rescripts, ‘From my Deserts of Fontainbleau!’ It puts one in mind of Monkish legends, of faded splendour, of the leaden spouts and uncouth stone-cherubim of a country church-yard. It is empty or gaudy within, stiff and heavy without. Henry IV. figures on the walls with the fair Gabrielle, like the Tutelary Satyr of the place, keeping up the remembrance of old-fashioned royalty and gallantry. They here shew you the table (a plain round piece of mahogany) on which Buonaparte in 1814 signed the abdication of the human race, in favour of the hereditary proprietors of the species. We walked forward a mile or two before the coach the next day on the road to Montargis. It presents a long, broad, and stately avenue without a turning, as far as the eye can reach, and is skirted on each side by a wild, woody, rocky scenery. The birch-trees, with their grey stems and light glittering branches, silvered over the darker back-ground, and afforded a striking contrast to the brown earth and green moss beneath. There was a stillness in the woods, which affects the mind the more in 176objects whose very motion is gentleness. The day was dull, but quite mild, though in the middle of January. The situation of Fontainbleau is certainly interesting and fine. It stands in the midst of an extensive forest, intersected with craggy precipices and rugged ranges of hills; and the various roads leading to or from it are cut out of a wilderness, which a hermit might inhabit. The approach to the different towns in France has, in this respect, the advantage over ours; for, from burning wood instead of coal, they must have large woods in the neighbourhood, which clothe the country round them, and afford, as Pope expresses it,

We dig our fuel out of the bowels of the earth, and have a greater portion of its surface left at our disposal, which we devote not to ornament, but use. A copse-wood or an avenue of trees however, makes a greater addition to the beauty of a town than a coal-pit or a steam-engine in its vicinity.

When the Diligence came up, and we took our seats in the coupé (which is that part of a French stage-coach which resembles an old shattered post-chaise, placed in front of the main body of it) we found a French lady occupying the third place in it, whose delight at our entrance was as great as if we had joined her on some desert island, and whose mortification was distressing when she learnt we were not going the whole way with her. She complained of the cold of the night air; but this she seemed to dread less than the want of company. She said she had been deceived, for she had been told the coach was full, and was in despair that she should not have a soul to speak to all the way to Lyons. We got out, notwithstanding, at the inn at Montargis, where we met with a very tolerable reception, and were waited on at supper by one of those Maritorneses that perfectly astonish an English traveller. Her joy at our arrival was as extreme as if her whole fortune depended on it. She laughed, danced, sung, fairly sprung into the air, bounced into the room, nearly overset the table, hallooed and talked as loud as if she had been alternately ostler and chamber-maid. She was as rough and boisterous as any country bumpkin at a wake or statute-fair; and yet so full of rude health and animal spirits, that you were pleased instead of being offended. In England, a girl with such boorish manners would not be borne; but her good-humour kept pace with her coarseness, and she was as incapable of giving as of feeling pain. There is something in the air in France that carries off the blue devils!

The mistress of the inn, however, was a little peaking, pining 177woman, with her face wrapped up in flannel, and not quite so inaccessible to nervous impressions; and when I asked the girl, ‘What made her speak so loud?’ she answered for her, ‘To make people deaf!’ This side-reproof did not in the least moderate the brazen tones of her help-mate, but rather gave a new fillip to her spirits; though she was less on the alert than the night before, and appeared to the full as much bent on arranging her curls in the looking-glass when she came into the room, as on arranging the breakfast things on the tea-board.

We staid here till one o’clock on Sunday (the 16th,) waiting the arrival of the Lyonnais, in which we had taken our places forward, and which I thought would never arrive. Let no man trust to a placard stuck on the walls of Paris, advertising the cheapest and most expeditious mode of conveyance to all parts of the world. It may be no better than a snare to the unwary. The Lyonnais, I thought from the advertisement, was the Swift-sure of Diligences. It was to arrive ten hours before any other Diligence; it was the most compact, the most elegant of modern vehicles. From the description and the print of it, it seemed ‘a thing of life,’ a minion of the fancy. To see it stand in a state of disencumbered abstraction, it appeared a self-impelling machine; or if it needed aid, was horsed, unlike your Paris Diligences, by nimble, airy Pegasuses. To look at the fac-simile of it that was put into your hand, you would say it might run or fly—might traverse the earth, or whirl you through the air, without let or impediment, so light was it to outward appearance in structure ‘fit for speed succinct’—a chariot for Puck or Ariel to ride in! This was the account I had (or something like it) from Messieurs the Proprietors at the Cour des Fontaines. ‘Mark how a plain tale shall put them down.’ Those gentlemen came to me after I had paid for two places as far as Nevers, to ask me to resign them in favour of two Englishmen, who wished to go the whole way, and to re-engage them for the following evening. I said I could not do that; but as I had a dislike to travelling at night, I would go on to Montargis by some other conveyance, and proceed by the Lyonnais, which would arrive there at eight or nine on Sunday morning, as far as I could that night. I set out on the faith of this understanding. I had some difficulty in finding the Office sur la place, to which I had been directed, and which was something between a stable, a kitchen, and a cook-shop. I was led to it by a shabby double or counterpart of the Lyonnais, which stood before the door, empty, dirty, bare of luggage, waiting the Paris one, which had not yet arrived. It drove into town four hours afterwards, with three foundered hacks, with the postilion and 178Conducteur for its complement of passengers, the last occupying the left hand corner of the coupé in solitary state, with a whisp of straw thrust through a broken pane of one of the front windows, and a tassel of blue and yellow fringe hanging out of the other; and with that mixture of despondency and fierté in his face, which long and uninterrupted pondering on the state of the way-bill naturally produces in such circumstances. He seized upon me and my trunks as lawful prize; he afterwards insisted on my going forward in the middle of the night to Lyons, (contrary to my agreement,) and I was obliged to comply, or to sleep upon trusses of straw in a kind of out-house. We quarrelled incessantly, but I could not help laughing, for he sometimes looked like my old acquaintance, Dr. S., and sometimes like my friend, A—— H——, of Edinburgh. He said we should reach Lyons the next evening, and we got there twenty-four hours after the time. He told me for my comfort, the reason of his being so late was, that two of his horses had fallen down dead on the road. He had to raise relays of horses all the way, as if we were travelling through a hostile country; quarrelled with all the postilions about an abatement of a few sous; and once our horses were arrested in the middle of the night by a farmer who refused to trust him; and he had to go before the Mayor, as soon as day broke. We were quizzed by the post-boys, the innkeepers, the peasants all along the road, as a shabby concern; our Conducteur bore it all, like another Candide. We stopped at all the worst inns in the outskirts of the towns, where nothing was ready; or when it was, was not eatable. The second morning we were to breakfast at Moulins; when we alighted, our guide told us it was eleven: the clock in the kitchen pointed to three. As he laughed in my face when I complained of his misleading me, I told him that he was ‘un impudent,’ and this epithet sobered him the rest of the way. As we left Moulins, the crimson clouds of evening streaked the west, and I had time to think of Sterne’s Maria. The people at the inn, I suspect, had never heard of her. There was no trace of romance about the house. Certainly, mine was not a Sentimental Journey. Is it not provoking to come to a place, that has been consecrated by ‘famous poet’s pen,’ as a breath, a name, a fairy-scene, and find it a dull, dirty town? Let us leave the realities to shift for themselves, and think only of those bright tracts that have been reclaimed for us by the fancy, where the perfume, the sound, the vision, and the joy still linger, like the soft light of evening skies! Is the story of Maria the worse, because I am travelling a dirty road in a rascally Diligence? Or is it an injury done us by the author to have 179invented for us what we should not have met with in reality? Has it not been read with pleasure by thousands of readers, though the people at the inn had never heard of it? Yet Sterne would have been vexed to find that the fame of his Maria had never reached the little town of Moulins. We are always dissatisfied with the good we have, and always punished for our unreasonableness.

At Palisseau (the road is rich in melodramatic recollections) it became pitch-dark; you could not see your hand; I entreated to have the lamp lighted; our Conducteur said it was broken (cassé). With much persuasion, and the ordering a bottle of their best wine, which went round among the people at the inn, we got a lantern with a rushlight in it, but the wind soon blew it out, and we went on our way darkling; the road lay over a high hill, with a loose muddy bottom between two hedges, and as we did not attempt to trot or gallop, we came safe to the level ground on the other side. We breakfasted at Rouane, where we were first shewn into the kitchen, while they were heating a suffocating stove in a squalid salle à manger. There, while I was sitting half dead with cold and fatigue, a boy came and scraped a wooden dresser close at my ear, with a noise to split one’s brain, and with true French nonchalance; and a portly landlady, who had risen just as we had done breakfasting, ushered us to our carriage with the airs and graces of a Madame Maintenon. In France you meet with the court address in a stable-yard. In other countries you may find grace in a cottage or a wilderness; but it is simple, unconscious grace, without the full-blown pride and strut of mannered confidence and presumption. A woman in France is graceful by going out of her sphere; not by keeping within it.—In crossing the bridge at Rouane, the sun shone brightly on the river and shipping, which had a busy cheerful aspect; and we began to ascend the Bourbonnois under more flattering auspices. We got out and walked slowly up the sounding road. I found that the morning air refreshed and braced my spirits; and that even the continued fatigue of the journey, which I had dreaded as a hazardous experiment, was a kind of seasoning to me. I was less exhausted than the first day. I will venture to say, that for an invalid, sitting up all night is better than lying in bed all day. Hardships, however dreadful to nervous apprehensions, by degrees give us strength and resolution to endure them: whereas effeminacy softens and renders us less and less capable of encountering pain or difficulty. It is the love of indulgence, or the shock of the first privation or effort, that confirms almost all the weaknesses of body or mind. As we loitered up the long, winding ascent of the 180road from Rouane, we occasionally approached the brink of some Alpine declivity tufted with pine trees, and noticed the white villas, clustering [or] scattered, which in all directions spotted the very summits of that vast and gradual amphitheatre of hills which overlooked the neighbouring town. The Bourbonnois is the first large chain of hills piled one upon another, and extending range beyond range, that you come to on the route to Italy, and that occupy a wide-spread district, like a mighty conqueror, with uniform and growing magnificence. To those who have chiefly seen detached mountains or abrupt precipices rising from the level surface of the ground, the effect is exceedingly imposing and grand. The descent on the other side into Tarare is more sudden and dangerous; and you avoid passing over the top of the mountain (along which the road formerly ran) by one of those fine, broad, firmly-cemented roads with galleries and bridges, which bespeak at once the master-hand that raised them. Tarare is a neat little town, famous for the manufacture of serges and calicoes. We had to stop here for three-quarters of an hour, waiting for fresh horses; and as we sat in the coupé in this helpless state, the horses taken out, the sun shining in, and the wind piercing through every cranny of the broken panes and rattling sash-windows, the postilion came up and demanded to know if we were English, as there were two English gentlemen who would be glad to see us. I excused myself from getting out, but said I should be happy to speak to them. Accordingly, my informant beckoned to a young man in black, who was standing at a little distance in a state of anxious expectation, and who coming to the coach-door said, he presumed we were from London, and that he had taken the liberty to pay his respects to us. His friend, he said, who was staying with him, was ill in bed, or he would have done himself the same pleasure. He had on a pair of wooden clogs, turned up and pointed at the toes in the manner of the country (which he recommended to me as useful for climbing the hills if ever I should come into those parts) warm worsted mittens, and had a thin, genteel, shivering aspect. I expected every moment he would tell me his name or business; but all I learnt was that he and his friend had been here some time, and that they could not get away till spring, that there were no entertainments, that trade was flat, and that the French seemed to him a very different people from the English. The fact is, he found himself quite at a loss in a French country-town, and had no other resource or way of amusing himself, than by looking out for the Diligences as they passed, and trying to hear news from England. He stood at his own door, and waved his hand with a melancholy air as we rode by, and no doubt 181instantly went up stairs to communicate to his sick friend, that he had conversed with two English people.

Our delay at Tarare had deprived us of nearly an hour of daylight; and, besides, the miserable foundered jades of horses, that we had to get on with in this paragon of Diligences, were quite unequal to the task of dragging it up and down the hills on the road to Lyons, which was still twenty miles distant. The night was dark, and we had no light. I found it was quite hopeless when we should reach our journey’s end (if we did not break our necks by the way) and that both were matters of very great indifference to Mons. le Conducteur, who was only bent on saving the pockets of Messieurs his employers, and who had no wish, like me, to see the Vatican! He affected to make bargains for horses, which always failed and added to our delay; and lighted his lantern once or twice, but it always went out. At last I said that I had intended to give him a certain sum for himself, but that if we did not arrive in Lyons by ten o’clock at night, he might depend upon it I would not give him a single farthing. This had the desired effect. He got out at the next village we came to, and three stout horses were fastened to the harness. He also procured a large piece of candle (with a reserve of another piece of equal length and thickness in his lantern) and held it in his hand the whole way, only shifting it from one hand to the other, as he grew tired, and biting his lips and making wry faces at this new office of a candelabrum, which had been thrust upon him much against his will. I was not sorry, for he was one of the most disagreeable Frenchmen I ever met with, having all the indifference and self-sufficiency of his countrymen with none of their usual obligingness. He seemed to me a person out of his place (a thing you rarely discover in France)—a broken-down tradesman, or ‘one that had had misfortunes,’ and who neither liked nor was fit for his present situation of Conducteur to a Diligence without funds, without horses, and without passengers. We arrived in safety at Lyons at eleven o’clock at night, and were conducted to the Hotel des Couriers, where we, with some difficulty, procured a lodging and a supper, and were attended by a brown, greasy, dark-haired, good-humoured, awkward gypsey of a wench from the south of France, who seemed just caught; stared and laughed, and forgot every thing she went for; could not help exclaiming every moment—‘Que Madame a le peau blanc!’ from the contrast to her own dingy complexion and dirty skin, took a large brass-pan of scalding milk, came and sat down by me on a bundle of wood, and drank it; said she had had no supper, for her head ached, and declared the English were braves gens, and that the Bourbons were bons enfans, started up to 182look through the key-hole, and whispered through her broad strong-set teeth, that a fine Madam was descending the staircase, who had been to dine with a great gentleman, offered to take away the supper things, left them, and called us the next morning with her head and senses in a state of even greater confusion than they were over-night. The familiarity of common servants in France surprises the English at first; but it has nothing offensive in it, any more than the good natured gambols and freedoms of a Newfoundland dog. It is quite natural.

Lyons is a fine, dirty town. The streets are good, but so high and narrow, that they look like sinks of filth and gloom. The shops are mere dungeons. Yet two noble rivers water the city, the Rhone and the Saone—the one broad and majestic, the other more confined and impetuous in its course, and join a little below the town to pour their friendly streams into the Mediterranean. The square is spacious and handsome, and the heights of St. Just, that overlook it, command a fine view of the town, the bridges, both rivers, the hills of Provence, the road to Chambery, and the Alps, with their snowy tops propping the clouds. The sight of them effectually deterred me from attempting to go by Geneva and the Simplon; and we were contented (for this time) with the humbler passage of Mount Cenis. Here is the Hotel de Notre Dâme de Piété, which is shewn you as the inn where Rousseau stopped on his way to Paris, when he went to overturn the French Monarchy by the force of style. I thought of him, as we came down the mountain of Tarare, in his gold-laced hat, and with his jet d’eau playing. If they could but have known who was coming, how many battalions would have been sent out to meet him; what a ringing of alarm-bells, what a beating of drums, what raising of drawbridges, what barring of gates, what examination of passports, what processions of priests, what meetings of magistrates, what confusion in the towns, what a panic through the country, what telegraphic despatches to the Court of Versailles, what couriers posting to all parts of Europe, what manifestoes from armies, what a hubbub of Holy Alliances, and all for what? To prevent one man from speaking what he and every other man felt, and whose only fault was that the beatings of the human heart had found an echo in his pen! At Lyons I saw this inscription over a door: Ici on trouve le seul et unique depôt de l’encre sans pareil et incorruptible—which appeared to me to contain the whole secret of French poetry. I went into a shop to buy M. Martine’s Death of Socrates, which I saw in the window, but they would neither let me have that copy nor get me another. The French are not ‘a nation of shopkeepers.’ They had quite as lieve see you walk out of their shops as come into 183them. While I was waiting for an answer, a French servant in livery brought in four volumes of the History of a Foundling, an improved translation, in which it was said the morceaux omitted by M. de la Place were restored. I was pleased to see my old acquaintance Tom Jones, with his French coat on. The poetry of M. Alphonse Martine and of M. Casimir de la Vigne circulates in the provinces and in Italy, through the merit of the authors and the favour of the critics. L. H. tells me that the latter is a great Bonapartist, and talks of ‘the tombs of the brave.’ He said I might form some idea of M. Martine’s attempts to be great and unfrenchified by the frontispiece to one of his poems, in which a young gentleman in an heroic attitude is pointing to the sea in a storm, with his other hand round a pretty girl’s waist. I told H. this poet had lately married a lady of fortune. He said, ‘That’s the girl.’ He also said very well, I thought, that ‘the French seemed born to puzzle the Germans.’ Why are there not salt-spoons in France? In England it is a piece of barbarism to put your knife into a salt-cellar with another. But in France the distinction between grossness and refinement is done away. Every thing there is refined!

There was a Diligence next day for Turin over Mount Cenis, which went only twice a week (stopping at night) and I was glad to secure (as I thought) two places in the interior at seventy francs a seat, for 240 miles. The fare from Paris to Lyons, a distance of 360 miles, was only fifty francs each, which is four times as cheap; but the difference was accounted for to me, from there being no other conveyance, which was an arbitrary reason, and from the number and expense of horses necessary to drag a heavy double coach over mountainous roads. Besides, it was a Royal Messagerie, and I was given to understand that Messrs. Bonnafoux paid the King of Sardinia a thousand crowns a year for permission to run a Diligence through his territories. The knave of a waiter (I found) had cheated me; and that from Chambery there was only one place in the interior and one in the coupé, which turned out to be a cabriolet, a place in front with a leathern apron and curtains, which in winter time, and in travelling over snowy mountains and through icy valleys, was not a situation ‘devoutly to be wished.’ I had no other resource, however, having paid my four pounds in advance at the over-pressing instances of the Garçon, but to call him a coquin, (which being a Milanese was 184not quite safe) to throw out broad hints (à l’Anglais) of a collusion between him and the Office, and to arrange as well as I could with the Conducteur, that I and my fellow-traveller should not be separated. I would advise all English people travelling abroad to take their own places at coach-offices, and not to trust to waiters, who will make a point of tricking them, both as a principle and pastime; and further to procure letters of recommendation (in case of disagreeable accidents on the road) for it was a knowledge of this kind, namely, that I had a letter of introduction to one of the Professors of the College at Lyons, that procured me even the trifling concession above-mentioned, through the influence which the landlady of the Hotel had with the Conducteur: otherwise, instead of being stuck in the cabriolet, I might have mounted on the imperial, and any signs of vexation or impatience I might have exhibited, would have been construed into ebullitions of the national character, and a want of bienseance in Monsieur l’Anglois. The French, and foreigners in general, (as far as I have seen) are civil, polite, easy-tempered, obliging; but the art of keeping up plausible appearances stands them in lieu of downright honesty. They think they have a right to cheat you if they can (a compliment, a civil bow, a shrug, is worth the money!) and the instant you find out the imposition or begin to complain, they turn away from you as a disagreeable or wrong-headed person, and you can get no redress but by main force. It is not the original transgressor, but he who declares he is aggrieved, that is considered as guilty of a breach of good manners, and a disturber of the social compact. I think one is more irritated at the frequent impositions that are practised on one abroad, because the novelty of the scene, one’s ignorance of the ways of the world, and the momentary excitement of the spirits and of the flush of hope, have a tendency to renew in one’s mind the unsuspecting simplicity and credulity of youth; and the petty tricks and shuffling behaviour we meet with on the road are a greater baulk to our warm, sanguine, buoyant, travelling impulses.

Annoyed at the unfair way in which we had been treated, and at the idea of being left to the mercy of the Conducteur, whose ‘honest, sonsie, bawsont face’ had, however, no more of the fox in it than implied an eye to his own interest, and might be turned to our own advantage, we took our seats numerically in the Royal Diligence of Italy, at seven in the evening (January 20) and for some time suffered the extreme penalties of a French stage-coach—not indeed ‘the icy fang and season’s difference,’ but a very purgatory of heat, closeness, confinement, and bad smells. Nothing can surpass it but the section of a slave-ship, or the Black-hole of Calcutta. Mr. Theodore Hook 185or Mr. Croker should take an airing in this way on the Continent, in order to give them a notion of, and I should think, a distaste for the blessings of the Middle Passage. Not only were the six places in the interior all taken, and all full, but they had suspended a wicker basket (like a hen-coop) from the top of the coach, stuffed with fur-caps, hats, overalls, and different parcels, so as to make it impossible to move one way or other, and to stop every remaining breath of air. A negociant at my right-hand corner, who was inclined to piece out a lengthened recital with a parce que and a de sorte que at every word, having got upon ticklish ground, without seeing his audience, was cut short in the flower of his oratory, by asserting that Barcelona and St. Sebastian’s in Spain were contiguous to each other. ‘They were at opposite sides of the country,’ exclaimed in the same breath a French soldier and a Spaniard, who sat on the other side of the coach, and whom he was regaling with the gallant adventures of a friend of his in the Peninsula, and not finding the usual excuse—‘C’est égal‘—applicable to a blunder in geography, was contented to fall into the rear of the discourse for the rest of the journey. At midnight we found that we had gone only nine miles in five hours, as we had been climbing a gradual ascent from the time we set out, which was our first essay in mountain-scenery, and gave us some idea of the scale of the country we were beginning to traverse. The heat became less insupportable as the noise and darkness subsided; and as the morning dawned, we were anxious to remove that veil of uncertainty and prejudice which the obscurity of night throws over a number of passengers whom accident has huddled together in a stage-coach. I think one seldom finds one’s-self set down in a party of this kind without a strong feeling of repugnance and distaste, and one seldom quits it at last without some degree of regret. It was the case in the present instance. At day-break, the pleasant farms, the thatched cottages, and sloping valleys of Savoy attracted our notice, and I was struck with the resemblance to England (to some parts of Devonshire and Somersetshire in particular) a discovery which I imparted to my fellow-travellers with a more lively enthusiasm than it was received. An Englishman thinks he has only to communicate his feelings to others to meet with sympathy, and is not a little disconcerted if (after this amazing act of condescension) he is at all repulsed. How should we laugh at a Frenchman who expected us to be delighted with his finding out a likeness of some part of England to France? We English are a nation of egotists, say what we will; and so much so, that we expect others to swallow the bait of our self-love.

At Pont Beau-Voisin, the frontier town of the King of Sardinia’s 186dominions, we stopped to breakfast, and to have our passports and luggage examined at the Barrier and Custom-house. I breakfasted with the Spaniard, who invited himself to our tea-party, and complimented Madame (in broken English) on the excellence of her performance. We agreed between ourselves that the Spaniards and English were very much superior to the French. I found he had a taste for the Fine Arts, and I spoke of Murillo and Velasquez as two excellent Spanish painters. ‘Here was sympathy.’ I also spoke of Don Quixote—‘Here was more sympathy.’ What a thing it is to have produced a work that makes friends of all the world that have read it, and that all the world have read! Mention but Don Quixote, and who is there that does not own him for a friend, countryman, and brother? There is no French work, at the name of which (as at a talisman) the scales of national prejudice so completely fall off; nay more, I must confess there is no English one. We were summoned from our tea and patriotic effusions to attend the Douane. It was striking to have to pass and repass the piquets of soldiers stationed as a guard on bridges across narrow mountain-streams that a child might leap over. After some slight dalliance with our great-coat pockets, and significant gestures as if we might or might not have things of value about us that we should not, we proceeded to the Custom-house. I had two trunks. One contained books. When it was unlocked, it was as if the lid of Pandora’s box flew open. There could not have been a more sudden start or expression of surprise, had it been filled with cartridge-paper or gun-powder. Books were the corrosive sublimate that eat out despotism and priestcraft—the artillery that battered down castle and dungeon-walls—the ferrets that ferreted out abuses—the lynx-eyed guardians that tore off disguises—the scales that weighed right and wrong—the thumping make-weight thrown into the balance that made force and fraud, the sword and the cowl, kick the beam—the dread of knaves, the scoff of fools—the balm and the consolation of the human mind—the salt of the earth—the future rulers of the world! A box full of them was a contempt of the constituted Authorities; and the names of mine were taken down with great care and secrecy—Lord Bacon’s ‘Advancement of Learning,’ Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ De Stutt-Tracey’s ‘Ideologie,’ (which Bonaparte said ruined his Russian expedition,) Mignet’s ‘French Revolution,’ (which wants a chapter on the English Government,) ‘Sayings and Doings,’ with pencil notes in the margin, ‘Irving’s Orations,’ the same, an ‘Edinburgh Review,’ some ‘Morning Chronicles,’ ‘The Literary Examiner,’ a collection of Poetry, a Volume bound in crimson velvet, and the Paris edition of ‘Table-talk.’ Here was 187some questionable matter enough—but no notice was taken. My box was afterwards corded and leaded with equal gravity and politeness, and it was not till I arrived at Turin that I found it was a prisoner of state, and would be forwarded to me anywhere I chose to mention, out of his Sardinian Majesty’s dominions. I was startled to find myself within the smooth polished grasp of legitimate power, without suspecting it; and was glad to recover my trunk at Florence, with no other inconvenience than the expense of its carriage across the country.^[36]

It was noon as we returned to the inn, and we first caught a full 188view of the Alps over a plashy meadow, some feathery trees, and the tops of the houses of the village in which we were. It was a magnificent sight, and in truth a new sensation. Their summits were bright with snow and with the midday sun; they did not seem to stand upon the earth, but to prop the sky; they were at a considerable distance from us, and yet appeared just over our heads. The surprise seemed to take away our breath, and to lift us from our feet. It was drinking the empyrean. As we could not long retain possession of our two places in the interior, I proposed to our guide to exchange them for the cabriolet; and, after some little chaffering and candid representations of the outside passengers of the cold we should have to encounter, we were installed there to our great satisfaction, and the no less contentment of those whom we succeeded. Indeed I had no idea that we should be steeped in these icy valleys at three o’clock in the morning, or I might have hesitated. The view was cheering, the clear air refreshing, and I thought we should set off each morning about seven or eight. But it is part of the sçavoir vivre in France, and one of the methods of adding to the agrémens of travelling, to set out three hours before day-break in the depth of winter, and stop two hours about noon, in order to arrive early in the evening. With all the disadvantages of preposterous hours and of intense cold pouring into the cabriolet like water the two first mornings, I cannot say I repented of my bargain. We had come a thousand miles to see the Alps for one thing, and we did see them in perfection, which we could not have done inside. The ascent for some way was striking and full of novelty; but on turning a corner of the road we entered upon a narrow defile or rocky ledge, overlooking a steep valley under our feet, with a headlong turbid stream dashing down it, and spreading itself out into a more tranquil river below, a dark wood of innumerable pine-trees covering the side of the valley opposite, with broken crags, morasses, and green plots of cultivated ground, orchards, and quiet homesteads, on which the sun glanced its farewell rays through the openings of the mountains. On our left, a precipice of dark brown rocks of various shapes rose abruptly at our side, or hung threatening over the road, into which some of their huge fragments, loosened by the winter’s flaw, had fallen, and which men and mules were employed in removing—(the thundering crash had hardly yet subsided, as you looked up and saw the fleecy clouds sailing among the shattered cliffs, while another giant-mass seemed ready to quit its station in the sky)—and as the road wound along to the other extremity of this noble pass, between the beetling rocks and dark sloping pine-forests, frowning defiance at each other, you caught the azure sky, the snowy ridges of the mountains, and the peaked tops of 189the Grand Chartreuse, waving to the right in solitary state and air-clad brightness.—It was a scene dazzling, enchanting, and that stamped the long-cherished dreams of the imagination upon the senses. Between those four crystal peaks stood the ancient monastery of that name, hid from the sight, revealed to thought, half-way between earth and heaven, enshrined in its cerulean atmosphere, lifting the soul to its native home, and purifying it from mortal grossness. I cannot wonder at the pilgrimages that are made to it, its calm repose, its vows monastic. Life must there seem a noiseless dream;—Death a near translation to the skies! Winter was even an advantage to this scene. The black forests, the dark sides of the rocks gave additional and inconceivable brightness to the glittering summits of the lofty mountains, and received a deeper tone and a more solemn gloom from them; while in the open spaces the unvaried sheets of snow fatigue the eye, which requires the contrast of the green tints or luxuriant foliage of summer or of spring. This was more particularly perceptible as the day closed, when the golden sunset streamed in vain over frozen valleys that imbibed no richness from it, and repelled its smile from their polished marble surface. But in the more gloomy and desert regions, the difference is less remarkable between summer and winter, except in the beginning of spring, when the summits of the hoary rocks are covered with snow, and the cleft[s] in their sides are filled with fragrant shrubs and flowers. I hope to see this miracle when I return.

We came to Echelles, where we changed horses with great formality and preparation, as if setting out on some formidable expedition. Six large strong-boned horses with high haunches (used to ascend and descend mountains) were put to, the rope-tackle was examined and repaired, and our two postilions mounted and dismounted more than once, before they seemed willing to set off, which they did at last at a hand-gallop, that was continued for some miles. It is nothing to see English blood-horses get over the ground with such prodigious fleetness and spirit, but it is really curious to see the huge cart-horses, that they use for Diligences abroad, lumbering along and making the miles disappear behind them with their ponderous strength and persevering activity. The road for some way rattled under their heavy hoofs, and the heavy wheels that they dragged or whirled along at a thundering pace; the postilions cracked their whips, and the one in front (a dark, swarthy, short-set fellow) flourished his, shouted and hallooed, and turned back to vociferate his instructions to his companion with the robust energy and wildness of expression of a smuggler or a leader of banditti, carrying off a rich booty from a troop of soldiers. There was something in the scenery 190to favour this idea. Night was falling as we entered the superb tunnel cut through the mountain at La Grotte (a work attributed to Victor-Emanuel, with the same truth that Falstaff took to himself the merit of the death of Hotspur), and its iron floor rang, the whips cracked, and the roof echoed to the clear voice of our intrepid postilion as we dashed through it. Our path then wound among romantic defiles, where huge masses of snow and the gathering gloom threatened continually to bar our way; but it seemed cleared by the lively shout of our guide, and the carriage-wheels, clogged with ice, rolled after the heavy tramp of the horses. In this manner we rode on through a country full of wild grandeur and shadowy fears, till we had nearly reached the end of our day’s journey, when we dismissed our two fore-horses and their rider, to whom I presented a trifling douceur ‘for the sake of his good voice and cheerful countenance.’ The descent into Chambery was the most dangerous part of the road, and our horses were nearly thrown on their haunches several times. The road was narrow and slippery; there were a number of market-carts returning from the town, and there was a declivity on one side, which, though not a precipice, was quite sufficient to have dashed us to pieces in a common-place way. We arrived at Chambery in the dusk of the evening; and there is surely a charm in the name, and in that of the Charmettes near it (where he who relished all more sharply than his fellows, and made them feel for him as for themselves, alone felt peace or hope), which even the Magdalen Muse of Mr. Moore has not been able to unsing! We alighted at the inn fatigued enough, and were delighted on being shewn to a room to find the floor of wood, and English teacups and saucers. We were in Savoy.

We set out early the next morning, and it was the most trying part of our whole journey. The wind cut like a scythe through the valleys, and a cold, icy feeling struck from the sides of the snowy precipices that surrounded us, so that we seemed enclosed in a huge well of mountains. We got to St. Jean de Maurienne to breakfast about noon, where the only point agreed upon appeared to be to have nothing ready to receive us. This was the most tedious day of all; nor did we meet with any thing to repay us for our uncomfortable setting out. We travelled through a scene of desolation, were chilled in sunless valleys or dazzled by sunny mountain-tops, passed frozen streams or gloomy cavities, that might be transformed into the scene of some Gothic wizard’s spell, or reminded one of some German novel. Let no one imagine that the crossing the Alps is the work of a moment, or done by a single heroic effort—that they are a huge but detached chain of hills, or like the dotted line we find in the 191map. They are a sea or an entire kingdom of mountains. It took us three days to traverse them in this, which is the most practicable direction, and travelling at a good round pace. We passed on as far as eye could see, and still we appeared to have made little way. Still we were in the shadow of the same enormous mass of rock and snow, by the side of the same creeping stream. Lofty mountains reared themselves in front of us—horrid abysses were scooped out under our feet. Sometimes the road wound along the side of a steep hill, overlooking some village-spire or hamlet, and as we ascended it, it only gave us a view of remoter scenes, ‘where Alps o’er Alps arise,’ tossing about their billowy tops, and tumbling their unwieldy shapes in all directions—a world of wonders!—Any one, who is much of an egotist, ought not to travel through these districts; his vanity will not find its account in them; it will be chilled, mortified, shrunk up: but they are a noble treat to those who feel themselves raised in their own thoughts and in the scale of being by the immensity of other things, and who can aggrandise and piece out their personal insignificance by the grandeur and eternal forms of nature! It gives one a vast idea of Buonaparte to think of him in these situations. He alone (the Rob Roy of the scene) seemed a match for the elements, and able to master ‘this fortress, built by nature for herself.’ Neither impeded nor turned aside by immoveable barriers, he smote the mountains with his iron glaive, and made them malleable; cut roads through them; transported armies over their ridgy steeps; and the rocks ‘nodded to him, and did him courtesies!’

We arrived at St. Michelle at night-fall (after passing through beds of ice and the infernal regions of cold), where we met with a truly hospitable reception, with wood-floors in the English fashion, and where they told us the King of England had stopped. This made no sort of difference to me.

We breakfasted the next day (being Sunday) at Lans-le-Bourg, where I observed my friend the Spaniard busy with his tables, taking down the name of the place. The landlady was a little, round, fat, good-humoured black-eyed Italian or Savoyard, saying a number of good things to all her guests, but sparing of them otherwise. We were now at the foot of Mount Cenis, and after breakfast we set out on foot before the Diligence, which was to follow us in half an hour. We passed a melancholy-looking inn at the end of the town, professing to be kept by an Englishwoman; but there appeared to be nobody about the house, English, French, or Italian. The mistress of it (a young woman who had married an Italian) had, in fact, died a short time before of pure chagrin and disappointment in this solitary place, after having told her tale of distress to every one, till it fairly wore her out. We had leisure to look 192back to the town as we proceeded, and which, with its church, stone-cottages, and slated roofs, shrunk into a miniature-model of itself as we continued to advance farther and higher above it. Some straggling cottages, some vineyards planted at a great height, and another compact and well-built village, that seemed to defy the extremity of the seasons, were seen in the direction of the valley that we were pursuing. Else all around were shapeless, sightless piles of hills covered with snow, with crags or pine-trees or a foot-path peeping out, and in the appearance of which no alteration whatever was made by our advancing or receding. We gained on the mountain by a broad, winding road that continually doubles, and looks down upon the point from whence you started half an hour before. Some snow had fallen in the morning, but it was now fine, though cloudy. We found two of our fellow-travellers following our example, and they soon after overtook us. They were both French. We noticed some of the features of the scenery; and a lofty hill opposite to us being scooped out into a bed of snow, with two ridges or promontories projecting (something like an arm-chair) on each side. ‘Voilà!’ said the younger and more volatile of our companions, ‘c’est un trône, et le nuage est la gloire!‘—A white cloud indeed encircled its misty top. I complimented him on the happiness of his allusion, and said that Madame was pleased with the exactness of the resemblance. He then turned to the valley, and said, ‘C’est un berceau.’ This is the height to which the imagination of a Frenchman always soars, and it can soar no higher. Any thing that is not cast in this obvious, common-place mould, that had been used a thousand times before with applause, they think barbarous, and as they phrase it, originaire. No farther notice was taken of the scenery, any more than if we had been walking on the Boulevards at Paris, and my young Frenchman talked of other things, laughed, sung, and smoked a cigar with a gaiety and lightness of heart that I envied. ‘What has become,’ said the elder of the Frenchmen, ‘of Monsieur l’Espagnol? He does not easily quit his seat; he sits in one corner, never looks out, or if you point to any object, takes no notice of it; and when you come to the end of the stage, says—“What is the name of that place we passed by last?” takes out his pocket-book, and makes a note of it. “That is droll.”’ And what made it more so, it turned out that our Spanish friend was a painter, travelling to Rome to study the Fine Arts! All the way as we ascended, there were red posts placed at the edge of the road, ten or twelve feet in height, to point out the direction of the road in case of a heavy fall of snow, and with notches cut to shew the depth of the drifts. There were also scattered stone-hovels, erected as stations for the Gens d’armes, who 193were sometimes left here for several days together after a severe snow-storm, without being approached by a single human being. One of these stood near the top of the mountain, and as we were tired of the walk (which had occupied two hours) and of the uniformity of the view, we agreed to wait here for the Diligence to overtake us. We were cordially welcomed in by a young peasant (a soldier’s wife) with a complexion as fresh as the winds, and an expression as pure as the mountain-snows. The floor of this rude tenement consisted of the solid rock; and a three-legged table stood on it, on which were placed three earthen bowls filled with sparkling wine, heated on a stove with sugar. The woman stood by, and did the honours of this cheerful repast with a rustic simplicity and a pastoral grace that might have called forth the powers of Hemskirk and Raphael. I shall not soon forget the rich ruby colour of the wine, as the sun shone upon it through a low glazed window that looked out on the boundless wastes around, nor its grateful spicy smell as we sat round it. I was complaining of the trick that had been played by the waiter at Lyons in the taking of our places, when I was told by the young Frenchman, that, in case I returned to Lyons, I ought to go to the Hotel de l’Europe, or to the Hotel du Nord, ‘in which latter case he should have the honour of serving me.’ I thanked him for his information, and we set out to finish the ascent of Mount Cenis, which we did in another half-hour’s march. The traiteur of the Hotel du Nord and I had got into a brisk theatrical discussion on the comparative merits of Kean and Talma, he asserting that there was something in French acting which an English understanding could not appreciate; and I insisting loudly on bursts of passion as the forte of Talma, which was a language common to human nature; that in his Œdipus, for instance, it was not a Frenchman or an Englishman he had to represent—‘Mais c’est un homme, c’est Œdipe‘—when our cautious Spaniard brushed by us, determined to shew he could descend the mountain, if he would not ascend it on foot. His figure was characteristic enough, his motions smart and lively, and his dress composed of all the colours of the rainbow. He strutted on before us in the snow, like a flamingo or some tropical bird of variegated plumage; his dark purple cloak fluttered in the air, his Montero cap, set a little on one side, was of fawn colour; his waistcoat a bright scarlet, his coat a reddish brown, his trowsers a pea-green, and his boots a perfect yellow. He saluted us with a national politeness as he passed, and seemed bent on redeeming the sedentary sluggishness of his character by one bold and desperate effort of locomotion.

The coach shortly after overtook us. We descended a long and 194steep declivity, with the highest point of Mount Cenis on our left, and a lake to the right, like a landing-place for geese. Between the two was a low, white monastery, and the barrier where we had our passports inspected, and then went forward with only two stout horses and one rider. The snow on this side of the mountain was nearly gone. I supposed myself for some time nearly on level ground, till we came in view of several black chasms or steep ravines in the side of the mountain facing us, with water oozing from it, and saw through some galleries, that is, massy stone-pillars knit together by thick rails of strong timber, guarding the road-side, a perpendicular precipice below, and other galleries beyond, diminished in a fairy perspective, and descending ‘with cautious haste and giddy cunning,’ and with innumerable windings and re-duplications to an interminable depth and distance from the height where we were. The men and horses with carts, that were labouring up the path in the hollow below, shewed like crows or flies. The road we had to pass was often immediately under that we were passing, and cut from the side of what was all but a precipice out of the solid rock by the broad, firm master-hand that traced and executed this mighty work. The share that art has in the scene is as appalling as the scene itself—the strong security against danger as sublime as the danger itself. Near the turning of one of the first galleries is a beautiful waterfall, which at this time was frozen into a sheet of green pendant ice—a magical transformation. Long after we continued to descend, now faster and now slower, and came at length to a small village at the bottom of a sweeping line of road, where the houses seemed like dove-cotes with the mountain’s back reared like a wall behind them, and which I thought the termination of our journey. But here the wonder and the greatness began: for, advancing through a grove of slender trees to another point of the road, we caught a new view of the lofty mountain to our left. It stood in front of us, with its head in the skies, covered with snow, and its bare sides stretching far away into a valley that yawned at its feet, and over which we seemed suspended in mid air. The height, the magnitude, the immovableness of the objects, the wild contrast, the deep tones, the dance and play of the landscape from the change of our direction and the interposition of other striking objects, the continued recurrence of the same huge masses, like giants following us with unseen strides, stunned the sense like a blow, and yet gave the imagination strength to contend with a force that mocked it. Here immeasurable columns of reddish granite shelved from the mountain’s sides; here they were covered and stained with furze and other shrubs; here a chalky cliff shewed a fir-grove climbing its tall sides, and that itself looked at a distance like a 195huge, branching pine-tree; beyond was a dark, projecting knoll, or hilly promontory, that threatened to bound the perspective—but, on drawing nearer to it, the cloudy vapour that shrouded it (as it were) retired, and opened another vista beyond, that, in its own unfathomed depth, and in the gradual obscurity of twilight, resembled the uncertain gloom of the back-ground of some fine picture. At the bottom of this valley crept a sluggish stream, and a monastery or low castle stood upon its banks. The effect was altogether grander than I had any conception of. It was not the idea of height or elevation that was obtruded upon the mind and staggered it, but we seemed to be descending into the bowels of the earth—its foundations seemed to be laid bare to the centre; and abyss after abyss, a vast, shadowy, interminable space, opened to receive us. We saw the building up and frame-work of the world—its limbs, its ponderous masses, and mighty proportions, raised stage upon stage, and we might be said to have passed into an unknown sphere, and beyond mortal limits. As we rode down our winding, circuitous path, our baggage, (which had been taken off) moved on before us; a grey horse that had got loose from the stable followed it, and as we whirled round the different turnings in this rapid, mechanical flight, at the same rate and the same distance from each other, there seemed something like witchcraft in the scene and in our progress through it. The moon had risen, and threw its gleams across the fading twilight; the snowy tops of the mountains were blended with the clouds and stars; their sides were shrouded in mysterious gloom, and it was not till we entered Susa, with its fine old drawbridge and castellated walls, that we found ourselves on terra firma, or breathed common air again. At the inn at Susa, we first perceived the difference of Italian manners; and the next day arrived at Turin, after passing over thirty miles of the straightest, flattest, and dullest road in the world. Here we stopped two days to recruit our strength and look about us.

My arrival at Turin was the first and only moment of intoxication I have found in Italy. It is a city of palaces. After a change of dress (which, at the end of a long journey, is a great luxury) I walked out, and traversing several clean, spacious streets, came to a promenade outside the town, from which I saw the chain of Alps we had left behind us, rising like a range of marble pillars in the evening sky. Monte Viso and Mount Cenis resembled two pointed cones of 196ice, shooting up above all the rest. I could distinguish the broad and rapid Po, winding along at the other extremity of the walk, through vineyards and meadow grounds. The trees had on that deep sad foliage, which takes a mellower tinge from being prolonged into the midst of winter, and which I had only seen in pictures. A Monk was walking in a solitary grove at a little distance from the common path. The air was soft and balmy, and I felt transported to another climate—another earth—another sky. The winter was suddenly changed to spring. It was as if I had to begin my life anew. Several young Italian women were walking on the terrace, in English dresses, and with graceful downcast looks, in which you might fancy that you read the soul of the Decameron. It was a fine, serious grace, equally remote from French levity and English sullenness, but it was the last I saw of it. I have run the gauntlet of vulgar shapes and horrid faces ever since. The women in Italy (so far as I have seen hitherto) are detestably ugly. They are not even dark and swarthy, but a mixture of brown and red, coarse, marked with the small pox, with pug-features, awkward, ill-made, fierce, dirty, lazy, neither attempting nor hoping to please. Italian beauty (if there is, as I am credibly informed, such a thing) is retired, conventual, denied to the common gaze. It was and it remains a dream to me, a vision of the brain! I returned to the inn (the Pension Suisse) in high spirits, and made a most luxuriant dinner. We had a wild duck equal to what we had in Paris, and the grapes were the finest I ever tasted. Afterwards we went to the Opera, and saw a ballet of action (out-heroding Herod) with all the extravagance of incessant dumb-show and noise, the glittering of armour, the burning of castles, the clattering of horses on and off the stage, and heroines like furies in hysterics. Nothing at Bartholomew Fair was ever in worse taste, noisier, or finer. It was as if a whole people had buried their understandings, their imaginations, and their hearts in their senses; and as if the latter were so jaded and worn out, that they required to be inflamed, dazzled, and urged almost to a kind of frenzy-fever, to feel any thing. The house was crowded to excess, and dark, all but the stage, which shed a dim, ghastly light on the gilt boxes and the audience. Milton might easily have taken his idea of Pandemonium from the inside of an Italian Theatre, its heat, its gorgeousness, and its gloom. We were at the back of the pit, in which there was only standing room, and leaned against the first row of boxes, full of the Piedmontese Nobility, who talked fast and loud in their harsh guttural dialect, in spite of the repeated admonitions of ‘a gentle usher, Authority by name,’ who every five seconds hissed some lady of quality and high breeding whose voice was heard with an éclat above all the rest. No 197notice whatever was taken of the acting or the singing (which was any thing but Italian, unless Italian at present means a bad imitation of the French) till a comic dance attracted all eyes, and drew forth bursts of enthusiastic approbation. I do not know the performers’ names, but a short, squat fellow (a kind of pollard of the green-room) dressed in a brown linsey-woolsey doublet and hose, with round head, round shoulders, short arms and short legs, made love to a fine die-away lady, dressed up in the hoops, lappets and furbelows of the last age, and stumped, nodded, pulled and tugged at his mistress with laudable perseverance, and in determined opposition to the awkward, mawkish graces of an Adonis of a rival, with flowing locks, pink ribbons, yellow kerseymere breeches, and an insipid expression of the utmost distress. It was an admirable grotesque and fantastic piece of pantomime humour. The little fellow who played the Clown, certainly entered into the part with infinite adroitness and spirit. He merited the teres et rotundus of the poet. He bounded over the stage like a foot-ball, rolled himself up like a hedge-hog, stuck his arms in his sides like fins, rolled his eyes in his head like bullets—and the involuntary plaudits of the audience witnessed the success of his efforts at once to electrify and stultify them! The only annoyance I found at Turin was the number of beggars who are stuck against the walls like fixtures, and expose their diseased, distorted limbs, with no more remorse or feeling than if they did not belong to them, deafening you with one wearisome cry the whole day long.

We were fortunate enough to find a voiture going from Geneva to Florence, with an English lady and her niece—I bargained for the two remaining places for ten guineas, and the journey turned out pleasantly, I believe, to all parties; I am sure it did so to us. We were to be eight days on the road, and to stop two days to rest, once at Parma, and once at Bologna, to see the pictures. Having made this arrangement, I was proceeding over the bridge towards the Observatory that commands a view of the town and the whole surrounding country, and had quite forgotten that I had such a thing as a passport to take with me. I found, however, I had no fewer than four signatures to procure, besides the six that were already tacked to my passport, before I could proceed, and which I had some difficulty in obtaining in time to set out on the following morning. The hurry I was thrown into by this circumstance prevented me from seeing some fine Rembrandts, Spagnolettos and Caraccis, which I was told are to be found in the Palace of Prince Carignani and elsewhere. I received this piece of information from my friend the Spaniard, who called on me to inquire my proposed route, and to ‘testify,’ as he said, ‘his respect for the English character.’ Shall I own it? I 198who flout, rail at, and contemn the English, was more pleased with this compliment paid to me in my national character, than with any I ever received on the score of personal civility. My fellow-traveller was for Genoa and Milan; I for Florence: but we were to meet at Rome.

The next morning was clear and frosty, and the sun shone bright into the windows of the voiture, as we left Turin, and proceeded for some miles at a gentle pace along the banks of the Po. The road was level and excellent, and we met a number of market people with mules and yokes of oxen. There were some hills crowned with villas; some bits of traditional Italian scenery now and then; but in general you would not know but that you were in England, except from the greater clearness and lightness of the air. We breakfasted at the first town we came to, in two separate English groups, and I could not help being struck with the manner of our reception at an Italian inn, which had an air of indifference, insolence, and hollow swaggering about it, as much as to say, ‘Well, what do you think of us Italians? Whatever you think, we care very little about the matter!’ The French are a politer people than the Italians—the English are honester; but I may as well postpone these comparisons till my return. The room smoked, and the waiter insisted on having the windows and the door open, in spite of my remonstrances to the contrary. He flung in and out of the room as if he had a great opinion of himself, and wished to express it by a braggadocio air. The partridges, coffee, cheese and grapes, on which we breakfasted à la fourchette, were, however, excellent. I said so, but the acknowledgment seemed to be considered as superfluous by our attendant, who received five francs for his master, and one for himself, with an air of condescending patronage. In consequence of something being said about our passports, he relaxed in the solemnity of his deportment, and observed that ‘he had been once near being engaged as valet to an English gentleman, at Ostend; that he had but three hours to procure his passport, but while he was getting it, the ship sailed, and he lost his situation.’ Such was my first impression of Italian inns and waiters, and I have seen nothing since materially to alter it. They receive you with a mixture of familiarity and fierceness, and instead of expecting any great civility from them, they excite that sort of uncomfortable sensation as to the footing you are upon, that you are glad to get away without meeting with some affront. There is either a fawning sleekness, which looks like design, or an insolence, which looks as if they had you in their power. In Switzerland and Savoy you are waited on by women; in Italy by men. I cannot say I like the exchange. From Turin to Florence, only one girl entered the room, and she (not to mend the 199matter) was a very pretty one.—I was told at the office of Messrs. Bonnafoux at Turin, that travelling to Rome by a vetturino was highly dangerous, and that their Diligence was guarded by four carabineers, to defend it from the banditti. I saw none, nor the appearance of any thing that looked like a robber, except a bare-foot friar, who suddenly sprang out of a hedge by the road-side, with a somewhat wild and haggard appearance, which a little startled me. Instead of finding a thief concealed behind each bush, or a Salvator Rosa face scowling from a ruined hovel, or peeping from a jutting crag at every turn, there is an excellent turnpike-road all the way, three-fourths perfectly level, skirted with hedges, corn-fields, orchards and vineyards, populous with hamlets and villages, with labourers at work in the fields, and with crowds of peasants in gay, picturesque attire, and with healthy, cheerful, open, but manly countenances, passing along, either to or from the different market-towns. It was Carnival time; and as we travelled on, we were struck with the variety of rich dresses, red, yellow, and green, the high-plaited head-dresses of the women, some in the shape of helmets, with pins stuck in them like skewers, with gold crosses at their bosoms, and large muffs on their hands, who poured from the principal towns along the high-road, or turned off towards some village-spire in the distance, chequering the landscape with their gaily-tinted groups. They often turned back and laughed as we drove by them, or passed thoughtfully on without noticing us, but assuredly showed no signs of an intention to rob or murder us. Even in the Apennines, though the road is rugged and desolate, it is lined with farm-houses and towns at small distances; and there is but one house all the way that is stained by the recollection of a tragic catastrophe. How it may be farther south, I cannot say; but so far, the reports to alarm strangers are (to the best of my observation and conjecture) totally unfounded.

We had left the Alps behind us, the white tops of which we still saw scarcely distinguishable from ridges of rolling clouds, and that seemed to follow us like a formidable enemy, and almost enclose us in a semicircle; and we had the Apennines in front, that, gradually emerging from the horizon, opposed their undulating barrier to our future progress, with shadowy shapes of danger and Covigliaijo lurking in the midst of them. All the space between these two, for at least 150 miles (I should suppose) is one level cultivated plain, one continuous garden. This became more remarkably the case, as we entered the territories of Maria-Louisa (the little States of Parma and Placentia) when, for two whole days, we literally travelled through an uninterrupted succession of corn-fields, vineyards and orchards, all in the highest state of cultivation, with the hedges 200neatly clipped into a kind of trellis-work, and the vines hanging in festoons from tree to tree, or clinging ‘with marriageable arms’ round the branches of each regularly planted and friendly support. It was more like passing through a number of orchard-plots or garden-grounds in the neighbourhood of some great city (such as London) than making a journey through a wide and extensive tract of country. Not a common came in sight, nor a single foot of waste or indifferent ground. It became tedious at last from the richness, the neatness, and the uniformity; for the whole was worked up to an ideal model, and so exactly a counterpart of itself, that it was like looking out of a window at the same identical spot, instead of passing on to new objects every instant. We were saturated even with beauty and comfort, and were disposed to repeat the wish—

A white square villa, or better sort of farm-house, sometimes stared on us from the end of a long, strait avenue of poplars, standing in ostentatious, unadorned nakedness, and in a stiff, meagre, and very singular taste. What is the cause of the predilection of the Italians for straight lines and unsheltered walls? Is it for the sake of security or vanity? The desire of seeing everything or of being seen by every one? The only thing that broke the uniformity of the scene, or gave an appearance of wretchedness or neglect to the country, was the number of dry beds of the torrents of melted snow and ice that came down from the mountains in the breaking up of the winter, and that stretched their wide, comfortless, unprofitable length across these valleys in their progress to the Adriatic. Some of them were half a mile in breadth, and had stately bridges over them, with innumerable arches—(the work, it seems, of Maria Louisa) some of which we crossed over, others we rode under. We approached the first of them by moonlight, and the effect of the long, white, glimmering, sepulchral arches was as ghastly then as it is dreary in the day-time. There is something almost preternatural in the sensation they excite, particularly when your nerves have been agitated and harassed during several days’ journey, and you are disposed to startle at everything in a questionable shape. You do not know what to make of them. They seem like the skeletons of bridges over the dry bones and dusty relics of rivers. It is as if some mighty concussion of the earth had swept away the water, and left the bridge standing in stiffened horror over it. It is a new species of desolation, as flat, dull, disheartening, and hopeless as can be imagined. Mr. Crabbe should travel post to Italy on purpose to describe it, and to add it to his list of prosaic horrors. While here, he might also try his hand upon an Italian 201vintage, and if he does not squeeze the juice and spirit out of it, and leave nothing but the husk and stalks, I am much mistaken. As we groped our way under the stony ribs of the first of these structures that we came to, one of the arches within which the moonlight fell, presented a momentary appearance of a woman in a white dress and hood, stooping to gather stones. I wish I had the petrific pencil of the ingenious artist above-named, that I might imbody this flitting shadow in a permanent form.

It was late on the fourth day (Saturday) before we reached Parma. Our two black, glossy, easy-going horses were tired of the sameness or length of the way; and our guide appeared to have forgotten it, for we entered the capital of the Archduchy without his being aware of it. We went to the Peacock Inn, where we were shewn into a very fine but faded apartment, and where we stopped the whole of the next day. Here, for the first time on our journey, we found a carpet, which, however, stuck to the tiled floor with dirt and age. There was a lofty bed, with a crimson silk canopy, a marble table, looking-glasses of all sizes and in every direction,^[37] and excellent coffee, fruit, game, bread and wine at a moderate rate—that is to say, our supper the first night, our breakfast, dinner, and coffee the next day, and coffee the following morning, with lodging and fire, came to twenty-three francs. It would have cost more than double in England in the same circumstances. We had an exhilarating view from our window of the street and great square. It was full of noise and bustle. The people were standing in lounging attitudes by themselves, or talking loud in groups, and with great animation. The expression of character seemed to be natural and unaffected. Every one appeared to follow the bent of his own humour and feelings (good or bad) and I did not perceive any of that smirking grimace and varnish of affectation and self-complacency, which glitters in the face and manners of every Frenchman, and makes them so many enemies. If an individual is inordinately delighted with himself, do not others laugh at and take a dislike to him? Must it not be equally so with a nation enamoured of itself?—The women that I saw did not answer to my expectations. They had high shoulders, thick 202waists, and shambling feet, or that crapaudeux shape, which is odious to see or think of. The men looked better, and I saw little difference between them and the English, except a greater degree of fire and spirit. The priests had many of them (both here and at Turin) fine faces, with a jovial expression of good humour and good living, or of subtle thought and painful watching, studious to keep the good things that enriched the veins and pampered the pride of the brotherhood. Here we saw the whole market-place kneel down as the host passed by. Being Carnival time, high mass was celebrated at the principal churches, and Moses in Egypt was given at the Opera in the evening. The day before, as we entered Parma in the dusk, we saw a procession of flambeaux at a distance, which denoted a funeral. The processions are often joined by persons of the highest quality in disguise, who make a practice of performing penance, or expiating some offence by attending the obsequies of the dead. This custom may be ridiculed as superstitious by an excess of Protestant zeal; but the moralist will hardly blame what shews a sense of human infirmity, and owns something ‘serious in mortality;’ and is besides freed from the suspicion of ostentation or hypocrisy. Lord Glenallan, in ‘The Antiquary,’ has been censured on the same principle, as an excrescence of morbid and superannuated superstition. Honi soit qui mal y pense. When human nature is no longer liable to such misfortunes, our sympathy with them will then be superfluous—we may dry up our tears, and stifle our sighs. In the mean time, they who enlarge our sympathy with others, or deepen it for ourselves from lofty, imaginary sources, are the true teachers of morality, and benefactors of mankind, were they twenty times tools and Tories. It is not the shutting up of hospitals, but the opening of the human heart, that will lead to the regeneration of the world^[38]!

It was at Parma I first noticed the women looking out of the windows (not one or two stragglers, but two or three from every house) where they hang like signs or pictures, stretching their necks out, or confined, like children by iron bars, often with cushions to lean upon, scaldalettos dangling from their hands (another vile custom). This seems to shew a prodigious predominance of the organ of sight, or a want of something to do or to think of. In France, the passion of the women is not to see, but to talk. In Hogarth, you perceive some symptoms of the same prurience of the optic nerve, and willingness to take in knowledge at the entrance of the eyes. It certainly has a great look of ignorance, indolence, and vulgarity. In summer time, perhaps, the practice might be natural—in winter, the habit is quite unaccountable. I thought, at 203first, it might be one of the abuses of the Carnival; but the Carnival is over, and the windows are still lined with eyes and heads—that do not like the trouble of putting on a cap.

We were told we could see her Majesty at mass, (so her dutiful subjects call the Archduchess) and we went to see the daughter of a sovereign, the self-devoted consort of one who only lost himself by taking upon him a degrading equality with Emperors and Kings. We had a Cicerone with us, who led us, without ceremony, to a place in the chapel, where we could command a full view of Maria Louisa, and which we made use of without much reserve. She knelt, or stood, in the middle of a small gallery, with attendants, male and female, on each side of her. We saw her distinctly for several minutes. She has full fair features, not handsome, but with a mild, unassuming expression, tinged with thoughtfulness. She appears about forty; she seemed to cast a wistful look at us, being strangers and English people—

There are some not very pleasant rumours circulated of her. She must have had something of the heroine of the Cid about her. She married the man who had conquered her father. She is said to have leaned on the Duke of Wellington’s arm. After that, she might do whatever she pleased. Perhaps these stories are only circulated to degrade her; or, perhaps, a scheme may have been laid to degrade her in reality, by the persons nearest to her, and most interested in, but most jealous of, her honour! We were invited to see the cradle of the little Napoleon, which I declined; and we then went to see the new gallery which the Archduchess has built for her pictures, in which there is a bust of herself, by Canova. Here I saw a number of pictures, and among others the Correggios and the celebrated St. Jerome, which I had seen at Paris. I must have been out of tune; for my disappointment and my consequent mortification were extreme. I had never thought Correggio a God; but I had attributed this to my own inexperience and want of taste, and I hoped by this time to have ripened into that full idolatry of him expressed by Mengs and others. Instead of which, his pictures (they stood on the ground without frames, and in a bad light) appeared to be comparatively mean, feeble, and affected. There is the master-hand, no doubt, but tremulous with artificial airs—beauty and grace carried to a pitch of quaintness and conceit—the expression of joy or woe, but lost in a doting contemplation of its own ecstasy or agony, and after being raised to the height of truth and nature, hurried over the brink 204of refinement into effeminacy, by a craving after impossibilities, and a wanton dalliance with the ideal. Correggio has painted the wreathed smile of sweetness, but he does not stop till he has contorted it into affectation; he has expressed the utmost distress and despondency of soul, but it is the weakness of suffering without the strength. His pictures are so perfect and delicate, that ‘the sense aches at them;’ and in his efforts after refinement, he has worked himself up into a state of languid, nervous irritability, which is reflected back upon the spectator. These remarks appeared to me applicable in their full force to the St. Jerome, the Taking down from the Cross, and the Martyrdom of St. Placide, in which there is an executioner with his back turned, in a chiaro-scuro of the most marvellous clearness and beauty. In all these there is a want of manly firmness and simplicity. He might be supposed to have touched, at some period of his progress, on the highest point of excellence, and then to have spoiled all by a wish to go farther, without knowing how or why. Perhaps modesty, or an ignorance of what others had done, or of what the art could do, was at the foundation of this, and prevented him from knowing where to stop. Perhaps he had too refined and tender a susceptibility, or ideas of sanctity and sweetness beyond the power of his art to express; and in the attempt to reconcile the mechanical and ideal, failed from an excess of feeling! I saw nothing else to please me, and I was sorry I had come so far to have my faith in great names and immortal works misgive me. I was ready to exclaim, ‘Oh painting! I thought thee a substance, and I find thee a shadow!’ There was, however, a Crowning of the Virgin, a fresco (by Correggio) from the Church of St. Paul, which was full of majesty, sweetness, and grace; and in this, and the heads of boys and fawns, in the Chase of Diana, there is a freedom and breadth of execution, owing to the mode in which they were painted, and which makes them seem pure emanations of the mind, without anything overdone, finical, or little. The cupola of St. Paul’s, painted by Correggio in fresco, is quite destroyed, or the figures flutter in idle fragments from the walls. Most of the other pictures in this church were in a tawdry, meretricious style. I was beginning to think that painting was not calculated for churches, coloured surfaces not agreeing with solid pillars and masses of architecture, and also that Italian art was less severe, and more a puppet-show business than I had thought it. I was not a little tired of the painted shrines and paltry images of the Virgin at every hundred yards as we rode along. But if my thoughts were veering to this cheerless, attenuated speculation of nothingness and vanity, they were called back by the sight of the Farnese Theatre—the noblest and most striking monument I have seen of 205the golden age of Italy. It was built by one of the Farnese family about the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and would hold eight thousand spectators. It is cold, empty, silent as the receptacles of the dead. The walls, roofs, rafters, and even seats, remain perfect; but the tide of population and of wealth, the pomp and pride of patronage and power, seemed to have turned another way, and to have left it a deserted pile, that would, long ere this, have mouldered into ruin and decay, but that its original strength and vast proportions would not suffer it—a lasting proof of the magnificence of a former age, and of the degeneracy of this! The streets of Parma are beautiful, airy, clean, spacious; the churches elegant; and the walls around it picturesque and delightful. The walls and ramparts, with the gardens and vineyards close to them, have a most romantic effect; and we saw, on a flight of steps near one of the barriers, a group of men, women, and children, that for expression, composition, and colouring rivalled any thing in painting. We here also observed the extreme clearness and brilliancy of the southern atmosphere: the line of hills in the western horizon was distinguished from the sky by a tint so fine that it was barely perceptible.

Bologna is even superior to Parma. If its streets are less stately, its public buildings are more picturesque and varied; and its long arcades, its porticos, and silent walks are a perpetual feast to the eye and the imagination. At Parma (as well as Turin) you see a whole street at once, and have a magical and imposing effect produced once for all. At Bologna you meet with a number of surprises; new beauties unfold themselves, a perspective is gradually prolonged, or branches off by some retired and casual opening, winding its heedless way—the rus in urbe—where leisure might be supposed to dwell with learning. Here is the Falling Tower, and the Neptune of John of Bologna, in the great square. Going along, we met Professor Mezzofanti, who is said to understand thirty-eight languages, English among the rest. He was pointed out to us as a prodigious curiosity by our guide, (Signor Gatti) who has this pleasantry at his tongue’s end, that ‘there is one Raphael to paint, one Mezzofanti to understand languages, and one Signor Gatti to explain everything they wish to know to strangers.’ We went under the guidance of this accomplished person, and in company of our fellow-travellers, to the Academy, and to the collection of the Marquis Zampieri. In the last there is not a single picture worth seeing, except some old and curious ones of Giotto and Ghirlandaio. One cannot look at these performances (imperfect as they are, with nothing but the high endeavour, the fixed purpose stamped on them, like the attempts of a deformed person at grace) with sufficient veneration, when one 206considers what they must have cost their authors, or what they have enabled others to do. If Giotto could have seen the works of Raphael or Correggio, would he not have laughed or wept? Yet Raphael and Correggio should have bowed the head to him, for without those first rude beginners and dumb creators of the art, they themselves would never have been!—What amused us here was a sort of wild Meg Merrilies of a woman, in a grey coarse dress, and with grey matted hair, that sprang out of a dungeon of a porter’s lodge, and seizing upon Madame ——, dragged her by the arm up the staircase, with unrestrained familiarity and delight. We thought it was some one who presumed on old acquaintance, and was overjoyed at seeing Madame —— a second time. It was the mere spirit of good fellowship, and the excess of high animal spirits. No woman in England would dream of such an extravagance, who was not mad or drunk. She afterwards followed us about the rooms; and though she rather slunk behind, being somewhat abashed by our evident wish to shake her off, she still seemed to watch for an opportunity to dart upon some one, like an animal whose fondness you cannot get rid of by repeated repulses.^[39] There is a childishness and want of self-control about the Italians, which has an appearance of folly or craziness. We passed a group of women on the road, and though there was something odd in their dress and manner, it was not for some time that we discovered that they were insane persons, walking out under the charge of keepers, from a greater degree of vacant vivacity, or thoughtful abstraction than usual.

To return. The Collection of Pictures in the Academy is worthy of Italy and of Bologna. It is chiefly of the Bolognese school; or in that fine, sombre, shadowy tone that seems reflected from sacred subjects or from legendary lore, that corresponds with crucifixions and martyrdoms, that points to skyey glories or hovers round conventual gloom. Here is the St. Cecilia of Raphael (of which the engraving conveys a faithful idea), several Caraccis, Domenichino’s St. Teresa, and his St. Peter Martyr, (a respectable, not a formidable rival of Titian’s) a Sampson, by Guido (an ill-chosen subject, finely coloured) and the Five Patron-Saints of Bologna, by the same, a very large, finely-painted and impressive picture, occupying the end of the Gallery. Four out of five of the Saints are admirable old 207Monkish heads (even their very cowls seem to think): the Dead Christ above has a fine monumental effect; and the whole picture, compared with this master’s general style, is like ‘the cathedral’s gloom and choir,’ compared with sunny smiles and the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountains. I left this Gallery, once more reconciled to my favourite art. Guido also gains upon me, because I continually see fine pictures of his. ‘By their works ye shall know them,’ is a fair rule for judging of painters or men.

There is a side pavement at Bologna, Modena, and most of the other towns in Italy, so that you do not walk, as in Paris, in continual dread of being run over. The shops have a neat appearance, and are well supplied with the ordinary necessaries of life, fruit, poultry, bread, onions or garlick, cheese and sausages. The butchers’ shops look much as they do in England. There is a technical description of the chief towns in Italy, which those who learn the Italian Grammar are told to get by heart—Genoa la superba, Bologna la dotta, Ravenna l’antica, Firense la bella, Roma la santa. Some of these I have seen, and others not; and those that I have not seen seem to me the finest. Does not this list convey as good an idea of these places as one can well have? It selects some one distinct feature of them, and that the best. Words may be said, after all, to be the finest things in the world. Things themselves are but a lower species of words, exhibiting the grossnesses and details of matter. Yet, if there be any country answering to the description or idea of it, it is Italy; and to this theory, I must add, the Alps are also a proud exception.

We left Bologna on our way to Florence in the afternoon, that we might cross the Apennines the following day. High Mass had been celebrated at Bologna; it was a kind of gala day, and the road was lined with flocks of country-people returning to their homes. At the first village we came to among the hills, we saw, talking to her companions by the road-side, the only very handsome Italian we have yet seen. It was not the true Italian face neither, dark and oval, but more like the face of an English peasant, with heightened grace and animation, with sparkling eyes, white teeth, a complexion breathing health,

208Our voiture was ascending a hill; and as she walked by the side of it with elastic step, and a bloom like the suffusion of a rosy cloud, the sight of her was doubly welcome, in this land of dingy complexions, squat features, scowling eye-brows and round shoulders.

We slept at ——, nine miles from Bologna, and set off early the next morning, that we might have the whole day before us. The moon, which had lighted on us on our way the preceding evening, still hung over the western horizon, its yellow orb nigh dropping behind the snowy peaks of the highest Apennines, while the sun was rising with dazzling splendour behind a craggy steep that overhung the frozen road we were passing over. The white tops of the Apennines, covered with hoar-frost gleamed in the misty morning. There was a delightful freshness and novelty in the scene. The Apennines have not the vastness nor the unity of effect of the Alps; but are broken up into a number of abrupt projecting points, that crossing one another, and presenting new combinations as the traveller shifts his position, produce, though a less sublime and imposing, a more varied and picturesque effect. A brook brawled down the precipice on the road-side, a pine-tree or mountain-ash hung over it, and shewed the valley below in a more distant, airy perspective; on the point of a rock half-way down was perched some village-spire or ruined battlement, while hamlets and farm-houses were sheltered in the bosom of the vale far below: a pine-forest rose on the sides of the mountain above, or a bleak tract of brown heath or dark morass was contrasted with the clear pearly tints of the snowy ridges in the higher distance, above which some still loftier peak saluted the sky, tinged with a rosy light.—Such were nearly the features of the landscape all round, and for several miles; and though we constantly ascended and descended a very winding road, and caught an object now in contact with one part of the scene, now giving relief to another, at one time at a considerable distance beneath our feet, and soon after soaring as high above our heads, yet the elements of beauty or of wildness being the same, the coup d’œil, though constantly changing, was as often repeated, and we at length grew tired of a scenery that still seemed another and the same. One of our pleasantest employments was to remark the teams of oxen and carts that we had lately passed, winding down a declivity in our rear, or suspended on the edge of a precipice, that on the spot we had mistaken for level ground. We had some difficulty too with our driver, who had talked gallantly over-night of hiring a couple of oxen to draw us up the mountain; but when it came to the push, his heart failed him, and his Swiss economy prevailed. In addition to his habitual closeness, the windfall of the ten guineas, which was beyond 209his expectations, had whetted his appetite for gain, and he appeared determined to make a good thing of his present journey. He pretended to bargain with several of the owners, but from his beating them down to the lowest fraction, nothing ever came of it, and when from the thawing of the ice in the sun, the inconvenience became serious, so that we were several times obliged to get out and walk, to enable the horses to proceed with the carriage, he said it was too late. The country now grew wilder, and the day gloomy. It was three o’clock before we stopped at Pietra Mala to have our luggage examined on entering the Tuscan States; and here we resolved to breakfast, instead of proceeding four miles farther to Covigliaio, where, though we did not choose to pass the night, we had proposed to regale our waking imaginations with a thrilling recollection of the superstitious terrors of the spot, at ease and in safety. Our reception at Pietra Mala was frightful enough; the rooms were cold and empty, and we were met with a vacant stare or with sullen frowns, in lieu of any better welcome. I have since thought that these were probably the consequence of the contempt and ill-humour shewn by other English travellers at the desolateness of the place, and the apparent want of accommodation; for, as the fire of brushwood was lighted, and the eggs, bread, and coffee were brought in by degrees, and we expressed our satisfaction in them, the cloud on the brow of our reluctant entertainers vanished, and melted into thankful smiles. There was still an air of mystery, of bustle, and inattention about the house; persons of both sexes, and of every age, passed and repassed through our sitting room to an inner chamber with looks of anxiety and importance, and we learned at length that the mistress of the inn had been, half an hour before, brought to bed of a fine boy!

We had now to mount the longest and steepest ascent of the Apennines; and Jaques, who began to be alarmed at the accounts of the state of the road, and at the increasing gloom of the weather, by a great effort of magnanimity had a yoke of oxen put to, and afterwards another horse, to drag us up the worst part; but as soon as he could find an excuse he dismissed both, and we crawled and stumbled on as before. The hills were covered with a dense cloud of sleet and vapour driven before the blast, that wrapped us round, and hung like a blanket or (if the reader pleases) a dark curtain over the more distant range of mountains. On our right were high ledges of frowning rocks, ‘cloud-clapt,’ and the summits impervious to the sight—on our farthest left, an opening was made which showed a milder sky, evening clouds pillowed on rocks, and a chain of lofty peaks basking in the rays of the setting sun; between, and in the valley below, there 210was nothing to be seen but mist and crag and grim desolation with the lowering symptoms of the impending storm. We felt uncomfortable, for the increased violence of the wind or thickening of the fog would have presented serious obstacles to our farther progress, which became every moment more necessary as the evening closed in—as it was, we only saw a few yards of the road distinctly before us, which cleared as we advanced forward; and at the side there was sometimes a precipice, beyond which we could distinguish nothing but mist, so that we seemed to be travelling along the edge of the world. The feeling was more striking than agreeable. Our horses were blinded by the mist, which drove furiously against them, and were nearly exhausted with continued exertion. At length, when we had arrived near the very top of the mountain, we had to cross a few yards of very slippery ice, which became a matter of considerable doubt and difficulty.—The horses could hardly keep their feet in straining to move forward, and if one of them had fallen and been hurt, the accident might have detained us on the middle of the mountain, without any aid near, or made it so late that the descent on the other side would have been dangerous. Luckily, a desperate effort succeeded, and we gained the summit of the hill without accident. We had still some miles to go, and we descended rapidly down on the other side, congratulating ourselves that we had daylight to distinguish the road from the abyss that often skirted it. About half-way down we emerged, to our great delight, from the mist (or brouillard, as it is called) that had hitherto enveloped us, and the valley opened at our feet in dim but welcome perspective. We proceeded more leisurely on to La Maschere, having escaped the dangers threatened us from precipices and robbers, and drove into a spacious covered court-yard belonging to the inn, where we were safely housed like a flock of sheep folded for the night. The inn at La Maschere is, like many of the inns in Italy, a set of wide dilapidated halls, without furniture, but with quantities of old and bad pictures, portraits or histories. The people (the attendants here were women) were obliging and good-humoured, though we could procure neither eggs nor milk with our coffee, but were compelled to have it black. We were put into a sitting-room with three beds in it without curtains, as they had no other with a fire-place disengaged, and which, with the coverlids like horse-cloths, and the strong smell of the leaves of Indian corn with which they were stuffed, brought to one’s mind the idea of a three-stalled stable. We were refreshed, however, for we slept securely; and we entered upon the last stage betimes the following day, less exhausted than we had been by the first. We had left the unqualified desolation and unbroken irregularity of the Apennines behind us; but 211we were still occasionally treated with a rocky cliff, a pine-grove, a mountain-torrent; while there was no end of sloping hills with old ruins or modern villas upon them, of farm-houses built in the Tuscan taste, of gliding streams with bridges over them, of meadow-grounds, and thick plantations of olives and cypresses by the road side.

After being gratified for some hours with the cultivated beauty of the scene (rendered more striking by contrast with our late perils), we came to the brow of the hill overlooking Florence, which lay under us, a scene of enchantment, a city planted in a garden, and resembling a rich and varied suburb. The whole presented a brilliant amphitheatre of hill and vale, of buildings, groves, and terraces. The circling heights were crowned with sparkling villas; the varying landscape, above or below, waved in an endless succession of olive-grounds. The olive is not unlike the common willow in shape or colour, and being still in leaf, gave to the middle of winter the appearance of a grey summer. In the midst, the Duomo and other churches raised their heads; vineyards and olive-grounds climbed the hills opposite till they joined a snowy ridge of Apennines rising above the top of Fesole; one plantation or row of trees after another fringed the ground, like rich lace; though you saw it not, there flowed the Arno; every thing was on the noblest scale, yet finished in the minutest part—the perfection of nature and of art, populous, splendid, full of life, yet simple, airy, embowered. Florence in itself is inferior to Bologna, and some other towns; but the view of it and of the immediate neighbourhood is superior to any I have seen. It is, indeed, quite delicious, and presents an endless variety of enchanting walks. It is not merely the number or the exquisiteness or admirable combination of the objects, their forms or colour, but every spot is rich in associations at once the most classical and romantic. From my friend L. H.’s house at Moiano, you see at one view the village of Setiniano, belonging to Michael Angelo’s family, the house in which Machiavel lived, and that where Boccaccio wrote, two ruined castles, in which the rival families of the Gerardeschi and the —— carried on the most deadly strife, and which seem as though they might still rear their mouldering heads against each other; and not far from this the Valley of Ladies (the scene of The Decameron), and Fesole, with the mountains of Perugia beyond. With a view like this, one may think one’s sight ‘enriched,’ in Burns’s phrase. On the ascent towards Fesole is the house where Galileo lived, and where he was imprisoned after his release from the Inquisition, at the time Milton saw him.^[40] In the town itself are Michael Angelo’s 212house, the Baptistery, the gates of which he thought worthy to be the gates of Paradise, the Duomo, older than St. Peter’s, the ancient Palace of the Medici family, the Palace Pitti, and here also stands the statue that ‘enchants the world.’ The view along the Arno is certainly delightful, though somewhat confined, and the bridges over it grotesque and old, but beautiful.

The streets of Florence are paved entirely with flag-stones, and it has an odd effect at first to see the horses and carriages drive over them. You get out of their way, however, more easily than in Paris, from not having the slipperiness of the stones to contend with. The streets get dirty after a slight shower, and the next day you have clouds of dust again. Many of the narrower streets are like lofty paved courts, cut through a solid quarry of stone. In general, the public buildings are old, and striking chiefly from their massiness and the quaintness of the style and ornaments. Florence is like a town that has survived itself. It is distinguished by the remains of early and rude grandeur; it is left where it was three hundred years ago. Its history does not seem brought down to the present period. On entering it, you may imagine yourself enclosed in a besieged town; if you turn down any of its inferior streets, you feel as if you might meet the plague still lurking there. Even the walks out of the town are mostly between high stone-walls, which are a bad substitute for hedges. The best and most fashionable is that along the river-side; and the gay dresses and glittering equipages passing under the tall cedar-trees, and with the purple hills in the distance for a back-ground, produce a delightful effect, particularly when seen from the opposite side of the river. The carriages in Florence are numerous and splendid, and rival those in London. Lord Burghersh’s, with its six horses and tall footmen in fine liveries, is only distinguishable from the rest by the little child in a blue velvet hat and coat, looking out at the window. The Corso on Sundays, and on other high days and holidays, is filled with a double row of open carriages, like the ring in Hyde-Park, moving slowly in opposite directions, in which you see the flower of the Florentine nobility. I see no difference between them and the English, except that they are darker and graver. It was Carnival-time when we came, and the town presented something of the same scene that London does at Bartholomew-Fair. The streets were crowded with people, half of them masked. But what soon took off from the gaiety of the motley assemblage was, that you found that the masks were all the same. There was great observance 213of the season, and great good-will to be pleased, but a dearth of wit and invention. Not merely the uniformity of the masks grew tiresome, but the seeing an inflexible pasteboard countenance moving about upon a living body (and without any thing quaint or extravagant in the actions of the person to justify a resort to so grotesque a disguise) shocked by its unmeaning incongruity. May-day in London is a favourable version of the Carnival here. The finery of the chimney-sweepers is an agreeable and intelligible contrast to their usual squalidness. Their three days’ license has spirit, noise, and mirth in it; whereas the dull eccentricity and mechanical antics of the Carnival are drawled out till they are merged without any violent effort in the solemn farce of Lent. It had been a fine season this year, and it is said that the difference between a good season and a bad one to the trades-people is so great, that it pays the rent of their houses. No one is allowed to wear a mask, after Lent commences, and the priests never mask. There is no need that they should. There is no ringing of bells here as with us (triple bob-majors have not sent their cheering sound into the heart of Italy); but during the whole ten days or fortnight that the Carnival continues, there is a noise and jangling of bells, such as is made by the idle boys in a country town on our Shrove Tuesday. We could not tell exactly what to make of the striking of the clocks at first: at eight they struck two; at twelve six. We thought they were put back to prevent the note of time, or were thrown into confusion to accord with the license of the occasion. A day or two cleared up the mystery, and we found that the clocks here (at least those in our immediate neighbourhood) counted the hours by sixes, instead of going on to twelve—which method, when you are acquainted with it, saves time and patience in telling the hour. I have only heard of two masks that seemed to have any point or humour in them; and one of these was not a mask, but a person who went about with his face uncovered, but keeping it, in spite of every thing he saw or heard, in the same unmoved position as if it were a mask. The other was a person so oddly disguised, that you did not know what to make of him, whether he were man or woman, beast or bird, and who, pretending to be equally at a loss himself, went about asking every one, if they could tell him what he was? A Neapolitan nobleman who was formerly in England (Count Acetto), carried the liberty of masking too far. He went to the English Ambassador’s in the disguise of a monk, carrying a bundle of wood at his back, with a woman’s legs peeping out, and written on a large label, ‘Provision for the Convent.’ The clergy, it is said, interfered, and he has been exiled to Lucca. Lord 214Burghersh remonstrated loudly at this step, as a violation of the dignity and privileges of Ambassadors. The offence, whatever it was, was committed at his house, and the English Ambassador’s house is supposed to be in England—the absentees here were alarmed, for at this rate strangers might be sent out of the town at an hour’s notice for a jest. The Count called in person on the Grand Duke, who shook him kindly by the hand—the Countess Rinuccini demanded an interview with the Grand Duchess—but the clergy must be respected, and the Count has been sent away. There has been a good deal of talk and bustle about it—ask the opinion of a dry Scotchman, who judges of every thing by precedent, and he will tell you, ‘It is just like our Alien Bill.’ It is a rule here that a priest is never brought upon the stage. How do they contrive to act our Romeo and Juliet? Molière’s Tartuffe is not a priest, but merely a saint. When this play was forbidden to be acted a second time by the Archbishop of Paris, and the audience loudly demanded the reason of its being withdrawn, Molière came forward and said, ‘Monsieur l’Archevêque ne veut pas qu’il soit joué?’ This was a hundred and fifty years ago. With so much wit and sense in the world one wonders that there are any Tartuffes left in it; but for the last hundred and fifty years, it must be confessed, they have had but an uneasy life of it.

Lent is not kept here very strictly. The streets, however, have rather a ‘fishy fume’ in consequence of it; and, generally speaking, the use of garlick, tobacco, cloves and oil gives a medicated taint to the air. The number of pilgrims to Rome, at this season, is diminished from 80 or 90,000 a century ago, to a few hundreds at present. We passed two on the road, with their staff and scrip and motley attire. I did not look at them with any particle of respect. The impression was, that they were either knaves or fools. The farther they come on this errand, the more you have a right to suspect their motives, not that I by any means suppose these are always bad—but those who signalise their zeal by such long marches obtain not only absolution for the past, but extraordinary indulgence for the future, so that if a person meditate any baseness or mischief, a pilgrimage to Rome is his high road to it. The Popish religion is a convenient cloak for crime, an embroidered robe for virtue. It makes the essence of good and ill to depend on rewards and punishments, and places these in the hands of the priests, for the honour of God and the welfare of the church. Their path to Heaven is a kind of gallery directly over the path to Hell; or, rather, it is the same road, only that at the end of it you kneel down, lift up your hands and eyes, and say you have gone wrong, and you are admitted into 215the right-hand gate, instead of the left-hand one. Hell is said, in the strong language of controversial divinity, to be ‘paved with good intentions.’ Heaven, according to some fanatical creeds, is ‘paved with mock-professions.’ Devotees and proselytes are passed on like wretched paupers, with false certificates of merit, by hypocrites and bigots, who consider submission to their opinions and power as more than equivalent to a conformity to the dictates of reason or the will of God. All this is charged with being a great piece of cant and imposture: it is not more so than human nature itself. Popery is said to be a make-believe religion: man is a make-believe animal—he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part; he is ever at war with himself—his theory with his practice—what he would be (and therefore pretends to be) with what he is; and Popery is an admirable receipt to reconcile his higher and his lower nature in a beautiful equivoque or double-entendre of forms and mysteries,—the palpableness of sense with the dim abstractions of faith, the indulgence of passion with the atonement of confession and abject repentance when the fit is over, the debasement of the actual with the elevation of the ideal part of man’s nature, the Pagan with the Christian religion; to substitute lip-service, genuflections, adoration of images, counting of beads, repeating of Aves for useful works or pure intentions, and to get rid at once of all moral obligation, of all self-control and self-respect, by the proxy of maudlin superstition, by a slavish submission to priests and saints, by prostrating ourselves before them, and entreating them to take our sins and weaknesses upon them, and supply us with a saving grace (at the expence of a routine of empty forms and words) out of the abundance of their merits and imputed righteousness. This religion suits the pride and weakness of man’s intellect, the indolence of his will, the cowardliness of his fears, the vanity of his hopes, his disposition to reap the profits of a good thing and leave the trouble to others, the magnificence of his pretensions with the meanness of his performance, the pampering of his passions, the stifling of his remorse, the making sure of this world and the next, the saving of his soul and the comforting of his body. It is adapted equally to kings and people—to those who love power or dread it—who look up to others as Gods, or who would trample them under their feet as reptiles—to the devotees of show and sound, or the visionary and gloomy recluse—to the hypocrite and bigot—to saints or sinners—to fools or knaves—to men, women, and children. In short, its success is owing to this, that it is a mixture of bitter sweets—that it is a remedy that soothes the disease it affects to cure—that it is not an antidote, but a vent for the peccant humours, the 216follies and vices of mankind, with a salvo in favour of appearances, a reserve of loftier aspirations (whenever it is convenient to resort to them), and a formal recognition of certain general principles, as a courtesy of speech, or a compromise between the understanding and the passions! Omne tulit punctum. There is nothing to be said against it, but that it is contrary to reason and common sense; and even were they to prevail over it, some other absurdity would start up in its stead, not less mischievous but less amusing; for man cannot exist long without having scope given to his propensity to the marvellous and contradictory. Methodism with us is only a bastard kind of Popery, with which the rabble are intoxicated; and to which even the mistresses of Kings might resort (but for its vulgarity) to repair faded charms with divine graces, to exchange the sighs of passion for the tears of a no less luxurious repentance, and to exert one more act of power by making proselytes of their royal paramours!

The Popish calendar is but a transposition of the Pagan Mythology. The images, shrines, and pictures of the Virgin Mary, that we meet at the corner of every street or turning of a road, are not of modern date, but coeval with the old Greek and Roman superstitions. There were the same shrines and images formerly dedicated to Flora, or Ceres, or Pomona, and the flowers and the urn still remain. The oaths of the common people are to this day more Heathen than Catholic. They swear ‘By the countenance of Bacchus’—‘By the heart of Diana.’ A knavish innkeeper, if you complain of the badness of his wine, swears ‘Per Bacco e per Dio,’ ‘By Bacchus and by God, that it is good!’ I wonder when the change in the forms of image-worship took place in the old Roman States, and what effect it had. I used formerly to wonder how or when the people in the mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and who live in solitudes to which the town of Keswick is the polite world, and its lake ‘the Leman-Lake,’ first passed from Popery to Protestantism, what difference it made in them at the time, or has done to the present day? The answer to this question would go a good way to shew how little the common people know of or care for any theory of religion, considered merely as such. Mr. Southey is on the spot, and might do something towards a solution of the difficulty!

Customs come round. I was surprised to find, at the Hotel of the Four Nations, where we stopped the two first days, that we could have a pudding for dinner (a thing that is not to be had in all France); and I concluded this was a luxury which the Italians had been compelled to adopt from the influx of the English, and the loudness of their demands for comfort. I understand it is more probable that 217this dish is indigenous rather than naturalized; and that we got it from them in the time of Queen Elizabeth, when our intercourse with Italy was more frequent than it was with France. We might have remained at the Four Nations; for eighteen francs a day, living in a very sumptuous manner; but we have removed to apartments fitted up in the English fashion, for ten piastres (two guineas) a month, and where the whole of our expenses for boiled and roast, with English cups and saucers and steamed potatoes, does not come to thirty shillings a week. We have every English comfort with clearer air and a finer country. It was exceedingly cold when we first came, and we felt it the more from impatience and disappointment. From the thinness of the air there was a feeling of nakedness about you; you seemed as if placed in an empty receiver. Not a particle of warmth or feeling was left in your whole body: it was just as if the spirit of cold had penetrated every part; one might be said to be vitrified. It is now milder (Feb. 23), and like April weather in England. There is a balmy lightness and vernal freshness in the air. Might I once more see the coming on of Spring as erst in the spring-time of my life, it would be here! I cannot speak to the subject of manners in this place, except as to outward appearances, which are the same as in a country town in England. Judging by the fashionable test on this subject, they must be very bad and desperate indeed; for none of that stream of prostitution flows down the streets, that in the British metropolis is supposed to purify the morality of private families, and to carry off every taint of grossness or licentiousness from the female heart. Cecisbeism still prevails here, less in the upper, more in the lower classes; and may serve as a subject for the English to vent their spleen and outrageous love of virtue upon.

Fesole, that makes so striking a point of view near Florence, was one of the twelve old Tuscan cities that existed before the time of the Romans, and afterwards in a state of hostility to them. It is supposed to have been originally founded by a Greek colony that came over with Cecrops, and others go back to the time of Japhet or to Hesiod’s theogony. Florence was not founded till long after. It is said to have occupied the three conically-shaped hills which stand about three miles from Florence. Here was fought the last great battle between Catiline and the Senate; and here the Romans besieged and starved to death an army of the Goths. It is a place of the highest antiquity and renown, but it does not bear the stamp of anything extraordinary upon its face. You stand upon a bleak, rocky hill, without suspecting it to have been the centre of a thronged population, the seat of battles and of mighty events in eldest times. So you pass through cities and stately palaces, and cannot be 218persuaded that, one day, no trace of them will be left. Italy is not favourable to the look of age or of length of time. The ravages of the climate are less fatal; the oldest places seem rather deserted than mouldering into ruin, and the youth and beauty of surrounding objects mixes itself up even with the traces of devastation and decay. The monuments of antiquity appear to enjoy a green old age in the midst of the smiling productions of modern civilization. The gloom of the seasons does not at any rate add its weight to the gloom and antiquity. It was in Italy, I believe, that Milton had the spirit and buoyancy of imagination to write his Latin sonnet on the Platonic idea of the archetype of the world, where he describes the shadowy cave in which ‘dwelt Eternity’ (otiosa eternitas), and ridicules the apprehension that Nature could ever grow old, or ‘shake her starry head with palsy.’ It has been well observed, that there is more of the germ of Paradise Lost in the author’s early Latin poems, than in his early English ones, which are in a strain rather playful and tender, than stately or sublime. It is said that several of Milton’s Poems, which he wrote at this period, are preserved in manuscript in the libraries in Florence; but it is probable that if so, they are no more than duplicates of those already known, which he gave to friends. His reputation here was high, and delightful to think of; and a volume was dedicated to him by Malatesta, a poet of the day, and a friend of Redi—‘To the ingenuous and learned young Englishman, John Milton.’ When one thinks of the poor figure which our countrymen often make abroad, and also of the supposed reserved habits and puritanical sourness of our great English Epic Poet, one is a little in pain for his reception among foreigners and surprised at his success, for which, perhaps, his other accomplishments (as his skill in music) and his personal advantages, may, in some measure, account. There is another consideration to be added, which is, that Milton did not labour under the disadvantage of addressing foreigners in their native tongue, but conversed with them on equal terms in Latin. That was surely the polite and enviable age of letters, when the learned spoke a common and well-known tongue, instead of petty, huckstering, Gothic dialects of different nations! Now, every one who is not a Frenchman, or who does not gabble French, is no better than a stammerer or a changeling out of his own country. I do not complain of this as a very great grievance; but it certainly prevents those far-famed meetings between learned men of different nations, which are recorded in history, as of Sir Thomas More with Erasmus, and of Milton with the philosophers and poets of Italy.

219So Dante makes one of his heroes exclaim. It is pleasant to hear or speak one’s native tongue when abroad; but possibly the language of that higher and adopted country, which was familiar to the scholar of former times, sounded even sweeter to the ear of friendship or of genius.

The first thing you do when you get to a town abroad is to go to the Post-office in expectation of letters, which you are sure not to receive exactly in proportion as you are anxious to have them. Friends at a distance have you at a disadvantage; and they let you know it, if they will let you know nothing else. There is in this a love of power or of contradiction, and at the same time a want of imagination. They cannot change places with you, or suppose how you can be so much at a loss about what is so obvious to them. It seems putting them to unnecessary trouble to transmit a self-evident truth (which it is upon the spot) a thousand miles (where it becomes a discovery). You have this comfort, however, under the delay of letters, that they have no bad news to send you, or you would hear of it in an instant.

When you are disappointed of your letters at the post-office at Florence, you turn round, and find yourself in the square of the Grand Duke, with the old Palace opposite to you, and a number of colossal statues, bleached in the open air, in front of it. They seem a species of huge stone-masonry. What is your surprise to learn, that they are the Hercules of Bandinello, and the David of Michael Angelo! Not far from these, is the Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini, which he makes such a fuss about in his Life.^[41] It is of bronze. After a great deal of cabal, before he was employed on this work, and great hostility and disagreeable obstacles thrown in his way in the progress of it, he at length finished the mould, and prepared to cast the figure. He found that the copper which he had at first thrown in did not work kindly. After one or two visits to the furnace, he grew impatient, and seizing on all the lead, iron, and brass he could lay his hands on in the house, threw it pell-mell, and in a fit of desperation, into the melting mass, and retired to wait the result. After passing an hour in the greatest 220agitation, he returned; and inspecting the cast, to his extreme joy discovered it to be smooth and perfect, without a flaw in any part, except a dint in the heel. He then sat down to enjoy his triumph over his enemies, and to devour a cold chicken (which he had provided for his supper) with vast composure and relish. It is a pity that a work produced under such auspicious circumstances does not altogether answer the romantic expectations formed of it. There is something petty and forced about it; and it smells of the goldsmith’s and jeweller’s shop. I would rather see the large silver vase, richly embossed by him with groups of flowers and figures, which was ordered by the Pope and placed under his table for the Cardinals and other guests to throw their bones into, instead of throwing them on the floor for the dogs to pick up, as had hitherto been the custom—a fine proof of the mingled barbarism and refinement of those days.^[42] Benvenuto was a character and a genius, and more of a character than of a genius; for, after all, the greatest geniuses are ‘men of no mark or likelihood.’ Their strongest impulses are not personal, but pass out of themselves into the universe; nor do they waste their energies upon their private whims and perverse peculiarities. In Bandinello one does not look for much; he was never much esteemed, and is made a butt of by Benvenuto Cellini. But what shall we say to a commonplace or barbarous piece of work by Michael Angelo? The David is as if a large mass of solid marble fell upon one’s head, to crush one’s faith in great names. It looks like an awkward overgrown actor at one of our minor theatres, without his clothes: the head is too big for the body, and it has a helpless expression of distress. The Bacchus in the Gallery, by the same artist, is no better. It is potbellied, lank, and with a sickly, mawkish aspect. Both these statues were, it is true, done when he was very young; and the latter, when finished, he buried underground, and had it dug up as an antique, and when it was pronounced by the virtuosi of the day to be superior to any thing in modern art, he produced the arm (which he had broken off), and claimed it as his own, to the confusion of his adversaries. Such is the story; and under the safeguard of this tradition, it has passed, criticism-proof. There are two pictures here attributed to this great artist; one in the Gallery, and another in the Palace Pitti, of The Fates, which are three meagre, dry, mean-looking old women. I shall not return to this subject till I get to the Vatican, and then I hope to tell a different story. Nothing more casts one down than to find an utter disproportion between the reality and one’s previous conceptions in a case of this 221kind, when one has been brooding all one’s life over an idea of greatness. If one could sneak off with one’s disappointment in one’s pocket, and say nothing about it, or whisper it to the reeds, or bury it in a hole, or throw it into the river (Arno), where no one would fish it up, it would not signify; but to be obliged to note it in one’s common-place book, and publish it to all the world, ‘tis villainous! It is well one can turn from disagreeable thoughts like these to a landscape of Titian’s (the Holy Family at the Pitti Palace). A green bank in the fore-ground presents a pastoral scene of sheep and cattle reposing; then you have the deep green of the middle distance, then the blue-topped hills, and the golden sky beyond, with the red branches of an autumn wood rising into it; and in the faces of the bending group you see the tints of the evening sky reflected, and the freshness of the landscape breathed on their features. The depth and harmony of colouring in natural objects, refined in passing through the painter’s mind, mellowed by the hand of time, has acquired the softness and shadowy brilliancy of a dream, and while you gaze at it, you seem to be entranced! But to take things somewhat more in order.—

One of the striking things in the Gallery at Florence (given to the City by one of the Medici Family) is the Collection of Antique Busts. The Statues of Gods are the poetry of the art of that period. The busts of men and women handed down to us are the history of the species. You see the busts of Vitellius (whose throat seems bursting with ‘the jowl’ and a dish of lampreys), Galba, Trajan, Augustus, Julia, Faustina, Messalina; and you ask, were there real beings like these existing two thousand years ago? It is an extension of the idea of humanity; and ‘even in death there is animation too.’ History is vague and shadowy, but sculpture gives life and body to it; the names and letters in time-worn books start up real people in marble, and you no longer doubt their identity with the present race. Nature produced forms then as perfect as she does now.—Forsyth and others have endeavoured to invalidate the authenticity of these busts, and to shew that few of them can be traced with certainty to the persons whose names they bear. That with me is not the question. The interesting point is not to know who they were, but that they were. There is no doubt that they are busts of people living two thousand years ago, and that is all that my moral demands. As to individual character, it would be as well sometimes to find it involved in obscurity; for some of the persons are better looking than for the truth of physiognomy they ought to be. Nero is as handsome a gentleman as his eulogists could wish him to be. The truth is, that what pleases me in these busts and others of the 222same kind that I have seen is, that they very much resemble English people of sense and education in the present day, only with more regular features. They are grave, thoughtful, unaffected. There is not a face among them that you could mistake for a French face. These fine old heads, in short, confirm one in the idea of general humanity: French faces stagger one’s faith in the species!

There are two long galleries enriched with busts and statues of the most interesting description, with a series of productions of the early Florentine school, the Flying Mercury of John of Bologna, &c.; and in a room near the centre (called the Tribune) stands the Venus of Medici, with some other statues and pictures not unworthy to do her homage. I do not know what to say of the Venus, nor is it necessary to say much where all the world have already formed an opinion for themselves; yet, perhaps, this opinion, which seems the most universal, is the least so, and the opinion of all the world means that of no one individual in it. The end of criticism, however, is rather to direct attention to objects of taste, than to dictate to it. Besides, one has seen the Venus so often and in so many shapes, that custom has blinded one equally to its merits or defects. Instead of giving an opinion, one is disposed to turn round and ask, ‘What do you think of it?’ It is like a passage in the ‘Elegant Extracts,’ which one has read and admired, till one does not know what to make of it, or how to affix any ideas to the words: beauty and sweetness end in an unmeaning commonplace! If I might, notwithstanding, hazard a hypercriticism, I should say, that it is a little too much like an exquisite marble doll. I should conjecture (for it is only conjecture where familiarity has neutralized the capacity of judging) that there is a want of sentiment, of character, a balance of pretensions as well as of attitude, a good deal of insipidity, and an over-gentility. There is no expression of mental refinement, nor much of voluptuous blandishment. There is great softness, sweetness, symmetry, and timid grace—a faultless tameness, a negative perfection. The Apollo Belvidere is positively bad, a theatrical coxcomb, and ill-made; I mean compared with the Theseus. The great objection to the Venus is, that the form has not the true feminine proportions; it is not sufficiently large in the lower limbs, but tapers too much to a point, so that it wants firmness and a sort of indolent repose (the proper attribute of woman), and seems as if the least thing would overset it. In a word, the Venus is a very beautiful toy, but not the Goddess of Love, or even of Beauty. It is not the statue Pygmalion fell in love with; nor did any man ever wish or fancy his mistress to be like it. There is something beyond it, both in imagination and in nature. Neither have we a firm faith in the 223identity of the Goddess; it is a nice point, whether any such form ever existed. Now let us say what we will of the ideal, it ought, when embodied to the senses, to bear the stamp of the most absolute reality, for it is only an image taken from nature, with every thing omitted that might contradict or disturb its uniformity. The Venus is not a poetical and abstract personification of certain qualities; but an individual model, that has been altered and tampered with. It would have had a better effect if executed in ivory, with gold sandals and bracelets, like that of Phidias (mentioned by Pliny), to define its pretensions as belonging to the class of ornamental art; for it neither carries the mind into the regions of ancient mythology, nor of ancient poetry, nor rises to an equality of style with modern poetry or painting. Raphael has figures of far greater grace, both mental and bodily. The Apollo of Medicis, which is in the same room, is a very delightful specimen of Grecian art; but it has the fault of being of that equivocal size (I believe called small-life) which looks like diminutive nature, not nature diminished.

Raphael’s Fornarina (which is also in this highly-embellished cabinet of art) faces the Venus, and is a downright, point-blank contrast to it. Assuredly no charge can be brought against it of mimmini-piminee affectation or shrinking delicacy. It is robust, full to bursting, coarse, luxurious, hardened, but wrought up to an infinite degree of exactness and beauty in the details. It is the perfection of vulgarity and refinement together. The Fornarina is a bouncing, buxom, sullen, saucy baker’s daughter—but painted, idolized, immortalized by Raphael! Nothing can be more homely and repulsive than the original; you see her bosom swelling like the dough rising in the oven; the tightness of her skin puts you in mind of Trim’s story of the sausage-maker’s wife—nothing can be much more enchanting than the picture—than the care and delight with which the artist has seized the lurking glances of the eye, curved the corners of the mouth, smoothed the forehead, dimpled the chin, rounded the neck, till by innumerable delicate touches, and the ‘labour of love,’ he has converted a coarse, rude mass into a miracle of art. Raphael, in the height of his devotion, and as it were to insinuate that nothing could be too fine for this idol of his fancy (as Rousseau prided himself in writing the letters of Julia on the finest paper with gilt edges) has painted the chain on the Fornarina’s neck with actual gold-leaf. Titian would never have thought of such a thing; he could not have been guilty of such a solecism in painting, as to introduce a solid substance without shadow. Highly as Raphael has laboured this portrait, it still shows his inferiority to Titian in the imitative part of painting. The colour on the cheeks 224of the Fornarina seems laid on the skin; in the girl by Titian at the Pitti Palace, it is seen through it. The one appears tanned by the sun; the other to have been out in the air, or is like a flower ‘just washed in the dew.’ Again, the surface of the flesh in Raphael is so smooth, that you are tempted to touch it: in Titian, it retires from the touch into a shadowy recess. There is here a duplicate (varied) of his Mistress at her Toilette (to be seen in the Louvre), dressed in a loose night-robe, and with the bosom nearly bare. It is very carefully finished, and is a rich study of colouring, expression, and natural grace. Of the Titian Venus (with her gouvernante and chest of clothes in the background) I cannot say much. It is very like the common print. The Endymion by Guercino has a divine character of pensive softness, and youthful, manly grace, and the impression made by the picture answers to that made by the fable—an excellent thing in history! It is one of the finest pictures in Florence. I should never have done if I were to go into the details. I can only mention a few of the principal. Near the Fornarina is the Young St. John in the Wilderness, by Raphael; it is very dark, very hard, and very fine, like an admirable carving in wood. He has here also two Holy Families, full of playful sweetness and mild repose. There are also two by Correggio of the same subject, and a fine and bold study of the Head of a Boy. There is a spirit of joy and laughing grace contained in this head, as the juice of wine is in the grape. Correggio had a prodigious raciness and gusto, when he did not fritter them away by false refinement and a sort of fastidious hypercriticism upon himself. His sketches, I suspect, are better than his finished works. One of the Holy Families here is the very acme of the affettuoso and Della Cruscan style of painting. The figure of the Madonna is like a studiously-involved period or turn upon words: the infant Christ on the ground is a diminutive appellation, a prettiness, a fairy-fancy. Certainly, it bears no proportion to the Mother, whose hands are bent back over it with admiration and delight, till grace becomes a cramp, and her eye-lids droop and quiver over the fluttering object of her ‘strange child-worship,’ almost as if they were moved by metallic tractors. The other Madonna is perfectly free from any taint of affectation. It is a plain rustic beauty, innocent, interesting, simple, without one contortion of body or of mind. It is sweetly painted. The Child is also a pure study after nature: the blood is tingling in his veins, and his face has an admirable expression of careless infantine impatience. The old Man at the side is a master-piece, with all this painter’s knowledge of foreshortening, chiaro-scuro, the management of drapery, &c. Herodias’s Daughter, by Luini, is an elaborate and successful imitation of 225Leonardo da Vinci. The Medusa’s Head of the latter is hardly, I think, so fine as Barry’s description of it. It has not quite the watery languor—the dim obscurity. The eyes of the female are too much like the eyes of the snakes, red, crusted, and edgy. I shall only notice one picture more in this collection—the Last Judgment, by Bronzino. It has vast merit in the drawing and expression, but its most remarkable quality is the amazing relief without any perceivable shadow, and the utmost clearness with the smallest possible variety of tint. It looks like a Mosaic painting. The specimens of the Dutch and other foreign schools here are upon a small scale, and of inferior value.

The Palace Pitti was begun by one of the Strozzi, who boasted that he would build a palace with a court-yard in it, in which another palace might dance. He had nearly ruined himself by the expense, when one of the Medici took it off his hands and completed it. It is at present the residence of the Grand Duke. The view within over the court-yard to the terrace and mount above is superb. Here is the Venus of Canova, an elegant sylph-like figure; but Canova was more to be admired for delicacy of finishing, than for expression or conception of general form. At the Gallery there is one room full of extraordinary pictures and statues: at the Palace Pitti there are six or seven covered with some of the finest portraits and history-pieces in the world, and the walls are dark with beauty, and breathe an air of the highest art from them. It is one of the richest and most original Collections I have seen. It is not so remarkable for variety of style or subject as for a noble opulence and aristocratic pride, having to boast names in the highest ranks of art, and many of their best works. The Palace Pitti formerly figured in the Catalogue of the Louvre, which it had contributed to enrich with many of its most gorgeous jewels, which have been brought back to their original situation, and which now shine here, though not with unreflected lustre, nor in solitary state. Among these, for instance, is Titian’s Hippolito di Medici (which the late Mr. Opie pronounced the finest portrait in the world), with the spirit and breadth of history, and with the richness, finish, and glossiness of an enamel picture. I remember the first time I ever saw it, it stood on an easel which I had to pass, with the back to me, and as I turned and saw it with the boar-spear in its hand, and its keen glance bent upon me, it seemed ‘a thing of life,’ with supernatural force and grandeur. The famous music-piece by Giorgioni was at one time in the Louvre, and is not a whit inferior to Titian. The head turned round of the man playing on the harpsichord, for air, expression, and a true gusto of colouring, may challenge competition all the world through. There goes a 226tradition that these are the portraits of Luther and Calvin. Giorgioni died at the age of thirty-four, heart-broken, it is said, because one of his scholars had robbed him of his mistress—possibly the very beauty whose picture is introduced here. Leo X., by Raphael, that fine, stern, globular head, on which ‘deliberation sits and public care,’ is in the same room with the Cardinal Bentivoglio, one of Vandyke’s happiest and most spiritual heads—a fine group of portraits by Rubens, of himself, his brother, Grotius and Justus Lipsius, all in one frame—an admirable Holy Family, in this master’s very best manner, by Julio Romano—and the Madonna della Seggia of Raphael—all of these were formerly in the Louvre. The last is painted on wood, and worn, so as to have a crayon look. But for the grouping, the unconscious look of intelligence in the children, and the rounding and fleshiness of the forms of their limbs, this is one of the artist’s most unrivalled works. There are also several by Andrea del Sarto, conceived and finished with the highest taste and truth of feeling; a Nymph and Satyr by Giorgioni, of great gusto; Hercules and Antæus, by Schiavoni (an admirable study of bold drawing and poetical colouring), an unfinished sketch by Guido, several by Cigoli and Fra. Bartolomeo; a girl in a flowered dress, by Titian (of which Mr. Northcote possesses a beautiful copy by Sir Joshua); another portrait of a Man in front view and a Holy Family, by the same; and one or two fine pieces by Rubens and Rembrandt. There is a Parmegiano here, in which is to be seen the origin of Mr. Fuseli’s style, a child in its mother’s lap, with its head rolling away from its body, the mother’s face looking down upon it with green and red cheeks tapering to a point, and a thigh of an angel, which you cannot well piece to an urn which he carries in his hand, and which seems like a huge scale of the ‘shard-borne beetle.’—The grotesque and discontinuous are, in fact, carried to their height. Here is also the Conspiracy of Catiline, by Salvator Rosa, which looks more like a Cato-street Conspiracy than any thing else, or a bargain struck in a blacksmith’s shop; and a Battle-piece by the same artist, with the round haunches and flowing tail of a white horse repeated, and some fierce faces, hid by the smoke and their helmets, of which you can make neither head nor tail. Salvator was a great landscape-painter; but both he and Lady Morgan have been guilty of a great piece of egotism in supposing that he was any thing more. These are the chief failures, but in general out of heaps of pictures there is scarce one that is not of the highest interest both in itself, and from collateral circumstances. Those who come in search of high Italian art will here find it in perfection; and if they do not feel this, they may turn back at once. The pictures in the Pitti 227Palace are finely preserved, and have that deep, mellow tone of age upon them which is to the eyes of a connoisseur in painting as the rust of medals or the crust on wine is to connoisseurs and judges of a different stamp.

The road between Florence and Rome by Sienna is not very interesting, though it presents a number of reflections to those who are well acquainted with the changes that have taken place in the history and agriculture of these districts. Shortly after you leave Florence, the way becomes dreary and barren or unhealthy. Towards the close of the first day’s journey, however, we had a splendid view of the country we were to travel, which lay stretched out beneath our feet to an immense distance, as we descended into the little town of Pozzo Borgo. Deep valleys sloped on each side of us, from which the smoke of cottages occasionally curled: the branches of an overhanging birch-tree or a neighbouring ruin gave relief to the grey, misty landscape, which was streaked by dark pine-forests, and speckled by the passing clouds; and in the extreme distance rose a range of hills glittering in the evening sun, and scarcely distinguishable from the ridge of clouds that hovered near them. We did not reach these hills (on the top of one of which stands the fort of Radicofani) till the end of two days’ journey, making a distance of between fifty and sixty miles, so that their miniature size and fairy splendour, as they crowned the far-off horizon, may be easily guessed. We did not find the accommodation on the road quite so bad as we had expected. The chief want is of milk, which is to be had only in the morning; but we remedied this defect by a taking a bottle of it with us. The weather was cold enough (in the middle of March) to freeze it. The economy of life is here reduced to a very great simplicity, absolute necessaries from day to day and from hand to mouth; and nothing is allowed for the chapter of accidents, or the irregular intrusion of strangers. The mechanism of English inns is accounted for by the certainty of the arrival of customers, with full pockets and empty stomachs. There every road is a thoroughfare; here a traveller is a curiosity, and we did not meet ten carriages on our journey, a distance of a hundred and ninety-three miles, and which it took us six days to accomplish. I may add that we paid only seven louis for our two places in the Voiture (which, besides, we had entirely to ourselves) our expences on the road included. This is cheap enough.

228Sienna is a fine old town, but more like a receptacle of the dead than the residence of the living. ‘It was,’ might be written over the entrance to this, as to most of the towns in Italy. The magnificence of the buildings corresponds but ill with the squalidness of the inhabitants; there seems no reason for crowding the streets so close together when there are so few people in them. There is at present no enemy without to huddle them together within the walls, whatever might have been the case in former times: for miles you do not meet a human being, or discern the traces of a human dwelling. The view through the noble arch of the gate as you leave Sienna is at once exquisitely romantic and picturesque: otherwise, the country presents a most deplorable aspect for a length of way. Nature seems to have here taken it upon her to play the part of a cinder-wench, and to have thrown up her incessant heaps of clay and ashes, without either dignity or grace. At a distance to the right and left, you see the stately remains of the ancient Etruscan cities, cresting the heights and built for defence; and here and there, perched on the top of a cliff, the ruinous haunt of some bandit chief (the scourge of later days), that might be compared in imagination to some dragon, old and blind, still watching for its long-lost prey, and sharing the desolation it has made. There are two of these near the wretched inn of La Scala, where we stopped the third morning, rising in lonely horror from the very point of two hills, facing each other and only divided by a brook, that baffle description, and require the artist’s boldest pencil. Aided by the surrounding gloom, and shrouded by the driving mist (as they were when we passed), they throw the mind back into a trance of former times, and the cry of midnight revelry, of midnight murder is heard from the crumbling walls. The romantic bridge and hamlet under them begins the ascent of Radicofani. The extensive ruin at the top meets your view and disappears repeatedly during the long, winding, toilsome ascent. Over a tremendous valley to the left, we saw the distant hills of Perugia, covered with snow and blackened with clouds, and a heavy sleet was falling around us. We started, on being told that the post-house stood directly on the other side of the fort (at a height of 2400 feet above the level of the sea), and that we were to pass the night there. It was like being lodged in a cloud: it seemed the very rocking-cradle of storms and tempests. As we wound round the road at the foot of it, we were relieved from our apprehensions. It was a fortress built by stubborn violence for itself, that might be said to scowl defiance on the world below, and to promise security and shelter to those within its reach. Huge heaps of round stones, gnarled like iron, and that looked as if they would break the feet 229that trusted themselves among them, were rolled into the space between the heights and the road-side. The middle or principal turret, which rose between the other two, was thrown into momentary perspective by the mist; a fragment of an outer wall stood beneath, half covered with ivy; close to it was an old chapel-spire built of red brick, and a small hamlet crouched beneath the ramparts. It reminded me, by its preternatural strength and sullen aspect, of the castle of Giant Despair in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The dark and stern spirit of former times might be conceived to have entrenched itself here as in its last hold; to have looked out and laughed at precipices and storms, and the puny assaults of hostile bands, and resting on its red right arm, to have wasted away through inaction and disuse in its unapproachable solitude and barbarous desolation. Never did I see any thing so rugged and so stately, apparently so formidable in a former period, so forlorn in this. It was a majestic shadow of the mighty past, suspended in another region, belonging to another age. I might take leave of it in the words of old Burnet, whose Latin glows among these cold hills, Vale augusta sedes, digna rege; vale augusta rupes, semper mihi memoranda!—We drove into the inn-yard, which resembled a barrack (so do most of the inns on the road), with its bed-rooms like hospital-wards, and its large apartments for assemblages of armed men, now empty, gloomy, and unfurnished; but where we found a hospitable welcome, and by the aid of a double fee to the waiters every thing very comfortable. The first object was to procure milk for our tea (of which last article we had brought some very good from the shop of Signor Pippini, at Florence^[43]) and the next thing was to lay in a stock for the remaining half of our journey. We were not sorry to pass a night at the height of 2400 feet above the level of the sea, and immediately under this famous fortress. The winds ‘howled through the vacant guard-rooms and deserted lobbies’ of our hostelry, and the snow descended in a heavy fall, and covered the valleys; but Radicofani looked the same, as we saw it through the coach-windows the next morning, old, grey, deserted, gloomy, as if it had survived ‘a thousand storms, a thousand winters’—the peasant still crawled along its trenches, the traveller stopped to gaze at its battlements—but neither spear nor battle-axe would glitter there again, nor banner be spread, nor the clash of arms be heard in the round of ever-rolling years—it looked back to other times as we looked back upon it, and stood towering in its decay, and nodding to an eternal repose! The road in this, as in other parts of Italy, is evidently calculated, and was 230originally constructed, for the march of an army. Instead of creeping along the valleys, it passes along the ridges of hills to prevent surprise, or watch the movements of an enemy, and thus generally commands an extensive view of the country, such as it is. It was long before winding slowly into the valley, we lost sight of our last night’s station.

Aquapendente is situated on the brow of a hill, over a running stream, as its name indicates, and the ascent to it is up the side of a steep rugged ravine, with overhanging rocks and shrubs. The mixture of wildness and luxuriance answered to my idea of Italian scenery, but I had seen little of it hitherto. The town is old, dirty, and disagreeable; and we were driven to an inn in one of the bye-streets, where there was but one sitting-room, which was occupied by an English family, who were going to leave it immediately, but who, I suppose, on hearing that some one else was waiting for it, claimed the right of keeping it as long as they pleased. The assertion of an abstract right is the idea uppermost in the minds of all English people. Unfortunately, when its attainment is worth any thing, their spirit of contradiction makes them ready to relinquish it; or when it costs them any thing, their spirit of self-interest deters them from the pursuit! After waiting some time, we at last breakfasted in a sort of kitchen or outhouse upstairs, where we had very excellent but homely fare, and where we were amused with the furniture—a dove-house, a kid, half-skinned, hanging on the walls; a loose heap of macaroni and vegetables in one corner, plenty of smoke, a Madonna carved and painted, and a map of Constantinople. The pigeons on the floor were busy with their murmuring plaints, and often fluttered their wings as if to fly. So, thought I, the nations of the earth clap their wings, and strive in vain to be free! The landlady was a woman about forty, diminutive and sickly, but with one of those pale, mild, penetrating faces which one seldom sees out of Italy. She was the mother of two buxom daughters, as coarse and hard as any thing of the kind one might meet with in Herefordshire or Gloucestershire! The road from Aquapendente is of a deep heavy soil, over which the horses with difficulty dragged the carriage, The view on one side was bounded by two fine conical hills clothed to the very top with thick woods of beech and fir; and our route lay for miles over an undulating ground covered with the wild broom (growing to the size of a large shrub), among which herds of slate-coloured oxen were seen browzing luxuriously. The broom floated above them, their covering and their food, with its flexible silken branches of light green, and presented an eastern scene, extensive, soft and wild. We passed, I think, but one habitation between Aquapendente and San Lorenzo, and met but one human being, which was a Gen d’Armes! I asked 231our Vetturino if this dreary aspect of the country was the effect of nature or of art. He pulled a handful of earth from the hedge-side, and shewed a rich black loam, capable of every improvement. I asked in whose dominions we were, and received for answer, ‘In the Pope’s.’ San Lorenzo is a town built on the summit of a hill, in consequence of the ravages of the malaria in the old town, situated in the valley below. It looks like a large alms-house, or else like a town that has run away from the plague and itself, and stops suddenly on the brow of a hill to see if the Devil is following it. The ruins below are the most ghastly I ever saw. The scattered fragments of walls and houses are crumbling away like rotten bones, and there are holes in the walls and subterraneous passages, in which disease, like an ugly witch, seems to lurk and to forbid your entrance. Further on, and winding round the edge of the lake, you come to Bolsena. The unwholesome nature of the air from the water may be judged of from the colour of the tops of the houses, the moss on which is as yellow as the jaundice, and the grass and corn-fields on its borders are of a tawny green. The road between this and Monte-Fiascone, which you see on an eminence before you, lies through a range of gloomy defiles, and is deformed by the blackened corses of huge oak-trees, that strew the road-side, the unsightly relics of fine old woods that were cut down and half-burnt a few years ago as the haunts of bands of robbers. They plant morals in this country by rooting up trees! While the country is worth seeing, it is not safe to travel; but picturesque beauty must, of course, give place to the police. I thought, when I first saw these cadaverous trunks lying by the side of the lake, that they were the useless remains of cargoes of timber that we had purchased of the Holy See to fight its battles, and maintain the cause of social order in every part of the world! Let no English traveller stop at Monte-Fiascone (I mean at the inn outside the town), unless he would be starved and smoke-dried, but pass on to Viterbo, which is a handsome town, with the best inn on the road. You pass one night more on the road in this mode of travelling (which resembles walking a minuet, rather than striking up a country dance) at Ronciglione; and the next day from Baccano, you see rising up, in a flat, hazy plain, the dome of St. Peter’s. You proceed for some miles along a gradual descent without any object of much interest, pass the Tiber and the gate Del Popolo, and you are in Rome. When there, go any where but to Franks’s Hotel, and get a lodging, if possible, on the Via Gregoriana, which overlooks the town, and where you can feast the eye and indulge in sentiment, without being poisoned by bad air. The house of Salvator Rosa is at present let out in lodgings. I have now lived twice in houses occupied by celebrated men, once in 232a house that had belonged to Milton, and now in this, and find to my mortification that imagination, is entirely a thing imaginary, and has nothing to do with matter of fact, history, or the senses. To see an object of thought or fancy is just as impossible as to feel a sound or hear a smell.

‘As London is to the meanest country town, so is Rome to every other city in the world.’

So said an old friend of mine, and I believed him till I saw it. This is not the Rome I expected to see. No one from being in it would know he was in the place that had been twice mistress of the world. I do not understand how Nicolas Poussin could tell, taking up a handful of earth, that it was ‘a part of the Eternal City.’ In Oxford an air of learning breathes from the very walls: halls and colleges meet your eye in every direction; you cannot for a moment forget where you are. In London there is a look of wealth and populousness which is to be found nowhere else. In Rome you are for the most part lost in a mass of tawdry, fulsome common-places. It is not the contrast of pig-styes and palaces that I complain of, the distinction between the old and new; what I object to is the want of any such striking contrast, but an almost uninterrupted succession of narrow, vulgar-looking streets, where the smell of garlick prevails over the odour of antiquity, with the dingy, melancholy flat fronts of modern-built houses, that seem in search of an owner. A dunghill, an outhouse, the weeds growing under an imperial arch offend me not; but what has a green-grocer’s stall, a stupid English china warehouse, a putrid trattoria, a barber’s sign, an old clothes or old picture shop or a Gothic palace, with two or three lacqueys in modern liveries lounging at the gate, to do with ancient Rome? No! this is not the wall that Romulus leaped over: this is not the Capitol where Julius Cæsar fell: instead of standing on seven hills, it is situated in a low valley: the golden Tiber is a muddy stream: St. Peter’s is not equal to St. Paul’s: the Vatican falls short of the Louvre, as it was in my time; but I thought that here were works immoveable, immortal, inimitable on earth, and lifting the soul half way to heaven. I find them not, or only what I had seen before in different ways: the Stanzas of Raphael are faded, or no better than the prints; and the mind of Michael Angelo’s figures, of which no traces are to be found in the copies, is equally absent from the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Rome is great only in ruins: the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Arch of 233Constantine fully answered my expectations; and an air breathes round her stately avenues, serene, blissful, like the mingled breath of spring and winter, betwixt life and death, betwixt hope and despair. The country about Rome is cheerless and barren. There is little verdure, nor are any trees planted, on account of their bad effects on the air. Happy climate! in which shade and sunshine are alike fatal. The Jews (I may add while I think of it) are shut up here in a quarter by themselves. I see no reason for it. It is a distinction not worth the making. There was a talk (it being Anno Santo) of shutting them up for the whole of the present year. A soldier stands at the gate, to tell you that this is the Jews’ quarter, and to take any thing you choose to give him for this piece of Christian information. A Catholic church stands outside their prison, with a Crucifixion painted on it as a frontispiece, where they are obliged to hear a sermon in behalf of the truth of the Christian religion every Good Friday. On the same day they used to make them run races in the Corso, for the amusement of the rabble (high and low)—now they are compelled to provide horses for the same purpose. Owing to the politeness of the age, they no longer burn them as of yore, and that is something. Religious zeal, like all other things, grows old and feeble. They treat the Jews in this manner at Rome (as a local courtesy to St. Peter), and yet they compliment us on our increasing liberality to the Irish Catholics. The Protestant chapel here stands outside the walls, while there is a British monument to the memory of the Stuarts, inside of St. Peter’s; the tombs in the English burying-ground were destroyed and defaced not long ago; yet this did not prevent the Prince Regent from exchanging portraits with the Pope and his Ministers!—‘Oh! liberalism—lovely liberalism!’ as Mr. Blackwood would say.

From the window of the house where I lodge, I have a view of the whole city at once: nay, I can see St. Peter’s as I lie in bed of a morning. The town is an immense mass of solid stone-buildings, streets, palaces, and churches; but it has not the beauty of the environs of Florence, nor the splendid background of Turin, nor does it present any highly picturesque or commanding points of view like Edinburgh. The pleasantest walks I know are round the Via Sistina, and along the Via di Quattro-Fontane—they overlook Rome from the North-East on to the churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, and of St. John Lateran, towards the gate leading to Naples. As we loiter on, our attention was caught by an open greensward to the left, with foot-paths, and a ruined wall and gardens on each side. A carriage stood in the road just by, and a gentleman and lady, with a little child, had got out of it to walk. A soldier and a girl were seen talking together further on, and a herd of cattle were feeding at 234their leisure on the yielding turf. The day was close and dry—not a breath stirred. All was calm and silent. It had been cold when we set out, but here the air was soft—of an Elysian temperature, as if the winds did not dare to visit the sanctuaries of the dead too roughly. The daisy sprung beneath our feet—the fruit-trees blossomed within the nodding arches. On one side were seen the hills of Albano, on the other the Claudian gate; and close by was Nero’s Golden House, where there were seventy thousand statues and pillars, of marble and of silver, and where senates kneeled, and myriads shouted in honour of a frail mortal, as of a God. Come here, oh man! and worship thine own spirit, that can hoard up, as in a shrine, the treasures of two thousand years, and can create out of the memory of fallen splendours and departed grandeur a solitude deeper than that of desert wildernesses, and pour from the out-goings of thine own thoughts a thunder louder than that of maddening multitudes! No place was ever so still as this; for none was ever the scene of such pomp and triumph! Not far from this are the Baths of Titus; the grass and the poppy (the flower of oblivion) grow over them, and in the vaults below they shew you (by the help of a torch) paintings on the ceiling eighteen hundred years old, birds, and animals, a figure of a slave, a nymph and a huntsman, fresh and elegantly foreshortened, and also the place where the Laocoon was discovered. A few paces off is the Coliseum, or Amphitheatre of Titus, the noblest ruin in Rome. It is circular, built of red stone and brick, with arched windows, and the gillyflower and fennel growing on its walls to the very top: one side is nearly perfect. As you pass under it, it seems to raise itself above you, and mingle with the sky in its majestic simplicity, as if earth were a thing too gross for it; it stands almost unconscious of decay, and may still stand for ages—though Mr. Hobhouse has written Annotations upon it! There is a hypocritical inscription on it, to say that it has been kept in repair by the Popes, in order to preserve the memory of the martyrs that suffered here in cruel combats with wild beasts. As I have alluded to this subject, I will add that I think the finest stanza in Lord Byron is that where he describes the Dying Gladiator, who falls and does not hear the shout of barbarous triumph echoing from these very walls:—

235The temple of Vesta is on the Tiber. It is not unlike an hour-glass—or a toad-stool; it is small, but exceedingly beautiful, and has a look of great antiquity. The Pantheon is also as fine as possible. It has the most perfect unity of effect. It was hardly a proper receptacle for the Gods of the Heathens, for it has a simplicity and grandeur like the vaulted cope of Heaven. Compared with these admired remains of former times I must say that the more modern churches and palaces in Rome are poor, flashy, upstart looking things. Even the dome of St. Peter’s is for the most part hid by the front, and the Vatican has no business by its side. The sculptures there are also indifferent, and the mosaics, except two—the Transfiguration and St. Jerome, ill chosen. I was lucky enough to see the Pope here on Easter Sunday. He seems a harmless, infirm, fretful old man. I confess I should feel little ambition to be at the head of a procession, at which the ignorant stare, the better informed smile. I was also lucky enough to see St. Peter’s illuminated to the very top (a project of Michael Angelo’s) in the evening. It was finest at first, as the kindled lights blended with the fading twilight. It seemed doubtful whether it were an artificial illumination, the work of carpenters and torch-bearers, or the reflection of an invisible sun. One half of the cross shone with the richest gold, and rows of lamps gave light as from a sky. At length a shower of fairy lights burst out at a signal in all directions, and covered the whole building. It looked better at a distance than when we went nearer it. It continued blazing all night. What an effect it must have upon the country round! Now and then a life or so is lost in lighting up the huge fabric, but what is this to the glory of the church and the salvation of souls, to which it no doubt tends? I can easily conceive some of the wild groups that I saw in the streets the following day to have been led by delight and wonder from their mountain-haunts, or even from the bandits’ cave, to worship at this new starry glory, rising from the earth. The whole of the immense space before St. Peter’s was in the afternoon crowded with people to see the Pope give his benediction. The rich dresses of the country people, the strong features and orderly behaviour of all, gave this assemblage a decided superiority over any thing of the kind I had seen in England. I did not hear the Miserere which is chaunted by the Priests, and sung by a single voice (I understand like an angel’s) in a dim religious light in the Sistine Chapel; nor did I see the exhibition of the relics, at which I was told all the beauty of Rome was present. It is something even to miss such things. After all, St. Peter’s does not seem to me the chief boast or most imposing display of the Catholic religion. Old Melrose Abbey, battered to pieces and in ruins, as 236it is, impresses me much more than the collective pride and pomp of Michael Angelo’s great work. Popery is here at home, and may strut and swell and deck itself out as it pleases, on the spot and for the occasion. It is the pageant of an hour. But to stretch out its arm fifteen hundred miles, to create a voice in the wilderness, to have left its monuments standing by the Teviot-side, or to send the midnight hymn through the shades of Vallombrosa, or to make it echo among Alpine solitudes, that is faith, and that is power. The rest is a puppet-shew! I am no admirer of Pontificals, but I am a slave to the picturesque. The Priests talking together in St. Peter’s, or the common people kneeling at the altars, make groups that shame all art. The inhabitants of the city have something French about them—something of the cook’s and the milliner’s shop—something pert, gross, and cunning; but the Roman peasants redeem the credit of their golden sky. The young women that come here from Gensano and Albano, and that are known by their scarlet boddices and white head-dresses and handsome good-humoured faces, are the finest specimens I have ever seen of human nature. They are like creatures that have breathed the air of Heaven, till the sun has ripened them into perfect beauty, health, and goodness. They are universally admired in Rome. The English women that you see, though pretty, are pieces of dough to them. Little troops and whole families, men, women, and children, from the Campagna and neighbouring districts of Rome, throng the streets during Easter and Lent, who come to visit the shrine of some favourite Saint, repeating their Aves aloud, and telling their beads with all the earnestness imaginable. Popery is no farce to them. They surely think St. Peter’s is the way to Heaven. You even see priests counting their beads, and looking grave. If they can contrive to get possession of this world for themselves, and give the laity the reversion of the next, were it only in imagination, something is to be said for the exchange. I only hate half-way houses in religion or politics, that take from us all the benefits of ignorance and superstition, and give us none of the advantages of liberty or philosophy in return. Thus I hate Princes who usurp the thrones of others, and would almost give them back, sooner than allow the rights of the people. Once more, how does that monument to the Stuarts happen to be stuck up in the side-aisle of St. Peter’s? I would ask the person who placed it there, how many Georges there have been since James III.? His ancestor makes but an ambiguous figure beside the posthumous group—

237The only thing unpleasant in the motley assemblage of persons at Rome, is the number of pilgrims with their greasy oil-skin cloaks. They are a dirty, disgusting set, with a look of sturdy hypocrisy about them. The Pope (pro formâ) washes their feet; the Nuns, when they come, have even a less delicate office to perform. Religion, in the depth of its humility, ought not to forget decorum. But I am a traveller, and not a reformer.

The picture-galleries in Rome disappointed me quite. I was told there were a dozen at least, equal to the Louvre; there is not one. I shall not dwell long upon them, for they gave me little pleasure. At the Ruspigliosi Palace (near the Monte Cavallo, where are the famous Colossal groups, said to be by Phidias and Praxiteles, of one of which we have a cast in Hyde Park) are the Aurora and the Andromeda, by Guido. The first is a most splendid composition (like the Daughter of the Dawn) but painted in fresco; and the artist has, in my mind, failed through want of practice in the grace and colouring of most of the figures. They are a clumsy, gloomy-looking set, and not like Guido’s females. The Andromeda has all the charm and sweetness of his pencil, in its pearly tones, its graceful timid action, and its lovely expression of gentleness and terror. The face, every part of the figure, has a beauty and softness not to be described. This one figure is worth all the other group, and the Apollo, the horses and the azure sea to boot. People talk of the insipidity of Guido. Oh! let me drink long, repeated, relishing draughts of such insipidity! If delicacy, beauty, and grace are insipidity, I too profess myself an idolizer of insipidity: I will venture one assertion, which is, that no other painter has expressed the female character so well, so truly, so entirely in its fragile, lovely essence, neither Raphael, nor Titian, nor Correggio; and, after these, it is needless to mention any more. Raphael’s women are Saints; Titian’s are courtesans; Correggio’s an affected mixture of both; Guido’s are the true heroines of romance, the brides of the fancy, such as ‘youthful poets dream of when they love,’ or as a Clarissa, a Julia de Roubigne, or a Miss Milner would turn out to be! They are not only angels, but young ladies into the bargain, which is more than can be said for any of the others, and yet it is something to say. Vandyke sometimes gave this effect in portrait, but his historical figures are fanciful and sprawling. Under the Andromeda is a portrait by Nicholas Poussin of himself (a duplicate of that in the Louvre), and an infant Cupid or Bacchus, by the same artist, finely coloured, and executed in the manner of Titian. There is in another room an unmeaning picture, by Annibal Caracci, of Samson pulling down the temple of the Philistines, and also a fine 238dead Christ by him; add to these a Diana and Endymion by Guercino, in which the real sentiment of the story is thrown into the landscape and figures. The Ruspigliosi Pavilion, containing these and some inferior pictures, is situated near the remains of Constantine’s Bath in a small raised garden or terrace, in which the early violets and hyacinths blossom amidst broken cisterns and defaced statues. It is a pretty picture; art decays, but nature still survives through all changes. At the Doria Palace, there is nothing remarkable but the two Claudes, and these are much injured in colour. The trees are black, and the water looks like lead. There are several Garofolos, which are held in esteem here (not unjustly) and one fine head by Titian. The Velasquez (Innocent X.), so much esteemed by Sir Joshua, is a spirited sketch. The Borghese Palace has three fine pictures, and only three—the Diana and Actæon of Domenichino; the Taking down from the Cross, by Raphael; and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. This last picture has a peculiar and inexpressible charm about it. It is something between portrait and allegory, a mixture of history and landscape, simple and yet quaint, fantastical yet without meaning to be so, but as if a sudden thought had struck the painter, and he could not help attempting to execute it out of curiosity, and finishing it from the delight it gave him. It is full of sweetness and solemnity. The Diana of Domenichino is just the reverse of it. Every thing here is arranged methodically, and is the effect of study and forethought. Domenichino was a painter of sense, feeling, and taste; but his pencil was meagre, and his imagination dispirited and impoverished. In Titian, the execution surpassed the design, and the force of his hand and eye, as he went on, enriched the most indifferent outline: in Domenichino, the filling up fell short of the conception and of his own wishes. He was a man of great modesty and merit; and when others expressed an admiration of his talents, they were obliged to reckon up a number of his chef-d’œuvres to convince him that they were in earnest. He could hardly believe that any one else thought much of his works, when he thought so little of them himself. Raphael’s Taking down from the Cross is in his early manner, and the outlines of the limbs are like the edges of plates of tin; but it has what was inseparable from his productions, first and last, pregnant expression and careful drawing. I ought to mention that there is, by the same master-hand, a splendid portrait of Cæsar Borgia, which is an addition to my list. The complexion is a strange mixture of orange and purple. The hair of his sister, Lucretia Borgia (the friend and mistress of Cardinal Bembo) is still preserved in Italy, and a lock of it was in the possession of Lord Byron. I lately saw it in company with that of Milton 239and of Bonaparte, looking calm, golden, beautiful, a smiling trophy from the grave! The number and progressive improvement of Raphael’s works in Italy is striking. It might teach our holiday artists that to do well is to do much. Excellence springs up behind us, not before us; and is the result of what we have done, not of what we intend to do. Many artists (especially those abroad, who are distracted with a variety of styles and models) never advance beyond the contemplation of some great work, and think to lay in an unexampled store of accomplishments, before they commence any undertaking. That is where they ought to end; to begin with it is too much. It is as if the foundation-stone should form the cupola of St. Peter’s. Great works are the result of much labour and of many failures, and not of pompous pretensions and fastidious delicacy.

The Corsini pictures are another large and very indifferent collection. All I can recollect worth mentioning are, a very sweet and silvery-toned Herodias, by Guido; a fine landscape, by Gaspar Poussin; an excellent sketch from Ariosto of the Giant Orgagna; and the Plague of Milan by a modern artist, a work of great invention and judgment, and in which the details of the subject are so managed as to affect, and not to shock. The Campidoglio collection is better. There is a large and admirable Guercino, an airy and richly-coloured Guido, some capital little Garofolos, a beautiful copy of a Repose of Titian’s by Pietro da Cortona, several Giorgiones, and a number of antique busts of the most interesting description. Here is the bronze She-Wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, and the Geese that cackled in the Capitol. I find nothing so delightful as these old Roman heads of Senators, Warriors, Philosophers. They have all the freshness of truth and nature. They shew something substantial in mortality. They are the only things that do not crush and overturn our sense of personal identity; and are a fine relief to the mouldering relics of antiquity, and to the momentary littleness of modern things! The little Farnese contains the Galatea and the Cupid and Psyche. If any thing could have raised my idea of Raphael higher, it would have been some of these frescoes. I would mention the group of the Graces in particular; they are true Goddesses. The fine flowing outline of the limbs, the variety of attitudes, the unconscious grace, the charming unaffected glow of the expression, are inimitable. Raphael never perhaps escaped so completely from the trammels of his first manner, as in this noble series of designs. The Galatea has been injured in colour by the stoves which the Germans, who were quartered there, lighted in the apartment. In the same room is the famous chalk head, said to have been sketched upon the wall by Michael Angelo. The story is 240probably a fabrication; the head is as coarse and mechanical as any thing can be. Raphael’s Loggia in the corridors of the Vatican (the subjects of what is called his Bible) appear to me divine in form, relief, conception—above all, the figure of Eve at the forbidden tree; his Stanzas there appear to me divine, more particularly the Heliodorus, the School of Athens, and the Miracle of Bolseno, with all the truth and force of character of Titian’s portraits (I see nothing, however, of his colouring) and his own purity, sweetness, and lofty invention, added to them. His oil pictures there are divine. The Transfiguration is a wonderful collection of fine heads and figures: their fault is, that they are too detached and bare, but it is not true that it embraces two distinct points of time. The event below is going on in the Gospel account, at the same time with the miracle of the Transfiguration above. But I almost prefer to this the Foligno picture: the child with the casket below is of all things the most Raphaelesque, for the sweetness of expression, and the rich pulpy texture of the flesh; and perhaps I prefer even to this the Crowning of the Virgin, with that pure dignified figure of the Madonna sitting in the clouds, and that wonderous emanation of sentiment in the crowd below, near the vase of flowers, all whose faces are bathed in one feeling of ecstatic devotion, as the stream of inspiration flows over them. There is a singular effect of colouring in the lower part of this picture, as if it were painted on slate, and from this cold chilly ground the glow of sentiment comes out perhaps the more strong and effectual. In the same suite of apartments (accessible to students and copyists) are the Death of St. Jerome, by Domenichino; and the Vision of St. Romuald, by Andrea Sacchi, the last of the Italian painters. Five nobler or more impressive pictures are not in the world. A single figure of St. Michelle (as a pilgrim among the Alps) is a pure rich offering of the pencil to legendary devotion, and remarkable for the simplicity of the colouring, sweetness of the expression, and the gloomy splendour of the background. There are no others equally good. The Vatican contains numberless fine statues and other remains of antiquity, elegant and curious. The Apollo I do not admire, but the Laocoon appears to me admirable, for the workmanship, for the muscular contortions of the father’s figure, and the divine expression of the sentiment of pain and terror in the children. They are, however, rather small than young. Canova’s figures here seem to me the work of an accomplished sculptor, but not of a great man. Michael Angelo’s figures of Day and Night, at the Chapel of St. Lorenzo at Florence, are those of a great man; whether of a perfect sculptor or not, I will not pretend to say. The neck of the Night is curved like the 241horse’s, the limbs have the involution of serpents. These two figures and his transporting the Pantheon to the top of St. Peter’s, have settled my wavering idea of this mighty genius, which his David and early works at Florence had staggered. His Adam receiving life from his Creator, in the Sistine Chapel, for boldness and freedom, is more like the Elgin Theseus than any other figure I have seen. The Jeremiah in the same ceiling droops and bows the head like a willow-tree surcharged with showers. Whether there are any faces worthy of these noble figures I have not been near enough to see. Those near the bottom of the Last Judgment are hideous, vulgar caricatures of demons and cardinals, and the whole is a mass of extravagance and confusion. I shall endeavour to get a nearer view of the Prophets and Sybils in the Capella Sistina. And if I can discover an expression and character of thought in them equal to their grandeur of form, I shall not be slow to acknowledge it. Michael Angelo is one of those names that cannot be shaken without pulling down Fame itself. The Vatican is rich in pictures, statuary, tapestry, gardens, and in the views from it; but its immense size is divided into too many long and narrow compartments, and it wants the unity of effect and imposing gravity of the Louvre.

There are two things that an Englishman understands, hard words and hard blows. Nothing short of this (generally speaking) excites his attention or interests him in the least. His neighbours have the benefit of the one in war time, and his own countrymen of the other in time of peace. The French express themselves astonished at the feats which our Jack Tars have so often performed. A fellow in that class of life in England will strike his hand through a deal board—first, to shew his strength, which he is proud of; secondly, to give him a sensation, which he is in want of; lastly to prove his powers of endurance, which he also makes a boast of. So qualified, a controversy with a cannon-ball is not much out of his way: a thirty-two pounder is rather an ugly customer, but it presents him with a tangible idea (a thing he is always in search of)—and, should it take off his head or carry away one of his limbs, he does not feel the want of the one or care for that of the other. Naturally obtuse, his feelings become hardened by custom; or if there are any qualms of repugnance or dismay left, a volley of oaths, a few coarse jests, and a double allowance of grog soon turn the affair into a pastime. Stung with 242wounds, stunned with bruises, bleeding and mangled, an English sailor never finds himself so much alive as when he is flung half dead into the cockpit; for he then perceives the extreme consciousness of his existence in his conflict with external matter, in the violence of his will, and his obstinate contempt for suffering. He feels his personal identity on the side of the disagreeable and repulsive; and it is better to feel it so than to be a stock or a stone, which is his ordinary state. Pain puts life into him; action, soul: otherwise, he is a mere log. The English are not like a nation of women. They are not thin-skinned, nervous, or effeminate, but dull and morbid: they look danger and difficulty in the face, and shake hands with death as with a brother. They do not hold up their heads, but they will turn their backs on no man: they delight in doing and in bearing more than others: what every one else shrinks from through aversion to labour or pain, they are attracted to, and go through with, and so far (and so far only) they are a great people. At least, it cannot be denied that they are a pugnacious set. Their heads are so full of this, that if a Frenchman speaks of Scribe, the celebrated farce-writer, a young Englishman present will suppose he means Cribb the boxer; and ten thousand people assembled at a prize-fight will witness an exhibition of pugilism with the same breathless attention and delight as the audience at the Théatre Français listen to the dialogue of Racine or Molière. Assuredly, we do not pay the same attention to Shakspeare: but at a boxing-match every Englishman feels his power to give and take blows increased by sympathy, as at a French theatre every spectator fancies that the actors on the stage talk, laugh, and make love as he would. A metaphysician might say, that the English perceive objects chiefly by their mere material qualities of solidity, inertness, and impenetrability, or by their own muscular resistance to them; that they do not care about the colour, taste, smell, the sense of luxury or pleasure:—they require the heavy, hard, and tangible only, something for them to grapple with and resist, to try their strength and their unimpressibility upon. They do not like to smell to a rose, or to taste of made-dishes, or to listen to soft music, or to look at fine pictures, or to make or hear fine speeches, or to enjoy themselves or amuse others; but they will knock any man down who tells them so, and their sole delight is to be as uncomfortable and disagreeable as possible. To them the greatest labour is to be pleased: they hate to have nothing to find fault with: to expect them to smile or to converse on equal terms, is the heaviest tax you can levy on their want of animal spirits or intellectual resources. A drop of pleasure is the most difficult thing to extract from their hard, dry, mechanical, husky frame; a civil word or look is the last thing 243they can part with. Hence the matter-of-factness of their understandings, their tenaciousness of reason or prejudice, their slowness to distinguish, their backwardness to yield, their mechanical improvements, their industry, their courage, their blunt honesty, their dislike to the frivolous and florid, their love of liberty out of hatred to oppression, and their love of virtue from their antipathy to vice. Hence also their philosophy, from their distrust of appearances and unwillingness to be imposed upon; and even their poetry has its probable source in the same repining, discontented humour, which flings them from cross-grained realities into the region of lofty and eager imaginations.^[44]—A French gentleman, a man of sense and wit, expressed his wonder that all the English did not go and live in the South of France, where they would have a beautiful country, a fine climate, and every comfort almost for nothing. He did not perceive that they would go back in shoals from this scene of fancied contentment to their fogs and sea-coal fires, and that no Englishman can live without something to complain of. Some persons are sorry to see our countrymen abroad cheated, laughed at, quarrelling at all the inns they stop at:—while they are in hot-water, while they think themselves ill-used and have but the spirit to resent it, they are happy. As long as they can swear, they are excused from being complimentary: if they have to fight, they need not think: while they are provoked beyond measure, they are released from the dreadful obligation of being pleased. Leave them to themselves, and they are dull: introduce them into company, and they are worse. It is the incapacity of enjoyment that makes them sullen and ridiculous; the mortification they feel at not having their own way in everything, and at seeing others delighted without asking their leave, that makes them haughty and distant. An Englishman is silent abroad from having nothing to say; and he looks stupid, because he is so. It is kind words and graceful acts that afflict his soul—an appearance of happiness, which he suspects to be insincere because he cannot enter into it, and a flow of animal spirits which dejects him the more from 244making him feel the want of it in himself; pictures that he does not understand, music that he does not feel, love that he cannot make, suns that shine out of England, and smiles more radiant than they! Do not stifle him with roses: do not kill him with kindness: leave him some pretext to grumble, to fret, and torment himself. Point at him as he drives an English mail-coach about the streets of Paris or of Rome, to relieve his despair of éclat by affording him a pretence to horsewhip some one. Be disagreeable, surly, lying, knavish, impertinent out of compassion; insult, rob him, and he will thank you; take any thing from him (nay even his life) sooner than his opinion of himself and his prejudices against others, his moody dissatisfaction and his contempt for every one who is not in as ill a humour as he is.

John Bull is certainly a singular animal. It is the being the beast he is that has made a man of him. If he do not take care what he is about, the same ungoverned humour will be his ruin. He must have something to butt at; and it matters little to him whether it be friend or foe, provided only he can run-a-muck. He must have a grievance to solace him, a bugbear of some sort or other to keep himself in breath: otherwise, he droops and hangs the head—he is no longer John Bull, but John Ox, according to a happy allusion of the Poet-Laureate’s. This necessity of John’s to be repulsive (right or wrong) has been lately turned against himself, to the detriment of others, and his proper cost. Formerly, the Pope, the Devil, the Inquisition, and the Bourbons, served the turn, with all of whom he is at present sworn friends, unless Mr. Canning should throw out a tub to a whale in South America: then Bonaparte took the lead for awhile in John’s panic-struck brain; and latterly, the Whigs and the Examiner newspaper have borne the bell before all other topics of abuse and obloquy. Formerly, liberty was the word with John,—now it has become a bye-word. Whoever is not determined to make a slave and a drudge of him, he defies, he sets at, he tosses in the air, he tramples under foot; and after having mangled and crushed whom he pleases, stands stupid and melancholy (fænum in cornu) over the lifeless remains of his victim. When his fury is over, he repents of what he has done—too late. In his tame fit, and having made a clear stage of all who would or could direct him right, he is led gently by the nose by Mr. Croker; and the ‘Stout Gentleman’ gets upon his back, making a monster of him. Why is there a tablet stuck up in St. Peter’s at Rome, to the memory of the three last of the Stuarts? Is it a baisés mains to the Pope, or a compromise with legitimacy? Is the dread of usurpation become so strong, that a reigning family are half-ready to acknowledge themselves usurpers, in favour of those who are 245not likely to come back to assert their claim, and to countenance the principles that may keep them on a throne, in lieu of the paradoxes that placed them there? It is a handsome way of paying for a kingdom with an epitaph, and of satisfying the pretensions of the living and the dead. But we did not expel the slavish and tyrannical Stuarts from our soil by the volcanic eruption of 1688, to send a whining Jesuitical recantation and writ of error after them to the other world a hundred years afterwards. But it may be said that the inscription is merely a tribute of respect to misfortune. What! from that quarter? No! it is a ‘lily-livered,’ polished, courtly, pious monument to the fears that have so long beset the hearts of Monarchs, to the pale apparitions of Kings dethroned or beheaded in time past or to come (from that sad example) to the crimson flush of victory, which has put out the light of truth, and to the reviving hope of that deathless night of ignorance and superstition, when they shall once more reign as Gods upon the earth, and make of their enemies their footstool! Foreigners cannot comprehend this bear-garden work of ours at all: they ‘perceive a fury, but nothing wherefore.’ They cannot reconcile the violence of our wills with the dulness of our apprehensions, nor account for the fuss we make about nothing; our convulsions and throes without end or object, the pains we take to defeat ourselves and others, and to undo all that we have ever done, sooner than any one else should share the benefit of it. They think it is strange, that out of mere perversity and contradiction we would rather be slaves ourselves, than suffer others to be free; that we back out of our most heroic acts and disavow our favourite maxims (the blood-stained devices in our national coat of arms) the moment we find others disposed to assent to or imitate us, and that we would willingly see the last hope of liberty and independence extinguished, sooner than give the smallest credit to those who sacrifice every thing to keep the spark alive, or abstain from joining in every species of scurrility, insult, and calumny against them, if the word is once given by the whippers-in of power. The English imagination is not riante: it inclines to the gloomy and morbid with a heavy instinctive bias, and when fear and interest are thrown into the scale, down it goes with a vengeance that is not to be resisted, and from the effects of which it is not easy to recover. The enemies of English liberty are aware of this weakness in the public mind, and make a notable use of it.

Give a dog an ill name, and hang him—so says the proverb. The courtiers say, ‘Give a patriot an ill name, and ruin him’ alike with 246Whig and Tory—with the last, because he hates you as a friend to freedom; with the first, because he is afraid of being implicated in the same obloquy with you. This is the reason why the Magdalen Muse of Mr. Thomas Moore finds a taint in the Liberal; why Mr. Hobhouse visits Pisa, to dissuade Lord Byron from connecting himself with any but gentlemen-born, for the credit of the popular cause. Set about a false report or insinuation, and the effect is instantaneous and universally felt—prove that there is nothing in it, and you are just where you were. Something wrong somewhere, in reality or imagination, in public or in private, is necessary to the minds of the English people: bring a charge against any one, and they hug you to their breasts: attempt to take it from them, and they resist it as they would an attack upon their persons or property: a nickname is to their moody, splenetic humour a freehold estate, from which they will not be ejected by fair means or foul: they conceive they have a vested right in calumny. No matter how base the lie, how senseless the jest, it tells—because the public appetite greedily swallows whatever is nauseous and disgusting, and refuses, through weakness or obstinacy, to disgorge it again. Therefore Mr. Croker plies his dirty task—and is a Privy-councillor; Mr. Theodore Hook calls Mr. Waithman ‘Lord Waithman’ once a week, and passes for a wit!

I had the good fortune to meet the other day at Paris with my old fellow-student Dr. E——, after a lapse of thirty years; he is older than I by a year or two, and makes it five-and-twenty. He had not been idle since we parted. He sometimes looked in, after having paid La Place a visit; and I told him it was almost as if he had called on a star in his way. It is wonderful how friendship, that has long lain unused, accumulates like money at compound interest. We had to settle a long account, and to compare old times and new. He was naturally anxious to learn the state of our politics and literature, and was not a little mortified to hear that England, ‘whose boast it was to give out reformation to the world,’ had changed her motto, and was now bent on propping up the continental despotisms, and on lashing herself to them. He was particularly mortified at the degraded state of our public press—at the systematic organization of a corps of government-critics to decry every liberal sentiment, and proscribe every liberal writer as an enemy to the person of the reigning sovereign, only because he did not avow the principles of the Stuarts. I had some difficulty in making him understand the full lengths of the malice, the lying, the hypocrisy, the sleek adulation, the meanness, equivocation, and skulking concealment, of a Quarterly Reviewer,^[45]

247the reckless blackguardism of Mr. Blackwood, and the obtuse drivelling profligacy of the John Bull. He said, ‘It is worse with you than with us: here an author is obliged to sacrifice twenty mornings and twenty pair of black silk-stockings, in paying his court to the Editors of different journals, to ensure a hearing from the public; but with you, it seems, he must give up his understanding and his character, to establish a claim to taste or learning.’ He asked if the scandal could not be disproved, and retorted on the heads of the aggressors: but I said that these were persons of no character, or studiously screened by their employers; and besides, the English imagination was a bird of heavy wing, that, if once dragged through the kennel of Billingsgate abuse, could not well raise itself out of it again. He could hardly believe that under the Hanover dynasty (a dynasty founded to secure us against tyranny) a theatrical licenser had struck the word ‘tyrant’ out of Mr. Shee’s tragedy, as offensive to ears polite, or as if from this time forward there could be supposed to be no such thing in rerum naturâ; and that the common ejaculation, ‘Good God!’ was erased from the same piece, as in a strain of too great levity in this age of cant. I told him that public opinion in England was at present governed by half a dozen miscreants, who undertook to bait, hoot, and worry every man out of his country, or into an obscure grave, with lies and nicknames, who was not prepared to take the political sacrament of the day, and use his best endeavours (he and his friends) to banish the last traces of freedom, truth, and honesty from the land. ‘To be direct and honest is not safe.’ To be a Reformer, the friend of a Reformer, or the friend’s friend of a Reformer, is as much as a man’s peace, reputation, or even life is worth. Answer, if it is not so, pale shade of Keats, or living mummy of William Gifford! Dr. E—— was unwilling to credit this statement, but the proofs were too flagrant. He asked me what became of that band of patriots that swarmed in our younger days, that were so glowing-hot, desperate, and noisy in the year 1794? I said I could not tell; but referred him to our present Poet-Laureate for an account of them!

248I suspect it is peculiar to the English not to answer the letters of their friends abroad. They know you are anxious to hear, and have a surly, sullen pleasure in disappointing you. To oblige is a thing abhorrent to their imaginations; to be uneasy at not hearing from home just when one wishes, is a weakness which they cannot encourage. Any thing like a responsibility attached to their writing is a kind of restraint upon their free-will, an interference with their independence. There is a sense of superiority in not letting you know what you wish to know, and in keeping you in a state of helpless suspense. Besides, they think you are angry at their not writing, and would make them if you could; and they show their resentment of your impatience and ingratitude by continuing not to write.—One thing truly edifying in the accounts from England, is the number of murders and robberies with which the newspapers abound. One would suppose that the repetition of the details, week after week, and day after day, might stagger us a little as to our superlative idea of the goodness, honesty, and industry of the English people. No such thing: whereas one similar fact occurring once a year abroad fills us with astonishment, and makes us ready to dub the Italians (without any further inquiry) a nation of assassins and banditti. It is not safe to live or travel among them. Is it not strange, that we should persist in drawing such wilful conclusions from such groundless premises? A murder or a street-robbery in London is a matter of course^[46]: accumulate a score of these under the most aggravated circumstances one upon the back of the other, in town and country, in the course of a few weeks—they all go for nothing; they make nothing against the English character in the abstract; the force of prejudice is stronger than the weight of evidence. The process of the mind is this; and absurd as it appears, is natural enough. We say (to ourselves) we are English, we are good people, and therefore the English are good people. We carry a proxy in our bosoms for the national character in general. Our own motives are ‘very stuff o’ the conscience,’ and not like those of barbarous foreigners. Besides, we know many excellent English people, and the mass of the population cannot be affected in the scale of morality by the outrages of a few ruffians, which instantly meet with the reward they merit from wholesome and excellent laws. We are not to be moved from this position, that the great body of the British public do not live by thieving and cutting the throats of their neighbours, 249whatever the accounts in the newspapers might lead us to suspect. The streets are lined with bakers’, butchers’, and haberdashers’ shops, instead of night-cellars and gaming-houses; and are crowded with decent, orderly, well-dressed people, instead of being rendered impassable by gangs of swindlers and pickpockets. The exception does not make the rule. Nothing can be more clear or proper; and yet if a single Italian commit a murder or a robbery, we immediately form an abstraction of this individual case, and because we are ignorant of the real character of the people or state of manners in a million of instances, take upon us, like true Englishmen, to fill up the blank, which is left at the mercy of our horror-struck imaginations, with bugbears and monsters of every description. We should extend to others the toleration and the suspense of judgment we claim; and I am sure we stand in need of it from those who read the important head of ‘Accidents and Offences’ in our Journals. It is true an Italian baker, some time ago, shut his wife up in an oven, where she was burnt to death; the heir of a noble family stabbed an old woman to rob her of her money; a lady of quality had her step-daughter chained to a bed of straw, and fed on bread and water till she lost her senses. This translated into vulgar English means that all the bakers’ wives in Italy are burnt by their husbands at a slow fire; that all the young nobility are common bravoes; that all the step-mothers exercise unheard-of and unrelenting cruelty on the children of a former marriage. We only want a striking frontispiece to make out a tragic volume. As the traveller advances into the country, robbers and rumours of robbers fly before him with the horizon. In Italy,

At Turin, they told me it was not wise to travel by a vetturino to Florence without arms. At Florence, I was told one could not walk out to look at an old ruin in Rome, without expecting to see a Lazzaroni start from behind some part of it with a pistol in his hand. ‘There’s no such thing;’ but hatred has its phantoms as well as fear; and the English traduce and indulge their prejudices against other nations in order to have a pretence for maltreating them. This moral delicacy plays an under-game to their political profligacy. I am at present kept from proceeding forward to Naples by imaginary bands of brigands that infest the road the whole way. The fact is, that a gang of banditti, who had committed a number of atrocities and who had their haunts in the mountains near Sonino, were taken up about three years ago, to the amount of two and thirty: four of them were executed at Rome, and their wives still get their living 250in this city by sitting as models to artists, on account of the handsomeness of their features and the richness of their dresses. As to courtesans, from which one cannot separate the name of Italy even in idea, I have seen but one person answering to this description since I came, and I do not even know that this was one. But I saw a girl in white (an unusual thing) standing at some distance at the corner of one of the bye-streets in Rome; after looking round her for a moment, she ran hastily up the street again, as if in fear of being discovered, and a countryman who was passing with a cart at the time, stopped to look and hiss after her. If the draymen in London were to stop to gape and hoot at all the girls they see standing at the corners of streets in a doubtful capacity, they would have enough to do. But the tide of public prostitution that pours down all our streets is considered by some moralists as a drain to carry off the peccant humours of private life, and to keep the inmost recesses of the female breast sweet and pure from blemish! If this is to be the test, we have indeed nearly arrived at the idea of a perfect commonwealth.

Cicisbeism is still kept up in Italy, though somewhat on the decline. I have nothing to say in favour of that anomaly in vice and virtue. The English women are particularly shocked at it, who are allowed to hate their husbands, provided they do not like any body else. It is a kind of marriage within a marriage; it begins with infidelity to end in constancy; it is not a state of licensed dissipation, but is a real chain of the affections, superadded to the first formal one, and that often lasts for life. A gay captain in the Pope’s Guard is selected by a lady as her cavalier servente in the prime of life, and is seen digging in the garden of the family in a grey jacket and white hairs thirty years after. This does not look like a love of change. The husband is of course always a fixture; not so the cavalier servente, who is liable to be removed for a new favourite. In noble families the lover must be noble; and he must be approved by the husband. A young officer, who the other day volunteered this service to a beautiful Marchioness without either of these titles, and was a sort of interloper on the intended gallant, was sent to Volterra. Whatever is the height to which this system has been carried, or the level to which it has sunk, it does not appear to have extinguished jealousy in all its excess as a part of the national character, as the following story will shew: it is related by M. Beyle, in his charming little work, entitled De l’Amour, as a companion to the famous one in Dante; and I shall give the whole passage in his words, as placing the Italian character (in former as well as latter times) in a striking point of view.

251‘I allude,’ he says, ‘to those touching lines of Dante;—

‘The woman who speaks with so much reserve, had in secret undergone the fate of Desdemona, and had it in her power, by a single word, to have revealed her husband’s crime to the friends whom she had left upon earth.

‘Nello della Pietra obtained in marriage the hand of Madonna Pia, sole heiress of the Ptolomei, the richest and most noble family of Sienna. Her beauty, which was the admiration of all Tuscany, gave rise to a jealousy in the breast of her husband, that, envenomed by false reports and by suspicions continually reviving, led to a frightful catastrophe. It is not easy to determine at this day if his wife was altogether innocent; but Dante has represented her as such. Her husband carried her with him into the marshes of Volterra, celebrated then, as now, for the pestiferous effects of the air. Never would he tell his unhappy wife the reason of her banishment into so dangerous a place. His pride did not deign to pronounce either complaint or accusation. He lived with her alone, in a deserted tower, of which I have been to see the ruins on the sea-shore; here he never broke his disdainful silence, never replied to the questions of his youthful bride, never listened to her entreaties. He waited unmoved by her for the air to produce its fatal effects. The vapours of this unwholesome swamp were not long in tarnishing features the most beautiful, they say, that in that age had appeared upon earth. In a few months she died. Some chroniclers of these remote times report, that Nello employed the dagger to hasten her end: she died in the marshes in some horrible manner; but the mode of her death remained a mystery, even to her contemporaries. Nello della Pietra survived to pass the rest of his days in a silence which was never broken.

‘Nothing can be conceived more noble or more delicate than the manner in which the ill-fated Pia addresses herself to Dante. She desires to be recalled to the memory of the friends whom she had quitted so young: at the same time, in telling her name and alluding to her husband, she does not allow herself the smallest complaint against a cruelty unexampled, but thenceforth irreparable; and merely intimates that he knows the history of her death. This constancy in vengeance and in suffering is to be met with, I believe, only among 252the people of the South. In Piedmont, I found myself the involuntary witness of a fact almost similar; but I was at the time ignorant of the details. I was ordered with five-and-twenty dragoons into the woods that border the Sesia, to prevent the contraband traffic. On my arrival in the evening at this wild and solitary place, I distinguished among the trees the ruins of an old castle: I went to it: to my great surprise, it was inhabited. I there found a Nobleman of the country, of a very unpromising aspect; a man six feet in height, and forty years of age: he allowed me a couple of apartments with a very ill grace. Here I entertained myself by getting up some pieces of music with my quarter-master: after the expiration of some days, we discovered that our host kept guard over a woman whom we called Camilla in jest: we were far from suspecting the dreadful truth. She died at the end of six weeks. I had the melancholy curiosity to see her in her coffin; I bribed a monk who had charge of it, and towards midnight, under pretext of sprinkling the holy water, he conducted me into the chapel. I there saw one of those fine faces, which are beautiful even in the bosom of death: she had a large aquiline nose, of which I never shall forget the noble and expressive outline. I quitted this mournful spot; but five years after, a detachment of my regiment accompanying the Emperor to his coronation as King of Italy, I had the whole story recounted to me. I learned that the jealous husband, the Count of ——, had one morning found, hanging to his wife’s bedside, an English watch belonging to a young man in the little town where they lived. The same day he took her to the ruined castle, in the midst of the forests of the Sesia. Like Nello della Pietra, he uttered not a single word. If she made him any request, he presented to her sternly and in silence the English watch, which he had always about him. In this manner he passed nearly three years with her. She at length fell a victim to despair, in the flower of her age. Her husband attempted to dispatch the owner of the watch with a stiletto, failed, fled to Genoa, embarked there, and no tidings have been heard of him since. His property was confiscated.’—De l’Amour, vol i. p. 131.

This story is interesting and well told. One such incident, or one page in Dante or in Spenser is worth all the route between this and Paris, and all the sights in all the post-roads in Europe. Oh Sienna! if I felt charmed with thy narrow, tenantless streets, or looked delighted through thy arched gateway over the subjected plain, it was that some recollections of Madonna Pia hung upon the beatings of my spirit, and converted a barren waste into the regions of romance!

We had some thoughts of taking a lodging at L’Ariccia, at the Caffé del Piazza, for a month, but the deep sandy roads, the centinels posted every half-mile on this, which is the route for Naples (which shewed that it was not very safe to leave them), the loose, straggling woods sloping down to the dreary marshes, and the story of Hippolitus painted on the walls of the inn (who, it seems, was ‘native to the manner here’), deterred us. L’Ariccia, besides being, after Cortona, the oldest place in Italy, is also one step towards Naples, which I had a strong desire to see—its brimming shores, its sky which glows like one entire sun, Vesuvius, the mouth of Hell, and Sorrentum, like the Islands of the Blest—yet here again the reports of robbers, exaggerated alike by foreigners and natives, who wish to keep you where you are, the accounts of hogs without hair, and children without clothes to their backs, the vermin (animal as well as human), the gilded hams and legs of mutton that Forsyth speaks of, gave me a distaste to the journey, and I turned back to put an end to the question. I am fond of the sun, though I do not like to see him and the assassin’s knife glaring over my head together. As to the real amount of the danger of travelling this road, as far as I can learn, it is this—there is at present a possibility but no probability of your being robbed or kidnapped, if you go in the day-time and by the common method of a Vetturino, stopping two nights on the road. If you go alone, and with a determination to set time, place, and circumstances at defiance, like a personified representation of John Bull, maintaining the character of your countrymen for sturdiness and independence of spirit, you stand a very good chance of being shot through the head: the same thing might happen to you, if you refused your money to an English footpad; but if you give it freely, like a gentleman, and do not stand too nicely upon a punctilio, they let you pass like one. If you have no money about you, you must up into the mountain, and wait till you can get it. For myself, my remittances have not been very regular even in walled towns; how I should fare in this respect upon the forked mountain, I cannot tell, and certainly I have no wish to try. A friend of mine said that he thought it the only romantic thing going, this of being carried off by the banditti; that life was become too tame and insipid without such accidents, and that it would not be amiss to put one’s-self in the way of such an adventure, like putting in for the grand prize in the lottery. Assuredly, one is not likely to go to sleep in such circumstances: one person who was detained 254in this manner, and threatened every hour with being despatched, went mad in consequence. A French Artist was laid hold of by a gang of the outlaws, as he was sketching in the neighbourhood of their haunts, about a year ago; he did not think their mode of life at all agreeable. As he had no money, they employed him in making sketches of their heads, with which they were exceedingly delighted. Their vanity kept him continually on the alert when they had a moment’s leisure; and, besides, he was fatigued almost to death, for they made long marches of from forty to fifty miles a day, and scarcely ever rested more than one night in the same place. They travelled through bye-roads (in constant apprehension of the military) in parties of five or six, and met at some common rendezvous at night-fall. He was in no danger from them in the day-time; but at night they sat up drinking and carousing, and when they were in this state of excitement, he was in considerable jeopardy from their violence or sportive freaks: they amused themselves with presenting their loaded pieces at his breast, or threatened to dispatch him if he did not promise to procure ransom. At last he effected his escape in one of their drunken bouts. Their seizure of the Austrian officer last year was singular enough: they crept for above a mile on their hands and knees, from the foot of the mountain which was their place of retreat, and carried off their prize in the same manner, so as to escape the notice of the sentinels who were stationed at short distances on the road side. Some years since a plan was laid to carry off Lucien Buonaparte from his villa at Frascati, about eleven miles from Rome, on the Albano side, where the same range of Apennines begins: he was walking in his garden and saw them approaching through some trees, for his glance is quick and furtive; he retired into the house, his valet came out to meet them, who passed himself off for his master, they were delighted with their sham-prize, and glad to take 4,000 crowns to release him. Since then Lucien Buonaparte has lived in Rome. I remember once meeting this celebrated character in the streets of Paris, walking arm in arm with Maria Cosway, with whom I had drunk tea the evening before. He was dressed in a light drab-coloured great-coat, and was then a spirited, dashing-looking young man. I believe I am the only person in England who ever read his Charlemagne. It is as clever a poem as can be written by a man who is not a poet. It came out in two volumes quarto, and several individuals were applied to by the publishers to translate it; among others Sir Walter Scott, who gave for answer, ‘that as to Mister Buonaparte’s poem, he should have nothing to do with it.’ Such was the petty spite of this understrapper of greatness and of titles, himself since titled, the scale of whose intellect can be equalled 255by nothing but the pitifulness and rancour of his prejudices! The last account I have heard of the exploits of Neapolitan banditti is, that they had seized upon two out of three Englishmen, who had determined upon passing through Calabria on their way to Sicily, and were proceeding beyond Pæstum for this purpose. They were told by the Commandant there, that this was running into the lion’s mouth, that there were no patrols to protect them farther, and that they were sure to be intercepted; but an Englishman’s will is his law—they went forward—and succeeded in getting themselves into the only remaining romantic situation. I have not heard whether they have yet got out of it. The national propensity to contend with difficulty and to resist obstacles is curious, perhaps praiseworthy. A young Englishman returned the other day to Italy with a horse that he had brought with him for more than two thousand miles on the other side of Grand Cairo; and poor Bowdich gave up the ghost in a second attempt to penetrate to the source of the Niger, the encouragement to persevere being in proportion to the impossibility of success! I am myself somewhat effeminate, and would rather ‘the primrose path of dalliance tread;’ or the height of my ambition in this line would be to track the ancient route up the valley of the Simplon, leaving the modern road (much as I admire the work and the workman), and clambering up the ledges of rocks, and over broken bridges, at the risk of a sprained ankle or a broken limb, to return to a late, but excellent dinner at the post-house at Brigg!

What increases the alarm of robbers in the South of Italy, is the reviving of old stories, like the multiplication of echoes, and shifting their dates indefinitely, so as to excite the fears of the listener, or answer the purposes of the speaker. About three years ago, a desperate gang of ruffians infested the passes of the Abruzzi, and committed a number of atrocities; but this gang, to the amount of about thirty, were seized and broken up, their ringleaders beheaded in the Square di Popolo at Rome, and their wives or mistresses now live there by sitting for their pictures to English artists. The remainder figure as convicts in striped yellow and brown dresses in the streets of Rome, and very civilly pull off their hats to strangers as they pass. By the way, I cannot help reprobating this practice of employing felons as common labourers in places of public resort. Either you must be supposed to keep up your feelings of dislike and indignation against them while thus mixing with the throng and innocently employed, which is a disagreeable and forced operation of the sense of justice; or if you retain no such feelings towards these victims of the law, then why do they retain the chains on their feet and ugly badges on their shoulders? If the thing is to be treated 256seriously, it is painful: if lightly and good-humouredly, it turns the whole affair into a farce or drama, with as little of the useful as the pleasant in it. I know nothing of these people that I see manacled and branded, but that they are labouring in a broiling sun for my convenience; if one of them were to break loose, I should not care to stop him. When we witness the punishments of individuals, we should know their crimes; or at least their punishment and their delinquency should not be mixed up indiscriminately with the ordinary gaieties and business of human life. It is a chapter of the volume that should be read apart! About six months ago, twenty-two brigands came down from the mountains at Velletri, and carried off four young women from the village. A Vetturino, who wished me to return with him to Florence, spoke of this as having happened the week before. There is a band of about ninety banditti scattered through the mountains near Naples. Some years ago they were the terror of travellers: at present they are more occupied in escaping from the police themselves. But by thus confounding dates and names, all parts of the road are easily filled all the year round with nothing but robbers and rumours of robbers. In short, any one I believe can pass with proper precaution from Rome to Naples and back again, with tolerable, if not with absolute security. If he can guard equally against petty thieving and constant imposition for the rest of his route, it will be well.

Before leaving Rome, we went to Tivoli, of which so much has been said. The morning was bright and cloudless; but a thick mist rose from the low, rank, marshy grounds of the Campagna, and enveloped a number of curious objects to the right and left, till we approached the sulphurous stream of Solfatara, which we could distinguish at some distance by its noise and smell, and which crossing the road like a blue ugly snake, infects the air in its hasty progress to the sea. The bituminous lake from which it springs is about a mile distant, and has the remains of an ancient temple on its borders. Farther on is a round brick tower, the tomb of the Plautian family, and Adrian’s villa glimmers with its vernal groves and nodding arches to the right. In Rome, around it nothing strikes the eye, nothing rivets the attention but ruins, the fragments of what has been; the past is like a halo forever surrounding and obscuring the present! Ruins should be seen in a desert, like those of Palmyra, and a pilgrimage should be made to them; but who would take up his abode among tombs? Or if there be a country and men in it, why have they nothing to shew but the relics of antiquity, or why are the living contented to crawl about like worms, or to hover like shadows in the monuments of the dead? Every object he sees reminds the modern 257Roman that he is nothing—the spirits of former times overshadow him, and dwarf his pigmy efforts: every object he sees reminds the traveller that greatness is its own grave. Glory cannot last; for when a thing is once done, it need not be done again, and with the energy to act, a people lose the privilege to be. They repose upon the achievements of their ancestors; and because every thing has been done for them, sink into torpor, and dwindle into the counterfeits of what they were. The Greeks will not recover their freedom till they forget that they had ancestors, for nothing is twice because it was once. The Americans will perhaps lose theirs, when they begin fully to reap all the fruits of it; for the energy necessary to acquire freedom, and the ease that follows the enjoyment of it, are almost incompatible. If Italy should ever be any thing again, it will be when the tokens of her former glory, pictures, statues, triumphal arches are mouldered in the dust, and she has to re-tread the gradual stages of civilization, from primeval barbarism to the topmost round of luxury and refinement; or when some new light gives her a new impulse; or when the last oppression (such as in all probability impends over her) equally contrary to former independence, to modern apathy, stinging her to the quick, once more kindles the fire in her eye, and twines the deadly terrors on her brow. Then she might have music in her streets, the dance beneath her vines, inhabitants in her houses, business in her shops, passengers in her roads, commerce on her shores, honesty in her dealings, openness in her looks, books for the censorship, the love of right for the fear of power, and a calculation of consequences from a knowledge of principles—and England, like the waning moon, would grow pale in the rising dawn of liberty, that she had in vain tried to tarnish and obscure! Mais assez des reflexions pour un voyageur.

Tivoli is an enchanting—a fairy spot. Its rocks, its grottos, its temples, its waterfalls, and the rainbows reflected on them, answer to the description, and make a perfect play upon the imagination. Every object is light and fanciful, yet steeped in classic recollections. The whole is a fine net-work—a rare assemblage of intricate and high-wrought beauties. To do justice to the scene would require the pen of Mr. Moore, minute and striking as it is, sportive yet romantic, displaying all the fascinations of sense, and unfolding the mysteries of sentiment,

glittering like a sun-beam on the Sybil’s Temple at top, or darting on a rapid antithesis to the dark grotto of the God beneath, loading the prismatic spray with epithets, linking the meeting beauties on each 258side the abrupt, yawning chasm by an alliteration, painting the flowers, pointing the rocks, passing the narrow bridge on a dubious metaphor, and blending the natural and artificial, the modern and the antique, the simple and the quaint, the glimmer and the gloom in an exquisite profusion of fluttering conceits. He would be able to describe it much better, with its tiny cascades and jagged precipices, than his friend Lord Byron has described the Fall of Terni, who makes it, without any reason that I can find, tortuous, dark, and boiling like a witch’s cauldron. On the contrary, it is simple and majestic in its character, a clear mountain-stream that pours an uninterrupted, lengthened sheet of water over a precipice of eight hundred feet, in perpendicular descent, and gracefully winding its way to the channel beyond, while on one side the stained rock rises bare and stately the whole height, and on the other, the gradual green woods ascend, moistened by the ceaseless spray, and lulled by the roar of the waterfall, as the ear enjoys the sound of famous poet’s verse. If this noble and interesting object have a fault, it is that it is too slender, straight, and accompanied with too few wild or grotesque ornaments. It is the Doric, or at any rate the Ionic, among water-falls. It has nothing of the texture of Lord Byron’s terzains, twisted, zigzag, pent up and struggling for a vent, broken off at the end of a line, or point of a rock, diving under ground, or out of the reader’s comprehension, and pieced on to another stanza or shelving rock.—Nature has

To say the truth, if Lord Byron had put it into Don Juan instead of Childe Harold, he might have compared the part which her ladyship has chosen to perform on this occasion to an experienced waiter pouring a bottle of ale into a tumbler at a tavern. It has somewhat of the same continued, plump, right-lined descent. It is not frittered into little parts, nor contrasted into quaintness, nor tortured into fury. All the intricacy and contradiction that the noble Poet ascribes to it belong to Tivoli; but then Tivoli has none of the grandeur or violence of the description in Childe Harold. The poetry is fine, but not like.

As I have got so far on my way, I may as well jump the intermediate space, and proceed with my statistics here, as there was nothing on the road between this and Rome worth mentioning, except Narni (ten miles from Terni), the approach to which overlooks a fine, bold, woody, precipitous valley. We stopped at Terni for the 259express purpose of visiting the Fall, which is four or five miles from it. The road is excellent, and commands a succession of charming points of view. You must pass the little village of Papinio, perched like a set of pigeon-houses on the point of a rock about half-way up, which has been battered almost in pieces by French, Austrians, and others at different times, from a fort several hundred feet above it, and that looks directly down upon the road. When you get to the top of the winding ascent, and immediately before you turn off by a romantic little path to the waterfall, you see the ranges of the Abruzzi and the frozen top of the Pie de Lupo. Along this road the Austrian troops marched three years ago to the support of good government and social order at Naples. The prospect of the cold blue mountain-tops, and other prospects which the sight of this road recalled, chilled me, and I hastened down the side-path to lose, in the roar of the Velino tumbling from its rocky height, and the wild freedom of nature, my recollection of tyranny and tyrants. On a green bank far below, so as to be just discernible, a shepherd-boy was sleeping under the shadow of a tree, surrounded by his flock, enjoying peace and freedom, scarce knowing their names. That’s something—we must wait for the rest!

We returned to the inn at Terni too late to proceed on our journey, and were thrust, as a special favour, into a disagreeable apartment. We had the satisfaction, however, to hear the united voices of the passengers by two vetturinos, French and Italian men and women, lifted up against the supper and wine as intolerably bad. The general complaint was, that having paid so much for our fare, we were treated like beggars—comme des gueux. This was true enough, and not altogether unreasonable. Let no one who can help it, and who travels for pleasure, travel by a vetturino. You are treated much in the same manner as if in England you went by the caravan or the waggon. In fact, this mode of conveyance is an imposition on innkeepers and the public. It is the result of a combination among the vetturino owners, who bargain to provide you for a certain sum, and then billet you upon the innkeepers for as little as they can, who when thus obtruded upon them, under the guarantee of a grasping stage-coach driver, consider you as common property or prey, receive you with incivility, keep out of the way, will not deign you an answer, stint you in the quantity of your provisions, poison you by the quality, order you into their worst apartments, force other people into the same room or even bed with you, keep you in a state of continual irritation and annoyance all the time you are in the house, and send you away jaded and dissatisfied with your reception, and terrified at the idea of arriving at the next 260place of refreshment, for fear of meeting with a renewal of the same contemptible mortifications and petty insults. You have no remedy: if you complain to the Vetturino, he says it is the fault of the innkeeper; if you remonstrate with the innkeeper, he says he has orders from the Vetturino only to provide certain things. It is of little use to try to bribe the waiters; they doubt your word, and besides, do not like to forego the privilege of treating a vetturino passenger as one. It is best, if you travel in this manner, to pay for yourself; and then you may stand some chance of decent accommodation. I was foolish enough to travel twice in this manner, and pay three Napoleons a day, for which I might have gone post, and fared in the most sumptuous manner. I ought to add, in justice, that when I have escaped from the guardianship of Monsieur le Vetturino and have stopped at inns on my own account, as was the case at Venice, Milan, and at Florence twice, I have no reason to complain either of the treatment or the expence. As to economy, it is in vain to look for it in travelling in Italy or at an hotel; and if you succeed in procuring a private lodging for a time, besides the everlasting trickery and cabal, you are likely to come off with very meagre fare, unless you can eat Italian dishes. I ought, however, to repeat what I believe I have said before, that the bread, butter, milk, wine and poultry that you get here (even ordinarily) are excellent, and that you may also obtain excellent tea and coffee.

We proceeded next morning (in no very good humour) on our way to Spoleto. The day was brilliant, and our road lay through steep and narrow defiles for several hours. The sides of the hills on each side were wild and woody; indeed, the whole ride was interesting, and the last hill before we came to Spoleto, with a fine monastery embosomed in its thick tufted trees, crowned our satisfaction with the journey. Spoleto is a handsome town, delightfully situated, and has an appearance (somewhat startling in Italy) as if life were not quite extinct in it. It stands on the slope of a range of the Apennines, extending as far as Foligno and Perugia, and ‘sees and is seen’ to a great distance. From Perugia in particular (an interval of forty miles) you seem as if you could put your hand upon it, so plain does it appear, owing to the contrast between the white stone-houses, and the dark pine-groves by which it is surrounded. The effect of this contrast is not always pleasant. The single cottages or villas scattered in the neighbourhood of towns in Italy, often look like dominos or dice spread on a dark green cloth. We arrived at Foligno early in the evening, and as a memorable exception to the rest of our route, found there an inn equally clean and hospitable. From the windows of our room we could see the young people of the town walking out 261in a fine open country, to breathe the clear fresh air, and the priests sauntering in groups and enjoying the otium cum dignitate. It was for some monks of Foligno that Raphael painted his inimitable Madonna.

We turned off at Assizi to view the triple Franciscan church and monastery. We saw the picture of Christ (shewn by some nuns), that used to smile upon St. Francis at his devotions; and the little chapel in the plain below, where he preached to his followers six hundred years ago, over which a large church is at present built, like Popery surmounting Christianity. The church on the top of the hill, built soon after his death in honour of the saint, and where his heart reposes, is a curiosity in its kind. First, two churches were raised, one on the top of the other, and then a third was added below with some difficulty, by means of excavations in the rock. The last boasts a modern and somewhat finical mausoleum or shrine, and the two first are ornamented with fresco paintings by Giotto and Ghirlandaio, which are most interesting and valuable specimens of the early history of the art. I see nothing to contemn in them—much to admire—fine heads, simple grouping, a knowledge of drawing and foreshortening, and dignified attitudes and expressions, some of which Raphael has not disdained to copy, though he has improved upon them. St. Francis died about 1220, and this church was finished and ornamented with these designs of the chief actions of his life, within forty months afterwards; so that the pictures in question must be about six hundred years old. We are not, however, to wonder at the maturity of these productions of the pencil; the art did not arise out of barbarism or nothing, but from a lofty preconception in the minds of those who first practised it, and applied it to purposes of devotion. Even the grace and majesty of Raphael were, I apprehend, but emanations of the spirit of the Roman Catholic religion, and existed virtually in the minds of his countrymen long before and after he transferred them, with consummate skill, to the canvass. Not a Madonna scrawled on the walls near Rome, not a baby-house figure of the Virgin, that is out of character and costume, or that is not imbued with an expression of resignation, benignity, and purity. We were shewn these different objects by a young priest, who explained them to us with a gracefulness of manner, and a mild eloquence, characteristic of his order. I forgot to mention, in the proper place, that I was quite delighted with the external deportment of the ecclesiastics in Rome. It was marked by a perfect propriety, decorum, and humanity, from the highest to the lowest. Not the slightest look or gesture to remind you that you were foreigners or heretics—an example of civility that is far from being superfluous, even in the capital of the Christian world. It may be said that this is art, and a desire to gain upon the good opinion of 262strangers. Be it so, but it must be allowed that it is calculated to this end. Good manners have this advantage over good morals, that they lie more upon the surface; and there is nothing, I own, that inclines me to think so well of the understandings or dispositions of others, as a thorough absence of all impertinence. I do not think they can be the worst people in the world who habitually pay most attention to the feelings of others; nor those the best who are endeavouring every moment to hurt them. At Perugia, while looking at some panels in a church painted by Pietro Perugino, we met with a young Irish priest, who claimed acquaintance with us as country-folks, and recommended our staying six days, to see the ceremonies and finery attending the translation of the deceased head of his order from the church where he lay to his final resting-place. We were obliged by this proposal, but declined it. It was curious to hear English spoken by the inmate of a Benedictine Monastery,—to see the manners of an Italian priest engrafted on the Irish accent—to think that distant countries are brought together by agreement in religion—that the same country is rent asunder by differences in it. Man is certainly an ideal being, whom the breath of an opinion wafts from Indus to the Pole, and who is ready to sacrifice the present world and every object in it for a reversion in the skies! Perugia is situated on a lofty hill, and is in appearance the most solid mass of building I ever beheld. It commands a most extensive view in all directions, and the ascent to it is precipitous on every side. Travelling this road from Rome to Florence is like an eagle’s flight—from hill-top to hill-top, from towered city to city, and your eye devours your way before you over hill or plain. We saw Cortona on our right, looking over its wall of ancient renown, conscious of its worth, not obtruding itself on superficial notice; and passed through Arezzo, the reputed birth-place of Petrarch. All the way we were followed (hard upon) by another Vetturino, with an English family, and we had a scramble whenever we stopped for supper, beds, or milk. At Incisa, the last stage before we arrived at Florence, an intimation was conveyed that we should give up our apartments in the inn, and seek for lodgings elsewhere. This modest proposition could come only from English people, who have such an opinion of their dormant stock of pretended good-nature, that they think all the world must in return be ready to give up their own comforts to oblige them. We had two French gentlemen in the coach with us, equally well-behaved and well-informed, and two Italians in the cabriolet, as good-natured and ‘honest as the skin between their brows.’ Near Perugia we passed the celebrated lake of Thrasymene, near which Hannibal defeated the Roman consul Flaminius. It struck me as not unlike Windermere in character and 263scenery, but I have seen other lakes since, which have driven it out of my head. Florence (the city of flowers) seemed to deserve its name as we entered it for the second time more than it did the first. The weather had been cold during part of our journey, but now it had changed to sultry heat. The people looked exceedingly plain and hard-featured, after having passed through the Roman States. They have the look of the Scotch people, only fiercer and more ill-tempered.

I have already described the road between Florence and Bologna. I found it much the same on returning; for barren rocks and mountains undergo little alteration either in summer or winter. Indeed, of the two, I prefer the effect in the most dreary season, for it is then most complete and consistent with itself: on some kinds of scenery, as on some characters, any attempt at the gay and pleasing sits ill, and is a mere piece of affectation. There is so far a distinction between the Apennines and Alps, that the latter are often covered with woods, and with patches of the richest verdure, and are capable of all the gloom of winter or the bloom of spring. The soil of the Apennines, on the contrary, is as dry and gritty as the rocks themselves, being nothing but a collection of sand-heaps and ashes, and mocks at every idea that is not of a repulsive and disagreeable kind. We stopped the first night at Traversa, a miserable inn or almost hovel on the road side, in the most desolate part of this track; and found amidst scenes, which the imagination and the pen of travellers have peopled with ghastly phantoms and the assassin’s midnight revelry, a kind but simple reception, and the greatest sweetness of manners, prompted by the wish, but conscious of being perhaps without the means to please. Courtesy in cities or palaces goes for little, means little, for it may and must be put on; in the cottage or on the mountain-side it is welcome to the heart, for it comes from it. It then has its root in unsophisticated nature, without the gloss of art, and shews us the original goodness of the soil or germ, from which human affections and social intercourse in all their ramifications spring. A little boy clung about its mother, wondering at the strangers; but from the very thoughts of novelty and distance, nestling more fondly in the bosom of home. What is the map of Europe, what all the glories of it, what the possession of them, to that poor little fellow’s dream, to his sidelong glance at that wide world of fancy that circles his native rocks!

264The second morning, we reached the last of the Apennines that overlook Bologna, and saw stretched out beneath our feet a different scene, the vast plain of Lombardy, and almost the whole of the North of Italy, like a rich sea of boundless verdure, with towns and villas spotting it like the sails of ships. A hazy inlet of the Adriatic appeared to the right (probably the Gulph of Comachio). We strained our eyes in vain to catch a doubtful view of the Alps, but they were still sunk below the horizon. We presently descended into this plain (which formed a perfect contrast to the country we had lately passed), and it answered fully to the promise it had given us. We travelled for days, for weeks through it, and found nothing but ripeness, plenty, and beauty. It may well be called the Garden of Italy or of the World. The whole way from Bologna to Venice, from Venice to Milan, it is literally so. But I anticipate.—We went to our old inn at Bologna, which we liked better the second time than the first; and had just time to snatch a glimpse of the Guidos and Domenichinos at the Academy, which gleamed dark and beautiful through the twilight. We set out early the next morning on our way to Venice, turning off to Ferrara. It was a fine spring morning. The dew was on the grass, and shone like diamonds in the sun. A refreshing breeze fanned the light-green odorous branches of the trees, which spread their shady screen on each side of the road, which lay before us as straight as an arrow for miles. Venice was at the end of it; Padua, Ferrara, midway. The prospect (both to the sense and to the imagination) was exhilarating; and we enjoyed it for some hours, till we stopped to breakfast at a smart-looking detached inn at a turning of the road, called, I think, the Albergo di Venezia. This was one of the pleasantest places we came to during the whole of our route. We were shewn into a long saloon, into which the sun shone at one extremity, and we looked out upon the green fields and trees at the other. There were flowers in the room. An excellent breakfast of coffee, bread, butter, eggs, and slices of Bologna sausages was served up with neatness and attention. An elderly female, thin, without a cap, and with white thread-stockings, watched at the door of a chamber not far from us, with the patience of an eastern slave. The door opened, and a white robe was handed out, which she aired carefully over a chaffing-dish with mechanical indifference, and an infinite reduplication of the same folds. It was our young landlady who was dressing for church within, and who at length issued out, more remarkable for the correctness of her costume than the beauty of her person. Some rustics below were playing at a game, that from the incessant loud jarring noises of counting that accompanied it, implied equally good lungs and nerves in the 265performers and by-standers. At the tinkling of a village bell, all was in a moment silent, and the entrance of a little chapel was crowded with old and young, kneeling in postures of more or less earnest devotion. We walked forward, delighted with the appearance of the country, and with the simple manners of the inhabitants; nor could we have proceeded less than four or five miles along an excellent footpath, but under a broiling sun, before we saw any signs of our Vetturino, who was willing to take this opportunity of easing his horses—a practice common with those sort of gentry. Instead of a fellow-feeling with you, you find an instinctive inclination in persons of this class all through Italy to cheat and deceive you: the more easy or cordial you are with them, the greater is their opinion of your folly and their own cunning, and the more are they determined to repel or evade any advances to a fair understanding: threaten, or treat them with indignity, and you have some check over them; relax the reins a moment, and they are sure to play you some scurvy trick.

At Ferrara we were put on short allowance, and as we found remonstrance vain, we submitted in silence. We were the more mortified at this treatment, as we had begun to hope for better things; but Mr. Henry Waister, our Commissary on the occasion, was determined to make a good thing of his three Napoleons a-day; he had strained a point in procuring us a tolerable supper and breakfast at the two last stages, which must serve for some time to come; and as he would not pay for our dinner, the landlord would not let us have one, and there the matter rested. We walked out in the evening, and found Ferrara enchanting. Of all the places I have seen in Italy, it is the one by far I should most covet to live in. It is the ideal of an Italian city, once great, now a shadow of itself. Whichever way you turn, you are struck with picturesque beauty and faded splendours, but with nothing squalid, mean, or vulgar. The grass grows in the well-paved streets. You look down long avenues of buildings, or of garden walls, with summer-houses or fruit-trees projecting over them, and airy palaces with dark portraits gleaming through the grated windows—you turn, and a chapel bounds your view one way, a broken arch another, at the end of the vacant, glimmering, fairy perspective. You are in a dream, in the heart of a romance; you enjoy the most perfect solitude, that of a city which was once filled with ‘the busy hum of men,’ and of which the tremulous fragments at every step strike the sense, and call up reflection. In short, nothing is to be seen of Ferrara, but the remains, graceful and romantic, of what it was—no sordid object intercepts or sullies the retrospect of the past—it is not degraded and patched up like Rome, with upstart improvements, with earthenware and oil-shops; 266it is a classic vestige of antiquity, drooping into peaceful decay, a sylvan suburb—

Here Ariosto lived—here Tasso occupied first a palace, and then a dungeon. Verona has even a more sounding name; boasts a finer situation, and contains the tomb of Juliet. But the same tender melancholy grace does not hang upon its walls, nor hover round its precincts as round those of Ferrara, inviting to endless leisure and pensive musing. Ferrara, while it was an independent state, was a flourishing and wealthy city, and contained 70,000 inhabitants; but from the time it fell into the hands of the Popes, in 1597, it declined, and it has now little more than an historical and poetical being.

From Ferrara we proceeded through Rovigo to Padua the Learned, where we were more fortunate in our inn, and where, in the fine open square at the entrance, I first perceived the rage for vulgar and flaunting statuary, which distinguishes the Lombardo-Venetian States. The traveller to Venice (who goes there to see the masterpieces of Titian or Palladio’s admired designs), runs the gauntlet all the way along at every town or villa he passes, of the most clumsy, affected, paltry, sprawling figures, cut in stone, that ever disgraced the chisel. Even their crucifixes and common Madonnas are in bad taste and proportion. This inaptitude for the representation of forms in a people, whose eye for colours transcended that of all the world besides, is striking as it is curious: and it would be worth the study of a man’s whole life to give a true and satisfactory solution of the mystery. Padua, though one of the oldest towns in Italy, is still a place of some resort and bustle; among other causes, from the number of Venetian families who are in the habit of spending the summer months there. Soon after leaving it, you begin to cross the canals and rivers which intersect this part of the country bordering upon the sea, and for some miles you follow the course of the Brenta along a flat, dusty, and unprofitable road. This is a period of considerable and painful suspense, till you arrive at Fusina, where you are put into a boat and rowed down one of the Lagunes, where over banks of high rank grass and reeds, and between solitary sentry-boxes at different intervals, you see Venice rising from the sea. For an hour and a half, that it takes you to cross from the last point of land to this Spouse of the Adriatic, its long line of spires, towers, churches, wharfs is stretched along the 267water’s edge, and you view it with a mixture of awe and incredulity. A city built in the air would be something still more wonderful; but any other must yield the palm to this for singularity and imposing effect. If it were on the firm land, it would rank as one of the first cities in Europe for magnificence, size, and beauty; as it is, it is without a rival. I do not know what Lord Byron and Lady Morgan could mean by quarrelling about the question who first called Venice ‘the Rome of the sea’—since it is perfectly unique in its kind. If a parallel must be found for it, it is more like Genoa shoved into the sea. Genoa stands on the sea, this in it. The effect is certainly magical, dazzling, perplexing. You feel at first a little giddy: you are not quite sure of your footing as on the deck of a vessel. You enter its narrow, cheerful canals, and find that instead of their being scooped out of the earth, you are gliding amidst rows of palaces and under broad-arched bridges, piled on the sea-green wave. You begin to think that you must cut your liquid way in this manner through the whole city, and use oars instead of feet. You land, and visit quays, squares, market-places, theatres, churches, halls, palaces; ascend tall towers, and stroll through shady gardens, without being once reminded that you are not on terra firma. The early inhabitants of this side of Italy, driven by Attila and his hordes of Huns from the land, sought shelter in the sea, built there for safety and liberty, laid the first foundations of Venice in the rippling wave, and commerce, wealth, luxury, arts, and crimson conquest crowned the growing Republic;—

Man, proud of his amphibious creation, spared no pains to aggrandize and embellish it, even to extravagance and excess. The piles and blocks of wood on which it stands are brought from the huge forests at Treviso and Cadore: the stones that girt its circumference, and prop its walls, are dug from the mountains of Istria and Dalmatia: the marbles that inlay its palace-floors are hewn from the quarries near Verona. Venice is loaded with ornament, like a rich city-heiress with jewels. It seems the natural order of things. Her origin was a wonder: her end is to surprise. The strong, implanted tendency of her genius must be to the showy, the singular, the fantastic. Herself an anomaly, she reconciles contradictions, liberty with aristocracy, commerce with nobility, the want of titles with the pride of birth and heraldry. A violent birth in nature, she lays greedy, perhaps ill-advised, hands on all the artificial advantages that can supply her original defects. Use turns to gaudy beauty; extreme 268hardship to intemperance in pleasure. From the level uniform expanse that forever encircles her, she would obviously affect the aspiring in forms, the quaint, the complicated, relief and projection. The richness and foppery of her architecture arise from this: its stability and excellence probably from another circumstance counteracting this tendency to the buoyant and fluttering, viz., the necessity of raising solid edifices on such slippery foundations, and of not playing tricks with stone-walls upon the water. Her eye for colours and costume she would bring with conquest from the East. The spirit, intelligence, and activity of her men, she would derive from their ancestors: the grace, the glowing animation and bounding step of her women, from the sun and mountain-breeze! The want of simplicity and severity in Venetian taste seems owing to this, that all here is factitious and the work of art: redundancy again is an attribute of commerce, whose eye is gross and large, and does not admit of the too much; and as to irregularity and want of fixed principles, we may account by analogy at least for these, from that element of which Venice is the nominal bride, to which she owes her all, and the very essence of which is caprice, uncertainty, and vicissitude!

This, which is a description of a dream of Babylon of old, by a living poet, is realized almost literally in modern Venice.

I never saw palaces anywhere but at Venice. Those at Rome are dungeons compared to them. They generally come down to the water’s edge, and as there are canals on each side of them, you see 269them four-square. The views by Canaletti are very like, both for the effect of the buildings and the hue of the water. The principal are by Palladio, Longhena, and Sansovino. They are massy, elegant, well-proportioned, costly in materials, profuse of ornament. Perhaps if they were raised above the water’s edge on low terraces (as some of them are), the appearance of comfort and security would be greater, though the architectural daring, the poetical miracle would appear less. As it is, they seem literally to be suspended in the water.—The richest in interior decoration that I saw, was the Grimani Palace, which answered to all the imaginary conditions of this sort of thing. Aladdin might have exchanged his for it, and given his lamp into the bargain. The floors are of marble, the tables of precious stones, the chairs and curtains of rich silk, the walls covered with looking-glasses, and it contains a cabinet of invaluable antique sculpture, and some of Titian’s finest portraits. I never knew the practical amount to the poetical, or furniture seem to grow eloquent but in this instance. The rooms were not too large for comfort neither; for space is a consideration at Venice. All that it wanted of an Eastern Palace was light and air, with distant vistas of hill and grove. A genealogical tree of the family was hung up in one of the rooms, beginning with the founder in the ninth century, and ending with the present representative of it; and one of the portraits, by Titian, was of a Doge of the family, looking just like an ugly, spiteful old woman; but with a truth of nature, and a force of character that no one ever gave but he. I saw no other mansion equal to this. The Pisani is the next to it for elegance and splendour; and from its situation on the Grand Canal, it admits a flood of bright day through glittering curtains of pea-green silk, into a noble saloon, enriched with an admirable family-picture by Paul Veronese, with heads equal to Titian for all but the character of thought.

Close to this is the Barberigo Palace, in which Titian lived, and in which he died, with his painting-room just in the state in which he left it. It is hung round with pictures, some of his latest works, such as the Magdalen and the Salvator Mundi (which are common in prints), and with an unfinished sketch of St. Sebastian, on which he was employed at the time of his death. Titian was ninety-nine when he died, and was at last carried off by the plague. My guide who was enthusiastic on the subject of Venetian art, would not allow any falling-off in these latest efforts of his mighty pencil, but represented him as prematurely cut off in the height of his career. He knew, he said, an old man, who had died a year ago, at one hundred and twenty. The Venetians may still live to be old, but they do not 270paint like Titian! The Magdalen is imposing and expressive, but the colouring is tinted (quite different from Titian’s usual simplicity) and it has a flaccid, meretricious, affectedly lachrymose appearance, which I by no means like. There is a slabbery freedom or a stiff grandeur about most of these productions, which, I think, savoured of an infirm hand and eye, accompanied with a sense of it. Titian, it is said, thought he improved to the last, and wished to get possession of his former pictures, to paint them over again, upon broader and more scientific principles, as some authors have wished to re-write their works: there was a small model of him in wax, done by a contemporary artist in his extreme old age, shewn in London a year or two ago, with the black velvet cap, the green gown, and a white sleeve appearing from under it, against a pale, shrivelled hand. The arrangement of colouring was so truly characteristic, that it was probably dictated by himself. It may be interesting to artists to be told, that the room in the Barberigo Palace (said to be his painting-room) has nearly a southern aspect. There are some other indifferent pictures hanging in the room, by painters before his time, probably some that he had early in his possession, and kept longest for that reason. It is an event in one’s life to find one’s-self in Titian’s painting-room. Yet it did not quite answer to my expectations—a hot sun shone into the room, and the gondola in which we came was unusually close—neither did I stoop and kiss the stone which covers his dust, though I have worshipped him on this side of idolatry!

This is the inscription on his tomb in the church of the Frati. I read it twice over, but it would not do. Why grieve for the immortals? One is not exactly one’s-self on such occasions, and enthusiasm has its intermittent and stubborn fits; besides, mine is, at present, I suspect, a kind of July shoot, that must take its rise from the stock of former impressions. It spread aloft on the withered branches of the St. Peter Martyr, and shot out more kindly still from seeing three pictures of his, close together, at the house of Signor Manfrini (a Venetian tobacconist), an elaborate Portrait of his friend Ariosto—sharp-featured and tawny-coloured, with a light Morisco look—a bronzed duplicate of the Four Ages at the Marquess of Stafford’s—and his Mistress (which is in the Louvre) introduced into a composition with a gay cavalier and a page. I was glad to see her in company so much fitter for her than her old lover; and besides, the varied grouping gave new life and reality to this charming 271vision. The two last pictures are doubtfully ascribed to Giorgioni, and this critical equivoque was a source of curiosity and wonder. Giorgioni is the only painter with respect to whom this could be made a question (the distinction between Titian and the other painters of the Venetian school, Tintoret and Paul Veronese, is broad and palpable enough)—and for myself, I incline to attribute the last of the three chef d’œuvres above enumerated to Giorgioni. The difference, it appears to me, may be thus stated. There is more glow and animation in Giorgioni than in Titian. He is of a franker and more genial spirit. Titian has more subtilty and meaning, Giorgioni more life and youthful blood. The feeling in the one is suppressed; in the other, it is overt and transparent. Titian’s are set portraits, with the smallest possible deviation from the straight line: they look as if they were going to be shot, or to shoot somebody. Giorgioni, in what I have seen of his pictures, as the Gaston de Foix, the Music-piece at Florence, &c. is full of inflection and contrast; there is seldom a particle of it in Titian. An appearance of silence, a tendency to still-life, pervades Titian’s portraits; in Giorgioni’s there is a bending attitude, and a flaunting air, as if floating in gondolas or listening to music. For all these reasons (perhaps slenderly put together) I am disposed to think the portrait of the young man in the picture alluded to is by Giorgioni, from the flushed cheek, the good-natured smile, and the careless attitude; and for the same reason, I think it likely that even the portrait of the lady is originally his, and that Titian copied and enlarged the design into the one we see in the Louvre, for the head (supposed to be of himself, in the background) is middle-aged, and Giorgioni died while Titian was yet young. The question of priority in this case is a very nice one; and it would be curious to ascertain the truth by tradition or private documents of any kind.

I teazed my valet de place (Mr. Andrew Wyche, a Tyrolese, a very pleasant, companionable, and patriotic sort of person) the whole of the first morning at every fresh landing or embarkation by asking, ‘But are we going to see the Saint Peter Martyr?’ When we reached the Church of Saint John and Saint Paul, the light did not serve, and we got reprimanded by the priest for turning our backs on the host, in our anxiety to find a proper point of view. We returned to the charge at five in the afternoon, when the light fell upon it through a high-arched Gothic window, and it came out in all its pristine glory, with its rich, embrowned, overshadowing trees, its nobly-drawn heroic figures, its blood-stained garments, its flowers and trailing plants, and that cold convent-spire rising in the distance amidst the sapphire mountains and the golden sky. I found every 272thing in its place and as I expected. Yet I am unwilling to say that I saw it through my former impressions: this picture suffices to itself, and fills the mind without an effort; for it contains all the mighty world of landscape and history, grandeur and breadth of form with the richest depth of colouring, an expression characteristic, powerful, that cannot be mistaken, conveying the scene at the moment, a masterly freedom and unerring truth of execution, and a subject as original as it is stately and romantic. It is the foremost of Titian’s productions, and exhibits the most extraordinary specimen of his varied powers. Most probably, as a picture, it is the finest in the world; or if I cannot say it is the picture which I would the soonest have painted, it is at least the one which I would the soonest have. It is a rich feast to the eye, ‘where no crude surfeit reigns.’ As an instance of the difference between Titian and Raphael, you here see the figures from below, and they stand out with noble grandeur of effect against the sky; Raphael would have buried them under the horizon, or stuck them against the landscape, without relief or motion. So much less knowledge had he of the picturesque! Again, I do not think Raphael could have given the momentary expression of sudden, ghastly terror, or the hurried, disorderly movements of the flying Monk, or the entire prostration of the other (like a rolling ruin) so well as Titian. The latter could not, I know, raise a sentiment to its height like the former; but Raphael’s expressions and attitudes were (so to speak) the working out of ‘foregone conclusions,’ not the accidental fluctuations of mind or matter—were final and fixed,^[47] not salient or variable. I observed, in looking closer, that the hinder or foreshortened leg of the flying monk rests upon the edge of a bank of earth, from which he is descending. This explains the action of the part better, but I doubt whether this idea of inequality and interruption from the broken nature of the ground is an addition to the feeling of precipitate fear and staggering perplexity in the mind of the person represented. This may be an hypercriticism. The colouring of the foremost leg of this figure is sufficient to prove that the utter paleness of the rest of it is from its having faded in the course of time. The colour of the face in this and the other monk is the same as it was twenty years ago; it has sustained no injury in that time. But for the sun-burnt, well-baked, robust tone of the flesh-colour, commend me to the leg and girded thigh of the robber. What a difference between this and Raphael’s brick-dust!—I left this admirable performance with regret; yet I do not see why; for I have it present with me, ‘in my mind’s eye,’ 273and swear, in the wildest scenes of the Alps, that the St. Peter Martyr is finer. That, and the Man in the Louvre, are my standards of perfection; my taste may be wrong; nay, even ridiculous—yet such it is.

The picture of the Assumption, at the Academy of Painting at Venice, which was discovered but the other day under a load of dirt and varnish, is cried up as even superior to the St. Peter: it is indeed a more extraordinary picture for the artist to have painted; but for that very reason it is neither so perfect nor so valuable. Raphael could not paint landscape; Titian could hardly paint history without the help of landscape. A background was necessary to him, like music to a melodrame. He had in this picture attempted the style of Raphael, and has succeeded and even failed—to admiration. He has given the detached figures of the Roman school, the contrasted, uniform colours of their draperies, the same determined outline, no breaking of the colours or play of light and shade, and has aimed at the same elevation and force of expression. The drawing has nearly the same firmness with more scope, the colouring is richer and almost as hard, the attitudes are imposing and significant, and the features handsome—what then is wanting? That glow of heavenward devotion bent on ideal objects, and taking up its abode in the human form and countenance as in a shrine; that high and abstracted expression, that outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace, which Raphael alone could give in its utmost purity and intensity. One glimpse of the Crowning of the Virgin in the Vatican is worth it all—lifts the mind nigher to the subject, dissolves it in greater sweetness, sinks it in deeper thoughtfulness. The eager headlong enthusiasm of the Apostle to the right in a green mantle is the best; the lambent eyes and suffused glow of the St. John are only the indications of rosy health, and youthful animation; the Virgin is a well-formed rustic beauty with a little affectation, and the attitude of the Supreme Being is extravagant and distorted. Raphael could have painted this subject, as to its essential qualities, better; he could not have done the St. Peter Martyr in any respect so well. I like Titian’s Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (notwithstanding the horror of the subject) better than the Assumption, for its characteristic expression, foreshortening, and fine mellow masses of light and shade. Titian could come nearer the manner of Michael Angelo than that of Raphael, from an eye for what was grand and impressive in outward form and position, as his frescoes of Prometheus, Cain and Abel, and another grotesque and gigantic subject on the ceiling of one of the churches, shew. These, in picturesque grouping, in muscular relief, and vastness of contour, surpass Michael 274Angelo’s figures in the Last Judgment, however they may fall short of them in anatomical knowledge or accuracy. I also was exceedingly delighted with the Salutation of the Virgin at the Academy, which is shewn as one of his masterpieces, for the mixture of airy scenic effect with the truth of individual portraiture. The churches and public buildings here bear ample testimony to the powers of Titian’s historic pencil, though I did not see enough of his portraits in private collections, of which I had hoped to take my fill. In the large hall of the Academy of Painting are also the fine picture of the Miracle of Saint Mark by Tintoret, an inimitable representation of a religious and courtly ceremony by Paris Bourbon (inimitable for the light, rich, gauze-colouring, and magical effect of the figures in perspective), and several others of vast merit as well as imposing dimensions. The Doge’s Palace and the Council-Chamber of the Senate are adorned with the lavish performances of Tintoret and Paul Veronese; and in the allegorical figures in the ceiling of the Council-Chamber, and in the splendid delineation of a Doge returning thanks to the Virgin for some victory over the Infidels, which occupies the end of it, I think the last-named painter has reached the top of his own and of Venetian art. As an art of decoration, addressing itself to the eye, to the vain or voluptuous part of our constitution, it cannot be carried farther. Of all pictures this Thanksgiving is the most dazzling, the most florid. A rainbow is not more rich in hues, a bubble that glitters in the sun is not more light and glossy, a bed of tulips is not more gaudy. A flight of angels with rosy hues and winged glories connects the heavenly and the earthly groups like a garland of blushing flowers. The skill and delicacy of this composition is equal to its brilliancy of effect. His marriage of Cana (another wonderful performance) is still at Paris: it was formerly in the Refectory of the church of St. Giorgio Maggiore, on an island on the opposite side of the harbour, which is well worth attention for the architecture by Palladio and the altar-piece in bronze by John of Bologna, containing a number of figures (as it appears to me) of the most masterly design and execution.

I have thus hastily run through what struck me as most select in fine art in this celebrated city. To enumerate every thing would be endless. There are other objects for the curious. The Mosaics of the church of St. Mark, the Brazen Horses, the belfry or Campanile, the arsenal, and the theatres, which are wretched both as it relates to the actors and the audience. The shops are exceedingly neat and well-stocked, and the people gay and spirited. The harbour does not present an appearance of much traffic. In the times of the Republic, 30,000 people are said to have slept every 275night in the vessels in the bay. Daniell’s Hotel, at which we were, and to which I would recommend every English traveller, commands a superb view of it, and the scene (particularly by moonlight) is delicious. I heard no music at Venice, neither voice nor lute; saw no group of dancers or maskers, and the gondolas appear to me to resemble hearses more than pleasure-boats. I saw the Rialto, which is no longer an Exchange. The Bridge of Sighs, of which Lord Byron speaks, is not a thoroughfare, but an arch suspended at a considerable height over one of the canals, and connecting the Doge’s palace with the prison.

We left Venice with mingled satisfaction and regret. We had to retrace our steps as far as Padua, on our way to Milan. For four days’ journey, from Padua to Verona, to Brescia, to Treviglio, to Milan, the whole way was cultivated beauty and smiling vegetation. Not a rood of land lay neglected, nor did there seem the smallest interruption to the bounty of nature or the industry of man. The constant verdure fatigued the eye, but soothed reflection. For miles before you, behind you, and on each side, the trailing vines hung over waving corn-fields, or clear streams meandered through rich meadow-grounds, and pastures. The olive we had nearly left behind us in Tuscany, and were not sorry to part with its half-mourning appearance amidst more luxuriant scenes and various foliage. The country is quite level, and the roads quite straight for nearly four hundred miles that we had travelled after leaving Bologna; and every foot or acre of this immense plain is wrought up to a pitch of neatness and productiveness, equal to that of a gentleman’s kitchen-garden, or to the nursery-grounds in the neighbourhood of London. A gravel-pit or a furze-bush by the roadside is a relief to the eye. There is no perceptible difference in approaching the great towns, though their mounds of green earth and the mouldering remains of fortifications give an agreeable and romantic variety to the scene; the whole of the intermediate space is literally, and without any kind of exaggeration, one continued and delightful garden. Whether this effect is owing to the felicity of the soil and climate, or to the art of man, or to former good government, or to all these combined, I shall not here inquire; but the fact is so, and it is sufficient to put an end to the idea that there is neither industry nor knowledge of agriculture nor plenty out of 276England, and to the common proverbial cant about the sloth and apathy of the Italians, as if they would not lift the food to their mouths, or gather the fruits that are drooping into them. If the complaints of the poverty and wretchedness of Italy are confined to the Campagna of Rome, or to some districts of the Apennines, I have nothing to say; but if a sweeping conclusion is drawn from these to Italy in general, or to the North of it in particular, I must enter my protest against it. Such an inference is neither philosophical, nor, I suspect, patriotic. The English are too apt to take every opportunity, and to seize on every pretext for treating the rest of the world as wretches—a tone of feeling which does not exactly tend to enhance our zeal in the cause either of liberty or humanity. If people are wretches, the next impression is that they deserve to be so; and we are thus prepared to lend a helping hand to make them what we say they are. The Northern Italians are as fine a race of people as walk the earth; and all that they want, to be what they once were, or that any people is capable of becoming, is neither English abuse nor English assistance, but three words spoken to the other powers; ‘Let them alone!’ But England, in the dread that others should follow her example, has quite forgotten what she herself once was. Another idea that the aspect of this country and of the country-people suggests, is the fallacy of some of Mr. Malthus’s theories. The soil is here cultivated to the greatest possible degree, and yet it seems to lead to no extraordinary excess of population. Plenty and comfort abound; but they are not accompanied by an appearance of proportionable want and misery, tracking them at the heels. The present generation of farmers and peasants seem well of; the last, probably, were so: this circumstance, therefore, does not appear to have given any overweening presumptuous activity, or headstrong impulse to the principle of population, nor to have determined those fortunate possessors of a land flowing with milk and honey, from an acquaintance with the good things of this life, to throw all away at one desperate cast, and entail famine, disease, vice, and misery on themselves and their immediate descendants. It is not, however, my intention to enter into politics or statistics: let me, therefore, escape from them.

We reached Verona the second day: it is delightfully situated. Mr. Addison has given a very beautiful description of the Giusti gardens which overlook it on one side. They here shew you the tomb of Juliet: it looks like an empty cistern in a common court-yard: you look round, however, and the carved niches with the frescoes on the walls convince you that you are in the precincts of an ancient monastery. The guide also points to the part of the 277wall that Romeo leaped over, and takes you to the spot in the garden where he fell. This gives an air of trick and fiction to the whole. The tradition is a thousand years old: it is kept up with a tender and pious awe: the interest taken in the story of a passion faithful to death shews not that the feeling is rare, but common. Many Italian women have read Shakspeare’s tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, admire and criticise it with great feeling. What remains of the old monastery is at present a Foundling Hospital. On returning from this spot, which is rather low and gloomy, we witnessed the most brilliant sight we had seen in Italy—the sun setting in a flood of gold behind the Alps that overlook the lake of Garda. The Adige foamed at our feet below; the bank opposite was of pure emerald; the hills which rose directly behind it in the most fantastic forms were of perfect purple, and the arches of the bridge to the left seemed plunged in ebon darkness by the flames of light that darted round them. Verona has a less dilapidated, pensive air than Ferrara. Its streets and squares are airy and spacious; but the buildings have a more modern and embellished look, and there is an appearance of greater gaiety and fashion among the inhabitants. The English sometimes come here to reside, though not in such crowds as at Florence, and things are proportionably less dear. The Amphitheatre is nearly as fine and quite as entire as that at Rome: the Gate of Galienas terminates one of the principal streets. We met with nothing remarkable the rest of the way to Milan, except the same rich, unvaried face of the country; the distant Alps hanging like a thin film over the horizon, or approaching nearer in lofty, solid masses as we advanced; the lake of Garda embosomed in them, and the fine fortress of Peschiera buried in its almost subterranean fastnesses like a mole; the romantic town of Virli, with a rainbow glittering over its verdant groves and hills; a very bad inn at Brescia, and a very excellent one at Treviglio. Milan was alive and full of visitors, thick as the ‘motes that people the sun-beam;’ it felt the presence of its lord. The Emperor of Austria was there! Milan (at least on this occasion) was as gay as Bath or any town in England. How times and the characters of countries change with them! In other parts of Italy, as at Rome and at Florence, the business of the inhabitants seemed to be to hide themselves, neither to see nor be seen: here it was evidently their object to do both. The streets were thronged and in motion, and the promenades full of carriages and of elegantly-dressed women, as on a festival or gala-day. I think I never saw so many well-grown, well-made, good-looking women as at Milan. I did not however see one face strikingly beautiful, or with a very fine expression. In this respect 278the Romans have the advantage of them. The North has a tinge of robust barbarism in it. Their animation was a little exuberant; their look almost amounts to a stare, their walk is a swing, their curiosity is not free from an air of defiance. The free and unrestrained manners of former periods of Italy appear also to have been driven northward, and to have lingered longer on the confines. The Cathedral or Duomo is a splendid fabric of white marble: it is rich, vast, and the inside solemn and full of a religious awe: the marble is from a quarry on the Lago Maggiore. We also saw the celebrated theatre of the Gran Scala, which is of an immense size and of extreme beauty, but it was not full, nor was the performance striking. The manager is the proprietor of the Cobourg Theatre (Mr. Glossop), and his wife (formerly our Miss Fearon) the favourite singer of the Milanese circles. I inquired after the great pantomime Actress, Pallarini, but found she had retired from the stage on a fortune. The name of Vigano was not known to my informant. I did not see the great picture of the Last Supper by Leonardo nor the little Luini, two miles out of Milan, which my friend Mr. Beyle charged me particularly to see.

We left Milan, in a calash or small open carriage, to proceed to the Isles Borromees. The first day it rained violently, and the third day the boy drove us wrong, pretending to mistake Laveno for Baveno; so I got rid of him. We had a delightful morning at Como, and a fine view of the lake and surrounding hills, which however rise too precipitously from the shores to be a dwelling-place for any but hunters and fishermen. Several English gentlemen as well as rich Milanese have villas on the banks. I had a hankering after Cadenobia; but the Simplon still lay before me. We were utterly disappointed in the Isles Borromees. Isola Bella, belonging to the Marquis Borromeo, indeed resembles ‘a pyramid of sweetmeats ornamented with green festoons and flowers.’ I had supposed this to be a heavy German conceit, but it is a literal description. The pictures in the Palace are trash. We were accosted by a beggar in an island which contains only a palace and an inn. We proceeded to the inn at Baveno, situated on the high road, close to the lake, and enjoyed for some days the enchanting and varied scenery along its banks. The abrupt rocky precipices that overhang it—the woods that wave in its refreshing breeze—the distant hills—the gliding sails and level shore at the opposite extremity—the jagged summits of the mountains that look down upon Palanza and Feriole, and the deep defiles and snowy passes of the Simplon, every kind of sublimity or beauty, changing every moment with the shifting light or point of view from which you beheld them. We were tempted to 279stop here for the summer in a suite of apartments (not ill furnished) that command a panoramic view of the lake hidden by woods and vineyards from all curious eyes, or in a similar set of rooms at Intra on the other side of the lake, with a garden and the conveniences of a market-town, for six guineas for the half year. Hear this, ye who pine in England on limited incomes, and with a taste for the picturesque! The temptation was great, and may yet prove too strong. We wished, however, to pass the Simplon first. We proceeded to Domo d’ Ossola for this purpose, and the next day began the ascent. I have already attempted to describe the passage of Mont Cenis: this is said to be finer, and I believe it; but it impressed me less, I believe owing to circumstances. The road does not wind its inconceivable breathless way down the side of the same mountain (like the circumgyrations of an eagle), gallery seeing gallery sunk beneath it, but makes longer reaches, and passes over from one side of the valley to the other. The ascent is nearly by the side of the brook of the Simplon for several miles, and you pass along by the edge of precipices and by slender bridges over mountain-torrents, under huge brown rugged rocks, hanging over the road like mighty masses of ruins or castle walls—some bare, others covered with pine-trees to the top; some too steep for any plant to grow on them, others displaying spots of verdure, the thatched cottage, and the winding path half-way up, and dallying with vernal flowers and the winter’s snow to the last moment. The fir generally clothes them, and its spiny form and dark hues combine well with their ‘star-ypointing pyramids,’ and ashy paleness. The eagle screams over-head, and the chamois looks startled round. Half-way up a little rugged path (the pathway of their life) loitered a young peasant and his mistress hand in hand, with some older people behind, following to their peaceful humble home—half hid among the cliffs and clouds. We passed under one or two sounding arches, and over some lofty bridges. At length we reached the village of the Simplon, and stopped there at a most excellent inn, where we had a supper that might vie, for taste and elegance, with that with which Chiffinch entertained Peveril of the Peak and his companion at the little inn, in the wilds of Derbyshire. The next day we proceeded onwards, and passed the commencement of the tremendous glacier of the Flech Horr. Monteroso ascended to the right, shrouded in cloud and mist, at a height inaccessible even to the eye. This mountain is only a few hundred feet lower than Mont-Blanc, yet its name is hardly known. So a difference of a hair’s breadth in talent often makes all the difference between total obscurity and endless renown! We soon after passed the barrier, and found 280ourselves involved in fog and driving sleet upon the brink of precipices: the view was hidden, the road dangerous. On our right were drifts of snow left there by the avalanches. Soon after the mist dispersed, or we had perhaps passed below it, and a fine sunny morning disclosed the whole amazing scene above, about, below us. On our right was the Swartzenberg, behind us the Simplon, on our left the Flech Horr, and the pointed Clise-Horn—opposite was the Yung-Frow, and the distant mountains of the lake of Geneva rose between, circled with wreaths of mist and sunshine: stately fir-trees measured the abrupt descent at our side, or the sound of dimly-seen cataracts; and in an opening below, seen through the steep chasm under our feet, lay the village of Brigg (as in a map) still half a day’s journey distant. We wound round the valley at the other extremity of it: the road on the opposite side, which we could plainly distinguish, seemed almost on the level ground, and when we reached it we found a still greater depth below us. Villages, cottages, flocks of sheep in the valley underneath, now came in sight, and made the eye giddy to look at them: huge cedars by the road-side were interposed between us and the rocks and mountains opposite, and threw them into half-tint; and the height above our heads, and that beneath our feet, by being perceptibly joined together, doubled the elevation of the objects. Mountains seem highest either when you are at their very summits and look down on the world, or when you are midway up, and the eye takes in the measure of their height at two distinct stages. I think the finest part of the descent of the Simplon is about four or five miles before you come to Brigg. The valley is here narrow, and affords prodigious contrasts of wood and rock, of hill and vale, of sheltered beauty and of savage grandeur. The red perpendicular chasm in the rock at the foot of the Clise-Horn is tremendous; the look back to the snow-clad Swartzenberg that you have left behind is no less so. I grant the Simplon has the advantage of Mont Cenis in variety and beauty and in sudden and terrific contrasts, but it has not the same simple expansive grandeur, blending and growing into one vast accumulated impression; nor is the descent of the same whirling and giddy character, as if you were hurried, stage after stage, and from one yawning depth to another, into the regions of ‘Chaos and old Night.’ The Simplon presents more picturesque points of view; Mont Cenis makes a stronger impression on the imagination. I am not prejudiced in favour of one or the other; the road over each was raised by the same master-hand. After a jaunt like this through the air, it was requisite to pause some time at the hospitable inn at Brigg to recover. It only remains for me to describe the lake of Geneva and Mont Blanc.

We left the inn at Brigg, after having stopped there above a week, and proceeded on our way to Vevey, which had always been an interesting point in the horizon, and a resting-place to the imagination. In travelling, we visit names as well as places; and Vevey is the scene of the New Eloise. In spite of Mr. Burke’s philippic against this performance, the contempt of the Lake School, and Mr. Moore’s late Rhymes on the Road, I had still some overmastering recollections on that subject, which I proposed to indulge at my leisure on the spot which was supposed to give them birth, and which I accordingly did. I did not, on a re-perusal, find my once favourite work quite so vapid, quite so void of eloquence or sentiment as some critics (it is true, not much beholden to it) would insinuate. The following passage, among others, seemed to me the perfection of style:—‘Mais vois la rapidité de cet astre, qui vole et ne s’arrête jamais; le tems fuit, l’occasion échappe, ta beauté, ta beauté même aura son terme, elle doit flétrir et périr un jour comme un fleur qui tombe sans avoir été cueilli!’ What a difference between the sound of this passage and of Mr. Moore’s verse or prose! Nay, there is more imagination in the single epithet astre, applied as it is here to this brilliant and fleeting scene of things, than in all our fashionable poet’s writings! At least I thought so, reading St. Preux’s Letter in the wood near Clarens, and stealing occasional glances at the lake and rocks of Meillerie. But I am anticipating.

The mountains on either side of the Valley of the Simplon present a gloomy succession of cliffs, often covered with snow, and contrasting by no means agreeably with the marshy grounds below, through which the Rhone wanders scarce noticed, scarce credited. It is of a whitish muddy colour (from the snow and sand mingled with its course, very much as if had been poured out of a washing-tub), and very different from the deep purple tint it assumes on oozing out from the other side of the Lake, after having drank its cerulean waters. The woods near the lofty peaks of the Clise-Horn, and bordering on Monteroso, are said to be still the frequent haunt of bears, though a price is set upon their heads. As we advanced farther on beyond Tortomania, the whole breadth of the valley was sometimes covered with pine-forests, which gave a relief to the eye, and afforded scope to the imagination. The fault of mountain scenery in general is, that it is too barren and naked, and that the whole is exposed in enormous and unvarying masses to the view at once. The clothing of trees is no less wanted as an ornament than partially to conceal 282objects, and thus present occasional new points of view. Without something to intercept and break the aggregate extent of surface, you gain no advantage by change of place; the same elevation and ground-plan of hill and valley are still before you—you might as well carry a map or landscape in your hand. In this part of our journey, however, besides the natural wildness and grandeur of the scenery, the road was rough and uneven, and frequently crossed rude bridges over the Rhone, or over rivulets pouring into it: the gloomy recesses of the forests might be the abode of wild beasts or of the lurking robber. The huge fragments of rock that had tumbled from the overhanging precipices often made a turning in the road necessary, and for a moment interrupted the view beyond; the towns, built on the sides of the hills, resembled shattered heaps of rock, scarcely distinguishable from the grey peaks and crags with which they were surrounded, giving an agreeable play to the fancy; while the snowy tops of the Simplon mountains, now coming in sight, now hidden behind the nearer summits, threw us back to the scenes we had left, and measured the distance we had traversed. The way in which these mighty landmarks of the Alpine regions ascertain this point is, however, contrary to the usual one: for it is by appearing plainer, the farther you retire from them. They tower with airy shape and dazzling whiteness above the lengthening perspective; and it is the intervening objects that dwindle in the comparison, and are lost sight of in succession. In the midst of the most lonely and singular part of this scene, just as we passed a loose bridge of rough fir-planks over a brawling brook, and as a storm seemed to threaten us, we met a party of English gentlemen in an open carriage, though their courteous looks and waving salutation almost ‘forbade us to interpret them such.’ Certainly there is no people in whom urbanity is more a duty than the English; for there is no people that feel it more. Travelling confounds our ideas, not of place only, but of time; and I could not help making a sudden transition from the party we had by chance encountered to the Chevalier Grandison and his friends, paying their last visit to Bologna. Pshaw! Why do I indulge in such idle fancies? Yet why in truth should I not, when I am a thousand miles from home, and when every object one meets is like a dream? Passe pour cela.

We reached Sion that evening. It is one of the dirtiest and least comfortable towns on the road; nor does the chief inn deserve the epithet so applicable to Swiss inns in general—simplex munditiis. It was here that Rousseau, in one of his early peregrinations, was recommended by his landlord to an iron-foundry in the neighbourhood (the smoke of which, I believe, we saw at a little distance), where 283he would be likely to procure employment, mistaking ‘the pauper lad’ for a journeyman blacksmith. Perhaps the author of the Rhymes on the Road will think it a pity he did not embrace this proposal, instead of forging thunderbolts for kingly crowns. Alas! Mr. Moore would then never have had to write his ‘Fables for the Holy Alliance.’ Haunted by some indistinct recollection of this adventure, I asked at the Inn, ‘If Jean Jacques Rousseau had ever resided in the town?’ The waiter himself could not tell, but soon after brought back for answer, ‘That Monsieur Rousseau had never lived there, but that he had passed through about fourteen years before on his way to Italy, when he had only time to stop to take tea!’—Was this a mere stupid blunder, or one of the refractions of fame, founded on his mission as Secretary to the Venetian Ambassador a hundred years before? There is a tradition in the neighbourhood of Milton’s house in York-street, Westminster, that ‘one Mr. Milford, a celebrated poet, formerly lived there!’ We set forward the next morning on our way to Martigny, through the most dreary valley possible, and in an absolute straight line for twelve or fifteen miles of level road, which was terminated by the village-spire and by the hills leading to the Great St. Bernard and Mont-Blanc. The wind poured down from these tremendous hills, and blew with unabated fury in our faces the whole way. It was a most unpleasant ride, nor did the accommodations at the inn (the Swan, I think) make us amends. The rooms were cold and empty. It might be supposed that the desolation without had subdued the imagination to its own hue and quality, so that it rejected all attempts at improvement; that the more niggard Nature had been to it, the more churlish it became to itself; and through habit, neither felt the want of comforts nor a wish to supply others with them. Close to the bridge stands a steep rock with a castle at the top of it (attributed to the times of the Romans). At a distance it was hardly discernible; and afterwards, when we crossed over to Chamouni, we saw it miles below us like a dove-cot, or a dirt-pye raised by children. Yet viewed from beneath, it seemed to present an imposing and formidable attitude, and to elevate its pigmy front in a line with the stately heights around. So Mr. Washington Irvine binds up his own portrait with Goldsmith’s in the Paris edition of his works, and to many people seems the genteeler man! From the definite and dwarfish, we turned to the snow-clad and cloud-capt; and strolled to the other side of the village, where the road parts to St. Bernard and Chamouni, anxiously gazing at the steep pathway on either side, and half tempted to launch into that billowy sea of mist and mountain: but we reserved this for a subsequent period. As we were loitering at the foot of the dizzy ascent, our 284postilion, who had staid behind us a couple of hours the day before to play at bowls, now drove on half an hour before his time, and when we turned a corner which gave us a view of our inn, no cabriolet was there. He, however, soon found his mistake, and turned back to meet us. The only picturesque objects between this and Bex are a waterfall about two hundred feet in height, issuing through the cavities of the mountain from the immense glacier in the valley of Trie, and the romantic bridge of St. Maurice, the boundary between Savoy and the Pays de Vaud. On the ledge of a rocky precipice, as you approach St. Maurice, stands a hermitage in full view of the road; and possibly the inmate consoles himself in his voluntary retreat by watching the carriages as they come in sight, and fancying that the driver is pointing out his aërial dwelling to the inquisitive and wondering traveller! If a man could transport himself to one of the fixed stars, so far from being lifted above this sublunary sphere, he would still wish his fellow-mortals to point to it as his particular abode, and the scene of his marvellous adventures. We go into a crowd to be seen: we go into solitude that we may be distinguished from the crowd, and talked of. We travel into foreign parts to get the start of those who stay behind us; we return home to hear what has been said of us in our absence. Lord Byron mounted on his pedestal of pride on the shores of the Adriatic, as Mr. Hobhouse rides in the car of popularity through the streets of Westminster. The one object could be seen at a distance; the other, whose mind is more Sancho-Panza-ish and pug-featured, requires to be brought nearer to the eye for stage-effect! Bex itself is delicious. It stands in a little nook of quiet, almost out of the world, nestling in rural beauty, in mountain sublimity. There is an excellent inn, a country church before it, a large ash tree, a circulating library, a rookery, every thing useful and comfortable for the life of man. Behind, there is a ridge of dark rocks; beyond them tall and bare mountains—and a higher range still appears through rolling clouds and circling mists. Our reception at the inn was every way what we could wish, and we were half disposed to stop here for some months. But something whispered me on to Vevey:—this we reached the next day in a drizzling shower of rain, which prevented our seeing much of the country, excepting the black masses of rock and pine-trees that rose perpendicularly from the roadside. The day after my arrival, I found a lodging at a farm-house, a mile out of Vevey, so ‘lapped in luxury,’ so retired, so reasonable, and in every respect convenient, that we remained here for the rest of the summer, and felt no small regret at leaving it.

The country round Vevey is, I must nevertheless own, the least 285picturesque part of the borders of the Lake of Geneva. I wonder Rousseau, who was a good judge and an admirable describer of romantic situations, should have fixed upon it as the scene of the ‘New Eloise.’ You have passed the rocky and precipitous defiles at the entrance into the valley, and have not yet come into the open and more agreeable parts of it. The immediate vicinity of Vevey is entirely occupied with vineyards slanting to the south, and inclosed between stone-walls without any kind of variety or relief. The walks are uneven and bad, and you in general see little (for the walls on each side of you) but the glassy surface of the Lake, the rocky barrier of the Savoy Alps opposite (one of them crowned all the year round with snow, and which, though it is twenty miles off, seems as if you could touch it with your hand, so completely does size neutralize the effect of distance), the green hills of an inferior class over Clarens, with the Dent de Jamant sticking out of them like an iron tooth, and the winding valley leading northward towards Berne and Fribourg. Here stands Gelamont (the name of the Campagna which we took), on a bank sloping down to the brook that passes by Vevey, and so entirely embosomed in trees and ‘upland swells,’ that it might be called, in poetical phrase, ‘the peasant’s nest.’ Here every thing was perfectly clean and commodious. The fermier or vineyard-keeper, with his family, lived below, and we had six or seven rooms on a floor (furnished with every article or convenience that a London lodging affords) for thirty Napoleons for four months, or about thirty shillings a week. This first expense we found the greatest during our stay, and nearly equal to all the rest, that of a servant included. The number of English settled here had made lodgings dear, and an English gentleman told me he was acquainted with not less than three-and-twenty English families in the neighbourhood. To give those who may feel an inclination to try foreign air, an idea of the comparative cheapness of living abroad, I will mention that mutton (equal to the best Welch mutton, and fed on the high grounds near Moudon) is two batz, that is, threepence English per pound; and the beef (which is also good, though not of so fine a quality) is the same. Trout, caught in the Lake, you get almost for nothing. A couple of fowls is eighteen-pence. The wine of the country, which though not rich, is exceedingly palatable, is three pence a bottle. You may have a basket of grapes in the season for one shilling or fifteen pence.^[48] The bread, butter and milk are equally cheap and excellent. They have not the art here of adulterating every thing. You find the same things as in England, served up in the same plain and decent manner, but in greater plenty, and generally 286speaking, of a better and more wholesome quality, and at least twice as cheap. In England they have few things, and they contrive to spoil those few. There is a good deal of ill-nature and churlishness, as well as a narrow policy in this. The trading principle seems to be to give you the worst, and make you pay as dear for it as possible. It is a vile principle. As soon as you land at Dover, you feel the force of this home truth. They cheat you to your face, and laugh at you. I must say, that it appears to me, whatever may be the faults or vices of other nations, the English population is the only one to which the epithet blackguard is applicable. They are, in a word, the only people who make a merit of giving others pain, and triumph in their impudence and ill-behaviour, as proofs of a manly and independent spirit. Afraid that you may complain of the absence of foreign luxuries, they are determined to let you understand beforehand, they do not care about what you may think, and wanting the art to please, resort to the easier and surer way of keeping up their importance by practising every kind of annoyance. Instead of their being at your mercy, you find yourself at theirs, subjected to the sullen airs of the masters, and to the impertinent fatuity of the waiters. They dissipate your theory of English comfort and hospitality at the threshold. What do they care that you have cherished a fond hope of getting a nice, snug little dinner on your arrival, better than any you have had in France? ‘The French may be d——,’ is the answer that passes through their minds—‘the dinner is good enough, if it is English!’ Let us take care, that by assuming an insolent local superiority over all the world, we do not sink below them in every thing, liberty not excepted. While the name of any thing passes current, we may dispense with the reality, and keep the start of the rest of mankind, simply by asserting that we have it, and treating all foreigners as a set of poor wretches, who neither know how, nor are in truth fit to live! Against this post, alas! John Bull is continually running his head, but as yet without knocking his brains out. The beef-steak which you order at Dover with patriotic tender yearnings for its reputation, is accordingly filled with cinders—the mutton is done to a rag—the soup not eatable—the porter sour—the bread gritty—the butter rancid. Game, poultry, grapes, wine it is in vain to think of; and as you may be mortified at the privation, they punish you for your unreasonable dissatisfaction by giving you cause for it in the mismanagement of what remains.^[49] In the midst of this ill fare you meet with equally 287bad treatment. While you are trying to digest a tough beef-steak, a fellow comes in and peremptorily demands your fare, on the assurance that you will get your baggage from the clutches of the Custom-house in time to go by the six o’clock coach; and when you find that this is impossible, and that you are to be trundled off at two in the morning, or by the next day’s coach, if it is not full, and complain to that personification of blind justice, an English mob, you hear the arch slang reply, ‘Do you think the Gentleman such a fool as to part with his money without knowing why?’ and should the natural rejoinder rise to your lips—‘Do you take me for a fool, because I did not take you for a rogue?’ the defendant immediately stands at bay upon the national character for honesty and morality. ‘I hope there are no rogues here!’ is echoed through the dense atmosphere of English intellect, though but the moment before they had been laughing in their sleeves (or out loud) at the idea of a stranger having been tricked by a townsman. Happy country! equally and stupidly satisfied with its vulgar vices and boasted virtues!

Yet to what purpose utter such a wish, since it is impossible to stay there, and the moment you are separated from your fellows, you think better of them, begin to form chimeras with which you would fain compare the realities, find them the same as ever to your cost and shame—

I found little of this tracasserie at Gelamont. Days, weeks, months, and even years might have passed on much in the same manner, with ‘but the season’s difference.’ We breakfasted at the same hour, and the tea-kettle was always boiling (an excellent thing in housewifery)—a lounge in the orchard for an hour or two, and twice a week we could see the steam-boat creeping like a spider over the surface of the lake; a volume of the Scotch novels (to be had in every library on the Continent, in English, French, German, or Italian, as the reader pleases), or M. Galignani’s Paris and London Observer, amused us till dinner time; then tea and a walk till the moon unveiled itself, ‘apparent queen of night,’ or the brook, swoln with a transient shower, was heard more distinctly in the darkness, mingling with the soft, rustling breeze; and the next morning the song of peasants broke upon refreshing sleep, as the sun glanced among the clustering vine-leaves, or the shadowy hills, as the mists retired from their summits, looked in at our windows. The uniformity of this mode of life was 288only broken during fifteen weeks that we remained in Switzerland, by the civilities of Monsieur Le Vade, a Doctor of medicine and octogenarian, who had been personally acquainted with Rousseau in his younger days; by some attempts by our neighbours to lay us under obligations, by parting with rare curiosities to Monsieur l’Anglois for half their value; and by an excursion to Chamouni, of which I must defer the account to my next.

We crossed over in a boat to St. Gingolph, a little town opposite to Vevey, and proceeded on the other side of the lake to Martigny, from which we could pass over either on foot or by the help of mules to Mont-Blanc. It was a warm day towards the latter end of August, and the hills before us drew their clear outline, and the more distant Alps waved their snowy tops (tinged with golden sunshine) in the gently-undulating surface of the crystal lake. As we approached the Savoy side, the mountains in front, which from Vevey look like a huge battery or flat upright wall, opened into woody recesses, or reared their crests on high; rich streaks of the most exquisite verdure gleamed at their feet, and St. Gingolph came distinctly in view, with its dingy-looking houses and smoking chimneys. It is a small manufacturing town, full of forges and workshops, and the inn is dirty and disagreeable. The contrast to Vevey was striking. But this side of the lake is in the dominions of the King of Sardinia, and cleanliness seems to be in general the virtue of republics, or of free states. There is an air of desolation, sluttishness, and indifference, the instant you cross the water, compared with the neatness, activity, regularity, and cheerfulness of the Pays de Vaud. We walked out to take a view of the situation, as soon as we had bespoken our room and a supper. It was a brilliant sunset; nor do I recollect having ever beheld so majestic and rich a scene, set off to such advantage. A steep pathway led to a village embayed between two mountains, whose tops towered into the sky: conical hills rose to about half their height, covered with green copses: fields and cottages were seen climbing as it were the sides of others, with cattle feeding; the huge projecting rocks gave new combinations and a new aspect to the most picturesque objects; tall branching trees (ash, or beech, or chesnut) hung from green sloping banks over the road-side, or dipped their foliage in the transparent wave below: their bold luxuriant forms threw the rocks and mountains into finer relief, and elevated them into a higher atmosphere, so that they seemed trembling (another airy 289world) over our heads. The lake shone like a broad golden mirror, reflecting the thousand dyes of the fleecy purple clouds, while Saint Gingolph, with its clustering habitations, shewed like a dark pitchy spot by its side; and beyond the glimmering verge of the Jura (almost hid in its own brightness) hovered gay wreaths of clouds, fair, lovely, visionary, that seemed not of this world, but brought from some dream of fancy, treasured up from past years, emblems of hope, of joy and smiling regret, that had come to grace a scene so heavenly, and to bid it a last, lingering farewell. No person can describe the effect; but so in Claude’s landscapes the evening clouds drink up the rosy light, and sink into soft repose! Every one who travels into Switzerland should visit this secluded spot, and witness such a sunset, with the heaven stooping its face into the lake on one side, and the mountains, rocks, and woods, lifting earth to heaven on the other. We had no power to leave it or to admire it, till the evening shades stole in upon us, and drew the dusky veil of twilight over it.

We had a pleasant walk the next morning along the side of the lake under the grey cliffs, the green hills and azure sky; now passing under the open gateway of some dilapidated watch-tower that had in former times connected the rocky barrier with the water, now watching the sails of a boat slowly making its way among the trees on the banks of the Rhone, like butterflies expanding their wings in the breeze, or the snowy ridges that seemed close to us at Vevey receding farther into a kind of lofty back-ground as we advanced. The speculation of Bishop Berkeley, or some other philosopher, that distance is measured by motion and not by the sight, is verified here at every step. After going on for hours, and perceiving no alteration in the form or appearance of the object before you, you begin to be convinced that it is out of ordinary calculation, or, in the language of the Fancy, an ‘ugly customer;’ and our curiosity once excited, is ready to magnify every circumstance relating to it to an indefinite extent. The literal impression being discarded as insufficient, the imagination takes out an unlimited letter of credit for all that is possible or wonderful, and what the eye sees is considered thenceforward merely as an imperfect hint, to be amplified and filled up on a colossal scale by the understanding and rules of proportion. To say the truth, you also suffer a change, feel like Lilliputians, and can fancy yourselves transported to a different world, where the dimensions and relations of things are regulated by some unknown law. The inn where we stopped at Vionnax is bad. Beyond this place, the hills at the eastern end of the lake form into an irregular and stupendous amphitheatre; and you pass through long and apparently endless vistas of tall flourishing trees, 290without being conscious of making much progress. There is a glass-manufactory at Vionnax, which I did not go to see; others who have more curiosity may. It will be there (I dare say) next year for those who choose to visit it: I liked neither its glare nor its heat. The cold icy crags that hang suspended over it have been there a thousand years, and will be there a thousand years to come. Short-lived as we are, let us attach ourselves to the immortal, and scale (assisted by earth’s giant brood) the empyrean of pure thought! But the English abroad turn out of their way to see every pettifogging, huckstering object that they could see better at home, and are as fussy and fidgetty, with their smoke-jacks and mechanical inventions among the Alps, as if they had brought Manchester and Sheffield in their pockets! The finest effect along this road is the view of the bridge as you come near St. Maurice. The mountains on either side here descend nearly to a point, boldly and abruptly; the river flows rapidly through the tall arch of the bridge, on one side of which you see an old fantastic turret, and beyond it the hill called the Sugar-loaf, rising up in the centre of immense ranges of mountains, and with fertile and variously-marked plains stretching out in the intervening space. The landscape painter has only to go there, and make a picture of it. It is already framed by nature to his hand! I mention this the more, because that kind of grouping of objects which is essential to the picturesque, is not always to be found in the most sublime or even beautiful scenes. Nature (so to speak) uses a larger canvass than man, and where she is greatest and most prodigal of her wealth, often neglects that principle of concentration and contrast which is an indispensable preliminary before she can be translated with effect into the circumscribed language of art. We supped at Martigny, at the Hotel de la Poste (formerly a convent), and the next morning proceeded by the Valley of Trie and the Col de Peaume to Chamouni.

We left the great St. Bernard, and the road by which Buonaparte passed to Marengo, on our left, and Martigny and the Valley of the Simplon directly behind us. These last were also soon at an immeasurable depth below us; but the summits of the mountains that environed us on all sides, seemed to ascend with us, and to add our elevation to their own. Crags, of which we could only before discern the jutting tops, gradually reared their full stature at our side; and icy masses, one by one, came in sight, emerging from their lofty recesses, like clouds floating in mid-air. All this while a green valley kept us company by the road-side, watered with gushing rills, interspersed with cottages and well-stocked farms: fine elms and ash grew on the sides of the hills, under the shade of one of which we 291saw an old peasant asleep. The road, however, was long, rough, and steep; and from the heat of the sun, and the continual interruption of loose stones and the straggling roots of trees, I felt myself exceedingly exhausted. We had a mule, a driver, and a guide. I was advised, by all means, to lessen the fatigue of the ascent by taking hold of the queue of Monsieur le Mulet, a mode of travelling partaking as little of the sublime as possible, and to which I reluctantly acceded. We at last reached the top, and looked down on the Valley of Trie, bedded in rocks, with a few wooden huts in it, a mountain-stream traversing it from the Glacier at one end, and with an appearance as if summer could never gain a footing there, before it would be driven out by winter. In the midst of this almost inaccessible and desolate spot, we found a little inn or booth, with refreshments of wine, bread, and fruit, and a whole drove of English travellers, mounted or on foot.

As we mounted the steep wood on the other side of the valley, we met several mules returning, with their drivers only, and looking extremely picturesque, as they were perched above our heads among the jagged pine-trees, and cautiously felt their perilous way over the edges of projecting rocks and stumps of trees, down the zigzag pathway. The view here is precipitous, extensive, and truly appalling, both from the size of the objects and their rugged wildness. The smell of the pine-trees, the clear air, and the golden sunshine gleaming through the dark foliage refreshed me; and the fatigue from which I had suffered in the morning completely wore off. I had concluded that when we got to the top of the wood that hung over our heads, we should have mastered our difficulties; but they only then began. We emerged into a barren heath or morass of a most toilsome ascent, lengthening as we advanced, with herds of swine, sheep, and cattle feeding on it, and a bed of half-melted snow marking the summit over which we had to pass. We turned aside, half-way up this dreary wilderness, to stop at a chalet, where a boy, who tended the straggling cattle, was fast asleep in the middle of the day; and being waked up, procured us a draught of most delicious water from a fountain. We at length reached the Col de Peaume, and saw Mont Blanc, the King of Mountains, stretching away to the left, with clouds circling round its sides, and snows forever resting on its head. It was an image of immensity and eternity. Earth had heaved it from its bosom; the ‘vast cerulean’ had touched it with its breath. It was a meeting of earth and sky. Other peaked cliffs rose perpendicularly 292by its side, and a range of rocks, of red granite, fronted it to the north; but Mont-Blanc itself was round, bald, shining, ample, and equal in its swelling proportions—a huge dumb heap of matter. The valley below was bare, without an object—no ornament, no contrast to set it off—it reposed in silence and in solitude, a world within itself.

There is an end here of vanity and littleness, and all transitory jarring interests. You stand, as it were, in the presence of the Spirit of the Universe, before the majesty of Nature, with her chief elements about you; cloud and air, and rock, and stream, and mountain are brought into immediate contact with primeval Chaos and the great First Cause. The mind hovers over mysteries deeper than the abysses at our feet; its speculations soar to a height beyond the visible forms it sees around it. As we descended the path on foot (for our muleteer was obliged to return at the barrier between the two states of Savoy and Switzerland marked by a solitary unhewn stone,) we saw before us the shingled roofs of a hamlet, situated on a patch of verdure near inaccessible columns of granite, and could hear the tinkling bells of a number of cattle pasturing below (an image of patriarchal times!)—we also met one or two peasants returning home with loads of fern, and still farther down, found the ripe harvests of wheat and barley growing close up to the feet of the glaciers (those huge masses of ice arrested in their passage from the mountains, and collected by a thousand winters,) and the violet and gilliflower nestling in the cliffs of the hardest rocks. There are four of these glaciers, that pour their solid floods into the valley, with rivulets issuing from them into the Arbe. The one next to Chamouni is, I think, the finest. It faces you like a broad sheet of congealed snow and water about half-way up the lofty precipice, and then spreads out its arms on each side into seeming batteries and fortifications of undistinguishable rock and ice, as though winter had here ‘built a fortress for itself,’ seated in stern state, and amidst frowning horrors. As we advanced into the plain, and before it became dusk, we could discern at a distance the dark wood that skirts the glaciers of Mont-Blanc, the spire of Chamouni, and the bridges that cross the stream. We also discovered, a little way on before us, stragglers on mules, and a cabriolet, that was returning from the valley of Trie, by taking a more circuitous route. As the day closed in and was followed by the moonlight, the mountains on our right hung over us like a dark pall, and the glaciers gleamed like gigantic shrouds opposite. We might have fancied ourselves inclosed in a vast tomb, 293but for the sounding cataracts and the light clouds that flitted over our heads. We arrived at Chamouni at last, and found the three inns crowded with English. The entrance to that to which we had been recommended, or rather were conducted by our guide (the Hotel de Londres,) was besieged by English loungers, like a bazaar, or an hotel at some fashionable watering-place, and we were glad to secure a small but comfortable room for the night.

We had an excellent supper, the materials of which we understood came from Geneva. We proceeded the next morning to Saleges, on our way to this capital. If the entrance to the valley of Chamouni is grand and simple, the route from it towards Geneva unites the picturesque to the sublime in the most remarkable degree. For two or three miles you pass along under Mont-Blanc, looking up at it with awe and wonder, derived from a knowledge of its height. The interest, the pleasure you take in it is from conviction and reflection; but turn a corner in the road at a homely village and a little bridge, and it shoots up into the sky of its own accord, like a fantastic vision. Its height is incredible, its brightness dazzling, and you notice the snow crusted upon its surface into round hillocks, with pellucid shadows like shining pavilions for the spirits of the upper regions of the air. Why is the effect so different from its former desolate and lumpish appearance? Tall rocks rise from the roadside with dark waving pine-trees shooting from them, over the highest top of which, as you look up, you see Mont-Blanc; a ruined tower serves as a foil to the serene smiler in the clouds that mocks at the defences of art, or the encroachments of time. Another mountain opposite, part bare, part clothed with wood, intercepts the view to the left, giving effect to what is seen, and leaving more to the imagination; and the impetuous torrent roars at your feet, a hundred fathoms below, with the bright red clusters of the mountain-ash and loose fragments of rock bending over it, and into which a single step would precipitate you. One of the mightiest objects in nature is set off by the most appropriate and striking accidents; and the impression is of the most romantic and enchanting kind. The scene has an intoxicating effect; you are relieved from the toil of wishing to admire, and the imagination is delighted to follow the lead of the senses. We passed this part of the road in a bright morning, incessantly turning back to admire, and finding fresh cause of pleasure and wonder at every step or pause, loth to leave it, and yet urged onward by continual displays of new and endless beauties. Chamouni seems to lie low enough; but we found that the river and the road along with it winds and tumbles for miles over steep banks or sloping ground; and as you revert your eye, you find that which was a flat converted 294into a table-land; the objects which were lately beneath you now raised above you, and forming an intermediate stage between the spot where you are and the more distant elevations; and the last snow-crowned summits reflected in translucent pools of water by the roadside, with spots of the brightest azure in them (denoting mineral springs); the luxuriant branches of the ash, willow, and acacia waving over them, and the scarlet flowers of the geranium, or the water-lilies, ‘all silver white,’ stuck like gems in the girdle of old winter, and offering a sparkling foreground to the retiring range of icebergs and avalanches. This rapid and whirling descent continued almost to Saleges, about twenty miles from Chamouni. Here we dined, and proceeded that night to Bonneville, on nearly level ground; but still with the same character the whole way of a road winding through the most cultivated and smiling country, full of pastures, orchards, vineyards, cottages, villas, refreshing streams, long avenues of trees, and every kind of natural and artificial beauty, flanked with rocks and precipices (on each side) of the most abrupt and terrific appearance, and on which, from the beginning of time, the hand of man has made no impression, except that here and there you see a patch of verdure, a cottage, a flock of sheep, at a height which the eye can hardly reach, and which you think no foot could tread. I have seen no country where I have been more tempted to stop and enjoy myself, where I thought the inhabitants had more reason to be satisfied, and where, if you could not find happiness, it seemed in vain to seek farther for it. You have every kind and degree of enjoyment; the extremes of luxury and wildness, gigantic sublimity at a distance or over your head, elegance and comfort at your feet; you may gaze at the air-drawn Alps, or shut out the prospect by a flowering shrub, or by a well-clipped hedge, or neatly-wainscoted parlour: and you may vary all these as you please, ‘with kindliest interchange.’ Perhaps one of these days I may try the experiment, and turn my back on sea-coal fires, and old English friends! The inn at Bonneville was dirty, ill-provided, and as it generally happens in such cases, the people were inattentive, and the charges high. We were, however, indemnified by the reception we met with at Geneva, where the living was luxurious, and the expence comparatively trifling. I shall not dwell on this subject, lest I should be thought an epicure, though indeed I rather ‘live a man forbid,’ being forced to deny myself almost all those good things which I recommend to others. Geneva is, I think, a very neat and picturesque town, not equal to some others we had seen, but very well for a Calvinistic capital. It stands on a rising ground, at the end of the lake, with the purple Rhone running by it, and Mont-Blanc and the 295Savoy Alps seen on one side, and the Jura on the other. I was struck with the fine forms of many of the women here. Though I was pleased with my fare, I was not altogether delighted with the manners and appearance of the inhabitants. Their looks may be said to be moulded on the republican maxim, that ‘you are no better than they,’ and on the natural inference from it, that ‘they are better than you.’ They pass you with that kind of scrutinizing and captious air, as if some controversy was depending between you as to the form of religion or government. I here saw Rousseau’s house, and also read the Edinburgh Review for May. The next day we passed along in the Diligence through scenery of exquisite beauty and perfect cultivation—vineyards and farms, and villas and hamlets of the most enviable description, succeeding each other in uninterrupted connexion, by the smooth margin of the silver lake. We saw Lausanne by moonlight. Its situation, as far as I could judge, and the environs were superb. We arrived that night at Vevey, after a week’s absence and an exceedingly delightful tour.

We returned down the Rhine through Holland. I was willing to see the contrast between flat and lofty, and between Venice and Amsterdam. We left Vevey on the 20th of September, and arrived in England on the 16th of October. It was at first exceedingly hot; we encountered several days of severe cold on the road, and it afterwards became mild and pleasant again. We hired a char-aux-bancs from Vevey to Basle, and it took us four days to reach this latter place; the expense of the conveyance was twenty-four francs a day, besides the driver. The first part of our journey, as we ascended from the Lake on the way to Moudon, was like an aërial voyage, from the elevation and the clearness of the atmosphere; yet still through the most lovely country imaginable, and with glimpses of the grand objects behind us (seen over delicious pastures, and through glittering foliage) that were truly magical. The combinations of language, however, answer but ill to the varieties of nature, and by repeating these descriptions so often, I am afraid of becoming tiresome. My excuse must be, that I have little to relate but what I saw. After mounting to a considerable height, we descended to Moudon, a small town situated in a most romantic valley. The accommodations at the inn here were by no means good, though it is a place of some pretensions. In proportion to the size of the house 296and the massiveness of the furniture, the provisions of the kitchen appeared to be slender, and the attendance slack. The freshness of the air the next morning, and the striking beauty and rapid changes of the scenery, soon made us forget any disappointment we had experienced in this respect. As we ascended a steep hill on this side of Moudon, and looked back, first at the green dewy valley under our feet, with the dusky town and the blue smoke rising from it, then at the road we had traversed the preceding evening, winding among thick groves of trees, and last at the Savoy Alps on the other side of the Lake of Geneva (with which we had been familiar for four months, and which seemed to have no mind to quit us) I perceived a bright speck close to the top of one of these—I was delighted, and said it was Mont Blanc. Our driver was of a different opinion, was positive it was only a cloud, and I accordingly supposed I had taken a sudden fancy for a reality. I began in secret to take myself to task, and to lecture myself for my proneness to build theories on the foundation of my conjectures and wishes. On turning round occasionally, however, I observed that this cloud remained in the same place, and I noticed the circumstance to our guide, as favouring my first suggestion; for clouds do not usually remain long in the same place. We disputed the point for half a day, and it was not till the afternoon when we had reached the other side of the lake of Neufchatel, that this same cloud rising like a canopy over the point where it had hovered, ‘in shape and station proudly eminent,’ he acknowledged it to be Mont Blanc. We were then at a distance of about forty miles from Vevey, and eighty or ninety from Chamouni. This will give the reader some idea of the scale and nature of this wonderful scenery. We dined at Iverdun (a pretty town), at the head of the lake, and passed on to Neufchatel, along its enchanting and almost unrivalled borders, having the long unaspiring range of the Jura on our left (from the top of which St. Preux, on his return from his wanderings round the world, first greeted that country, where ‘torrents of delight had poured into his heart,’ and, indeed, we could distinguish the Dent de Jamant right over Clarens almost the whole way), and on our right was the rippling lake, its low cultivated banks on the other side, then a brown rocky ridge of mountains, and the calm golden peaks of the snowy passes of the Simplon, the Great St. Bernard, and (as I was fain to believe) of Monteroso rising into the evening sky at intervals beyond. Meanwhile we rode on through a country abounding in farms and vineyards and every kind of comfort, and deserving the epithets, ‘verd et riant.’ Sometimes a tall rock rose by the road side; or a ruinous turret or a well-compacted villa attracted our attention. Neufchatel is larger and handsomer than 297Iverdun, and is remarkable for a number of those genteel and quiet-looking habitations, where people seem to have retired (in the midst of society) to spend the rest of their lives in ease and comfort: they are not for shew, nor are they very striking from situation; they are neither fashionable nor romantic; but the decency and sober ornaments of their exterior evidently indicate fireside enjoyments and cultivated taste within. This kind of retreat, where there is nothing to surprise, nothing to disgust, nothing to draw the attention out of itself, uniting the advantages of society and solitude, of simplicity and elegance, and where the mind can indulge in a sort of habitual and self-centred satisfaction, is the only one which I should never feel a wish to quit. The golden mean is, indeed, an exact description of the mode of life I should like to lead—of the style I should like to write; but alas! I am afraid I shall never succeed in either object of my ambition!

The next day being cloudy, we lost sight entirely of the highest range of Alpine hills, and saw them no more afterwards. The road lay for some miles through an open and somewhat dreary country, in which the only objects of curiosity were the tall peasant-girls working in the fields, with their black gauze head-dresses, sticking out from their matted hair like the wings of a dragon-fly. We, however, had the Lake of Bienne and Isle of St. Pierre in prospect before us, which are so admirably described by Rousseau, in his ‘Reveries of a Solitary Walker,’ and to which he gives the preference over the Lake of Geneva. The effect from the town of Bienne where we stopped to dine was not much; but in climbing to the top of a steep sandy hill beyond it, we saw the whole to great advantage. Evening was just closing in, and the sky was cloudy, with a few red streaks near the horizon: the first range of Alps only was discernible; the Lake was of a dull sombre lead colour, and the Isle of St. Pierre was like a dark spot in it; the hills on one side of the Lake ascended abrupt and gloomy; extensive forests swept in magnificent surges over the rich valley to our left; towns were scattered below us here and there, as in a map; rocky fragments hung over our heads, with the shattered trunks of huge pine-trees; a mountain-torrent rushed down the irregular chasm between us and the base of the mountain, that rose in misty grandeur on the opposite side; but the whole was in the greatest keeping, and viewed by the twilight of historic landscape. Yet amidst all this solemnity and grandeur, the eye constantly reverted to one little dark speck, the Isle of St. Pierre (where Rousseau had taken refuge for a few months from his sorrows and his persecutions) with a more intense interest than all the rest; for the widest prospects are trivial to the deep recesses of the human heart, and its anxious 298beatings are far more audible than the ‘loud torrent or the whirlwind’s roar!’ The clouds of vapours, and the ebon cloud of night prevented our having a distinct view of the road that now wound down to ——, where we stopped for the night. The inn here (the Rose and Crown), though almost a solitary house in a solitary valley, is a very good one, and the cheapest we met with abroad. Our bill for supper, lodging, and breakfast, amounted to only seven francs. Our route, the following morning, lay up a broad steep valley, with a fine gravelly road through it, and forests of pine and other trees, raised like an amphitheatre on either side. The sun had just risen, and the drops of rain still hung upon the branches. On the other side we came into a more open country, and then again were inclosed among wild and narrow passes of high rock, split either by thunder or earthquakes into ledges, like castle walls, coming down to the edge of a stream that winds through the valley, or aspiring to an airy height, with the diminished pines growing on their very tops, and patches of verdure and the foliage of other trees flourishing in the interstices between them. It was the last scene of the kind we encountered. I begin to tire of these details, and will hasten to the end of my journey, touching only on a few detached points and places.

Basle.—This is a remarkably neat town; but it lies beyond the confines of the picturesque. We stopped at the Three Kings, and were shewn into a long, narrow room, which did not promise well at first; but the waiter threw up the window at the further end, and we all at once saw the full breadth of the Rhine, rolling rapidly beneath it, after passing through the arches of an extensive bridge. It was clear moonlight, and the effect was fine and unexpected. The broad mass of water rushed by with clamorous sound and stately impetuosity, as if it were carrying a message from the mountains to the ocean! The next morning we perceived that it was of a muddy colour. We thought of passing down it in a small boat; but the covering was so low as to make the posture uncomfortable, or, if raised higher, there was a danger of its being overset by any sudden gust of wind. We therefore went by the Diligence to Colmar and Strasburg. I regretted afterwards that we did not take the right hand road by Freybourg and the Black Forest—the woods, hills, and mouldering castles of which, as far as I could judge from a distance, are the most romantic and beautiful possible. The tower at Strasburg is red, and has a singular appearance. The fortifications here, in time of peace, have an effect like the stillness of death.

Rastadt.—We crossed the Rhine at Strasburg, and proceeded through Rastadt and Manheim to Mayence. We stopped the first night at the Golden Cross at Rastadt, which is the very best inn I 299was at during the whole time I was abroad. Among other things, we had chiffrons for supper, which I found on inquiry were wood-partridges, which are much more highly esteemed than the field ones. So delicately do they distinguish in Germany! Manheim is a splendid town, both from its admirable buildings and the glossy neatness of the houses. They are too fine to live in, and seem only made to be looked at. Would that one of the streets could be set down in Waterloo-place! Yet even Manheim is not equal to the towns in Italy. There the houses are palaces.

Mayence is a disagreeable town. We half missed the scenery between this and Coblentz, the only part of the Rhine worth seeing. We saw it, however, by moonlight (which hung over it like a silver veil), with its nodding towers and dismantled fortresses over our heads, the steep woody banks on the opposite side, and the broad glittering surface of the Rhine, reflecting the white clouds or dark sail gliding by. It was like a brilliant dream; nor did the mellow winding notes of the horn, calling to the warders of the drawbridges as we passed along, lessen the effect. Ehrenbreitstein overlooks Coblentz, and crowns it with magnificence and beauty. The Duke of Wellington, I understood, had been here, and being asked by a French officer, ‘If it could be taken?’ answered, ‘Yes; in two ways, by hunger and gold.’ Did the Duke of Wellington make this answer? I cry you mercy—it was the Frenchman who gave the answer: the Duke said nothing.

Cologne is the birth-place of Rubens; and at one of the churches, there is a Crucifixion by him, which we did not see, for it being the time of divine service, the back was turned to the spectator, and only a copy of it was exhibited. The road from Cologne to Neuss is the only really bad one we found on the Continent; it is a mere sand-bank, and not likely to be soon mended, from its vicinity to the Rhine.

From Neuss to Cleves we went in the Royal Prussian Diligence, and from thence to Nimeguen, the first town in Holland. From a small tower here we had an admirable view of the country. It was nearly a perfect flat all round, as far as the eye could reach; yet it was a rich and animated, as well as a novel scene. You saw a greater extent of surface than is possible in a hilly country; all within the circumference of the horizon lay exposed to the eye. It was like seeing a section of the entire globe, or like ‘striking flat its thick rotundity.’ It was a fine clear afternoon, and in the midst of this uniformity of surface, you saw every other variety—rich meadows, with flocks and herds feeding, hedge-rows, willowy banks, woods, corn-fields, roads winding along in different directions, canals, boats 300sailing, innumerable villages, windmills, bridges, and towns and cities in the far-off horizon; but neither rock, nor mountain, nor barren waste, nor any object that prevented your seeing the one beyond it. There were no contrasts, no masses, but the immense space stretched out beneath the eye was filled up with dotted lines, and minute, detached, countless beauties. It was as if the earth were curiously fringed and embroidered. Holland is the same everywhere, except that it is often more intersected by canals; and that as you approach the sea, the water prevails over the land. We proceeded from Nimeguen to Utrecht and Amsterdam, by the stage. The rich uninterrupted cultivation, the marks of successful industry and smiling plenty, are equally commendable and exhilarating; but the repetition of the same objects, and the extent of home view, become at last oppressive. If you see much at once, there ought to be masses and relief: if you see only detached objects, you ought to be confined to a few of them at a time. What is the use of seeing a hundred windmills, a hundred barges, a hundred willow-trees, or a hundred herds of cattle at once? Any one specimen is enough, and the others hang like a dead-weight on the traveller’s patience. Besides, there is something lumpish and heavy in the aspect of the country; the eye is clogged and impeded in its progress over it by dams and dykes, and the marshy nature of the soil damps and chills imagination. There is a like extent of country at Cassel in France; but from the greater number of woods and a more luxuriant vegetation (leaving the bare earth seldom visible,) the whole landscape seems in one glow, and the eye scours delighted over waving groves and purple distances. The towns and villas in Holland are unrivalled for neatness, and an appearance of wealth and comfort. All the way from Utrecht to Amsterdam, to the Hague, to Rotterdam, you might fancy yourself on Clapham Common. The canals are lined with farms and summer-houses, with orchards and gardens of the utmost beauty, and in excellent taste. The exterior of their buildings is as clean as the interior of ours; their public-houses look as nice and well-ordered as our private ones. If you are up betimes in a morning, you see a servant wench (the domestic Naiad,) with a leathern pipe, like that attached to a fire-engine, drenching the walls and windows with pail-fulls of water. With all this, they suffocate you with tobacco smoke in their stage-coaches and canal-boats, and you do not see a set of clean teeth from one end of Holland to the other. Amsterdam did not answer our expectations; it is a kind of paltry, rubbishly Venice. The pictures of Rembrandt here (some of which have little shade) are inferior to what we have in England. I was assured here that Rembrandt was the greatest painter in the world, and at Antwerp that Rubens was. 301The inn at Amsterdam (the Rousland) is one of the best I have been at; and an inn is no bad test of the civilization and diffusion of comfort in a country. We saw a play at the theatre here; and the action was exceedingly graceful and natural. The chimes at Amsterdam, which play every quarter of an hour, at first seemed gay and delightful, and in a day and a half became tedious and intolerable. It was as impertinent as if a servant could not come into the room to answer the bell without dancing and jumping over the chairs and tables every time. A row of lime-trees grew and waved their branches in the middle of the street facing the hotel. The Dutch, who are not an ideal people, bestow all their taste and fancy on practical things, and instead of creating the chimeras of poetry, devote their time and thoughts to embellishing the objects of ordinary and familiar life. Ariosto said, it was easier to build palaces with words, than common houses with stones. The Hague is Hampton-Court turned into a large town. There is an excellent collection of pictures here, with some of my old favourites brought back from the Louvre, by Rembrandt, Vandyke, Paul Potter, &c. Holland is, perhaps, the only country which you gain nothing by seeing. It is exactly the same as the Dutch landscapes of it. I was shewn the plain and village of Ryswick, close to the Hague. It struck me I had seen something very like it before. It is the back-ground of Paul Potter’s Bull. From the views and models of Chinese scenery and buildings preserved in the Museum here, it would seem that Holland is the China of Europe. Delft is a very model of comfort and polished neatness. We met with a gentleman belonging to this place in the trackschuyt, who, with other civilities, shewed us his house (a perfect picture in its kind,) and invited us in to rest and refresh ourselves, while the other boat was getting ready. These things are an extension of one’s idea of humanity. It is pleasant, and one of the uses of travel, to find large tracts of land cultivated, cities built and repaired, all the conveniences of life, men, women, and children laughing, talking, and happy, common sense and good manners on the other side of the English channel. I would not wish to lower any one’s idea of England; but let him enlarge his notions of existence and enjoyment beyond it. He will not think the worse of his own country, for thinking better of human nature! The inconveniences of travelling by canal-boats in Holland is, that you make little way, and are forced to get out and have your luggage taken into another boat at every town you come to, which happens two or three times in the course of the day. Let no one go to the Washington Arms at Rotterdam; it is only fit for American sea-captains. Rotterdam is a handsome bustling town; and on inquiring our way, we were accosted 302by a Dutch servant-girl, who had lived in an English family for a year, and who spoke English better, and with less of a foreign accent, than any French woman I ever heard. This convinced me that German is not so difficult to an Englishman as French; for the difficulty of acquiring any foreign language must be mutual to the natives of each country. There was a steam-boat here which set sail for London the next day; but we preferred passing through Ghent, Lille, and Antwerp. This last is a very delightful city, and the spire of the cathedral exquisitely light, beautiful, and well-proportioned. Indeed, the view of the whole city from the water-side is as singular as it is resplendent. We saw the Rubenses in the great church here. They were hung outside the choir; and seen against the huge white walls, looked like pictures dangling in a broker’s shop for sale. They did not form a part of the building. The person who shewed us the Taking Down from the Cross, said, ‘It was the finest picture in the world.’ I said, ‘One of the finest’—an answer with which he appeared by no means satisfied. We returned by way of St. Omers and Calais. I wished to see Calais once more, for it was here I first landed in France twenty years ago.

I confess, London looked to me on my return like a long, straggling, dirty country-town; nor do the names of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, or Coventry, sound like a trumpet in the ears, or invite our pilgrim steps like those of Sienna, of Cortona, Perugia, Arezzo, Pisa and Ferrara. I am not sorry, however, that I have got back. There is an old saying, Home is home, be it never so homely. However delightful or striking the objects may be abroad, they do not take the same hold of you, nor can you identify yourself with them as at home. Not only is the language an insuperable obstacle; other things as well as men speak a language new and strange to you. You live comparatively in a dream, though a brilliant and a waking one. It is in vain to urge that you learn the language; that you are familiarized with manners and scenery. No other language can ever become our mother-tongue. We may learn the words; but they do not convey the same feelings, nor is it possible they should do so, unless we could begin our lives over again, and divide our conscious being into two different selves. Not only can we not attach the same meaning to words, but we cannot see objects with the same eyes, or form new loves and friendships after a certain period of our lives. The pictures that most delighted me in Italy were those I had before seen in the Louvre ‘with eyes of youth.’ I could revive this feeling of enthusiasm, but not transfer it. Neither would I recommend the going abroad when young, to become a mongrel being, half French, half English. It is better to be something than nothing. It is well 303to see foreign countries to enlarge one’s speculative knowledge, and dispel false prejudices and libellous views of human nature; but our affections must settle at home. Besides though a dream, it is a splendid one. It is fine to see the white Alps rise in the horizon of fancy at the distance of a thousand miles; or the imagination may wing its thoughtful flight among the castellated Apennines, roaming from city to city over cypress and olive grove, viewing the inhabitants as they crawl about mouldering palaces or temples, which no hand has touched for the last three hundred years, and see the genius of Italy brooding over the remains of virtue, glory and liberty, with Despair at the gates, an English Minister handing the keys to a foreign Despot, and stupid Members of Parliament wondering what is the matter!

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS ON THE FINE ARTS — BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE — CONTENTS — THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE BRITISH INSTITUTION — WEST’S PICTURE OF DEATH ON THE PALE HORSE — ON WILLIAMS’S VIEWS IN GREECE — ON THE ELGIN MARBLES — FONTHILL ABBEY — JUDGING OF PICTURES — THE VATICAN — ENGLISH STUDENTS AT ROME — FINE ARTS — JAMES BARRY — ORIGINALITY — THE IDEAL — ROYAL ACADEMY

Of the essays on the Fine Arts which follow, none were collected for publication in volume form by Hazlitt. Particulars as to their source will be found at the head of the Notes referring to each essay.

In 1838 the articles on Painting and The Fine Arts, ‘contributed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, by B. R. Haydon, Esq., and William Hazlitt, Esq.,’ were republished in Edinburgh by Messrs. Adam & Charles Black, in a post 8vo. volume. See the article in the present volume and notes thereto.

In 1843 appeared a fcap. 8vo. volume of ‘Criticisms on Art: and Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England. By William Hazlitt. With Catalogues of the Principal Galleries, now first collected. Edited by his Son,’ and published by John Templeman, 248, Regent Street. A Second Series appeared the year following, published by C. Templeman, 6 Great Portland Street, London. These volumes contain the essays printed in the present volume, together with others on Art which are to be found in Table Talk, The Round Table, The Plain Speaker and volume x. of the present edition, where the Edinburgh Review articles will be found. They also contain two appendixes of catalogues of pictures in the various galleries, compiled by Hazlitt’s son, and not here reprinted. In the Advertisement to these volumes Mr. W. Hazlitt (the second) states: ‘I have carefully corrected all the references to the pictures described, according to the latest arrangement of each particular gallery; and I have here and there ventured to append an illustrative or corrective note, where such seemed to be required as to a matter of fact.’ In the present edition the Essays are given as Hazlitt published them, and in the order of their first publication.

A ‘New Edition’ of ‘Essays on the Fine Arts by William Hazlitt,’ was published in one volume by Messrs. Reeves & Turner in 1873, edited by Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt.

ON HAYDON’S SOLOMON

The Tenth Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours opened on Monday last. The productions of Glover, Cristall, De Wint, &c. principally fill and adorn the Water Colour Department.—Among the oil pictures in the room, the principal are, The Judgment of Solomon, by Mr. Haydon, and Don Quixote receiving Mambrino’s Helmet from Sancho, by Mr. Richter. The former is a work that evidently claims a place in the higher department of art; and we are little disposed to reject that claim. It certainly shews a bold and aspiring mind; in many parts (that which we hold above all other things to be essential to the painter) an eye for the picturesque both in form and colour; considerable variety of expression, attitude and character, and great vigour and rapidity of execution throughout. It would, at the same time, be in vain to deny, that the success is not always in proportion to the effort made; that the conception of character is sometimes erroneous; that the desire to avoid insipidity and monotony has occasionally led to extravagance and distortion; that there are great inequalities in the style, and some inconsistencies in the composition; and that, however striking and admirable many of the parts are, there is a want of union and complete harmony between them. What was said of the disjecta membra poetæ is not inapplicable to this picture. It exhibits fine studies and original fragments of a great work—it has many powerful starts of genius—without conveying that impression of uniform consistency and combined effect, which is sometimes attained by the systematic mechanism of well-disciplined dullness, and at others is the immediate emanation of genius.

That which strikes the eye most on entering the room, and on which it dwells with the greatest admiration afterwards, are the figures of the two Jewish Doctors on the left of Solomon. We do not recollect any figures in modern pictures which have a more 310striking effect. We say this, not only with respect to the solid mass of colour which they project on the eye, the dark draperies contrasting finely with the paleness of the countenances, but also with respect to the force, truth, and dramatic opposition of character displayed in them. The face of the one is turned in anxious expectation towards the principal actors in the scene: the other, looking downwards, appears lost in inward meditation upon it. The one is eagerly watching for the catastrophe,—the other seems endeavouring to anticipate it. Too much praise cannot be given to the conception of the figure of Solomon, which is raised above the rest of the picture, and placed in the centre—the face fronting, and looking down, the action balanced and suspended, and the face intended to combine the different characters of youth, beauty, and wisdom. Such is evidently the conception of the painter, which we think equally striking and just; but we are by no means satisfied that he has succeeded in embodying this idea, except as far as relates to the design. The expression of the countenance of the youthful judge, which ought to convey the feeling of calm penetration, we think, degenerates into supercilious indifference; the action given to the muscles is such as to destroy the beauty of the features, without giving force to the character, and instead of the majesty of conscious power and intellect, there is an appearance of languid indecision, which seems to shrink with repugnance from the difficulties which it has to encounter. The colouring of the head is unexceptionable. In the face of the good mother, the artist has, in our opinion, succeeded in overcoming that which has been always considered as the greatest difficulty of the art—the union of beauty with strong expression. The whole face exhibits the internal workings of maternal love and fear; but its death-like paleness and agony do not destroy the original character of feminine beauty and delicacy. The attitude of this figure is decidedly bad, and out of nature as well as decorum. It is one of those sprawling, extravagant, theatrical French figures, in which a common action is strained to the extremity of caricature. The action and expression of the executioner are liable to the same objection. He is turbulent and fierce, instead of being cold and obdurate. He should not bluster in the part heroically like an actor—it is his office.—On the whole, we think this picture decidedly superior to any of this Artist’s former productions, and a proof not only of genius, but of improved taste and judgment. In speaking of it with freedom, we trust we shall best serve both him and the art.

We will lay odds that this is a fellow ‘damned in a fair face;’ with white eyes and eye-brows; of the colour of a Shrewsbury cake; a smooth tallow-skinned rascal, a white German sausage, a well-fed chitterling, from whose face Madame de —— would have turned away in disgust,—a transcendental stuffed man! We have no patience that the Arts should be catechised by a piece of whitleather, a whey-face, who thinks that pictures, like the moon, should be made of green-cheese! Shall a roll of double tripe rise up in judgment on grace; shall a piece of dough talk of feeling? ‘Tis too much. ‘Sdeath, for Rembrandt to be demanded of a cheese-curd, what replication should he make? What might Vandyke answer to a jack-pudding, whose fingers are of a thickness at both ends? What should Rubens say, who ‘lived in the rainbow, and played i’ th’ plighted clouds,’ to a swaddling-clout, a piece of stockinet, of fleecy hosiery, to a squab man, without a bend in his body? What might Raphael answer to a joint-stool? Or Nicholas Poussin, charged in the presence of his Cephalus and Aurora with being a mere pedant, without grace or feeling, to this round-about machine of formal impertinence, this lumbering go-cart of dulness and spite? We could have wished that as the fellow stood before the portrait of Rembrandt, chattering like an ape, making mocks and mows at it, the picture had lifted up its great grimy fist, and knocked him down.

The Catalogue Raisonné of the British Institution is only worth notice, as it is pretty well understood to be a declaration of the views of the Royal Academy. It is a very dull, gross, impudent attack by one of its toad-eaters on human genius, on permanent reputation, and on liberal art. What does it say? Why, in so many words, that the knowledge of Art in this country is inconsistent with the existence of the Academy, and that their success as a body of men instituted for promoting and encouraging the Fine Arts, requires the destruction or concealment of all works of Art of great and acknowledged excellence. In this they may be right; but we did not think they would have come forward to say so themselves. Or that they would get a fellow, a low buffoon, a wretched Merry Andrew, a practical St. Giles’s joker, a dirty Grub-Street critic, to vent his abominations on the chef-d’œuvres produced by the greatest painters that have gone before them, to paw them over with his bleared-eyes, to smear the filth and ordure of his tongue upon them, 312to spit at them, to point at them, to nickname them, to hoot at them, to make mouths at them, to shrug up his shoulders and run away from them in the presence of these divine guests, like a blackguard who affects to make a bugbear of every one he meets in the street; to play over again the nauseous tricks of one of Swift’s Yahoos—and for what? Avowedly for the purpose of diverting the public mind from the contemplation of all that genius and art can boast in the lapse of ages, and to persuade the world that there is nothing in Art that has been or ever will be produced worth looking at but the gilt frames and red curtains at the Exhibition of the Royal Academy! We knew before that they had no great genius for the Arts; but we thought they might have some love of them in their hearts. They here avow their rankling jealousy, hatred and scorn, of all Art and of all the great names in Art, and as a bold put indeed, require the keeping down of the public taste as the only means of keeping up the bubble of their reputation. They insist that their only hope of continued encouragement and support with a discerning public is in hood-winking that public, in confining their highest notions of Art to their own gross and superficial style of daubing, and in vilifying all works of standard genius.—This is right English. The English are a shop-keeping nation, and the Royal Academy are a society of hucksters in the Fine Arts, who are more tenacious of their profits as chapmen and dealers, than of the honour of the Art. The day after the Catalogue Raisonné was published, the Prince Regent, in the name and on behalf of his Father, should have directed it to be burned by the hands of the hangman of their Committee, or, upon refusal, have shut up their shop. A society for the encouragement and promotion of Art has no right to exist at all, from the moment that it professes to exist only in wrong of Art, by the suppression of the knowledge of Art, in contempt of genius in Art, in defiance of all manly and liberal sentiment in Art. But this is what the Royal Academy professes to do in the Catalogue Raisonné.

The Academy, from its commencement and up to the present hour, is in fact, a mercantile body, like any other mercantile body, consisting chiefly of manufacturers of portraits, who have got a regular monopoly of this branch of trade, with a certain rank, style, and title of their own, that is, with the King’s privilege to be thought Artists and men of genius,—and who, with the jealousy natural to such bodies, supported by authority from without, and by cabal within, think themselves bound to crush all generous views and liberal principles of Art, lest they should interfere with their monopoly and their privilege to be thought Artists and men of genius. The Academy is the Royal road to Art. The whole style of English Art, as issuing from this 313Academy, is founded on a principle of appeal to the personal vanity and ignorance of their sitters, and of accommodation to the lucrative pursuits of the Painter, in a sweeping attention to effect in painting, by which means he can cover so many more whole or half lengths in each season. The Artists have not time to finish their pictures, or if they had, the effect would be lost in the superficial glare of that hot room, where nothing but rouged cheeks, naked shoulders, and Ackermann’s dresses for May, can catch the eye in the crowd and bustle and rapid succession of meretricious attractions, as they do in another hot room of the same equivocal description. Yet they complain in one part of the Catalogue, that ‘they (the Academicians) are forced to come into a hasty competition every year with works that have stood the test of ages.’ It is for that very reason, among others, that it was proper to exhibit the works at the British Institution, to show to the public, and by that means to make the Academicians feel, that the securing the applause of posterity and a real rank in the Art, which that alone can give, depended on the number of pictures they finished, and not on the number they began. It is this which excites the apprehensions of the cabal; for if the eye of the public should be once spoiled by the Old Masters, the necessity of doing something like them might considerably baulk the regularity of their returns. Why should they complain of being forced into this premature competition? Who forces them to bring forward so many pictures yearly before they are fit to be seen? Would they have taken more pains, more time to finish them, to work them up to that fastidious standard of perfection, on which they have set their minds, if they had not been hurried into this unfair competition with the British Institution, ‘sent to their account with all their imperfections on their heads, unhouseled, unanointed, unanealed?’ Would they have done a single stroke more to any one picture, if the Institution had never been opened? No such thing. It is not then true, that this new and alarming competition prevents them from finishing their works, but it prevents them from imposing them on the public as finished. Pingo in eternitatem, is not their motto. There are three things which constitute the art of painting, which make it interesting to the public, which give it permanence and rank among the efforts of human genius. They are, first, gusto or expression: i.e. the conveying to the eye the impressions of the soul, or the other senses connected with the sense of sight, such as the different passions visible in the countenance, the romantic interest connected with scenes of nature, the character and feelings associated with different objects. In this, the highest and first part of art, the Italian painters, particularly Raphael, Correggio, 314&c., excel. The second is the picturesque; that is, the seizing on those objects, or situations and accidents of objects, as light and shade, &c. which make them most striking to the mind as objects of sight only. This is the forte of the Flemish and Venetian painters, Titian, Paul Veronese, Rubens, Vandyke, Rembrandt, and they have carried this part of the art as high as it can go, some of them with more, some of them with less of the former excellence. The third is the exact and laborious imitation of natural objects, such as they exist in their component parts, with every variety and nicety of detail, the pencil performing the part of a microscope, and there being no necessity for expression or the picturesque in the object represented, or anything but truth in the representation. In this least interesting but still curious and ingenious part of the Art, the Dutch School have been allowed to excel, though with little of the former qualities, which indeed are not very much wanted for this purpose. Now in all these three the English School are notoriously deficient and they are so for these following reasons:—

They cannot paint gusto, or high expression, for it is not in the national character. At least, it must be sought in Nature; but our Painters do not go out of their way in search of character and expression—their sitters come to them in crowds; and they come to them not to be painted in all the truth of character and expression, but to be flattered out of all meaning; or they would no longer come in crowds. To please generally, the Painter must exaggerate what is generally pleasing, obvious to all capacities, and void of offence before God and man, the shewy, the superficial, and the insipid, that which strikes the greatest number of persons with the least effort of thought; and he must suppress all the rest; all that might be ‘to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Gentiles foolishness.’ The Exhibition is a successful experiment on the ignorance and credulity of the town. They collect ‘a quantity of barren spectators’ to judge of Art, in their corporate and public capacity, and then each makes the best market he can of them in his own. A Royal Academician must not ‘hold the mirror up to Nature,’ but make his canvass ‘the glass of fashion, and the mould of form.’ The ‘numbers without number’ who pay thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred guineas for their pictures in large, expect their faces to come out of the Painter’s hands smooth, rosy, round, smiling; just as they expect their hair to come out of the barber’s curled and powdered. It would be a breach of contract to proceed in any other way. A fashionable Artist and a fashionable hair-dresser have the same common principles of theory and practice; the one fits his customers to appear with éclat in a ball room, the other in the Great Room of 315the Royal Academy. A certain dexterity, and a knowledge of the prevailing fashion, are all that is necessary to either. An Exhibition-portrait is, therefore, an essence, not of character, but of commonplace. It displays not high thought and fine feeling, but physical well-being, with an outside label of health, ease, and competence. Yet the Catalogue-writer talks of the dignity of modern portrait! To enter into a general obligation to paint the passions or characters of men, must, where there are none, be difficult to the artist; where they are bad, be disagreeable to his employers. When Sir Thomas Lawrence painted Lord Castlereagh some time ago, he did not try to exhibit his character, out of complaisance to his Lordship, nor his understanding, out of regard to himself; but he painted him in a fashionable coat, with his hair dressed in the fashion, in a genteel posture like one of his footmen, and with the prim, smirking aspect of a haberdasher. There was nothing of the noble disinvoltura of his Lordship’s manner, the grand contour of his features, the profundity of design hid under an appearance of indifference, the traces of the Irish patriot or the English statesman. It would have puzzled Lavater or Spurzheim to have discovered there the author of the Letter to Mon Prince. Tacitus had drawn him before in a different style, and perhaps Sir Thomas despaired of rivalling this great master in his own way. Yet the picture pleased, and Mr. Perry of the Chronicle swore to the likeness, though he had been warned to the contrary. Now, if this picture had erred on the side of the characteristic expression as much as it did on that of mannered insignificance, how it must have shocked all parties in the State! An insipid misrepresentation was safer than a disagreeable reality. In the glosses of modern art, as in the modern refinement of law, it is the truth that makes the libel.—Again, the picturesque is necessarily banished from the painting rooms of the Academicians, and from the Great Room of the Academy. People of fashion go to be painted because other people do, and they wish to look like other people. We never remember to have seen a memorable head in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. Any thing that had any thing singular or striking in it would look quite monstrous there, and would be stared out of countenance. Any thing extraordinary or original in nature is inadmissible in modern art; any thing that would strike the eye, or that you would ever think of again, would be a violation of decorum, an infringement of professional etiquette, and would disturb the uniform and well-arranged monotony of the walls of the Exhibition ‘with most admired disorder.’ A man of any originality of mind, if he has also the least common sense, soon finds his error, and reforms. At Rome one must do as the people at Rome do. The 316Academy is not the place for the eccentricities of genius. The persons of rank and opulence, who wish to have their pictures exhibited, do not wish to be exhibited as objects of natural history, as extraordinary phenomena in art or nature, in the moral or intellectual world; and in this they are right. Neither do they wish to volunteer their own persons, which they hold in due reverence, though there is nothing at all in them, as subjects for the painter to exercise his skill upon, as studies of light and shade, as merely objects of sight, as something curious and worth seeing from the outward accidents of nature. They do not like to share their triumph with nature; to sink their persons in ‘her glorious light.’ They owe no allegiance to the elements. They wish to be painted as Mr. and Mrs. Such-a-one, not as studies of light and shade; they wish to be represented as complete abstractions of persons and property, to have one side of the face seen as much as the other; to have their coat, waistcoat and breeches, their muslin dresses, silks, sophas, and settees, their dogs and horses, their house furniture, painted, to have themselves and all that belongs to them, and nothing else painted. The picture is made for them, and not they for the picture. Hence there can be nothing but the vapid, trite, and mechanical, in professional Art. Professional Art is a contradiction in terms. Art is genius, and genius cannot belong to a profession. Our Painters’ galleries are not studies, but lounging shew-rooms. Would a booby with a star wish to be painted (think you) with a view to its effect in the picture, or would he not have it seen at all events and as much as possible? The Catalogue Writer wishes the gentlemen-sitters of the Royal Academy to go and look at Rembrandt’s portraits, and to ask themselves, their wives, and daughters, whether they would like to be painted in the same way? No, truly. This, we confess, is hard upon our Artists, to have to look upon splendour and on obscurity still more splendid, which they dare not even attempt to imitate; to see themselves condemned, by the refinements of taste and progress of civilization, to smear rouge and white paste on the faces and necks of their portraits, for ever; and still ‘to let I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage.’ But why then complain of the injury they would sustain by the restoration of Art (if it were possible) into the original wardship of nature and genius, when ‘service sweat for duty, not for meed.’ Sir Joshua made a shift to combine some of Rembrandt’s art with his portraits, only by getting the start of public affectation, and by having the lead in his profession, so that like the early painters he could assert the independence of his own taste and judgment. The modern makers of catalogues would have driven 317him and his chiaro scuro into the shade presently. The critic professes to admire Sir Joshua, though all his excellencies are Gothic, palpably borrowed from the Old Masters. But he is wrong or inconsistent in everything.—The imitation of the details of nature is not compatible with the professional avarice of the painter, as the two former essentials of the art are inconsistent with the vanity and ignorance of his employers. ‘This, this is the unkindest blow of all.’ It is that in which the understanding of the multitude is most likely to conspire with the painter’s ‘own gained knowledge’ to make him dissatisfied with his disproportioned profits or under the loss of them. The Dutch masters are instructive enough in this way, and shew the value of detail by shewing the value of Art where there is nothing else but this. But this is not all. It might be pretended by our wholesale manufacturers of chef-d’œuvres in the Fine Arts, that so much nicety of execution is useless or improper in works of high gusto and grand effect. It happens unfortunately, however, that the works of the greatest gusto and most picturesque effect have this fidelity of imitation often in the highest degree (as in Raphael, Titian, and Rembrandt), generally in a very high degree (as in Rubens and Paul Veronese), so that the moderns gain nothing by this pretext. This is a serious loss of time or reputation to them. To paint a hand like Vandyke would cost them as much time as a dozen half-lengths; and they could not do it after all. To paint an eye like Titian would cost them their whole year’s labour, and they would lose their time and their labour into the bargain. Or to take Claude’s landscapes as an example in this respect, as they are in almost all others. If Turner, whom, with the Catalogue-writer, we allow, most heartily allow, to be the greatest landscape-painter of the age, were to finish his trees or his plants in the foreground, or his distances, or his middle distances, or his sky, or his water, or his buildings, or any thing in his pictures, in like manner, he could only paint and sell one landscape where he now paints and sells twenty. This is a clear loss to the artist of pounds, shillings, and pence, and ‘that’s a feeling disputation.’ He would have to put twenty times as much of every thing into a picture as he now has, and that is what (if he is like other persons who have got into bad habits) he would be neither able nor willing to do. It was a common cant a short time ago to pretend of him as it formerly was of Wilson, that he had other things which Claude had not, and that what Claude had besides, only impaired the grandeur of his pictures. The public have seen to the contrary. They see the quackery of painting trees blue and yellow, to produce the effect of green at a distance. They see the affectation of despising the mechanism of the Art, and never thinking about any 318thing but the mechanism. They see that it is not true in Art, that a part is greater than the whole, or that the means are destructive of the end. They see that a daub, however masterly, cannot vie with the perfect landscapes of the all-accomplished Claude. ‘To some men their graces serve them but as enemies’; and it was so till the other day with Claude. If it had been only for opening the eyes of the public on this subject, the Institution would have deserved well of the art and their country.

Mr. West’s name stands deservedly high in the annals of art in this country—too high for him to condescend to be his own puffer, even at second-hand. He comes forward, in the present instance, as the painter and the showman of the piece; as the candidate for public applause, and the judge who awards himself the prize; as the idol on the altar, and the priest who offers up the grateful incense of praise. He places himself, as it were, before his own performance, with a Catalogue Raisonné in his hand, and, before the spectator can form a judgment on the work itself, dazzles him with an account of the prodigies of art which are there conceived and executed. This is not quite fair. It is a proceeding which, though ‘it sets on a quantity of barren spectators to admire, cannot but make the judicious grieve.’ Mr. West, by thus taking to himself unlimited credit for the ‘high endeavour and the glad success,’ by proclaiming aloud that he has aimed at the highest sublimities of his art, and as loudly, with a singular mixture of pomposity and phlegm, that he has fully accomplished all that his most ardent hopes had anticipated,—must, we should think, obtain a great deal of spurious, catchpenny reputation, and lose a great deal of that genuine tribute of approbation to which he is otherwise entitled, by turning the attention of the well-informed and unprejudiced part of the community from his real and undoubted merits to his groundless and exaggerated pretensions. Self-praise, it is said, is no praise; but it is worse than this. It either shows great weakness and vanity for an artist to talk (or to get another to talk) of his own work, which was produced yesterday, and may be forgotten to-morrow, with the same lofty, emphatic, solemn tone, as if it were already stamped with the voice of ages, and had become sacred to the imagination of the beholder; or else the doing so is a deliberate attempt to encroach on the right of private judgment and public 319opinion, which those who are not its dupes will resent accordingly, and endeavour to repel by acts of precaution or hostility. An unsuccessful effort to extort admiration is sure to involve its own punishment.

We should not have made these remarks, if the ‘Description of the Picture of Death’ had been a solitary instance of the kind; but it is one of a series of descriptions of the same sort—it is a part of a system of self-adulation which cannot be too much discouraged. Perhaps Mr. West may say, that the Descriptive Catalogue is not his; that he has nothing to do with its composition or absurdities. But it must be written with his consent and approbation; and this is a sanction which it ought not to receive. We presume the artist would have it in his option to put a negative on any undue censure or flagrant abuse of his picture; it must be equally in his power, and it is equally incumbent upon him, to reject, with dignified modesty, the gross and palpable flatteries which it contains, direct or by implication.

The first notice we received of this picture was by an advertisement in a morning paper, (the editor of which is not apt to hazard extravagant opinions without a prompter,) purporting that, ‘in consequence of the President’s having devoted a year and a half to its completion, and of its having for its subject the Terrible Sublime, it would place Great Britain in the same conspicuous relation to the rest of Europe in arts, that the battle of Waterloo had done in arms!’ We shall not stay to decide between the battle and the picture; but the writer follows up the same idea of the Terrible Sublime in the Catalogue, the first paragraph of which is conceived in the following terms:—

‘The general effect proposed to be excited by this picture is the terrible sublime, and its various modifications, until lost in the opposite extremes of pity and horror, a sentiment which painting has so seldom attempted to awaken, that a particular description of the subject will probably be acceptable to the public.’

‘So shall my anticipation prevent your discovery.’ Mr. West here, like Bayes in the ‘Rehearsal,’ insinuates the plot very profoundly. He has, it seems, opened a new walk in art with its alternate ramifications into the opposite regions of horror and pity, and kindly takes the reader by the hand, to show him how triumphantly he has arrived at the end of his journey.

‘In poetry,’ continues the writer, ‘the same effect is produced by a few abrupt and rapid gleams of description, touching, as it were, with fire, the features and edges of a general mass of awful obscurity; but in painting, such indistinctness would be a defect, and imply, that the artist wanted the power to pourtray the conceptions of his fancy. 320Mr. West was of opinion that to delineate a physical form, which in its moral impression would approximate to that of the visionary Death of Milton, it was necessary to endow it, if possible, with the appearance of superhuman strength and energy. He has, therefore, exerted the utmost force and perspicuity of his pencil on the central figure.’ This is ‘spoken with authority, and not as the scribes.’ Poetry, according to the definition here introduced of it, resembles a candlelight picture, which gives merely the rim and outlines of things in a vivid and dazzling, but confused and imperfect manner. We cannot tell whether this account will be considered as satisfactory. But Mr. West, or his commentator, should tread cautiously on this ground. He may otherwise commit himself, not only in a comparison with the epic poet, but with the inspired writer, who only uses words. It will hardly be contended, for instance, that the account of Death on the Pale Horse in the book of Revelations, never produced its due effect of the terrible sublime, till the deficiencies of the pen were supplied by the pencil. Neither do we see how the endowing a physical form with superhuman strength, has any necessary connection with the moral impression of the visionary Death of Milton. There seems to be here some radical mistake in Mr. West’s theory. The moral attributes of death are powers and effects of an infinitely wide and general description, which no individual or physical form can possibly represent, but by courtesy of speech or by a distant analogy. The moral impression of Death is essentially visionary; its reality is in the mind’s eye. Words are here the only things; and things, physical forms, the mere mockeries of the understanding. The less definite the conception, the less bodily, the more vast, unformed, and unsubstantial, the nearer does it approach to some resemblance of that omnipresent, lasting, universal, irresistible principle, which everywhere, and at some time or other, exerts its power over all things. Death is a mighty abstraction, like Night, or Space, or Time. He is an ugly customer, who will not be invited to supper, or to sit for his picture. He is with us and about us, but we do not see him. He stalks on before us, and we do not mind him; he follows us behind, and we do not look back at him. We do not see him making faces at us in our lifetime! we do not feel him tickling our bare ribs afterwards, nor look at him through the empty grating of our hollow eyes! Does Mr. West really suppose that he has put the very image of Death upon his canvas; that he has taken the fear of him out of our hearts; that he has circumscribed his power with a pair of compasses; that he has measured the length of his arm with a two-foot rule; that he has suspended the stroke of his dart with a stroke of his pencil; that he has laid his hands on the universal principle of destruction, 321and hemmed him in with lines and lineaments, and made a gazing-stock and a show of him, ‘under the patronage of the Prince Regent’ (as that illustrious person has taken, and confined, and made a show of another enemy of the human race)—so that the work of decay and dissolution is no longer going on in nature; that all we have heard or felt of death is but a fable compared with this distinct, living, and warranted likeness of him? Oh no! There is no power in the pencil actually to embody an abstraction, to impound the imagination, to circumvent the powers of the soul, which hold communion with the universe. The painter cannot make the general particular, the infinite and imaginary defined and palpable, that which is only believed and dreaded, an object of sight.

As Mr. West appears to have wrong notions of the powers of his art, so he seems not to put in practice all that it is capable of. The only way in which the painter of genius can represent the force of moral truth, is by translating it into an artificial language of his own,—by substituting hieroglyphics for words, and presenting the closest and most striking affinities his fancy and observation can suggest between the general idea and the visible illustration of it. Here we think Mr. West has failed. The artist has represented Death riding over his prostrate victims in all the rage of impotent despair. He is in a great splutter, and seems making a last effort to frighten his foes by an explosion of red-hot thunderbolts, and a pompous display of his allegorical paraphernalia. He has not the calm, still, majestic form of Death, killing by a look,—withering by a touch. His presence does not make the still air cold. His flesh is not stony or cadaverous, but is crusted over with a yellow glutinous paste, as if it had been baked in a pye. Milton makes Death ‘grin horrible a ghastly smile,’ with an evident allusion to the common Death’s head; but in the picture he seems grinning for a wager, with a full row of loose rotten teeth; and his terrible form is covered with a long black drapery, which would cut a figure in an undertaker’s shop, and which cuts a figure where it is (for it is finely painted), but which serves only as a disguise for the King of Terrors. We have no idea of such a swaggering and blustering Death as this of Mr. West’s. He has not invoked a ghastly spectre from the tomb, but has called up an old squalid ruffian from a night cellar, and crowned him ‘monarch of the universal world.’ The horse on which he rides is not ‘pale,’ but white. There is no gusto, no imagination in Mr. West’s colouring. As to his figure, the description gives an accurate idea of it enough. ‘His horse rushes forward with the universal wildness of a tempestuous element, breathing livid pestilence, and rearing and trampling with the vehemence of unbridled fury.’ The style of the figure 322corresponds to the style of the description. It is overloaded and top-heavy. The chest of the animal is a great deal too long for the legs.

The painter has made amends for this splashing figure of the Pale Horse, by those of the White and Red Horse. They are like a couple of rocking-horses, and go as easy. Mr. West’s vicarious egotism obtrudes itself again offensively in speaking of the Rider on the White Horse. ‘As he is supposed,’ says the Catalogue, ‘to represent the Gospel, it was requisite that he should be invested with those exterior indications of purity, excellence, and dignity, which are associated in our minds with the name and offices of the Messiah. But it was not THE Saviour healing and comforting the afflicted, or the meek and lowly Jesus, bearing with resignation the scorn and hatred of the scoffing multitude, that was to be represented;—it was the King of Kings going forth, conquering and to conquer. He is therefore painted with a solemn countenance, expressive of a mind filled with the thoughts of a great enterprise; and he advances onward in his sublime career with that serene Majesty,’ &c. Now this is surely an unwarrantable assumption of public opinion in a matter of taste. Christ is not represented in this picture as he was in Mr. West’s two former pictures; but in all three he gives you to understand that he has reflected the true countenance and divine character of the Messiah. Multum abludit imago. The Christs in each picture have a different character indeed, but they only present a variety of meanness and insipidity. But the unwary spectator, who looks at the catalogue to know what he is to think of the picture, and reads all these therefores of sublimity, serenity, purity, &c. considers them as so many infallible inferences and demonstrations of the painter’s skill.

Mr. West has been tolerably successful in the delineation of the neutral character of the ‘Man on the Black Horse;’ but ‘the two wretched emaciated figures’ of a man and woman before him, ‘absorbed in the feelings of their own particular misery,’ are not likely to excite any sympathy in the beholders. They exhibit the lowest stage of mental and physical imbecility, that could never by any possibility come to any good. In the domestic groupe in the foreground, ‘the painter has attempted to excite the strongest degree of pity which his subject admitted, and to contrast the surrounding objects with images of tenderness and beauty;’ and it is here that he has principally failed. The Dying Mother appears to have been in her lifetime a plaster-cast from the antique, stained with a little purple and yellow, to imitate the life. The ‘Lovely Infant’ that is falling from her breast, is a hideous little creature, with glazed eyes, and 323livid aspect, borrowed from the infant who is falling out of his mother’s lap over the bridge, in Hogarth’s Print of Gin-Lane. The Husband’s features, who is placed in so pathetic an attitude, are cut out of the hardest wood, and of the deepest dye; and the surviving Daughter, who is stated ‘to be sensible only to the loss she has sustained by the death of so kind a parent,’ is neither better nor worse than the figures we meet with in the elegant frontispieces to history-books, or family stories, intended as Christmas presents to good little boys and girls. The foreshortening of the lower extremities, both of the Mother and Child, is wretchedly defective, either in drawing and colouring.

In describing ‘the anarchy of the combats of men with beasts,’ Mr. West has attained that sort of excellence which always arises from a knowledge of the rules of composition. His lion, however, looks as if his face and velvet paws were covered with calf’s skin, or leather gloves pulled carefully over them. So little is the appearance of hair given! The youth in this group, whom Mr. West celebrates for his muscular manly courage, has a fine rustic look of health and strength about him; but we think the other figure, with scowling swarthy face, striking at an animal, is superior in force of character and expression. In the back figure of the man holding his hand to his head, (with no very dignified action), the artist has well imitated the bad colouring, and stiff inanimate drawing of Poussin. The remaining figures are not of much importance, or are striking only from their defects. Mr. West, however, omits no opportunity of discreetly sounding his own praise. ‘The story of this group,’ it is said, ‘would have been incomplete, had the lions not been shown conquerors to a certain extent, by the two wounded men,’ &c. As it is, it is perfect! Admirable critic! Again we are told, ‘The pyramidal form of this large division is perfected by a furious bull,’ &c. Nay, indeed, the form of the pyramid is even preserved in the title-page of the catalogue. The prettiest incident in the picture is the dove lamenting over its mate, just killed by the serpent. We do not deny Mr. West the praise of invention. Upon the whole, we think this the best coloured and most picturesque of all Mr. West’s productions; and in all that relates to composition, and the introduction of the adjuncts of historical design, it shows, like his other works, the hand of a master. In the same room is the picture of Christ Rejected. Alas! how changed, and in how short a time! The colours are scarcely dry, and it already looks dingy, flat, and faded.

There has been lately exhibited at the Calton Convening Room, Edinburgh, a collection of views in Greece, Italy, Sicily, and the Ionian Isles, painted in water colours by Mr. Hugh Williams, a native of Scotland, which themselves do honour to the talents of the artist, as the attention they have excited does to the taste of the northern capital. It is well; for the exhibition in that town of the works of living artists (to answer to our Somerset-House exhibition) required some set-off. Mr. Williams has made the amende honorable, for his country, to the offended genius of art, and has stretched out under the far-famed Calton Hill, and in the eye of Arthur’s Seat, fairy visions of the fair land of Greece, that Edinburgh belles and beaux repair to see with cautious wonder and well-regulated delight. It is really a most agreeable novelty to the passing visitant to see the beauty of the North, the radiant beauty of the North, enveloped in such an atmosphere, and set off by such a back-ground. Oriental skies pour their molten lustre on Caledonian charms. The slender, lovely, taper waist (made more taper, more lovely, more slender by the stay-maker), instead of being cut in two by the keen blasts that rage in Prince’s street, is here supported by warm languid airs, and a thousand sighs, that breathe from the vale of Tempe. Do not those fair tresses look brighter as they are seen hanging over a hill in Arcadia, than when they come in contact with the hard grey rock of the castle? Do not those fair blue eyes look more translucent as they glance over some classic stream? What can vie with that alabaster skin but marble temples, dedicated to the Queen of Love? What can match those golden freckles but glittering sun-sets behind Mount Olympus? Here, in one corner of the room, stands the Hill of the Muses, and there is a group of Graces under it! There played the Nine on immortal lyres, and here sit the critical but admiring Scottish fair, with the catalogue in their hands, reading the quotations from Lord Byron’s verses with liquid eyes and lovely vermilion lips—would that they spoke English, or any thing but Scotch!—Poor is this irony! Vain the attempt to reconcile Scottish figures with Attic scenery! What land can rival Greece? What earthly flowers can compare with the colours in the sky? What living beauty can recall the dead? For in that word, Greece, there breathe three thousand years of fame that has no date to come! Over that land hovers a light, brighter than that of suns, softer than that which vernal skies shed on halcyon seas, the light that rises from the tomb of virtue, genius, liberty! Oh! thou Uranian Venus, thou 325that never art, but wast and art to be; thou that the eye sees not, but that livest for ever in the heart; thou whom men believe and know to be, for thou dwellest in the desires and longings, and hunger of the mind; thou that art a Goddess, and we thy worshippers, say dost thou not smile for ever on this land of Greece, and shed thy purple light over it, and blend thy choicest blandishments with its magic name? But here (in the Calton Convening Room, in Waterloo place, close under the Melville monument—strange contradiction!) another Greece grows on the walls—other skies are to be seen, ancient temples rise, and modern Grecian ladies walk. Here towers Mount Olympus, where Gods once sat—that is the top of a hill in Arcadia—(who would think that the eyes would ever behold a form so visionary, that they would ever see an image of that, which seems only a delicious vanished sound?) this is Corinth—that is the Parthenon—there stands Thebes in Bœotia—that is the Plain of Platæa,—yonder is the city of Syracuse, and the Temple of Minerva Sunias, and there the site of the gardens of Alcinous.

This is Pope’s description of them in the Odyssey, which (we must say) is very bad, and if Mr. Williams had not given us a more distinct idea of the places he professes to describe, we should not have gone out of our way to notice them. As works of art, these water-colour drawings deserve very high praise. The drawing is correct and characteristic: the colouring chaste, rich, and peculiar; the finishing generally careful; and the selection of points of view striking and picturesque. We have at once an impressive and satisfactory idea of the country of which we have heard so much; and wish to visit places which, it seems from this representation of them, would not bely all that we have heard. Some splenetic travellers have pretended that Attica was dry, flat, and barren. But it is not so in Mr. Williams’s authentic draughts; and we thank him for restoring to us our old, and, as it appears, true illusion—for crowning that 326Elysium of our school-boy fancies with majestic hills, and scooping it into lovely winding valleys once more. Lord Byron is, we believe, among those who have spoken ill of Greece, calling it a ‘sand-bank,’ or something of that sort. Every ill-natured traveller ought to hold a pencil as well as a pen in his hand, and be forced to produce a sketch of his own lie. As to the subjects of Mr. Williams’s pencil, nothing can exceed the local interest that belongs to them, and which he has done nothing, either through injudicious selection, or negligent execution, to diminish. Quere. Is not this interest as great in London as it is in Edinburgh? In other words, we mean to ask, whether this exhibition would not answer well in London.

There are a number of other very interesting sketches interspersed, and some very pleasing home views, which seem to show that nature is everywhere herself.

The true lesson to be learnt by our students and professors from the Elgin marbles, is the one which the ingenious and honest Cowley has expressed in the above spirited lines. The great secret is to recur at every step to nature—

It is evident to any one who views these admirable remains of Antiquity (nay, it is acknowledged by our artists themselves, in despite of all the melancholy sophistry which they have been taught or have been teaching others for half a century) that the chief excellence of the figures depends on their having been copied from nature, and not from imagination. The communication of art with nature is here everywhere immediate, entire, palpable. The artist gives himself no fastidious airs of superiority over what he sees. He 327has not arrived, at that stage of his progress described at much length in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, in which having served out his apprenticeship to nature, he can set up for himself in opposition to her. According to the old Greek form of drawing up the indentures in this case, we apprehend they were to last for life. At least, we can compare these Marbles to nothing but human figures petrified: they have every appearance of absolute fac-similes or casts taken from nature. The details are those of nature; the masses are those of nature; the forms are from nature; the action is from nature; the whole is from nature. Let any one, for instance, look at the leg of the Ilissus or River-God, which is bent under him—let him observe the swell and undulation of the calf, the inter-texture of the muscles, the distinction and union of all the parts, and the effect of action every where impressed on the external form, as if the very marble were a flexible substance, and contained the various springs of life and motion within itself, and he will own that art and nature are here the same thing. It is the same in the back of the Theseus, in the thighs and knees, and in all that remains unimpaired of these two noble figures. It is not the same in the cast (which was shown at Lord Elgin’s) of the famous Torso by Michael Angelo, the style of which that artist appears to have imitated too well. There every muscle has obviously the greatest prominence and force given to it of which it is capable in itself, not of which it is capable in connexion with others. This fragment is an accumulation of mighty parts, without that play and re-action of each part upon the rest, without that ‘alternate action and repose’ which Sir Thomas Lawrence speaks of as characteristic of the Theseus and the Ilissus, and which are as inseparable from nature as waves from the sea. The learned, however, here make a distinction, and suppose that the truth of nature is, in the Elgin Marbles, combined with ideal forms. If by ideal forms they mean fine natural forms, we have nothing to object; but if they mean that the sculptors of the Theseus and Ilissus got the forms out of their own heads, and then tacked the truth of nature to them, we can only say, ‘Let them look again, let them look again.’ We consider the Elgin Marbles as a demonstration of the impossibility of separating art from nature without a proportionable loss at every remove. The utter absence of all setness of appearance proves that they were done as studies from actual models. The separate parts of the human body may be given from scientific knowledge:—their modifications or inflections can only be learnt by seeing them in action; and the truth of nature is incompatible with ideal form, if the latter is meant to exclude actually existing form. The mutual action of the parts cannot be determined where the object itself is not seen. 328That the forms of these statues are not common nature, such as we see it every day, we readily allow: that they were not select Greek nature, we see no convincing reason to suppose. That truth of nature, and ideal or fine form, are not always or generally united, we know; but how they can ever be united in art, without being first united in nature, is to us a mystery, and one that we as little believe as understand!

Suppose, for illustration’s sake, that these Marbles were originally done as casts from actual nature, and then let us inquire whether they would not have possessed all the same qualities that they now display, granting only, that the forms were in the first instance selected with the eye of taste, and disposed with knowledge of the art and of the subject.

First, the larger masses and proportions of entire limbs and divisions of the body would have been found in the casts, for they would have been found in nature. The back and trunk, and arms, and legs, and thighs would have been there, for these are parts of the natural man or actual living body, and not inventions of the artist, or ideal creations borrowed from the skies. There would have been the same sweep in the back of the Theseus; the same swell in the muscles of the arm on which he leans; the same division of the leg into calf and small, i.e. the same general results, or aggregation of parts, in the principal and most striking divisions of the body. The upper part of the arm would have been thicker than the lower, the thighs larger than the legs, the body larger than the thighs, in a cast taken from common nature; and in casts taken from the finest nature they would have been so in the same proportion, form, and manner, as in the statue of the Theseus, if the Theseus answers to the idea of the finest nature; for the idea and the reality must be the same; only, we contend that the idea is taken from the reality, instead of existing by itself, or being the creature of fancy. That is, there would be the same grandeur of proportions and parts in a cast taken from finely developed nature, such as the Greek sculptors had constantly before them, naked and in action, that we find in the limbs and masses of bone, flesh, and muscle, in these much and justly admired remains.

Again, and incontestibly, there would have been, besides the grandeur of form, all the minutiæ and individual details in the cast that subsist in nature, and that find no place in the theory of ideal art—in the omission of which, indeed, its very grandeur is made to consist. The Elgin Marbles give a flat contradiction to this gratuitous separation of grandeur of design and exactness of detail, as incompatible in works of art, and we conceive that, with their whole ponderous weight to crush it, it will be difficult to set this theory on its legs again. In these majestic colossal figures, nothing is omitted, 329nothing is made out by negation. The veins, the wrinkles in the skin, the indications of the muscles under the skin (which appear as plainly to the anatomist as the expert angler knows from an undulation on the surface of the water what fish is playing with his bait beneath it), the finger-joints, the nails, every the smallest part cognizable to the naked eye, is given here with the same ease and exactness, with the same prominence, and the same subordination, that it would be in a cast from nature, i.e., in nature itself. Therefore, so far these things, viz., nature, a cast from it, and the Elgin Marbles, are the same; and all three are opposed to the fashionable and fastidious theory of the ideal. Look at Sir Joshua’s picture of Puck, one of his finest-coloured, and most spirited performances. The fingers are mere spuds, and we doubt whether any one can make out whether there are four toes or five allowed to each of the feet. If there had been a young Silenus among the Elgin Marbles, we don’t know that in some particulars it would have surpassed Sir Joshua’s masterly sketch, but we are sure that the extremities, the nails, &c. would have been studies of natural history. The life, the spirit, the character of the grotesque and imaginary little being would not have made an abortion of any part of his natural growth or form.

Farther, in a cast from nature there would be, as a matter of course, the same play and flexibility of limb and muscle, or, as Sir Thomas Lawrence expresses it, the same ‘alternate action and repose,’ that we find so admirably displayed in the Elgin Marbles. It seems here as if stone could move: where one muscle is strained, another is relaxed, where one part is raised, another sinks in, just as in the ocean, where the waves are lifted up in one place, they sink proportionally low in the next: and all this modulation and affection of the different parts of the form by others arise from an attentive and co-instantaneous observation of the parts of a flexible body, where the muscles and bones act upon, and communicate with, one another like the ropes and pullies in a machine, and where the action or position given to a particular limb or membrane naturally extends to the whole body. This harmony, this combination of motion, this unity of spirit diffused through the wondrous mass and every part of it, is the glory of the Elgin Marbles:—put a well-formed human body in the same position, and it will display the same character throughout; make a cast from it while in that position and action, and we shall still see the same bold, free, and comprehensive truth of design. There is no alliteration or antithesis in the style of the Elgin Marbles, no setness, squareness, affectation, or formality of appearance. The different muscles do not present a succession of tumuli, each heaving with big throes to rival the other. If one is raised, the other falls quietly into 330its place. Neither do the different parts of the body answer to one another, like shoulder-knots on a lacquey’s coat or the different ornaments of a building. The sculptor does not proceed on architectural principles. His work has the freedom, the variety, and stamp of nature. The form of corresponding parts is indeed the same, but it is subject to inflection from different circumstances. There is no primness or petit maître-ship, as in some of the later antiques, where the artist seemed to think that flesh was glass or some other brittle substance; and that if it were put out of its exact shape it would break in pieces. Here, on the contrary, if the foot of one leg is bent under the body, the leg itself undergoes an entire alteration. If one side of the body is raised above the other, the original, or abstract, or ideal form of the two sides is not preserved strict and inviolable, but varies as it necessarily must do in conformity to the law of gravitation, to which all bodies are subject. In this respect, a cast from nature would be the same. Mr. Chantrey once made a cast from Wilson the Black. He put him into an attitude at first, and made the cast, but not liking the effect when done, got him to sit again and made use of the plaister of Paris once more. He was satisfied with the result; but Wilson, who was tired with going through the operation, as soon as it was over, went and leaned upon a block of marble with his hands covering his face. The sagacious sculptor was so struck with the superiority of this natural attitude over those into which he had been arbitrarily put that he begged him (if possible) to continue in it for another quarter of an hour, and another impression was taken off. All three casts remain, and the last is a proof of the superiority of nature over art. The effect of lassitude is visible in every part of the frame, and the strong feeling of this affection, impressed on every limb and muscle, and venting itself naturally in an involuntary attitude which gave immediate relief, is that which strikes every one who has seen this fine study from the life. The casts from this man’s figure have been much admired:—it is from no superiority of form: it is merely that, being taken from nature, they bear her ‘image and superscription.’

As to expression, the Elgin Marbles (at least the Ilissus and Theseus) afford no examples, the heads being gone.

Lastly, as to the ideal form, we contend it is nothing but a selection of fine nature, such as it was seen by the ancient Greek sculptors; and we say that a sufficient approximation to this form may be found in our own country, and still more in other countries, at this day, to warrant the clear conclusion that, under more favourable circumstances of climate, manners, &c. no vain imagination of the human mind could come up to entire natural forms; and that actual casts 331from Greek models would rival the common Greek statues, or surpass them in the same proportion and manner as the Elgin Marbles do. Or if this conclusion should be doubted, we are ready at any time to produce at least one cast from living nature, which if it does not furnish practical proof of all that we have here advanced, we are willing to forfeit the last thing we can afford to part with—a theory!

If then the Elgin Marbles are to be considered as authority in subjects of art, we conceive the following principles, which have not hitherto been generally received or acted upon in Great Britain, will be found to result from them:—

1. That art is (first and last) the imitation of nature.

2. That the highest art is the imitation of the finest nature, that is to say, of that which conveys the strongest sense of pleasure or power, of the sublime or beautiful.

3. That the ideal is only the selecting a particular form which expresses most completely the idea of a given character or quality, as of beauty, strength, activity, voluptuousness, &c. and which preserves that character with the greatest consistency throughout.

4. That the historical is nature in action. With regard to the face, it is expression.

5. That grandeur consists in connecting a number of parts into a whole, and not in leaving out the parts.

6. That as grandeur is the principle of connexion between different parts, beauty is the principle of affinity between different forms, or rather gradual conversion into each other. The one harmonizes, the other aggrandizes our impressions of things.

7. That grace is the beautiful or harmonious in what relates to position or motion.

8. That grandeur of motion is unity of motion.

9. That strength is the giving the extremes, softness, the uniting them.

10. That truth is to a certain degree beauty and grandeur, since all things are connected, and all things modify one another in nature. Simplicity is also grand and beautiful for the same reason. Elegance is ease and lightness, with precision.

All this we have, we believe, said before; we shall proceed to such proofs or explanations as we are able to give of it in another article.

At the conclusion of a former article on this subject, we ventured to lay down some general principles, which we shall here proceed to elucidate in such manner as we are able.

1. The first was, that art is (first and last) the imitation of nature.

By nature, we mean actually existing nature, or some one object to be found in rerum naturâ, not an idea of nature existing solely in the 332mind, got from an infinite number of different objects, but which was never yet embodied in an individual instance. Sir Joshua Reynolds may be ranked at the head of those who have maintained the supposition that nature (or the universe of things) was indeed the groundwork or foundation on which art rested; but that the superstructure rose above it, that it towered by degrees above the world of realities, and was suspended in the regions of thought alone—that a middle form, a more refined idea, borrowed from the observation of a number of particulars, but unlike any of them, was the standard of truth and beauty, and the glittering phantom that hovered round the head of the genuine artist:

We have no notion of this vague, equivocal theory of art, and contend, on the other hand, that each image in art should have a tally or corresponding prototype in some object in nature. Otherwise, we do not see the use of art at all: it is a mere superfluity, an incumbrance to the mind, a piece of ‘laborious foolery’—for the word, the mere name of any object or class of objects will convey the general idea, more free from particular details or defects than any the most neutral and indefinite representation that can be produced by forms and colours. The word Man, for instance, conveys a more filmy, impalpable, abstracted, and (according to this hypothesis) sublime idea of the species, than Michael Angelo’s Adam, or any real image can possibly do. If this then is the true object of art, the language of painting, sculpture, &c. becomes quite supererogatory. Sir Joshua and the rest contend, that nature (properly speaking) does not express any single individual, nor the whole mass of things as they exist, but a general principle, a something common to all these, retaining the perfections, that is, all in which they are alike, and abstracting the defects, namely, all in which they differ: so that, out of actual nature, we compound an artificial nature, never answering to the former in any one part of its mock-existence, and which last is the true object of imitation to the aspiring artist. Let us adopt this principle of abstraction as the rule of perfection, and see what havoc it will make in all our notions and feelings in such matters. If the perfect is the intermediate, why not confound all objects, all forms, all colours at once? Instead of painting a landscape with blue sky, or white clouds, or green earth, or grey rocks and towers; what should we say if the artist (so named) were to treat all these ‘fair varieties’ as so many imperfections and mistakes in the creation, and mass them 333altogether, by mixing up the colours on his palette in the same dull, leaden tone, and call this the true principle of epic landscape-painting? Would not the thing be abominable, an abortion, and worse than the worst Dutch picture? Variety then is one principle, one beauty in external nature, and not an everlasting source of pettiness and deformity, which must be got rid of at all events, before taste can set its seal upon the work, or fancy own it. But it may be said, it is different in things of the same species, and particularly in man, who is cast in a regular mould, which mould is one. What then, are we, on this pretext, to confound the difference of sex in a sort of hermaphrodite softness, as Mr. Westall, Angelica Kauffman, and others, have done in their effeminate performances? Are we to leave out of the scale of legitimate art, the extremes of infancy and old age, as not middle terms in man’s life? Are we to strike off from the list of available topics and sources of interest, the varieties of character, of passion, of strength, activity, &c.? Is everything to wear the same form, the same colour, the same unmeaning face? Are we only to repeat the same average idea of perfection, that is, our own want of observation and imagination, for ever, and to melt down the inequalities and excrescences of individual nature in the monotony of abstraction? Oh no! As well might we prefer the cloud to the rainbow; the dead corpse to the living moving body! So Sir Joshua debated upon Rubens’s landscapes, and has a whole chapter to inquire whether accidents in nature, that is, rainbows, moonlight, sun-sets, clouds and storms, are the proper thing in the classical style of art. Again, it is urged that this is not what is meant, viz. to exclude different classes or characters of things, but that there is in each class or character a middle point, which is the point of perfection. What middle point? Or how is it ascertained? What is the middle age of childhood? Or are all children to be alike, dark or fair? Some of Titian’s children have black hair, and others yellow or auburn: who can tell which is the most beautiful? May not a St. John be older than an infant Christ? Must not a Magdalen be different from a Madonna, a Diana from a Venus? Or may not a Venus have more or less gravity, a Diana more or less sweetness? What then becomes of the abstract idea in any of these cases? It varies as it does in nature; that is, there is indeed a general principle or character to be adhered to, but modified everlastingly by various other given or nameless circumstances. The highest art, like nature, is a living spring of unconstrained excellence, and does not produce a continued repetition of itself, like plaster-casts from the same figure. But once more it may be insisted, that in what relates to mere form or organic structure, there is necessarily a middle line or central point, anything 334short of which is deficiency, and anything beyond it excess, being the average form to which all the other forms included in the same species tend, and approximate more or less. Then this average form as it exists in nature should be taken as the model for art. What occasion to do it out of your own head, when you can bring it under the cognizance of your senses? Suppose a foot of a certain size and shape to be the standard of perfection, or if you will, the mean proportion between all other feet. How can you tell this so well as by seeing it? How can you copy it so well as by having it actually before you? But, you will say, there are particular minute defects in the best-shaped actual foot which ought not to be transferred to the imitation. Be it so. But are there not also particular minute beauties in the best, or even the worst shaped actual foot, which you will only discover by ocular inspection, which are reducible to no measurement or precepts, and which in finely-developed nature outweigh the imperfections a thousandfold, the proper general form being contained there also, and these being only the distinctly articulated parts of it, with their inflections which no artist can carry in his head alone? For instance, in the bronze monument of Henry VII. and his wife, in Westminster Abbey, by the famous Torregiano, the fingers and fingernails of the woman in particular are made out as minutely, and, at the same time, as beautifully as it is possible to conceive; yet they have exactly the effect that a cast taken from a fine female hand would have, with every natural joint, muscle, and nerve in complete preservation. Does this take from the beauty or magnificence of the whole? No: it aggrandises it. What then does it take from? Nothing but the conceit of the artist that he can paint a hand out of his own head (that is, out of nothing, and by reducing it again as near as can be to nothing, to a mere vague image) that shall be better than any thing in nature. A hand or foot is not one thing, because it is one word or name; and the painter of mere abstractions had better lay down his pencil at once, and be contented to write the descriptions or titles under works of art. Lastly, it may be objected that a whole figure can never be found perfect or equal; that the most beautiful arm will not belong to the same figure as the most beautiful leg, and so on. How is this to be remedied? By taking the arm from one, and the leg from the other, and clapping them both on the same body? That will never do; for however admirable in themselves, they will hardly agree together. One will have a different character from the other; and they will form a sort of natural patchwork. Or, to avoid this, will you take neither from actual models, but derive them from the neutralising medium of your own imagination. Worse and worse. Copy them from the same 335model, the best in all its parts you can get; so that, if you have to alter, you may alter as little as possible, and retain nearly the whole substance of nature.^[50] You may depend upon it that what is so retained, will alone be of any specific value. The rest may have a negative merit, but will be positively good for nothing. It will be to the vital truth and beauty of what is taken from the best nature, like the piecing of an antique statue. It fills a gap, but nothing more. It is, in fact, a mental blank.

2. This leads us to the second point laid down before, which was, that the highest art is the imitation of the finest nature, or in other words, of that which conveys the strongest sense of pleasure or power, of the sublime or beautiful.

The artist does not pretend to invent an absolutely new class of objects, without any foundation in nature. He does not spread his palette on the canvas, for the mere finery of the thing, and tell us that it makes a brighter show than the rainbow, or even than a bed of tulips. He does not draw airy forms, moving above the earth, ‘gay creatures of the element, that play i’ th’ plighted clouds,’ and scorn the mere material existences, the concrete descendants of those that came out of Noah’s Ark, and that walk, run, or creep upon it. No, he does not paint only what he has seen in his mind’s eye, but the common objects that both he and others daily meet—rocks, clouds, trees, men, women, beasts, fishes, birds, or what he calls such. He is then an imitator by profession. He gives the appearances of things that exist outwardly by themselves, and have a distinct and independent nature of their own. But these know their own nature best; and it is by consulting them that he can alone trace it truly, either in the immediate details, or characteristic essences. Nature is consistent, unaffected, powerful, subtle: art is forgetful, apish, feeble, coarse. Nature is the original, and therefore right: art is the copy, and can but tread lamely in the same steps. Nature penetrates into the parts, and moves the whole mass: it acts with diversity, and in necessary connexion; for real causes never forget to operate, and to contribute their portion. Where, therefore, these causes are called into play to the utmost extent that they ever go to, there we shall have a strength and a refinement, that art may imitate but cannot surpass. But it is said that art can surpass this most perfect image in nature by combining others with it. What! by joining to the most perfect in its kind something less perfect? Go to,—this argument will not pass. Suppose you have a goblet of the finest wine that ever was tasted: you will not mend it by pouring 336into it all sorts of samples of an inferior quality. So the best in nature is the stint and limit of what is best in art: for art can only borrow from nature still; and, moreover, must borrow entire objects, for bits only make patches. We defy any landscape-painter to invent out of his own head, and by jumbling together all the different forms of hills he ever saw, by adding a bit to one, and taking a bit from another, anything equal to Arthur’s seat, with the appendage of Salisbury Crags, that overlook Edinburgh. Why so? Because there are no levers in the mind of man equal to those with which nature works at her utmost need. No imagination can toss and tumble about huge heaps of earth as the ocean in its fury can. A volcano is more potent to rend rocks asunder than the most splashing pencil. The convulsions of nature can make a precipice more frightfully, or heave the backs of mountains more proudly, or throw their sides into waving lines more gracefully than all the beau idéal of art. For there is in nature not only greater power and scope, but (so to speak) greater knowledge and unity of purpose. Art is comparatively weak and incongruous, being at once a miniature and caricature of nature. We grant that a tolerable sketch of Arthur’s seat, and the adjoining view, is better than Primrose Hill itself, (dear Primrose Hill! ha! faithless pen, canst thou forget its winding slopes, and valleys green, to which all Scotland can bring no parallel?) but no pencil can transform or dandle Primrose Hill (our favourite Primrose Hill!) into a thing of equal character and sublimity with Arthur’s seat. It gives us some pain to make this concession; but in doing it, we flatter ourselves that no Scotchman will have the liberality in any way to return us the compliment. We do not recollect a more striking illustration of the difference between art and nature in this respect, than Mr. Martin’s very singular and, in some things, very meritorious pictures. But he strives to outdo nature. He wants to give more than she does, or than his subject requires or admits. He sub-divides his groups into infinite littleness, and exaggerates his scenery into absolute immensity. His figures are like rows of shiny pins; his mountains are piled up one upon the back of the other, like the stories of houses. He has no notion of the moral principle in all art, that a part may be greater than the whole. He reckons that if one range of lofty square hills is good, another range above that with clouds between must be better. He thus wearies the imagination, instead of exciting it. We see no end of the journey, and turn back in disgust. We are tired of the effort, we are tired of the monotony of this sort of reduplication of the same object. We were satisfied before; but it seems the painter was not, and we naturally sympathise with him. This craving after quantity is a morbid affection. A landscape is not an architectural 337elevation. You may build a house as high as you can lift up stones with pulleys and levers, but you cannot raise mountains into the sky merely with the pencil. They lose probability and effect by striving at too much; and, with their ceaseless throes, oppress the imagination of the spectator, and bury the artist’s fame under them. The only error of these pictures is, however, that art here puts on her seven-league boots, and thinks it possible to steal a march upon nature. Mr. Martin might make Arthur’s Seat sublime, if he chose to take the thing as it is; but he would be for squaring it according to the mould in his own imagination, and for clapping another Arthur’s Seat on the top of it, to make the Calton Hill stare! Again, with respect to the human figure. This has an internal structure, muscles, bones, blood-vessels, &c. by means of which the external surface is operated upon according to certain laws. Does the artist, with all his generalizations, understand these, as well as nature does? Can he predict, with all his learning, that if a certain muscle is drawn up in a particular manner, it will present a particular appearance in a different part of the arm or leg, or bring out other muscles, which were before hid, with certain modifications? But in nature all this is brought about by necessary laws, and the effect is visible to those, and those only, who look for it in actual objects. This is the great and master-excellence of the Elgin Marbles, that they do not seem to be the outer surface of a hard and immovable block of marble, but to be actuated by an internal machinery, and composed of the same soft and flexible materials as the human body. The skin (or the outside) seems to be protruded or tightened by the natural action of a muscle beneath it. This result is miraculous in art: in nature it is easy and unavoidable. That is to say, art has to imitate or produce certain effects or appearances without the natural causes: but the human understanding can hardly be so true to those causes as the causes to themselves; and hence the necessity (in this sort of simulated creation) of recurring at every step to the actual objects and appearances of nature. Having shown so far how indispensable it is for art to identify itself with nature, in order to preserve the truth of imitation, without which it is destitute of value or meaning, it may be said to follow as a necessary consequence, that the only way in which art can rise to greater dignity or excellence is by finding out models of greater dignity and excellence in nature. Will any one, looking at the Theseus, for example, say that it could spring merely from the artist’s brain, or that it could be done from a common, ill-made, or stunted body! The fact is, that its superiority consists in this, that it is a perfect combination of art and nature, or an identical, and as it were spontaneous copy of an individual picked out of a 338finer race of men than generally tread this ball of earth. Could it be made of a Dutchman’s trunk-hose? No. Could it be made out of one of Sir Joshua’s Discourses on the middle form? No. How then? Out of an eye, a head, and a hand, with sense, spirit, and energy to follow the finest nature, as it appeared exemplified in sweeping masses, and in subtle details, without pedantry, conceit, cowardice, or affectation! Some one was asking at Mr. H—yd—n’s one day, as a few persons were looking at the cast from this figure, why the original might not have been done as a cast from nature. Such a supposition would account at least for what seems otherwise unaccountable—the incredible labour and finishing bestowed on the back and the other parts of this figure, placed at a prodigious height against the walls of a temple, where they could never be seen after they were once put up there. If they were done by means of a cast in the first instance, the thing appears intelligible, otherwise not. Our host stoutly resisted this imputation, which tended to deprive art of one of its greatest triumphs, and to make it as mechanical as a shaded profile. So far, so good. But the reason he gave was bad, viz., that the limbs could not remain in those actions long enough to be cast. Yet surely this would take a shorter time than if the model sat to the sculptor; and we all agreed that nothing but actual, continued, and intense observation of living nature could give the solidity, complexity, and refinement of imitation which we saw in the half animated, almost moving figure before us.^[51] Be this as it may, the principle here stated does not reduce art to the imitation of what is understood by common or low life. It rises to any point of beauty or sublimity you please, but it rises only as nature rises exalted with it too. To hear these critics talk, one would suppose there was nothing in the world really worth looking at. The Dutch pictures were the best that they could paint: they had no other landscapes or faces before them. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Yet who is not alarmed at a Venus by Rembrandt? The Greek statues were (cum grano salis) Grecian youths and nymphs; and the women in the streets of Rome (it has been remarked^[52]) look to this hour as if they had walked out of Raphael’s pictures. Nature is always truth: at its best, it is beauty and sublimity as well; though Sir Joshua tells us in one of the papers in the Idler, that in itself, or with reference to individuals, it is a mere tissue of meanness and deformity. Luckily, the Elgin Marbles say NO to that conclusion: for they are 339decidedly part and parcel thereof. What constitutes fine nature, we shall inquire under another head. But we would remark here, that it can hardly be the middle form, since this principle, however it might determine certain general proportions and outlines, could never be intelligible in the details of nature, or applicable to those of art. Who will say that the form of a finger nail is just midway between a thousand others that he has not remarked: we are only struck with it when it is more than ordinarily beautiful, from symmetry, an oblong shape, &c. The staunch partisans of this theory, however, get over the difficulty here spoken of, in practice, by omitting the details altogether, and making their works sketches, or rather what the French call ébauches and the English daubs.

3. The Ideal is only the selecting a particular form which expresses most completely the idea of a given character or quality, as of beauty, strength, activity, voluptuousness, &c. and which preserves that character with the greatest consistency throughout.

Instead of its being true in general that the ideal is the middle point, it is to be found in the extremes; or, it is carrying any idea as far as it will go. Thus, for instance, a Silenus is as much an ideal thing as an Apollo, as to the principle on which it is done, viz., giving to every feature, and to the whole form, the utmost degree of grossness and sensuality that can be imagined, with this exception (which has nothing to do with the understanding of the question), that the ideal means by custom this extreme on the side of the good and beautiful. With this reserve, the ideal means always the something more of anything which may be anticipated by the fancy, and which must be found in nature (by looking long enough for it) to be expressed as it ought. Suppose a good heavy Dutch face (we speak by the proverb)—this, you will say, is gross; but it is not gross enough. You have an idea of something grosser, that is, you have seen something grosser and must seek for it again. When you meet with it, and have stamped it on the canvas, or carved it out of the block, this is the true ideal, namely, that which answers to and satisfies a preconceived idea; not that which is made out of an abstract idea, and answers to nothing. In the Silenus, also, according to the notion we have of the properties and character of that figure, there must be vivacity, slyness, wantonness, &c. Not only the image in the mind, but a real face may express all these combined together; another may express them more, and another most, which last is the ideal; and when the image in nature coalesces with, and gives a body, force, and reality to the idea in the mind, then it is that we see the true perfection of art. The forehead should be ‘villainous low;’ the eye-brows bent in; the eyes small and gloating; the nose pugged, 340and pointed at the end, with distended nostrils; the mouth large and shut; the cheeks swollen; the neck thick, &c. There is, in all this process, nothing of softening down, of compromising qualities, of finding out a mean proportion between different forms and characters; the sole object is to intensify each as much as possible. The only fear is ‘to o’erstep the modesty of nature,’ and run into caricature. This must be avoided; but the artist is only to stop short of this. He must not outrage probability. We must have seen a class of such faces, or something so nearly approaching, as to prevent the imagination from revolting against them. The forehead must be low, but not so low as to lose the character of humanity in the brute. It would thus lose all its force and meaning. For that which is extreme and ideal in one species is nothing, if, by being pushed too far, it is merged in another. Above all, there should be keeping in the whole and every part. In the Pan, the horns and goat’s feet, perhaps, warrant the approach to a more animal expression than would otherwise be allowable in the human features; but yet this tendency to excess must be restrained within certain limits. If Pan is made into a beast, he will cease to be a God! Let Momus distend his jaws with laughter, as far as laughter can stretch them, but no farther; or the expression will be that of pain and not of pleasure. Besides, the overcharging the expression or action of any one feature will suspend the action of others. The whole face will no longer laugh. But this universal suffusion of broad mirth and humour over the countenance is very different from a placid smile, midway between grief and joy. Yet a classical Momus, by modern theories of the ideal, ought to be such a nonentity in expression. The ancients knew better. They pushed art in such subjects to the verge of ‘all we hate,’ while they felt the point beyond which it could not be urged with propriety, i.e. with truth, consistency, and consequent effect. There is no difference, in philosophical reasoning, between the mode of art here insisted on, and the ideal regularity of such figures as the Apollo, the Hercules, the Mercury, the Venus, &c. All these are, as it were, personifications, essences, abstractions of certain qualities of virtue in human nature, not of human nature in general, which would make nonsense. Instead of being abstractions of all sorts of qualities jumbled together in a neutral character, they are in the opposite sense abstractions of some single quality or customary combination of qualities, leaving out all others as much as possible, and imbuing every part with that one predominant character to the utmost. The Apollo is a representation of graceful dignity and mental power; the Hercules of bodily strength; the Mercury of swiftness; the Venus of female loveliness, and so on. In these, in 341the Apollo is surely implied and found more grace than usual; in the Hercules more strength than usual; in the Mercury more lightness than usual; in the Venus more softness than usual. Is it not so? What then becomes of the pretended middle form? One would think it would be sufficient to prove this, to ask, ‘Do not these statues differ from one another? And is this difference a defect?’ It would be ridiculous to call them by different names, if they were not supposed to represent different and peculiar characters: sculptors should, in that case, never carve anything but the statue of a man, the statue of a woman, &c. and this would be the name of perfection. This theory of art is not at any rate justified by the history of art. An extraordinary quantity of bone and muscle is as proper to the Hercules as his club, and it would be strange if the Goddess of Love had not a more delicately rounded form, and a more languishing look withal, than the Goddess of Hunting. That a form combining and blending the properties of both, the downy softness of the one, with the elastic buoyancy of the other, would be more perfect than either, we no more see than that grey is the most perfect of colours. At any rate, this is the march neither of nature nor of art. It is not denied that these antique sculptures are models of the ideal; nay, it is on them that this theory boasts of being founded. Yet they give a flat contradiction to its insipid mediocrity. Perhaps some of them have a slight bias to the false ideal, to the smooth and uniform, or the negation of nature: any error on this side is, however, happily set right by the Elgin Marbles, which are the paragons of sculpture and the mould of form.—As the ideal then requires a difference of character in each figure as a whole, so it expects the same character (or a corresponding one) to be stamped on each part of every figure. As the legs of a Diana should be more muscular and adapted for running, than those of a Venus or a Minerva, so the skin of her face ought to be more tense, bent on her prey, and hardened by being exposed to the winds of heaven. The respective characters of lightness, softness, strength, &c. should pervade each part of the surface of each figure, but still varying according to the texture and functions of the individual part. This can only be learned or practised from the attentive observation of nature in those forms in which any given character or excellence is most strikingly displayed, and which has been selected for imitation and study on that account.—Suppose a dimple in the chin to be a mark of voluptuousness; then the Venus should have a dimple in the chin; and she has one. But this will imply certain correspondent indications in other parts of the features, about the corners of the mouth, a gentle undulation and sinking in of the cheek, as if it had just been pinched, 342and so on: yet so as to be consistent with the other qualities of roundness, smoothness, &c. which belong to the idea of the character. Who will get all this and embody it out of the idea of a middle form, I cannot say: it may be, and has been, got out of the idea of a number of distinct enchanting graces in the mind, and from some heavenly object unfolded to the sight!

4. That the historical is nature in action. With regard to the face, it is expression.

Hogarth’s pictures are true history. Every feature, limb, figure, group, is instinct with life and motion. He does not take a subject and place it in a position, like a lay figure, in which it stirs neither limb nor joint. The scene moves before you: the face is like a frame-work of flexible machinery. If the mouth is distorted with laughter, the eyes swim in laughter. If the forehead is knit together, the cheeks are puckered up. If a fellow squints most horribly, the rest of his face is awry. The muscles pull different ways, or the same way, at the same time, on the surface of the picture, as they do in the human body. What you see is the reverse of still life. There is a continual and complete action and re-action of one variable part upon another, as there is in the Elgin Marbles. If you pull the string of a bow, the bow itself is bent. So is it in the strings and wires that move the human frame. The action of any one part, the contraction or relaxation of any one muscle, extends more or less perceptibly to every other:

Thus the celebrated Iö of Correggio is imbued, steeped, in a manner in the same voluptuous feeling all over—the same passion languishes in her whole frame, and communicates the infection to the feet, the back, and the reclined position of the head. This is history, not carpenter’s work. Some painters fancy that they paint history, if they get the measurement from the foot to the knee and put four bones where there are four bones. This is not our idea of it; but we think it is to show how one part of the body sways another in action and in passion. The last relates chiefly to the expression of the face, though not altogether. Passion may be shown in a clenched fist as well as in clenched teeth. The face, however, is the throne of expression. Character implies the feeling, which is fixed and permanent; expression that which it occasional and momentary, at least, technically speaking. Portrait treats of objects as they are; history of the events and changes to which they are liable. And so far history has a double superiority; or a double difficulty to overcome, viz. in the rapid glance over a number of parts subject to the simultaneous action 343of the same law, and in the scope of feeling required to sympathise with the critical and powerful movements of passion. It requires greater capacity of muscular motion to follow the progress of a carriage in violent motion, than to lean upon it standing still. If, to describe passion, it were merely necessary to observe its outward effects, these, perhaps, in the prominent points, become more visible and more tangible as the passion is more intense. But it is not only necessary to see the effects, but to discern the cause, in order to make the one true to the other. No painter gives more of intellectual or impassioned appearances than he understands or feels. It is an axiom in painting that sympathy is indispensable to truth of expression. Without it, you get only caricatures, which are not the thing. But to sympathise with passion, a greater fund of sensibility is demanded in proportion to the strength or tenderness of the passion. And as he feels most of this whose face expresses most passion, so he also feels most by sympathy whose hand can describe most passion. This amounts nearly, we take it, to a demonstration of an old and very disputed point. The same reasoning might be applied to poetry, but this is not the place.—Again, it is easier to paint a portrait than an historical face, because the head sits for the first, but the expression will hardly sit for the last. Perhaps those passions are the best subjects for painting, the expression of which may be retained for some time, so as to be better caught, which throw out a sort of lambent fire, and leave a reflected glory behind them, as we see in Madonnas, Christ’s heads, and what is understood by sacred subjects in general. The violences of human passion are too soon over to be copied by the hand, and the mere conception of the internal workings is not here sufficient, as it is in poetry. A portrait is to history what still-life is to portraiture: that is, the whole remains the same while you are doing it; or while you are occupied about each part, the rest wait for you. Yet, what a difference is there between taking an original portrait and making a copy of one! This shows that the face in its most ordinary state is continually varying and in action. So much of history is there in portrait!—No one should pronounce definitively on the superiority of history over portrait, without recollecting Titian’s heads. The finest of them are very nearly (say quite) equal to the finest of Raphael’s. They have almost the look of still-life, yet each part is decidedly influenced by the rest. Everything is relative in them. You cannot put any other eye, nose, lip in the same face. As is one part, so is the rest. You cannot fix on any particular beauty; the charm is in the whole. They have least action, and the most expression of any portraits. They are doing nothing, and yet all other business seems insipid in comparison of their thoughts. They are silent, retired, and 344do not court observation; yet you cannot keep your eyes from them. Some one said, that you would be as cautious of your behaviour in a room where a picture of Titian’s was hung, as if there was somebody by—so entirely do they look you through. They are the least tiresome furniture-company in the world!

5. Grandeur consists in connecting a number of parts into a whole, and not leaving out the parts.

Sir Joshua lays it down that the great style in art consists in the omission of the details. A greater error never man committed. The great style consists in preserving the masses and general proportions; not in omitting the details. Thus, suppose, for illustration’s sake, the general form of an eye-brow to be commanding and grand. It is of a certain size, and arched in a particular curve. Now, surely, this general form or outline will be equally preserved, whether the painter daubs it in, in a bold, rough way, as Reynolds or perhaps Rembrandt would, or produces the effect by a number of hair-lines arranged in the same form as Titian sometimes did; and in his best pictures. It will not be denied (for it cannot) that the characteristic form of the eye-brow would be the same, or that the effect of the picture at a small distance would be nearly the same in either case; only in the latter, it would be rather more perfect, as being more like nature. Suppose a strong light to fall on one side of a face, and a deep shadow to involve the whole of the other. This would produce two distinct and large masses in the picture; which answers to the conditions of what is called the grand style of composition. Well, would it destroy these masses to give the smallest veins or variation of colour or surface in the light side, or to shade the other with the most delicate and elaborate chiaro-scuro? It is evident not; from common sense, from the practice of the best masters, and, lastly, from the example of nature, which contains both the larger masses, the strongest contrasts, and the highest finishing, within itself. The integrity of the whole, then, is not impaired by the indefinite subdivision and smallness of the parts. The grandeur of the ultimate effects depends entirely on the arrangement of these in a certain form or under certain masses. The Ilissus, or River-god, is floating in his proper element, and is, in appearance, as firm as a rock, as pliable as a wave of the sea. The artist’s breath might be said to mould and play upon the undulating surface. The whole is expanded into noble proportions, and heaves with general effect. What then? Are the parts unfinished; or are they not there? No; they are there with the nicest exactness, but in due subordination; that is, they are there as they are found in fine nature; and float upon the general form, like straw or weeds upon the tide of ocean. Once more: in Titian’s portraits we perceive a 345certain character stamped upon the different features. In the Hippolito de Medici the eye-brows are angular, the nose is peaked, the mouth has sharp corners, the face is (so to speak) a pointed oval. The drawing in each of these is as careful and distinct as can be. But the unity of intention in nature, and in the artist, does not the less tend to produce a general grandeur and impressiveness of effect; which at first sight it is not easy to account for. To combine a number of particulars to one end is not to omit them altogether; and is the best way of producing the grand style, because it does this without either affectation or slovenliness.

6. The sixth rule we proposed to lay down was, that as grandeur is the principle of connexion between different parts; beauty is the principle of affinity between different forms, or their gradual conversion into each other. The one harmonizes, the other aggrandizes, our impressions of things.

There is a harmony of colours and a harmony of sounds, unquestionably: why then there should be all this squeamishness about admitting an original harmony of forms as the principle of beauty and source of pleasure there we cannot understand. It is true, that there is in organized bodies a certain standard of form to which they approximate more or less, and from which they cannot very widely deviate without shocking the sense of custom, or our settled expectations of what they ought to be. And hence it has been pretended that there is in all such cases a middle central form, obtained by leaving out the peculiarities of all the others, which alone is the pure standard of truth and beauty. A conformity to custom is, we grant, one condition of beauty or source of satisfaction to the eye, because an abrupt transition shocks; but there is a conformity (or correspondence) of colours, sounds, lines, among themselves, which is soft and pleasing for the same reason. The average or customary form merely determines what is natural. A thing cannot please, unless it is to be found in nature; but that which is natural is most pleasing, according as it has other properties which in themselves please. Thus the colour of a cheek must be the natural complexion of a human face;—it would not do to make it the colour of a flower or a precious stone;—but among complexions ordinarily to be found in nature, that is most beautiful which would be thought so abstractedly, or in itself. Yellow hair is not the most common, nor is it a mean proportion between the different colours of women’s hair. Yet, who will say that it is not the most beautiful? Blue or green hair would be a defect and an anomaly, not because it is not the medium of nature, but because it is not in nature at all. To say that there is no difference in the sense of form except from custom, is like saying that there is no difference in the sensation of smooth or rough. Judging by analogy, a gradation 346or symmetry of form must affect the mind in the same manner as a gradation of recurrence at given intervals of tones or sounds; and if it does so in fact, we need not inquire further for the principle. Sir Joshua (who is the arch-heretic on this subject) makes grandeur or sublimity consist in the middle form, or abstraction of all peculiarities; which is evidently false, for grandeur and sublimity arise from extraordinary strength, magnitude, &c. or in a word, from an excess of power, so as to startle and overawe the mind. But as sublimity is an excess of power, beauty is, we conceive, the blending and harmonizing different powers or qualities together, so as to produce a soft and pleasurable sensation. That it is not the middle form of the species seems proved in various ways. First, because one species is more beautiful than another, according to common sense. A rose is the queen of flowers, in poetry at least; but in this philosophy any other flower is as good. A swan is more beautiful than a goose; a stag than a goat. Yet if custom were the test of beauty, either we should give no preference, or our preference would be reversed. Again, let us go back to the human face and figure. A straight nose is allowed to be handsome, that is, one that presents nearly a continuation of the line of the forehead, and the sides of which are nearly parallel. Now this cannot be the mean proportion of the form of noses. For, first, most noses are broader at the bottom than at the top, inclining to the negro head, but none are broader at top than at the bottom, to produce the Greek form as a balance between both. Almost all noses sink in immediately under the forehead bone, none ever project there; so that the nearly straight line continued from the forehead cannot be a mean proportion struck between the two extremes of convex and concave form in this feature of the face. There must, therefore, be some other principle of symmetry, continuity, &c. to account for the variation from the prescribed rule. Once more (not to multiply instances tediously), a double calf is undoubtedly the perfection of beauty in the form of the leg. But this is a rare thing. Nor is it the medium between two common extremes. For the muscles seldom swell enough to produce this excrescence, if it may be so called, and never run to an excess there, so as, by diminishing the quantity, to subside into proportion and beauty. But this second or lower calf is a connecting link between the upper calf and the small of the leg, and is just like a second chord or half-note in music. We conceive that any one who does not perceive the beauty of the Venus de Medicis, for instance, in this respect, has not the proper perception of form in his mind. As this is the most disputable, or at least the most disputed part of our theory, we may, perhaps, have to recur to it again, and shall leave an opening for that purpose.

3477. That grace is the beautiful or harmonious in what relates to position or motion.

There needs not much be said on this point; as we apprehend it will be granted that, whatever beauty is as to the form, grace is the same thing in relation to the use that is made of it. Grace, in writing, relates to the transitions that are made from one subject to another, or to the movement that is given to a passage. If one thing leads to another, or an idea or illustration is brought in without effect, or without making a boggle in the mind, we call this a graceful style. Transitions must in general be gradual and pieced together. But sometimes the most violent are the most graceful, when the mind is fairly tired out and exhausted with a subject, and is glad to leap to another as a repose and relief from the first. Of these there are frequent instances in Mr. Burke’s writings, which have something Pindaric in them. That which is not beautiful in itself, or in the mere form, may be made so by position or motion. A figure by no means elegant may be put in an elegant position. Mr. Kean’s figure is not good; yet we have seen him throw himself into attitudes of infinite spirit, dignity, and grace. John Kemble’s figure, on the contrary, is fine in itself; and he has only to show himself to be admired. The direction in which anything is moved has evidently nothing to do with the shape of the thing moved. The one may be a circle and the other a square. Little and deformed people seem to be well aware of this distinction, who, in spite of their unpromising appearance, usually assume the most imposing attitudes, and give themselves the most extraordinary airs imaginable.

8. Grandeur of motion is unity of motion.

This principle hardly needs illustration. Awkwardness is contradictory or disjointed motion.

9. Strength in art is giving the extremes, softness the uniting them.

There is no incompatibility between strength and softness, as is sometimes supposed by frivolous people. Weakness is not refinement. A shadow may be twice as deep in a finely coloured picture as in another, and yet almost imperceptible, from the gradations that lead to it, and blend it with the light. Correggio had prodigious strength, and greater softness. Nature is strong and soft, beyond the reach of art to imitate. Softness then does not imply the absence of considerable extremes, but it is the interposing a third thing between them, to break the force of the contrast. Guido is more soft than strong. Rembrandt is more strong than soft.

10. And lastly. That truth is, to a certain degree, beauty and grandeur, since all things are connected, and all things modify one another 348in nature. Simplicity is also grand and beautiful for the same reason. Elegance is ease and lightness, with precision.

This last head appears to contain a number of gratis dicta, got together for the sake of completing a decade of propositions. They have, however, some show of truth, and we should add little clearness to them by any reasoning upon the matter. So we will conclude here for the present.

The old sarcasm—Omne ignotum pro magnifico est—cannot be justly applied here. Fonthill Abbey, after being enveloped in impenetrable mystery for a length of years, has been unexpectedly thrown open to the vulgar gaze, and has lost none of its reputation for magnificence—though, perhaps, its visionary glory, its classic renown, have vanished from the public mind for ever. It is, in a word, a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy-shop, an immense Museum of all that is most curious and costly, and, at the same time, most worthless, in the productions of art and nature. Ships of pearl and seas of amber are scarce a fable here—a nautilus’s shell surmounted with a gilt triumph of Neptune—tables of agate, cabinets of ebony and precious stones, painted windows ‘shedding a gaudy, crimson light,’ satin borders, marble floors, and lamps of solid gold—Chinese pagodas and Persian tapestry—all the miniature splendour of Solomon’s Temple is displayed to the view—whatever is far-fetched and dear-bought, rich in the materials, or rare and difficult in the workmanship—but scarce one genuine work of art, one solid proof of taste, one lofty relic of sentiment or imagination!

The difficult, the unattainable, the exclusive, are to be found here in profusion, in perfection; all else is wanting, or is brought in merely as a foil or as a stop-gap. In this respect the collection is as satisfactory as it is unique. The specimens exhibited are the best, the most highly finished, the most costly and curious, of that kind of ostentatious magnificence which is calculated to gratify the sense of property in the owner, and to excite the wondering curiosity of the stranger, who is permitted to see or (as a choice privilege and favour) even to touch baubles so dazzling and of such exquisite nicety of execution; and which, if broken or defaced, it would be next to impossible to replace. The same character extends to the pictures, which are mere furniture-pictures, remarkable chiefly for their antiquity or painful finishing, without beauty, without interest, 349and with about the same pretensions to attract the eye or delight the fancy as a well-polished mahogany table or a waxed oak-floor. Not one great work by one great name, scarce one or two of the worst specimens of the first masters, Leonardo’s Laughing Boy, or a copy from Raphael or Correggio, as if to make the thing remote and finical—but heaps of the most elaborate pieces of the worst of the Dutch masters, Breughel’s Sea-horses with coats of mother-of-pearl, and Rottenhammer’s Elements turned into a Flower-piece. The Catalogue, in short, is guiltless of the names of any of those works of art

and is sacred to those which rank no higher than veneering, and where the painter is on a precise par with the carver and gilder. Such is not our taste in art; and we confess we should have been a little disappointed in viewing Fonthill, had not our expectations been disabused beforehand. Oh! for a glimpse of the Escurial! where the piles of Titians lie; where nymphs, fairer than lilies, repose in green, airy, pastoral landscapes, and Cupids with curled locks pluck the wanton vine; at whose beauty, whose splendour, whose truth and freshness, Mengs could not contain his astonishment, nor Cumberland his raptures;

the very thought of which, in that monastic seclusion and low dell, surrounded by craggy precipices, gives the mind a calenture, a longing desire to plunge through wastes and wilds, to visit at the shrine of such beauty, and be buried in the bosom of such verdant sweetness.—Get thee behind us, temptation; or not all China and Japan will detain us, and this article will be left unfinished, or found (as a volume of Keats’s poems was carried out by Mr. Ritchie to be dropped in the Great Desart) in the sorriest inn in the farthest part of Spain, or in the marble baths of the Moorish Alhambra, or amidst the ruins of Tadmor, or in barbaric palaces, where Bruce encountered Abyssinian queens! Any thing to get all this frippery, and finery, and tinsel, and glitter, and embossing, and system of tantalization, and fret-work of the imagination out of our heads, and take one deep, long, oblivious draught of the romantic and marvellous, the thirst of which the fame of Fonthill Abbey has raised in us, but not satisfied!—

Mr. Beckford has undoubtedly shown himself an industrious bijoutier, a prodigious virtuoso, an accomplished patron of unproductive labour, an enthusiastic collector of expensive trifles—the 350only proof of taste (to our thinking) he has shown in this collection is his getting rid of it. What splendour, what grace, what grandeur might he substitute in lieu of it! What a handwriting might he spread out upon the walls! What a spirit of poetry and philosophy might breathe there! What a solemn gloom, what gay vistas of fancy, like chequered light and shade, might genius, guided by art, shed around! The author of Vathek is a scholar; the proprietor of Fonthill has travelled abroad, and has seen all the finest remains of antiquity and boasted specimens of modern art. Why not lay his hands on some of these? He had power to carry them away. One might have expected to see, at least, a few fine old pictures, marble copies of the celebrated statues, the Apollo, the Venus, the Dying Gladiator, the Antinous, antique vases with their elegant sculptures, or casts from them, coins, medals, bas-reliefs, something connected with the beautiful forms of external nature, or with what is great in the mind or memorable in the history of man,—Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Chaldee manuscripts, or paper made of the reeds of the Nile, or mummies from the Pyramids! Not so; not a trace (or scarcely so) of any of these;—as little as may be of what is classical or imposing to the imagination from association or well-founded prejudice; hardly an article of any consequence that does not seem to be labelled to the following effect—‘This is mine, and there is no one else in the whole world in whom it can inspire the least interest, or any feeling beyond a momentary surprise!’ To show another your property is an act in itself ungracious, or null and void. It excites no pleasure from sympathy. Every one must have remarked the difference in his feelings on entering a venerable old cathedral, for instance, and a modern-built private mansion. The one seems to fill the mind and expand the form, while the other only produces a sense of listless vacuity, and disposes us to shrink into our own littleness. Whence is this, but that in the first case our associations of power, of interest, are general, and tend to aggrandize the species; and that in the latter (viz. the case of private property) they are exclusive, and tend to aggrandize none but the individual? This must be the effect, unless there is something grand or beautiful in the objects themselves that makes us forget the distinction of mere property, as from the noble architecture or great antiquity of a building; or unless they remind us of common and universal nature, as pictures, statues do, like so many mirrors, reflecting the external landscape, and carrying us out of the magic circle of self-love. But all works of art come under the head of property or showy furniture, which are neither distinguished by sublimity nor beauty, and are estimated only by the labour required to produce what is trifling or worthless, and are 351consequently nothing more than obtrusive proofs of the wealth of the immediate possessor. The motive for the production of such toys is mercenary, and the admiration of them childish or servile. That which pleases merely from its novelty, or because it was never seen before, cannot be expected to please twice: that which is remarkable for the difficulty or costliness of the execution can be interesting to no one but the maker or owner. A shell, however rarely to be met with, however highly wrought or quaintly embellished, can only flatter the sense of curiosity for a moment in a number of persons, or the feeling of vanity for a greater length of time in a single person. There are better things than this (we will be bold to say) in the world both of nature and art—things of universal and lasting interest, things that appeal to the imagination and the affections. The village-bell that rings out its sad or merry tidings to old men and maidens, to children and matrons, goes to the heart, because it is a sound significant of weal or woe to all, and has borne no uninteresting intelligence to you, to me, and to thousands more who have heard it perhaps for centuries. There is a sentiment in it. The face of a Madonna (if equal to the subject) has also a sentiment in it, ‘whose price is above rubies.’ It is a shrine, a consecrated source of high and pure feeling, a well-head of lovely expression, at which the soul drinks and is refreshed, age after age. The mind converses with the mind, or with that nature which, from long and daily intimacy, has become a sort of second self to it: but what sentiment lies hid in a piece of porcelain? What soul can you look for in a gilded cabinet or a marble slab? Is it possible there can be any thing like a feeling of littleness or jealousy in this proneness to a merely ornamental taste, that, from not sympathising with the higher and more expansive emanations of thought, shrinks from their display with conscious weakness and inferiority? If it were an apprehension of an invidious comparison between the proprietor and the author of any signal work of genius, which the former did not covet, one would think he must be at least equally mortified at sinking to a level in taste and pursuits with the maker of a Dutch toy. Mr. Beckford, however, has always had the credit of the highest taste in works of art as well as in virtù. As the showman in Goldsmith’s comedy declares that ‘his bear dances to none but the genteelest of tunes—Water parted from the Sea, or The Minuet in Ariadne;’—so it was supposed that this celebrated collector’s money went for none but the finest Claudes and the choicest specimens of some rare Italian master. The two Claudes are gone. It is as well—they must have felt a little out of their place here—they are kept in countenance, where they are, by the very best company!

352We once happened to have the pleasure of seeing Mr. Beckford in the Great Gallery of the Louvre—he was very plainly dressed in a loose great coat, and looked somewhat pale and thin—but what brought the circumstance to our minds, was that we were told on this occasion one of those thumping matter-of-fact lies, which are pretty common to other Frenchmen besides Gascons—viz. That he had offered the First Consul no less a sum than two hundred thousand guineas for the purchase of the St. Peter Martyr. Would that he had! and that Napoleon had taken him at his word!—which we think not unlikely. With two hundred thousand guineas he might have taken some almost impregnable fortress. ‘Magdeburg,’ said Buonaparte, ‘is worth a hundred queens:’ and he would have thought such another stronghold worth at least one Saint. As it is, what an opportunity have we lost of giving the public an account of this picture! Yet why not describe it, as we see it still ‘in our mind’s eye,’ standing on the floor of the Thuilleries, with none of its brightness impaired, through the long perspective of waning years? There it stands, and will for ever stand in our imagination, with the dark, scowling, terrific face of the murdered monk looking up to his assassin, the horror-struck features of the flying priest, and the skirts of his vest waving in the wind, the shattered branches of the autumnal trees that feel the coming gale, with that cold convent spire rising in the distance amidst the sapphire hills and golden sky—and over-head are seen the cherubim bringing the crown of martyrdom with rosy fingers; and (such is the feeling of truth, the soul of faith in the picture) you hear floating near, in dim harmonies, the pealing anthem, and the heavenly choir! Surely, the St. Peter Martyr surpasses all Titian’s other works, as he himself did all other painters. Had this picture been transferred to the present collection (or any picture like it) what a trail of glory would it have left behind it! for what a length of way would it have haunted the imagination! how often should we have wished to revisit it, and how fondly would the eye have turned back to the stately tower of Fonthill Abbey, that from the western horizon gives the setting sun to other climes, as the beacon and guide to the knowledge and the love of high Art!

The Duke of Wellington, it is said, has declared Fonthill to be ‘the finest thing in Europe.’ If so, it is since the dispersion of the Louvre. It is also said, that the King is to visit it. We do not mean to say it is not a fit place for the King to visit, or for the Duke to praise: but we know this, that it is a very bad one for us to describe. The father of Mr. Christie was supposed to be ‘equally great on a ribbon or a Raphael.’ This is unfortunately not our case. We are not ‘great’ at all, but least of all in little things. 353We have tried in various ways: we can make nothing of it. Look here—this is the Catalogue. Now what can we say (who are not auctioneers, but critics) to

Six Japan heron-pattern embossed dishes; or,

Twelve burnt-in dishes in compartments; or,

Sixteen ditto, enamelled with insects and birds; or,

Seven embossed soup-plates, with plants and rich borders; or,

Nine chocolate cups and saucers of egg-shell China, blue lotus pattern; or,

Two butter pots on feet, and a bason, cover, and stand, of Japan; or,

Two basons and covers, sea-green mandarin; or,

A very rare specimen of the basket-work Japan, ornamented with flowers in relief, of the finest kind, the inside gilt, from the Ragland Museum; or,

Two fine enamelled dishes scalloped; or,

Two blue bottles and two red and gold cups—extra fine; or,

A very curious egg-shell lantern; or,

Two very rare Japan cups mounted as milk buckets, with silver rims, gilt and chased; or,

Two matchless Japan dishes; or,

A very singular tray, the ground of a curious wood artificially waved, with storks in various attitudes on the shore, mosaic border, and avanturine back; or,

Two extremely rare bottles with chimæras and plants, mounted in silver gilt; or,

Twenty-four fine OLD SÈVE dessert plates; or,

Two precious enamelled bowl dishes, with silver handles;—

Or, to stick to the capital letters in this Paradise of Dainty Devices, lest we should be suspected of singling out the meanest articles, we will just transcribe a few of them, for the satisfaction of the curious reader:—

A Rich and Highly Ornamented Casket of the very rare gold Japan, completely covered with figures.

An Oriental Sculptured Tassa of Lapis Lazuli, mounted in silver gilt, and set with lapis lazuli intaglios. From the Garde Meuble of the late King of France.

A Persian Jad Vase and Cover, inlaid with flowers and ornaments, composed of oriental rubies, and emeralds on stems of fine gold.

A large Oval Engraved Rock Crystal Cup, with the figure of a Syren, carved from the block, and embracing a part of the vessel with her wings, so as to form a handle; from the Royal Collection of France.

An Oval Cup and Cover of Oriental Mamillated Agate, richly marked in arborescent mocoa, elaborately chased and engraved in a very superior manner. An unique article.

354Shall we go on with this fooling? We cannot. The reader must be tired of such an uninteresting account of empty jars and caskets—it reads so like Della Cruscan poetry. They are not even Nugæ Canoræ. The pictures are much in the same mimminèe-pimminèe taste. For instance, in the first and second days’ sale we meet with the following:—

A high-finished miniature drawing of a Holy Family, and a portrait: one of those with which the patents of the Venetian nobility were usually embellished.

A small landscape, by Breughel.

A small miniature painting after Titian, by Stella.

A curious painting, by Peter Peters Breughel, the conflagration of Troy—a choice specimen of this scarce master.

A picture by Franks, representing the temptation of St. Anthony.

A picture by old Breughel, representing a fête—a singular specimen of his first manner.

Lucas Cranach—The Madonna and Child—highly finished.

A crucifixion, painted upon a gold ground, by Andrea Orcagna, a rare and early specimen of Italian art. From the Campo Santo di Pisa.

A lady’s portrait, by Cosway.

Netecher—a lady seated, playing on the harpsichord, &c.

Who cares any thing about such frippery, time out of mind the stale ornaments of a pawnbroker’s shop; or about old Breughel, or Stella, or Franks, or Lucas Cranach, or Netecher, or Cosway?—But at that last name we pause, and must be excused if we consecrate to him a petit souvenir in our best manner: for he was Fancy’s child. All other collectors are fools to him: they go about with painful anxiety to find out the realities:—he said he had them—and in a moment made them of the breath of his nostrils and the fumes of a lively imagination. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to—the original manuscript of the Rape of the Lock—the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham—the first finished sketch of the Jocunda—Titian’s large colossal portrait of Peter Aretine—a mummy of an Egyptian king—an alligator stuffed. Were the articles authentic?—no matter—his faith in them was true. What a fairy palace was his of specimens of art, antiquarianism, and virtù, jumbled all together in the richest disorder, dusty, shadowy, obscure, with much left to the imagination (how different from the finical, polished, petty, perfect, modernised air of Fonthill!) and with copies of the old masters, cracked and damaged, which he touched and retouched with his own hand, and yet swore they were the genuine, the pure originals! He was gifted with a second-sight in such matters: he believed whatever was incredible. Happy 355mortal! Fancy bore sway in him, and so vivid were his impressions that they included the reality in them. The agreeable and the true with him were one. He believed in Swedenborgianism—he believed in animal magnetism—he had conversed with more than one person of the Trinity—he could talk with his lady at Mantua through some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak to a servant down stairs through an ear-pipe.—Richard Cosway was not the man to flinch from an ideal proposition. Once, at an Academy dinner, when some question was made, whether the story of Lambert’s leap was true, he started up, and said it was, for he was the man that performed it;—he once assured us, that the knee-pan of King James I. at Whitehall was nine feet across (he had measured it in concert with Mr. Cipriani); he could read in the book of Revelations without spectacles, and foretold the return of Buonaparte from Elba and from St. Helena. His wife, the most lady-like of Englishwomen, being asked, in Paris, what sort of a man her husband was, answered, Toujours riant, toujours gai. This was true. He must have been of French extraction. His soul had the life of a bird; and such was the jauntiness of his air and manner that, to see him sit to have his half-boots laced on, you would fancy (with the help of a figure) that, instead of a little withered elderly gentleman, it was Venus attired by the Graces. His miniatures were not fashionable—they were fashion itself. When more than ninety, he retired from his profession, and used to hold up the palsied right hand that had painted lords and ladies for upwards of sixty years, and smiled, with unabated good humour, at the vanity of human wishes. Take him with all his faults or follies, ‘we scarce shall look upon his like again!’

After speaking of him, we are ashamed to go back to Fonthill, lest one drop of gall should fall from our pen. No, for the rest of our way, we will dip it in the milk of human kindness, and deliver all with charity. There are four or five very curious cabinets—a triple jewel cabinet of opaque, with panels of transparent amber, dazzles the eye like a temple of the New Jerusalem—the Nautilus’s shell, with the triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite, is elegant, and the table on which it stands superb—the cups, vases, and sculptures, by Cellini, Berg, and John of Bologna, are as admirable as they are rare—the Berghem (a sea-port) is a fair specimen of that master—the Poulterer’s Shop, by G. Douw, is passable—there are some middling Bassans—the Sibylla Libyca, of L. Caracci, is in the grand style of composition—there is a good copy of a head by Parmegiano—the painted windows in the centre of the Abbey have a surprising effect—the form of the building (which was raised by torch-light) is fantastical, to say the least—and the grounds, which 356are extensive and fine from situation, are laid out with the hand of a master. A quantity of coot, teal, and wild fowl sport in a crystal stream that winds along the park; and their dark brown coats, seen in the green shadows of the water, have a most picturesque effect. Upon the whole, if we were not much pleased by our excursion to Fonthill, we were very little disappointed; and the place altogether is consistent and characteristic.

Painters assume that none can judge of pictures but themselves. Many do this avowedly, some by implication, and all in practice. They exclaim against any one writing about art who has not served his apprenticeship to the craft, who is not versed in the detail of its mechanism. This has often put me a little out of patience—but I will take patience, and say why.

In the first place, with regard to the productions of living artists, painters have no right to speak at all. The way in which they are devoured and consumed by envy would be ludicrous if it were not lamentable. It is folly to talk of the divisions and backbitings of authors and poets while there are such people as painters in the world. I never in the whole course of my life heard one speak in hearty praise of another. Generally they blame downrightly—but at all events their utmost applause is with a damning reservation. Authors—even poets, the genus irritabile—do taste and acknowledge the beauties of the productions of their competitors; but painters either cannot see them through the green spectacles of envy, or seeing, they hate and deny them the more. In conformity with this, painters are more greedy of praise than any other order of men. ‘They gorge the little fame they get all raw’—they are gluttonous of it in their own persons in the proportion in which they would starve others.

I once knew a very remarkable instance of this. A friend of mine had written a criticism of an exhibition. In this were mentioned in terms of the highest praise the works of two brothers—sufficiently so, indeed, to have satisfied, one would have thought, the most insatiate. I was going down into the country to the place where these brothers lived, and I was asked to be the bearer of the work in which the critique appeared. I was so, and sent a copy to each of them. Some days afterwards I called on one of them, who began to speak of the review of his pictures. He expressed some thanks for what was said of them, but complained that the writer of 357it had fallen into a very common error under which he had often suffered—the confounding, namely, his pictures with his brother’s. ‘Now, my dear sir,’ continued he, ‘what is said of me is all very well, but here,’ turning to the high-wrought panegyric on his brother, ‘this is all in allusion to my style—this is all with reference to my pictures—this is all meant for me.’ I could hardly help exclaiming before the man’s face. The praise which was given to himself was such as would have called a blush to any but a painter’s face to speak of; but, not content with this, he insisted on appropriating his brother’s also: How insatiate is the pictorial man!

But to come to the more general subject—I deny in toto and at once the exclusive right and power of painters to judge of pictures. What is a picture meant for? To convey certain ideas to the mind of painters? that is, of one man in ten thousand?—No, but to make them apparent to the eye and mind of all. If a picture be admired by none but painters, I think it is strong presumption that the picture is bad. A painter is no more a judge, I suppose, than another man of how people feel and look under certain passions and events. Every body sees as well as him whether certain figures on the canvas are like such a man, or like a cow, a tree, a bridge, or a windmill. All that the painter can do more than the lay spectator, is to tell why and how the merits and defects of a picture are produced. I see that such a figure is ungraceful and out of nature—he shows me that the drawing is faulty, or the foreshortening incorrect. He then points out to me whence the blemish arises; but he is not a bit more aware of the existence of the blemish than I am. In Hogarth’s ‘Frontispiece’ I see that the whole business is absurd, for a man on a hill two miles off could not light his pipe at a candle held out of a window close to me—he tells me that it is from a want of perspective, that is, of certain rules by which certain effects are obtained. He shows me why the picture is bad, but I am just as well capable of saying ‘The picture is bad’ as he is. To take a coarse illustration, but one most exactly apposite, I can tell whether a made dish be good or bad,—whether its taste be pleasant or disagreeable.—It is dressed for the palate of uninitiated people, and not alone for the disciples of Dr. Kitchener and Mr. Ude. But it needs a cook to tell one why it is bad; that there is a grain too much of this, or a drop too much of t’other—that it has been boiled rather too much, or stewed rather too little—these things, the wherefores, as ‘Squire Western would say, I require an artist to tell me,—but the point in debate—the worth or the bad quality of the painting or potage, I am as well able to decide upon as any he who ever brandished a pallet or a pan, a brush or a skimming-ladle.

358To go into the higher branches of the art—the poetry of painting—I deny still more peremptorily the exclusiveness of the initiated. It might be as well said, that none but those who could write a play have any right to sit on the third row in the pit, on the first night of a new tragedy. Nay, there is more plausibility in the one than the other. No man can judge of poetry without possessing in some measure a poetical mind. It need not be of that degree necessary to create, but it must be equal to taste and to analyze. Now in painting there is a directly mechanical power required to render those imaginations, to the judging of which the mind may be perfectly competent. I may know what is a just or a beautiful representation of love, anger, madness, despair, without being able to draw a straight line—and I do not see how that faculty adds to the capability of so judging. A very great proportion of painting is mechanical. The higher kinds of painting need first a poet’s mind to conceive:—Very well, but then they need a draughtsman’s hand to execute. Now he who possesses the mind alone is fully able to judge of what is produced, even though he is by no means endowed with the mechanical power of producing it himself. I am far from saying that any one is capable of duly judging pictures of the higher class. It requires a mind capable of estimating the noble, or touching, or terrible, or sublime subjects which they present—but there is no sort of necessity that we should be able to put them upon the canvas ourselves.

There is one point, even, on which painters usually judge worse of pictures than the general spectator; I say usually, for there are some painters who are too thoroughly intellectual to run into the error of which I am about to speak. I mean that they are apt to overlook the higher and more mental parts of a picture, in their haste to criticise its mechanical properties. They forget the expression, in being too mindful of what is more strictly manual. They talk of such a colour being skilfully or unskillfully put in opposition to another, rather than of the moral contrast of the countenances of a group. They say that the flesh-tints are well brought out, before they speak of the face which the flesh forms. To use a French term of much condensation, they think of the physique before they bestow any attention on the morale.

I am the farthest in the world from falling into the absurdity of upholding that painters should neglect the mechanical parts of their profession; for without a mastery in them it would be impossible to body forth any imaginations, however strong or beautiful. I only wish that they should not overlook the end to which these are the means—and give them an undue preference over that end itself. Still more I object to their arrogating to the possessors of these qualities 359of hand and eye all power of judging that which is conveyed through the physical vision into the inward soul.

On looking over what I have written, I find that I have used some expressions with regard to painters as a body which may make it appear that I hold them in light esteem; whereas no one can admire their art, or appreciate their pursuit of it, more highly than I do. Of what I have said, however, with regard to their paltry denial of each other’s merits, I cannot bate them an ace. I appeal to all those who are in the habit of associating with painters to say whether my assertion be not correct. And why should they do this?—surely the field is wide enough. Haydon and Wilkie can travel to fame together without ever jostling each other by the way. Surely there are parallel roads which may be followed, each leading to the same point—but neither crossing or trenching upon one another.

The Art of Painting is one equally delightful to the eye and to the mind. It has very nearly the reality of dramatic exhibition, and has permanence, which that is wholly without. We may gaze at a picture, and pause to think, and turn and gaze again. The art is inferior to poetry in magnitude of extent and succession of detail—but its power over any one point is far superior: it seizes it, and figures it forth in corporeal existence if not in bodily life. It gives to the eye the physical semblance of those figures which have floated in vagueness in the mind. It condenses indistinct and gauzy visions into palpable forms—as, in the story, the morning mist gathered into the embodying a spirit. But shall it be said that the enchanter alone can judge of the enchantment—that none shall have an eye to see, and a heart to feel, unless he have also a hand to execute? Alas, our inherent perceptions give the lie to this. As I used to go to the Louvre, day after day, to glut myself and revel in the congregated genius of pictorial ages, would any one convince me that it was necessary to be able to paint that I might duly appreciate a picture?

L. The Vatican did not quite answer your expectation?

H. To say the truth, it was not such a blow as the Louvre; but then it came after it, and what is more, at the distance of twenty years. To have made the same impression, it should have been twenty times as fine; though that was scarcely possible, since all that there is fine in the Vatican, in Italy, or in the world, was in the Louvre when I first saw it, except the frescoes of Raphael and 360Michael Angelo, which could not be transported, without taking the walls of the building, across the Alps.

L. And what, may I ask (for I am curious to hear,) did you think of these same frescoes?

H. Much the same as before I saw them. As far as I could judge, they are very like the prints. I do not think the spectator’s idea of them is enhanced beyond this. The Raphaels, of which you have a distinct and admirable view, are somewhat faded—I do not mean in colour, but the outline is injured—and the Sibyls and Prophets in the Sistine Chapel are painted on the ceiling at too great a height for the eye to distinguish the faces as accurately as one would wish. The features and expressions of the figures near the bottom of the ‘Last Judgment’ are sufficiently plain, and horrible enough they are.

L. What was your opinion of the ‘Last Judgment’ itself?

H. It is literally too big to be seen. It is like an immense field of battle, or charnel-house, strewed with carcases and naked bodies: or it is a shambles of Art. You have huge limbs apparently torn from their bodies and stuck against the wall: anatomical dissections, backs and diaphragms, tumbling ‘with hideous ruin and combustion down,’ neither intelligible groups, nor perspective, nor colour; you distinguish the principal figure, that of Christ, only from its standing in the centre of the picture, on a sort of island of earth, separated from the rest of the subject by an inlet of sky. The whole is a scene of enormous, ghastly confusion, in which you can only make out quantity and number, and vast, uncouth masses of bones and muscles. It has the incoherence and distortion of a troubled dream, without the shadowiness; everything is here corporeal and of solid dimensions.

L. But surely there must be something fine in the Sibyls and Prophets, from the copies we have of them; justifying the high encomiums of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of so many others.

H. It appears to me that nothing can be finer as to form, attitude, and outline. The whole conception is so far inimitably noble and just; and all that is felt as wanting, is a proportionable degree of expression in the countenances, though of this I am not sure, for the height (as I said before) baffles a nice scrutiny. They look to me unfinished, vague, and general. Like some fabulous figure from the antique, the heads were brutal, the bodies divine. Or at most, the faces were only continuations of and on a par with the physical form, large and bold, and with great breadth of drawing, but no more the seat of a vivifying spirit, or with a more powerful and marked intelligence emanating from them, than from the rest of the limbs, the hands, or even drapery. The filling up of the mind is, I suspect, 361wanting, the divinæ particula auræ: there is prodigious and mighty prominence and grandeur and simplicity in the features, but they are not surcharged with meaning, with thought or passion, like Raphael’s, ‘the rapt soul sitting in the eyes.’ On the contrary, they seem only to be half-informed, and might be almost thought asleep. They are fine moulds, and contain a capacity of expression, but are not bursting, teeming with it. The outward material shrine, or tabernacle, is unexceptionable; but there is not superadded to it a revelation of the workings of the mind within. The forms in Michael Angelo are objects to admire in themselves: those of Raphael are merely a language pointing to something beyond, and full of this ultimate import.

L. But does not the difference arise from the nature of the subjects?

H. I should think, not. Surely, a Sibyl in the height of her phrensy, or an inspired Prophet—‘seer blest’—in the act of receiving or of announcing the will of the Almighty, is not a less fit subject for the most exalted and impassioned expression than an Apostle, a Pope, a Saint, or a common man. If you say that these persons are not represented in the act of inspired communication, but in their ordinary quiescent state,—granted; but such preternatural workings, as well as the character and frame of mind proper for them, must leave their shadowings and lofty traces behind them. The face that has once held communion with the Most High, or been wrought to madness by deep thought and passion, or that inly broods over its sacred or its magic lore, must be ‘as a book where one may read strange matters,’ that cannot be opened without a correspondent awe and reverence. But here is ‘neither the cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night:’ neither the blaze of immediate inspiration nor the hallowed radiance, the mystic gloomy light that follows it, so far as I was able to perceive. I think it idle to say that Michael Angelo painted man in the abstract, and so left the expression indeterminate, when he painted prophets and other given characters in particular. He has painted them on a larger scale, and cast their limbs in a gigantic mould to give a dignity and command answering to their situations and high calling, but I do not see the same high character and intensity of thought or purpose impressed upon their countenances. Thus, nothing can be nobler or more characteristic than the figure of the prophet Jeremiah. It is not abstracted, but symbolical of the history and functions of the individual. The whole figure bends and droops under a weight of woe, like a large willow tree surcharged with showers. Yet there is no peculiar expression of grief in one part more than another; the head hangs down despondingly indeed, but so do the hands, the clothes, and every part seems to labour under and be involved in a 362complication of distress. Again, the prophet Ezra is represented reading in a striking attitude of attention, and with the book held close to him as if to lose no part of its contents in empty space:—all this is finely imagined and designed, but then the book reflects back none of its pregnant, hieroglyphic meaning on the face, which, though large and stately, is an ordinary, unimpassioned, and even unideal one. Daniel, again, is meant for a face of inward thought and musing, but it might seem as if the compression of the features were produced by external force as much as by involuntary perplexity. I might extend these remarks to this artist’s other works; for instance, to the Moses, of which the form and attitude express the utmost dignity and energy of purpose, but the face wants a something of the intelligence and expansive views of the Hebrew legislator. It is cut from the same block, and by the same bold sweeping hand, as the sandals or the drapery.

L. Do you think there is any truth or value in the distinction which assigns to Raphael the dramatic, and to Michael Angelo the epic department of the art?

H. Very little, I confess. It is so far true, that Michael Angelo painted single figures, and Raphael chiefly groups; but Michael Angelo gave life and action to his figures, though not the same expression to the face. I think this arose from two circumstances. First, from his habits as a sculptor, in which form predominates, and in which the fixed lineaments are more attended to than the passing inflections, which are neither so easily caught nor so well given in sculpture as in painting. Secondly, it strikes me that Michael Angelo, who was a strong, iron-built man, sympathised more with the organic structure, with bones and muscles, than with the more subtle and sensitive workings of that fine medullary substance called the brain. He compounded man admirably of brass or clay, but did not succeed equally in breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, of thought or feeling. He has less humanity than Raphael, and I think that he is also less divine, unless it be asserted that the body is less allied to earth than the mind. Expression is, after all, the principal thing. If Michael Angelo’s forms have, as I allow, an intellectual character about them and a greatness of gusto, so that you would almost say ‘his bodies thought;’ his faces, on the other hand, have a drossy and material one. For example, in the figure of Adam coming from the hand of his Creator, the composition, which goes on the idea of a being starting into life at the touch of Omnipotence, is sublime:—the figure of Adam, reclined at ease with manly freedom and independence, is worthy of the original founder of our race; and the expression of the face, implying passive resignation and the first 363consciousness of existence, is in thorough keeping—but I see nothing in the countenance of the Deity denoting supreme might and majesty. The Eve, too, lying extended at the foot of the Forbidden Tree, has an elasticity and buoyancy about it, that seems as if it could bound up from the earth of its own accord, like a bow that has been bent. It is all life and grace. The action of the head thrown back, and the upward look, correspond to the rest. The artist was here at home. In like manner, in the allegorical figures of Night and Morn at Florence, the faces are ugly or distorted, but the contour and actions of the limbs express dignity and power, in the very highest degree. The legs of the figure of Night, in particular, are twisted into the involutions of a serpent’s folds; the neck is curved like the horse’s, and is clothed with thunder.

L. What, then, is the precise difference between him and Raphael, according to your conception?

H. As far as I can explain the matter, it seems to me that Michael Angelo’s forms are finer, but that Raphael’s are more fraught with meaning; that the rigid outline and disposable masses in the first are more grand and imposing, but that Raphael puts a greater proportion of sentiment into his, and calls into play every faculty of mind and body of which his characters are susceptible, with greater subtilty and intensity of feeling. Dryden’s lines—

do not exactly answer to Raphael’s character, which is mild and thoughtful rather than fiery; nor is there any want either of grace or grandeur in his figures; but the passage describes the ‘o’er-informing’ spirit that breathes through them, and the unequal struggle of the expression to vent itself by more than ordinary physical means. Raphael lived a much shorter time than Michael Angelo, who also lived long after him; and there is no comparison between the number, the variety, or the finished elegance of their works.^[53] Michael Angelo possibly lost himself in the material and instrumental part of art, in embodying a technical theory, or in acquiring the grammar of different branches of study, excelling in knowledge and in gravity of pretension; whereas Raphael gave himself up to the diviner or lovelier impulse that breathes its soul over the face of 364things, being governed by a sense of reality and of general truth. There is nothing exclusive or repulsive in Raphael; he is open to all impressions alike, and seems to identify himself with whatever he saw that arrested his attention or could interest others. Michael Angelo studied for himself, and raised objects to the standards of his conception, by a formula or system: Raphael invented for others, and was guided only by sympathy with them. Michael Angelo was painter, sculptor, architect; but he might be said to make of each art a shrine in which to build up the stately and gigantic stature of his own mind:—Raphael was only a painter, but in that one art he seemed to pour out all the treasures and various excellence of nature, grandeur and scope of design, exquisite finishing, force, grace, delicacy, the strength of man, the softness of woman, the playfulness of infancy, thought, feeling, invention, imitation, labour, ease, and every quality that can distinguish a picture, except colour. Michael Angelo, in a word, stamped his own character on his works, or recast Nature in a mould of his own, leaving out much that was excellent: Raphael received his inspiration from without, and his genius caught the lambent flame of grace, of truth, and grandeur, which are reflected in his works with a light clear, transparent and unfading.

L. Will you mention one or two things that particularly struck you?

H. There is a figure of a man leading a horse in the Attila, which I think peculiarly characteristic. It is an ordinary face and figure, in a somewhat awkward dress: but he seems as if he had literally walked into the picture at that instant; he is looking forward with a mixture of earnestness and curiosity, as if the scene were passing before him, and every part of his figure and dress is flexible and in motion, pliant to the painter’s plastic touch. This figure, so unconstrained and free, animated, salient, put me in mind, compared with the usual stiffness and shackles of the art, of chain-armour used by the knights of old instead of coat-of-mail. Raphael’s fresco figures seem the least of all others taken from plaster-casts; this is more than can be said of Michael Angelo’s, which might be taken from, or would serve for very noble ones. The horses in the same picture also delight me. Though dumb, they appear as though they could speak, and were privy to the import of the scene. Their inflated nostrils and speckled skins are like a kind of proud flesh; or they are animals spiritualised. In the Miracle of Bolsano is that group of children, round-faced, smiling, with large-orbed eyes, like infancy nestling in the arms of affection; the studied elegance of the choir of tender novices, with all their sense of the godliness of their function and the beauty of holiness; and the hard, liny, individual 365portraits of priests and cardinals on the right-hand, which have the same life, spirit, boldness, and marked character, as if you could have looked in upon the assembled conclave. Neither painting nor popery ever produced anything finer. There is the utmost hardness and materiality of outline, with a spirit of fire. The School of Athens is full of striking parts and ingenious contrasts; but I prefer to it the Convocation of Saints, with that noble circle of Prophets and Apostles in the sky, on whose bent foreheads and downcast eyes you see written the City of the Blest, the beatific presence of the Most High and the Glory hereafter to be revealed, a solemn brightness and a fearful dream, and that scarce less inspired circle of sages canonised here on earth, poets, heroes, and philosophers, with the painter himself, entering on one side like the recording angel, smiling in youthful beauty, and scarce conscious of the scene he has embodied. If there is a failure in any of these frescoes, it is, I think, in the Parnassus, in which there is something quaint and affected. In the St. Peter delivered from prison, he has burst with Rembrandt into the dark chambers of night, and thrown a glory round them. In the story of Cupid and Psyche, at the Little Farnese, he has, I think, even surpassed himself in a certain swelling and voluptuous grace, as if beauty grew and ripened under his touch, and the very genius of ancient fable hovered over his enamoured pencil.

L. I believe you when you praise, not always when you condemn. Was there anything else that you saw to give you a higher idea of him than the specimens we have in this country?

H. Nothing superior to the Cartoons for boldness of design and execution; but I think his best oil pictures are abroad, though I had seen most of them before in the Louvre. I had not, however, seen the Crowning of the Virgin, which is in the Picture-gallery of the Vatican, and appears to me one of his very highest-wrought pictures. The Virgin in the clouds is of an admirable sedateness and dignity, and over the throng of breathing faces below there is poured a stream of joy and fervid devotion that can be compared to nothing but the golden light that evening skies pour on the edges of the surging waves. ‘Hope elevates, and joy brightens their every feature.’ The Foligno Virgin was at Paris, in which I cannot say I am quite satisfied with the Madonna; it has rather a précieuse expression; but I know not enough how to admire the innumerable heads of cherubs surrounding her, touched in with such care and delicacy, yet so as scarcely to be perceptible except on close inspection, nor that figure of the winged cherub below, offering the casket, and with his round, chubby face and limbs as full of rosy health and joy, as the cup is full of the juice of the purple vine. There is another picture of his I 366will mention, the Leo X. in the Palace Pitti, ‘on his front engraven thought and public care; ‘and again, that little portrait in a cup in the Louvre, muffled in thought and buried in a kind of mental chiaro scuro. When I think of these and so many other of his inimitable works, ‘scattered like stray-gifts o’er the earth,’ meeting our thoughts half-way, and yet carrying them farther than we should have been able of ourselves, enriching, refining, exalting all around, I am at a loss to find motives for equal admiration or gratitude in what Michael Angelo has left, though his Prophets and Sibyls on the walls of the Sistine Chapel are thumping make-weights thrown into the opposite scale. It is nearly impossible to weigh or measure their different merits. Perhaps Michael Angelo’s works, in their vastness and unity, may give a greater blow to some imaginations and lift the mind more out of itself, though accompanied with less delight or food for reflection, resembling the rocky precipice, whose ‘stately height though bare’ overlooks the various excellence and beauty of subjected art.

L. I do not think your premises warrant your conclusion. If what you have said of each is true, I should give the undoubted preference to Raphael as at least the greater painter, if not the greater man. I must prefer the finest face to the largest mask.

H. I wish you could see and judge for yourself.

L. I prythee do not mock me. Proceed with your account. Was there nothing else worth mentioning after Raphael and Michael Angelo?

H. So much, that it has slipped from my memory. There are the finest statues in the world there, and they are scattered and put into niches or separate little rooms for effect, and not congregated together like a meeting of the marble gods of mythology, as was the case in the Louvre. There are some of Canova’s, worked up to a high pitch of perfection, which might just as well have been left alone—and there are none, I think, equal to the Elgin marbles. A bath of one of the Antonines, of solid porphyry and as large as a good-sized room, struck me as the strongest proof of ancient magnificence. The busts are innumerable, inimitable, have a breathing clearness and transparency, revive ancient history, and are very like actual English heads and characters. The inscriptions alone on fragments of antique marble would furnish years of study to the curious or learned in that way. The vases are most elegant—of proportions and materials unrivalled in taste and in value. There are some tapestry copies of the Cartoons, very glaring and unpleasant to look at. The room containing the coloured maps of Italy, done about three hundred years ago, is one of the longest and most striking; and the passing through it with the green hillocks, rivers, and mountains on its spotty sides, is 367like going a delightful and various journey. You recall or anticipate the most interesting scenes and objects. Out of the windows of these long straggling galleries, you look down into a labyrinth of inner and of outer courts, or catch the Dome of St Peter’s adjoining (like a huge shadow), or gaze at the distant amphitheatre of hills surrounding the Sacred City, which excite a pleasing awe, whether considered as the haunts of banditti or from a recollection of the wondrous scene, the hallowed spot, on which they have overlooked for ages, Imperial or Papal Rome, or her commonwealth, more august than either. Here also in one chamber of the Vatican is a room stuffed full of artists, copying the Transfiguration, or the St. Jerome of Domenichino, spitting, shrugging, and taking snuff, admiring their own performances and sneering at those of their neighbours; and on certain days of the week the whole range of the rooms is thrown open without reserve to the entire population of Rome and its environs, priests and peasants, with heads not unlike those that gleam from the walls, perfect in expression and in costume, and young peasant girls in clouted shoes with looks of pleasure, timidity and wonder, such as those with which Raphael himself, from the portraits of him, might be supposed to have hailed the dawn of heaven-born art. There is also (to mention small works with great) a portrait of George the Fourth in his robes (a present to his Holiness) turned into an outer room; and a tablet erected by him in St. Peter’s, to the memory of James III. Would you believe it? Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, when he saw the averted looks of the good people of England as they proclaimed his Majesty James III. in any of the towns through which they passed, would not have believed it. Fergus Maclvor, when in answer to the crier of the court, who repeated ‘Long live King George!’ he retorted, ‘Long live King James!’ would not have believed it possible!

L. Hang your politics.

H. Never mind, if they do not hang me.

Rome is of all places the worst to study in, for the same reason that it is the best to lounge in. There is no end of objects to divert and distract the mind. If a person has no other view than to pass away his time, to fill his portfolio or common-place book, or to 368improve his general taste and knowledge, he may find employment and amusement here for ever: if ever he wishes to do any thing, he should fly from it as he would from the plague. There is a species of malaria hanging over it, which infects both the mind and the body. It has been the seat of too much activity and luxury formerly, not to have produced a correspondent torpor and stagnation (both in the physical and moral world) as the natural consequence at present. If Necessity is the mother of Invention it must be stifled in the birth here, where every thing is already done and provided to your hand that you could possibly wish for or think of. You have no stimulus to exertion, for you have but to open your eyes and see, in order to live in a continued round of delight and admiration. The doors of a splendid banquet of all that is rare and rich in art stand ready open to you, you are invited to enter in and feast your senses and your imagination gratis; and it is not likely that, under these circumstances, you will try to earn a scanty meal by hard labour, or even to gain an appetite by wholesome exercise. The same thing occurs here that is objected to the inhabitants of great cities in general. They have too many objects always passing before them, that engage their attention and fill up their time, to allow them either much leisure or inclination for thought or study. Rome is the great metropolis of Art; and it is somewhat to be feared that those who take up their abode there will become, like other cockneys, ignorant, conceited, and superficial.

The queen and mistress of the ancient and the modern world claims such a transcendent superiority over the mind, that you look down as it were from this eminence on the rest of mankind; and from the contempt you feel for others, come to have a mighty good opinion of yourself. The being at Rome (both from the sound of the name and the monuments of genius and magnificence she has to show) is of itself a sufficient distinction without doing anything there. After viewing some splendid relic of antiquity, the efforts of contemporary art sink into insignificance and nothingness: but we are disposed to occupy the vacant space, the clear ground thus created, with our own puny pretensions and aspiring fancies. As this indulgence of alternate enthusiasm and reflected self-complacency is a never-failing source of gratification, and a much less laborious one than the embodying our vain imaginations in practice, we easily rest in the means as the end; and without making any farther progress, are perfectly satisfied with what others have done, and what we are to do. We indeed wear the livery, and follow in the train of greatness; and, like other livery-servants, despise the rabble, growing more lazy, affected, luxurious, insolent, trifling, and incapable of gaining an honest livelihood every 369hour. We are the dupes of flattering appearances and of false comparisons between ourselves and others. We think that a familiarity with great names and great works is an approach to an equality with them; or fondly proceed to establish our own pretensions on the ruins of others, not considering that if it were not what we do, but what we see, that is the standard of proficiency, thousands of spectators might give themselves the same airs of self-importance on the same idle score, and treat us as barbarians and poor creatures, if they had our impertinence and presumption. We stand before a picture of some great master, and fancy there is nothing between him and us: we walk under the Dome of St. Peter’s, and it seems to grow larger with a consciousness of our presence and with the amplitude of our conceptions. All this is fine as well as easy work; nor can it be supposed that we shall be in any haste to exchange this waking dream for the drudgery of mechanical exertion, or for the mortifying evidence of the disparity between our theory and our practice. All the great names and schools of art stand proxy for us, till we choose to take the responsibility on our own shoulders; and as it happens in other cases, we have no objection to make our faith in the merits of others a convenient substitute for good works and zealous exertions in the cause. Yet a common stone-mason or sign-painter, who understands the use of his tools and sticks close to his business, has more resemblance to Raphael or Michael Angelo, and stands a better chance of achieving something great, than those who visit the Corridors of the Vatican or St. Peter’s once a day, return home, spend the evening in extolling what they have witnessed, begin a sketch or a plan and lay it aside, and saunter out again the next day in search of fresh objects to dissipate ennui and kill the time without being obliged to draw for one instant on their own resources or resolution.

Numberless are the instances of those who go on thus, while vanity and indolence together are confirmed into an incurable disease, the sleek, pampered tone of which they mistake for the marks of taste and genius. What other result can be expected? If they do any thing, it is all over with them. They not only strip off the mask from their own self-love, but expose themselves to the pity and derision of their competitors, whom they before affected to despise. Within ‘the vast, the unbounded’ circle of pretension, of vapouring, and inuendo, they are safe: the future would-be Raphaels, Correggios, &c. have nothing to dread from criticism while they hatch their embryo conquests and prepare a distant triumph: no one can apply Ithuriel’s spear to detect what is confessedly a shadow. But they must waive this privilege when they descend into the common lists; and in proportion as they have committed themselves in conversation or in 370idle fancy, they are ashamed to commit themselves in reality, because any thing they could do at first must unavoidably fall short of that high standard of excellence, which (if at all) can only be attained by the labour and experience of a whole life. Their real incapacity shrinks from the pomp of their professions. The magnificence of the air-drawn edifice of their reputation prevents them from laying the first stone in downright earnest; and they have no other mode of excusing the delay, and the indecision it betokens, than by assuming still greater delicacy of taste and loftiness of ambition, and by thus aggrandising their unfounded schemes, rendering their execution more hopeless and impossible. Should they begin something, a new thought strikes them, and they throw aside a very promising sketch to enlarge their canvass and proceed upon a scale more worthy of them: to this enlarged design some object is indispensably necessary, which is unluckily wanting:—thus time is gained, a new lease of credit is granted, and instead of putting the last hand to the original sketch, they take merit to themselves for the enlargement of their views and the determined pursuit of the higher walk of art. Meantime, the smaller picture stands unfinished on the easel, and nominal commissions pour in for new and more extended projects. Then comes a new secret of colouring, a new principle of grouping, a new theory, a new book—always something to draw off the attention from its proper object, and to substitute laborious idleness for true pains and profitable study. Then a picture is to be copied as a preparation for undertaking a given subject, or a library to be ransacked to ascertain the precise truth of the historical facts or the exact conception of the characters; and after a year thus lost in desultory and scrupulous researches, the whole plan is given up, either because no one comes forward effectually to patronise it, or because some more tempting prospect is opened into the realms of art and high renown. Then again friends are to be consulted; some admire one thing, some another; some recommend the study of nature, others are all for the antique; some insist on the utmost finishing, others explode all attention to minutiæ; artists find one fault, the uninstructed spectator another; and in going backwards and forwards from one to another, listening to new reasons and new objections, in reconciling all parties and pleasing none, life is passed in endless doubts and difficulties, and we discover that our most valuable years have fled in busy preparations to do—nothing. It is then too late, and we consume the remainder in vain regrets and querulous repinings, as we did the flower and marrow of our time in fanciful speculation and egregious trifling. The student should of all things steer clear of the character of the dilettanti—it is the rock on which he is most likely to split. 371Pleasure, or extravagance, or positive idleness, are less dangerous; for these he knows to be fatal to his success, and he indulges in them with his eyes open. But in the other case, he is thrown off his guard by the most plausible appearances. Vanity here puts on the garb of humility, indecision of long-sighted perseverance, and habitual sloth of constant industry. Few will reproach us, while we are accumulating the means of ultimate success, with neglecting the end; or remind us that though art is long, life is short. It is true, that art is a long and steep ascent, but we must learn to scale it by regular, practical stages, and not by a hasty wish or still more futile calculations and measurements of the height. We can only indeed be sensible of its real height by the actual progress we have made, and by the glorious views that gradually dawn upon us, the cheerers of our way, and the harbingers of our success. It is only by attempting something that we feel where our strength lies, and if we have what travellers call a forte journée to perform, it is the more indispensable that we should set out betimes and not loiter on the road. What is well done is the consequence of doing much—perfection is the reward of numberless attempts and failures. The chief requisites are a practised hand and eye, and an active imagination. Indolent taste and passive acquirements are not enough. They will neither supply our wants while living, nor enable us to leave a name behind us after we are dead. Farther, the brooding over excellence with a feverish importunity, and stimulating ourselves to great things by an abstract love of fame, can do little good, and may do much harm. It is, no doubt, a very delightful and enviable state of mind to be in, but neither a very arduous nor a very profitable one. Nothing remarkable was ever done, except by following up the impulse of our own minds, by grappling with difficulties and improving our advantages, not by dreaming over our own premature triumphs or doating on the achievements of others.

If it were nothing else, the having the works of the great masters of former times always before us is enough to discourage and defeat all ordinary attempts. How many elegant designs and meritorious conceptions must lie buried under the high arched porticoes of the Vatican! The walls of the Sistine Chapel must fall upon the head of inferior pretensions and crush them. What minor pencil can stand in competition with the ‘petrific mace’ that painted the Last Judgment? What fancy can expand into blooming grace and beauty by the side of the Heliodorus? What is it we could add, or what occasion, what need, what pretence is there to add anything to the art after this? Who in the presence of such glorious works does not wish to shrink into himself, or to live only for them? Is it not a 372profanation to think he can hope to do any thing like them? And who, having once seen, can think with common patience or with zealous enthusiasm of doing aught but treading in their footsteps? If the artist has a genius and turn of mind at all similar, they baulk and damp him by their imposing stately height: if his talent lies in a different and humbler walk, they divert and unsettle his mind. If he is contented to look on and admire, a vague and unattainable idea of excellence floats before his imagination, and tantalises him with equally vain hopes and wishes. If he copies, he becomes a mechanic; and besides, runs another risk. He finds he can with ease produce in three days an incomparably finer effect than he could do with all his efforts, and after any length of time, in working without assistance. He is therefore disheartened and put out of countenance, and returns with reluctance to original composition: for where is the sense of taking ten times the pains and undergoing ten times the anxiety to produce not one hundredth part of the effect? When I was young, I made one or two studies of strong contrasts of light and shade in the manner of Rembrandt with great care and (as it was thought) with some success. But after I had once copied some of Titian’s portraits in the Louvre, my ambition took a higher flight. Nothing would serve my turn but heads like Titian—Titian expressions, Titian complexions, Titian dresses; and as I could not find these where I was, after one or two abortive attempts to engraft Italian art on English nature, I flung away my pencil in disgust and despair. Otherwise I might have done as well as others, I dare say, but from a desire to do too well. I did not consider that Nature is always the great thing, or that ‘Pan is a god, Apollo is no more!’—Nor is the student repelled and staggered in his progress only by the degree of excellence, but distracted and puzzled by the variety of incompatible claims upon his ingenuous and sincere enthusiasm. While any one attends to what circumstances bring in his way, or keeps in the path that is prompted by his own genius (such as it may be), he stands a fair chance, by directing all his efforts to one point, to compass the utmost object of his ambition. But what likelihood is there of this from the moment that all the great schools, and all the most precious chef-d’œuvres of art, at once unveil their diversified attractions to his astonished sight? What Protestant, for instance, can be properly and permanently imbued with the fervent devotion or saint-like purity of the Catholic religion, or hope to transfer the pride, pomp, and pageantry of that detested superstition to his own canvass, with real feeling and con amore? What modern can enter fully into the spirit of the ancient Greek mythology, or rival the symmetry of its naked forms? What single individual will presume to unite ‘the colouring 373of Titian, the drawing of Raphael, the airs of Guido, the learning of Poussin, the purity of Domenichino, the correggiescity of Correggio, and the grand contour of Michael Angelo,’ in the same composition? Yet those who are familiar with all these different styles and their excellences, require them all. Mere originality will not suffice, it is quaint and Gothic—common-place perfection is still more intolerable, it is insipid and mechanical. Modern Art is indeed like the fabled Sphinx, that imposes impossible tasks on her votaries, and as she clasps them to her bosom pierces them to the heart. Let a man have a turn and taste for landscape, she whispers him that nothing is truly interesting but the human face: if he makes a successful debut in portrait, he soon (under the same auspices) aspires to history; but if painting in its highest walks seems within his reach, she then plays off the solid forms and shining surfaces of sculpture before his eyes, urging him to combine the simple grandeur of the Antique with Canova’s polished elegance; or he is haunted with the majestic effects and scientific rules of architecture, and ruined temples and broken fragments nod in his bewildered imagination! What is to be done in this case? What generally is done—Nothing. Amidst so many pretensions, how is choice possible? Or where all are equally objects of taste and knowledge, how rest satisfied without giving some proofs of our practical proficiency in all? To mould a clay-figure that if finished might surpass the Venus; to make a pen-and-ink drawing after a splendid piece of colouring by Titian; to give the picturesque effect of the arch of some ancient aqueduct as seen by moonlight; some such meagre abstractions and flimsy refinements in art are among the spolia opima and patchwork trophies offered to the presiding Goddess of spleen, idleness, and affectation!—

Nothing can be conceived more unpropitious to ‘the high endeavour and the glad success,’ than the whole aspect and character of ancient Rome, both what remains as well as what is lost of it. Is this the Eternal City? Is this she that (amazon or votaress) was twice mistress of the world? Is this the country of the Scipios, the Cincinnati and the Gracchi, of Cato and of Brutus, of Pompey and of Sylla, is this the Capitol where Julius Cæsar fell, where Cicero thundered against Catiline, the scene of combats and of triumphs, and through whose gates kings and nations were led captive by the side of their conquerors’ chariot-wheels? All is vanished. The names alone remain to haunt the memory: the spirits of the mighty dead mock us, as we pass. The genius of Antiquity bestrides the place like a Colossus. Ruin here sits on her pedestal of pride, and reads a mortifying lecture to human vanity. We see all that ages, nations, a subjected world conspired to build up to magnificence, overthrown 374or hastening fast into decay; empire, religion, freedom, Gods and men trampled in the dust or consigned to the regions of lasting oblivion or of shadowy renown; and what are we that in this mighty wreck we should think of cultivating our petty talents and advancing our individual pretensions? Rome is the very tomb of ancient greatness, the grave of modern presumption. The mere consciousness of the presence in which we stand ought to abash and overawe our pragmatical self-conceit. Men here seem no better than insects crawling about: everything has a Lilliputian and insignificant appearance. Our big projects, our bloated egotism, shrink up within the enormous shadow of transitory power and splendour: the sinews of desire relax and moulder away, and the fever of youthful ambition is turned into a cold ague-fit. There is a languor in the air; and the contagion of listless apathy infects the hopes that are yet unborn.—As to what remains of actual power and spiritual authority, Hobbes said well, that ‘Popery was the ghost of the Roman Empire, sitting upon the ruins of Rome.’ The only flourishing thing in Rome (and that is only half flourishing) is an old woman; and who would wish to be an old woman? Greatness here is greatness in masquerade—one knows not whether to pity or laugh at it—and the Cardinals’ red legs peeping out like the legs of some outlandish stuffed bird in a Museum, excite much the same curiosity and surprise. No one (no Englishman at least) can be much edified by the array of distinctions, that denote a consummation of art or weakness. Still, perhaps, to the idle and frivolous there may be something alluring in this meretricious mummery and splendour, as moths are attracted to the taper’s blaze, and perish in it!

There is a great deal of gossiping and stuff going on at Rome. There are Conversationes, where the Cardinals go and admire the fair complexions and innocent smiles of the young Englishwomen; and where the English students who have the entrée look at the former with astonishment as a sort of nondescripts, and are not the less taken with their pretty countrywomen for being the objects of attention to Popish Cardinals. Then come the tittle-tattle of who and who’s together, the quaint and piquant inter-national gallantries, and the story of the greatest beauty in Rome said to be married to an English gentleman—how odd and at the same time how encouraging! Then the manners and customs of Rome excite a buzz of curiosity, and the English imagination is always recurring to and teazed with that luckless question of cicisbeism. Some affect to be candid, while others persist in their original blindness, and would set on foot a reform of the Roman metropolis—on the model of the British one! In short, there is a great deal too much tampering and dalliance with subjects, 375with which we have little acquaintance and less business. All this passes the time, and relieves the mind either after the fatigue or in the absence of more serious study. Then there is to be an Academy Meeting at night, and a debate is to take place whether the Academy ought not to have a President, and if so, whether the President of the Academy at Rome ought not (out of respect) to be a Royal Academician, thus extending the links in the chain of professional intrigue and cabal from one side of the Continent to the other. A speech is accordingly to be made, a motion seconded, which requires time and preparation—or a sudden thought strikes the more raw and heedless adventurer, but is lost for want of words to express it—Vox faucibus hæsit, and the cast of the Theseus looks dull and lumpish as the disappointed candidate for popular applause surveys it by the light of his lamp in retiring to his chamber, Sedet infelix Theseus, &c. So the next day Gibbon is bought and studied with great avidity to give him a command of tropes and figures at their next meeting. The arrival of some new lord or squire of high degree or clerical virtuoso is announced, and a cabal immediately commences, who is to share his patronage, who is to guide his taste, who is to show him the lions, who is to pasquinade, epigrammatise or caricature him, and fix his pretensions to taste and liberality as culminating from the zenith or sunk below zero. Everything here is transparent and matter of instant notoriety: nothing can be done in a corner. The English are comparatively few in number, and from their being in a foreign country are objects of importance to one another as well as of curiosity to the natives. All ranks and classes are blended together for mutual attack or defence. The patron sinks into the companion; the protegé plays off the great man upon occasion. Indeed the grand airs and haughty reserve of English manners are a little ridiculous and out of place at Rome. You are glad to meet with any one who will bestow his compassion and ‘his tediousness’ upon you. You want some shelter from the insolence and indifference of the inhabitants, which are very much calculated to repel the feelings, and throw you back on your resources in common humanity or the partiality of your fellow-countrymen. Nor is this the least inconvenience of a stranger’s residence at Rome. You have to squabble with every one about you to prevent being cheated, to drive a hard bargain in order to live, to keep your hands and your tongue within strict bounds, for fear of being stilettoed, or thrown into the Tower of St. Angelo, or remanded home. You have much to do to avoid the contempt of the inhabitants; if you fancy you can ingratiate yourself with them and play off the amiable, you have a still more charming pursuit and bait for vanity and idleness. You must run the gauntlet of sarcastic words or looks 376for a whole street, of laughter or want of comprehension in reply to all the questions you ask; or if a pretty black-browed girl puts on a gracious aspect, and seems to interest herself in your perplexity, you think yourself in high luck, and well repaid for a thousand affronts. A smile from a Roman beauty must be well nigh fatal to many an English student at Rome. In short, while abroad, and while our self-love is continually coming into collision with that of others, and neither knows what to make of the other, we are necessarily thinking of ourselves and of them, and in no pleasant or profitable way. Every thing is strange and new; we seem beginning life over again, and feel like children or rustics. We have not learned the alphabet of civilization and humanity: how, then, should we aspire to the height of Art? We are taken up with ourselves as English travellers and English students, when we should be thinking of something else. All the petty intrigue, vexation, and tracasserie of ordinary dealings, should be banished as much as possible from the mind of the student, who requires to have his whole time and faculties to himself; all ordinary matters should go on mechanically of themselves, without giving him a moment’s uneasiness or interruption; but here they are forced upon him with tenfold sharpness and frequency, hurting his temper and hindering his time. Instead of ‘tearing from his memory all trivial, fond records,’ that he may devote himself to the service of Art, and that ‘her commandment all alone may live within the book and volume of his brain, unmixed with baser matter,’ he is never free from the most pitiful annoyances—they follow him into the country, sit down with him at home, meet him in the street, take him by the button, whisper in his ear, prevent his sleeping, waken him before the dawn, and plague him out of his very life, making it resemble a restless dream or an ill-written romance. Under such disadvantages, should an artist do anything, the Academy which has sent him out should lose no time in sending for him back again; for there is nothing that may not be expected from an English student at Rome who has not become an idler, a petit-maitre, and a busy-body! Or if he is still unwilling to quit classic ground, is chained by the soft fetters of the climate or of a fair face, or likes to see the morning mist rise from the Marshes of the Campagna and circle round the Dome of St. Peter’s, and that to sever him from these would be to sever soul from body, let him go to Gensano, stop there for five years, visiting Rome only at intervals, wander by Albano’s gleaming lake and wizard grottoes, make studies of the heads and dresses of the peasant-girls in the neighbourhood, those Goddesses of health and good-temper, embody them to the life, and show (as the result) what the world never saw before!

Objects of the Article.—In the Encyclopædia there is some account, under the head Arts, of the general theory and history of the Fine Arts, including Poetry, Eloquence, Painting, Statuary, and Architecture. The term, in its widest application, would also embrace Music, Dancing, Theatrical Exhibition; and in general, all those arts, in which the powers of imitation or invention are exerted, chiefly with a view to the production of pleasure, by the immediate impression which they make on the mind. The phrase has of late, we think, been restricted to a narrower and more technical signification; namely, to Painting, Sculpture, Engraving, and Architecture, which appeal to the eye as the medium of pleasure; and by way of eminence, to the two first of these arts. In the present article, we shall adopt this limited sense of the term; and shall endeavour to develope the principles upon which the great Masters have proceeded, and also to inquire, in a more particular manner, into the state and probable advancement of these arts in this Country.

Ruling Principle of the Fine Arts.—The great works of art, at present extant, and which may be regarded as models of perfection in their several kinds, are the Greek statues—the pictures of the celebrated Italian Masters—those of the Dutch and Flemish schools—to which we may add the comic productions of our own countryman, Hogarth. These all stand unrivalled in the history of art; and they owe their pre-eminence and perfection to one and the same principle,—the immediate imitation of nature. This principle predominated equally in the classical forms of the antique, and in the grotesque figures of Hogarth; the perfection of art in each arose from the truth and identity of the imitation with the reality; the difference was in the subjects; there was none in the mode of imitation. Yet the advocates for the ideal system of art would persuade their disciples, that the difference between Hogarth and the antique does not consist in the different forms of nature which they imitated, but in this, that the one is like, and the other unlike nature. This is an error, the most detrimental, perhaps, of all others, both to the theory and practice of art. As, however, the prejudice is very strong and general, and supported by the highest authority, it will be necessary to go somewhat elaborately into the question in order to produce an impression on the other side.

What has given rise to the common notion of the ideal, as something quite distinct from actual nature, is probably the perfection of 378the Greek statues. Not seeing among ourselves any thing to correspond in beauty and grandeur, either with the features or form of the limbs in these exquisite remains of antiquity, it was an obvious, but a superficial conclusion, that they must have been created from the idea existing in the artist’s mind, and could not have been copied from anything existing in nature. The contrary, however, is the fact. The general form, both of the face and figure, which we observe in the old statues, is not an ideal abstraction, is not a fanciful invention of the sculptor, but is as completely local and national (though it happens to be more beautiful) as the figures on a Chinese screen, or a copperplate engraving of a negro chieftain in a book of travels. It will not be denied that there is a difference of physiognomy as well as of complexion in different races of men. The Greek form appears to have been naturally beautiful, and they had, besides, every advantage of climate, of dress, of exercise, and modes of life to improve it. The artist had also every facility afforded him in the study and knowledge of the human form, and their religious and public institutions gave him every encouragement in the prosecution of his art. All these causes contributed to the perfection of these noble productions; but we should be inclined principally to attribute the superior symmetry of form common to the Greek statues, in the first place, to the superior symmetry of the models in nature, and in the second, to the more constant opportunities for studying them. If we allow, also, for the superior genius of the people, we shall not be wrong; but this superiority consisted in their peculiar susceptibility to the impressions of what is beautiful and grand in nature. It may be thought an objection to what has just been said, that the antique figures of animals, &c., are as fine, and proceed on the same principles as their statues of gods or men. But all that follows from this seems to be, that their art had been perfected in the study of the human form, the test and proof of power and skill; and was then transferred easily to the general imitation of all other objects, according to their true characters, proportions, and appearances. As a confirmation of these remarks, the antique portraits of individuals were often superior even to the personifications of their gods. We think that no unprejudiced spectator of real taste can hesitate for a moment in preferring the head of the Antinous, for example, to that of the Apollo. And in general, it may be laid down as a rule, that the most perfect of the antiques are the most simple;—those which affect the least action, or violence of passion;—which repose the most on natural beauty of form, and a certain expression of sweetness and dignity, that is, which remain most nearly in that state in which they could be copied from nature without straining the limbs or features of 379the individual, or racking the invention of the artist. This tendency of Greek art to repose has indeed been reproached with insipidity by those who had not a true feeling of beauty and sentiment. We, however, prefer these models of habitual grace or internal grandeur to the violent distortions of suffering in the Laocoon, or even to the supercilious air of the Apollo. The Niobe, more than any other antique head, combines truth and beauty with deep passion. But here the passion is fixed, intense, habitual;—it is not a sudden or violent gesticulation, but a settled mould of features; the grief it expresses is such as might almost turn the human countenance itself into marble!

In general, then, we would be understood to maintain, that the beauty and grandeur so much admired in the Greek statues were not a voluntary fiction of the brain of the artist, but existed substantially in the forms from which they were copied, and by which the artist was surrounded. A striking authority in support of these observations, which has in some measure been lately discovered, is to be found in the Elgin marbles, taken from the Acropolis at Athens, and supposed to be the works of the celebrated Phidias. The process of fastidious refinement and indefinite abstraction is certainly not visible there. The figures have all the ease, the simplicity, and variety, of individual nature. Even the details of the subordinate parts, the loose hanging folds in the skin, the veins under the belly or on the sides of the horses, more or less swelled as the animal is more or less in action, are given with scrupulous exactness. This is true nature and true art. In a word, these invaluable remains of antiquity are precisely like casts taken from life. The ideal is not the preference of that which exists only in the mind, to that which exists in nature; but the preference of that which is fine in nature to that which is less so. There is nothing fine in art but what is taken almost immediately, and, as it were, in the mass, from what is finer in nature. Where there have been the finest models in nature, there have been the finest works of art.

As the Greek statues were copied from Greek forms, so Raphael’s expressions were taken from Italian faces; and we have heard it remarked, that the women in the streets at Rome seem to have walked out of his pictures in the Vatican.

Sir Joshua Reynolds constantly refers to Raphael as the highest example in modern times (at least with one exception) of the grand or ideal style; and yet he makes the essence of that style to consist in the embodying of an abstract or general idea, formed in the mind of the artist by rejecting the peculiarities of individuals, and retaining only what is common to the species. Nothing can be more inconsistent 380than the style of Raphael with this definition. In his Cartoons and in his groupes in the Vatican, there is hardly a face or figure which is any thing more than fine individual nature finely disposed and copied. The late Mr. Barry, who could not be suspected of a prejudice on this side of the question, speaks thus of them: “In Raphael’s pictures (at the Vatican) of the Dispute of the Sacrament, and the School of Athens, one sees all the heads to be entirely copied from particular characters in nature, nearly proper for the persons and situations which he adapts them to; and he seems to me only to add and take away what may answer his purpose in little parts, features, &c.; conceiving, while he had the head before him, ideal characters and expressions, which he adapts these features and peculiarities of face to. This attention to the particulars which distinguish all the different faces, persons, and characters, the one from the other, gives his pictures quite the verity and unaffected dignity of nature, which stamp the distinguishing differences betwixt one man’s face and body and another’s.”

If any thing is wanting to the conclusiveness of this testimony, it is only to look at the pictures themselves; particularly the Miracle of the Conversion, and the Assembly of Saints, which are little else than a collection of divine portraits, in natural and expressive attitudes, full of the loftiest thought and feeling, and as varied as they are fine. It is this reliance on the power of nature which has produced those masterpieces by the prince of painters, in which expression is all in all;—where one spirit,—that of truth,—pervades every part, brings down Heaven to Earth, mingles Cardinals and Popes with Angels and Apostles,—and yet blends and harmonizes the whole by the true touches and intense feeling of what is beautiful and grand in nature. It is no wonder that Sir Joshua, when he first saw Raphael’s pictures in the Vatican, was at a loss to discover any great excellence in them, if he was looking out for his theory of the ideal,—of neutral character and middle forms.

There is more an appearance of abstract grandeur of form in Michael Angelo. He has followed up, has enforced, and expanded, as it were, a preconceived idea, till he sometimes seems to tread on the verge of caricature. His forms, however, are not middle, but extreme forms, massy, gigantic, supernatural. They convey the idea of the greatest size and strength in the figure, and in all the parts of the figure. Every muscle is swollen and turgid. This tendency to exaggeration would have been avoided, if Michael Angelo had recurred more constantly to nature, and had proceeded less on a scientific knowledge of the structure of the human body; for science gives only the positive form of the different parts, which the imagination 381may afterwards magnify, as it pleases, but it is nature alone which combines them with perfect truth and delicacy, in all the varieties of motion and expression. It is fortunate that we can refer, in illustration of our doctrine, to the admirable fragment of the Theseus at Lord Elgin’s, which shows the possibility of uniting the grand and natural style in the highest degree. The form of the limbs, as affected by pressure or action, and the general sway of the body, are preserved with the most consummate mastery. We should prefer this statue as a model for forming the style of the student to the Apollo, which strikes us as having something of a theatrical appearance, or to the Hercules, in which there is an ostentatious and over-laboured display of anatomy. This last figure is so overloaded with sinews, that it has been suggested as a doubt, whether, if life could be put into it, it would be able to move. Grandeur of conception, truth of nature, and purity of taste, seem to have been at their height when the masterpieces which adorned the temple of Minerva at Athens, of which we have only these imperfect fragments, were produced. Compared with these, the later Greek statues display a more elaborate workmanship, more of the artifices of style. The several parts are more uniformly balanced, made more to tally like modern periods: each muscle is more equally brought out, and more highly finished as a part, but not with the same subordination of each part to the whole. If some of these wonderful productions have a fault, it is the want of that entire and naked simplicity which pervades the whole of the Elgin marbles.

Works of the Grecian and Italian Artists.—Having spoken here of the Greek statues, and of the works of Raphael and Michael Angelo, as far as relates to the imitation of nature, we shall attempt to point out, to the best of our ability, and as concisely as possible, what we conceive to be their general and characteristic excellences. The ancients excelled in beauty of form; Michael Angelo in grandeur of conception; Raphael in expression. In Raphael’s faces, particularly his women, the expression is very superior to the form; in the ancient statues the form is the principal thing. The interest which the latter excite, is in a manner external; it depends on a certain grace and lightness of appearance, joined with exquisite symmetry and refined susceptibility to voluptuous emotions; but there is in general a want of pathos. In their looks, we do not read the workings of the heart; by their beauty they seem raised above the sufferings of humanity, by their beauty they are deified. The pathos which they exhibit is rather that of present and physical distress, than of deep internal sentiment. What has been remarked of Leonardo da Vinci, is also true of Raphael, that there is an angelic 382sweetness and tenderness in his faces, in which human frailty and passion are purified by the sanctity of religion. The ancient statues are finer objects for the eye to contemplate; they represent a more perfect race of physical beings, but we have little sympathy with them. In Raphael, all our natural sensibilities are heightened and refined by the sentiments of faith and hope, pointing mysteriously to the interests of another world. The same intensity of passion appears also to distinguish Raphael from Michael Angelo. Michael Angelo’s forms are grander, but they are not so informed with expression. Raphael’s, however ordinary in themselves, are full of expression, ‘even to o’erflowing;’ every nerve and muscle is impregnated with feeling,—bursting with meaning. In Michael Angelo, on the contrary, the powers of body and mind appear superior to any events that can happen to them; the capacity of thought and feeling is never full, never strained or tasked to the extremity of what it will bear. All is in a lofty repose and solitary grandeur, which no human interest can shake or disturb. It has been said that Michael Angelo painted man, and Raphael men; that the one was an epic, the other a dramatic painter. But the distinction we have stated is, perhaps, truer and more intelligible, viz. that the one gave greater dignity of form, and the other greater force and refinement of expression. Michael Angelo, in fact, borrowed his style from sculpture. He represented, in general, only single figures (with subordinate accompaniments), and had not to express the conflicting actions and passions of a multitude of persons. It is therefore a mere truism to say that his compositions are not dramatic. He is much more picturesque than Raphael. The whole figure of his Jeremiah droops and hangs down like a majestic tree surcharged with showers. His drawing of the human form has the characteristic freedom and boldness of Titian’s landscapes.

After Michael Angelo and Raphael, there is no doubt that Leonardo da Vinci, and Correggio, are the two painters, in modern times, who have carried historical expression to the highest ideal perfection; and yet it is equally certain that their heads are carefully copied from faces and expressions in nature. Leonardo excelled principally in his women and children. We find, in his female heads, a peculiar charm of expression; a character of natural sweetness and tender playfulness, mixed up with the pride of conscious intellect, and the graceful reserve of personal dignity. He blends purity with voluptuousness; and the expression of his women is equally characteristic of ‘the mistress or the saint.’ His pictures are worked up to the height of the idea he had conceived, with an elaborate, felicity; but this idea was evidently first suggested, and afterwards religiously 383compared with nature. This was his excellence. His fault is, that his style of execution is too mathematical; that is, his pencil does not follow the graceful variety of the details of objects, but substitutes certain refined gradations, both of form and colour, producing equal changes in equal distances, with a mechanical uniformity. Leonardo was a man of profound learning as well as genius, and perhaps transferred too much of the formality of science to his favourite art.

The masterpieces of Correggio have the same identity with nature, the same stamp of truth. He has indeed given to his pictures the utmost softness and refinement of outline and expression; but this idea, at which he constantly aimed, is filled up with all the details and varieties which such heads would have in nature. So far from any thing like a naked abstract idea, or middle form, the individuality of his faces has something peculiar in it, even approaching the grotesque. He has endeavoured to impress habitually on the countenance, those undulating outlines which rapture or tenderness leave there, and has chosen for this purpose those forms and proportions which most obviously assisted his design.

As to the colouring of Correggio, it is nature itself. Not only the general tone is perfectly true, but every speck and particle is varied in colour, in relief, in texture, with a care, a felicity, and an effect, which is almost magical. His light and shade are equally admirable. No one else, perhaps, ever gave the same harmony and roundness to his compositions. So true are his shadows,—equally free from coldness, opacity, or false glare;—so clear, so broken, so airy, and yet so deep, that if you hold your hand so as to cast a shadow on any part of the flesh which is in the light, this part, so shaded, will present exactly the same appearance which the painter has given to the shadowed part of the picture. Correggio, indeed, possessed a greater variety of excellences in the different departments of his art, than any other painter; and yet it is remarkable, that the impression which his pictures leave upon the mind of the common spectator, is monotonous and comparatively feeble. His style is in some degree mannered and confined. For instance, he is without the force, passion, and grandeur of Raphael, who, however, possessed his softness of expression, but of expression only; and in colour, in light and shade, and other qualities, was quite inferior to Correggio. We may, perhaps, solve this apparent contradiction by saying, that he applied the power of his mind to a greater variety of objects than others; but that this power was still of the same character; consisting in a certain exquisite sense of the harmonious, the soft and graceful in form, colour, and sentiment, but with a deficiency of strength, and a tendency to effeminacy in all these.

384After the names of Raphael and Correggio, we shall mention that of Guido, whose female faces are exceedingly beautiful and ideal, but altogether commonplace and vapid, compared with those of Raphael or Correggio; and they are so, for no other reason but that the general idea they convey is not enriched and strengthened by an intense contemplation of nature. For the same reason, we can conceive nothing more unlike the antique than the figures of Nicholas Poussin, except as to the preservation of the costume; and it is perhaps chiefly owing to the habit of studying his art at second-hand, or by means of scientific rules, that the great merits of that able painter, whose understanding and genius are unquestionable, are confined to his choice of subjects for his pictures, and his manner of telling the story. His landscapes, which he probably took from nature, are superior as paintings to his historical pieces. The faces of Poussin want natural expression, as his figures want grace; but the back grounds of his historical compositions can scarcely be surpassed. In his plague of Athens, the very buildings seem stiff with horror. His giants, seated on the top of their fabled mountains, and playing on their Pan’s pipes, are as familiar and natural as if they were the ordinary inhabitants of the scene. The finest of his landscapes is his picture of the Deluge. The sun is just seen, wan and drooping in his course. The sky is bowed down with a weight of waters, and Heaven and earth seem mingling together.

Titian is at the head of the Venetian school. He is the first of all colourists. In delicacy and purity Correggio is equal to him, but his colouring has not the same warmth and gusto in it. Titian’s flesh-colour partakes of the glowing nature of the climate, and of the luxuriousness of the manners of his country. He represents objects not through a merely lucid medium, but as if tinged with a golden light. Yet it is wonderful in how low a tone of local colouring his pictures are painted,—how rigidly his means are husbanded. His most gorgeous effects are produced, not less by keeping down, than by heightening his colours; the fineness of his gradations adds to their variety and force; and, with him, truth is the same thing as splendour. Every thing is done by the severity of his eye, by the patience of his touch. He is enabled to keep pace with nature, by never hurrying on before her; and as he forms the broadest masses out of innumerable varying parts and minute strokes of the pencil, so he unites and harmonises the strongest contrasts by the most imperceptible transitions. Every distinction is relieved and broken by some other intermediate distinction, like half notes in music; and yet all this accumulation of endless variety is so managed, as only to produce the majestic simplicity of nature; so that to a common eye there is nothing 385extraordinary in his pictures, any more than in nature itself. It is, we believe, owing to what has been here stated, that Titian is, of all painters, at once the easiest and the most difficult to copy. He is the most difficult to copy perfectly, for the artifice of his colouring and execution is hid in its apparent simplicity; and yet the knowledge of nature, and the arrangement of the forms and masses in his pictures, is so masterly, that any copy made from them, even the rudest outline or sketch, can hardly fail to have a look of high art. Because he was the greatest colourist in the world, this, which was his most prominent, has, for shortness, been considered as his only excellence; and he has been said to have been ignorant of drawing. What he was, generally speaking, deficient in, was invention or composition, though even this appears to have been more from habit than want of power; but his drawing of actual forms, where they were not to be put into momentary action, or adapted to a particular expression, was as fine as possible. His drawing of the forms of inanimate objects is unrivalled. His trees have a marked character and physiognomy of their own, and exhibit an appearance of strength or flexibility, solidity or lightness, as if they were endued with conscious power and purpose. Character was another excellence which Titian possessed in the highest degree. It is scarcely speaking too highly of his portraits to say, that they have as much expression, that is, convey as fine an idea of intellect and feeling, as the historical heads of Raphael. The chief difference appears to be, that the expression in Raphael is more imaginary and contemplative, and in Titian more personal and constitutional. The heads of the one seem thinking more of some event or subject, those of the other to be thinking more of themselves. In the portraits of Titian, as might be expected, the Italian character always predominates; there is a look of piercing sagacity, of commanding intellect, of acute sensibility, which it would be in vain to seek for in any other portraits. The daring spirit and irritable passions of the age and country, are distinctly stamped upon their countenances, and can be as little mistaken as the costume which they wear. The portraits of Raphael, though full of profound thought and feeling, have more of common humanity about them. Titian’s portraits are the most historical that ever were painted; and they are so, for this reason, that they have most consistency of form and expression. His portraits of Hippolito de Medici, and of a young Neapolitan nobleman, lately in the gallery of the Louvre, are a striking contrast in this respect. All the lines of the face in the one, the eye-brows, the nose, the corners of the mouth, the contour of the face, present the same sharp angles, the same acute, edgy, contracted, violent expression. The other portrait has the finest expansion of 386feature and outline, and conveys the most exquisite idea possible, of mild, thoughtful sentiment. The consistency of the expression constitutes as great a charm in Titian’s portraits, as the harmony of the colouring. The similarity sometimes objected to his heads, is partly national, and partly arises from the class of persons whom he painted. He painted only Italians; and in his time it rarely happened, that any but persons of the highest rank, Senators or Cardinals, sat for their pictures. The similarity of costume of the dress, the beard, &c. also adds to the similarity of their appearance. It adds, at the same time, to their picturesque effect; and the alteration in this respect, is one circumstance among others that has been injurious, not to say fatal, to modern art. This observation is not confined to portrait; for the hired dresses with which our historical painters clothe their figures sit no more easily on the imagination of the artist, than they do gracefully on the lay-figures over which they are thrown.

Giorgioni, Paul Veronese, Tintoret, and the Bassans, are the remaining great names of the Venetian school. The excellence of all of them consisted in the bold, masterly, and striking imitation of nature. Their want of ideal form and elevated character is, indeed, a constant subject of reproach against them. Giorgioni takes the first place among them; for he was in some measure the master of Titian, whereas the others were only his disciples. The Carraccis, Domenichino, and the rest of the Bolognese school, formed themselves on a principle of combining the excellences of the Roman and Venetian painters, in which they for a while succeeded to a considerable degree; but they degenerated and dwindled away into absolute insignificance, in proportion as they departed from nature, or the great masters who had copied her, to mould their works on academic rules, and the phantoms of abstract perfection.

Flemish and Dutch Painters.—Rubens is the prince of the Flemish painters. Of all the great painters, he is perhaps the most artificial,—the one who painted most from his own imagination,—and, what was almost the inevitable consequence, the most of a mannerist. He had neither the Greek forms to study from, nor the Roman expression, nor the high character, picturesque costume, and sun-burnt hues which the Venetian painters had immediately before them. He took, however, what circumstances presented to him,—a fresher and more blooming tone of complexion, arising from moister air, and a colder climate. To this he added the congenial splendour of reflected lights and shadows cast from rich drapery; and he made what amends he could for the want of expression, by the richness of his compositions, and the 387fantastic variety of his allegorical groups. Both his colouring and his drawing were, however, ideal exaggerations. But both had particular qualities of the highest value. He has given to his flesh greater transparency and freshness than any other painter; and this excellence he had from nature. One of the finest instances will be found in his Peasant Family going to Market, in which the figures have all the bloom of health upon their countenances; and the very air of the surrounding landscape strikes sharp and wholesome on the sense. Rubens had another excellence; he has given all that relates to the expression of motion in his allegorical figures, in his children, his animals, even in his trees, to a degree which no one else has equalled, or indeed approached. His drawing is often deficient in proportion, in knowledge, and in elegance, but it is always picturesque. The drawing of N. Poussin, on the contrary, which has been much cried up, is merely learned and anatomical: he has a knowledge of the structure and measurements of the human body, but very little feeling of the grand, or beautiful, or striking, in form. All Rubens’s forms have ease, freedom, and excessive elasticity. In the grotesque style of history,—as in the groups of satyrs, nymphs, bacchanals, and animals, where striking contrasts of form are combined with every kind of rapid and irregular movement, he has not a rival. Witness his Silenus at Blenheim, where the lines seem drunk and staggering; and his procession of Cupids riding on animals at Whitehall, with that adventurous leader of the infantine crew, who, with a spear, is urging a lion, on which he is mounted, over the edge of the world; for beyond we only see a precipice of clouds and sky. Rubens’s power of expressing motion perhaps arose from the facility of his pencil, and his habitually trusting a good deal to memory and imagination in his compositions; for this quality can be given in no other way. His portraits are the least valuable productions of his pencil. His landscapes are often delightful, and appear like the work of fairy hands.

It remains to speak of Vandyke and Rembrandt, the one the disciple of Rubens, the other the entire founder of his own school. It is not possible for two painters to be more opposite. The characteristic merits of the former are very happily summed up in a single line of a poetical critic, where he speaks of

The general object of this analysis of the works of the great masters, has been to show, that their pre-eminence has constantly depended, not on the creation of a fantastic, abstract excellence, existing nowhere but in their own minds, but in their selecting and 388embodying some one view of nature, which came immediately under their habitual observation, and which their particular genius led them to study and imitate with success. This is certainly the case with Vandyke. His portraits, mostly of English women, in the collection in the Louvre, have a cool refreshing air about them, a look of simplicity and modesty even in the very tone, which forms a fine contrast to the voluptuous glow and mellow golden lustre of Titian’s Italian women. There is a quality of flesh-colour in Vandyke which is to be found in no other painter, and which exactly conveys the idea of the soft, smooth, sliding, continuous, delicately varied surface of the skin. The objects in his pictures have the least possible difference of light and shade, and are presented to the eye without passing through any indirect medium. It is this extreme purity and silvery clearness of tone, together with the facility and precision of his particular forms, and a certain air of fashionable elegance, characteristic of the age in which he flourished, that places Vandyke in the first rank of portrait painters.

If ever there was a man of genius in the art, it was Rembrandt. He might be said to have created a medium of his own, through which he saw all objects. He was the grossest and the least vulgar, that is to say, the least common-place in his grossness, of all men. He was the most downright, the least fastidious of the imitators of nature. He took any object, he cared not what, how mean soever in form, colour, and expression, and from the light and shade which he threw upon it, it came out gorgeous from his hands. As Vandyke made use of the smallest contrasts of light and shade, and painted as if in the open air, Rembrandt used the most violent and abrupt contrasts in this respect, and painted his objects as if in a dungeon. His pictures may be said to be ‘bright with excessive darkness.’ His vision had acquired a lynx-eyed sharpness from the artificial obscurity to which he had accustomed himself. ‘Mystery and silence hung upon his pencil.’ Yet he could pass rapidly from one extreme to another, and dip his colours with equal success in the gloom of night, or in the blaze of the noon-day sun. In surrounding different objects with a medium of imagination, solemn or dazzling, he was a true poet; in all the rest, he was a mere painter, but a painter of no common stamp. The powers of his hand were equal to those of his eye; and indeed he could not have attempted the subjects he did, without an execution as masterly as his knowledge was profound. His colours are sometimes dropped in lumps on the canvas; at other times they are laid on as smooth as glass; and he not unfrequently painted with the handle of his brush. He had an eye for all objects as far as he had seen them. His history and landscapes 389are equally fine in their way. His landscapes we could look at for ever, though there is nothing in them. But ‘they are of the earth, earthy.’ It seems as if he had dug them out of nature. Every thing is so true, so real, so full of all the feelings and associations which the eye can suggest to the other senses, that we immediately take as strong an affection to them as if they were our home—the very place where we were brought up. No length of time could add to the intensity of the impression they convey. Rembrandt is the least classical and the most romantic of all painters. His Jacob’s Ladder is more like a dream than any other picture that ever was painted. The figure of Jacob himself is thrown in one corner of the picture like a bundle of clothes, while the angels hover above the darkness, in the shape of airy wings.

It would be needless to prove that the generality of the Dutch painters copied from actual objects. They have become almost a bye-word for carrying this principle into its abuse, by copying every thing they saw, and having no choice or preference of one thing to another, unless that they preferred that which was most obvious and common. We forgive them. They perhaps did better in faithfully and skilfully imitating what they had seen, than in imagining what they had not seen. Their pictures at least show, that there is nothing in nature, however mean or trivial, that has not its beauty and some interest belonging to it, if truly represented. We prefer Vangoyen’s views on the borders of a canal, the yellow-tufted bank, and passing sail, or Ruysdael’s woods and sparkling waterfalls, to the most classical or epic compositions which they could have invented out of nothing; and we think that Teniers’s boors, old women, and children, are very superior to the little carved ivory Venuses in the pictures of Vanderneer; just as we think Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode is better than his Sigismunda, or as Mr. Wilkie’s Card-Players is better than his Alfred. We should not assuredly prefer a Dutch Fair by Teniers to a Cartoon by Raphael; but we suspect we should prefer a Dutch Fair by Teniers to a Cartoon by the same master; or we should prefer truth and nature in the simplest dress, to affectation and inanity in the most pompous disguise. Whatever is genuine in art must proceed from the impulse of nature and individual genius.

French and Spanish Painters.—In the French school there are but two names of high and established reputation, N. Poussin and Claude Lorraine. Of the former we have already spoken; of the latter we shall give our opinion when we come to speak of our own Wilson. We ought not to pass over the names of Murillo and Velasquez, those admirable Spanish painters. It is difficult to characterize their peculiar excellences as distinct from those of the Italian and Dutch 390schools. They may be said to hold a middle rank between the painters of mind and body. They express not so much thought and sentiment, nor yet the mere exterior, as the life and spirit of the man. Murillo is probably at the head of that class of painters who have treated subjects of common life. After making the colours on the canvass feel and think, the next best thing is to make them breathe and live. But there is in Murillo’s pictures of this kind a look of real life, a cordial flow of native animal spirits, which we find nowhere else. We might here refer particularly to his picture of the Two Spanish Beggar Boys, in the collection at Dulwich College, which cannot easily be forgotten by those who have ever seen it.

Progress of Art in Britain.—We come now to speak of the progress of art in our own Country,—of its present state,—and the means proposed for advancing it to still higher perfection.

Hogarth.—We shall speak first of Hogarth, both as he is the first name in the order of time that we have to boast of, and as he is the greatest comic painter of any age or country. His pictures are not imitations of still life, or mere transcripts of incidental scenes or customs; but powerful moral satires, exposing vice and folly in their most ludicrous points of view, and with a profound insight into the weak sides of character and manners, in all their tendencies, combinations, and contrasts. There is not a single picture of his, containing a representation of merely natural or domestic scenery. His object is not so much ‘to hold the mirror up to nature,’ as ‘to show vice her own feature, scorn her own image.’ Folly is there seen at the height—the moon is at the full—it is the very error of the time. There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities, a tilt and tournament of absurdities, pampered into all sorts of affectation, airy, extravagant, and ostentatious! Yet he is as little a caricaturist as he is a painter of still life. Criticism has not done him justice, though public opinion has. His works have received a sanction which it would be vain to dispute, in the universal delight and admiration with which they have been regarded, from their first appearance, to the present moment. If the quantity of amusement, or of matter for reflection which they have afforded, is that by which we are to judge of precedence among the intellectual benefactors of mankind, there are perhaps few persons who can put in a stronger claim to our gratitude than Hogarth. The wonderful knowledge which he possessed of human life and manners, is only to be surpassed (if it can be) by the powers of invention with which he has arranged his materials, and by the mastery of execution with which he has embodied and made tangible the very thoughts and passing movements of the mind. Some persons object to the style of Hogarth’s pictures, or the class to 391which they belong. First, Hogarth belongs to no class, or, if he belongs to any, it is to the same class as Fielding, Smollett, Vanbrugh, and Molière. Besides, the merit of his pictures does not depend on the nature of his subjects, but on the knowledge displayed of them, on the number of ideas, on the fund of observation and amusement contained in them. Make what deductions you please for the vulgarity of the subjects—yet in the research, the profundity, the absolute truth and precision of the delineation of character,—in the invention of incident, in wit and humour, in life and motion, in everlasting variety and originality,—they never have, and probably never will be, surpassed. They stimulate the faculties, as well as amuse them. ‘Other pictures we see, Hogarth’s we read.’^[54]

There is one error which has been frequently entertained on this subject, and which we wish to correct, namely, that Hogarth’s genius was confined to the imitation of the coarse humours and broad farce of the lowest life. But he excelled quite as much in exhibiting the vices, the folly, and frivolity of the fashionable manners of his time. His fine ladies do not yield the palm of ridicule to his waiting-maids, and his lords and his porters are on a very respectable footing of equality. He is quite at home, either in St. Giles’s or St. James’s. There is no want, for example, in his Marriage à la Mode, or his Taste in High Life, of affectation verging into idiotcy, or of languid sensibility that might

Many of Hogarth’s characters would form admirable illustrations of Pope’s Satires, who was contemporary with him. In short, Hogarth was a painter of real, not of low life. He was, as we have said, a satirist, and consequently his pencil did not dwell on the grand and beautiful, but it glanced, with equal success at the absurdities and peculiarities of high or low life, ‘of the great vulgar and the small.’

To this it must be added, that he was as great a master of passion as of humour. He succeeded in low tragedy, as much as in low or genteel comedy, and had an absolute power in moving the affections and rending the hearts of the spectators, by depicting the effects of the most dreadful calamities of human life, on common minds and common countenances. Of this, the Rake’s Progress, particularly the Bedlam scene, and many others, are unanswerable proofs. Hogarth’s merits, as a mere artist, are not confined to his prints. In general, indeed, this is the case. But when he chose to take pains, he could add the delicacies of execution and colouring in the highest degree to 392those of character and composition; as is evident in his series of pictures, all equally well painted, of the Marriage à la Mode, exhibited lately at the British Institution.

Wilson.—We shall next speak of Wilson, whose pictures may be divided into three classes:—his Italian landscapes, or imitations of the manner of Claude,—his copies of English scenery,—and his historical compositions. The first of these are, in our opinion, by much the best; and we appeal, in support of this opinion, to the Apollo and the Seasons, and to the Phaeton. The figures are of course out of the question (these being as uncouth and slovenly as Claude’s are insipid and finical); but the landscape, in both pictures, is delightful. In looking at them, we breathe the air which the scene inspires, and feel the genius of the place present to us. In the first, there is the cool freshness of a misty spring morning; the sky, the water, the dim horizon, all convey the same feeling. The fine grey tone, and varying outline of the hills; the graceful form of the retiring lake, broken still more by the hazy shadows of the objects that repose on its bosom; the light trees that expand their branches in the air; and the dark stone figure and mouldering temple, that contrast strongly with the broad clear light of the rising day,—give a charm, a truth, a force and harmony to this composition, which produce the greater pleasure the longer it is dwelt on. The distribution of light and shade resembles the effect of light on a globe. The Phaeton has the dazzling fervid appearance of an autumnal evening; the golden radiance streams in solid masses from behind the flickering clouds; every object is baked in the sun;—the brown fore-ground, the thick foliage of the trees, the streams, shrunk and stealing along behind the dark high banks,—combine to produce that richness, and characteristic unity of effect, which is to be found only in nature, or in art derived from the study and imitation of nature. These two pictures, as they have the greatest general effect, are also more carefully finished than any other pictures we have seen of his.

In general, Wilson’s views of English scenery want almost every thing that ought to recommend them. The subjects he has chosen are not well fitted for the landscape-painter, and there is nothing in the execution to redeem them. Ill-shaped mountains, or great heaps of earth, trees that grow against them without character or elegance, motionless waterfalls, a want of relief, of transparency and distance, without the imposing grandeur of real magnitude (which it is scarcely within the province of art to give),—are the chief features and defects of this class of his pictures. In more confined scenes, the effect must depend almost entirely on the difference in the execution and the details; for the difference of colour alone is not sufficient to 393give relief to objects placed at a small distance from the eye. But, in Wilson, there are commonly no details,—all is loose and general; and this very circumstance, which might assist him in giving the massy contrasts of light and shade, deprived his pencil of all force and precision within a limited space. In general, air is necessary to the landscape painter; and, for this reason, the lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland afford few subjects for landscape-painting. However stupendous the scenery of that country is, and however powerful and lasting the impression which it must always make on the imagination, yet the effect is not produced merely through the medium of the eye, but arises chiefly from collateral and associated feelings. There is the knowledge of the physical magnitude of the objects in the midst of which we are placed,—the slow, improgressive motion which we make in traversing them;—there is the abrupt precipice, the torrent’s roar, the boundless expanse of the prospect from the highest mountains,—the difficulty of their ascent, their loneliness and silence; in short, there is a constant sense and superstitious awe of the collective power of matter, of the gigantic and eternal forms of nature, on which, from the beginning of time, the hand of man has made no impression, and which, by the lofty reflections they excite in us, give a sort of intellectual sublimity even to our sense of physical weakness. But there is little in all these circumstances that can be translated into the picturesque, which makes its appeal immediately to the eye.

Wilson’s historical landscapes, his Niobe, Celadon and Amelia, &c. do not, in our estimation, display either true taste or fine imagination, but are affected and violent exaggerations of clumsy common nature. They are made up mechanically of the same stock of materials,—an over-hanging rock, bare shattered trees, black rolling clouds, and forked lightning. The figures, in the most celebrated of these, are not like the children of Niobe, punished by the Gods, but like a group of rustics, crouching from a hail-storm. We agree with Sir Joshua Reynolds, that Wilson’s mind was not, like N. Poussin’s, sufficiently imbued with the knowledge of antiquity to transport the imagination three thousand years back, to give natural objects a sympathy with preternatural events, and to inform rocks, and trees, and mountains with the presence of a God. To sum up his general character, we may observe, that, besides his excellence in aërial perspective, Wilson had great truth, harmony, and depth of local colouring. He had a fine feeling of the proportions and conduct of light and shade, and also an eye for graceful form, as far as regards the bold and varying outlines of indefinite objects; as may be seen in his foregrounds, &c., where the artist is not tied down to an imitation of characteristic and articulate forms. In his figures, trees, cattle, 394and in everything having a determinate and regular form, his pencil was not only deficient in accuracy of outline, but even in perspective and actual relief. His trees, in particular, frequently seem pasted on the canvass, like botanical specimens. In fine, we cannot subscribe to the opinion of those who assert, that Wilson was superior to Claude as a man of genius; nor can we discern any other grounds for this opinion, than what would lead to the general conclusion,—that the more slovenly the performance the finer the picture, and that that which is imperfect is superior to that which is perfect. It might be said, on the same principle, that the coarsest sign-painting is better than the reflection of a landscape in a mirror; and the objection that is sometimes made to the mere imitation of nature, cannot be made to the landscapes of Claude, for in them the Graces themselves have, with their own hands, assisted in selecting and disposing every object. Is the general effect in his pictures injured by the details? Is the truth inconsistent with the beauty of the imitation? Does the perpetual profusion of objects and scenery, all perfect in themselves, interfere with the simple grandeur and comprehensive magnificence of the whole? Does the precision with which a plant is marked in the fore-ground, take away from the air-drawn distinctions of the blue glimmering horizon? Is there any want of that endless airy space, where the eye wanders at liberty under the open sky, explores distant objects, and returns back as from a delightful journey? There is no comparison between Claude and Wilson. Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say, that there would be another Raphael before there would be another Claude. His landscapes have all that is exquisite and refined in art and nature. Every thing is moulded into grace and harmony; and, at the touch of his pencil, shepherds with their flocks, temples and groves, and winding glades, and scattered hamlets, rise up in never-ending succession, under the azure sky and the resplendent sun, while

Michael Angelo has left, in one of his sonnets, a fine apostrophe to the earliest poet of Italy:

What landscape-painter does not feel this of Claude.^[55]

Gainsborough.—We have heard an anecdote connected with the reputation of Gainsborough’s pictures, which rests on pretty good authority. Sir Joshua Reynolds, at one of the Academy dinners, speaking of Gainsborough, said to a friend,—‘He is undoubtedly the best English landscape-painter.’ ‘No,’ said Wilson, who overheard the conversation, ‘he is not the best landscape-painter, but he is the best portrait-painter in England.’ They were both wrong; but the story is creditable to the versatility of Gainsborough’s talents.

Those of his portraits which we have seen are not in the first rank. They are in a good measure imitations of Vandyke; and have more an air of gentility, than of nature. His landscapes are of two classes or periods; his early and his later pictures. The former are minute imitations of nature, or of painters who imitated nature, such as Ruysdael, &c. some of which have great truth and clearness. His later pictures are flimsy caricatures of Rubens, who himself carried inattention to the details to the utmost limit that it would bear. Many of Gainsborough’s latter landscapes may be compared to bad water-colour drawings, washed in by mechanical movements of the hand, without any communication with the eye. The truth seems to be, that Gainsborough found there was something wanting in his early manner, that is, something beyond the literal imitation of the details of natural objects; and he appears to have concluded rather hastily, that the way to arrive at that something more, was to discard truth and nature altogether. His fame rests principally, at present, on his fancy-pieces, cottage-children, shepherd-boys, &c. These have often great truth, great sweetness, and the subjects are often chosen with great felicity. We too often find, however, even in his happiest efforts, a consciousness in the turn of the limbs, and a pensive languor in the expression, which is not taken from nature. We think the gloss of art is never so ill bestowed as on such subjects, the essence of which is simplicity. It is perhaps the general fault of Gainsborough, that he presents us with an ideal common life, of which we have had a surfeit in poetry and romance. His subjects are softened, and sentimentalised too much; it is not simple unaffected nature that we see, but nature sitting for her picture. Our artist, we suspect, led the way to that masquerade style, which piques itself on giving the air of an Adonis to the driver of a hay-cart, and models the features of a milk-maid on the principles of the antique. His Woodman’s Head is admirable. Nor can too much praise be given to his Shepherd Boy in a Storm; in which the unconscious simplicity of the boy’s expression, looking up with his hands folded and with timid wonder,—the noisy chattering of a magpie perched above,—and the 396rustling of the coming storm in the branches of the trees, produce a most delightful and romantic impression on the mind.

Gainsborough was to be considered, perhaps, rather as a man of delicate taste, and of an elegant and feeling mind, than as a man of genius; as a lover of the art, rather than an artist. He devoted himself to it, with a view to amuse and soothe his mind, with the ease of a gentleman, not with the severity of a professional student. He wished to make his pictures, like himself, amiable; but a too constant desire to please almost unavoidably leads to affectation and effeminacy. He wanted that vigour of intellect, which perceives the beauty of truth; and thought that painting was to be gained, like other mistresses, by flattery and smiles. It was an error which we are disposed to forgive in one, around whose memory, both as an artist and a man, many fond recollections, many vain regrets, must always linger.^[56]

Sir Joshua Reynolds.—The authority of Sir Joshua Reynolds, both from his example and instructions, has had, and still continues to have, a considerable influence on the state of art in this country. That influence has been on the whole unquestionably beneficial in itself, as well as highly creditable to the rare talents and elegant mind of Sir Joshua; for it has raised the art of painting from the lowest state of degradation,—of dry, meagre, lifeless inanity, to something at least respectable, and bearing an affinity to the rough strength and bold spirit of the national character. Whether the same implicit deference to his authority, which has helped to advance the art thus far, may not, among other causes, limit and retard its future progress? Whether there are not certain original errors, both in his principles and practice, which, the farther they are proceeded in, the farther they will lead us from the truth? Whether there is not a systematic bias from the right line by which alone we can arrive at the goal of the highest perfection?—are questions well worth considering.

We shall begin with Sir Joshua’s merits as an artist. There is one error which we wish to correct at setting out, because we think it important. There is not a greater or more unaccountable mistake than the supposition that Sir Joshua Reynolds owed his success or excellence in his profession, to his having been the first who introduced into this country more general principles of the art, and who raised portrait to the dignity of history from the low drudgery of copying the peculiarities, meannesses, and details of individual 397nature, which was all that had been attempted by his immediate predecessors. This is so far from being true, that the very reverse is the fact. If Sir Joshua did not give these details and peculiarities so much as might be wished, those who went before him did not give them at all. Those pretended general principles of the art, which, it is said, ‘alone give value and dignity to it,’ had been pushed to their extremest absurdity before his time; and it was in getting rid of the mechanical systematic monotony and middle forms, by the help of which Lely, Kneller, Hudson, the French painters, and others, carried on their manufactories of history and face painting, and in returning (as far as he did return) to the truth and force of individual nature, that the secret both of his fame and fortune lay. The pedantic, servile race of artists, whom Reynolds superseded, had carried the abstract principle of improving on nature to such a degree of refinement, that they left it out altogether; and confounded all the varieties and irregularities of form, feature, character, expression or attitude, in the same artificial mould of fancied grace and fashionable insipidity. The portraits of Kneller, for example, seem all to have been turned in a machine; the eye-brows are arched as if by a compass; the mouth curled, and the chin dimpled, the head turned on one side, and the hands placed in the same affected position. The portraits of this mannerist, therefore, are as like one another as the dresses which were then in fashion; and have the same ‘dignity and value’ as the full bottomed wigs which graced their originals. The superiority of Reynolds consisted in his being varied and natural, instead of being artificial and uniform. The spirit, grace, or dignity which he added to his portraits, he borrowed from nature, and not from the ambiguous quackery of rules. His feeling of truth and nature was too strong to permit him to adopt the unmeaning style of Kneller and Hudson; but his logical acuteness was not such as to enable him to detect the verbal fallacies and speculative absurdities which he had learned from Richardson and Coypel; and, from some defects in his own practice, he was led to confound negligence with grandeur. But of this hereafter.

Sir Joseph Reynolds owed his vast superiority over his contemporaries to incessant practice, and habitual attention to nature, to quick organic sensibility, to considerable power of observation, and still greater taste in perceiving and availing himself of those excellences of others, which lay within his own walk of art. We can by no means look upon Sir Joshua as having a claim to the first rank of genius. He would hardly have been a great painter, if other greater painters had not lived before him. He would not have given a first impulse to the art, nor did he advance any part 398of it beyond the point where he found it. He did not present any new view of nature, nor is he to be placed in the same class with those who did. Even in colour, his pallet was spread for him by the old Masters, and his eye imbibed its full perception of depth and harmony of tone, from the Dutch and Venetian schools, rather than from nature. His early pictures are poor and flimsy. He indeed learned to see the finer qualities of nature through the works of art, which he, perhaps, might never have discovered in nature itself. He became rich by the accumulation of borrowed wealth, and his genius was the offspring of taste. He combined and applied the materials of others to his own purpose, with admirable success; he was an industrious compiler, or skilful translator, not an original inventor in art. The art would remain, in all its essential elements, just where it is, if Sir Joshua had never lived. He has supplied the industry of future plagiarists with no new materials. But it has been well observed, that the value of every work of art, as well as the genius of the artist, depends, not more on the degree of excellence, than on the degree of originality displayed in it. Sir Joshua, however, was perhaps the most original imitator that ever appeared in the world; and the reason of this, in a great measure, was, that he was compelled to combine what he saw in art, with what he saw in nature, which was constantly before him. The portrait-painter is, in this respect, much less liable than the historical painter, to deviate into the extremes of manner and affectation; for he cannot discard nature altogether, under the excuse that she only puts him out. He must meet her, face to face; and if he is not incorrigible, he will see something there that cannot fail to be of service to him. Another circumstance which must have been favourable to Sir Joshua was, that though not the originator in point of time, he was the first Englishman who transplanted the higher excellences of his profession into his own country, and had the merit, if not of an inventor, of a reformer of the art. His mode of painting had the graces of novelty in the age and country in which he lived; and he had, therefore, all the stimulus to exertion, which arose from the enthusiastic applause of his contemporaries, and from a desire to expand and refine the taste of the public.

To an eye for colour and for effects of light and shade, Sir Joshua united a strong perception of individual character,—a lively feeling of the quaint and grotesque in expression, and great mastery of execution. He had comparatively little knowledge of drawing, either as it regarded proportion or form. The beauty of some of his female faces and figures arises almost entirely from their softness and fleshiness. His pencil wanted firmness and precision. The 399expression, even of his best portraits, seldom implies either lofty or impassioned intellect or delicate sensibility. He also wanted grace, if grace requires simplicity. The mere negation of stiffness and formality is not grace; for looseness and distortion are not grace. His favourite attitudes are not easy and natural, but the affectation of ease and nature. They are violent deviations from a right line. Many of the figures in his fancy-pieces are placed in postures in which they could not remain for an instant without extreme difficulty and awkwardness. We might instance the Girl drawing with a Pencil, and some others. His portraits are his best pictures, and of these his portraits of men are the best; his pictures of children are the next in value. He had fine subjects for the former, from the masculine sense and originality of character of many of the persons whom he painted; and he had also a great advantage (as far as practice went) in painting a number of persons of every rank and description. Some of the finest and most interesting are those of Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith (which is, however, too much a mere sketch), Baretti, Dr. Burney, John Hunter, and the inimitable portrait of Bishop Newton. The elegant simplicity of character, expression, and drawing, preserved throughout the last picture, even to the attitude and mode of handling, discover the true genius of a painter. We also remember to have seen a print of Thomas Warton, than which nothing could be more characteristic or more natural. These were all Reynolds’s intimate acquaintances, and it could not be said of them that they were men of ‘no mark or likelihood.’ Their traits had probably sunk deep into the artist’s mind; he painted them as pure studies from nature, copying the real image existing before him, with all its known characteristic peculiarities; and, with as much wisdom as good-nature, sacrificing the graces on the altar of friendship. They are downright portraits, and nothing more, and they are valuable in proportion. In his portraits of women, on the contrary (with very few exceptions), Sir Joshua appears to have consulted either the vanity of his employers or his own fanciful theory. They have not the look of individual nature, nor have they, to compensate the want of this, either peculiar elegance of form, refinement of expression, delicacy of complexion, or gracefulness of manner. Vandyke’s attitudes have been complained of as stiff and confined. Reynolds, to avoid this defect, has fallen into the contrary extreme of negligence and contortion. His female figures which aim at gentility, are twisted into that serpentine line, the idea of which he ridiculed so much in Hogarth. Indeed, Sir Joshua, in his Discourses (see his account of Correggio), speaks of grace as if it were nearly allied to 400affectation. Grace signifies that which is pleasing and natural in the posture and motions of the human form, as Beauty is more properly applied to the form itself. That which is stiff, inanimate, and without motion, cannot, therefore, be graceful; but, to suppose that a figure, to be graceful, need only be put into some languishing or extravagant posture, is to mistake flutter and affectation for ease and elegance.

Sir Joshua’s children, as we have said above, are among his chef d’œuvres. The faces of children have in general that want of precision of outline, that prominence of relief, and strong contrast of colour, which were peculiarly adapted to his style of painting. The arch simplicity of expression, and the grotesque character which he has given to the heads of his children, were, however, borrowed from Correggio. His Puck is the most masterly of all these; and the colouring, execution, and character, alike exquisite. The single figure of the Infant Hercules is also admirable. Many of those to which his friends have suggested historical titles are mere common portraits or casual studies. Thus the Infant Samuel is an innocent little child saying its prayers at the bed’s feet: it has nothing to do with the story of the Hebrew prophet. The same objection will apply to many of his fancy-pieces and historical compositions. There is often no connection between the picture and the subject but the name. Even his celebrated Iphigenia (beautiful as she is, and prodigal of her charms) does not answer to the idea of the story. In drawing the naked figure, Sir Joshua’s want of truth and firmness of outline, became more apparent; and his mode of laying on his colours, which, in the face and extremities, was relieved and broken by the abrupt inequalities of surface and variety of tints in each part, produced a degree of heaviness and opacity in the larger masses of flesh-colour, which can indeed only be avoided by extreme delicacy, or extreme lightness of execution.

Shall we speak the truth at once? In our opinion, Sir Joshua did not possess either that high imagination, or those strong feelings, without which no painter can become a poet in his art. His larger historical compositions have been generally allowed to be most liable to objection, in a critical point of view. We shall not attempt to judge them by scientific or technical rules, but make one or two observations on the character and feeling displayed in them. The highest subject which Sir Joshua has attempted was the Count Ugolino, and it was, as might be expected from the circumstances, a total failure. He had, it seems, painted a study of an old beggar-man’s head; and some person, who must have known as little of painting as of poetry, persuaded the unsuspecting artist, that it was 401the exact expression of Dante’s Count Ugolino, one of the most grand, terrific, and appalling characters in modern fiction. Reynolds, who knew nothing of the matter but what he was told, took his good fortune for granted, and only extended his canvass to admit the rest of the figures. The attitude and expression of Count Ugolino himself, are what the artist intended them to be, till they were pampered into something else by the officious vanity of friends—those of a common mendicant at the corner of a street, waiting patiently for some charitable donation. The imagination of the painter took refuge in a parish work-house, instead of ascending the steps of the Tower of Famine. The hero of Dante is a lofty, high-minded, and unprincipled Italian nobleman, who had betrayed his country to the enemy, and who, as a punishment for his crime, is shut up with his four sons in the dungeon of the citadel, where he shortly finds the doors barred against him, and food withheld. He in vain watches with eager feverish eye the opening of the door at the accustomed hour, and his looks turn to stone; his children one by one drop down dead at his feet; he is seized with blindness, and, in the agony of his despair, he gropes on his knees after them,

Even in the other world, he is represented with the same fierce, dauntless, unrelenting character, ‘gnawing the skull of his adversary, his fell repast.’ The subject of the Laocoon is scarcely equal to that described by Dante. The horror there is physical and momentary; in the other, the imagination fills up the long, obscure, dreary void of despair, and joins its unutterable pangs to the loud cries of nature. What is there in the picture to convey the ghastly horrors of the scene, or the mighty energy of soul with which they are borne?^[57] His picture of Macbeth is full of wild and grotesque images; and the apparatus of the witches contains a very elaborate and well arranged inventory of dreadful objects. His Cardinal Beaufort is a fine display of rich mellow colouring; and there is something gentlemanly and Shakespearian in the King and the attendant Nobleman. At the same time, we think the expression of the Cardinal himself is too much one of physical horror, a canine gnashing of the teeth, like a man strangled. This is not the best style of history. Mrs. Siddons 402as the Tragic Muse, is neither the tragic muse nor Mrs. Siddons; and we have still stronger objections to Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy.

There is a striking similarity between Sir Joshua Reynolds’s theory and his practice; and as each of these has been appealed to in support of the other, it is necessary that we should examine both. Sir Joshua’s practice was generally confined to the illustration of that part of his theory, which relates to the more immediate imitation of nature, and it is to what he says on this subject, that we shall chiefly direct our observations at present.

He lays it down as a general and invariable rule, that ‘the great style in art, and the most PERFECT IMITATION OF NATURE, consists in avoiding the details and peculiarities of particular objects.’ This sweeping principle he applies almost indiscriminately to Portrait, History, and Landscape; and he appears to have been led to the conclusion itself, from supposing the imitation of particulars to be inconsistent with general truth and effect. It appears to us, that the highest perfection of the art depends, not on separating but on uniting general truth and effect with individual distinctness and accuracy.

First, it is said, that the great style in painting, as it relates to the immediate imitation of external nature, consists in avoiding the details of particular objects. It consists neither in giving nor avoiding them, but in something quite different from both. Any one may avoid the details. So far, there is no difference between the Cartoons, and a common sign-painting. Greatness consists in giving the larger masses and proportions with truth;—this does not prevent giving the smaller ones too. The utmost grandeur of outline, and the broadest masses of light and shade, are perfectly compatible with the utmost minuteness and delicacy of detail, as may be seen in nature. It is not, indeed, common to see both qualities combined in the imitations of nature, any more than the combination of other excellences; nor are we here saying to which the principal attention of the artist should be directed; but we deny, that, considered in themselves, the absence of the one quality is necessary or sufficient to the production of the other.

If, for example, the form of the eye-brow is correctly given, it will be perfectly indifferent to the truth or grandeur of the design, whether it consists of one broad mark, or is composed of a number of hair-lines, arranged in the same order. So, if the lights and shades are disposed in fine and large masses, the breadth of the picture, as it is called, cannot possibly be affected by the filling up of those masses with the details, that is, with the subordinate distinctions which 403appear in nature. The anatomical details in Michael Angelo, the ever-varying outline of Raphael, the perfect execution of the Greek statues, do not destroy their symmetry or dignity of form; and, in the finest specimens of the composition of colour, we may observe the largest masses combined with the greatest variety in the parts of which those masses are composed.

The gross style consists in giving no details; the finical in giving nothing else. Nature contains both large and small parts, both masses and details; and the same may be said of the most perfect works of art. The union of both kinds of excellence, of strength with delicacy, as far as the limits of human capacity, and the shortness of human life would permit, is that which has established the reputation of the most successful imitators of nature. Farther, their most finished works are their best. The predominance, indeed, of either excellence in the best Masters, has varied according to their opinion of the relative value of these qualities,—the labour they had the time or the patience to bestow on their works,—the skill of the artist,—or the nature and extent of his subject. But, if the rule here objected to (that the careful imitation of the parts injures the effect of the whole), be once admitted, slovenliness would become another name for genius, and the most unfinished performance be the best. That such has been the confused impression left on the mind by the perusal of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, is evident from the practice, as well as conversation, of many (even eminent) artists. The late Mr. Opie proceeded entirely on this principle. He left many admirable studies of portraits, particularly in what relates to the disposition and effect of light and shade; but he never finished any of the parts, thinking them beneath the attention of a great artist. He went over the whole head the second day as he had done the first, and therefore made no progress. The picture at last, having neither the lightness of a sketch, nor the accuracy of a finished work, looked coarse, laboured, and heavy. Titian is the most perfect example of high finishing. In him the details are engrafted on the most profound knowledge of effect, and attention to the character of what he represented. His pictures have the exact look of nature, the very tone and texture of flesh. The variety of his tints is blended into the greatest simplicity. There is a proper degree both of solidity and transparency. All the parts hang together; every stroke tells, and adds to the effect of the rest. Sir Joshua seems to deny that Titian finished much; and says that he produced, by two or three strokes of his pencil, effects which the most laborious copyist would in vain attempt to equal. It is true, he availed himself in some degree of what is called execution, to facilitate his imitation of the details and 404peculiarities of nature; but it was to facilitate, not to supersede it. There can be nothing more distinct than execution and daubing. Titian, however, made a very moderate, though a very admirable, use of this power; and those who copy his pictures will find that the simplicity is in the results, not in the details. To conclude our observations on this head, we will only add, that, while the artist thinks there is any thing to be done, either to the whole or to the parts of his picture, which can give it still more the look of nature, if he is willing to proceed, we would not advise him to desist. This rule is the more necessary to the young student, for he will relax in his attention as he grows older. And again, with respect to the subordinate parts of a picture, there is no danger that he will bestow a disproportionate degree of labour upon them, because he will not feel the same interest in copying them, and because a much less degree of accuracy will serve every purpose of deception.

Secondly, with regard to the imitation of expression, we can hardly agree with Sir Joshua, that ‘the perfection of portrait-painting consists in giving the general idea or character without the individual peculiarities.’ No doubt, if we were to choose between the general character, and the peculiarities of feature, we ought to prefer the former. But, they are so far from being incompatible with, that they are not without some difficulty distinguishable from, each other. There is a general look of the face, a predominant expression arising from the correspondence and connection of the different parts, which it is of the first and last importance to give; and without which, no elaboration of detached parts, or marking of the peculiarities of single features, is worth any thing; but which, at the same time, is not destroyed, but assisted by the careful finishing, and still more by giving the exact outline of each part.

It is on this point that the modern French and English schools differ, and (in our opinion) are both wrong. The English seem generally to suppose, that if they only leave out the subordinate parts, they are sure of the general result. The French, on the contrary, as erroneously imagine, that, by attending successively to each separate part, they must infallibly arrive at a correct whole; not considering that, besides the parts, there is their relation to each other, and the general expression stamped upon them by the character of the individual, which to be seen must be felt; for it is demonstrable, that all character and expression, to be adequately represented, must be perceived by the mind, and not by the eye only. The French painters give only lines and precise differences; the English only general masses, and strong effects. Hence the two nations reproach one another with the difference of their styles of art,—the one as 405dry, hard, and minute,—the other as gross, gothic, and unfinished; and they will probably remain for ever satisfied with each other’s defects, as they afford a very tolerable fund of consolation on either side.

Much has been said of historical portrait; and we have no objection to this phrase, if properly understood. The giving historical truth to a portrait, means, then, the representing the individual under one consistent, probable, and striking view; or showing the different features, muscles, &c. in one action, and modified by one principle. A portrait thus painted may be said to be historical; that is, it carries internal evidence of truth and propriety with it; and the number of individual peculiarities, as long as they are true to nature, cannot lessen, but must add to the strength of the general impression.

It might be shown (if there were room in this place) that Sir Joshua has constructed his theory of the ideal in art, upon the same mistaken principle of the negation or abstraction of particular nature. The ideal is not a negative but a positive thing. The leaving out the details or peculiarities of an individual face does not make it one jot more ideal. To paint history, is to paint nature as answering to a general, predominant, or preconceived idea in the mind, of strength, beauty, action, passion, thought, &c.; but the way to do this is not to leave out the details, but to incorporate the general idea with the details;—that is, to show the same expression actuating and modifying every movement of the muscles, and the same character preserved consistently through every part of the body. Grandeur does not consist in omitting the parts, but in connecting all the parts into a whole, and in giving their combined and varied action: abstract truth or ideal perfection does not consist in rejecting the peculiarities of form, but in rejecting all those which are not consistent with the character intended to be given; and in following up the same general idea of softness, voluptuousness, strength, activity, or any combination of these through every ramification of the frame. But these modifications of form or expression can only be learnt from nature, and therefore the perfection of art must always be sought in nature. The ideal properly applies as much to the idea of ugliness, weakness, folly, meanness, vice, as of beauty, strength, wisdom, magnanimity, or virtue. The antique heads of fauns and satyrs, of Pan or Silenus, are quite as ideal as those of the Apollo or Bacchus; and Hogarth adhered to an idea of humour in his faces, as Raphael did to an idea of sentiment. But Raphael found the character of sentiment in nature as much as Hogarth did that of humour; otherwise neither of them would have given one or the other with such perfect truth, purity, force, and keeping. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ideal, as consisting 406in a mere negation of individuality, bears just the same relation to real beauty or grandeur as caricature does to true comic character.^[58]

Present State of British Art.—It is owing either to a mistaken theory of elevated art, or to the want of models in nature, that the English are hitherto without any painter of serious historical subjects, who can be placed in the first rank of genius. Many of the pictures of modern artists have shown a capacity for correct and happy delineation of actual objects and domestic incidents, only inferior to the masterpieces of the Dutch School. We might here mention the names of Wilkie, Collins, Heaphy, and many others. We have portrait-painters, who have attained to a very high degree of excellence in all the branches of their art. In landscape, Turner has shown a knowledge of the effects of air, and of powerful relief in objects, which was never surpassed. But in the highest walk of art—in giving the movements of the finer or loftier passions of the mind, this country has not produced a single painter, who has made even a faint approach to the excellence of the great Italian painters. We have, indeed, a good number of specimens of the clay-figure, the anatomical mechanism, the regular proportions measured by a two-foot rule;—large canvasses, covered with stiff figures, arranged in deliberate order, with the characters and story correctly expressed by uplifted eyes or hands, according to old receipt-books for the passions;—and with all the hardness and inflexibility of figures carved in wood, and painted over in good strong body colours, that look ‘as if some of nature’s journeymen had made them, and not made them well.’ But we still want a Prometheus to give life to the cumbrous mass, to throw an intellectual light over the opaque image,—to embody the inmost refinements of thought to the outward eye,—to lay bare the very soul of passion. That picture is of little comparative value which can be completely translated into another language,—of which the description in a common catalogue conveys all that is expressed by the picture itself; for it is the excellence of every art to give what can be given by no other, in the same degree. Much less is that picture to be esteemed, which only injures and defaces the idea already existing in the mind’s eye,—which does not come up to the conception which the imagination forms of the subject, and substitutes a dull reality for high sentiment; for the art is in this case an incumbrance, not an assistance, and interferes with, instead of adding to, the stock of our pleasurable sensations. But we should 407be at a loss to point out (we will not say any English picture, but certainly) any English painter, who, in heroic and classical composition, has risen to the height of his subject, and answered the expectation of the well-informed spectator, or excited the same impression by visible means, as had been excited by words, or by reflection.^[59] That this inferiority in English art is not owing to a deficiency of genius, imagination, or passion, is proved sufficiently by the works of our poets and dramatic writers, which, in loftiness and force, are not surpassed by those of any other nation. But whatever may be the depth of internal thought and feeling in the English character, it seems to be more internal; and (whether this is owing to habit, or physical constitution) to have, comparatively, a less immediate and powerful communication with the organic expression of passion,—which exhibits the thoughts and feelings in the countenance, and furnishes matter for the historic muse of painting. The English artist is instantly sensible that the flutter, grimace, and extravagance of the French physiognomy, are incompatible with high history; and we are at no loss to explain in this way, that is, from the defect of living models, how it is that the productions of the French school are marked with all the affectation of national caricature, or sink into tame and lifeless imitations of the antique. May we not account satisfactorily for the general defects of our own historic productions, in a similar way,—from a certain inertness and constitutional phlegm, which does not habitually impress the workings of the mind in correspondent traces on the countenance, and which may also render us less sensible of these outward and visible signs of passion, even when they are so impressed there? The irregularity of proportion, and want of symmetry, in the structure of the national features, though it certainly enhances the difficulty of infusing natural grace and grandeur into the works of art, rather accounts for our not having been able to attain the exquisite refinements of Grecian sculpture, than for our not having rivalled the Italian painters in expression.

Mr. West does not form an exception to, but a confirmation of, these general observations. His pictures have all that can be required in what relates to the composition of the subject; to the regular arrangement of the groups; the anatomical proportions of the human body; and the technical knowledge of expression,—as far as expression is reducible to abstract rules, and is merely a vehicle for the telling of a story; so that anger, wonder, sorrow, pity, &c. have 408each their appropriate and well-known designations. These, however, are but the instrumental parts of the art, the means, not the end; but beyond these, Mr. West’s pictures do not go. They never ‘snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.’ They exhibit the mask, not the soul of expression. We doubt, whether, in the entire range of Mr. West’s productions, meritorious and admirable as the design and composition often are, there is to be found one truly fine head. They display a total want of gusto. In Raphael, the same divine spirit breathes through every part; it either agitates the inmost frame, or plays in gentle undulations on the trembling surface. Whether we see his figures bending with all the blandishments of maternal love, or standing in the motionless silence of thought, or hurried into the tumult of action, the whole is under the impulse of deep passion. But Mr. West sees hardly any thing in the human face but bones and cartilages; or, if he avails himself of the more flexible machinery of nerves and muscles, it is only by rule and method. The effect is not that which the soul of passion impresses on the countenance, and which the soul of genius alone can seize; but such as might, in a good measure, be given to wooden puppets or pasteboard figures, pulled by wires, and taught to open the mouth, or knit the forehead, or raise the eyes in a very scientific manner. In fact, there is no want of art or learning in his pictures, but of nature and feeling.

Means of Promoting the Fine Arts.—It is not long ago that an opinion was very general, that all that was wanting to the highest splendour and perfection of the arts in this country might be supplied by Academies and public institutions. We believe the most sanguine promoters of this scheme have at present relaxed in their zeal. There are three ways in which Academies and public institutions may be supposed to promote the fine arts; either by furnishing the best models to the student; or by holding out immediate emolument and patronage; or by improving the public taste. We shall bestow a short consideration on the influence of each.

First, a constant reference to the best models of art necessarily tends to enervate the mind, to intercept our view of nature, and to distract the attention by a variety of unattainable excellence. An intimate acquaintance with the works of the celebrated masters may indeed add to the indolent refinements of taste, but will never produce one work of original genius, one great artist. In proof of the general truth of this observation, we might cite the history of the progress and decay of art in all countries where it has flourished. It is a little extraordinary, that if the real sources of perfection are to be sought in Schools, in Models, and Public Institutions, that whereever 409schools, models, and public institutions have existed, there the arts should regularly disappear,—that the effect should never follow from the cause.

The Greek statues remain to this day unrivalled,—the undisputed standard of the most perfect symmetry of form. In Italy the art of painting has had the same fate. After its long and painful struggles in the time of the earlier artists, Cimabue, Ghirlandaio, Massacio, and others, it burst out with a light almost too dazzling to behold, in the works of Titian, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio; which was reflected, with diminished lustre, in the productions of their immediate disciples; lingered for a while with the school of the Carraccis, and expired with Guido Reni. From that period, painting sunk to so low a state in Italy as to excite only pity or contempt. There is not a single name to redeem its faded glory from utter oblivion. Yet this has not been owing to any want of Dilettanti and Della Cruscan societies,—of academies of Florence, of Bologna, of Parma, and Pisa,—of honorary members and Foreign Correspondents—of pupils and teachers, professors and patrons, and the whole busy tribe of critics and connoisseurs.

What is become of the successors of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyke? What have the French Academicians done for the arts; or what will they ever do, but add intolerable affectation and grimace to centos of heads from the antique, and caricature Greek forms by putting them into opera attitudes? Nicholas Poussin is the only example on record in favour of the contrary theory, and we have already sufficiently noticed his defects. What extraordinary advances have we made in our own country in consequence of the establishment of the Royal Academy? What greater names has the English school to boast than those of Hogarth, Reynolds, and Wilson, who created it? Even the venerable President of the Royal Academy was one of its founders.

Again, we might cite, in support of our assertion, the works of Carlo Maratti, of Raphael Mengs, or of any of the effeminate school of critics and copyists, who have attempted to blend the borrowed beauties of others in a perfect whole. What do they contain, but a negation of every excellence which they pretend to combine? The assiduous imitator, in his attempts to grasp all, loses his hold of that which was placed within his reach, and, from aspiring at universal excellence, sinks into uniform mediocrity. The student who has models of every kind of excellence constantly before him, is not only diverted from that particular walk of art, in which, by patient exertion, he might have obtained ultimate success, but, from having his imagination habitually raised to an overstrained standard of refinement, 410by the sight of the most exquisite examples in art, he becomes impatient and dissatisfied with his own attempts, determines to reach the same perfection all at once, or throws down his pencil in despair. Thus the young enthusiast, whose genius and energy were to rival the great Masters of antiquity, or create a new æra in the art itself, baffled in his first sanguine expectations, reposes in indolence on what others have done; wonders how such perfection could have been achieved,—grows familiar with the minutest peculiarities of the different schools,—flutters between the splendour of Rubens, and the grace of Raphael, and ends in nothing. Such was not Correggio. He saw and felt for himself; he was of no school, but had his own world of art to create. That image of truth and beauty, which existed in his mind, he was forced to construct for himself, without rules or models. As it had arisen in his mind from the contemplation of nature, so he could only hope to embody it to others, by the imitation of nature. We can conceive the work growing under his hands by slow and patient touches, approaching nearer to perfection, softened into finer grace, gaining strength from delicacy, and at last reflecting the pure image of nature on the canvass. Such is always the true progress of art; such are the necessary means by which the greatest works of every kind have been produced. They have been the effect of power gathering strength from exercise, and warmth from its own impulse—stimulated to fresh efforts by conscious success, and by the surprise and strangeness of a new world of beauty, opening to the delighted imagination. The triumphs of art were victories over the difficulties of art; the prodigies of genius, the result of that strength which had grappled with nature. Titian copied even a plant or a piece of common drapery from the objects themselves; and Raphael is known to have made elaborate studies of the principal heads in his pictures. All the great painters of this period were thoroughly grounded in the first principles of their art; had learned to copy a face, a hand, or an eye, and had acquired patience to finish a single figure, before they undertook to paint extensive compositions. They knew that though Fame is represented with her head above the clouds, her feet rest upon the earth. Genius can only have its full scope, where, though much may have been done, more remains to do; where models exist chiefly to show the deficiencies of art, and where the perfect idea is left to be filled up in the painter’s imagination. When once the stimulus of novelty and of original exertion is wanting, generations repose on what has been done for them by their predecessors, as individuals, after a certain period, rest satisfied with the knowledge they have already acquired.

With regard to the pecuniary advantages arising from the public 411patronage of the arts;—the plan unfortunately defeats itself; for it multiplies its objects faster than it can satisfy their claims; and raises up a swarm of competitors for the prize of genius from the dregs of idleness and dulness. The real patron is anxious to reward merit, not to encourage gratuitous pretensions to it; to see that the man of genius takes no detriment, that another Wilson is not left to perish for want;—not to propagate the breed of embryo candidates for fame. Offers of public and promiscuous patronage can in general be little better than a species of intellectual seduction, administering provocatives to vanity and avarice, and leading astray the youth of the nation by fallacious hopes, which can scarcely ever be realized. At the same time, the good that might be done by private taste and benevolence, is in a great measure defeated. The moment that a few individuals of discernment and liberal spirit become members of a public body, they are no longer anything more than parts of a machine, which is usually wielded at will by some officious, overweening pretender; their good-sense and good-nature are lost in a mass of ignorance and presumption; their names only serve to reflect credit on proceedings in which they have no share, and which are determined on by a majority of persons who have no interest in the arts but what arises from the importance attached to them by regular organization, and no opinions but what are dictated to them by some self-constituted judge. As far as we have had an opportunity of observing the conduct of such bodies of men, instead of taking the lead of public opinion, of giving a firm, manly, and independent tone to that opinion, they make it their business to watch all its caprices, and follow it in every casual turning. They dare not give their sanction to sterling merit, struggling with difficulties, but take advantage of its success, to reflect credit on their own reputation for sagacity. Their taste is a servile dependant on their vanity, and their patronage has an air of pauperism about it. Perhaps the only public patronage which was ever really useful to the arts, or worthy of them, was that which they received first in Greece, and afterwards in Italy, from the religious institutions of the country; when the artist felt himself, as it were, a servant at the altar; when his hand gave a visible form to Gods or Heroes, Angels or Apostles; and when the enthusiasm of genius was exalted by mingling with the flame of national devotion. The artist was not here degraded, by being made the dependant on the caprice of wealth or fashion, but felt himself at once the servant and the benefactor of the public. He had to embody, by the highest efforts of his art, subjects which were sacred to the imagination and feelings of the spectators; there was a common link, a mutual sympathy between them in their common faith. Every 412other mode of patronage, but that which arises, either from the general institutions and manners of a people, or from the real unaffected taste of individuals, must, we conceive, be illegitimate, corrupted in its source, and either ineffectual or injurious to its professed object.

Lastly, Academies and Institutions may be supposed to assist the progress of the fine arts, by promoting a wider taste for them.

In general, it must happen in the first stages of the arts, that as none but those who had a natural genius for them would attempt to practise them,—so none but those who had a natural taste for them, would pretend to judge of or criticise them. This must be an incalculable advantage to the man of true genius; for it is no other than the privilege of being tried by his peers. In an age when connoisseurship had not become a fashion; when religion, war, and intrigue, occupied the time and thoughts of the great, only those minds of superior refinement would be led to notice the works of art, who had a real sense of their excellence; and, in giving way to the powerful bent of his own genius, the painter was most likely to consult the taste of his judges. He had not to deal with pretenders to taste, through vanity, affectation, and idleness. He had to appeal to the higher faculties of the soul,—to that deep and innate sensibility to truth and beauty, which required only fit objects to have its enthusiasm excited,—and to that independent strength of mind, which, in the midst of ignorance and barbarism, hailed and fostered genius whereever it met with it. Titian was patronised by Charles V. Count Castiglione was the friend of Raphael. These were true patrons and true critics; and, as there were no others (for the world, in general, merely looked on and wondered), there can be little doubt that such a period of dearth of factitious patronage would be most favourable to the full developement of the greatest talents, and to the attainment of the highest excellence.

By means of public institutions, the number of candidates for fame, and pretenders to criticism, is increased beyond all calculation, while the quantity of genius and feeling remain much the same as before; with these disadvantages, that the man of original genius is often lost among the crowd of competitors who would never have become such, but from encouragement and example, and that the voice of the few whom nature intended for judges, is apt to be drowned in the noisy and forward suffrages of shallow smatterers in Taste.

Barry (James) an eminent painter, was born in Cork, in Ireland, October 11, 1741. His father had been a builder, and at one time of his life, a coasting trader between the two countries of England and Ireland. To this business of a trader was James destined, and he actually made, when a boy, several voyages; but these voyages being forced upon him, he on one occasion ran away from the ship, and on others discovered such an aversion to the life and habits of a sailor, as to induce his father to quit all hopes of him in this line, and to suffer him to pursue his inclinations, which led him to drawing and study. When on board his father’s vessel, instead of handling sails and ropes, and climbing the mast, he was generally occupied with a piece of black chalk, sketching the coast, or drawing figures, as his fancy directed him. When his father found that the idea of making a sailor of him must be given up, he permitted him to acquire as much instruction as the schools of Cork afforded; but long retained his aversion to the chalk drawings, with which the floors and walls of the house were covered; the boy being always engaged in some attempt at large figures, and early catching at the means of representing action, attitude, and passion. It was at a very early period of his life that some bookseller in Ireland, undertaking to reprint a set of fables or emblems, young Barry offered to furnish the drawings, and, as it is believed, helped to etch the engravings, such as they were. At the schools in Cork, which he was sent to, he was distinguished by his parts and industry above his school-fellows; his habits differed from those of ordinary boys, as he seldom mixed in their games or amusements, but at those times stole off to his own room, where he worked at his pencil, or was studying some book that he had borrowed or bought. He would spend whole nights in this manner at his studies, to the alarm of his mother, who dreaded his injuring his health or setting fire to the house, and who often kept up his sister or the servant to watch him. His allowance of money he spent in buying books or candles to read by; he sometimes locked himself up in his room for days, and seldom slept upon his bed, or else made it so hard as to take away the temptation or luxury of lying long in it. Perhaps the unsocial and ascetic turn of his temper, which thus early manifested itself, might be remarked as the source both of the misfortunes of his life, and the defects of his genius. Common humanity, a sense of pleasure, and a sympathy 414with the feelings of those around us, is not more necessary to success in life, than it probably is to success in the fine arts. Few things can be more fatal to the artist than this sort of indifference to the common pleasures and pursuits of life. If affected, it is bad; if real and constitutional, it is even worse. It stuck to poor Barry to the last. It is not to be understood that, at this period of his life, he led the life of an absolute recluse, for he could and did occasionally join in any feats going on in the neighbourhood, and was not behind other boys in such pastimes and mischief as boys are usually fond of. An adventure which happened to him about this time, and which left a strong impression on his mind, is worth mentioning here. In one of his rambles in the neighbourhood, he entered, one winter’s evening, an old, and, as he thought, an uninhabited house, situate in a narrow bye-lane in the city of Cork. The house was without doors or windows; but curiosity impelled him to enter, and, after mounting a rotten staircase, which conducted to empty rooms on different floors, he arrived at the garret, where he could just discern, by the glimmering light of a few embers, two old and emaciated figures, broken by age, disease, and want, sitting beside each other, in the act, as far as their palsied efforts would permit, of tearing each other’s faces; not a word being uttered by either, but with the most horrible grimaces that malice could invent. They took no notice of his entrance, but went on with their deeds of mutual hate, which made such an impression on the boy that he ran down stairs, making his own reflections, which he afterwards found verified through life, that man and all animals are malicious and cruel in proportion as they are impotent; and that age and poverty, two of the worst evils in human life, almost always add to the calamities inherent in them by arts of their own creating. In general, his great desire to improve his mind led him to seek the society of educated men; who were not averse to receive him, seeing his active and inquisitive disposition, and his seriousness of manner, couched under a garb the plainest and coarsest; for he adopted this kind of attire from his childhood, not from affectation, but from an indifference to all dress. Having a retentive memory, he profited by his own reading, and by the conversation of others, who directed him also in the choice of books. As his finances were too low to make many purchases, he borrowed books from his friends, and was in the practice of making large extracts from such as he particularly liked, and sometimes even of copying out the whole book, of which several specimens were found among his papers, written in a stiff school-boy’s hand. As his industry was excessive, his advances in the acquisition of knowledge were rapid, and he was regarded as a prodigy by his school-fellows. His mother 415being a zealous Catholic, the son could not avoid mixing at times in the company of priests resident at Cork, who pointed out to him books of polemical divinity, of which he became a great reader, and for which he retained a strong bias during his lifetime. He was said at one time to have been destined for the priesthood, but for this report there is no authority. He, however, always continued a Catholic, and in the decline of life manifested rather a bigoted attachment to the religion of his early choice. For a short interval he had a little wavering in his belief of revealed religion in general; but a conversation with Mr. Edmund Burke put an end to this levity. A book which Mr. Burke lent him, and which settled his mind on this subject, was Bishop Butler’s Analogy; and, as a suitable reward, he has placed this Prelate in the group of divines, in his picture of Elysium.

About the age of seventeen he first attempted oil paintings; and between that and the age of twenty-two, when he first went to Dublin, he produced several large ones, which decorated his father’s house, and represented subjects not often handled by young men; such as Æneas escaping with his family from the flames of Troy; Susanna and the Elders; Daniel in the Lion’s Den, &c. At this period, he also produced the picture which first drew him into public notice, launched him on an ampler theatre than his native town of Cork afforded, and, above all, gained him the acquaintance and patronage of Mr. Burke. This picture was founded on an old tradition of the landing of St. Patrick on the sea-coast of Cashel, and of the conversion and baptism of the king of that district by the patron saint of Ireland. The priest, in the act of baptizing his new convert, inadvertently strikes the spear of the crosier in the foot of the monarch. The holy father, absorbed in the duties of his office, does not perceive what he has done, and the king, without interrupting the ceremony, bears the pain with immoveable fortitude. This incident, together with the gestures and expressions of the attendants, certainly formed a good subject for an historical picture; and Mr. Barry’s manner of treating it was such as to insure him the applause and admiration of the connoisseurs of the metropolis of the sister kingdom, where it was exhibited in 1762 or 1763. Mr. Barry took this picture with him to Dublin; and afterwards going to the exhibition room, being delighted with the encomiums it received from the spectators, he could not refrain from making himself known as the painter. His pretensions were treated with great contempt by the company, and Barry burst into tears of anger and vexation. But the incredulity of his hearers was a compliment paid to the real or supposed excellence of his painting. It appears that a Dr. Sleigh, a 416physician of Cork, and a sensible and amiable man, was first instrumental in introducing young Barry to the notice of Mr. Burke. During their early acquaintance, having fallen into a dispute on the subject of taste, Barry quoted a passage in support of his opinion from the Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, which had been just then published anonymously, and which Barry, in his youthful admiration of it, had, it seems, transcribed entire. Burke affected to treat this work as a theoretical romance, of no authority whatever, which threw Barry into such a rage in its defence, that Mr. Burke thought it necessary to appease him by owning himself to be the author. The scene ended in Barry’s running to embrace him, and showing him the copy of the work which he had been at the pains to transcribe. He passed his time in Dublin in reading, drawing, and society. While he resided here, an anecdote is preserved of him, which marks the character of the man. He had been enticed by his companions several times to carousings at a tavern, and one night, as he wandered home by himself, a thought struck him of the frivolity and viciousness of thus mis-spending his time: the fault, he imagined, lay in his money, and, therefore, without more ado, in order to avoid the morrow’s temptation, he threw the whole of his wealth, which perhaps amounted to no great sum, into the Liffey, and locked himself up at his favourite pursuits. After a residence of seven or eight months in Dublin, an opportunity offered of accompanying some part of Mr. Burke’s family to London, which he eagerly embraced. This took place some time in the year 1764, when he was twenty-three years of age, and with one of those advantages which do not always fall to the lot of young artists on their arrival in the British capital, that of being recommended to the acquaintance of the most eminent men in the profession by the persuasive eloquence of a man who, to genius in himself, added the rare and noble quality of encouraging it in others; this was Mr. Burke, who lost no time, not merely in making Barry known, but in procuring for him the first of all objects to an inexperienced and destitute young artist, employment. This employment was chiefly that of copying in oil drawings by Mr. Stewart, better known by the name of Athenian Stewart; and whether it suited the ambition of Barry or not, to be at this kind of labour, yet there can be no doubt that he profited by his connection with such a man as Stewart, and had full leisure to cast his eye about, and to improve by the general aspect of art and artists that occupied the period.

Mr. Burke and his other friends thinking it important that he should be introduced to a wider and nobler school of art than this country afforded, now came forward with the means necessary to accomplish this object; and in the latter end of 1765 Mr. Barry proceeded 417to the Continent, where he remained till the beginning of 1771, studying his art with an enthusiasm which seemed to augur the highest success, and making observations on the different chef d’œuvres of Italy with equal independence of judgment and nicety of discrimination. He was supported during this period by the friendly liberality of the Burke family (Edmund, William, and Richard), who allowed him forty pounds a-year for his necessary expenditure, besides occasional remittances for particular purposes. He proceeded first to Paris, then to Rome, where he remained upwards of three years, from thence to Florence and Bologna, and home through Venice. His letters to the Burkes, giving an account of Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci, show a complete insight into the characteristic merits of their works, and would make us wonder (if the case were at all singular) how he could enter with such force, delicacy, and feeling, into excellencies of which he never transplanted an atom into his own works. He saw, felt, and wrote; his impressions were profound and refined, but the expression of them must be instantaneous, such as gave the results of them with a stroke of the pen, as they were received by a glance of the eye, and he could not wait for the slow process of the pencil for embodying his conceptions in the necessary details of his own art. It was his desire to make the ideas and language of painting co-instantaneous,—to express abstract results by abstract mechanical means (a thing impossible),—to stamp the idea in his mind at once upon the canvass, without knowledge of its parts, without labour, without patience, without a moment’s time or thought intervening between what he wished to do and its being done, that was perhaps the principal obstacle to his ever attaining a degree of excellence in his profession at all proportioned either to his ambition or his genius. It is probable, that, as his hand had not the patience to give the details of objects, his eye, from the same habit of mind, had not the power to analyze them. It is possible, however, to see the results without the same laborious process that is necessary to convey them; for the eye sees faster than the hand can move.

We suspect Mr. Barry did not succeed very well in copying the pictures he so well describes; because he appears to have copied but few, only one of Raphael, as far as we can find, and three from Titian, whom he justly considered as the model of colouring, and as more perfect in that department of the art than either Raphael or Michael Angelo were in theirs, expression and form, the highest excellence in which he conceives to have been possessed only by the ancients. In copying from the antique, however, he manifested the same aversion to labour, or to that kind of labour which, by showing 418us our defects, compels us to make exertions to remedy them. He made all his drawings from the antique, by means of a delineator, that is, a mechanical instrument, to save the trouble of acquiring a knowledge both of form and proportion. In this manner, equally gratifying to his indolence and his self-love, he is stated to have made numberless sketches of the antique statues, of all sizes, and in all directions, carefully noting down on his sketch-paper their several measurements and proportions.

The consequences are before us in his pictures; namely, that all those of his figures which he took from these memorandums are deficient in every thing but form, and that all the others are equally deficient in form and every thing else. If he did not employ his pencil properly, or enough, in copying from the models he saw, he employed his thoughts and his pen about them with indefatigable zeal and spirit. He talked well about them; he wrote well about them; he made researches into all the collateral branches of art and knowledge, sculpture, architecture, cameos, seals, and intaglios. There is a long letter of his, addressed to Mr. Burke, on the origin of the Gothic style of architecture, written, as it should seem, to convince his friend and patron of his industry in neglecting his proper business. Soon after his arrival at Rome, he became embroiled with the whole tribe of connoisseurs, painters, and patrons there, whether native or foreign, on subjects of virtù; and he continued in this state of hostility with those around him while he staid there, and, indeed, to the end of his life. One might be tempted to suppose that Barry chiefly studied his art as a subject to employ his dialectics upon. On this unfortunate disposition of his to wrangling and controversy, as it was likely to affect his progress in his art and his progress in life, he received some most judicious advice from Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mr. Burke, his answers to which show an admirable self-ignorance. On his irritable denunciations of the practices and tricks of the Italian picture-dealers, Mr. Burke makes a reflection well deserving of attention. ‘In particular, you may be assured that the traffic in antiquity, and all the enthusiasm, folly, and fraud, which may be in it, never did, nor never can, hurt the merit of living artists. Quite the contrary, in my opinion: for I have ever observed, that, whatever it be that turns the minds of men to anything relative to the arts, even the most remotely so, brings artists more and more into credit and repute; and though, now and then, the mere broker and dealer in such things runs away with a great deal of profit, yet, in the end, ingenious men will find themselves gainers by the dispositions which are nourished and diffused in the world by such pursuits.’ Mr. Barry painted two pictures while abroad, his Adam and Eve and his 419Philoctetes. The first of these he sent home as a specimen of his progress in the art. It does not appear to have given much satisfaction. His Philoctetes he brought home with him. It is a most wretched, coarse, unclassical performance, the direct opposite of all that he thought it to be. During his stay at Rome, he made an excursion to Naples, and was highly delighted with the collections of art there. All the time he was abroad, Mr. Burke and his brothers not only were punctual in their remittances to him, but kept up a most friendly and cordial correspondence. On one occasion, owing to the delay of a letter, a bill which Barry had presented to a banker was dishonoured. This detained Barry for some time at the place where he was in very awkward circumstances, and he had thoughts of getting rid of his chagrin and of his prospects in life at once, by running away and turning friar. For some time previous to his return to England, Mr. Hamilton (afterwards Sir William) appears to have been almost the only person with whom he kept up any intimacy. It was on his return home through Milan that he witnessed, and has recorded with due reprobation, the destruction of Leonardo’s Last Supper, which two bungling artists were employed to paint over by order of one Count de Firmian, the secretary of state.

In the spring of 1771, Mr. Barry arrived in England, after an absence of five years. He soon after produced his picture of Venus, which has been compared to the Galatea of Raphael, the Venus of Titian, and the Venus of Medicis, without reason. Mr. Barry flattered himself that he had surpassed the famous statue of that name, by avoiding the appearance of maternity in it. There is an engraving of it by Mr. Valentine Green. In 1773, he exhibited his Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida, which was much praised by some critics of that day. His Death of General Wolfe was considered as a falling off from his great style of art, which consisted in painting Greek subjects, and it accordingly is said to ‘have obtained no praise.’ His fondness for Greek costume was assigned by his admirers as the cause of his reluctance to paint portraits; as if the coat was of more importance than the face. His fastidiousness, in this respect, and his frequent excuses, or blunt refusals, to go on with a portrait of Mr. Burke, which he had begun, caused a misunderstanding with that gentleman, which does not appear to have been ever entirely made up. The difference between them is said to have been widened by Burke’s growing intimacy with Sir Joshua, and by Barry’s feeling some little jealousy of the fame and fortune of his rival in an humbler walk of the art. He, about the same time, painted a pair of classical subjects, Mercury inventing the Lyre, and Narcissus looking at himself in the water, the last suggested to him by Mr. 420Burke. He also painted an historical picture of Chiron and Achilles, and another of the story of Stratonice, for which last the Duke of Richmond gave him a hundred guineas. In 1773, there was a plan in contemplation for our artists to decorate the inside of St. Paul’s with historical and sacred subjects; but this plan fell to the ground, from its not meeting with the concurrence of the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the no small mortification of Barry, who had fixed upon the subject he was to paint,—the rejection of Christ by the Jews when Pilate proposes his release. In 1775, he published An Inquiry into the real and imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England, vindicating the capacity of the English for the fine arts, and tracing their slow progress hitherto to the Reformation; to political and civil dissensions; and, lastly, to the general turn of the public mind to mechanics, manufactures, and commerce. In the year 1774, shortly after the failure of the scheme of decorating St. Paul’s, a proposal was made, through Mr. Valentine Green, to the same artists, Reynolds, West, Cipriani, Barry, &c. for ornamenting the great room of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, in the Adelphi, with historical and allegorical paintings. This proposal was at the time rejected by the artists themselves; but, in 1777, Mr. Barry made an offer to paint the whole himself, on condition of being allowed the choice of his subjects, and being paid the expense of canvass, paints, and models, by the Society. This offer was accepted, and he finished the series of pictures at the end of seven years, instead of two, which he had proposed to himself, but with entire satisfaction to the members of the Society, for whom it was intended, and who conducted themselves to him with liberality throughout. They granted him two exhibitions, and at different periods voted him 50 guineas, their gold medal, and again 200 guineas, and a seat among them. Dr. Johnson remarked, when he saw the pictures, that, ‘whatever the hand had done, the head had done its part.’ There was an excellent anonymous criticism, supposed to be by Mr. Burke, published on them, in answer to some remarks put forth by Barry, in his descriptive catalogue, on the ideal style of art, and the necessity of size to grandeur. His notions on both these subjects are very ably controverted, and, indeed, they are the rock on which Barry’s genius split. It would be curious if Mr. Burke were the author of these strictures; for it is not improbable that Barry was led into the last error, here deprecated, by that author’s Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. The series consists of six pictures, showing the progress of human culture. The first represents Orpheus taming the savages by his lyre. The figure of Orpheus himself is more like a drunken bacchanal than an inspired poet or lawgiver. The 421only part of this picture which is valuable is the background, in one part of which a lion is seen ready to dart upon a family group milking near a cave, and, in another, a tyger is pursuing a horse. There is certainly a scope of thought and picturesque invention, in thus showing indirectly the protection which civilization extends, as it were, over both man and animals. The second picture is a Grecian harvest, which has nothing Grecian in it. But we cannot apply this censure to the third picture of the Olympic Games, some of the figures in which, and the principal group, are exceedingly graceful, classical, and finely conceived. This picture is the only proof Mr. Barry has left upon canvass that he was not utterly insensible to the beauties of the art. The figure of the young man on horseback really reminds the spectator of some of the Elgin marbles; and the outlines of the two youthful victors at the games, supporting their father on their shoulders, are excellent. The colouring is, however, as bald and wretched in this picture as the rest, and there is a great want of expression. The fourth picture is the triumph of commerce, with Dr. Burney swimming in the Thames, with his hair powdered, among naked sea-nymphs. The fifth, the Society of Arts, distributing their annual prizes. And the sixth represents Elysium. This last picture is a collection of caricatured portraits of celebrated individuals of all ages and nations, strangely jumbled together, with a huge allegorical figure of Retribution driving Heresy, Vice, and Atheism, into the infernal regions. The moral design of all these pictures is much better explained in the catalogue than on the canvass; and the artist has added none of the graces of the pencil to it in any of them, with the exception above made. Mr. Barry appears, however, to have rested his pretensions to fame as an artist on this work, for he did little afterwards but paltry engravings from himself, and the enormous and totally worthless picture of Pandora in the assembly of the gods. His self-denial, frugality, and fortitude, in the prosecution of his work at the Adelphi, cannot be too much applauded. He has been heard to say, that at the time of his undertaking it, he had only 16s. in his pocket; and that he had often been obliged, after painting all day, to sit up at night to sketch or engrave some design for the printsellers, which was to supply him with his next day’s subsistence. In this manner he did his prints of Job, dedicated to Mr. Burke, of the birth of Venus, Polemon, Head of Chatham, King Lear, from the picture painted for the Shakespear gallery, &c. His prints are caricatures even of his pictures: they seem engraved on rotten wood.

Soon after Mr. Barry’s return from the Continent, he was chosen a member of the Royal Academy; and in 1782, was appointed 422professor of painting, in the room of Mr. Penny, with a salary of £30 a-year. The lectures which he delivered from the chair were full of strong sense, and strong advice, both to the students and academicians. Among other things, he insisted much on the necessity of purchasing a collection of pictures by the best masters as models for the students, and proposed several of those in the Orleans collection. This recommendation was not relished by the academicians, who, perhaps, thought their own pictures the best models for their several pupils. Bickerings, jealousies, and quarrels arose, and at length reached such a height, that, in 1799, Mr. Barry was expelled from the academy, soon after the appearance of his Letter to the Dilettanti Society; a very amusing, but eccentric publication, full of the highest enthusiasm for his art, and the lowest contempt for the living professors of it. In 1800, he undertook a design or drawing to celebrate the union of the two kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. The profits of the two exhibitions of the Adelphi pictures are said to have amounted to above £500. Lord Romney presented him with 100 guineas for his portrait, which had been copied into one of the pictures, and he had twenty guineas for a head of Mr. Hooper. He probably received other sums for portraits introduced into the work. By extreme frugality he contrived, not only to live, but to save money. His house was twice robbed of sums which he kept by him; one of the times (in 1794) of upwards of £100; a loss which was made up by the munificence of Lord Radnor, and by that of his friends, the Hollis’s. After the loss of his salary, a subscription was set on foot by the Earl of Buchan to relieve him from his difficulties, and to settle him in a larger house to finish his picture of Pandora. The subscription amounted to £1000, with which an annuity was bought; but of this he was prevented from enjoying the benefit; for, on the 6th of February 1806, he was seized with a pleuritic fever, and as he neglected medical assistance at first, it was afterwards of no use. After lingering on for a fortnight in considerable pain, but without losing his fortitude of mind, he died on the 22d of the same month. On the 13th of March, the body was taken to the great room of the Society of Arts, and was thence attended, the following day, by a numerous and respectable train of his friends to the cathedral of St. Paul’s, where it was deposited.

Mr. Barry, as an artist, a writer, and a man, was distinguished by great inequality of powers and extreme contradictions in character. He was gross and refined at the same time; violent and urbane; sociable and sullen; inflammable and inert; ardent and phlegmatic; relapsing from enthusiasm into indolence; irritable, headstrong, impatient of restraint; captious in his intercourse with his friends, 423wavering and desultory in his profession. In his personal habits he was careless of appearances or decency, penurious, slovenly, and squalid. He regarded nothing but his immediate impulses, confirmed into incorrigible habits. His pencil was under no control. His eye and his hand seemed to receive a first rude impulse, to which it gave itself up, and paid no regard to any thing else. The strength of the original impetus only drove him farther from his object. His genius constantly flew off in tangents, and came in contact with nature only at salient points. There are two drawings of his from statues of a lion and a lioness at Rome; the nose of the lioness is two straight lines; the ears of the lion two curves, which might be mistaken for horns; as if, after it had taken its first direction, he lost the use of his hand, and his tools worked mechanically and monotonously without his will. His enthusiasm and vigour were exhausted in the conception; the execution was crude and abortive. His writings are a greater acquisition to the art than his paintings. The powers of conversation were what he most excelled in; and the influence which he exercised in this way over all companies where he came, in spite of the coarseness of his dress, and the frequent rudeness of his manner, was great. Take him for all in all, he was a man of whose memory it is impossible to think without admiration as well as regret.

Originality is any conception of things, taken immediately from nature, and neither borrowed from, nor common to, others. To deserve this appellation, the copy must be both true and new. But herein lies the difficulty of reconciling a seeming contradiction in the terms of the explanation. For as any thing to be natural must be referable to a consistent principle, and as the face of things is open and familiar to all, how can any imitation be new and striking, without being liable to the charge of extravagance, distortion, and singularity? And, on the other hand, if it has no such peculiar and distinguishing characteristic to set it off, it cannot possibly rise above the level of the trite and common-place. This objection would indeed hold good and be unanswerable, if nature were one thing, or if the eye or mind comprehended the whole of it at a single glance; in which case, if an object had been once seen and copied in the most cursory and mechanical way, there could be no farther addition to, or variation from, this idea, without obliquity and affectation; but nature presents an endless 424variety of aspects, of which the mind seldom takes in more than a part or than one view at a time; and it is in seizing on this unexplored variety, and giving some one of these new but easily recognised features, in its characteristic essence, and according to the peculiar bent and force of the artist’s genius, that true originality consists. Romney, when he was first introduced into Sir Joshua’s gallery, said, ‘there was something in his portraits which had been never seen in the art before, but which every one must be struck with as true and natural the moment he saw it.’ This could not happen if the human face did not admit of being contemplated in several points of view, or if the hand were necessarily faithful to the suggestions of sense. Two things serve to perplex this question; first, the construction of language, from which, as one object is represented by one word, we imagine that it is one thing, and that we can no more conceive differently of the same object than we can pronounce the same word in different ways, without being wrong in all but one of them; secondly, the very nature of our individual impressions puts a deception upon us; for, as we know no more of any given object than we see, we very pardonably conclude that we see the whole of it, and have exhausted inquiry at the first view, since we can never suspect the existence of that which, from our ignorance and incapacity, gives us no intimation of itself. Thus, if we are shown an exact likeness of a face, we give the artist credit chiefly for dexterity of hand; we think that any one who has eyes can see a face; that one person sees it just like another, that there can be no mistake about it (as the object and the image are in our notion the same)—and that if there is any departure from our version of it, it must be purely fantastical and arbitrary. Multum abludit imago. We do not look beyond the surface; or rather we do not see into the surface, which contains a labyrinth of difficulties and distinctions, that not all the effects of art, of time, patience, and study, can master and unfold. But let us take this self-evident proposition, the human face, and examine it a little; and we shall soon be convinced what a Proteus, what an inexplicable riddle it is! Ask any one who thinks he has a perfect idea of the face of his friend, what the shape of his nose or any other feature is, and he will presently find his mistake;—ask a lover to draw his ‘mistress’ eyebrow,’ it is not merely that his hand will fail him, but his memory is at fault both for the form and colour; he may, indeed, dream, and tell you with the poet, that

but if he wishes to embody his favourite conceit, and to convince any 425one else of all this by proof positive, he must borrow the painter’s aid. When a young artist first begins to make a study from a head, it is well known that he has soon done, because after he has got in a certain general outline and rude masses, as the forehead, the nose, the mouth, the eyes in a general way, he sees no farther, and is obliged to stop; he feels in truth that he has made a very indifferent copy, but is quite at a loss how to supply the defect—after a few months’ or a year or two’s practice, if he has a real eye for nature and a turn for his art, he can spend whole days in working up the smallest details, in correcting the proportions, in softening the gradations; and does not know when to leave off, till night closes in upon him, and then he sits musing and gazing in the twilight at what remains for his next day’s work. Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say, that if he did not finish any one of his pictures till he saw nothing more to be done to it, he should never leave off. Titian wrote on his pictures, faciebat—as much as to say that he was about them, but that it was an endless task. As the mind advances in the knowledge of nature, the horizon of art enlarges and the air refines. Then, in addition to an infinity of details, even in the most common object, there is the variety of form and colour, of light and shade, of character and expression, of the voluptuous, the thoughtful, the grand, the graceful, the grave, the gay, the I know not what; which are all to be found (separate or combined) in nature, which sufficiently account for the diversity of art, and to detect and carry off the spolia opima of any one of which is the highest praise of human genius and skill—

All that we meet with in the master-pieces of taste and genius is to be found in the previous capacity of nature; and man, instead of adding to the store, or creating any thing either as to matter or manner, can only draw out a feeble and imperfect transcript, bit by bit, and one appearance after another, according to the peculiar aptitude and affinity that subsists between his mind and some one part. The mind resembles a prism, which untwists the various rays of truth, and displays them by different modes and in several parcels. Enough has been said to vindicate both conditions of originality, which distinguish it from singularity on the one hand and from vulgarity on the other; or to show how a thing may at the same time be both true and new. This novel truth is brought out when it meets with a strong congenial mind—that is, with a mind in the highest degree susceptible of a certain class of impressions, or of a certain kind of beauty or power; and this peculiar strength, congeniality, truth of imagination, or command 426over a certain part of nature, is, in other words, what is meant by genius. This will serve to show why original inventors have in general (and except in what is mechanical), left so little for their followers to improve upon; for as the original invention implies the utmost stretch and felicity of thought, or the greatest strength and sagacity to discover and dig the ore from the mine of truth, so it is hardly to be expected that a greater degree of capacity should ever arise (than the highest), that a greater mastery should be afterwards obtained in shaping and fashioning the precious materials, than in the first heat and eagerness of discovery; or that, if the capacity were equal, the same scope and opportunity would be left for its exercise in the same field. If the genius were different, it would then seek different objects and a different vent, and open new paths to fame and excellence, instead of treading in old ones. Hence the well-known observation, that in each particular style or class of art, the greatest works of genius are the earliest. Hence, also, the first productions of men of genius are often their best. What was that something that Romney spoke of in Reynolds’s pictures that the world had never seen before, but with which they were enchanted the moment they beheld it, and which both Hoppner and Jackson, with all their merit, have but faintly imitated since? It was a reflection of the artist’s mind—an emanation from his character, transferred to the canvass. It was an ease, an amenity, an indolent but anxious satisfaction, a graceful playfulness, belonging to his disposition, and spreading its charm on all around it, attracting what harmonized with, and softening and moulding what repelled it, avoiding every thing hard, stiff, and formal, shrinking from details, reposing on effect, imparting motion to still life, viewing all things in their ‘gayest, happiest attitudes,’ and infusing his own spirit into nature as the leaven is kneaded into the dough; but, though the original bias existed in himself, and was thence stamped upon his works, yet the character could neither have been formed without the constant recurrence and pursuit of proper nourishment, nor could it have expressed itself without a reference to those objects, looks, and attitudes in nature, which soothed and assimilated with it. What made Hogarth original and inimitable, but the wonderful redundance, and, as it were, supererogation of his genius, which poured the oil of humanity into the wounds and bruises of human nature, redeemed, while it exposed, vice and folly, made deformity pleasing, and turned misfortune into a jest? But could he have done so if there were no enjoyment or wit in a night-cellar, or if the cripple could not dance and sing? No, the moral was in nature; but let no one dare to insist upon it after him, in the same language and with the same pretensions! There was 427Rembrandt—did he invent the extremes of light and shade, or was he only the first that embodied them? He was so only because his eye drank in light and shade more deeply than any one before or since; and, therefore, the sunshine hung in liquid drops from his pencil, and the dungeon’s gloom hovered over his canvass. Who can think of Correggio without a swimming of the head—the undulating line, the melting grace, the objects advancing and retiring as in a measured dance or solemn harmony! But all this fulness, roundness, and delicacy, existed before in nature, and only found a fit sanctuary in his mind. The breadth and masses of Michael Angelo were studies from nature, which he selected and cast in the mould of his own manly and comprehensive genius. The landscapes of Claude are in a fixed repose, as if nothing could be moved from its place without a violence to harmony and just proportion: in those of Rubens every thing is fluttering and in motion, light and indifferent, as the winds blow where they list. All this is characteristic, original, a different mode of nature, which the artist had the happiness to find out and carry to the utmost point of perfection. It has been laid down that no one paints any thing but his own character, and almost features; and the workman is always to be traced in the work. Mr. Fuseli’s figures, if they were like nothing else, were like himself, or resembled the contortions of a dream; Wilkie’s have a parochial air; Haydon’s are heroical; Sir Thomas’s genteel. What Englishman could bear to sit to a French artist? What English artist could hope to succeed in a French coquet? There is not only an individual but a national bias, which is observable in the different schools and productions of art. Mannerism is the bane (though it is the occasional vice) of genius, and is the worst kind of imitation, for it is a man’s imitating himself. Many artists go on repeating and caricaturing themselves, till they complain that nature puts them out. Gross plagiarism may consist with great originality. Sterne was a notorious plagiarist, but a true genius. His Corporal Trim, his Uncle Toby, and Mr. Shandy, are to be found no where else. If Raphael had done nothing but borrow the two figures from Masaccio, it would have been impossible to say a word in his defence: no one has a right to steal, who is not rich enough to be robbed by others. So Milton has borrowed more than almost any other writer; but he has uniformly stamped a character of his own upon it. In what relates to the immediate imitation of nature, people find it difficult to conceive of an opening for originality, inasmuch as they think that they themselves see the whole of nature, and that every other view of it is wrong:—in what relates to the productions of imagination or the discoveries of science, as they themselves are totally in the dark, 428they fancy the whole to be a fabrication, and give the inventor credit for a sort of dealing with the Devil, or some preternatural kind of talent. Poets lay a popular and prescriptive claim to inspiration: the astronomer of old was thought able to conjure with the stars; and the skilful leech, who performed unexpected cures was condemned for a sorcerer. This is as great an error the other way. The vulgar think there is nothing in what lies on the surface; though the learned only see beyond it by stripping off incumbrances and coming to another surface beneath the first. The difference between art and science is only the difference between the clothed and naked figure: but the veil of truth must be drawn aside before we can distinctly see the face. The physician is qualified to prescribe remedies because he is acquainted with the internal structure of the body, and has studied the symptoms of disorders: the mathematician arrives at his most surprising conclusions by slow and sure steps; and where he can add discovery to discovery by the very certainty of the hold he has of all the previous links. There is no witchcraft in either case. The invention of the poet is little more than the fertility of a teeming brain—that is, than the number and quantity of associations present to his mind, and the various shapes in which he can turn them without being distracted or losing a ‘semblable coherence’ of the parts; as the man of observation and reflection strikes out just and unforeseen remarks by taking off the mask of custom and appearances; or by judging for himself of men and things, without taking it for granted that they are what he has hitherto supposed them, or waiting to be told by others what they are. If there were no foundation for an unusual remark in our own consciousness or experience, it would not strike us as a discovery: it would sound like a jeu-d’esprit, a whim or oddity, or as flat nonsense. The mere mob, ‘the great vulgar and the small,’ are not therefore capable of distinguishing between originality and singularity, for they have no idea beyond the commonplace of fashion or custom. Prejudice has no ears either for or against itself; it is alike averse to objections and proofs, for both equally disturb its blind implicit notions of things. Originality is, then, ‘the strong conception’ of truth and nature ‘that the mind groans withal,’ and of which it cannot stay to be delivered by authority or example. It is feeling the ground sufficiently firm under one’s feet to be able to go alone. Truth is its essence; it is the strongest possible feeling of truth; for it is a secret and instinctive yearning after, and approximation towards it, before it is acknowledged by others, and almost before the mind itself knows what it is. Paradox and eccentricity, on the other hand, show a dearth of originality, as bombast and hyperbole show a dearth of imagination; they are the desperate resources of 429affectation and want of power. Originality is necessary to genius; for when that which, in the first instance, conferred the character, is afterwards done by rule and routine, it ceases to be genius. To conclude, the value of any work of art or science depends chiefly on the quantity of originality contained in it, and which constitutes either the charm of works of fiction or the improvement to be derived from those of progressive information. But it is not so in matters of opinion, where every individual thinks he can judge for himself, and does not wish to be set right. There is, consequently, nothing that the world like better than originality of invention, and nothing that they hate worse than originality of thought. Advances in science were formerly regarded with like jealousy, and stigmatised as dangerous by the friends of religion and the state: Galileo was imprisoned in the same town of Florence, where they now preserve his finger pointing to the skies!

The ideal is the abstraction of any thing from all the circumstances that weaken its effect, or lessen our admiration of it. Or it is filling up the outline of truth or beauty existing in the mind, so as to leave nothing wanting or to desire farther. The principle of the ideal is the satisfaction we have in the contemplation of any quality or object, which makes us seek to heighten, to prolong, or extend that satisfaction to the utmost; and beyond this we cannot go, for we cannot get beyond the highest conceivable degree of any quality or excellence diffused over the whole of an object. Any notion of perfection beyond is is a word without meaning—a thing in the clouds. Another name for the ideal is the divine; for, what we imagine of the Gods is pleasure without pain—power without effort. The ideal is the impassive and immortal: it is that which exists in and for itself; or is begot by the intense idea and innate love of it. Hence it has been argued by some, as if it were brought from another sphere, as Raphael was said to have fetched his Galatea from the skies; but it was the Gods, ‘the children of Homer,’ who peopled ‘the cloud-capt Olympus.’ The statue of Venus was not beautiful because it represented a goddess; but it was supposed to represent a goddess, because it was in the highest degree (that the art or wit of man could make it so) and in every part beautiful. Goddesses also walk the earth in the shape of women; the height of nature surpasses the utmost stretch of the imagination; the human form is alone the image of the divinity. 430It has been usual to represent the ideal as an abstraction of general nature, or as a mean or average proportion between different qualities and faculties, which, instead of carrying any one to the highest point of perfection or satisfaction, would only neutralise and damp the impression. We take our notions on this subject chiefly from the antique; but what higher conception do we form of the Jupiter of Phidias than that of power frowning in awful majesty? or of the Minerva of the same hand, than that of wisdom, ‘severe in youthful beauty?’ We shall do well not to refine in our theories beyond these examples, that have been left us—

What is the Venus, the Apollo, the Hercules, but the personification of beauty, grace, and strength, or the displaying these several properties in every part of the attitude, face, and figure, and in the utmost conceivable degree, but without confounding the particular kinds of form or expression in an intermediate something, pretended to be more perfect than either? A thing is not more perfect by becoming something else, but by being more itself. If the face of the Venus had been soft and feminine, but the figure had not corresponded, then this would have been a defect of the ideal, which subdues the discordances of Nature in the mould of passion, and so far from destroying character, imparts the same character to all, according to a certain established idea or preconception in the mind. The following up the contrary principle would lead to the inevitable result, that the most perfect, that is, the most abstract, representation of the human form could contain neither age nor sex, neither character nor expression, neither the attributes of motion nor rest, but a mere unmeaning negation or doubtful balance of all positive qualities—in fact, to propose to embody an abstraction is a contradiction in terms. The attempt to carry such a scheme into execution would not merely supersede all the varieties and accidents of nature, but would effectually put a stop to the productions of art, or reduce them to one vague and undefined abstraction, answering to the word man. That amalgamation, then, of a number of different impressions into one, which in some sense is felt to constitute the ideal, is not to be sought in the dry and desert spaces or the endless void of metaphysical abstraction, or by taking a number of things and muddling them all together, but by singling out some one thing or leading quality of an object, and making it the pervading and regulating principle of all the rest, so as to produce the greatest strength and harmony of effect. This is the natural progress of 431things, and accords with the ceaseless tendency of the human mind from the Finite to the Infinite. If I see beauty, I do not want to change it for power; if I am struck with power, I am no longer in love with beauty; but I wish to make beauty still more beautiful, power still more powerful, and to pamper and exalt the prevailing impression, whatever it be, till it ends in a dream and a vision of glory. This view of the subject has been often dwelt upon: I shall endeavour to supply some inferences from it. The ideal, it appears then by this account of it, is the enhancing and expanding an idea from the satisfaction we take in it; or it is taking away whatever divides, and adding whatever increases our sympathy with pleasure and power ‘till our content is absolute,’ or at the height. Hence that repose which has been remarked as one striking condition of the ideal; for as it is nothing but the continued approximation of the mind to the great and the good, so in the attainment of this object it rejects as much as possible not only the petty, the mean, and disagreeable, but also the agony and violence of passion, the force of contrast, and the extravagance of imagination. It is a law to itself. It relies on its own aspirations after pure enjoyment and lofty contemplation alone, self-moved and self-sustained, without the grosser stimulus of the irritation of the will, privation, or suffering—unless when it is inured and reconciled to the last (as an element of its being) by heroic fortitude, and when ‘strong patience conquers deep despair.’ In this sense, Milton’s Satan is ideal, though tragic: for it is permanent tragedy, or one fixed idea without vicissitude or frailty, and where all the pride of intellect and power is brought to bear in confronting and enduring pain. Mr. Wordsworth has expressed this feeling of stoical indifference (proof against outward impressions) admirably in the poem of Laodamia:—

These lines are a noble description and example of the ideal in poetry. But the ideal is not in general the stronghold of poetry. For description in words (to produce any vivid impression) requires a translation of the object into some other form, which is the language of metaphor and imagination; as narrative can only interest by a succession of events and a conflict of hopes and fears. Therefore, the sphere of the ideal is in a manner limited to 432Sculpture and Painting, where the object itself is given entire without any possible change of circumstances, and where, though the impression is momentary, it lasts for ever. Hence we may see the failure in Sir Charles Grandison, which is an attempt to embody this perfect or ideal character in a succession of actions without passion, and in a variety of situations where he is still the same everlasting coxcomb, and where we are tired to death of the monotony, affectation, and self-conceit. The story of ‘Patient Grizzle,’ however fine the sentiment, is far from dramatic: for the ideal character, which is the self-sufficient, the immovable, and the one, precludes change, or at least all motive for, or interest in, the alternation of events, to which it constantly rises superior. Shakspeare’s characters are interesting and dramatic, in proportion as they are not above passion and outward circumstances, that is, as they are men and not angels. The Greek tragedies may serve to explain how far the ideal and the dramatic are consistent; for the characters there are almost as ideal as their statues, and almost as impassive; and perhaps their extreme decorum and self-possession is only rendered palatable to us by the story which nearly always represents a conflict between Gods and men. The ideal part is, however, necessary at all times to the grandeur of tragedy, since it is the superiority of character to fortune and circumstances, or the larger scope of thought and feeling thrown into it, that redeems it from the charge of vulgar grossness or physical horrors. Mrs. Siddons’s acting had this character; that is to say, she kept her state in the midst of the tempest of passion, and her eye surveyed, not merely the present suffering, but the causes and consequences; there was inherent power and dignity of manner. In a word, as there is a sanguine temperament, and a health of body and mind which floats us over daily annoyances and hindrances (instead of fastening upon petty and disagreeable details), and turns every thing to advantage, so it is in art and works of the imagination, the principle of the ideal being neither more nor less than that fulness of satisfaction and enlargement of comprehension in the mind itself that assists and expands all that accords with it, and throws aside and triumphs over whatever is adverse. Grace in movement is either that which is continuous and consistent, from having no obstacles opposed to it, or that which perseveres in this continuous and equable movement from a delight in it, in spite of interruption or uneven ground; this last is the ideal, or a persisting in, and giving effect to, our choice of the good, notwithstanding the unfavourableness of the actual or outward circumstances. We may in like manner trace the origin of dancing, music, and poetry, which is the march of words. Self-possession is 433the ideal in ordinary behaviour. A low or vulgar character seizes on every trifling or painful circumstance that occurs, from irritability and want of imagination to look beyond the moment; while a person of more refinement and capacity, or with a stronger predisposition of the mind to good, and a greater fund of good sense and pleasurable feeling to second it, despises these idle provocations, and preserves an unruffled composure and serenity of temper. This internal character, being permanent, communicates itself to the outward expression in proportionable sweetness, delicacy, and unity of effect, which it requires all the same characteristics of the mind to feel and convey to others; and hence the superiority of Raphael’s Madonnas over Hogarth’s faces. Keeping is not the ideal, for there may be keeping in the little, the mean, and the disjointed, without strength, softness or expansion. The Fauns and Satyrs of antiquity belong (like other fabulous creations) rather to the grotesque than the ideal. They may be considered, however, as a bastard species of the ideal, for they stamp one prominent character of vice and deformity on the whole face, instead of going into the minute, uncertain, and shuffling details. As to the rest, the ideal abhors monsters and incongruity. If the horses in the Elgin marbles, or the boar of Meleager, are ranked with the human figures, it is from their being perfect representations of the forms and actions of the animals designed, not caricatures half-way between the human and the brute.

The ideal, then, is the highest point of purity and perfection to which we can carry the idea of any object or quality. The natural differs from the ideal style, inasmuch as what anything is differs from what we wish and can conceive it to be. Many people would substitute the phrase, from what it ought to be, to express the latter part of the alternative, and would explain what a thing ought to be by that which is best. But for myself, I do not understand, or at least it does not appear to me, a self-evident proposition, either what a thing ought to be, or what it is best that it should be; it is only shifting the difficulty a remove farther, and begging the question a second time. I may know what is good; I can tell what is better: but that which is best is beyond me—it is a thing in the clouds. There is perhaps also a species of cant—the making up for a want of clearness of ideas by insinuating a pleasing moral inference—in the words purity and perfection used above; but I would be understood as meaning by purity nothing more than a freedom from alloy or any incongruous mixture in a given quality or character of an object, and by perfection completeness, or the extending that quality to all the parts and circumstances of an object, so that it shall be as nearly as possible of a piece. The imagination does not ordinarily bestow any pains on 434that which is mean and indifferent in itself, but having conceived an interest in any thing, and the passions being once excited, we endeavour to give them food and scope by making that which is beautiful still more beautiful, that which is striking still more grand, that which is hateful still more deformed, through the positive, comparative, and superlative degrees, till the mind can go no farther in this progression of fancy and passion without losing the original idea, or quitting its hold of nature, which is the ground on which it still rests with fluttering pinions. The ideal does not transform any object into something else, or neutralize its character, but, by removing what is irrelevant and supplying what was defective, makes it more itself than it was before. I have included above the Fauns and Satyrs, as well as the Heroes and Deities of antique art, or the perfection of deformity as well as of beauty and strength, but any one who pleases may draw the line, and leave out the exceptionable part; it will make no difference in the principle.

Venus is painted fair, with golden locks, but she must not be fair beyond the fairness of woman—for the beauty we desire is that of woman—nor must the hair be actually of the colour of gold, but only approaching to it, for then it would no longer look like hair, but like something else, and in striving to enhance the effect we should weaken it. Habit, as well as passion, knowledge as well as desire, is one part of the human mind; nor, in aiming at imaginary perfection, are we to confound the understood boundaries and distinct classes of things, or ‘to o’erstep the modesty of nature.’ We may rise the superstructure of fancy as high as we please; the basis is custom. We talk in words of an ivory skin, of golden tresses; but these are but figures of speech, and a poetical licence. Richardson acknowledges that Clarissa’s neck was not so white as the lace on it, whatever the poets might say if they had been called upon to describe it.

The choice of a President for this Society is one of some nicety. Where there is not any individual taking a decided and indisputable lead in art, it requires a combination and balance of qualities not always easily to be met with. The President of the great body of art in this country ought not merely to be eminent in his profession, but a man of gentlemanly manners, of good person, of respectable character, and standing well in the opinion of his brother artists. He should be a person free from peculiarity of temper, from party spirit, and able to represent the elegant arts (of which he stands at the head) as the last 435ostensible link connecting scientific pursuit with the enlightened taste and aristocratic refinements of their immediate patrons. The choice has fallen upon Mr. Shee, and his honours will sit well upon him. This artist has been long a favourite with the public in the most popular branch of his art, and is scarcely less distinguished by his occasional brilliant effusions as a poet and his accomplishments as a man. The characteristics of Mr. Shee’s style of portrait painting are vivacity of expression, facility of execution, and clearness of colouring. He has attempted history with some success. Perhaps if he had done more in this way, it might have been to his own detriment; and the habits and studies of the historical painter, immersed in a world of retirement and abstraction, are such as hardly serve for an introduction to situations of ornament and distinction in social life. Mr. Wilkie’s merits as a painter of familiar subjects have procured him the deserved honour of being appointed ‘historical painter to the King’—the admirable busts of Mr. Chantrey might also have been thrown into the opposite scale; but, upon the whole, the judgment of the public will not take the laurel from the head where the hands of the Academy have placed it. If we might hint a fault where so much praise is due, it would be by expressing a wish that Mr. Shee could more boldly say with Rembrandt, ‘Je suis peintre, non pas teinturier.’ His tones are too pure, approaching too nearly to virgin tints. For one department of his office the new President is happily qualified—we mean the delivery of lectures from the Chair of the Royal Academy. The art of painting is dumb but Mr. Shee can borrow the aid of a sister muse.