Mi-v:f!l«, ';^':y iJ J- ^-.o/- i,-'*vy o.'r','-, -^.n ■ '■♦ ■ -^ 1 ■ •iSM *"*H THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE V V * V V V * ' Ex Libris ISAAC FOOT -- - - ^ ^ ^ ^- THE LITERAEY WORKS or JAMES SMETHAM THE LITERARY WORKS OF JAMES SMETHAM u( EDITED BY WILLIAM DAVIES MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1893 All rights reserved S3 \S^3 PREFACE This volume contains the chief literary produc- tions of James Smetham — at least such of them as are likely to appeal in any wide degree to the public. Already some account of the writer of them has been given in the introductory Memoir to the Letters of James Smetham, to which this volume may be considered supple- mentary. The essays here reprinted, chiefly from the London Quarterly Revieiv, though they do not admit of the versatility of his epistolary correspondence, have that in them which certainly merits a more permanent place in literature than the pages of a periodical afford or allow of. The one upon Sir Joshua Eeynolds is undoubtedly a notable production. Its line literary style, its compendious and comprehensive survey, its illus- Vi PREFACE trative and well-ordered array of facts, may be said to constitute a model in this style of composition. The essay on William Blake has already secured its acceptance in having been reprinted in part as an addendum to Gilchrist's and Eossetti's Life of Blake. Neither is the one on Alexander Smith and his School of writers inferior to the others. Many readers will be glad to be reminded of a page in literary history now almost forgotten, to which the literature of the present time is nevertheless largely indebted for a wider enfranchisement — the induction to a more daring and expansive range. Some of the poems at the end of the volume have been already published with the " Letters," It is thought better, however, to reproduce them here for the sake of completeness. Their power of thought, pictorial treatment, and compressed utterance, give them claims which the judicious reader will assuredly not be slow to appreciate. W. D. CONTENTS ESSAYS PAGE Sir Joshua Reynolds 3 William Blake 98 Alexander Smith 195 Gerhard Dow 230 POEMS The Soul's Departure 245 Early Dawn — Love and Hope .... 246 Song— "Make bright thy locks" . . . 247 Song—" Vow no more " 247 To Leuconoe. From Horace .... 248 From Horace 249 Retrospection 250 In the Night 253 viii CONTENTS PAGE Oblivion . . 254 Aspiration .... . 256 The Little Pool . . 257 Paraphrase— Psalm xvi. . 259 „ Psalm xlv. . 262 „ Job XXXVIII. . . 264 A Thought of God . 267 Quiet Hearts . 269 Immortal Love . 270 The Hundredfold Reward . 271 An Antidote to Care . . 272 The Seriousness of Life . 272 The Single Wish . . 273 Machpelah .... . 274 The Refuge .... . 276 On a Great Deliverance . . 277 Sorrow on the Sea . 278 Blank Verse . 279 The Painter and the Poet . 280 An Evening Landscape . 281 The Rotifer . 283 After Reading Tennyson's "In Memoriam" . 285 The Rest .... . 285 ESSAYS B n SIR JOSHUA EEYNOLDS "Everything turned out fortunately for Sir Joshua, from the moment of his birth to the hour I saw him laid in the earth. Never was a funeral of ceremony attended with so much sincere con- cern by all sorts of people. The day was favour- able, the order not broken or interrupted in the smallest degree. Your uncle, who was back in the procession, was struck motionless at his entering the great west door. The body was just then entering the choir, and the organ began to open, and the long black train before him pro- duced an astonishing effect on his sensibility, and, considering how dear to him the object of tliat ^ This essay was published in the London Qimrterhj, January 1866, as a review of the " Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds, by C. Leslie and T. Taylor." 4 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay melancholy pomp had been, everything, I think, was just as our deceased friend would, if living, have wished it to be ; for he was, as you know, not altogether indifferent to this kind of observance." No; for though "the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death makes a folly of posthumous memory, yet man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave ; solemnising nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery even in the infamy of his nature." Two mighty pens — the one in the hand of Edmund Burke, the other in tliat of Sir Thomas Browne — here supply a solemn and splendid image, and a profound and most eloquent reflec- tion. Both the image and tlie reflection naturally awaken a strong curiosity to know the whole story of what we may name The Fortunate Life, ended and crowned by those dark lionours of the sepulchre which he who received them did not hold to be " supervacuous," in this respect not re- sembling Horace, between whose character and his there were not a few other points of similarity. This remarkable career was not without record previous to the pul)lication of this biography. I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 5 Maloiie, ISTorthcote, Allan Cunningham, each have contributed to its illustration ; but it has not, till now, obtained a fair and full expression. Malone's memoir was slight ; Northcote's " pottering " and illiterate ; Allan Cunningham's — in the estimation of Leslie — was malicious and untrue. Neverthe- less, Allan Cunningham's Lives of the British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, is an entertain- ing book, giving a lively, and, on the whole, a truthful impression of the men whom he de- lineates. He was a poet, and had strong and glowing sympathy with the various forms of art. He lived among artists, being for a quarter of a century foreman to Sir Francis Chantrey, to whom he gave many a poetic hint. It was he who sug- gested the lovely idea of the snowdrop in the hand of the sleeping child in Lichfield Cathedral. He met constantly with men who knew Eeynolds. He could have, so far as we know, no special reason for traducing his character. What he asserts is asserted deliberately, and in his short memoir of Eeynolds there is a note to the effect that his damaging remarks were made after care- ful inquiry. It is true that he does not give his authorities. The impression he leaves on the reader's mind is a mixed one. Eeynolds is placed 6 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay before us as a man of high genius and determined purpose ; shrewd, philosophic, equable in temper, courtly in manners, making and keeping a large circle of friends among the best classes of his countrymen for rank, learning, and ability, among them much beloved, but debarred of court favour by his independence — all of which agrees with the record we are about to follow ; but he is exhibited as having another and less pleasing side to his character, most easily perceived by his dependants and subordinates, some of whom re- ported him to be exacting, penurious, and mean. People " spoke of him," says Allan Cunning- ham, " as they found him." No explicit contra- diction or disproof of Cunningham's statements is given by Leslie. The reader is left to infer from the evidence before him of the high excellence of the character of Eeynolds — its inconsistency with the charges brought against him. It is not in The British Painters, however, that we find the following quotation from Northcote's conversa- tions ; l)ut in Leslie's now puljlished memoir. " You describe him," said Northcote, " as I re- member Baretti once did Sir Joshua at his own table, saying to him, ' You are extravagant and I mean, generous and selfish, envious and candid, I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 7 proud and humble, a genius and a mere ordinary mortal at the same time.' I may not remember his exact words, but that was their effect. The fact was, that Sii' Joshua was a mixed character, like the rest of the icorld in that respect ; but he knew his own failings, and was on liis guard to keep them back as much as possible, though the defects would break out sometimes." Would not Thackeray have taken a careful note of that ? The biography before us contains what is likely to be a final and sufficient record of a man who stands out in the front rank of the history of the last century, and who is a conspicuous figure in the Johnsonian circle. All available docu- ments of importance have been gathered and arranged. The pocket-books of the painter have been placed at the disposal of the writers, to- gether with some hitherto unpuljlished letters and papers, and there is no remaining rumour of untouched stores of information. Leslie's pen has a quiet and unaffected distinctness which seldom becomes smart or glowing, although, where his knowledge as a painter and observer of aspect and manners is brought into play, we are made to feel its subtle charm. Mr. Taylor has taken up the narrative, left in 8 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay a very unfinished state at the death of Leslie, and by a process of reticulation and addition has com- pleted and put it together in his "own way." The key to his structural arrangement is found in a passage of his second volume, where he confesses his surprise on discovering the political com- plexion of lieynolds's career. This was a fortunate discovery in more ways than one, for it opens out a mass of material in the shape of historical accompaniments, lying within his own power to execute with spirit, and at the same time wonder- fully helps to give importance to the work which, with much steady, zealous, faithful labour, lie has completed in two good-sized volumes; probably on the wliole more interesting to the general reader than if Leslie had lived to complete them himself. Leslie was, as we all know, an eminent master in the British School, and lived a placid life in the pursuit of bis favourite art. We know — although his present coadjutor Mr. Taylor has published what professes to be his "Auto- biography" — far too little about him as a man. An autobiography that refers as seldom as pos- sible to the author and his doings is not the beau- ideal of an autobiography, and this is too much I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 9 the case with Leslie's. In some gleanings of recollection in the introduction, we learn that he did not choose much to visit with any one who did not care about painting, or did not possess good specimens ; as might therefore be expected, those portions of the memoir which were prepared by him are largely professional in material and tone. We are able to trace with great distinct- ness the double authorship ; Mr. Taylor — he hardly needed to have done it — has marked off by square brackets those portions of the work supplied by himself. The alternations of tone are noticeable and pleasant. Leslie, a meek and aged man, plays an air upon his sweet and low-toned German flute, now tolerably long, now shorter. But his younger, heartier, more hirsute companion strikes in suddenly with his cornet-ic-pisfo7is, wet- ting his lips and pouring shrill strains from his instrument, while the timid, apologetic German flute fills up the pauses. The performers are admirable friends. The stronger man does not try to outblow or override the venerable com- panion over whom he holds the office of protector, and he allows him a good share of the pence and praise. The flute dwells doatingly on studio anecdotes, picture criticisms, mild recollections 10 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay and rectifications, culled from Northcote and other sources. The strain is taken up more briskly by the cornet, and the scene shifts to the theatre, the Parliament, the higli seas, the club, the gaming-house, the literary coterie, the battle- field, the current scandal, or riot, or duel. When December comes round, year by year, and the deaf president delivers his indistinct, and, as we are here taught to believe, his illogical "dis- course," then the narrator becomes the critic; epitomises and analyses the lecture with in- dependence and good sense, and bows out the year with the list of sitters in the studio of Leicester Square. Mr, Taylor has some good preliminary quali- fications for work of this sort. He lias studied painting closely as a critic, and to some extent practically as a painter. He spent some time entirely among the ateliers of Paris, a student himself. He is a poet ; he is a dramatist ; he is a scholar, and a man of great general accomplish- ments. He is both firm and modest in tone, and cautious in statement. Such of his general picture criticism as we are acquainted with is valuable for its thoughtful and conscientious /ftW'- ness and lenity. He has a power of wide appre- I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 11 ciation — seldom rises to enthusiasm — does not vituperate, and does not blunder, and writes with a painstaking and quiet vivacity which lights up the page agreeably to the end of the work, leaving finally on the minds of his readers a very full and fair impression of the life and times of liis subject. The lists of sitters, given from the pocket- books, will have great value as a permanent and public record to which owners of pictures by Sir Joshua can appeal for verification, and by which students of art may trace the progress of Reynolds's improvement, from the days when he painted the funny little old children with their dogs and cats, and lapelled waistcoats, and knee-breeches, and cocked hats — his own life and fire struggling with the dullness of the Hudson school — to the days when he triumphantly swept the dark clouds round the head of the sublime portrait of Mrs. Siddons, as the Tragic Muse. Following the flute and cornet, then, as the shipwrecked mariners followed the " airy music and flying noises in the Enchanted Isle " of Pros- pero, let us trace out some of the lines of life in this pleasant biography. July IG, 1723, was the birthday of Joshua 12 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay Eeynolds. His father was a clergyman. We have prints of the face of the elder Eeynolds from a picture painted by his son ; and Leslie, who seems to have been deeply touched by the fact, notices that the costume in that portrait was afterwards adopted in the charming picture of Oliver Gold- smith, whom Eeynolds loved : the same flowing philosophic robe that suggested the garden and the porch, the bared neck, the loose, turned-down collar, — the face in the two pictures being also seen at the same angle. The features of the father bear no trace of resemblance to those of the son. He has a handsomer face, but it has not the blunt, half-surly expression of the counten- ance we know so well as " Sir Joshua." Joshua was not a " marvellous boy." His father thought him an idle one, as we shall presently see. He attended his father's school, and there laid the foundation of such education as he ever had. How deep that foundation was, we cannot very exactly judge. We hear nothing of Greek, and not a great deal of Latin. He read Ovid more or less in the original, and in after years, when he had lost the Latin epitaph written by Dr. Johnson on Goldsmith, the Doctor thought it possible that Eeynolds might recall and re- I Sm JOSHUA REYNOLDS 13 write it from memory — " Nil actum reputans clum quid superesset agendum," he writes in 1790 to Sheridan ; and with this scanty amount of material the evidence on that head closes. A good painter of the Eeynolds's organisation is not the man to become a deep scholar. But he drew in school, if he did not study classics. On one of these school- drawings there is found written by the pater-magister — " Done by Joshua out of pure idle- ness." At a very early age " the Jesuit's Perspec- tive " fell into his hands, and he studied it with such success that he was able to draw a correct representation of the colonnade beneath the school- house. His first attempt in oil colours was made with a ship-painter's tools and colours in a boat- house, in company with a certain Dick Edge- cumbe, of whom we hear more in the course of the narrative. Jonathan Eichardson was born in 1665, and died in 1745. He was a portrait painter, thougli not of the highest class. But he is best re- membered by " An Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting," and "An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Con- noisseur." One or both of these works — which Mr. Wornum says ought to be in every art library & U SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay — young Eeynolds read, and they, he was wont to say, " made him a painter." We cannot accept Eeynolds's definition of art-genius as being " great general powers accidentally determined in a particular direction," but such glowing and simple enthusiasm as breathes in the words of Eichard- son were enough to raise the latent spark of genius into a flame. Thenceforth his bias was made manifest, and the " particular direction " chosen. His father had some views of making him a physician ; but seeing his strong bent for painting, he offered no resistance, and with entire sympathy did what he could to forward his tastes and interests. The pupil and son-in-law of Eichardson, Hudson, one of the Sir Godfrey school of painters, was then at the head of the British likeness - takers, prosperous and popular, and Joshua was, at the age of seventeen, apprenticed to him. The required fee was £120. Of this one - lialf was borrowed from his sister, ]\lrs. Palmer. Hudson's pictures were dull, heavy, and formal. The interest of the work was distributed with great impartiality over the cocked hat, the ruffles, the broad-sleeved coat, tlie M'aistcoat, and the face. AVliile standing Ijeforc pictures of tliat I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 15 school the face cannot well be overlooked, but when away from them the face cannot easily be recalled to memory. We endeavour to remember it, but the broad-sleeved coat, the waistcoat, the rufries, and the cocked hat, that wearisome black triangle usually being carried under the arm, are too much for us. We have to meditate on " the fitness of things" before we are very sure that there was a face. And yet, strange to say, the face was not so badly painted. While the con- ception and relations of such pictures are de- pressing, the execution is often good. It is a long road which the uneducated young artist has to pass before he can mix oil-colours, and set eye, nose, lip, in its place as well as Hudson did; and no doubt young Eeynolds, who had all the grammar of his art to learn, looked \\\i\\ deep respect on the pictures, finished and unfinished, which hung round the studio of his new master, and felt the dignity and responsibility of his position when brought into the contact of even a sub- ordinate with the great Sir Eobert Walpole, when that statesman came to have his velvet- and-lace coat, his waistcoat, liis wig, and his face recorded w'i til an equal, inanimate propriety. Very slight records exist of the work done and 16 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay the life lived in Hudson's studio. Eeynolds copied the drawings of Cruercino with great success, as well as his master's pictures, and probably painted in subordinate parts of the originals. So far as the art of drawing and painting faces is concerned, his opportunities were favourable enough. Be- yond this they were barren in the extreme. The young students of our own day can go to the British Museum, the schools at South Kensington, the schools of the Royal Academy, and find plenty of casts from the antique to awaken effort, to cultivate the sense of beauty, and to give knowledge of the structure of the human figure, and the requirements of pure outline. Few such things would ever meet the eye of the pupil of Hudson. It will help us to look wdth tolerance on the want of substantial knowledge of form, in all but the head, from which Eeynolds suffered through life, if we reflect that — from the age of seventeen to twenty, the years when tlie eye and memory are most keen and strongly alive to impression — he missed entirely that glorious instruction which even the sight of the antique furnishes; and, con- sequently, that knowledge, the required extent of which is not appreciated by less general observers, I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 17 but \Yhich Barry compares to enlarged geograph- ical science. The promontories, hills, and vales of the human face are difficult enough to map out, to say nothing of their relation to expression ; but the endless involutions of a human body, in its vary- ing proportions between the Hercules and the Venus — in its strange changes of contour under muscular action, and especially in that refined superficies of form and colour which overlays the deep life below — constitute materials for a science needing the best year's of life for its acquirement. Michael Angelo gained it in perfection ; but we are told that he spent twelve years in the close study of anatomy as one of the preliminaries of its attainment. Twelve, twenty, or fifty years, however, without the higher perception of the relation of form to expression and action, would be insufficient. The wonder is that Reynolds, with such slender opportunities, did so well ; nor is it reverent or just for the youthful student, surrounded by " Gladiators " and " Discoboli " from his school- days, to afi'ect contempt for the " drawing " of the great master, wdio, till he was eight-and-twenty, probably only knew the antique from bad prints, or from a few maimed and yellow marbles, C 18 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay brought over on " the grand tour " by dilettanti noblemen. His study of the face must have been profound ; and the broad, deep, tender strength with which from an early age he laid in the features in their relative places, %^'ith their due retiring subordination, shows how nnicli he gained by being shut up to a narrow circle of observa- tion and study. There is a penalty often to be paid for extended opportunities. Lawrence could draw with immense knowledge and subtle grace ; but in his excess of science, we see, perhaps, one of the causes of his inferiority to Eeynolds in painting the face. He knew too much for his general powers, Keynolds's general powers always exceeded his knowledge. A fine head by Eeynolds gives the impression of its having been painted by a philosopher, which cannot be said of most works from tlie more perturbed, if more scientific, pencil of Sir Thomas Lawrence. It is said that Eeynolds left Hudson's studio throuoh some mutual misunderstanding. He re- mained, however, in after life in friendly rela- tions witb his old master; and though some slight "tiff" might be the occasion of their parting, the true reason probably was, that having seen how to set the palette and paint the head throughout, I SIR JOSHUA REYXOLDS 19 from dead colouring to glazing, and longing to infuse life on his own account into heads tolerably well painted, he began to tire of the everlasting round of blue velvet and cocked hat. Whether he made much way in society during this early London sojourn, we are not informed. He probably, at that time, saw and admired Gar- rick when he brought his quick and vivid powers to bear on the dull and stilted forms of theatrical art. An interesting anecdote of the period must not be omitted. At a public auction, where young Eeynolds was present, there arose a buzz and a whisper as the distorted form of the poet Pope walked througli a yielding crowd, dispensing salutations and shaking hands, and not refusing the hand of the youthful painter, stretched out in an impulse of respectful enthusiasm. This, to readers familiar with the incidents of the life of Reynolds, is sure to recall a similar act of homage paid by Northcote to Sir Joshua, on one of his visits to Devonshire. Northcote touched the skirt of his coat " with much satisfaction," delighted to be so near the man whom he adored as a painter. In the days when Daguerre was not, an average skill in portraiture was a sure foundation for respectable livelihood, if coupled with moderate 20 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay diligence, prudence, and manners, Eeynolds be- came for a while a country artist. A delightful little volume of sketches of country artists might be written, after the manner of the shorter lives of Allan Cunningham. Till about the year 1855 there was no mode of livelihood more secure and pleasant than that of the unambitious country portrait painter of any ability or conduct. Oil pictures of the heads of households were things as necessary to equip- ment as the sideboard and the sofa. The great blemish on the mass of the tribe who supplied this inevitable demand was, perhaps, an excess of conviviality.^ Nothing placed two men, who had dealings with each other in those days, on a more pleasant footing than that of painter and sitter. The sitter was desirous of looking his best in the eyes of the painter, and of giving the best possible impression of his person and character. He was all smiles, all hospitality and concession. The painter wished to see his subject at his ease. It was seldom that the painter had not some other unwonted gift. He sang or fiddled, or was a ^ One of these men (who painted in the Sir William Beechey style, red curtain and ruddy face), when asked at what period of the day he painted Lest, replied, "I always paint boldest after dinner." I SIR JOSHUA REYXOLDS 21 mimic, or had " a fund of anecdote." His con- tinual and varied intercourse with others gave a charm to his manners, and he became the lion of many a little country circle ; l)ut in much danger, if he were not a man of higher tastes, of sinking gradually into the red-nosed lodger at an inn — the hero of a " portrait club " ; the painter of signs to clear off scores, and too often sinking under a huge wave of work paid for, but \m- finished, accumulated debts, and irresistible habits of intemperance. Eeynolds, judging from his own account of about three years of his young manliood, was in some danger of declining into the free-and-easy habits of his sect. He always lamented his waste of time and opportunity at this period. After the death of his father, in 1746, he took a house at Plymouth Dock, and there lived with his two unmarried sisters till 1749. Some attempts at landscape, belonging to these years, are extant. It was at about this period that he came into contact with another and very important portion of his teaching, the pictures of William Gaudy, of Exeter, whose father was a pupil of Vandyke. Solemnity, force, and richness are said to mark many of these pictures ; and a traditional saying 22 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay of Gandy's, to the effect that the texture of oil paintings should resemble that of cream or cheese, weighed on the mind of Eeynolds, and influenced him throughout his whole career. If the un- learned reader will look closely into the little picture of " Innocence " in the Yernon Gallery, he will understand what this technical aphorism meant. It is interesting to observe, so far as prints can give the information, that Eeynolds did not take any violent leap out of the Hudsonian posi- tion into his own higher walk. He moved up- ward on safe ground, and in his early portraits we can trace the process of animation and adventure. The shadows deepen, and the lights brighten here and there. The titled dame pushes her stiff shoulder a little further towards action, and sometimes ventures to lay her bent wrist on the waist, angling the elbow with spirit. The light veil begins to flutter ; a stray lock is lifted by the breeze. " The dumb dead air," so particu- larly oppressive in the Hudson portrait, begins to roll and stir, and in due time we have the artist looking at us with an assured inquisitive- ness from under his shading hand in the fine portrait which has been placed for us in tlie I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 23 National Portrait Gallery. He was early taken under the patronage of Lord Edgecurabe, and it was at Lord Edgecumbe's house that he met with Commodore Keppel, to whose good offices thus early iu life so much of Eeynolds's bright fortune is owing. Both were young: Keppel, twenty- four; Eeynolds, twenty -six. The Ccnturio7i lay in the Channel, bound for the coast of Africa. Keppel generously offered to show his young acquaintance something of the world and to take him to Italy ; thus a warm friendship commenced which lasted through life, and was at all periods of great professional advantage to the painter. It also helped, undoubtedly, to give that political complexion to his life which ]Mr. Taylor has pointed out as being so significant. Life on board a man-of-war for four months, at that stage of a young artist's life, must have been an important fact in his training, and the character of Keppel must have influenced his own. Keppel was of Dutch extraction, well born, and valuing more than many (so says Burke) the advantages of birth ; yet he was frank, friendly, and brave. In the Commodore's com- pany he spent a week at Lisbon ; saw the great procession and the great bull-fight ; saw Cadiz, 24 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay Gibraltar, Tetuan, Algiers, and at Algiers saw the Dey of Algiers, and witnessed a remarkable inter- view between that potentate and tlie bold and calm British officer, when that " beardless boy," as the Dey called him, threatened bombardment. At Minorca, the name of which was in a few years to become the keynote of popular fury, he was entertained so long that he had time to paint almost all the officers of the garrison. He asked but small prices, three guineas a head ; and to the rapid production of pictures at this price must be attributed something of the speed and facility for which his pencil was afterwards re- markable. It was at Minorca that he was thrown from his horse, and received that cut on the lip which gives so peculiar a cast to the Eeynolds' mouth. In course of time he was landed at Leg- horn, and entered the region of enchantment to all artists. He was now to see what Eichardson liad taught him to wonder at, and almost to worship. He hastened onwards to Eome, and another and the most important stage of his education began. It is a soothing prelude to the marvellously active life of Eeynolds, to hear his account of the manner in which those two years were spent in I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 25 Eome. There is an expression occurring more than once in these memoirs, that shows his development to have been, though cautious and slow at first, by no means accidental. " I con- sidered," says he, " that I liad a great game to playy He sat down to his great game with eminent deliberation. That he might have time for study, he borrowed money from his married sisters, who seem to have been in good circum- stances. He did not seek commissions from the travelling lords who were willing to pay for copies of notable works. He did not copy, during all his stay in Italy, more than a very few of the great pictures. He did not paint serious portraits. He did, though, what is exceedingly anomalous. He painted two or three of that uninteresting- class of pictures, called in tliose days " cari- caticras." One of these, representing some noisy funny scene between tutor, lord, courier, and innkeeper, was exhibited not long ago at the British Institution, and showed but a feeble sense of humour, with not mucli painting power. It had the look of work done to oblige a patron who mistook, as men often do, verbal or historic humour for pictorial. His method was to make small studies and sketches, according to their 26 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay relation to the o-overnino; excellence of tlie work before liim, and plenty of written memoranda and slight pencillings for the purpose of fixing on his memory the great things he might never, and as it proved did never, see again. The years 1750 and 1751 were passed in this way to memorable advantage, and under very favourable conditions. It is pleasant to imagine him during this happy recess, sitting, standing, or lying, " through whole solemn hours," under the awful shades of the Sistine, " capable of the emo- tions which Michael Angelo intended to excite," or w^aiting breathless with close investigation before the " Heliodorus," or the " ]\Iiracle of Bolsena," or the " Disputa," or that airy Hill of the Muses, till the true light of taste dawned upon him, and he felt himself able to understand what, he confesses with genuine simplicity, he was at first sight unable thoroughly to receive or enjoy. By the way, this would be a good subject for a note to another' edition of the Modem Painters, — " How far was Reynolds right in his first impression of Eaphael, and wrong in his second?" Mr. Ruskin's analysis of the cartoon of " Christ's Charge to Peter," in the third volume of Modern Painters, may be compared with I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 27 Eeynolds's first and instinctive judgment of the pictures in the Vatican. After Eome he visited Florence, Bologna, and Venice, conceiving too high an opinion of the eclectic schools, but finding what he was best fitted to understand and love in Venice among the works of Titian, Veronese, the Bassani, and Tintoretto. In 1752, on the 16tli of October, Eeynolds arrived in London, and laid down the first stake in the great game he proposed to play. His capital consisted of a body and mind charged to the full Avith life, health, energy — the grammar of Hudson, the hints of Gandy, the rapid practice of Plymouth and Minorca, the " grand gusto " of Rome, the combinations of Bologna, and the superb ornamentalism of Venice, the experience of a traveller, tlie rudiments of a scholar, and the capacity of a philosopher. In addition, he had made some mechanical prepara- tions; he had contrived that some prelusive strains of fame should reach the ears of London before he arrived, and he brought with him an Italian " drapery man." The drapery man was a necessary appendage in every fashionable studio of those days. Unless 28 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay a little of the manufactory is conjoined witli the higher uses of art, fortune cannot be secured, and to our minds it is very observable that position, taken in the social sense, and fortune in the banking sense, were distinct and important parts of the great Eeynolds's " game." He meant to have everytliing the earth could give him, and he got it. The name of the young Italian was Giuseppe Marchi, and one of his master's earliest doings was a portrait of his pupil in a turban. It is not an astounding picture ; and Hudson told him plainly that he did not paint so well as before he went to Italy. Keynolds did not return to a soil entirely barren of art, though it was barren of all patronage except for portrait painting. In 1750 Hogarth's "Marriage a la Mode" was knocked down at a public auction for £110. The frames alone of this series cost him £24, so that for these match- less works he was paid at the rate of less than £15 each. He had shown great ability in portraiture long before this. Tiie portrait of Captain Coram, at the Foundling Hospital, is full of life and power, as no doubt was many another from the same hand. He was not fitted, how- ever, either by his skill or manners, to take the I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 29 place of a popular portrait painter. At this time he had mistaken his way, and was at work on sacred subjects. He had the " Paul before Felix " on his easel. If Paul had been what his accusers said he was, " a pestilent fellow," and Pelix a Bow Street magistrate, Ho2;artli was the man to have civen us an innnortal work — the real Paul and Felix were above his reach. Eichard AVilson had been a portrait painter, but was now beoinuiuG; that sorrowful career of landscape — landscape poetic, forlorn and grand — which helped so much to raise our landscape art, and so little to supply his own necessities. A Swiss painter, Liotard, was in possession of the field of portrait just then. He was a neat painter, but his neatness could not stand lomr before the importation of novelty, life, and strength fresh from abroad, and he disappeared. The first M'ork of Eeynolds which attracted public attention was a vigorous full length of Commodore Keppel, standing on a stormy sea- shore, and with animation giving directions to unseen fijiures on the beach. The attitude was adapted from a pencil sketch of an antique statue picked up somewhere in his travels, and marks from the first his habit of using 30 SIR JOSHUA REYXOLDS essay the ideas of otliers whenever he could do so with advantage. Leslie, in his clmrming Handhooh for Young Painters, has a remark wliich will help us to estimate Eeynolds all the more accurately. " I have no hesitation," he writes, " in saying, that every artist whose name has liv^ed, owes his im- mortality more to the excellence of his taste, than to any other single endowment ; because it displays all the rest to their fullest advantage, and without it his mind would be imperfectly seen ; and if taste be not the highest gift of the painter, it is, I think, the rarest." This rare gift M\as possessed by Eeynolds in an unwonted degree. This and another characteristic, midway between taste and humour — the power to see " the weak side of things " — enabled liim to use the inventions of others with consummate judgment. His fine eye and delicate hand, so cool and light, enabled him to give the charm of freshness and naturalness, which prevented the spectator from tracing the origin of his ideas. His mind was appreciative, not inventive. He saw no visions ; he dreamed no dreams. But he was alive to the airiest and most subtle charms of the visible. All in his life and thinking was eminently actual and outward. I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 31 It is where the mind is equally balanced between the visionary spontaneity of imagination, and the quiet, keen perception of outward fact, that the few hisihest masters of art are manifested, — the Michael Angelo, the Eaphael, the Titian, the Shakespeare, — and no man of this class can con- sent to borrow, though occasionally, as Eaphael did, he may condescend to adapt. His first house was at Xo. 104 St. IMartin's Lane, near the studio of Eoubiliac. He removed soon after to No. 5 Great Newport Street, his sister Frances taking the management of his house. The brother and sister were not congenial souls. He was even ; she was fretful and full of " megrims." She painted miniatures, and copied her brother's pictures. " These copies," said her brother, " make other people laugh and me cry." After a few years they separated. The principles on whicli he commenced his life-work are early apparent, and continued ever after to guide him. He had a settled, and indeed an exaggerated, conviction of the importance of labour. Feeling his slowness of invention, he made the best reflection under the circumstances — namely, that great facility often induces haste and carelessness. The tortoise in the actual result of the race of 32 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay life not seldom distances the hare. He be<>an with the determination to "go to his studio willing or unwilling, morning, noon, and night," a resolve differing from that of Stothard, who walked the streets daily for hours, drinking in health, and catching sudden and fleetino- "races from the moving life around him. Eeynolds was too much of an indoor artist all his life. He took, however, every pains to learn painting from paintings. He bought what good works of the old masters he could afford to buy; he "even borrowed money for that purpose, believing them to be for a painter the best kind of wealth." He went so far as to tell Northcote, that " for a really fine specimen of Titian he would consent to ruin himself" He died worth eighty thousand pounds in money, and surely if he had only half rained himself, he might have attained his wish. He thought India -stock valuable as well as Titians, and tried to dispose of his Titians before he died. He made systematic experiments in effect and colour, "leaving out every colour in turn, and showing it that he could do without it." He peered into, and chipped, and filed away and dissolved portions of old paintings to get at the I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 33 "Venetian secret." In painting his pictures he exhibited, perhaps, his most marked peculiarity of mind, always looking on them " as a whole." It is this breadth of view, this tendency to generalise and mass, this breath of the philosophic spirit, which gives so much of the air of greatness to his works. At first his use of materials was tolerably simple and safe. The aim at brilliance and rich- ness induced him from the first to use fleeting colours if they w^ere splendid in hue. It may be questioned whether he was not misled afterwards by the Gandy theory about cream and cheese. In his more successful efforts after this quality there is a species of charm on close inspection. But not only is it true that at the focal distance mere richness of pigment is lost, but it may also be respectfully denied that human flesh is like "cream or cheese" in texture. It is not like anything which may not be successfully imi- tated with such simple media as Gainsborough used. There i-s a tendency in some artists and connoisseurs to confuse the sweetness of the face with the sweetness of something to eat, and to such eyes the dry and airy world is " embedded and enjellied " in unctuous semi - transparency. D 34 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay One of the cant phrases of this school goes be- yond the Gandy idea. It is accounted to be an excellence in a picture that it should look " buttery." "We meet with one excellent resolve in the beginning of his public life, the want of which spoils many a young painter, — to do his best at each succeeding picture whether the subject were attractive or not. Moreover, his "grand tour," his Italian studies, his many qualifications, did not overwhelm his prudence. He began to paint at the very moderate price of five guineas a head. The political sketches which fill so many pages of the book, interesting and well written as they are, may be passed lightly over ; for, except that Keynolds's career was undoubtedly influenced by his early associations with the party in opposi- tion, we meet with no expressions of political sentiment, and only one political act, — his voting for Fox, — and we have abundant evidence that to him a man's politics were no barrier to inter- course. He was found one day at the table of Wilkes, and the next day hfi dined with Johnson ; and, during the grand and celebrated " Impeach- ment," we find him on one day sharing the I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 35 hospitality of Warren Hastings, and the next he has his feet under the table of Burke. The times of his appearance before the world are not pleasant to read of. " Coarse, rollicking, and hearty " they were ; drinking and gambling, and dissolute times in a degree that disgusts, while the narrative of it amuses ; days of fearful political corruption, when men would do anything for power, when the Paymaster of the Forces thought it no shame to pocket the interest of the money in his hands, and when " secret service money" meant money for buying votes for the Government. Truly, " the canker of peace " looked festering enough, and there is a sort of pleasure in seeing the wild passion of the upper-class men of those days becoming purged and noble with the bursting out of "the blossom of war with a heart of fire." It seems better that they should die bravely among the thunders of the fleet in Newfoundland mists, or leave their bones in the parched Carnatic, than thrust one another through in the stews of London. Into the mixed society of this era Reynolds was well prepared to enter. He had, young as he was, seen much good company. He had firm nerves, a quiet unobtrusive self-reliance, and his 36 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay speecli was considerate and wise. He had none of that moodiness and inequality of temper so often the counterbalance of genius ; yet, as we see by many instances, there was, under a calm exterior, a spirit of insatiable curiosity and rest- less observation. Little disturbed by thronging fancies from within, he was free to fix with more accuracy on impressions from without, and gather them home there for his use. People who had no great public events to fill mouths were talking of Sir Charles Granclison, Gray's Megy, Peregrine Pickle, and Johnson's Dictionary, and it was not long before he crossed the path of Ursa Major himself. They were friends at a stroke. They first met at the house of the daughters of Admiral Cotterell. One of the ladies lamented the death of a friend to whom they were under great obliga- tions. "You will," said the penetrating young portrait painter, who had seen the world out of the studio as well as in it, " at least be set free from the burden of obligation." This acute, caustic, and daring saying caught the quick ear of Johnson. It was " of a higher mood " than the commonplaces of polite society. He went home to sup with Reynolds, and in this way commenced a long friendship, founded in mutual I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 37 esteem and admiration, between two men as dis- similar in most respects as could well be. Their acquaintance was a fortunate occurrence for both. In Johnson, Eeynolds found his most influential teacher; and in Eeynolds, Johnson found his tenderest and most considerate friend. As yet, the star of Burke, who was to rise, according to Macaulay, " in amplitude of com- prehension and richness of imagination superior to every orator ancient or modern," was below the horizon. He was then twenty -three years old, reading for the bar, contributing to papers and periodicals, turning over in his mind the question of the j)ropriety of his emigrating, or the prospect of a consulship, and meditating on " the sublime and beautiful." Goldsmith, at the age of twenty -five, was going northward to study medicine, to learn, as Beauclerk put it afterwards, " to kill those who were not his enemies." Eey- nolds himself was nearly thirty, well trained, and in the best order for the race of life. In 1754 there was a great awakening of public interest and excitement. The horizons east and west, in India and America, were troubled, and, says Eeynolds's biographer, "few periods of our history were more stirring than the years from 38 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay 1754 to 1760." To any one interested at once in history and in art, the connection between the public events of the whole period of Eeynolds's activity and the shadowy studio in which so many of the remarkable men of the time sat from year to year, would be an exceedingly delightful branch of study, and would help to realise and enkindle his conception of the time. So many engravings exist from the long series of Eeynolds's portraits, that a very complete historic collection may be hung in the galleries of the mind from this source alone ; and this is, of course, the thread of connection by which the historic and biographic portions of the Life under consideration is bound together. In 1755 we find the painter in fully established business, and are able, from this date, to follow his doings pretty closely by means of those pocket-books which it would be a pleasure to see and handle ; filled slowly from day to day, through a course of nearly forty years, with names that create a slight thrill as we read them, and rendered the more racy from a certain want of genius for spelling, which was a small set-off against so many other excellent gifts. In this first recorded year we have not less than 120 sitters. Two portraits per week (when I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 39 many of them would be large and some full- length pictures) seems hard work ; but we must remember the valuable co-operation of "the drapery man." It ^vas a point with him never to be seen out of his studio in the daytime ; per- haps, for him, with his indoors' imagination, the best course. But it would seem as if he were equally careful, except when he received company, never to be found at home after dark. He lived in the age of clubs. He made the club his library and news-room, and had the good sense to clioose as companions those who could teach him ; men whose business it was to read, think, and write. His close study was of pictures ; but he was a shrewd, humorous, and delighted observer of life and manners. He was not a talker, and hated talking artists, but he was a delicate, discrimina- tive, and generous listener. The ear-trumpet is typical. In his power of listening with intelli- gence lies one of the great secrets of his power of making and keeping such dissimilar friends as Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, "Wilkes, and a host of others, who, at constant feud with each other, were all agreed in their warm attachment to Eeynolds. He besan with an artists' club, and at 40 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay " Slaughter's Coffee House " met weekly with his old master, Hudson, with Eoubiliac, the sculptor, Gravelot and M'Ardell, the engravers, Hogarth and Frank Hay man, rough and ready. We have now to trace broadly a career of unexampled good fortune, reaching over two-and-twenty years, in which no rival showed his face, and during which he was the lord paramount of portraiture in Britain. Of the 120 names of sitters recorded in the first pocket-book, a fourth are those of people of high title, beside two or three admirals, as many baronets, colonels, and captains. Among the admirals are Lord Anson, then resting from his labours in the dignity of First Lord of the Admiralty, and Boscawen, painted immediately before he set sail for Newfoundland on the break- ing out of hostilities with France. There is the name of Lord Ligonier, a French Protestant refugee, who became Generalissimo, one of Marl- borough's heroes. He died in 1770, at the age of ninety-two. It is supposed that Eeynolds's endeavour to paint the old man's features as they might liave appeared years before in the fields of Flanders, led to its being, as it certainly is, poorly painted as to the face. For seven laborious years Fieynolds seems to have thrown all his powers I SIR JOSHUA RF.YXOLDS 41 into the work of achieving a position. He worked incessantly, and with rapidly developing power. The portrait of Dr. Johnson, which was engraved in Boswell's Life, where he is sitting in a homely, check-covered chair, hy a homely table, into which he is plunging his left fist, or dropping it like a paw, the legs wide apart, the head hung heavily aside, the eyes looking askance for his weighty idea which the charged pen waits to record, was done in 1756, and shows how much life and daring his pencil had by this time acquired. During that heaving and convulsive year, when war blazed out all over the world, he seems to have worked harder than at any period of his career. ISTorthcote remarks the year 1758 as having been the busiest of all Eeynolds's years. He painted in it the surprising number of 150 portraits. William of Culloden, now less favour- ably known as William of Kloster Seven, is found among this mass of subjects ; Lady Coventry, one of the celebrated Miss Gunnings of the year when he returned from Italy, and now dying of con- sumption ; Commodore Edgecumbe, " fresh from the triumphs of Louisbourg" ; and Mrs. Horneck, hereafter to be better known as the friend of 42 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay Goldsmith — have their names on this year's list ; and as showing the martial spirit of the time, and an admirable type of it, the striking full leuoth of Sir Francis Deleval as a volunteer, evidently defying the world, by all that is signified between musket-stock and bayonet-point, his hat cocked bravely on his head. Mrs. Pelham, feeding her chickens, abundantly more charming than if she were sacrificing to the Graces, or wielding the bow of Diana w^ith a three- inch crescent perched on her head-dress, also sat or stood; and the extravagant and lively Kitty Fisher, so often afterwards painted by Eeynolds, now represented as nursing doves, with a dove- like grace and innocence of look, but belonging to a class of which the dove is not the most appro- priate emblem. INIany of this class were brought to him from time to time, La Eeuas and Checcinas, Phrynes and Thaises, whom he painted for the random gambling lords who imported them. Kitty Fisher is said to have squandered £12,000 in nine months. It was this Cleopatra -like profusion which probably suggested to Eeynolds the not unapt rendering of her in the character of the " swarthy queen with bold black eyes," dissolving a pearl in her wine cup. I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 43 Seamen lately renowned for gallant actions with French privateers were there ; admirals who saw Wolfe land at Quebec, and brought home the news of his death ; soldiers came to tell how the day went on the field of Minden, or left his studio to fall amid the smoke of Kempen, or to mix in other onsets in that dreadful, useless struggle for the province of Silesia, " for the sake of which the life-blood of more than a million was poured out like water." " Yellow Jacks " and " Black Dicks," dogged commodores and daring captains ; Lord George Sackville and the Colonel Fitzroy w^ho took the disobeyed orders of Prince Ferdinand to Lord George on the field ; commanders of secret expeditions ; colonels who had stood round George the Second in battle, and one (Colonel Trapaud) who prevented the king's horse from rushing into the French lines ; are all found in turn seated in the quiet studio chair, with their stories of marcli and charge and beleaguerment by the Rhine, the Weser, or the Elbe. Country mayors, like Sir William Blackett, whose picture is in the Infirmary at Xewcastle- on-Tyne ; clerical men and men of learning, such as Dr. Markham, afterwards Archbishop of York ; comedians like Harry Woodward, "brisk and 44 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay breezy " ; tragedians like Barry, and one who lived between both comedy and tragedy like Garrick ; are succeeded by men Wearing a lofty and a serious brow, Sad, liigli, and working full of state and woe, like Sir Septimus Eobinson, Usher of the Black Rod, whose sittings are " always very early " ; and mixed with these " a bevy of fair women richly dressed"; duchess, and marchioness, and countess, and lady ; the noble's mistress ; the squire's dame and young ones, the father's pride and the mother's joy. Such a bringing together of the image of an age as is only seen in the studio of the fashionable portrait painter. One of the very memorable portraits of this stage of Eeynolds's career is that of Laurence Sterne, the lion of society, whom to meet, " it was needful," says Gray the poet, " to have invitations a fortnight beforehand." On this picture Leslie makes the subtle criticism that he is not simply resting his head on his hand as in thought, but is at the same time propping himself up, as one in feeble health, and that the wig is tilted slightly on the head, giving it the rakish Shandean air which characterises it. The whole picture is individual ; the eyes stare and burn impudently close under I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 45 the square brow ; the expression, so incongruous with a clerical costume, is that of one who neither fears God nor regards man. This picture was pre- sented to Sterne by Eeynolds, and might possibly be a repayment of the most compact and felicit- ous description of the style of Eeynolds which we know. " Eeynolds himself, great and graceful as he paints, might have painted liim as he sat." Sterne tampered with the pencil on his own ac- count, and would know^ how to value such a gift. The resolute diligence and freedom from all rivalry of these first seven years ; the increase of his prices, which had gradually risen from five to twenty-five guineas, while the full length had reached a hun- dred guineas, had so enlarged his means as to warrant his removal to a larger house at No. 47 Leicester Square. He gave £1650 for a forty years' lease (which he almost lived to see expired), made additions to the extent of £1500 more, in the shape of a gallery and studio, and at the early age of thirty-seven set up his carriage — a gorgeous affair indeed — painted as to the panels with the four seasons by Catton, and furnished with foot- men in silver lace. This outburst exhausted his savings ; but, as his practice was large and his diligence great, he was able soon to replenish his 46 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay purse, and to lay the foundation of an ample fortune. We find that ere long his yearly income amounted to £6000. Here, already remarkable for the snuff (Hard- man's, 37 Strand) and the ear- trumpet which single him out to the eye, he was found established at the accession of George the Third. The Eoyal Marriage took place in 1761, and one of the best of his allegorical pictures was soon after painted, — that of Lady Elizabeth Keppel, one of the bridesmaids, sister of his early friend the Commodore. She was represented in the character of a votary adorning the altar of Hymen with long wreaths of flowers, and attended by a maiden who is preparing some sort of libation in an urn. The liufje Earl of Errol sat about the same time, "a colossus in cloth of gold," whom Horace Walpole compared to " one of the giants in the Guildhall new-gilt." The spirits sink unaccountably among these allegorical pictures in spite of the classics and the gods. Among his Didos embracing Cupid, his Hopes and Loves and Graces, it is pleasing to come upon the natural and probable group of Lady Sarah Lennox and Lady Susan Strangways, with the youthful Charles James Eox. One of I SIR JOSHUA REYXOLDS 47 the ladies leans out of window, the other raises a dove to her caress, and the young Fox invites them to a rehearsal. The red bricks of Holland House look more real and stimulating than the gloomy mausoleums and prophetic cells in which his uuvowed "votaries" are performing their sham sacrifices that make us yawn vehemently and wish they were over. The Earl of Bute in blue velvet and gold, the Princess Augusta, the witty, careless, clever, unprincipled Charles Townshend, the proposer of that memorable Colonial Stamp Act which set a-ringing the ominous muffled bells of Boston (and who made the wicked joke on another sitter, a stout and wealthy heiress, that " her tonnage was equal to her poundage "). Lord Holland; Lord Chief- Justice Pratt, afterwards Lord Camden, and closely concerned in the after dis- putes as to the legality of general warrants ; Lord Granby, Master- General of Ordnance, and the subject of one of his most striking whole lengths ; Count Lippe Schaumburg, " soldier, statesman, and man of letters," — found their way early to the new studio in Leicester Square. The Count's picture is a large full length on a square canvas. He stands, long-faced, long-chinned, dark-eyed, at once pleasant and grim, against a wild sky full 48 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay of rolliuo- dooms and sjleams, and in the shade around him finely disposed emblems of war — mortar, and cannon -wheel, and ball, a charger with ruffled mane below, a banner with dropping fold behind him. Equally fine is the Vandyke- like portrait of Sir Geoffrey Amherst, in plate armour, his helmet resting on some plan of siege or battlefield. Hogarth died in 1764, and the Literary Club was formed the same year, meeting till 1775 at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street. During the summer the ceaseless and ardent toils of Reynolds told upon his health, and he was laid aside for a while by severe illness. All that relates to that glorious circle, gathered round " the brown table " at " the Club," is intensely attractive. It was the intellectual centre of the time. There Johnson ruled, "predominating" like the huge bear over the gate of the Baron of Bradwardine. Our feel- ings veer like the wind as we look at the bulk and texture of the "literary leviathan," so strangely put together. At one moment the eye moistens in admiration of his nobility and tenderness ; at another moment we shrink and collapse as if we had been personally struck down and trampled in unexpected assault. I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 49 We see Edmimd Burke, who raises our con- ceptions of the possibilities of human nature, and touches us, like the prelude of an oratorio, with the sense of wonder and expectancy. Burke was a match for Johnson in talk. Reynolds was his match also, but in another way, and the Doctor found and pronounced him " invulnerable." A constant association with every class of men and women ; a quick, quiet eye, which could discover the coming storm at a distance ; a genial and not easily ruffled temper (to the excellence of which, the most striking if somewhat strongly pronounced testimony is that of Northcote, that " you might put the Diml on Eeynolds's back, without putting him in a fidget") ; a perception of " the weak side of things," which Goldsmith lacked ; and a well- filled purse, carried Reynolds through thirty years of close association with Dr. Johnson with scarcely a ripple of discordance, and it confirms our admira- tion of the firmness and expansiveness of Eey- nolds's understanding, that he should cultivate so near an intercourse with one who, beside being purblind, or, perhaps, partly because he icas pur- blind, had not the least sympathy with the painter's pursuits. The Biography gives many interesting and graphic notices of the doings E 50 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay and sayings of this memorable club, and Mr. Taylor has found such fascination in even its wine accounts, that he gives us the average consumption per man of the port and claret, which were the main beverages. Eeynolds was one of the most regular attend- ants there, but he by no means confined his atten- tion to this awful centre of intellectual law. He seems to have been as fond of the society of men of fashion as men of literature and art. He was a frequenter of a notorious club composed of " maccaronis " and " bloods," whose chief pursuits were hard drinking, deep gaming, and blasphe- mous profanity. Here he was distinguished for his ceremonious politeness and his bad whist-playing. Through all his laborious life we see in him nothing of the dreamy, secluded student. When not at his easel he was about among men ; beef- steak clubs, sgavoir vivre clubs, saur-kraut clubs, ladies' clubs, gambling clubs ; no clubs came amiss to him where " life " was to be seen. Along with clubs came endless dinner engagements, as various as his portraits ; great dukes and lords, bishops and politicians, Wilkes and Johnson, Burke and Warren Hastings, keen-tongued, card -playing Kitty Olive, all these, as well as, or more often I SIE JOSHUA REYXOLDS 51 than, the artist or counoisseur, were his daily table companions. When dinners were over, then to Yaiixhall and Eanelagh, and the Pantheon and Mrs. Cornelej's masquerades, to balls and assemblies, to " chaoses," and queer collections of " blues." "WTiile Gainsborough, in after years, sat by his lamp at home throwing his exquisite sketches under the table, or Eomuey, whose "solitude was sublime," brooded in front of his cartoons, Eeynolds was still in and out of the congregations of men. It is this ceaseless energy, this tranquil viva- city, this unappeasable curiosity for the things of the present, that formed a very large element and a very central secret of his great power and in- fluence. He also knew the meaning of the saying of Ulysses — To have done is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail, In monumental mockery . . . For emulation hath a thousand sons, That one Ijy one pursue ; if you give way, Or hedge aside from the dii'ect fortliright, Like to an entered tide, they all rush by And leave you hindmost. To complete the image of exuberant life, we must see him occasionally on horseback going across 52 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay country after the hounds, or in the stubble bag- ging the game, or betting Mv. Parker five guineas that he will hit a mark. Alive, alert, with next to unfailing health and unflagging spirits, we see him "atherino- more of the materials of a whole success than any man of his time. It was not in the supreme force of any one gift that we discern the pre-eminence of our Sir Joshua. He aimed at fame, and fortune, and influence, and the enjoy- ment of the passing hour, and at general culture so far as it could be obtained by a thoroughgoing man of the world, as he undoubtedly was. He looked after the small things that enhance success. In the poem written by Warton on the Oxford Window, he is desirous to have his name "hitched in," so that the praise may have its full personal force ; and he made his sister ride about in his gilded coach, that people might ask, if Northcote does not mislead us, "Whose coach is that?" and that people might answer, " That is the coach of Sir Joshua Eeynolds, the eminent portrait painter." Perhaps the political event in which Eeynolds would be most likely to have a strong personal interest was the brief accession to power of the Eockingham administration, in which the Edmund Burke of the club and the Edmund Burke of Eey- I SIR JOSHUA REYXOLDS 53 nolds's counsels and affections was " the foremost man." In an age when all good things were bought and sold, the sight of "a ministry who practised no corruption, nor were ever suspected of any, sold no offices, obtained no reversions or pensions, either coming in or going out, for them- selves, their families, or their dependants," is soothing and cheering, and sheds a pleasant re- flected light on the course of this biography. The splendour was soon eclipsed. In 1782 it gleamed out again like the sun on an October day, but we see the long course of Burke's magnificent life passed in the shade and storm of opposition, to die out under the lurid conflagration, which was mistaken for sunrise, of the French Eevolution. In 1768 Eeynolds paid a visit to Paris, setting out on the 9th of September, with Ei chard Burke, the talkative, light-hearted, and random brother of Edmund. They had only two breaks-down in their posting ; saw Abbeville, Amiens, St. Just, Chantilly, St. Denis, the galleries, the theatres, Preville and Mole ; " lay at Sittingbourne " on the return journey ; and arrived in Loudon on the 8th of October. On the 9th of December Eeynolds was hailed President of the Eoyal Academy, which had been 54 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay formed in his absence, and shortly afterwards he left a sitter for the hvie and returned — Sir Joshua Eeynolds — to his usual labours. These honours made Johnson break his resolution against wine, and we may fancy the scene at No. 47, when his health was drunk by Burke and the rest of that high company. The scheme of an Academy of Arts w\as first orio'inated in 1755, between the artists and the Dilettanti Society. It was placed on its pre- sent basis in this year of 1768. It has been fre- quently, sometimes violently attacked. Leslie here enters on an elaborate defence and eulogy of it. His collaborateur differs from him ; and it is not unfair to refer to the expressed opinions of Mr. Taylor, seeing that they are accessible to all in a blue-book. Mr. Taylor was examined by the royal commission which sat to investigate the constitution of the Academy in 1863. He speaks mildly of .the Academy in the Life of Eeynolds ; but not with much warm approval in the blue- book. The most real ground of assault has not been, however, against the Eoyal Academy as an academy. It is out of the annual exhibition over which it has the control that so many heart-burn- ings have chiefly arisen. There is no other arena I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 55 open to the artist where there is anything like a fair opportunity of being seen by the generality of buyers and patrons ; yet it has been thought that the interests of members of tlie Academy have been too exclusively consulted. They have a right to send a large number of works year by year, and to have these works hung in the best places. If their works were necessarily more excellent than others, this would not be felt to be a grievance. In the early days of the institution its members included every good painter. It is not so now ; and seeing that there are and have been in recent times so many painters of acknowledged power and genius not numbered amongst the members of the Academy, no young painter of ability will be, for the honour's sake, very anxious to add the mystic letters to his name. Still, there is the question of the market. If work is not seen it cannot be bought, and where can it be efficiently seen by the mass of buyers but at the Royal Academy ? To our mind the whole system of temporary exhibition is unpleasant. The crush, the heat, the whirl, the golden flames that blaze round the walls, the mass of incongruous subjects huddled together, unfit the very organs of vision for correct seeing, 5G SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay and the mind for correct judging, and we dream of something more adapted to the wants of both painter and buyer : some long, quiet, accessible, well-known galleries where, if need be the year round, as the pictures hung at the National Galleries, or in the corridors of South Kensington, the newly-finished work may be put up and re- moved at pleasure, and where it may be seen without distraction. At present all is bitter con- test — contest for admission, contest for proper hanging, contest for public applause. Now and then on the walls of South Kensington, the young painter's Paradise, we see a new picture (how it came there we know not, for the place is like a fairy palace, where unseen fingers work constantly new wonders), such as G. F. Watts's " Sisters." The delight of coming on such work with cool nerves and unthrobbing eyes is extreme. Concerning the relative value and placing of the paintings in the exhibition of 1863, Mr. Taylor says, " This year the worst pictures in almost every department of art, represented in the Eoyal Academy, are by Eoyal Academicians." And again he says, in conclusion, " I doubt whether the Eoyal Academy exercises an in- fluence for good. The education is most defective, I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 57 and the exhibition is not such as it ought to be to enhance tlie character of British art ; it popularises it, but it does not raise it." But whatever the Academy may be nou\ we have reason to be thankful for what it has done for art in this country. It has called public attention to art. It consolidated and trained the art spirit. It gave us Stothard, and Turner, and Wilkie, ^nd Hilton, and Landseer, and Leslie. And its first president and most splendid name was Sir Joshua Eeynolds. He was now at the summit of fame and influence. He had taken a villa at Pdchmond, and had joined the life there as in London. He appears at the Eichmond Assembly, and Mr. Taylor suggests that he very likely took lessons of Noverre, the great dancing master of the day. We find the club in 1768 anxious about Gold- smith's new comedy. In the life of Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith stands out for more than a dozen years a conspicuous figure ; but under the tempered light of the studio in Leicester Square, we see him in a more favourable aspect, and one more pleasant to our view. He was not laughed at, or cowed, or "knocked down with the butt end" of an argument there. Eeynolds loved him, and 58 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay painted him with the utmost tenderness of thought. Leslie has given us a fine criticism on this portrait, to which it is worth the reader's while to turn. Eeynolds knew from experience that thought and inward power may exist where the faculty of rapid or collected utterance is denied to the tongue, — and the man of whom Garrick said, that he "wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll," found a shelter in the sympathy of the man he learned to love like a brother. In the dedication to Sir Joshua of The Deserted Village, Goldsmith wrote : " Setting interest aside, to which I never paid much attention, I must be indulged at present in following my affections. The only dedication I ever made was to my brother, because I loved him better than most other men. He is since dead. Permit me to inscribe this poem to you." Johnson was subsisting at this time on sub- scriptions to his Shakespeare, without the for- titude to record either the sums received or the names sent in. His friends were anxious about his honour, and Eeynolds offered to assist him with his pen. He helped him also with three contributions to Tlic Idler. Eeynolds found his pen a more serviceable instrument than his tongue, and did his best to I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 59 train it. He projected and delivered from time to time a series of Discourses to tlie students of the Eoyal Academy. The first of these was given on the 2nd of January 1769. He was not an orator. His voice was indistinct, his delivery dry and tame, but he was full of the sense of the in- tellectual importance of the art he professed. He congratulated the students that they had notlnng to unlearn, exhorted them to obey rules, to talvC pains, and to remember that " nothing is denied to well-directed labour," that " labour will improve natural gifts," that "labour will even supply their deficiency," which may be in matters of art abun- dantly questioned. It is curious to read the innumerable little episodes of his stirring life : such as his visits to Wilkes when in hiding ; his dinners with him when in the King's Bench prison, and the accounts of the changeful society with which his evenings were spent. But we must liasten on. It is to Northcote that we owe some of the most intimate and trustworthy details of the life of Eeynolds. He became a pupil in the house of the painter, and left it after five years' faithful service. He was a man of third-rate ability in GO SIR JOSHUA REYXOLDS essay the art, but he ardently loved it and most sin- cerely admired Eeynolds. He talked to the end of his days the broad Devonshire dialect which he brought to Leicester Square, and which Eeynolds loved to hear. Under Hazlitt's pen in later years he appears a querulous, caustic, sagacious, penuri- ous old man, with hollow and wizard -like eyes. In Leicester Square we see another figure — the busy, faithful, listening, provincial assistant, for- warding the huge full length, and astounded with mingled vexation and admiration when Sir Joshua enters, and with great strokes of the brush sweeps away into effective generalisation the careful work of days, or swoops on one of his pictures done from the tame eagle in the back-yard, to make it a bird of Jove by a few rufflings of the hand of the master. " The Prince of Wales says he knows you ; where did you make his acquaintance?" asked Sir Joshua. " The Prince of Wales does not know me," answered Northcote; "it is only liis hmg." In 1772 Eeynolds painted Sir Joseph Banks, then newly returned from the expedition to Ota- heite for the purpose of observing the transit of Venus. Here, again, the lively curiosity of his nature is displayed. He sought as frequently as he could the society of Banks and Solander, and I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 61 took the utmost interest in all their discoveries and observations. It was Eeynolds's habit, when not employed with portraits, to paint small fancy pictures, the models for which he found for the most part among the tribe of beggars — old men and chil- dren. He had painted the study of a head from a favourite high-featured old man, formerly a pavior, by name George White, now reduced to beggary. This picture was seen by Burke and others, and pointed out as being an admirable suggestion for the head of Count Ugoliuo, whose death in the Tower of Hunger forms so horrible an episode in the Inferno of Dante. Eeynolds had before this entertained the intention of painting a picture from the scene, and he proceeded, on the hint of Burke, to produce what may be called his first historical picture. The design is well known by prints, and has several elements of power. The colour and composition are impressive, but it required greater gifts than Eeynolds possessed to reach the tragic height of a subject not very well suited to art. It was while he was ens;aQ;ed on this work that the University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Civil Law, in companionship with Dr. Beattie, whose portrait he painted soon 62 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay afterwards in gown and bands, holding his book on Truth, as the Vicar of Wakefield might hold Ms book on the Whistonian Controversy, while the Angel of Justice or Truth is thrusting down into darkness personifications of Infidelity and Scepticism. The figure of infidelity is made to bear a strong resemblance to Voltaire, while that of scepticism was said to resemble Hume. This treatment of the subject drew forth an indignant protest from Goldsmith. His objection was that Beattie, as a writer, was so much the inferior of Voltaire. Whether this be a just objection or not, there is surely great oddity in the combination of a matter-of-fact clergyman, with gown and bands and book, and the cloudy allegory in the back- ground. The mixture of real and allegorical figures in Reynolds's picture of " Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy," has been reasonably ob- jected to ; but in this case there is more absurdity in the combination, owing to the prosaic literal- ness of the principal figure. Sir Joshua's university honours were speedily followed by a civic elevation, which he had long coveted, and now much relished. He is found at Plympton going through the ceremony of being sworn in as mayor of his native town. It is said I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 63 that he was not without hope of taking his seat in Parliament for the same place ; but this never came to pass. Twenty-two years of unbroken prosperity had passed over him. His honours and emoluments had reached their highest point. He was no longer to remain the unquestioned master of the field of portraiture. Three men of mark began to make themselves felt in the w^orld of art. The first of these was James Barry, the son of a Cork skipper, now over thirty years old, and recently returued from Eome, where he had been sent by Edmund Burke, whose conduct to him raises Burke in our esteem. Barry was a man of great genius, but of unequal powers — fierce, gloomy, misanthropic, opinionated, sarcastic, and proud, with high views of the functions of art, and large powers of invention, but failing in pictorial knowledge and taste. The second was Thomas Gainsborough. For some years past AVilshire's waggon had brought from Bath, where Gains- borough had since 1760 resided, noble landscapes and spirited portraits to the exhibition at Spring Gardens. These pictures secured high recognition in London. The painter of them was only four years younger than Sir- Joshua, had studied in 64 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay early life under Gravelot, the engraver, and Hay- man, the painter, had met with good success at Ipswich and Bath as a portrait painter, and now resolved to set up his easel in the metropolis. He rented a part of the Duke of Schomberg's house in Pall Mall, for which he paid £300 a year, and shortly became more popular than Eey- nolds. The more moderate scale of his prices would no doubt contribute to this result ; but he had a facility of pencil, an elegance, originality, and spirit of execution, which made some of his best portraits equal to some of the best works of Sir Joshua. In addition he had powers which Eeynolds had not. Some of his landscapes are among the masterpieces of art ; and in certain of his fancy subjects — cottage girls, woodmen, shep- herd boys — there is a freshness and poetic power never reached by Eeynolds. Yet so overshadow- ing and deeply rooted were the fame and influence of Eeynolds, that it was not till the gathering of the Treasures of Art at Manchester, in 1857, that the full relative value of Gainsborough's works was seen by the British public. Eeynolds had a hold on the whole life of his age which Gains- borough never attained. His habits were different from those of Eeynolds. Xot particularly well I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 65 educated, he was shy, sensitive, fond of home, fond of music ; he mixed little in general society, and never sought the company of the wits, or men of learning. For all that, he stands before us as the more specific type of the man of genius both by gifts and habitudes. There was another rival in the field, whose natural powers were probably of a higher cast than those of either Eeynolds or Gainsborough. George Eomney was born in 1734, in Lancashire, and was brought up to his father's trade as a cabinet-maker. He had few educational advan- tages. He studied portraiture under a country artist, Steele, in Kendal, and for five years prac- tised there with great success. In 1762 he came to London, and began to paint portraits at the price of four guineas, which, hy 1793, had risen to thirty-five guineas. From 1773 to 1775 he studied in Italy, and after his return his popular- ity as a portrait painter, though he did not after 1772 exhibit publicly, was unbounded. Piomney was a friend of Flaxman the sculptor, and of Hayley and Cowper, unequally matched poets. His mode of execution was very simple. He was a good colourist, but did not aim at the fulness, richness, and depth of Eeynolds. He liad amaz- F 66 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay ing power of striking in the forms of his subjects at once, and had altogether more elevation of thought and elasticity of fancy than Eeynolds. He never did himself full justice in the walk where his powers were highest ; but his " Shake- speare nursed by Tragedy and Comedy," his Titanias, and some of the heads for which Lady Hamilton was a frequent model, stand among the very first things in English art, and suggest possi- bilities far beyond anything he ever had the full opportunity of realising on canvas. " His heads," says Flaxman, a high authority, "were various. The male were decided and grand, the female lovely. His figures resembled the antique, the limbs were elegant and finely formed, his drapery well understood ; few artists since the fifteenth century have been able to do so much in so many branches." Eeynolds had no longer the monopoly of por- traiture, and we find from Northcote that from that time he was not much employed in this way. Henceforth he devoted more attention to fancy subjects ; but his fortune was made. He had secured a position in society and among the learned at which his rivals never aimed, and he was upborne to the end of his days I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 67 at the highest point of reputation in his pro- fession. Goldsmith died in the year 1774. Johnson was turning his pen to the defence of the govern- ment of Lord North, and was writing Taxation no Tyranny. But the House of Assembly did not believe this ; the sharp echo of rifles among the woods of Lexington was heard in England, and then the guns of Bunker's Hill ; and the years of the American War passed stormily on, complicated mth dangers nearer home. Paul Jones, on the northern coast, and the fleets of France in the south, threatened and alarmed the country. Sir Joshua turned out with Garrick to visit the camps ; finding possibly that his sitters were few and his pursuits more solitary. The trial of Keppel and his acquittal, which set the town into a blaze of illumination, and drove the younger Pitt to the breaking of windows in his excitement, drew forth a letter of sympathy from Eeynolds to his early friend, not now the young commodore, but the veteran admiral, of whom Burke wrote in after years so feelingly, and whose honest face was elevated to the dignity of innumerable sign- boards, long since rotted and fallen, while Sir Hugh Palisser was burnt in effigy. 68 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay Art, however, even under the frown of threatened invasion, did not stand stilL The exhibition was removed from Spring Gardens to Somerset House, where it remained down to our own time. Eey- nolds painted a not very excellent figure of Theory sitting on a cloud, for the ceiling of the new room. Two of his finest portrait groups, those of the members of the Dilettanti Society, were done in these years ; and the designs for the great window of Oxford, afterwards rendered in glass, by Jervas — the Nativity in the centre, the Virtues in various compartments. Some of the designs for this series have been highly prized, and were sold for large sums after his death. Tlie Nativity w^as bought by the young Duke of Eutland, and was unfortunately burnt at the great fire at Belvoir Castle, together with many other fine works, one of which was a full length portrait of General Oglethorpe, of Savannah. In 1780 he again visited Devonshire. He spent a little time with Keppel at Bagshot, and with Dun- ning at Spitchwick- on -Dartmoor, while Burke was making an unsuccessful appeal to his Bristol constituency, and awarding unmeasured praise to Dunning. Barry had enshrouded his gloomy head in the Adelphi, which he had engaged to I SIR JOSHUA REYXOLDS 69 decorate for nothing, living hardly for seven years, and earning a scanty support by etching and engraving by lamplight, — a noble instance of devotion to art. The Adelphi Exhibition was thrown open in 1783, and we find Dr. Johnson present at the private view, and delivering the dictum, " Here we see a grasp of mind that we find nowhere else." In 1781 Sir Joshua paid that visit to the Low Countries, the result of which appeared in his pub- lished notes — a very valuable series of criticisms on individual pictures. His power had not declined, though he was now sixty years of age. Indeed, the study of the Flemish schools seemed to give new stimulus to his mind and hand, and to the last there vjcis no decline in his power. "We cannot stay to look at Eeynolds's political opinions, or at the political changes from this time : the Coalition ministry, the story of Fox's Martyrs, the general elections, where Mrs. Crewe (whose portrait as St. Genevieve among her sheep is one of Sir Joshua's masterpieces) and the Duchess of Devonshire mingled in the crowd ; nor at the passion for ballooning, of which Dr. Johnson grew so tired of heariug. Over the 70 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay brave and grand career of Johnson the glooms of the grave were spreading. His health had received severe shocks. Hearing of the death of Allan Eanisay, a good portrait painter, and a learned and accomplished man, all his life a friend both of Johnson and Eeynolds, he writes : "Whichever way I look, mortality presents its formidable frown " ; and soon the frown darkened over his own head. In patient submission and devout contemplations, fixed on those great truths of Christianity which he thought it almost pro- fanity to defend by argument, his great voice ceased — on Monday, 13th December 1784. "Dr. Johnson dyed at 7 in the afternoon," is the entry in the pocket-book of Eeynolds. There are other events of much interest in the years that remain, but the bright circlet of stars was broken and obscured — Goldsmith, Beauclerk, Garrick, Johnson, were all gone. Sterne had vanished suddenly long before. From the flush and glare of society he had found his way through the gloom of a parish burying -ground, and the sack of a body-snatcher, to the hideous resur- rection of a Cambridge dissecting-table. Boswell was left lamenting and maudlin ; untaught by all his opportunities, and yet engaged on the best I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 71 biography in the world. " We are not sure," says Macaulay, " that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. ]\Iany of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all." Eeynolds was not the man to succumb to the dreary privations of age. As he lost his old friends he did not close up his affections. He had taken the poet Crabbe, in 1783, to supply the void left by the death of Goldsmith ; and we find him visiting and holding friendly intercourse with a new race of amateurs and men of fashion, such as Sir George Beaumont and Sir Abraham Hume. To the years between 1784 and 1789, too, belong the largest and most ambitious of his works : the Infant Hercules, painted for tlie Empress Catherine of Eussia, who rewarded him with a letter, a diamond snuff-box, and fifteen hundred pounds, paid to his executors ; the Death of Cardinal Beaufort, and JNIacbeth and the Witches, for the Boydell gallery ; the Continence of Scipio, also purchased by the Empress of Russia ; and Cymon and Iphigcnia, shown in the International Exhibition of 1802, and one of his 72 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay finest works. He also did some of his best portraits in these few last years : John Hunter and Joshua Sharp were among the number. Two strokes of palsy had not disabled him either in mind or body. The year 1789, when he was sixty-six years old, found him more passionately in love with his palette and pencils than ever. Miss Palmer, one of the two nieces who for many years had kept his house, writes in 1787 : " He is painting from morning to night, and the truth is, that every picture he does seems better than the former." In power of execution, at any rate, this was true. The wonderful group of " Cherub-heads," in our National Gallery, was painted in 1787, and they are hardly exceeded, if they are exceeded, in magic of touch by any heads that were ever painted. Till Monday, 13th July 1789, he worked with untiring vigour. On that day, as he was painting the portrait of Miss Eussell, " a mist and a dark- ness" fell over his left eye, "a dim suffusion veiled " it, and from the same cause as in the case of Milton, gutta serena. He paused a moment, gently laid down his pencil and his palette, and resumed them no more. " The race is over," he writes to Sheridan six I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 73 months afterwards, "whether it is won or lost." He lived till the 23rd of February 1792. He was often low-spirited, from fear of utter blind- ness, but this did not come upon him. He rambled to various scenes in quest of change and health. He amused himself for a while with a canary that used to perch on his hand and sing to him, but it proved faithless and flew away. He wandered about Leicester Square after it for hours, but did not find it. Ozias Humphry, the painter, used to drop in and read the newspaper to him, and he now and then retouched and arranged his pictures, or slowly prepared his final Discourse. This, the fifteenth, was delivered on the 10th of December 1790 : " Sir Joshua had a crowded audience, and while he was speaking, a sudden crash was heard, and the floor of the room seemed to be giving way. The company rushed towards the door in the utmost alarm and confusion. Sir Joshua was silent, and did not move from his seat, and after some little time the company perceiving that the danger had ceased, most of them resumed their places, and he con- tinued his discourse as calmly as if nothing had occurred. It was afterwards found that one of the beams which supported the floor had given 74 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay way. iSir Joshua remarked to Northcote, that if the floor had really fallen, most of the persons assembled must have been crushed to death, and the arts in this country would have been thrown two hundred years back." The latter part of this memorable discourse consists of a eulocjium on Michael Ano-elo — its last passage : " I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man, and I should desire that the last words I should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name of Michael Angelo." " As Eeynolds descended from the chair, Burke stepped forward, and taking his hand, held it while he addressed him in the words of Milton : — " The angel ended, and in Adam's ear So charming left his voice, that he awhile Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear. " This I heard from Mr. Eogers, who said, ' Nobody but Burke could have done such a thing, without its appearing formal or theatrical. But from him it seemed spontaneous and irre- sistible. Such a tribute from such a man, formed a fitting close for the life's work of Eeynolds.' " I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 75 The disease of which Sir Joshua died was an affection of the liver, and this led to "a dis- tressing depression of the spirits, which his physicians ascribed to hypochondria," Boswell, in a melancholy letter to his friend Temple, dated 22nd November 1791, says: "My spirits have been still more sunk by seeing Sir Joshua Reynolds almost as low as myself. He has for more than two months past had a pain in his blind eye, the effect of which has been to occasion a weakness in the other, and he broods over the dismal apprehension of becoming quite blind. He has been kept so low as to diet, that he is quite relaxed and desponding. He who used to be looked upon as perhaps the most happy man in the world, is now as I tell you." Miss Burney, just released from the honours of court life and the talons of Madame Schwel leu- berg, called to see him. "He wore a bandage over one eye, and the other shaded with a green half-bonnet. He seemed serious even to sadness, though extremely kind. 'I am very glad,' he said, in a meek voice and dejected accent, ' to see you again, and I wish I could see you better, but I have but one eye now and scarcely that.' " 76 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay He bore patiently his last affliction, and died as sincerely regretted as any man of his time. While he lay dying, the political horizon was dark and troubled, like one of those wild back- grounds which we see in his portraits of warriors. The first hot blasts of the French Eevolution had blown, but he did not live to see the final bursting of the storm. The next morning, in the house where Sir Joshua lay, Edmund Burke wrote the following obituary notice, which we cannot refrain from quoting at length : — Last night, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, died, at his house in Leicester-fields, Sir Joshua Reynolds. His illness was long, but borne with a mild and cheerful fortitude, without the least mixtui'e of any- thing irritable or querulous, agreeably to the placid and even tenor of his whole life. He had from the beginning of his malady a distinct view of his dis- solution, and he contemplated it with that entire composure, which nothing but the innocence, integrity, and usefulness of his life, and an unaffected submis- sion to the will of Providence could bestoAV. In this situation he had every consolation from family tender- ness, which his own kindness had indeed well de- served. Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on very many accounts, one of the most memorable men of his time. He was I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 77 the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and harmony of colouring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned ages. In por- trait he went beyond them ; for he communicated to that description of the art, in which English artists are the most engaged, a variety, a fancy, and a dignity derived from the higher branches, which even those who professed them in a superior manner did not always preserve when they delineated individual nature. His portraits remind the spectator of the invention of history, and the arnenity of landscape. In painting portraits he appeared not to be raised upon that platform, but to descend to it from a higher sphere. His paintings illustrate his lessons, and his lessons seem to be derived from his paintings. He possessed the theory as perfectly as the practice of his art. To be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher. In full affluence of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert in art and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed by sovereign powers, and celebrated by distinguished poets, his native humility, modesty, and candour, never forsook him even on surprise or provocation, nor was the least degree of arrogance or assumption visible to the most scrutinising eye in any i)art of his conduct or discourse. 78 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay His talents of every kind, powerful from nature, and not meanly cultivated by letters, his social virtues in all the relations and all the habitudes of life, rendered him the centre of a very great and unparalleled variety of agreeable societies, which will be dissipated by his death. He had too much merit not to excite some jealousy ; too much innocence to provoke any enmity. The loss of no man of his time can be felt Avith more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow. Hail ! and Farewell ! His body lay in state at the Eoyal Academy, and was followed to the grave by a concourse such as had rarely been seen before on such an occasion. The Dukes of Portland, Dorset, and Leeds, the Marquises of Townshend and Abercorn, the Earls of Carlisle, Inchiquin, and Upper Ossory, Lord Palraerston, and Lord Elliot, bore his pall ; and perhaps in the long list of mourners there has seldom been in a state funeral so many who would really mourn. So lived, so died, so in "this kind of observance," was honoured the first renowned British artist — and one of the great artists of the world — standing in the front rank along with Titian, and Vandyke, and Ptembrandt. The contemplation of Pteynolds's portraits is I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 79 one of the enjoyments of every higlily-cultivated Englishman. There is in them a cahn dignity, a bright life, a bewitching grace. Mr. Taylor seems to be much impressed with the " momentary " character of Key nolds's portraits. What rapidity of eye, what accuracy of impression, what spirit and sparkle of taste do we see in them. Garrick with his thumbs pressed together, and his conversational pertinence of look. Hunter with his drooping pen and far wandering eye. Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone. Banks with his instinctive restless desire to rise from his chair and explore the earth to its utmost horizons. And this zest runs through so many of his portraits. How he got such endless variety is a continual wonder. " Hang it, how varioiis he is ! " said Gainsborough, as he paced the exhibition rooms. We know the character of our " portrait of a gentleman " ; our corporation pictures ; our too dazzling Lord Mayors, before we see them ; the hot, encumbered appurtenances, the Boswellian strut. But Eeynolds's men, though boiling over with action and motion, never strut. Their legs are not always well drawn, but they do not stand at ridiculous angles. If he stole all these viva- 80 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay cious attitudes, he was at least a most accomplished thief, — " Convey the wise it call." This rapid and consummate taste, this instinctive avoidance of " the weak side of things," this instant power of knowing when the right thing was before him, singles out Eeynolds from all others. See with what light and gallant spirit, yet with how little of the " bounce " of the modern " portrait of a gentleman," the Marquis of Hastings stands with his finger on his chin. See, in one of the ordinary run of his portraits, with what inquisitive ease John Gawler, Esquire, looks out of the kit- cat canvas ; with what negligent grace Captain Pownall leans on his anchor-fluke. How elegantlj'' Lady Sondes sits on her garden seat, attractive and not a dowdy in spite of the black and white machinery on her head, that at first glance makes us somehow think irresistibly of earthquakes and tornadoes. And what for sumptuous naturalness and winning hoine-loveliness can exceed the long stately picture of Mrs. Wynne, and the children wrestling in each other's embraces ? His intense sense of life broke in among the preposterous costumes of his time. "Never mind," said he, " they have all light and shade." And even with such head-dresses, hat and feather, frizzy locks I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 81 aud fly-away ribbons, as we see in the portrait of Lady Lade, life triumphs, and constructious, puzzling for their immensity and complexity, are so broken with tender clouds and breezy trees and flitting shades, that all looks agreeable and natural. The men who are everlastingly playing at backgammon and cards in the French Exhibition, in the restored costumes of the Eeynolds period, look dull, and tiresome, and heavy, if better drawn than by Eeynolds. But Eeynolds does not make them dull and tiresome, and it shows his power. He "always looked on his picture as a whole," — and how wonderful are the occult rela- tions of line, colour, and efl'ect which go to make up a whole picture ! There seem to be in them hidden powers that bafile all analysis. It is not mere mass or extent that gives sublimity. Perhaps there is no picture more solemn in general effect than the " Peter Martyr " of Titian ; none which, among other elements, gives so impressive a suggestion of forest grandeur ; yet it is not accomplished by representing great masses of forest scenery. Let the spectator compare the size of the trees with the size of the figures, and he will find that all the materials of the scene, G 82 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay witli the exception of the sky and the piece of distant mountain, might be contained inside a room. The nearest tree is not thicker than the thigh of the assassin, and not more than fourteen feet high. Both trees might any day be passed in a hedgerow, with a sense of their insignificance, and the foreground is not more than ten feet wide. It is the bend, the sw^ay, the subservience, the collocation, the mystery of relation to the human and divine interest of the scene, that makes them what they are. Man, as seen by the painter's eye, is seen in certain compressed conditions. The men we see apart from the framings and contrivances, and limitations of art, are puzzlingiy little. Across a street we can just recognise a face and figure. Seen against the great back- grounds of nature, man is nothing. The general- issimo ruling among thunderclouds, and making the mountains bow on the canvas of Eeynolds, is a speck out of doors. The greatest battle seen from the hill-brow is but the waving of " thin red lines" in a smoky field. Take the man as he could be made to fit against the cloud or the rock, and his importance dwindles — he has no " relief." There was smoke and roar at Gibraltar ; the roar only terrific within a league. No one saw General I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 83 Elliott's head as we see it in the picture in the National Gallery, standing out, with its triangular obstinate eyebrows, against the twisting clouds and the down-pointing gun. Man has to dignify himself, and to the great painter who can do it for him as Reynolds could, he will willingly accord " ceremonies of bravery even in the infamy of his nature." This vast desire of man Eeynolds was able to gratify. He rendered with equal percep- tion and ease the politician in his robes of office ; the mighty noble in velvet and ermine ; the wit, with his jest simmering on his features ; the student poring over his book, with near and pier- cing regard, as Baretti and Johnson, or looking afar with contemplative serenity like Zachary Mudge ; the country gentleman with his favourite dog, enjoying the repose of a rustic seat in the shade of his ancestral beech tree, in the gray afternoon, like Sir John Lade ; the dilettante fingering his gem or his gem-like glass of wine; the man of pleasure taking it with easy grace ; the fashionable beauty pillowed in state, with her gray towers of curl and plaster and plume, or tripping under narrow trees that bend to make her bending more graceful ; the actress in tragic state, like Mrs. Yates or Mrs. Siddons ; in saucy surprises, like 84 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay Mrs. Abington ; or in the mere lazy luxury of living, like Kitty Fisher, or " my Lady O'Brien " ; or, sweetest of all, the little children ! It was in these that Eeynolds reaches farthest into the heart. We melt before the picture of " Innocence," with her dimpled hands on her bosom. We are hushed before the infant Samuel, who yet is only a modern child, " called of the Lord " — sacred enough as such. There is a throng of these little ones peering at us from canvas and canvas, calling us back to our childhood with winning smiles and wondering eyes. In doing these his power seemed to rise with age. Let any one look well, who has not already often looked, at those cherub heads, all done from little Lady Mary Gordon, and painted not long before " the drop serene " brought him to a final pause : praised by Leslie for its exquisite evanescent touch and pure colour, but rising far beyond all technical grace. If we search anywhere among " the figures of the true " for an illustration of the words, " for of such is the kingdom of heaven," let us see it there. It is as much sermon as art can yield, simply to bring together before the mind's eye this picture and the Kitty Fishers and Nelly O'Briens, and make no further comment. I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 85 The greatest of all Eeyuolds's achievements in portraiture was the portrait of Mrs. Siddons, as Tragedy, on her cloudy throne. In this instance, the strange and ugly fashion in which the hair at that period was dressed, rather aids than impedes the sentiment. The whole mass moves horrent from the brow as if standing on end ; the dark eyebrows rise under it in slight corrugation, and the springs of imagination are moved. " Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes," the collapse of power, the eclipse of nations, terror, and the immensity of human sorrow, pass in twilight procession as we look, and haunt us when we turn away. On the force, and dignity, and life, and natural- ness of his portraits, there was, as his most peculiar distinction, the crown of grace. He was, as Euskin happily calls him, " lily- sceptred." Taken by itself, and apart from science, we might almost say that Eaphael himself had no higher sense of grace. We pardon even his incorrectness in the bewitching iluency of this element in his female portraits. It reached to the disposition of a curl and the flow of a fold. That and the sense of life and motion which pervades his pictures carry us away, and do not even suffer us long to weary 8G SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay of his works. And it was just that exquisitely balanced mixture of outward practical sense and spirit, with the amenity of a graceful soul, that made him so beloved in society, so able to please, without flattery or loss of independence. We can see for ourselves the refutation of Allan Cunning- ham's insinuations ; he had no need of the smooth tongue of the courtier to secure his success. He had a happy mixture of wisdom and gentleness — Still born to improve us in every part ; His pencil our faces, his manners our lieart. Where Eeynolds fell into the unhappy classic vein of his time, it is impossible to relish many of his works ; they become oppressive. Compare the dress of Mrs. Braddyl, its lively accidental " set," or the attire of the Ladies Waldegrave, in that lovely group where two are winding silk, and one is embroidering at a real table, with a drawer and a key, and think of their being exchanged for " The Graces adorning a bust of the Duchess as Magna Mater " — the Graces with great tetes pomatumed and powdered, the Graces in stays, the Graces without hoops, but with dresses lashed about their legs in such a manner as only the wettest and thinnest muslin would cling in the I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 87 wildest storms, yet doing it, defiant of law, in the profoundest calm ! " What," says Uncle Toby, " has a man who believes in God to do with these things?" Let the Graces wander in Ionia as Praxiteles saw them, and teach what they could to a world that " by wisdom knew not God." Our great-grandmothers, playing at Graces, and cook- ing sacrifices to perished divinities, " swearing by the sin of Samaria, and saying, Thy god, Dan, liveth, and the manner of Beersheba liveth," were too much for even Reynolds to render tolerable to a Christian age. One of the best of these we can examine at our leisure in the National Gallery. Three celebrated beauties are " adorning the altar of Hymen," but, that they had been winding silk, or shooting at targets, or even occupied, as it is said one fine lady who sat to him was — " eating beefsteaks and playing at cricket on the Steyne, at Brighton ! " Burke says that Reynolds seemed to descend to portraiture from a higher sphere. It was from the mount of philosophy that he descended, and not from "the highest heaven of invention." There was one thing he had not, — the perception of the unseen, of the something beyond. "Great and graceful as he paints," he is " a man of the earth," 88 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay seeing, it is true, all that is noblest and best on "this visible diurnal sphere," but never quitting it. In one instance — the portrait of Mrs. Siddons — we just feel the inflation of the balloon. It strains, and rocks, but it does not leave the ground. It was Mrs. Siddons more than Sir Joshua who gave the spiritual element to it. Other men of his time had the gift. Fuseli had it. In spite of Horace Walpole, with his lace ruffles and his two strokes of catalogue-disdain, Fuseli makes us feel the Gothic thrill at ghostly evanescence, the gray gliding mysteries of Hercynian forests, the stalk of mailed phantoms — By tliy wild and stormy steep, Elsinore. If he saw no gods descend from heaven, he saw them in the caverns of Endor '' rising out of the earth." If he could not soar and blaze with Uriel, he could sink by thought into the profound of Hades, and see the cloudy gates of Chaos and the pit, and the key that was " forged by no earthly smith." We feel his spell creeping in the roots of the hair. " Nature put him out," but he saio what he tried to paint if he could not perfectly paint all that he saw. I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 89 Aud Eomney, too, had the great gift. But it was the Greek gift, and not the Scandinavian. He beheld tlie Oread on her mountain heath, the Naiad by her ferny wells, the wild prevision of Cassandra, the stony horror of (Edipus waiting for his doom. And Gainsborough had it, but it was the true British imagination that possessed him. It was that swelling, glowing, heavenly- solemn faculty, that dwelt in the author of The Seasons, For ever rising with the rising mind, to which the cultured Englishman most readily responds, as he hears the sweep of autumnal gales in his own island, or through glades whose leafage is yellowing to the fall looks westward at his misty sunsets, exalted by the pleasing Miltonic melancholy with which he would " choose to live." Eeynolds had it not. He Jishcd for swch ideas as did not walk in the daylight. They never rose spontaneously from the deep, and the genii, caught by guile, sulk and are uneasy on his canvas. There is a touch of the terrible in tlie picture of Cardinal Beaufort, and we wish the anecdote of the grinning coalheaver who sat for it had been 90 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay suppressed. Yet the anecdote only proves that Shakespeare himself in his awfully minute de- lineation could not quicken the sterile fancy of Eeynolds without the help of the coalheaver. In the highest subjects of all, his failure was the most signal. Of the Oxford window, our only intuition is, that it is abominable in theory, in conception, in style. The lubberly angel above, the smirking faces below, the vapid rows of Virtues between the mullious, scarcely higher in invention than those blindfold white women with scales, and idiotic Hopes with anchors, which support the dignity of a " Perpetual Grand Master" of the Order of Odd Fellows, on his engraved diploma, — are all bad together. It is a wonder that Eeynolds should be so anxious to have his name " hitched in " in connection with so aimless, tasteless, and absurd an attempt. There were ten pictures under the great historic " Infant Hercules," " some better, some worse," he said, and there is something grand about the work, but not enough to kindle the mind. The " Macbeth " was a curious Hclumffi of Verrio, Michael Angelo, and Sir Joshua Eeynolds. Many of his purely fancy pictures are charming — his Shepherd Boys, Cupids in Disguise, Muscipulas, I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 91 Strawberry Girls, Contemplative Boys, Fortune Tellers. Whatever lie could reach by vision and taste he could do, but the gates of imagination were closed and sealed to him. It was his callino- to portray, and the allowance of his gifts was large enough. The chief praise which Mr. Taylor awards to Reynolds's writings on art is, that " their tendency is upwards." He had a strong conviction of the high claims of art on the attention of thinking men, and does not so much enforce this as assume it. This is, after all, one of the chief uses of the pen in the region of art. The medium of pictorial art is not loonls. It would be possible to render the most exact account in words of what a picture ought to be, without having the least perception of what it is, or the least power to judge it aright. The most valuable practical utterances are the simple dicta of great painters as to the relative status and qualities of pictures. The moment verbal analysis is attempted, the utter poverty of language in that sphere is made apparent. The finest criticisms are mere finger-posts to mark the road on which they do not travel. Where a painter takes the pen, however, he is amenable to the pen. Eeynolds was a pioneer in the direction 92 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay of statements on art. The laws which govern art — and here is one of its charms to those who pursue it— are those common to all the great pursuits of life. "So close," writes Erskine, "is the analogy between all the operations of genius, that your Discourse is the best dissertation upon the art of public eloquence that ever was or ever will be written." But, when these laws are dis- covered and laid down, the materials amongst which they work, the phenomena of aspect, line, form, colour, light, shade, effect, have all to be learnt and understood before a man can become a good critic of painting ; and the full meaning of Eeynolds's discourses, inaccurate as they may be in some of their reasonings, may be misunderstood if the painter and the literary critic do not intend the same thing. The true painter reasons with his brush, and can afford but little leisure to help forward that correct statement of the functions and laws of art which, in a verbal form, enter little into his meditations, but wliich yet are so much to be desired as a common platform between the artist and the man of general culture. " The eye has its own poetry," says Sir Charles Eastlake. Eeynolds's ondhods of painting were chiefly useful to our school in the way of warning. I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 93 Many of his finest pictures are already blurred and blighted beyond hope of recovery. His aims as to colour and texture were not always satis- factory. He used wax compounds, that now and then go far to suggest Madame Tussaud or Mrs. Jarley, in their confectionary surface. It was liis practice to lay in the likeness, in what is called "dead colour," with little more than black and white : over this, when dry, he passed transparent varnishes and mixtures, charged with the tints required to complete the colour. These colours — carmines, lakes, and other vegetable hues — were often fleeting. They " sparkled and exhaled " under the power of sunshine. Sometimes the varnish would turn brown or green, and ruin the complexion. Sometimes a thick-headed cleaner would fetch it all off, and find the caput mortuum below. A still more fatal practice was to lay one coat on another, with materials that had no blood relationship, and then there were constant feuds and insurrections among the pigments, and the picture was rent asunder. " Oh, heavens ! Murder ! Murder ! " says the ranting Haydon, as he spells out the comical occult recipes, partly broken English and partly Italian, in which Sir Joshua recorded these experiments. " Murder ! — it would 94 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay crack under the brush ! " His pictures have often a very special charm, arising from what Haydon calls " his glorious gemmy surface." This was in part owing to the reflex influence of his want of facility. There were ten pictures under " the Infant Hercules/' and many of his best pictures, before he had done with them, had been so loaded with coat on coat of rich pigments, rough and intermingled with all the tints of the palette, that they were ready for the final and magical "surface" that enchanted Haydon, When the full idea was seized, then came the " lily-sceptred " hand, and the light brush in its graceful sweeps catching the upper surfaces of the many-coloured granules, permits the eye to see, through the liberated airy stroke, the sparkle of the buried wealth beneath. Eomney struck in his forms with masterly ease at once, even at the first sit- ting ; and if in him we miss this jewelled richness, it is abundantly compensated by the breathing sense of power which plays around his works of imagination. Eeynolds's personal character is fascinating. If we are to judge of a man's worth by the rank and style of his friends, what shall we say of the man who secured such invariable and decided I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 95 testimonials from Samuel Johnson — of him whom the author of the Vicar of Wakefield loved like a brother ? Let us first read Burke's eulogies on Dunning and Keppel, and then reflect that Burke, Dunning, and Keppel were among Sir Joshua's most intimate friends. The terms used by all who knew him in describing his manners are all of one order. Calm, simple, unaffected, placid, genial, gentle, are words of constant occurrence on all sides in any attempt to characterise him. In his mental organisation, the most prominent faculty pointed at by all is the power of general- isation. " To be such a painter he was a profound and penetrating philosopher." Mr. Taylor watches closely his habit of " condensing " in conversation. Then came that precious virtue of taste — the guard of his rapid observation and intense sense of character. His surprising vitality, which palsy could only threaten, which age could not lower, is to be very especially noticed. It was this that permitted his life, " so full of labour that tongue cannot utter it." His fruitfulness was not less than iirodigious. We may pry too curiously into the moral of a life, but no truly thoughtful person can omit all consideration of it from his final judgment. This 96 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS essay consideratiou is especially provoked when the subject of it has been eminently fortunate and happy, and it is invited in the case of Sir Joshua Eeynolds by the generalised conception he enter- tained of life as a whole. Did all the elements of calculation enter into his arrangement of "the great game he had to play " ? He was convicted of nothing usually accounted a vice. In manners, in temper, he was all that could be wished or expected. He was — Dr. Johnson said — "invul- nerable " as a member of civil society. He had respect for religion, as appears in various incidental ways. We are not informed if he were a church- goer. We are told that he painted on Sunday, and that Johnson urged him to abandon the prac- tice. His. sister, Mrs. Palmer, was much con- cerned, and expostulated with him on the same subject. Johnson exhorted him to read the Bible daily, and to consider his latter end. It is well that we are not called on to look to the life of a man for a standard of virtue and reliuion. That is found outside a man. But it is permitted to us, it is enjoined upon us, for our own improvement, encouragement, or Avarniug, to judge of a man's conformity to that standard, and thus know him by his " fruits." In the case of those I SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 97 iadividual acts, which do not clearly contradict any known moral or divine law, the moral signi- ficance is indeed as hard to ascertain as it would be to pick out and protest against those parts of Eeynolds's pictures which were painted on Sunday. We look with high respect on the religious spirit of Johnson, and we see him occasionally doing pretty much the same things that Eeynolds did. At the theatre, the masquerade, at Eanelagh, at Vauxhall, in the company of wits and men of fashion, we find him by the side of Eeynolds. We have much information as to the creed and religious habits of Johnson. We have none as to those of Sir Joshua, and we can only ponder. 11 II WILLIAM BLAKE The great landscape painter, Linnell — whose portraits were, some of them, as choice as Holbein's — in the year 1827 painted a portrait of William Blake, the great idealist, an en- gravincir of which is before us as we write. A friend, looking at it, observed that it was " like a landscape." It was a happy observation. The forehead resembles a corrugated mountain- side O worn with tumbling streams " blanching and billowing in the hollows of it " ; the face is twisted into "as many lines as the new map with the augmentation of the Indies " ; it is a grand face ably anatomised, full of energy and vitality, and out of these labyrinthine lines there gazes an eye which seems to behold things more than mortal. At the Exhibition of aSTational Portraits at South Kensington there was a portrait of Blake by I ESSAY II WILLIAM BLAKE 99 Thomas Phillips ; but very different in treatment : the skin covers the bones and sinews more calmly, the attitude is eager, wistful, and prompt. Com- paring the two portraits, so fine and so different in style and manner, you are able adequately to conceive the man ; and in both you feel that this awful EYE, far-gazing, subduing the unseen to itself, was the most wonderful feature of the countenance. It is the countenance of a man whose grave is not to be recognised at this day, while Linnell lives on in venerable age producing his glorious representations of the phenomena of Nature as she appears out of doors, and, we believe, enjoying a large success, which he would merit, if for nothing else, as the reward of his kindness to William Blake. On the title-page of Gilchrist's Life of William Blake he is characterised as Pictor Ignotus. It was published in 1863, and he is "unknown" no longer.^ Even at this distance of time the topic may have something of that mixture of old ^ This essay was -written as a review of the first edition of the Life of William Blake, by A. Gilchrist. A part of it was after- wards reprinted in the second edition of that work edited by Jlrs. Gilchrist and D. G. Rossetti. It was thus introduced by tlie latter : " Next among Blake-labours of love, let me here refer to Mr. James Smetham's deeply sympathetic and assimilative study 100 WILLIAM BLAKE ESSAY and new which is more charming than either taken separately, and assuredly such a life is not to be classed among those things which are only interesting while the flower of novelty is upon them — for " the artist never dies." If we wished by a single question to sound the depth of a man's mind and capacity for the judg- ment of works of pure imagination, we know of none we should be so content to put as this one, (in tlie form of a review article on the present life), published in the London Quarterly Revieiv for January 1869. As this article is reprinted in our present Vol. II., no further tribute to its delicacy and force needs to be made here : it speaks for itself. But some personal mention, however slight, should here exist as due to its author, a painter and designer of our own day who is, in many signal respects, very closely akin to Blake ; more so probably than any other living artist could be said to be. James Smetham's work — generally of small or moderate size — ranges from Gospel subjects, of the subtlest imaginative and mental insight, and sometimes of the grandest colouring, through Old Testament compositions and through poetic and pastoral themes of every kind to a special imaginative form of landscape. " In all these he partakes greatly of Blake's immediate spirit, being also often nearly allied by landscape intensity to Samuel Palmer, who was in his youth the noble disciple of Blake. Mr. Smetham's works are very numerous, and, as other exclusive things have come to be, will some day be known in a wide circle. Space is altogether wanting to make more than this passing mention here of them and of their producer, who shares in a remarkable manner Blake's mental beauties and his formative shortcomings, and possesses besides an individual invention which often claims equality with the great excep- tional master himself." 11 WILLIAM BLAKE 101 " What think you of William Blake ? " He is one of those crucial tests which at once manifest the whole man of art and criticism. He is a stumbling- block to all pretenders, to all conventional learned- ness, to all merely technical excellence. Many a notorious painter whose canvases gather crowds and realise hundreds of pounds, might be, as it were, detected and shelved by the touch of this " officer in plain clothes." In him there is an utter freedom from pretence. Mr. Thackeray, with all his minute perception of human weak- nesses and meannesses, could not have affixed upon this son of nature any, the smallest, accusation of what he has called " snobbishness." As soon might we charge the west wind or the rising harvest moon or the gray -plumed nightingale with affectation as affix the stigma upon this simple, wondering, child - man, who wanders in russet by " the shores of old romance," or walks " with death and morning on the silver horns " in careless and familiar converse with the angel of the heights. You may almost gather so much if you only look on tlie engraved portrait. Say if that upright head, sturdy as Hogarth's, sensitive as Charles Lamb's, dreamy and gentle as Coleridge's, could ever have harboured a thought either 102 WILLIAM BLAKE essay malionant or mean ? It is a recommendation to the biograpliy. He must have a dull soul indeed who, having seen that face, does not long to know who and what the man was who bore it ; and it shall be our endeavour, in our humble way, to act as a guide to the solution of the inquiry. But before giving some account of "who," it must be permitted to offer some preliminary reflec- tions, enabling us better to understand " what " he was. No question in art or literature has been more discussed and with less decisiveness than that of the relations of subject-matter to style or form ; and on the view taken by the critic of the com- parative value of these relations will depend the degree of respect and admiration with which he will regard the products of Blake's genius. To those who look on the flaming inner soul of invention as being of far more importance than the grosser integuments which harbour and defend it, giving it visibility and motion to the eye, Blake will stand on one of the hiohest summits O of excellence and fame. To those who, having less imagination and feeling, are only able to comprehend thought when it is fully and perfectly elaborated in outward expression, he must ever II WILLIAM BLAKE 103 seem obscure, and comparatively unlovely. There can be no doubt that the true ideal is that which unites in equal strength the forming and all- energising imagination, and the solid body of external truth by which it is to manifest itself to the eye and the mind. There are moments when the sincere devotee of Blake is disposed to claim for him a place as great as that occupied by Michael Angelo ; when, carried away by the ravishment of his fiery wheels, the thought is lost beyond the confines of sense, and he seems " in the spirit to speak mysteries." In more sober hours, when it is evident that we are fixed for the present in a system of embodi- ment which soul informs but does not blur or weaken or obscure, we are compelled to wish that to his mighty faculty of conception Blake had added that scientific apprehensiveness which, when so conjoined, never fails to issue in an absolute and permanent greatness. But having granted thus much, let us not spoil one of the most original and charming of the many joys to be found " in stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find " along the meads of art, by hankering after what will not be found, or quarrelling with what we cannot mend. Before we can come to 104 WILLIAM BLAKE essay a true initiation into, and an abiding enjoyment of, the domains of representative art, we must have a keen, clear, settled, and contented view of its limitations. Far less of the fruitlessness of discontent enters into poetry and literature than into the subject of painting and sculpture. One would think that the reason of this was obvious, yet it is lost sight of continually. Our experience has shown us that there are few who receive from works of a plastic kind a tithe of their power to please because of the narrow, uncatholic, querulous condition of mind arising from a false standard and unwarrantable expectations. They will not be at the pains to recollect the wide chasm of difference between a medium in which only that need be told which can be told with truth, and one in which all must be told, either truthfully or untruthfully ; they will not reflect that the visible phenomena of nature are endless; that absolute perfection requires the presence of the whole series of those phenomena, and that nothing less can produce on the eye the full effect of nature ; that the conditions on which representations are made are subject to such an infinity of accidents, that it would take a regiment rather than a single man to catch the mere blush and bloom of any II WILLIAM BLAKE 105 one aspect of nature at any one time. They forget that life is short, health variable, opportunity mutable, means precarious, memory feeble, days dark, " models " impracticable, pigments dull, and media disappointing. Let us implore the visitor of gallery and studio to reflect for a while on these inexorable limita- tions and distinctions, and to endeavour rather to extract pleasure out of what is absolutely there than to repine over the lack of sufficiencies which probably, if demanded, would be found as incom- patible M'ith the subject treated as to paint the creaking of a gibbet or the shriek of a steam- whistle. For our own part, with any such j^ersons we should hesitate until this investigation had been comprehensively and satisfactorily made, to draw forth on a winter evening and in the sober quiet of the study, where alone such an action should be performed, that plain, grand, and solemn volume which is called Uhcstrations of the Boole of Job, invented and engraved by William Blake. And we should even longer hesitate before we called his enthusiastic attention to the small, rather rude and dark-looking, but to our mind most precious facsimile of the book which is appended to Gilchrist's Life of Blale. And yet 106 WILLIAM BLAKE ESSAY our inward tliought on the subject is that in the whole range of graphic art there is no epic more stately, no intellectual beauty more keen and thrilling, no thinking much more celestial and profound. The history and career of the designer of this noble poem are as interesting as his work. Judged by the ridiculous standard most frequently used in England for the admeasurement of position his life was unsuccessful and his surroundings mean. Judged by that far more exalted scale which Wordsworth applies when he praises the " plain living and hiyh thinking " of former ages and men, his life was enviable and serene, a confluence of outward suflicieucy and inward wealth ample enough to have stored a hundred minds. He was born in November 1757 in Broad Street, Carnaljy Market, Grolden Square. His father was a hosier in moderate circumstances, who gave him but an imperfect education. He was a dreamy child, and fond of rambling into the country, to Blackheath, Norwood, and Dulwich. His faculties and proclivities were soon enough seen, and in startling forms. He not only imagined, but said that he actually sain angels nestling in a tree and walking among the haymakers in a field. II WILLIAM BLAKE 107 In these country rambles we have one of the germs of his peculiar character and genius. Human powers and opportunities act and react on each other. The fledgling bird has enfolded in its bosom the passion for flight and for song, and, one might think, realises by foretaste, as the winds rock its nest, the music of the woods and the rapture of the illimitable air. So there are premonitory stirrings as sweet and inexpressible in the breast of the heaven-made child of genius. They are its surest sign. Talent grows insensibly, steadily, and discreetly. Genius usually has in early years a joyous restlessness, a keen, insatiable relish of life ; an eye soon touched with the " fine frenzy," and glancing everywhere. It is — Nursed by the waterfall That ever sounds and shines, A pillar of white light upon the wall Of purple cliffs aloof descried ; and is as various, as incessant, as full of rainbow colour and mingled sound. One of uur most unquestionable men of genius tells us how, as a child, landscape nature was effectually haunted to him. The cataract chimed in his ears and sang mysterious songs, the " White Lady of Avenel " fluttered about his path or sank in the 108 WILLIAM BLAKE essay black swirl and foam of the whirlpool. A child- painter will find it a bliss to notice that the distant hills are of a fine Titianesque blue long before he knows who Titian was or has seen a picture. It will give him ineffable joy to see how the valley lifts itself towards the mountains and how the streams meander from their recesses. He is not taught this ; it comes to him as blossoms come to the spring, and is the first mark of his vocation. It was this inward thirst and longing that sent out the boy Blake into the fields and lanes and among the suburban hills. The force of boyish imagination must have been stronger in him than in most, even of the children of genius, for as early as the age of thirteen or fourteen the conceptions of his mind began to assume an external form. He saw a tree sparkling in the sun, and discovered that it wa,sJiUed ivith angels. When he narrated this event at home his father was disposed to beat him for telling a lie, and would have done so but for the interposition of his mother; yet he continued to maintain the substantial truth of his story. In later life he perplexed friends and strangers by this mingling of the inward and outward. He was on one occasion " talking to a little group II WILLIAM BLAKE 109 gatliered round him, witliiii hearing of a lady whose children had just come home from boarding- school for the holidays. ' The other evening,' said Blake, in his usual quiet way, ' taking a walk, I came to a meadow, and at the farther corner of it I saw a fold of lambs. Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers, and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty. But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock but beautiful sculpture.' The lady, thinking this was a capital holiday show for her children, eagerly interposed, ' I beg your pardon, Mr. Blake, but may I ask v:here you saw this ? ' 'Here, madam,' answered Blake, touching his forehead. The reply brings us to the point of view from which Blake himself regarded his visions. It was by no means the mad view those ignorant of the man have fancied. He would candidly confess that they were not literal matters of fact, but phenomena seen by his imagination, realities none the less for that, but transacted within the realm of mind." We must say that there is something batUing in this double-minded assertion. That ideas in " the realm of mind," where the faculty of imagina- tion is strong, become equivalent in importance to 110 WILLIAM BLAKE ESSAY realities, is never questioned ; it is a waste of our interest and sympathy to claim for them more than a mental life, since no end can be answered by it, unless it be to suggest an unnecessary charge of unsoundness of mind ; and, on the other hand, the want of judgment displayed in thus uselessly tampering with the feelings of others exposes a man to a similar charge on different grounds. But even in regard to what is called vision by the inward eye, there are certain limitations which should not be forgotten. Fuseli wished he could " paint up to what he sav:!' Other instances have been heard of where this clearness of mental vision was laid claim to, where, nevertheless, the artist made abundance of various preparatory sketches. It might appear that if the interior image does indeed possess the actual completeness of life, there is nothing to do but copy wliat is before the mind's eye. There are painters of the highest imagination who do not possess this extra- vagant sensibility and completeness of parts in the regions of conception. They have the anima- tion of a labouring, inward idea which glimmers before tlie vision. They have judgment and taste by which they know when it is successfully translated into outward form. But all the II WILLIAM BLAKE 111 greatest painters have referred to and depended most minutely on the aid of natural models for the whole series of facts by means of which the image was to be realised on canvas. Young Blake's visions of angels, when analysed, would probably occur in some such way as the following : — It was in no green-topped suburban tree that he saw the heavenly visitants ; we must rather suppose him returning after the oxygen of the Surrey hill winds had exalted his nerves, among the orchards of some vale into which the last rays of the sun shine with their setting splendours. Here he pauses, leans over a gate, looks at a large, blossom-loaded tree in which the threads of sunlight are entangled like gossamers, which " twinkle into green and gold." A zephyr stirs the cloud of sun- stricken bloom, where wliite commingled with sparkling red flushes over leaves of emerald. Tears of boyish delight " rise from his heart, and gather to his eyes " as he gazes on it. The rays which kindle the blossoms turn his gathered tears to prisms, through which snow- white and ruby blooms, shaken along with the leaf- emeralds, quiver and dance. The impressible brain, already filled with thoughts of the " might of stars and angels," kindles suddenly into a 112 WILLIAM BLAKE essay dream-like creative energy and the sunny orchard becomes a Mahanaim, even to his outward eye. So it must have been with that other similar incident. He rambles among hayfields where white-robed girls, graceful as those whom Mulready has represented in the haymaking scene in Mr. Baring's gallery, are raking the fragrant fallen grass, and singing as they move. There are times when men not particularly imaginative, looking on the bloom of girlhood and softened by the music of youthful voices, come very near to the illusion by which the imagination raises " a mortal to the skies," or draws " an angel down." Blake, under the enchantments of boyhood and beauty, only took the short remaining stride and fancy became sufficiently veracious fact. He began early to draw — attended picture sales and frequented print shops — was "put to Mr. Pars's drawing-school in the Strand," where he copied casts from the antique, collected engrav- ings from the great Italians and Germans, and before he was fourteen began to compose poetry of unwonted sweetness, and containing the germ of that strange lyric power in which he stands alone among lyrists. It was one of the happy circumstances of Blake's career that his parents 11 WILLIAM BLAKE 113 did not attempt to throw hindrances in the way of his becoming an artist, since most men observe with considerable anxiety any traces of special inclination to the pursuit of art shown by their children, because of the great uncertainty which, no doubt, attaches to the calling. A few words may here be worth setting down on this head. Times have greatly altered in this, as in so many other particulars, since Blake's day. The whole field and apparatus of design have been enlarged. In the year 1767 there was nothing like the variety of occupation for the painter which there is now. In those days the artist, like the poet, had little chance of success unless he were taken by the hand and " patronised," in the old sense of the word. As the likelihood of being thus noticed depended greatly on accident, it was a dangerous risk for a lad to run when he resolved on throwing his life into the pursuit of painting or sculpture. Reynolds was so fortunate as to obtain high patronage early in life, and was of a constitution of mind able to use without abusing his opportunities. Wilkie, when only twenty years of age, gained the lifelong friendship and support of Sir George Beaumont and Lord Mulgrave. He, too, had that admiration for I lU WILLIAM BLAKE ESSAY grand society, and that placid and humble temper, which promoted the stability of such aids to success. Jackson was found on a tailor's shop- board by the same kindly and noble Lord Mulgrave, and was allowed £200 a year to enable him to study, until it became evident such good fortune was ruining him, and then the annuity was mercifully withdrawn. No doubt many young painters who have never made their way in life have been " taken up " by eminent patrons. Patronage will not qualify a painter though the want of it may prevent the highest abilities from being fairly developed. It is questionable whether even the best early patronage would have enabled Blake to succeed in any high degree. We shall see as we proceed that the inherent qualities of his mind — the marked and settled characteristics of his work, chosen and cultivated with a strength of conviction which no opinion of others, no baits of fortune, no perception of self-interest, could have shaken or disturbed — these, as well as the quality of his temper, were such that he never could have been largely appreciated during his own life. In so far as he becomes more and more recognised, it will be through a medium of inter- pretation, partly literary, partly artistic, which II WILLIAM BLAKE 115 will enable thoughtful and refined minds to read his works as they read the classics in the dead languages. The lapse of a century has altered all •the external conditions of art. There is no lon2;er a need for patronage in the ancient sense of the word. No painter has to take his turn in Lord Chesterfield's anteroom — pictured for us by E. M. Ward — with the yawning parson who comes to dedicate his volume of sermons, the wddow who wants a place in the charity-school for her son, the wooden-legged, overlooked, sea-captain who indignantly lugs out his turnip of a chronometer, the insolent, red-coated man of the turf who peers through an eye-glass fixed on the end of his jockey- whip at the frowning and impatient Samuel Johnson in snuff-colour who is perhaps even now chewing the bitter cud of that notable sentence which begins, " Is not a patron my Lord ? " and ends with the words " encumbers him with help." It is comparatively rarely that an English noble buys the more precious work of the pencil. The men to whom the painter addresses himself with hope are the wealthy merchant, the success- ful tradesman, the tasteful lawyer, the physician in good practice. While pushing up to the higher levels, most young men of any invention and skill 116 WILLIAM BLAKE essay can keep poverty at arm's length by designing on wood for Punch, or Judy, or the Illustrated Ncivs, or the Cornhill Magazine, or Good Words, or one of that legion of periodicals, weekly and monthly, which bristle with clever woodcuts, and in which, as in an open tilting-yard, young squires of the pencil may win their spurs. Even when the power of invention is not present in a high degree there is much work of a prosaic kind required, in doing which a fair living may be obtained by a diligent young man of average ability, not to speak of the exceedingly valuable practice afforded by this kind of labour. It seems not unlikely that this field will enlarge. Society is meeting its modern abridgments of time for reading by a rational employment of the arts of illustration — the photograph and the wood-engraving. We learn in a glance nowadays more than our fore- fathers learned in a page of print ; yet if William Blake had lived in these days of ample opportunity his work would have been equally at a disadvantage. He dealt with the abiding, the abstract — with the eternal, and not the fleeting aspects of passing life. What the Booh of Job is to the Cornhill Magazine, that was the mind of Blake to " the spirit of the age." 11 WILLIAM BLAKE 117 At fourteen he was apprenticed to Basire the engraver, by whom he was set to draw the monu- ments in Westminster Abbey and in the old churches about London — an occupation which had a great influence on his future manner of design. The influence of these solitary Gothic studies is traceable all through the future career of Blake. While the antique is the finest school for the study of the structure of the human form in its Adamic strength and beauty, the religious sculpture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the noblest material of study for the spiritual powers of form. The faces, though not often realising much delicacy of modelling, have far more expression than in the Greek statues. There is a mingling of ascetic severity with contemplative repose which transfuses itself into the beholder's mind, and gains upon him stealthily but surely, till he " forgets himself to marble." These monu- ments cannot be separated from the piles of wonderful architecture to which they belong. The niche in which a figure of bishop or king is placed is a portion of a great whole. It is usually adapted to its own position and lighting — a most important fact in monumental sculpture. There is a fine passage in Bogers's Italy 118 WILLIAM BLAKE essay describing the monument by Michael Angelo, where a warrior sits musing in gigantic repose under the shadow of his helmet, which casts so deep a gloom over the upper part of the face that, to the imagination of the beholder, the soul looks out of the frowning shade, and, " like a basilisk, it fascinates and is intolerable." A cast of the same statue may be seen at the Crystal Palace, but not with the same circumstantial advantages. The ghostly fascination of that glooming shadow is gone, though much remains. The power which the statuary of one of our old cathedrals may acquire over the mind is in- conceivable, unless we do as Blake did during this advantageous sojourn in the Abbey so replenished with the most august memories and images. The verger's voice must cease to echo among the soaring shafts of the nave, the last vibration of the organ must die among the groinings of the roof. An absolute solitude must settle along the marble tombs and into the shadowy recesses. There must be no sounds but those faint, cease- less, unearthly whispers of which every large cathedral is full. Sighs, as it were, of the weary centuries, more stilly and enchaining than utter silence. Some definite object must be before us 11 WILLIAM BLAKE 119 to hold the mind above the airy fancies of such a loneliness ; some brass to be copied ; some Templar to sketch and measure in his chain-mail (which the younger Stothard etched so deliciously) as he lies stark along the dark time-gnawn marble, or crouching in the panel of a crumbling tomb ; or there must be archives to search, and worm-eaten parchments to unroll, among earthy odours. It is after months of such experience as this that we begin to realise tlie dreadful beauty, the high majesty, of Gothic shrines and their clinging soul of imagination — the soul of many, not of one — of the ages, not of years. Mr. Gilchrist thinks it just possible that Blake may have seen the secret reopening of the coffin which revealed the face of Edward I. and the " yellow eyelids fallen " which dropped so sternly over his angry eyes at Carlisle. In Blake's angels and women, and, indeed, in most of his figures, we may see the abiding influence of these mediaeval studies in that element of patriarchal quietude which sits meditating among the wildest storms of action. The style of Basire laid the foundation of Blake's own practice as an engraver. It was dry and solid, and fitted for tlie realisation of strong 120 WILLIAM BLAKE essay and abstract pictorial thinking. Wliile here he wrote nianv sonsrs which were collected into a volume and published by the help of friends in 1783. In order to a ridit view of Blake's organisation, we must from the first bear in mind that he was a poetic thinker, who held in his hands two instruments of utterance. '■' With such a pencil, such a pen," few mortals were ever gifted. The combination of high literary power with high pictorial power is one of the rarest of endowments, and it is onlv among the loftiest order of minds — the Michael Angelos, the Leon- ardos, and the Eaffaelles — that its presence is eminently distinguishable, though by them held in check. The superb original strength of faculty to which the instrument is an accident, and which is able to work in any field, seems to be among Heaven's rarest gifts. Of Blake's conditions and limitations as a general thinker, we shall have afterwards to speak. Thought with him leaned largely to the side of imagery rather than to the side of organised philosophy ; and we shall have to be on our guard, while reading the record of his views and opinions, against the dogmatism which was more n WILLIAM BLAKE 121 frequently based on exalted fancies than on the rock of abiding reason and truth. He never dreamed of questioning the correctness of his impressions. To him all thought came with the clearness and veracity of vision. The conccptive faculty, working with a perception of outward facts singularly narrow and imperfect, projected every idea boldly into the sphere of the actual. What he tliovghf, he sav, to all intents and pur- poses; and it was this sudden and sharp crystallisa- tion of inward notions into outward and visible signs which produced the impression on many beholders that reason was unseated — a surmise which his biographer regards so seriously as to devote a chapter to the consideration of the question, " Mad or not mad ? " If we say on this point at once that, without attempting definitions and distinctions, and while jiolding his substantial genius in tlie highest esteem, having long studied both his character and his works, we cannot but, on the whole, lean to the opinion that somewhere in the wonderful com- pound of flesh and spirit — somewhere in those recesses where the one runs into the other — he was " sliglitly touched," we shall save ourselves the necessity of attempting to defend certain 122 WILLIAM BLAKE essay phases of his work while maiutaining an unqiiali- lied admiration for the mass and manner of his thoughts. At the age of twenty-one he studied for a while in the recently-instituted Eoyal Academy, under the care of " Old Moser," whose fitness for his work may be judged by liis recommendation to Blake to leave the study of the prints from Michael Angelo and Eaffaelle, and to study those from Le Brun and Eubens. His reply to Moser gives us an insight into Blake's temper, and the strong combative modes of expression which, delivered, we are told, in quiet tones for the most part, characterised him through life : " How," says he, " did I secretly rage ! I also spake my mind ! I said to Moser, ' These things that you call finished are not even begun ; how then can they be finished ? The man who does not know tlie be"innin£f cannot know the end of art.' " O O The view he here took of pictorial appliances explains most of the theory which embraces his highest excellences and his greatest defects. The living model artificially posed, to his sensitive fancy, " smelt of mortality." " Practice and oppor- tunity," he said, " very soon teach the language of art. Its spirit and poetry, centred in the II "WILLIAM BLAKE 123 imagination alone, never can be taught ; and these make the artist." And again, a still more frank, and, to some minds, fatal confession, made in old age was this : " Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me." And yet, lest this should tend to lower the reader's interest in the faculty of the painter, let us indulge ourselves by quoting the motto selected by his biographer, to show the magnificent way in which he " lights his torch at Nature's funeral pile : "— I ASSERT for myself that I do not behold the out- ward creation, and that to me it is hindrance, and not action. " "What," it will be questioned, " when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea 1 " Oh no, no ! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, " Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty ! " I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it. One is reminded here of the more solemn adjudication of the relative claims of ISIystery and Understanding given by St. Paul to the Corinthian Church. He does not deny the validity of the mystery yet expresses the strong views of a man 124 WILLIAM BLAKE essay of practical power. "I would rather speak five words with my understanding that I might teach others also than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue." We confess that we can never glance at the wild mysteries of Thel, and Urizen, and Jerusalem; without a frequent recur- rence of this somewhat depreciatory phrase, " ten thousand words in an unknown tongue " ; and, while acknowledging that, " howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries," being strongly disposed to advance our sling-stone of " five " against the Goliath of " ten thousand." It seems to us also, that there is something misleading in the vague use of the words " practice and opportunity." The value of the old phrase " practice makes perfect " depends on what we mean by practice ; as we take it, it means the doing agaiii and again the same kind of thing till we do it rightly ; and opportunity here is to be understood as the i^re- sentation of ap2'>i'opriate and available means. Form, colour, light, and shade, and composition are the dictionary, the syntax, and the prosody of painting. The thought, the central idea of the picture, corresponds to its realisation, as thinking in words does to grammar. If dictionaries are of no use and grammar has no relation to thought, Ti WILLIAM BLAKE 125 then the details of the human or any other form have no relation to painting. Indeed, to deny this is to create a ridiculous paradox which one may readily illustrate from the works of Blake himself What his inner eye may see in the rising sun it is not for us to determine, but he has drawn most pathetically in the drama of Job both rising and descending suns. It is true that he has not made them about the size of " a guinea" ; rather their arc spans the gloomy horizon like a rainbow ; but it is the segment of a circle. Why did he not draw it square or pyramidal ? In order to draw at all he was obliged to conform at least to one fact of nature, and so far as he followed her at all she did not " put him out," as Fuseli affirmed that nature did for him likewise. The case in which he has carried realistic idealism to its utmost verse is perhaps in the strange design called The Ghost of a Flea ; but examine the features of the ghost and say if for material he is not indebted first to the baser and more truculent lines of the human skull and nose and eye and hair, and then to those insect-like elements which he had observed in the plated beetle and the curious fly. The solemn boundaries of form become ridicu- 126 WILLIAM BLAKE ESSAY lous when they wander without enclosing some expressive fact visible to the eye either in heaven above or in earth beneath, and the question only remains, Hovj much of this array of fact is needful adequately to convey tlie given idea ? Jan Van Huysum would here pronounce a judgment entirely at the opposite pole from that of William Blake ; and there is no surer mark of the true connoisseur than to be able to put himself en rapport with the designer, and to judge at once his aim and the degree in which it has been realised. It would introduce a dangerous axiom to say that, in proportion to the grandeur and unearthliness of a thought the aid of common facts is less needed ; it entirely depends on 'ivJiat idea and tvhat facts are in question. As ajDplied to the human form, and to the highest idealisations of it yet known, and never to be surpassed, it would repay the reader who can see the collections of Michael Angelo's drawings at Oxford to observe with what grand reverence and timidity that learned pencil dwelt on the most minute expres- sions of detail from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot ; and it was this abundant learning which enabled the far-stretching soul of the mighty Florentine to avoid and to eliminate amongst a n WILLIAM BLAKE 127 hundred details all those lines and forms which would not accord with the brooding and colossal majesty of his prophets, the frowning eagerness of his sibyls, the cosmic strength of the first father, or the waving beauty of the mother of us all. A leading principle in Blake's design was that " a good and firm outline " is its main requisite. The claims of colour versiis drawing are not very fully opened out by his practice. Most of his works were of a kind that singularly divided these elements. Such of his productions as are most delightful in colour are comparatively rude and heavy in outline, and where his line is most sharp and masterly, the element of colour is nearly or altogether absent. His colour, again, was not so much an imitative as a purely decorative agent. The question as to whether the highest qualities of colour are compatible with the highest qualities of form seems to us to be not so much a matter of abstract possibility as of actual and personal practice. Tintoretto proposed to unite the " terrible manner" and grand drawing of Michael Angelo to the colour of Titian. There seems no reason in the nature of these two elements why they should not be united in the highest perfection. Whether any genius will arise who will succeed 128 WILLIAM BLAKE essay ill doing this remains to be seen. Colour is to drawing what music is to rhythmic words. It is not under every set of conditions that music can be " married to immortal verse " with success. Much depends on the auditory, much on the apprehension of the musician. There are delights of the eye in colour alone which fully correspond to the delights of melody alone. We may see in so common an object as an old garden wall, and in the compass of a dozen moss-grown or lichen- stained bricks, with the irregular intervening mortar-lines, such hues and harmonies as will for a while give to the trained eye the same delight as a happy air of music gives to the instructed ear. No two red bricks are alike. Some deepen into rich and mottled purples, others kindle into ruddy orange, or subside into grays of tlie loveliest gradation. These accidental combinations of time -stain and emerald moss -growth, with the cloudy hues of the irregular brick -wall, are sufficient of themselves to satisfy an eye open to perceive and understand them. In painting we may observe all manner of pleasant sophistries, which it is a fine holiday amusement to disentangle, arising from these subtle and indefinable relations of the pleasures II WILLIAM BLAKE 129 of colour to the pleasures of form. How often we receive the most bewitching impressions from this sophistical play of the elements into each other, especially among the smaller and more sketchy examples of landscape art. Translate some of the sketches labelled " Evening," or " Solitude," into black and white and their glory would sink into a compost of rude forms, gloomy and in- correct, quite incapable of existing alone. Add the daring tints — the sombre greens, the purples, clouded with fluent ultramarine, the red bands of fire seen between dark tree stems, the amber seas of air, or " that green light which lingers in the West," and you are so far imposed upon that you do not dream of questioning the legality of the magic which, by its very intensification of mutual and interchangeable errors, produces on the mind the same sensation wrouoht on it when beholding the splendid shoM's of the landscape itself. "We are far from believing that the rule and square of mere literal truth can be rigidly applied to human reproductions of nature. The difficulty of analysing the great equations and compensatory powers of art will ever make it an interesting subject of pursuit to the human race. It is a sea whose horizon fades — For ever and for ever as we move. K 130 WILLIAM BLAKE essay Even when colour is used in the engraver's sense of black and white alone, these com- minglings as mystic as twilight retain their power over the eye and fancy. Opposite to page 270, vol. i. of Blake's Life,, there are three woodcuts which fully illustrate our meaning. They were done to ornament the Pastorals of Virgil, edited by Dr. Thornton, and are of a degree of rudeness apparently verging on incapacity. Yet we would venture to ask any competent judge whether an effect in a high degree poetic is not produced by the total sentiment of the design. To our eye they seem to contain a germ of that grandeur and sense of awe and power of landscape which in some of his works John Linnell has carried out so finely, where dawn-lights dream over tranquil folds or evening slowly leaves the valley flock to the peace of night. In confirmation of our views we will quote from Mr. Gilchrist. The signal agreement of men so well qualified to judge as those named in the extract is worth notice : — The rough unconventional work of a mere prentice hand to the art of wood-engraving, they are in effect vigorous and artist-like, recalUng the doings of Albert Diirer and the early masters whose aim Avas to give ir WILLIAM BLAKE 131 ideas, not pretty language. When he sent in these seventeen, the publishers, unused to so daring a style, were taken aback and declared " this man must do no more " ; nay, were for having all he had done re-cut by one of their regular hands. The very engravers received them with derision, crying out in the words of the critic, "This will never do." Blake's merits, seldom wholly hidden from his artist-contemporaries, were always impenetrably dark to the book and print selling genus. Dr. Thornton had in his various undertakings been munificent to artists to an extent which brought him to poverty. But he had himself no kno\v^ledge of art, and despite kind intentions, was disposed to take his publishers' views. However, it fortunately happened that meeting one day several artists at Mr. Aders's table — Lawrence, James Ward, Linnell, and others — conversation fell on the Virgil. All present expressed warm admiration of Blake's art, and of those designs and woodcuts in jjartiadar. By such competent authority reassured, if also puzzled, the good Doctor began to think there must be more in them than he and his publishers could discern. The contemplated sacrifice of the blocks already cut Avas averted. And so we have these three grand but uncouth designs still preserved to us, in one of which the shepherd is eloquent among the ewes and sucking lambs, another where a traveller walks solemnly 132 WILLIAM BLAKE essay on among the hills alone, while in a third " the young moon with the old moon in her arms " rises over fallen ranks of wheat. Thought cannot fathom the secret of their power, and yet the power is there. Blake's reverence for " a firm and determinate outline " misled him chiefly where his works are intended to be elaborately shaded. The import- ance of right outline to all noble drawing cannot be overestimated. It must never be forgotten, however, that outline only represents the surface of objects in their extreme confines right and left, above and below, nor that the eye recognises the intermediate spaces, with all their projection and depression as clearly as it sees the limit which is called outline. To take a simple illustration of this. The out- line of an egg, with its lovely tapering lines, is primarily needful to record the image of an egg on paper or canvas. If Flaxman draws the egg from which Castor and Pollux issued, the oval boundary is sufficient. It is accepted as a type of the egg just as the flat figures of his designs from Homer or Hesiod are accepted as the types of men. But the case is altered if the relief of the whole has to be given by shading. An egg all II WILLIAM BLAKE 133 outline in the midst of a shaded design would look as flat as a small oval kite. To produce its proportion of resemblance, the outline must be filled with its pale moonshine gradations up to the central high light, by means of which the surface appears to swell forward to the eye. These gradations and shaded forms must be in their true place as much as the bounding line, or it will not yield the correct impression. If we apply this rule to each single feature of the human face and figure we shall see that while the firm and decided outline must be given correctly, it is only a hundredth part of the truth. Each point of the surface of the body if turned suffi- ciently would hecome outline, and indeed there is no portion of the exposed superficies which may not be called outline in this sense. It is owing to a one-sided view of the question of drawing such forms that we have to search among the often uncouth and broken shading in the plates of Blake for that powerful and accurate outline which we are sure almost universally to find. After these fair, nay ample opportunities for learning the appliances of design, Blake began to invent the long series of drawings, semi-paintings, and etchings, on which, together with a large 134 WILLIAM BLAKE essay section of his lyrics, his solid fame must ever rest. He supported himself by journeyman's work for the publishers. In 1780 he exhibited a drawing of " The Death of Earl Godwin," at the Eoyal Academy, and continued for years occasion- ally to exliibit there. All his works w^ere done in pencil or in water- colours. "With the still tougher mechanical difficulties of oil-painting he never fairly grappled," and, indeed, with his views of the inadequacy and unimportance of the solid facts of nature, it was utterly impossible that he should ever have been able to use with effect such an ample vehicle of expression. He married, and his marriage forms a pretty story, told in Allan Cunningham's sketch as well as more at length here. His wife became the faithful " Kate," whose image is inextricably bound up with that of the old man who attained " to something like prophetic strain," in the ears of the small band of faithful young disciples, some of whom survive to this day. Catherine Boucher was endowed with a loving, loyal nature, an adajjtive open mind, capable of profiting by good teaching, and of enabling her, under constant high influence, to become a meet companion to her imaginative husband in his solitary II AVILLIAM BLAKE 135 and wayward course. Uncomplainingly and helpfully she shared the low and rugged fortunes which over- originality ensured as his unvarying lot in life. She had mind and the ambition which follows. Not only did she prove a good housewife on straitened means, but in after years, under his tuition and hourly companionship, she acquired, besides the use- ful arts of reading and writing, that Avhicli very few uneducated women with the honestest effort can succeed in attaining, some footing of equality vnth her husband. She in time came to work off his engravings, as though she had 1)een bred to the trade ; nay, iml^ibed enough of his very spirit to reflect it in design which might almost have been his own. It was a fortunate circumstance for Blake in a professional sense that he had no children. In many cases the necessities of a family rouse and develop the resources of the parent mind and discover means of support where none appeared. This would have been impossible with such a nature as Blake's, He might have drudged and slaved at prosaic work with the graver and so have been prevented from finding his own sphere as an inventor, but he could not have made his works a whit more acceptable to the general taste. He needed no spur ; his powers were 136 WILLIAM BLAKE essay always awake, always on the stretch ; and we have probably from his hand all that could ever have been obtained under the most favourable circumstances. Many a man is depressed by poverty and anxiety to a level below that of his secret capacities. It was not so here. The last touches of his steady graving tool are as cool and strong in the latest of his works as in the earliest. It was not in the power of neglect or pain or sick- ness or age or infirmity to quench a vital force so native and so fervent. He and his wife took a little house in Green Street, Leicester-fields. He had become acquainted with riaxman the sculptor, and was by him intro- duced to " the celebrated Mrs. INIatthew," of whom the oblivious waves of time have left no authentic trace, except that she loved letters and art and held elegant conversaziones, at which Blake used to appear, and where he used to recite or sing his sweet lyrical ballads with music composed also by himself, to, probably, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Brooke, Mrs. Carter, or Mrs. Montague. In these light airy associations "■ he was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit." " His II WILLIAM BLAKE 137 unbending deportment, or what his adherents are pleased to call his manly firmness of opinion, which certainly was not at all times considered pleasing by every one," was the probable cause of the cessation of his visits to these and to the like assemblies. The commerce of true genius with the genius of " respectability " seldom ends with entire satisfaction to both parties. Their current coin of interchange does not consist of measurable equivalents, the accounts at length become confused and the books are closed. He engraved from Stothard and others for the magazines, mortified sometimes to see that his own designs had been the foundation, so he said, of the subject he engraved ; indeed, Fuseli him- self acknowledged that " Blake was good to steal from." We may understand the force of this saying if we only look at a design of early date by Blake, called " Plague," well known by means of frequent reproductions. An inexorable severe grandeur pervades the general lines ; an inexplic- able woe hangs over it, as of Samaria in the deadly siege when Joram, wandering on the walls, was obliged to listen to the appeal of the cannibal mother ; a sense of tragic culmination, the stroke of doom irreversible, comes through the windows of 138 WILLIAM BLAKE essay the eyes as they take in the straight black lines of the pall and bier, the mother falling from her husband's embrace with her dying child, one fair corpse scarcely earthed over in the foreground, and the black funereal reek of a distant fire which consumes we know not what unseen horror. It is enough to excite the imagination of the greatest historical painter. And yet the manner is so dry, so common, even so uninteresting, and so unlikely to find its way to " every drawing-room table," that a man of accomplishments and appreciative powers, but without the " vision and the faculty divine," would be sorely tempted to convey the thinking to his own canvas, and array it in forms more attrac- tive to the taste, without being haunted by the fear that his theft would be speedily recognised. In 1784 he set up a print shop at 27 Broad Street, near where he was born, and pursued his work as an engraver in partnership with a fellow- pupil at Basire's. Mrs. Blake "helped in the shop " while he wrought at the desk. The partner- ship came to nothing. He removed to Poland Street and continued as before inventing poems and designs and writing enthusiastic or sharp comments in the margins of his favourite books, Lavater and others. We may form a conception 11 WILLIAM BLAKE 139 of liis daily attitude if we peep into the plain little room with the frame of tissue paper inclining over his desk to moderate the light on his copper- plate, a thumbed " Lavater " by his side, in which he now and then Avrites a tender or pugnacious comment. When he was a little over thirty years of age he collected and published one of his sweetest and most original works. The Songs of Innocence, en- graving the poem in a singular way with delightful designs on copper. The plaques upon which these designs were made still exist. They are somewhat like rude, deep -cut casts from engraved wood blocks. They were drawn on the copper with some thick liquid impervious to acid ; the plate was then immersed in aquafortis and " bitten " away, so that the design remained in relief. These he printed with his own hand in various tones of brown, blue, and gray, tinting them afterwards by hand into a sort of rainbow- coloured, innocent page, in which the thrilling music of the verse and the gentle bedazzlement of the lines and colours so intermingle that the mind hangs in a pleasant uncertainty as to whether it is a picture that is singing or a song which has newly budded and blossomed into colour and 140 WILLIAM BLAKE essay form. All is what the title imports ; and though they have been of late years frequently quoted and lose half their sweetness away from the embowering leaves and tendrils which clasp them, running gaily in and out among the lines, we cannot but gratify ourselves and our readers wdth one light peal of the fairy bells : — Sweet dreams form a shade O'er my lovely infant's head, Sweet dreams of pleasant streams, By happy, silent, moony beams. Sweet sleep, with soft down Weave thy brows an infant crown ; Sweet sleep, angel mild, Hover o'er my happy child. Sweet smiles in the night. Hover over my delight ; Sweet smiles, mother's smiles. All the livelong night beguiles. Sweet moans, dovelike sighs, Chase not slumber from thy eyes. Sweet moans, sweeter smiles, All thy dovelike moans beguiles. Sleep, sleep, happy child. All creation slept and smiled ; Sleep, sleep, hapjiy sleep. While o'er thee thy mother weep. Sweet babe, in thy face Holy image I can trace ; Sweet babe, once like thee, Thy ]\Iaker lay and wept for me. II WILLIAM BLAKE 141 This is the tone of them ; and there are many- such strains as these that deserve to be much better known than they are, notwithstanding the bad grammar that mingles with their innocent music. There is a serene unconsciousness of arbitrary human law in genius such as this ; it floats with the lark in a "privacy of glorious light " where the grammatical hum of the critics cannot disturb its repose. We are reminded of the startling question of the Yorkshire orator when repudiating the bonds of syntax and pro- nunciation, " Who invented grammar I should HTce to hnoui ? I've as much right to invent grammar as any of them ! " Whatever we might concede to the Yorkshire orator, we may readily agree not to be inexorably severe in the application of our canons to the productions of such a genius as that of Blake. Amongst Blake's designs there is one which affects the eye wonderfully, where huge inter- twisted trunks writhe up one side of the page, while on the other springs, apparently. Jack's immortal laddered bean-stalk, aiming at heaven ; between the two on the blank white sky hang mystical verses, and below is a little vision of millennial rest; naked children sport with the 142 WILLIAM BLAKE essay lion and ride the lioness in playful domination while secure humanity sleeps at ease among them. Yet Blake had a difficult and repulsive phase in his character. It seems a pity that men so amiable and tender, so attractive to one's desire for fellowship, should prove on close contact to have a side of their nature so adamantine and fall of self-assertion and resistance that they are driven at last to dwell in the small circle of friends who have the forbearance to excuse their peculiarities and the wit to interpret their moods and minds : — Nor is it possible to thoiiglit A greater than itself to know. In this sphinx-like and musical couplet, Blake himself hits the true basis of the reason why men whose genius is at once so sweet, so strong, and so unusual are largely overlooked during life, and are difficult of exposition when the fluctuations and caprices of life no longer interfere to prevent a fair estimate of their powers and performances. After these exquisite poems, which come nearest to the universal heart, Blake struck off on his own strange wings into regions where we will not Do O II WILLIAM BLAKE 143 attempt to follow him. Those who wish to see what may be said for the scope and design of the series of Blake's illustrated mysteries may consult Mr. Swinburne's inquiries into and eloquent com- ments on them. For our own part, their chief value seems to consist in the fragments of astonish- ing pictorial invention which they contain, hints and indications of which are given in facsimile in Mr. Gilchrist's well illustrated Life. There can be no question that the first impression produced by them is, that they are the production of a mad- man of superb genius ; and this impression is so strong that few people would be persuaded to do more than glance at what would confirm their judgment. Here is one of those firm questions which the man whose mind is unbalanced will ask with unflinching eye — he is talking familiarly to Isaiah : " Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so ? " What an entangling preliminary question before he ventures to slip the leash of some " subjective " horror ! " I was in a printing- house in hell." What a nonchalant, passing in- troduction to a subject! "My friend the angel climbed up from his station into the mill " ; here is the easy way in which he treats principalities and powers. " So the angel said, ' Thy phantasy 144 WILLIAM BLAKE ESSAY has imposed upon me, and thou oughtest to be ashamed.' I answered, 'We impose on one another, and it is but lost time to converse with you, whose works are only analytics.' " Here is a man, not exactly a fool, who " rushes in where angels fear to tread," and snajDS his fingers in their faces. There is no wonder if ordinary civilians found such a one to be difficult to get on with. And yet an unconquerable indiffi^rence to his transcendental philosophy does not in the least interfere with our veneration of the artist, as such. We hold that the " creative " and the " critical " faculties are seldom found in close and powerful alliance, and that often in proportion to the in- tensity and energy of the former is the dormancy, if not the incapacity of the latter. In the proces- sion of his own labours the artist unconsciously selects or rejects. He is conscious that deep down in the laws of thought his justification is to be found, but he has neither time nor inclination to become a pearl diver, when the riches of the Eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the Eternal mind, come and pour themselves unsought at his feet. A life of analysis and reconstruction he leaves to II WILLIAM BLAKE 145 others, and he is the happiest painter or singer who leaves the philosophies On Argive heights divinely sung, to the Argives ; that is to say, so far as any practical intermeddling with them is concerned. Even if he be capable of entering the region he acts most wisely who follows Mr. Ruskin's short advice to a painter, "Fit yourself for the best company and — hcc^p out of it." As to any serious consideration of Blake's vocation to teach aught of morals, of theology, or non-theology, of Christian Atheism, or Atheistic Christianity; we, with "the volume of the Book," which "is written," in our hands — "calmly, but firmly, and finally," on a general glance at the tone and tenor of these portentous scrolls of Thcl and Urizen, these Marriarjes of Heaven and Hell, which would look blasphemous if we did not tenderly recollect by whom they w^ere M'ritten, refuse any serious further investigation of their claims, and must dismiss them, not scorn- fully though it may be sorrowfully. We regard them rather as we regard the gentle or exalted incoherences of a dear friend's delirium, for our theory of the mental structure of Blake renders L U6 WILLIAM BLAKE essay them as harmless to us as his gentle Songs of Innocence, but on this ground we dismiss them — repeating the words before applied to them, only with no anger or disdain — that they are " Ten thoiisand words in an unhioion tongue." But not shelving or ignoring the illuminated pages themselves, their inventive power remains, and they may be regarded as a repository of winged and fiery imagery which will be useful to us in our attempts to realise things invisible in so far as the elements of matter may bridge over for our conceptive faculties the gulfs between the seen and unseen, and in so far as they may be made to illustrate phases of thought to which they were not in the first instance intended to apply. Many of his less elaborated designs are eminently suggestive in this direction, and may be referred to in the woodcuts. Take them one by one, suppose no further relation than each has to its significant title, and we are wholly satis- fied. We will not say how often and with what fine eftect one of these rude but noble squares enters before the inner eye and allies itself with the current stream of thought. " Alas ! " — that is the simple title of one of them, a boy chasing winged loves which he kills II WILLIAM BLAKE 147 with his catching ; need we move farther to seek our goal of meaning? " IVhat is Man?" That caterpillar, huge and spectral, crawling over the oak leaf under which the baby -faced chrysalis lies expecting its life and its wdngs — to be " crushed before the moth " in due time. Can we not find our own sufficient application of such a wondrous image ? " / vMiit ! I u-ant ! " Here is " the globe's last verge " which both Dryden and Blake contrived (but with very different faculties and success) to see ; where, according to Dryden, we may behold "the ocean leaning on the sky." Here Blake, on this hint, boldly heaves his ladder to the hollow bosom of " our rolling neighbour," the crescent moon, and begins to climb fearless as Blondin, and cross the star-sown abyss to satisfy his " want." So with each of these precious little bald and grand designs, the last of which is almost appalling. A white, unearthly figure with a wand — a figure neither large nor small, for it is of no size to the judgment and imagination — cowers and stares beneath the root of a forest oak, a huge worm winds round before her feet, and the in- scription is, " Ihave said to the ivorm, Thou art my mother and my sister." Surely any one who ever sat awestruck over the Booh of Joh and heard 148 WILLIAM BLAKE essay the " deep sad music of humanity " coming on the long-drawn gust of Time from those lands of Uz, would feel that here was one worthy and sufficient interpretation of the idea of the verse and of those other kindred upbreathings from the grave and wail- ings of the haunted " house appointed for all living," of which the early chapters of the Book of Job are full. Laying aside these works as philosophies or preachings and returning upon them as strange pictures intended for the informing of the ima- gination through the eye, it is impossible to put into words the delight and restless wonder they excite. Without referring to the large collection of Blake's drawings which we remember having the privilege of being shown to us by Mr. Gilchrist while writing his book (a treat never to be for- gotten, for the various possessors of his books and designs, among whom Lord Houghton was one of the most appreciative owners of curious specimens, had furnished him with a sufficient mass of materials), we will rather call attention to such as may be accessible to every reader of the Bio- graphy. We invite the reader to turn to one of them, and to the opposite page, which is a facsimile of one of Blake's leaves from America, reduced — but by an unerring " photo-lithographic " process II WILLIAM BLAKE 149 — to half the size, and printed as nearly as possible in the colour used as a groundwork for his hand- tinting, so that we are looking, in fact, at an autograph. Study carefully the design on the upper part of the left-hand page. By a sheer breadth of black, sharply contrasted with the white page by some inexplicable magic, there is conveyed the impression of a space in the upper skies, where — coming we know and care not whence and hasting we know not whither — is a wild swan bridled and mounted by an elf into whose history and signi- ficance we shall never trouble ourselves to inquire. But we appeal to the intelligent observer whether that design does not kindle the page into a silver light and hasten the spirits into a breezy swiftness of enjoyment and strike the harp of memory within him, perhaps making him recall the fine image in the Palace of Art — Far as the wild swan wings to where the sky- Dipt down to sea and sands. It is in this, as in ten thousand other ways, that the pencil becomes the gorgeous sister and handmaiden of the poet's pen, kindling into incit- ing suggestion his flying images and doubling the value of his priceless words. The eye is irresistibly 150 WILLIAM BLAKE essay drawn below to the bottom of the page ; and what a rich and rare sense of visual joy comes as we see that serpent-" dragon of the prime," coming carelessly from nowhere and going by shining cloud and crescent and sparkling star into the emptiness of night, his tail curled, against all nature, into a writing-master's flourish, his sole apparent object being to oblige three merry fairies with a morning ride ! We pray you look at his eye and mouth ! How he enjoys the fun, and what a large reserve of cunning meaning there is all over his corrugated face as he puts out his forked tongue, most probably at the metaphy- sicians, or, however ungratefully, at Blake's manu- script itself. Turn to the right-hand page from America; its relations to the great Eepublic seem remote to the sense. Yet in the " tall talk " in the " centre " of the design, the strong and terribly bloodshot tone of which is greatly subdued by the pretty little twirls and twiddles into which its letters run, we see a foreshadowing of at least an accusa- tion against America — and in the capacity of the genii who weigh all creation in their own scales and fly away with the sword of the earth and fling world-powers into the void as easily as II WILLIAM BLAKE 151 Athamas dashed Learchus in pieces, and who perform Blondin feats on " Serpents of Eternity," instead of tight-ropes, between spires of rushing flame ascending out of the abyss, we see aUusions closer than we might at first suppose to the " greatest people on the face of the earth." Yet their chief value does not lie in this. It is in the mysterious fascination of line, the mingling of creative might and childlike play, the astonishing power which by dark and strongly imprinted curves can give — "lucus a non lucendo" — the sense of flashing flame, the power to " make black seem white," which so enchains and half stupefies the fancy. As a specific example of this, look at what we may call the prophecy of Blondin, the Herculean tumbler on the Serpent of Eternity. How amazingly grand the lines ! Carve it in onyx, and have we not an antique gem of the finest character, Phidias and Michael Angelo in little ? Yet pass below the giant acrobat's elbow and Michael Angelo subsides into a schoolboy finishins his little theme with an innocent flourish. This is Blake all over : now he is a Titan hurling rocks at the gods, now a chubby boy toddling to the infant-school and singing liis pretty echoing song. 152 WILLIAM BLAKE essay Beside these books and "prophecies," Blake made many designs of a separate or serial kind, and found in Mr. Butts a kind, steadfast, and appreciative patron. A large collection of these works is still in the possession of his son, Captain Butts. For nearly thirty years the modest, simple- living Blake found a constant resource in this worthy friend's patronage. It is a beautiful picture of his typical life of Arcadian simplicity and sufficiency to see this plain liver and high thinker taking his weekly design to sell for a very moderate price and returning to dream and draw and engrave in his own humble home. Out of this simple life issued in 1794 the Songs of Uxperience. Flaxman used to exclaim, " Sir, his poems are as grand as his pictures"; and Wordsworth " read them with delight." Yet words do not tell the half of Blake's poems — do not reveal half the man. Some pieces will bear separation from the rainbow pages on which they originally appeared ; others, and most of them, lose half their thrill and motion when enchained in the printer's " forme." When the brown poem and rough ground-lines of the design were stamped on the rough paper by the rude press, then his lyrical fingers playing with the prisms of water- II WILLIAM BLAKE 153 colour waslied and touched all over them in a way not to be described — poem and picture twined fondly round each other in a bath of colour and light refusing to be separated. So that he who is to understand Blake must be admitted to the penetralia where such sights are to be seen, Not that he had any special aim at exceptional seclusion. " Come in," he would say ; "it is only Adam and Eve," as in an anecdote narrated at length by Mr. Gilchrist which adds another proof of our theory that a veil of innocent unreason spread its haze over one side of his nature. Surely by this time the little poem which begins — Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, and which Charles Lamb called "glorious," is pretty well known, as also the song beginning — Piping down the valleys wild. The exceeding delicacy and sweetness of some separate verses in his poems convey that sense of enchantment which Scott describes as coming over him at any recurrence of the stanza — The dews of summer night did fall, The moon, sweet regent of the skj^, Silvered the walls of Cunuior Hall, And many an uak that grew thereby. 154 WILLIAM BLAKE essay It is hard to say in what this happy quality con- sists. To our own mind there is something of it in a song of Bulwer, in the Last Days of Pompeii, beginning — By the cool banks wliere soft Cepliisus flows, A voice sailed trembling down the waves of air. To which Blake's Song to the, Muses might have given the keynote — Whether on Ida's shady brow Or in the chambers of the East, The chambers of the sun that now From ancient melody have ceased. Whether in heaven ye wander fair. Or the green corners of the earth, Or the blue regions of the air, Where the melodious winds have birth. Whether on crystal rocks ye rove, Beneath the bosom of the sea. Wandering in many a coral grove, Fair Nine, forsaking poesy. How have you left your ancient love. The bards of old enjoyed in you ? The languid strings do scarcely move. The sound is forced, the notes are few. There is this ineffable charm of scenery and sound in these lines from Ni(Jit — 11 WILLIAM BLAKE 155 Farewell, green fields, and happy grove, Where flocks have ta'en delight. Where lambs have nibbled, silent move The feet of angels bright. Unseen they pour blessing, And joy without ceasing, On each bud and blossom, And each sleeping bosom. They look in every thoughtless nest Where birds are covered warm, They visit caves of every beast, To keep them all from harm. If they see any weeping That should have been sleeping. They pour sleep on their head, And sit down by the bed. The same simple and tender mood of soul that originated such child-melodi6s as " Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," which brings tears down the cheeks of the ruggedest sailor, and has touched the secret fount of tears in many an unconfessing heart, handled this " rural pen," and " stained that water clear," and wrote that happy song — Every child shall joy to hear. To such influences grown men also do well to keep open their souls ; for Blake, in his Auguries of Innocence, writes — He who mocks the infant's faith Shall be mocked in age and death. 156 WILLIAM BLAKE essay There is so much pleasure in copying out some of these fragments, that we are tempted to linger a little longer over them. The silver Shakespearean song of " Take, oh take those lips away ! " has always sounded like a honey- laden breeze of Hymettus. There is the same nameless spell in these words of Blake rolled sweetly on each other, as the rose-leaves curl towards the heart of the rose — Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be, For the gentle wind doth move Silently, invisibly. Here are two stanzas, not so remarkable for their pure melody but containing a wonderfully felici- tous image — Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau ! Mock on, mock on, 'tis all in vain ! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again. And every sand becomes a gem. Reflected in the beams diviiie ; Blown back, they blind the mocking eye, But still in Israel's paths they shine. In a motto prefixed to the Auguries of Inno- cence, he expresses that power which is given to genuine imagination and which so distinctively separates it from the rest of the faculties, or II WILLIAM BLAKE 157 rather, enables it both to use and master and transcend them all — the power To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. Thus we are led on by their alluring sweetness as we are led from bush to bush by the piping of a bird of unusual note and brilliant plume. But our material swells beyond expectation and we must return to his history. He illustrated Young's Night Thoughts for Edwards of New Bond Street, doing forty-three plates in one year, which seems to us a wonderful testimony to his diligence and skill. These designs, however, were not among his most successful works. The most remarkable episode in his career is the four years' residence at Felpham, near Bognor, on the coast of Sussex. He was forty-three years old when it commenced, and the occasion of it was that Hayley, the poet of the Triumphs of Temper and the friend of Cowper and Ronniey, desired him to illustrate his Life of Coivper then under way. Here he resided in a cottage, which we visited with reverence not very long since — a cottage by the sea, within sight of its waters and 158 "WILLIAM BLAKE essay sound of its everlasting roll. On the shore, at the end of a little lane leading thitherward, he often paced in the twilight, his friends and chance acquaintance in these rambles being " Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, and Milton — all majestic shadows, gray but luminous and superior to the common height of men." Blake was a little under the " common height of men," and it would have been a notable sight to have passed by him or seen him in the distance, walking the brown sands in the dusky air, and conversing on easy terms with these stately shades. He was recalled to the " visible diurnal sphere " rather rudely during his sojourn by the sea by no less an incident than that of being tried for high treason ! How a man so harmless and hermit- like came to find himself in such an astonishing position may well excite the reader's inquiry. It happened in this w^ay — One day in August a drunken soldier — probably from the barracks at Aldwick or Chichester — broke into the little sHp of garden fronting the painter's sequestered cottage, and was there as violent and un- ruly as is the wont of drunken soldiers to be. He refused to go. The red-coat was a great hulking fellow, the artist of short stature, but robust, well- II WILLIAM BLAKE 159 knit, with plenty of courage and capable of a supernatural energy, as it were, on occasions. In his exasperation he laid hold of the intrusive black- guard and turned him out neck and croj) in a kind of inspired frenzy, Avhich took the man aback and fairly frightened him ; such volcanic wrath being a novelty in his experience. "I do not know liotc I did it, but I did it," said Blake afterwards, and was himself dis- posed to attribute his success to that demoniac or spiritual loill by stress of which he believed a man might achieve anything physical. In the course of the scuffle, while blows were being exchanged, angry words passed of course — the red-coated bully vapour- ing that "he was the king's soldier, "and so forth. . . . [In fact, Blake swore at king and soldier.] The soldier, bent on revenge, out of Blake's hasty Avords made up a story and got a comrade to bear him out, that his rough host had been guilty of seditious lan- guage. The sequel forcibly reminds us we are here in the times of "the good old king," not in those of Vic- toria. The soldier and " his mate " made tlieir charge on oath liefore a magistrate, and Blake had to stand his trial for high treason at the next quarter sessions. By Hayley's efforts and the skill of Samuel Eose, his counsel, whose name occurs in Coirper''s Correspondetice, lie was acquitted. Mrs. Blake used afterwards to tell how in the middle of the trial, when the soldier invented some- 160 WILLIAM BLAKE essay thing to support his case, her husband called out "False ! " with characteristic vehemence, and in a tone which electrified the whole court and carried convic- tion A\dth it. Eose greatly exerted himself for the defence. In his cross-examination of the accuser, he "most happily exposed," says Hayley, " the falsehood and malignity of the charge, and also spoke very eloquently for his client," though in the midst of his speech seized "with illness and concluding it Avith difficulty. Blake's neighbours joined Hayley in gi\ang him the same character of habitual gentleness and peaceableness, which must have a little astonished the soldier after his peculiar experience of those qualities. " After a long and very patient hearing," the Sussex Advertiser continues, " he was by the jury acquitted, which so gratified the auditory that the court was in defiance of all decenc}' thrown into up- roar by their noisv exultations. During the sessions the Duke of Richmond sat the first day from ten in the morning till eight at night without quitting the court or taking any refreshment." The account of his work here and his ao^ree- nients and disagreements with the only partially appreciative Hayley is very delightful ; and the cottage, with its "thatched roof of rusty gold," will always form a lovely element in the " study of imagination" which any one loving Blake and II WILLIAM BLAKE 161 his works will frequently revolve. One comment from Hayley's pen is worth extracting here as throwing: lioht on the characteristics of Blake's life and mind. " Engraving," he writes, " of all human works appears to require the largest portion of patience, and he happily possesses more of that inestimable virtue than ever I saw united before to an imagination so lively and so prolitic." Having hinted our own doubts as to the absolute saneuess of his whole mind, we are anxious to set before that of the reader an accurate outline of the developments of his life in daily habit and practice. Let us dismiss any, the least, image of a dangerous or lunatic mental error. A patient, plodding, regular, daily course of strenuous employment severe and distinct, with intervals of quiet, unobtrusive meditation and converse flashing now and then with spirit, but usually mild and calm, saying his wild sayings in a way totally unalarming — this is the image which the biographer and one or two who have known him have impressed on our own under- standing and memory, — a man sweet and charming among the young and tKpse who were earnest in the pursuit of truth, but like William the Conqueror, being " stronger than his foregangers," M 162 WILLIAM BLAKE essay lie was stem to those wlio opposed his views or thwarted his will — yet speaking in a low and musical voice with a gentle enthusiasm and a natural high-pitched politeness, the fruit of reverence and love. Hayley endeavoured to persuade Blake to undertake the painting of miniature portraits while at Felpham, and introduced him to Lord Egremont of Petworth, Lord Bathurst of Havant, Mrs. Poole, and others, and obtained him com- missions, thinking that this work might promote the painter's fortunes. It was a good thought of Hayley's, and in almost any other case might have proved the making of Blake in those days. Those days are, alas, no more. The photograph has demolished the old-fashioned delightful mini- ature. The mournful " turn-out" of the profession one by one into fresh fields and new labours, as the foundations of their occupation were gradually crumbling under their feet, forms one of the most interesting episodes in the history of modern art. Some retired on their well-earned savings to the quiet occasional exercise of their pencil ; the larger number were absorbed in the photographic " studio," as it is euphemistically called, and found a more profitable if less meritorious sphere of II WILLIAM BLAKE 163 action. The older men who had not " made hay while the sun shone," and yet were paralysed, as it were, by the " sunstroke," retired to comparative iudio-ence and neu'lect. But in the be^innini? of the century an ordinary skilful hand might gain plenty of money by the miniature, which was in constant demand among persons of any means or station. The practice, too, of portraiture is one most useful and favourable to the painter of works of imagination w'here the human figure is em- ployed. Leslie has some valuable remarks on this sub- ject in his Handbook for Young Painters. He points out the great advantage which accrues to a student from having a constant series of models, who not only sit to him while he masters the millionfold details of texture, drawing, expression, colour, and handling, but who pay him well for his self-given lessons, and are as a rule not diffi- cult to please if his temper be easy and his behaviour courteous. How many a painter of middle age will recall those days before the flood of photography, when his pleasant sitters came duly from day to day, or wdien he was received with w^elcorae into the country house to paint the inmates and make a new circle of lifelong friends 1 164 WILLIAM BLAKE essay He will sio'li as he tliiuks how far removed aud how unlikely speedily to return those days of pleasure and profit are. But though Blake might have greatly gained both as to knowledge and purse by such practice as miniature painting would have afforded, his original structure here appears vindicating itself as usual. No prospect of gain could turn him aside from the flinty mountain path on which so early he had set his feet, and which he continued to climb till he reached its summit. He studied Greek with Hayley and had a good cajjacity for languages. He learned French so as to be able to read it in the compass of a few weeks ; and at sixty years of age he studied Italian in order to read Dante. " The kind indefatigable Blake — our alert Blake " — for a while seems to have enjoyed his retreat by the sea. Hayley appears to have been full of kind intentions, but he had not the faculty really to understand or appreciate his guest and fellow- labourer. He was not without sensibility and taste, but he was fussy, flighty, and shallow. His wit was of the small and twittering sort, as the note of a sparrow to the prolonged and varied moonlight song of Philomel, and his sentiment II WILLIAM BLAKE 165 was of the kind we call lackadaisical, the mere lady's-maid of the muse with " watery eyne." The oak-like strength and harebell tenderness of the painter could not very long live in such a smothering atmosphere, and an end was put to their intercourse. Hayley's society became irk- some and his sentiments distasteful to Blake, and, as his manner M^as, he flung satirical couplets off against him into a little volume, now in the hands of Mr. D. G. Eossetti — to such effect as this— Thy friendshiii oft luitli made my heart to ache ; Do be my enemy, for friendship's sake. He returned to London, to South Molton Street, near Oxford Street, and resumed his "Prophetic" works, illustrated wdth the "giant forms," as usual — Jerusalem, and Milton, etc. On these followed an edition of Blair's Grave, in which the designs were made by Blake and the etching done in a very first-rate way by Schiavo- netti. We well remember the thrill of wonder and delight with which we found this volume in a public library in the country in the days of youth. The complexities of the occasion, tlie treatment of Blake by Cromek, and Blake's own indignation, we will indicate at some length. Blake was near fifty years of age and in the 166 WILLIAM BLAKE essay zenith of liis strength when he was recommended to the public by Mr. Malkin, headmaster of Bury Grammar School, who published a highly-curious volume of memoirs of his son who died in his seventeenth year, and whose precocity of intellect was something appalling. The intellectual senti- ment of the time was unfavourable to the right guidance of such a mind. We catch a glimpse of it in the memoirs of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck. The style of ordinary composition suffered from the heavy rolling reverberation of the Johnsonian dialect and the detestable classicisms of the French Eevolution. Every well-educated mother was Cornelia or tlie mother of the Gracchi, and their children were the "jewels" of the same. The little miss who became Mrs. Schimmelpenninck "preferred dining with Scipio to supping with Lucullus." The letters written to his mamma by Master Malkin at the age of five take away one's breath. No wonder that lie did not survive to maturity. Kound the portrait — a pretty, winning face — prefixed to the Memoirs of this intellectual prodigy, is a design by Blake, engraved by Cromek. This design is made the occasion of a kindly and lengthened comment on the works of Blake, whom ]\Talkin calls an " untutored proficient." II WILLIAM BLAKE 167 The Cromek whose name is attached to the able copper-plate, and who was much employed in engraving Stothard's book-prints, was a very " canny " Yorkshireman, who had an eye for excellent art and a head for profitable trade. His health was not good and was made worse by application to the graver ; he therefore looked out for some way of using the brains of others for his own benefit. For twenty guineas he obtained twelve of the finest of Blake's designs from Blair's poem of The Grave. These he submitted to Fuseli, West, Cosway, Flaxman, Lawrence, Nolle- kens, and Stotliard, to Thomas Hope (" Anastatius Hope " ), and to Mr. Locke, of Norbury, from each of whom he obtained high testimonials of their excellence. He then engaged Blake to cut them in copper. One or two were executed ; but Cromek, who was a pupil of Bartolozzi, whose style of engraving was eminently clear and fascinating to the general eye, felt and i'olt justly that such an austere rendering would never be relished by the public. He therefore put tliem into the hands of Lewis Schiavonetti, a native of Bassano, who was a fellow-pupil at Bartolozzi's and surpassed liis master. The knowledge and skill, the sense of " grandeur and grace " possessed 168 WILLI Ail BLAKE essay by Schiavonetti produced the happiest results. Mr. Gilchrist says that Cromek " jockeyed Blake out of his copyright " ; and that Blake was naturally enraged at being supplanted by Schia- vonetti and despoiled by Cromek. While The Gh'cwe was in the course of execution Blake got hold of a magnificent subject of which Cromek had the wit to feel the value. Out of the whole range of modern literature no more picturesque, ample, or central theme could be discovered than the Cantcrlury Pilgrimage of Chaucer. A fine passage from the liand of the discoverer of this admirable subject, in what seems to us the best prose document remaining from his pen, shows the dignity of the conception : " The characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations. As one age falls another rises, different to mortal sight, but to immortals only the same ; for we see the same character repeated again and again in animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence. Accident ever varies. Substance can never suffer change or decay. Of Chaucer's characters, as described in his Canterlury Tales, some of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves II AVILLIAM BLAKE 169 for ever remain unaltered ; and consequently they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. I have known multitudes of those who would have been monks in the age of monkery, who in this deistical age are deists. As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linmvus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men." Some of the individual criticisms in this docu- ment seem to us very full of penetration, as, for ex- ample : " The Ploughman is simplicity itself, with wisdom and strength for its stamina. Chaucer has divided tiie ancient character of Hercules between his Miller and his Ploughman. Benevolence is the Ploughman's great characteristic. He is thin with excessive labour, and not witli old age, as some have supposed — " He woulde thresh ami thereto dike and delve, For Christe's sake, for every poore wight Withouten hire if it lay in liis mit^lil. The Ploughman of Chaucer is Hercules in his supreme eternal state divested of liis spectrous shadow, M'hich is the Miller, a ten-ible fellow, such as exists in all times and places for the trial of men, to astonish every neighbourhood with 170 WILLIAM BLAKE essay brutal strength and courage, to get rich and powerful to curb the pride of man." Again, " liead Chaucer's description of the Good Parson, and bow the head and the knee to Him who in every age sends us such a burning and a shining light. Search, 3'e rich and powerful, for these men, and oliey their counsel, then shall the golden age return. But, alas ! you will not easily distinguish him from the Friar and the Pardoner ; they also are ' full solemn men,' and their counsel you v>'ill continue to follow." These observations seem to look forward to the days of revived Eitualism, when "full solemn men" are in danger of obscuring the daylight of the Good Parson of Chaucer, of whom it is said — TIic lore of Christ and His Apostles twelve He tau(jhf, Init first lie followed it himselve. The attack on Stothard's rival picture in the document from which we quote, shows on the one hand the excited yet stingiess and futile sarcasm of men of Blake's high imaginative organisation. Mr. Gilchrist truly says : " Angels of light make sorry wits — handle mere terrestrial weapons of sarcasm and humorous assault in a very clumsy, ineffectual manner." Speaking of Stothard's com- II AVILLIAM BLAKE 171 position of the same subject, after pointing out a variety of inaccuracies, he says : " In this manner he has jumbled his dumb dollies together, and is praised by his equals for it." Cromek endeavoured to purchase Blake's inven- tion for the same purpose as llie Grave, viz. to have it separately engraved by Schiavonetti ; but Blake, smarting under Cromek's treatment, refused to sell it on those conditions, and issued a prospectus for an engraving to be done by himself Meantime Cromek went to Stothard, commissioned at the price of sixty guineas a small oil painting of the same subject, the etching of which was forwarded by Schiavonetti, and which was completed by several other hands after the premature death of that eminent engraver. It had a great success. The visitor to Abbotsford, passing through that little romantic study, with the dark leathern chair where " the Great Unknown " sat through long years to write his fictions, and where fancy sees him throwing on the ground sheet after sheet of that Life of Napoleon which was done with such marvellous celerity, will see in a dark Ijroad frame over the fireplace an impression of this engraving of the Canterbury Filrjrimaf/e after Stothard. It is the only design in 172 AYILLIAM BLAKE essay the room. Sir Walter Scott admired it greatly, but remarked of the young and graceful Squire that " as soon as his horse moves he will go over its head." Cromek does not come well out of this adven- ture. As a matter of business our sympathies go with the wronged inventor twice deprived of the fruit of his labours, with no powerful friends to see him righted, and at that time with no possible appeal to the law of the land. There is a letter printed at full length in the Bio- (jrcvpliy which reveals the mind of a mean and insolent man bent only on his own profit and aggrandisement. One sentence is worth quoting for its virulence : " Why did you ?io furiously rarje at the success of the little picture (Stothard's) of the Pilfjrimagc ? Three thousand people have now seen it and have apirrovcd of it. Believe me, yours is the voice of one crTjimj in the wilderness I " Here we have quotations from the Psalms and from Him who told the publicans to " exact no more than that which was appointed them," used to taunt one whom he himself in a former part of the letter believed to have been " altogether abstracted from this world, holding communion with the world of sjjirits, simple, unoffending — a combination of tlie serpent and the dove," — II WILLIAM BLAKE 173 flinging in liis teeth his sublime helplessness and the vexation of his own nnjiist success. Blake had only the wilderness of neglect wherein to cry, and the consolation of a few not very malignant satirical verses in the dear little account-book on Mr. Kossetti's shelves. Here is one of these feebly severe couplets — Ci'oiiiek loves artists as lie loves his meat : He loves the art — but 'tis the art to cheat ! As to the actual result of Cromek's doiuos on O the fame of Blake, we must say that no more complete instance of wise and subtle interpre- tation of the thoughts of another man was ever given than that by Schiavonetti in the designs from The Grave. Coleridge, in translating Schiller's Wallenstein, founds on two suggestive lines the noble passage beginning — never rudely will I blame his faith, etc. And in something of the same spirit of ample and discerning interpretation did this intelligent Italian render those noble conceptions so that they couhl be understood by the public. There is no impertinent addition, no unfeeling omission ; and yet there is a correct elegance superadded which must win every eye. 174 WILLIAM BLAKE essay The Canterbury Pilgrimage of Blake is, we regret to say, on the whole, a failure as to exe- cution in our judgmeut. The conception and composition are stately and strong. It might be taken from an early fresco in some " Campo Santo." But the horses, which he says " he has varied according to their riders," are so variously like what the Trojan horse might have been, and so liable to be thought like what the less epic rocking-horse usually is ; there is such a portrait- like, grim stare on all the faces, such a grotesque and improbable quality about the " Wife of Bath," who is something between a jewelled Hindoo idol and the ugly Madonna of a wayside shrine — that we cannot help feeling how, in spite of a hundred redeeming virtues of strength and grandeur, all the effort in the world would fail to recommend it to the general eye. Yet as a quaint, " most ancient," and delightful ornament for a dim oaken staircase we recommend its acquisition to all who can by any means procure a copy of it. The designs from Blair's poem were dedicated to the Queen of England as What I have borne on solemn wing From the vast regions of the grave. These words are truthful enough. II WILLIAM BLAKE 175 As the book is more readily to be seen than any other of Blake's works, we will not here speak of them in extenso ; but we cannot help feelino' as we write the wave of that " solemn wing," nor seeing, far stretching into the dimness of oblivion, the sights which Blake unveiled in those "vast regions of the grave": "Kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves, and princes that had gold, and filled their houses with silver," lying side by side with awful, open gaze, in tiie dusky silence, waiting for the trumpet of final awaking. Infancy, youth, manhood, and age, trooping hurriedly down- ward into the bleak darkness and " monumental caves of death." The huge, Herculean struggle of " the wicked strou" man " against the victorious, impalpable " shadow with the keys "; the sweet " soul hovering over the body "; the pictured reali- sation of Burns's tender wish — a family found at last — No wanderer lost — A family in heaven. Above all, that elevating vision worthy of the Sistine roof where Age, " a-leaning on his crutch," is driven by the last stress of the furious tempest of life into the Gate of Death ; but where, over- 176 WILLIAM BLAKE essay head, " young and lusty as the eagle," the new- born, immortal, worshipping man of the skies kneels in the radiance of the supernal sun of eternity. This book was indeed a fit overture to that still greater oratorio of Juh, with which, as if accompanied by a mighty Miltonic organ, the Master virtually concluded his pictured lays. It is to the thoughtful and self-denying kind- ness of the venerable John Linnell that we owe the production of the Illustration of the Booh of Job. Will it be believed that Blake was nearly seventy years old when this marvellous series of designs was commenced ? To show his manner of life at this period, and his surroundings, we nmst copy at some length a minute picture of the occasional visits paid by him to his friends the Linnells, at Hampstead Heath, not long before his death — Blake was at this period in the habit, when well, of spending frequent happy Sundays at his friend's Hampstead cottage, where he was received by host and hostess with the most cordial affection. Mr. Linnell's maimer was that of a son ; Mrs. Linnell was hospitable and kind, as ladies well know how to be to a valued friend. The children, whenever he was ex- pected, were on the (pii vive to catch the first glimpse II "WILLIAM BLAKE 177 of him from afar. One of them who has noAv children of her own, but still cherishes the old reverence for "Mr. Blake," remembers thus Avatching for him when a little girl of five or six ; and how, as he walked over the brow of the hill and came within sight of the young ones, he would make a particular signal ; how Dr. Thornton, another friend, and frequent visitor, would make a different one, — the Doctor taking ofl" his hat and raising it on his stick. She remembers how Blake would take her on his knee and recite children's stories to them all ; recollects his kind manner ; his putting her in the Avay of dra^ving, training her from his own doings. One day he brought up to Hampstead an early sketch-book, full of most singular things, as it seemed to the children. But in the midst of them they came upon a finished pre -Raphaelite- like drawing of a grasshopper, with which they were delighted. Mr. Linnell had first taken lodgings at Hampstead in June 1822, and in March 1824 moved his family to a farmhouse there, part of which was let off as a separate habitation — as it is to this day ; for Collins's Farm yet stands, altered by the erection of new out- buildings and the loss of some of its trees, but not so much altered as most things in Hampstead. It is on the north or countryward side, beyond the Heath, between North End and the " Spaniards." North End, every cockney knows, lies in a hollow over the Heath, a cluster of villa residences amid gardens and pleasure- N 178 WILLIAM BLAKE essay grounds, their roofs embosomed in trees. As you walk from it towards the " Spaniards," a winding lane to the left brings you back into the same high road. A little off this there is another winding way, in the middle of which stands Collins's Farm, at the bottom of another hollow. The house, an old one, looks out in front upon the heathery hillside, at back upon meadows and hedgerows, in summer one monotonous tint of heavy green. From the hillside the well-pitched red roof of the farmhouse picturesquely peeps out among the trees below. To London children the place must have been a little Paradise. Blake, too, notwithstanding a theoretic dislike to Hampstead, practically enjoyed his visits. Mr. Lin- nell's part of the house — a later erection than the rest, and of lower height, with a separate entrance through the garden, which stretches beside — was small and humble, containing only five rooms. In front it commanded a pleasant southern aspect. Blake, it is still remembered, would often stand at the door, gazing in tranquil revei^ie across the garden toward the gorse-clad hill. He liked sitting in the arbour at the bottom of the long gaidcn, or walking up and down the same at dusk, while the cows, munching their evening meal, were audible from the farmyard on the other side of the hedge. He was very fond of hearing Mrs. Liimell sing Scottish songs, and would sit by the pianoforte, tears falling from II WILLIAM BLAKE 179 his eyes, while he listened to the Border melody to which the song is set, commencing — ■ Nanny's liair is yellow as gowd, And lier een as the lift are blue. To simple national melodies Blake was very im- pressionable, though not so to music of more compli- cated structure. He himself still sang in a voice tremidous with age, sometimes old l^allads, sometimes his own songs to melodies of his own. The modest interior of the rustic cottage was rendered delightful, as artists generally can render their houses, by taste- ful fitting up and by fine prints and pictures hanging on the walls. Many an interesting friendly gathering- took place there, comprising often a complete circle of what are vulgarly called " characters." Sometimes, for instance, it would be, besides Blake and Mr. Linnell, Dr. Thornton, John Varley, and his brother, Cornelius, the latter living still, and well known in the scientific world, as a man devoted to the ingenious arts ; all, as one of them confessed to me, men " who did not propose to themselves to be as others," but to follow out views of their own. Sometimes Mulready would be of the company ; Richter also — a name familiar to frequenters of the old Water -Colour Society's Exhibition — who was a fervent disciple of Emanuel Kant, and very fond of iterating the meta- physical dogma of the non-existence of matter. . . . More often the circle at Hampstead wovdd be Blake, Linnell, and John Varley : a curiously- con- 180 AVILLIAM BLAKE essay trasted trio, as an eye-witness reports, to look upon in animated converse. Blake, with his quiet manner, his fine head — broad above, small below ; Varley's the reverse : Varley stout and heavy, yet active, and in exuberant spirits — ingenious, diffuse, poetical, eager, — talking as fast as possible ; Linnell original, brilliant, with strongly -marked character and filial manner towards Blake, assuming nothing of the patron, for- bearing to contradict his stories of his visions, etc., but trying to make reason out of them. Varley found them explicable astrologically, " Sagittarius crossing Taurus," and the like ; while Blake, on his part, believed in liis friend's astrology to a certain extent. He thought you could oppose and conquer the stars. A stranger, hearing the three talk of spirits and astrology in this matter-of-fact way, would have been mystified. Varley was a terrible assertor, bearing down all before him l)y mere force of loquacity, though not learned or deeply grounded, or even very original in his astrology which he had caught up at second-hand. But there was stuft' in him. His con- versation was powerful ; and by it he exerted a strong influence on ingenuous minds — a power he lost in his books. Writing was an art he liad not mastered. These were the quiet relaxations which Blake found while the noble plates from Jolj were being slowly engraved in the little room in Fountain Court. II WILLIAM BLAKE 181 Before being permitted to Imiidle its solemn pages, every spectator ought to be forewarned and instructed that these designs are the Latest pro- ducts of a hand growing stiff with age and verging on immortality, and should approacli them with something of the reverence with which the young ought to " rise up before the gray hairs." It is true that the drawings for the series were made when he was in the vigour of life. But every line of these plates was cut directly by the patient, wrinkled hand. He was poor, though contented, at this period of life. He had struggled through years of shameful and Bceotian neglect into the valley of age and decline. Even his patron Mr. Butts was alienated from him. The lioyal Academy had given him a grant of £25 out of its funds, showing tliat want was endeavouring to stare him out of countenance. At this juncture John Linnell stepped forward and gave the commission, at his own risk, for the execution of these designs from the Book of Jul. In pleasant little instalments of from £2 to £,'5 per week was the simple and frugal Old Master paid, while day by day the sharp graver cut these immortal lines. At this time he was like a simple Stoic philo- sopher in his one room in Fountain Court, Strand 182 WILLIAM BLAKE essay (how very strange a place for such a work ! — one would have thought rather they had been graven among mountains and Druidic cairns), surrounded by a little band of loving disciples, some of whom are amongst us at this day — two at least well known to fame — George Eichmond, the eminent portrait painter, and Samuel Palmer, whose pro- foundly poetic water-colour landscapes are still to be seen year by year on the walls of " the Old Water- Colour Society." N'o profits were realised 1)1/ the eivjrarhvjs ; their sale hardly covering ex- penses. The price of Paradise Lust will occur to the literary reader as he sighs over the last sentence ; but regardless of mere money-success, the old man ploughed over his last fields as the sun of life stood red in the horizon, and the vale darkened beneath his feet. The "long patience" of this stalwart son of toil and imagination endured to the end and saw no earthly reward. The thin, enduring furrows of these " inventions," traced by the ploughshare of his graver, have borne fruit since then ; but not for him nor for her he left behind. AVe must not attempt a full description of these inventions. Let us again say, that the style II WILLIA.M BLAKE 183 of their execution is of that intense, primeval, severe, and unaffected kind most suited to repro- duce scenes of the early world, but bare and dry, and as if centuries had eaten into their substance and left tlieni as the torrent streams are left among the barren heights. If with this explanation the engravings should greatly disappoint the observer, let him pass by them and go forward to something more congenial. Their Runic power and pathos is not for him. Each design has a border, which is a sort of outlined commentary in harmony with the subject and often allusive to it. It opens with a family picture of the patriarch, his wife, and children gathered under a vast tree — the parents sitting, the sons and daughters kneeling in worship ; the " homestead " is seen beyond close-packed flocks of sheep. Some rams of the flock and lambs of the fold lie in the fore- ground, M'hile the great sun sets and the crescent moon rises over heights stormy and barren. In the next, the vine and fig-tree of home, angel- guarded, overshades the luxurious ease of family love ; but above this tender vision is one more awful. The Ancient of Days (who is to be read by the instructed eye in Ilis cramped grandeur rather as an unlettered symbol of Divinity than as 184 WILLIAM BLAKE essay a representation of Him) sits upon His throne closed in by clouds and bowing cherubim while Satan presents his malignant plea. It is granted ; and in the succeeding scenes he works his fiery will. The darkening page seems to crackle with sulphurous and sudden flame; the strong pillars tremble and lurch and fall, crushing the lovely and the strong under their ruins. The rampant, rejoicing demon dances on the cornices and flaps his dragon- wings in glee; wdiile, in the margin, strange glints of issuing claws and eating fires crawl upward. Then the JNIesseugers are seen precipitating themselves one by one on the astonished eye of the patriarch and his wife. In the border Satan walks majestically on the circle of the earth, and round and below him the light- ninf shivers, "the all- dreaded thunder- stone " explodes, and the billowing waves of fire still curl and creep threateningly. Nevertheless, we see farther on the patient man — still with his attendant angels (so like the angels of Fra Angelico !) relieving the poor as before ; but the landscape is bereaved and desolate, and over the sharp stern ridges of the hills the sky encloses another heavenly conclave. The Tather of Heaven and His shrinking hosts watch how II AVILLIA:\I BLAKE 185 Lucifer in his wrath gathers in his hand the bottles of heaven into one pliant orifice, from which he sprinkles plagues and pains on the head of Job. The outline comment shows us the now manifest dragons of the pit with sombre eyes among thorns and piercing swords of flame which are soon to strike through his bones and flesh. And again, we see the faithful servant of God laid low. There is no vision in the upper air — all is cold and vaporous gloom. The bellying cloud becomes a reservoir of agony, wielded like a huge wine-skin of wrath and poured as before on the overthrown form upon the ground. Tlie sea blackens and the mighty rims of the setting sun seem to depart in protest. The scathed hills and scattered ruins against which the now pre- dominant Adversary rears himself, are abandoned by all blessing, wliile his unholy feet trample the righteous man into the dust. There is a series of symbols of lament in the border : a broken crook ; a restless, complaining grasshopper ; tlie toad and the shard ; the thistle and the wounding thorn. Then come the friends, with uplifted hands and sorrowful eyes ; while some strange, darting liorizou - li"ht like a northern aurora cuts out 186 WILLIAM BLAKE essay into gloomy relief the black mountain, wliich rises beyond a city desolate as Tadmor in the wilder- ness. The patriarch sitting on his dunghill, in the following design, spreads upward his pleading, appealing, protesting hands, while the friends bow beside the dishevelled wife and speak never a word. Light is withdrawn ; clouds steam from the rock ; and below, in the border, the dull fungus spreads its tent where evil dews drip on berries of poison. Still following down the darkening steps of grief, we behold the "terror by night" — described by Eliphaz — transacted in vision over a crouching group of the bereaved pair and their friends. The hair of his head stands up, while an apparition, dignified and ominous, walks arrayed with white nimbus and fire-darting cloud. Then again Job kneels, and the six scornful hands of his friends are levelled against his expanded Neptunian breast like spears as he proclaims his integrity; and worse than this, the fearful, hissing whisper of the over-tempted wife of his bosom rises to his ear bidding him to curse God and die. That is not the extremest depth of his woe. All hell seems to hurtle over his couch in the succeeding design ; jointed lightnings splinter amidst a lurid gloom ; demons throng the II WILLIAM BLAKE 187 chamber, and shake their chains by the bed ; iunumerable tongues of fire search through and through what shoukl be the place of rest ; while the Arch-Eneniy — now transformed into a volu- minous incubus serpent-wreathed — presses down in thunderous imminence upon his very soul, as foul and fiendish arms grasp the limbs of Job, longing to hurry him away. The border is now all fire, which wavers and soars triumphantly as over a sacked city. Our memory recalls a fine stanza, by a friend, which expresses the sentiment of this dark picture — My bones are filled witli feverish tire, My tongue liatlr nigli foi'got to speak, My couch is like a hurning pyre, My heart throbs wildly e'er it break. God, luy God, hear when I pray, And help — no other help I know ; 1 am full of tossings to and fro Unto the dawning of the day.^ But now a calm falls on the scene of sorrow. Heads are uplifted. Elihu, the son of Barachel the Buzite, speaks, and the vast stars shine around his head out of the black pall of night. All eyes rest on him except those of the despairing wife. There is a listening fear in their n-gard 1 William Davies, Suiujs of a Wayfarer. 188 WILLIAM BLAKE ESSAY as he speaks, saying, " When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble ? " A lovely marginal illustration shows, as it were, the beginning of a new hope. From the prostrate figure of the saint, on whose bosom hope seems to lie dead, there is a gradual lifting up of little angel-thoughts which, rising higher and higher, at last disappear on their way to the throne of God. There follows a subject of amazing grandeur — God speaks out of the incumbent wreatlis of the whirlwind ; and in tlie outer space there are sketchings that seem to represent the very roots of creation, while its boiling energies appear to overflow above. Now the elder sons of God sing together with clapping wings among the studded stars ; the Ahnighty spreads His arms of command and the coursers of the morning leap forth ; the silent-rushing dragons of the night issue into its purple hollows ; and, as it were, hidden in " a vacant intevlunar cave," Job and his friends behold and meditate on these things. And auain on other wonders: Behemoth tramps the earth; Leviathan wallows in the deep. Then, farther on, "Satan falls as lightning from heaven"; the shadows flee ; the sweet returns of the Divine favour brighten on the head of Job, while they II WILLIAM BLAKE 189 flash condemnation on the heads of his sceptical friends. Still farther, the altar of grateful sacrifice sends its pyramid of flame into the heaven of heavens. In the border of this invention are drawn, curiously enough, a palette and pencils and a graver. We never see this without surmis- ing some personal allusion in it and thinking of George Herbert's poem of The Flower — Who would have thought my shrivelled heart Could have recovered greenness ? It was gone Quite under ground : as flowers depart To see their mother-root when they have blown, Where they together All the hard weather Dead to the world keep house unknown. And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write ; I once more smell the dew and rain, And rcliah versing. my only Light ! It cannot be That I am he On whom Tliy tempests fell all night ! How sweet and grave is the next chapter of the story ! Dappled lights break over the newly- fruited fig-tree ; corn waves in the morning wind. Subdued, but with more than his old dignity, the restored patriarch unresentfully and thankfully receives from " every one a piece of money." 190 WILLIAM BLAKE ESSAY Time flows on, and in future years we look on him once again. In " a chamber of imagery," frescoed round with reminiscences of the long past " days of darkness," Job sits. Three daughters more lovely than those he lost clasp his knees ; while he, with longer waving beard and an aspect of deeper eld, recounts the story of his trial and his deliverance, his arms wide floating in grateful joy. In the last scene of all a full-voiced pgean rises. Under the ao-ed oak, where we saw the former family gathered in prayer, we now see standing in the exultation of praise a group of sons more strong and active, of daughters more beautiful and sweet. The psalm swells on the evening air ; resonant harp keeps time with warbling lute ; the uplifted silver trumpets peal ; the pastoral reed soothes the close -crowding, white -fleeced flocks ; a crescent rises as of yore ; while the sun, darting its rays to the zenith, sinks over the hills of God who blesses " the latter end of Job more than the beginning." If we mio'ht have our wish, we would select some accessible but far removed quiet vale where Corinthian capitals could never intrude. Here we would have built a strong, enduring, gray-stone, II WILLIAM BLAKE 191 simple building of one long cliamlDer, lighted from above. This chamber should be divided into niches. In each niche, and of the size of life, there should be done in fresco in low tones of simple, deep colour, one of these grand designs inlaid in a broad gold flat, which should be incised in deep brown lines with the sub-signification of Blake's MargiTuilia. They should be executed by men well paid by the Government — men like G. F. Watts and D. G. Eossetti, and Madox Brown and Burne- Jones, and W. B, Scott. At the inner end of this hall of power there should be a marble statue of Blake by Woolner — His looks commercing witli the skies, His rapt soul sitting in his eyes. He should be standing on a rock, its solid strenath overlapped by pale, marmoreal flames, while below his feet twined gently the " Serpent of Eternity." The admission should be by ticket — the claim to life-tickets founded upon a short examination passed before a " Blake commission." None \vho could not pass this examination satisfactorily should be admitted to those sacred precincts. The trees should whisper, the brook should murmur in the glade for the delectation of those 192 WILLIAM BLAKE essay who had earned tlieir title to enter; and the lodge-gates, kept by " a decayed historical painter," should never open to any who would be likely to laugh at the " queer little figures up in the air," which are the symbols of heavenly realities in the little gray or dark designs we have been endeavouring to describe. Some partially finished and very grand and awful subjects from Dante, also commissioned by John Linnell, succeeded ; and these lasted in various stages of completion till the cunning, patient liand stiffened in death, and the over- informino; mind fled to other regions of existence. We cannot afford room for gathering up further traits of character, or narrating other incidents in his history. He died on 12th August 1827. His wife survived him till the 18th of October 1831, having subsisted during the years of widowhood by the judicious, gradual sale of his remaining drawings and books, befriended and consoled by a few faithful ones, among whom Mr. and Mrs. Tatham were conspicuous. The " Kate," the details of whose history were so closely inter- twined with those of her husband's life, to whom she was so fit a companion, died in Mrs. Tatham's arms. Mr, Tatham, from whom we remember some years ir WILLIA]\r BLAKE 193 ago receiving some graphic touches of description of Blake's person and habits, we hope still sur- vives. He painted the portrait of Edward Irving which is so well known by the engraving, and was intimately acquainted with him. We shall attempt no final summary of Blake's powers and position as an artist. To pay some small tribute to his memory, from whom for many years we have received such unbounded delight and instruction, has been a growing wish ; and, in our humble measure, we have been able now to carry it into effect. He stands, and must always stand, eminently alone. The fountain of thought and knowledge to others, he could never be the head of a school. "What is best in him is wholly inimitable. " The fire of God was in him " ; and as all through his works this subtle element plays and penetrates, so in all he did and said the ethereal force flamed outward, warming all who knew how to use it aright, scorching or scathing all who came im- pertinently near to it. He can never be popular in the ordinary sense of the word, write we never so many songs in his praise, simply because the region in which he lived was loniote from the common concerns of life, and still more by reason 194 WILLIAM BLAKE essay ii of the truth of the "mystic sentence" uttered by his own lips, and once before cited in these pages — Nor is it ])ossihh to tlioiujht A greater than itself to hnoio. Ill ALEXANDER SMITH ' Though the habit of reviewing on insufficient material is to be deprecated, it is not necessary, when we make our observations on a book which has interested us, that we should be able to stand an examination in all the works of the author we review. The Last Leaves of Alexander Smith has afforded pleasant reading in some holiday hours, and as it has awakened many thoughts concerning past impressions of the works of Alexander Smith, and of the school to which he belonged, a few remarks will here be offered of a discursive rather than very seriously critical character, Tliese Last Leaves are interesting, and may be welcomed. They include a short memoir of Alexander Smith by his friend, ^ This essay was written as a review of " Last Leaves ; Sketches and Criticisms, by Alexander Smith, edited, with a Memoir, by P. P. Alexander." It was imblishcd in the London Quarterly l>cview, October 1868. 196 ALEXANDER SMITH ESSAV Patrick Proctor Alexander, who is known by a volume on Mill and Carlyle — the parody on Car- lyle being a clever and amusing extravaganza. There is an oval portrait — taken evidently from a photograph of the subject of the memoir — a sturdy, honest face, with beard and moustache, a solid square brow, over eyes which seem to have a " cast " in them, not to the extent of being dis- agreeable, though " there is something about it so very peculiar." We often see a civil engineer or a public official with such a physique and such a walking-stick — a man decisive, direct, good- humoured, not to be trifled with, putting every- thing by a touch into its right place. But such a presence is the last kind of personality which the youth Byron -and -Shelley -smitten, who turned down interesting collars in hope of the Muse alighting on them to whisper fairy-like into his ear, would have attributed to the chief of what was called " The Spasmodic School." Music and passion and self-questioning and the questioning of the universe are not by the mass of active men thought to be compatible with hard-headedness ; and yet there are many instances in which they are met with in close alliance, so close indeed that the poem is never published, and the " questionings Ill ALEXANDER SMITH 197 are all settled by a liappy marriage and a pros- perous middle age." The great unwritten poems no doubt are more tlian those M'hich are on record, as "the night of time far exceedeth the day." Poetry is no such speciality as it might appear. Happy he for the most part who can deter himself from turning his poetry into verse, and, above all, who has the fortitude to keep it from the loud acclaim and the fossilising power of the press. Whether this remark applies fairly to The Life Drama, is more than we should be desirous of affirming. The public of ten years ago did not think this. Men of middle age will remember when, having passed their exultant youth, they were entering on their golden manhood, while, the mind not yet closed to anything new in the way of imaginative literature, there was a sudden floating into the vacant spaces of its upper skies of a group of starry poets. Festus, and Balder, and The Life Drama, were themes inexhaustible for young scholars, young barristers, and young ladies of taste and sensibility. Whether their writers were real poets, strong poets, poets whose works would last, was the question. There was a great variety of replies. The younger folk were rapturously de- 198 ALEXANDER SMITH essay lighted ; and probably many a now sober-minded critic first rushed into the field, and threw down his glove in defence of these lately risen stars. In confessing our own position towards them, we must honestly say that we were not carried off our feet by the rush. Whether w^e really ever read The Life Drama, and Balder, and TJie Roman, in any way giving them a fair hearing, we dare not at this distance of time undertake to affirm. We had voted for Tennyson before Tennyson was much heard of. Thin, little, gray first editions in country libraries had won our heart ; falling on the receptive tenderness of early youth the silver melodies would not readily turn out to make room for others. The Ode to a Nightingale, and To a Grecian Urn, and Hyperion, had established themselves in the memory and imagination, moving reverently round the granitic and unquestioned monuments of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and the substantial pile which Wordsworth had almost finished building, and not rudely walking by the shrines of Byron and Shelley, or disturbing that schoolboy reverence for the "grassy barrows" of the elder world, near which we breathed a severer air, and felt impulses more stately, solemn, and Ill ALEXANDER SMITH 199 subdued. We did not, therefore, throw up our cap to greet the newcomers, any more than we received them with a disobliging air. The poet who was " greater than Keats in the very qualities in which Keats is finest," and " whose poems were in no respect inferior to those of the Laureate," did not strike us as being quite that. And yet our impression is, that there was in them much beauty and music and pathos and possible power for those who, being on the proper level of age, might have " need of such vanity." And there- fore we could, without violently wheeling round, see the sudden eclipse of the rising fame, and to some extent join in the good-humoured laugh created by Firmilian. Here, again, we are sur- prised to find how familiar a thing may, in a sense, become to us without our having gone through the labour of careful perusal. We should be sorry to commit ourselves to the assertion that we ever properly read Firmilian. This, however, we are very sure of, that it was thought very witty, and that it was a " telling hit " against the " Spasmodic School." Wendell Holmes truly says that "society is a strong infusion of books," and but for the staining power of the infusion of that time we should not have been 200 ALEXANDER SMITH essay able to enter with so much interest into the vohime under notice. We cauoht the current temper'^of the hour; helped, no doubt, to pass the catchword which did more harm than the criticism ; but, not having been seriously com- promised, we can now brush away the unfallen tear as we sigh over these fallen Last Leaves, and see how " the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." The brief biography of Alexander Smith is soon told, and another sigh is added by the man who turns aside to see his grave, as he thinks in how small a space is compressed con- cerning most even able men all we need to know. He was born at Kilmarnock on the last day of 1829. His father was a pattern designer, who gave him a good education, and brought him up to his own calling. His power and will to read was early developed, and in English literature he was " an unusually well-read man even among men professedly literary." The biographer says that it was proposed to educate him for the ministry, but seems to think it no great cause for regret that he did not become " a parson," for that " there seems no special reason to suppose he would have shone as a pulpit orator." The biographer's very cursory glance at the subject, and his view of the nature in ALEXANDER SMITH 201 of the disqualificatiou, suggest a wonder as to what the conception of such a man may be in regard of a vocation to the Christian ministry. Alexander Smith did not shine in pattern designing, but no doubt pursued his work steadily, writing poems in the interval of business, and sending them to the "Poets' Corner" of the Glasgow Citizen. In time he forwarded a bundle of poems to George Gilfillan, who, whatever may be the depth or strength of his own gifts, had, as we judged by his criticism of those days met with here and there, a generous, warm, and enthusiastic greeting to give to any young poet who showed reasonable promise of excellence — reminding one of the fervour and nobility of mind with which Christopher North wrote his fine rhapsodies of praise. No wonder that the poet should retain a grateful sense of the critic's kindness in the furtherance of his interests at the commencement of his career. The Life Drama appeared first in the pages of The Critic, then accessible to GilHllan and his proteges ; it was afterwards separately published, and Alexander Smith " found himself famous." One of the pleasant accidents of periodical and discursive literature is the amber-like power it has 202 ALEXANDER SMITH essay of embalming the " strays " of the world of mind. In this short memoir of the poet there is an amusing and graphic sketch of " an original," who, at this time and as long as he lived, was the most intimate of the poet's friends. His name was Hugh Macdonald. He was an enthusiastic and vigorous Celt, who never condescended to English (though not for want of acquaintance with it), a factory operative, who by the path of natural history and poetry — that of poetry being repre- sented chiefly by his reverential regard to Burns — emerged into a higher level and mixed with better company than that to which he was born. It is greatly to the credit of Alexander Smith's good sense and general strenofth that he should be so constant in his attachment to one who in regard to his poetry could use habitually and unhesita- tingly such language as the following : — I like ye weel, Sandy, and that ye weel ken ; but as for yer poetry as ye ca't, I mak' but little o't. It maij be poetry. I'm no sayin' it is ua. The creetics say it's poetry, an' nae doot they suld ken — but it's no my kind o' poetry. Jist a blatter o' braw words, to my mind, an' bit whirly-Avhas they ca' eemages. I can mak' neither head nor tail o't. The biograplier says — Ill ALEXANDER SMITH 203 It became part of the regular programme, at some time or other of the evening, to skilfully lead the conversation up to a discussion of Smith's claims, when Macdonald never failed in effect to deliver him- self with trenchant emphasis as above, however the tune might be played with lively and ingenious variations. Smith seemed always to enjoy quite as heartily as any one else, what should have been his own discomfiture, and shortly after the two oddly- assorted companions would go off into the night together. IMacdonald wrote songs and sang them in tunes, largely, " of Ms own composing " ; and in knowledge of the habits of birds and insects, the growth of trees and flowers, and in all that lore which is so useful to the poet, he seems to have been deeply versed — reminding one of that strange beins: beloncrino" to the Emersonian circle, Thoreau, to whom surely the lines in Emerson's Wood Notes must refer — And such I knew, a forest seer, A minstrel of the natural year. Foreteller of the vernal ides. Wise harbinger of spheres and tides ; A lover true wlio knew by heart Each joy the mountain dales impart ; It seemed that nature could not raise A plant in any secret place. 204 ALEXANDER SMITH essay In (j^uaking bog, ou snowy hill, Beneath the grass that shades the rill, Under the snow, beneath the rocks, In damp fields known to bird and fox ; But he would come in the very hour It ojDened in its virgin bower. As if a sunbeam showed the place, Aiid tell its long descended race ; It seemed as if the breezes brought him, It seemed as if the sparrows taught him ; As if by secret sight he knew Where in far fields the orchis grew. There are many events in the field AVhich are not shown to common eyes ; But all her shows did nature yield To please and win this jjilgrim wise. He saw the partridge drum in the Avoods, He heard the woodcock's evening hymn, He found the tawny thrush's broods. And the shy hawk did wait for him. What others did at distance hear. And guessed within the thicket's gloom. Was showed to this philosoj)her, And at bis bidding seemed to come. And, as an instance of this, the succeeding characteristic and, to our mind, beautiful touch of poetic life is worth transcribing. " Once, as we were pacing quietly along a wooded stretch of the river-side, he broke out suddenly, ' Od, but he's a queer fallow that ! ' and, catching on the instant our surprise — no soul being visible in the land- scape to whom the remark would apply — he added, Ill ALEXANDER S:\[ITH 205 ' It's that chiel, Tennyson, I'm speakin' o'. Hark ye baith noo,' and in his very best English manner he went on to quote — " ' "Why lingers slie to clothe lier heart with love, I/O ' Delaying, as the tender ash delays To clothe herself ivhen all the woods are green. " ' Ye mind it, Sandy ! it's i' the Princess. An' noo, look ye, that's an ash' — pointing with his staff — 'may be ye think it's an elm, Sandy! but it's no an elm, it's an ash, an deil a leaf on't ; see ye na ? an a' the ither trees are oot. I didna need ony o' yer Tennysons to tell me that — but neither o' ye kent it, I reckon. He's nae poet, I'll aye say that ; but I'se alloo ye'll no aften find him wrang wi' his flooers, an' his trees, an' things — he kens them, Sandy ! an' ye dinna. But ye're nae poets, neither tane nor t'ither o' ye.' " Indeed, the poet of poets to him — Shakespeare, witli much reluct- ance, excepted — was " Eabbie " Burns. The publication of The Life Drama, as has been said, raised the poet into instant fame ; and, when it is recollected that at the time of its publi- cation he was not more than two-and-twenty, this was, no doubt, a marvellous achievement. In estimating the works of men as works, we apply the more abstract standard ; but in estimating a 206 ALEXANDER SMITH essay career, it is well to pause and remember the cir- cumstances under which the given results are produced. It is true that Alfred Tennyson was young when he first began to publish his verse, but the youthful opportunities of Tennyson far exceeded those of Alexander Smith. An early life of education and leisure in a rural parsonage was passed under the influence of a father, himself a man of great accomplishments and learning. The seven elins — the poplars four, That stood beside his father's door, grew in the sweet air of the tranquil wolds where " every sound is sweet," where the doves moan in " firry woodlands," and the brook, with its " matted cress and ribbed sand," winds among anemones and violet-banks — beauties worthily celebrated in his Ode to Memory, and not exaggerated by the poet's fancy. He had a college education, and in what company and under what glorious influences let the Memorials of Arthur Hallam, and the wonderful threnody of In Memoriam, best tell. And yet, when first his silken sail was launched out into the open sea, there were many imperfec- tions seen in the rig of his vessel. " Eusty, Crusty, Christopher," who had an eye for such craft, was Ill ALEXANDER SMITH 207 able to spy out as many youthful defects as Cap- tain Cap in The Pnthfinder saw in the vessels of Lake Ontario. Byron was young when he pub- lished liis Hours of Idleness; but he was high- born and was college-bred when they were written, and when his hours were changed by the rod of Brougham into Hours of Indignation.. So with Shelley. And even from the precociousness of Keats — who was far from being the boy " born over a stable " Mdiich the careless phrase would suggest — the "tartarly" Quarterly struck out a plentiful mirth — all long since blackened into the merest forgotten tinder. If we remember the town birth, the modest education, tlie business ties of Alexander Smith, up to the period when, with no large experience of life in any form, he wrote The Life Drama, it will greatly modify and guide our appreciation of the native potentialities of the man. That he should not know overmuch of details which hide in the woods, bask in the fields, and glance along the streams, is no wonder, if we have seen Glasgow, and remember that he was designing patterns there. Tliat he should have lifted his eyes to the stars and the sun, and heard the " far seas moan as a single shell " in the ear of his imagination, should 208 ALEXANDER SMITH essay have heard the winds sweep in the wynds of the manufacturing town, and been haunted by them, and reproduced them with great effect again and again, was what might have been expected from such a youth so born and nurtured. But the critics, alas ! knew too much and too little. He must have been a strong youth to overtop the influences that surrounded him, and produce a work which, for a while, constituted a large section of the critics into a " Spasmodic School " of rapture. His biographer interjects a happy quotation — These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die, as they did ere long. There seems to be something in the Scottish genius which gives to it the power of sustaining the shock of sudden fame more manfully than the English genius sustains it. The pleasant account in Allan Cunningham's Life of Wilhie of the way in which the youth of twenty-one bore one of the most violent hurricanes of applause which ever threatened to dash a young painter in pieces, is worth comparing with the account now given of the way in which Alexander Smith bore up under the Parnassian tornado. The writer nr ALEXANDER S.MITH 209 says : " Some little show of elation might here very well have been excused to him, but I should be surprised if any one could say he ever saw in him the smallest trace of such a thing." This fact increases the consideration and respect with which we read anything he produced, and will probably induce many a man, who did not succumb to The Life Brama when it first appeared, to return to it with a new light upon its pages, now that the drama of the life of its author is concluded, and The monument above Ins bones, And aye-remaining lamps, are set up and kindled. One flash in the brief life of personal enjoyment of the results of fame is recorded. He received his first £100, and, on the strength of it, he went with John Nichol to the Lakes and to London, making various literary acquaintance — Herbert Spencer, Lewes, Helps, Miss Martineau, and others.^ 1 We cannot refrain from singling out a highly anuising note connected -with his visit to Miss Martineau. " iliss Martineau, it is otherwise well known, is a little infirm of hearing. When the travellers arrived, several ladies were with her, and by the little circle of petticoats they were received with some empi-essc- ment. Mr. Nichol took up the running, and some little conver- sation proceeded, Smith, in the racing-phrase, waiting. Pre- sently he ' came with a rush, ' and oljserved it ' had been a very fine day' — an unimpeachable and excellent remark whicli P 210 ALEXANDER SMITH essay He also became, for a week, the guest of the Duke of Argyle at Inveraray Castle. All this was what any reasonable young poet, of the spasmodic or any other school, might fairly call success. If he did not enjoy these two great phases of fame — the applause of the critics and the favourable personal regard of the gifted and the ennobled — there was little of very tangible enjoyment of it to be pro- cured or expected. He had, and we may hope he relished, both. After this interlude, it was needful that he should turn to consider his future way of life and " means to live." After a little desultory work for the press, he obtained the secretaryship to the brought him instantly into difficulties. Miss Martineau was at once on the qioi vive. The poet had made a remark jirobably instinct with fine genius, and wortliy of the author of The Life Drama. ' Would Mr. Smitli be so good as to repeat what he had said ? ' Mr. Smith — looking, no doubt, uncom- monly like an ass — repeated it in somewhat a higher key. Alas ! alas ! in vain. The old lady shook her head. ' It was really 50 annoying, but she did not quite catch it ; would Mr. Smitli be again so good ? ' and her hand was at her eager ear. The imhappy bard, feeling, as lie said, in his distress as if suicide might be the thing, shrieked and again shiieked his little piece of information — symptoms of ill-suppressed merriment becoming obvious around him. Finally the old ladj^'s ear-trumpet was produced, and proceeding to shriek through this instrument, of which the delicate use was unknown to him, the bard nearly blew her head off." Ill ALEXANDER SMITH 211 Edinburgh University, which he retained till his death. The emolument was small (£150 a year), but it would have sufficed if he had remained single. This he did not do. He married in 1857 a ]\Iiss Flora Macdonakl, from the Isle of Skye ; settled " at Wardie, near Granton " ; and there the remainder of his quiet life was passed. His family increased; his few chosen friends went in and out ; his remaining poems, tales, and essays ap- peared one after another. The first splendours of his fame were obscured by the attack of Aytoun, and by the laborious assault on his alleged " plagi- arisms," the work of some one with more memory than wit, and who surely has regretted the pains he took since he learned by whom the poems were written — at what age, and under what circum- stances. A valuable appendix by the biographer gives a fair consideration to the question, which ought never to have been so strongly agitated ; his ^ main point being that, to subject rigidly any of our great modern poets to the same treatment, would be to expose them to the same frivolous charge. Having said thus much, we become con- scious that of Alexander Smith's life there is little more to say. His means needed more and more constant replenishing as his expenses increased. 212 ALEXANDER SMITH essay His work — only varied by a yearly visit of a month to Skye — became more and more close and ex- hausting. The daily routine of his post at the University became yearly more dull and weari- some, till he was disposed to contemplate sheep- farming in Skye as an alternative. Then, like Hugh Miller, as it seems to us, the prey of overwork, he became at length its victim and died — " a kindly Scot," loved and lamented by all who knew him. The Last Leaves, to which the memoir is pre- fixed, consist of nine essays and two poems, pleasant to read, and over which we now purpose to glance. " Scottish Ballads " is the title of the first of them. A slight historic introduction, picturesquely arranged, shows that the ballads which have been handed down to arrest the ear and cause sometimes the eyes to fill with tears, were not the productions of the troubadour or paid minstrel of the court or the hall, whose works are described as being chiefly of the "begging-letter species," eloquent and witty, but not issuing in any great pecuniary results. They got for the most part as their reward, what the wealthy often give, so says the Autocrat of the BreaTxfast-taUe, to those who are personally hired to amuse them, the "funny-bone," and had to subsist on it as they Ill ALEXANDER SMITH 213 could. The ballads were composed and sung in the beginning by gabeiiunzies who roved the country, and sometimes by moss-troopers who reived the farmers of Cumberland, and were pre- served, with many intermixtures and interpola- tions, by the same class of men, who sang old songs and composed new ones, and were not par- ticular where one began and the other ended ; so that, in effect, like the grand Greek verses, they were the product of the mind of a class and of succeeding ages, rather than the single and con- summate invention of one genius. The absorbinj? sense of personal fame, and the jealous guarding of " a name," were not so strong on the spirits of the men of those ages as now. Part of the sim- plicity and power of the " old masters " of painting is, no doubt, traceable to the humble habit of mind which prevented these violent strivings after personal originality. It was of more importance that a fine picture should be painted than that the man whose name was affixed should be accredited with all the virtue and power of the picture. Nature worked her will more directly in those days than in these on the minds of inventors of poetry. The dreadful swaddling bands of modern criticism, and the fact that the high places of the 214 ALEXANDER SMITH essay field have been so occupied by tlie great men who sang before criticism became predominant, must greatly prevent that simple, powerful flow of thought and feeling which makes these pathetic songs very affecting to us. But God forbid that we should return to the social conditions out of which this rude simplicity and headlong pathos sprang : the burning " peel," the " ranshackled " homestead, the murdered good - man, mourning widow, and impaled infant, are a high price to pay for a vivid account of a raid in verse ; and the weird fairy tales, more entirely pleasing now that our faith is shaken in the fairies and their spells, were dearly bought by the widespread superstitions which brought so many twilight thrills of fear, and such midnight sweats of horror and pain. " There is an expression of misery in these ballads which appears frequently in Scottish song, and is in some degree peculiar to the compositions of the nation," says the author. We are content that our poets should be a little tied down, if the mind of the peasant may go free of such groundless shadowy creeds, and the home of the peaceful farmer be spared the sight of the seamed visage, battered " sallet," and cruel lance of " Edom o' Gordon." in ALEXANDER SMITH 215 In the " Essay on an Old Subject " there is the pensive treatment proper to a consideration of " Old Age." Cicero and Henry Taylor, Wendell Holmes and Bulwer, have had each to come to their turn over this theme, as most of us have who live to " brush out the first gray hair." 'What has struck us in reading most of the essays of the " pensive " kind on this subject, is that to a fair estimate of the question there should go an unflinching survey of all the conditions of human existence, the whole destiny and duty of man. Estimated by a merely earthly standard, there is no doubt something to be said as to the ameliora- tions of the condition of old age. There is the calmer judgment, the abated passion. There are the sweet daily habitudes and the fruition which early activities have left. We much question Avhether they actually fortify the mind to any great extent, unless there be a basis much deeper than can be arrived at by looking on that which now appears. An exquisite frank song of Shakespeare speaks nearer the truth in this matter — Youth is full of pleasancp, Age is full of care ; Youtli like summer brave, 216 ALEXANDER SMITH essay Age like winter bare ; Age, I do abhor tliee, Youth, I do adore thee. "We think," said the aged poet, Eogers, " anything beautiful that is young." We have seen and could point to many who seem to have reached a basis on which all the remaining delic;hts of aQ:e stand like ivied walls without crumbling or falling, whose heart is as fresh, whose smile as sweetly gay as in youth — but our observation has gone to show that this basis is only reached by descending to a rock not subject to the assaults and mutations of time. The most striking thought and the most important, if it be true, in the essay " On Dreams and Dreaming," is that the dream represents the real man, that disguises and accidental aids fall off from us in sleeping, and that we stand exposed to ourselves. If we find ourselves cowardly when attacked in dreams, we shall be sure to be cowards when attacked with our eyes open, etc. Probably, something of our real character follows us into our dreams. Our life is largely the Stuff as dreams are made of. But referring to our own character on this theory. Ill ALEXANDER SMITH 217 we feel a little puzzled. " We are," certainly, at at least, " seven." And which of the seven is our waking self "it passes tlie wit of man" to tell. "jNIethought I was — there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had — but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called Bottom's dream, because it hath no bottom." The "hempen home-spun," who was practising in "a wood, near Athens," for the approaching nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, well describes in these words manv of our mental night -wanderino;s. At rare intervals we have what comes nearer to the " clear dream and solemn vision " of Milton. But when dreams are most express and clear, there remain the most bewildering discrepancies. Sometimes we are charfTin