THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF PARLIAMENT.
In our last we briefly adverted to the gratifying fact that Mr. Barry had at least a thousand superficial feet on the walls of the new Houses of Parliament at the services of the historical painters of England; and we also, in a passing manner, suggested a few compositions worthy of their pencils. A reconsideration of the matter convinces us that the subject is too important—too national, to be adopted as merely the fringe of our article; and we have therefore determined within ourselves to devote our present essay to a serious discussion of the various pictures that are, or ought, to decorate the interior of the new House of Commons. As for the House of Lords, we see no necessity whatever for lavishing the fine inspirations of art on that temple of wisdom; inasmuch as the sages who deliberate there are, for the most part, born legislators, coming into the world with all the rudiments of government in embryo in their baby heads, and, on the twenty-first anniversary of their birthday, putting their legs out of bed adult, full-grown law-makers. It would be the height of democratic insolence to attempt to teach these chosen few: it would, in fact, be a misprision of treason against the sovereignty of Nature, who, when making the pia mater of a future peer of England, knows very well the delicate work she has in hand, and takes pains accordingly. It is different when she manufactures a mob of skulls which, by a jumble of worldly accidents, or by the satire of Fortune in her bitterest mood, may ultimately belong to Members of the House of Commons. These she makes, as they make blocks in Portsmouth-yard, a hundred a minute. All she has to do is to fulfil her contract with the world, taking care that there shall be no want of the raw material for Members of Parliament, leaving it to Destiny to work it up as she may. We have not the slightest doubt, by-the-by, that poor Nature is often very much confounded by the ultimate application of her own handiwork. We can fancy the venerable old gossip at her business, patting up skulls as serenely as our lamented great grandmother (she wrote a very pretty book on the beauties of population, and illustrated the work, too, with portraits from her own hand) was wont to pat up apple-dumplings:—we can imagine Nature—good old soul!—looking over her spectacles at the infant dough, and saying to herself as she finishes skull by skull—“Ha! that will do for a pawnbroker;”—“That, as it’s rather low and narrow, for a sharp attorney;”—“That for a parish constable;”—“That for a clown at a fair,”—and so on. And we can well imagine the astonishment of simple-hearted old Nature on getting a ticket for the gallery of the House of Commons (for very seldom, indeed, has she been known to show herself on the floor), to see her skull of a pawnbroker on the shoulders of a Chancellor of the Exchequer; her caput of the sharp attorney belonging to a Minister of the Home Department; her head of a parish constable as a Paymaster of the Forces; and the dough she had intended to swallow knives and eat fire at wakes and fairs gravely responded to as “an honourable and gallant member!” Whereupon, who can wonder at the amazement and indignation of Mother Nature, and that, with a keen sense of the misapplication of her skulls, she sometimes abuses Mother Fortune in good set terms, mingling with her reproaches the strongest reflections on her chastity?
We have thought it due to the full consideration of our subject so far, to dwell upon the natural difference between the skull of a Peer and the skull of a Commoner. The skull of the noble, as we have shown, is a thing made to order—fitted up, like Mr. MECHI’S pocket-dressing-case, with the ornamental and useful: no instrument can be added to it—the thing is complete. Hence, to employ historical painters for the education of the House of Lords would be a useless and profligate expenditure of art and money. It would be to paint the lily LONDONDERRY—to add a perfume to the violet ELLENBOROUGH. All Peers being from the first—indeed, even in utero—ordained law-makers, statute-making comes to them by nature. How much history goes to prove this, showing that the House of Lords—like the Solomons of the fleur-de-lis—have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing! To attempt to instruct a Peer would be as gross an impertinence to the instinct of his order as to present MINERVA—who no doubt came from the head of JOVE a Peeress in her own right—with a toy alphabet or horn-book.
For the skulls of the House of Commons,—that is, indeed, another question! We are so far utilitarian that we would have the pictures for which Mr. BARRY offers a thousand feet selected solely with a view to the dissemination of knowledge amongst the many benighted members of the House of Commons. We would have the subjects so chosen that they should entirely supersede Oldfield’s Representative History; never forgetting the wants of the most illiterate. For instance, for the politicians on the fifth form, the SIBTHORPS and PLUMPTRES, whose education in their youth has been shamefully neglected, we would have a nice pictorial political alphabet. We do not pride ourselves, be it understood, upon writing unwrinkled verse; we only present the subjoined as a crude idea of our plan, taken we confess, from certain variegated volumes, to be had either of Mr. SOUTER, St. Paul’s Churchyard, or Messrs. DARTON and HARVEY, Holborn.
A was King ALFRED, a monarch of note;
B is BURDETT, who can well turn a coat.
Here we would have the chief incidents of Alfred’s life nicely painted, with BURDETT, late Old Glory, and now Old Corruption. As for the poetry, when we consider the capacities of the learners, that cannot be too simple, too homely. The House, however, may order a Committee of Versification, if it please; all that we protest against is D’ISRAELI being of the number.
C is the CORN-LAWS, that famish’d the poor;
D is the DEBT, that will famish them more.
Here, for the imaginative artist, is an opportunity! To paint the wholesale wickedness and small villanies of the Corn-laws! What a contrast of scene and character! Squalid hovels, and princely residences—purse-proud, plethoric injustice, big and bloated with, its iniquitous gains, and gaunt, famine-stricken multitudes! Then for the Debt—that hideous thing begotten by war and corruption; what a tremendous moral lesson might be learned from a nightly conning of the terrific theme!
We have neither poetic genius nor space of paper to go through the whole of the alphabet; we merely throw out the above four lines—and were we not assured that they are better lines, far more musical, than any to be found in BULWER’S SIAMESE TWINS, we should blush much nearer scarlet than we do—to give an idea of the utility and beautiful comprehensiveness of our plan.
The great difficulty, however, will be to compress the subjects—so multitudinous are they—within the thousand feet allowed by the architect. To begin with the Wittenagemot, or meeting of the wise men, and to end with portraits of Mr. Roebuck’s ancestors—to say nothing of the fine imaginative sketch of the Member for Bath tilting, in the mode of Quixote with the steam-press of Printing-house-square—will require the most extraordinary powers of condensation on the parts of the artists. Nevertheless, if the undertaking be even creditably executed, it will be a monument of national wisdom and national utility to unborn generations of Members. What crowds of subjects press upon us! The History of Bribery might make a sort of Parliamentary Rake’s Progress, if we could but hit upon the artist to portray its manifold beauties. The Windsor Stables and the Education of the Poor would form admirable companion-pictures, in which the superiority of the horse over the human animal could be most satisfactorily delineated—the quadruped having considerably more than three times the amount voted to him for snug lodging, hay, beans, and oats, that the English pauper obtained from Parliament for that manure of the soil—as congregated piety at Exeter Hall denominates it—a Christian education!
What a beautiful arabesque border might be conceived from a perusal of the late Lord Castlereagh’s speeches! We should here have Parliamentary eloquence under a most fantastic yet captivating phase. Who, for instance, but the artist to PUNCH could paint CASTLEREAGH’S figure of a smug, contented, selfish traitor, the “crocodile with his hand in his breeches’ pocket?” Again, does not the reader recollect that extraordinary person who, according to the North Cray Demosthenes, “turned his back upon himself?” There would be a portrait!—one, too, presenting food for the most “sweet and bitter melancholy” to the GRAHAMS and the STANLEYS. There is also that immortal Parliamentary metaphor, emanating from the same mysterious source,—“The feature upon which the question hinges!” The only man who could have properly painted this was the enthusiastic BLAKE, who so successfully limned the ghost of a flea! These matters, however, are to be considered as merely supplementary ornaments to great themes. The grand subjects are to be sought for in Hansard’s Reports, in petitions against returns of members, in the evidence that comes out in the committee-rooms, in the abstract principles of right and wrong, that make members honest patriots, or that make them give the harlot “ay” and “no,” as dictated by the foul spirit gibbering in their breeches’ pockets.
That we may have painted all these things, Mr. BARRY offers up one thousand feet. Oh! Mr. B. can’t you make it ten!
Q.
PUNCH’s PENCILLINGS.—No. XV.
REFLECTION.
“FAREWELL, A LONG FAREWELL, TO ALL MY GREATNESS.”—King Henry VIII.