The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 06 (of 12)

by William Hazlitt

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A., were published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1826 and 1827, entitled ‘Boswell Redivivus.’ Revised and added to, they were published in volume form (8 × 5 inches) by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, London, in 1830, with a portrait of ‘James Northcote, Esq., R.A. in his 82nd Year. Engraved by T. Wright after a drawing by A. Wivell,’ and the following motto on the title-page:—

‘The precepts here of a divine old man

I could recite.

Armstrong.’

The volume was printed by C. Whiting, Beaufort House, Strand, and its text is that of the present issue.

CONVERSATION THE FIRST

Called on Mr. Northcote; had, as usual, an interesting conversation. Spoke of some account of Lord Byron in a newspaper, which he thought must be like. ‘The writer says, he did not wish to be thought merely a great poet. My sister asked, “What then did he wish to be thought?” Why, I’ll tell you; he wished to be something different from every body else. As to nobility, there were many others before him, so that he could not rely upon that; and then, as to poetry, there are so many wretched creatures that pretend to the name, that he looked at it with disgust: he thought himself as distinct from them as the stars in the firmament. It comes to what Sir Joshua used to say, that a man who is at the head of his profession is above it. I remember being at Cosway’s, where they were recommending some charitable institution for the relief of decayed artists; and I said I would not be of it, for it was holding out a temptation to idleness, and bringing those into the profession who were not fit for it. Some one who wanted to flatter me observed, “I wonder you should talk in this manner, who are under such obligations to the art!” I answered immediately, “If I am to take your compliment as I believe it is meant, I might answer, that it is the art that is under obligations to me, not I to it. Do you suppose that Rubens, Titian, and others were under obligations to the art—they who raised it from obscurity and made it all that it is? What would the art be without these?” The world in general, as Miss Reynolds used to say, with reference to her brother, think no more of a painter than they do of a fiddler or a dancing-master or a piano-forte-maker. And so of a poet. I have always said of that dispute about burying Lord Byron in Poet’s Corner, that he would have resisted it violently if he could have known of it. Not but there were many very eminent names there, with whom he would like to be associated; but then there were others that he would look down upon. If they had laid him there, he would have got up again. No; I’ll tell you where they should have laid him—if they had buried him with the kings in Henry VII. Chapel, he would have had no objection to that! One cannot alter the names of things, or the prejudices of the world respecting them, to suit one’s convenience. I once went with Hoppner to the hustings to vote for Horne Tooke; and when they asked me what I was, I said, a painter. At this Hoppner was very mad all the way home, and said I should have called myself a portrait-painter. I replied, the world had no time to trouble their heads about such distinctions. I afterwards asked Kemble, who agreed I was right, that he always called himself a player,’ &c.

I then observed, I had been to the play with G. and his daughter, from the last of whom I had learnt something about Lord Byron’s conversation. ‘What!’ he said, ‘the beauty-daughter?’ I said, ‘Do you think her a beauty, then?’—‘Why no, she rather thinks herself one, and yet there is something about her that would pass for such. Girls generally find out where to place themselves. She’s clever too; isn’t she?’—‘Oh! yes.’—‘What did she tell you about Lord Byron? because I am curious to know all about him.’—‘I asked her if it was true that Lord Byron was so poor a creature as H— represented him? She at first misunderstood me, and said, nothing could be meaner than he was, and gave some instances of it. I said, that was not what I meant; that I could believe any thing of that kind of him; that whatever he took in his head he would carry to extremes, regardless of every thing but the feeling of the moment; but that I could not conceive him to be in conversation, or in any other way, a flat and common-place person.[^[88]] “Oh! no,” she said, “he was not. H— was hardly a fair judge. The other had not behaved well to him, and whenever they met, H— always began some kind of argument, and as Lord Byron could not argue, they made but a bad piece of business of it, and it ended unsatisfactorily for all parties.” I said, H— was too apt to put people to their trumps, or to force them upon doing not what they could do, but what he thought he could do. He, however, not only gave his own opinion, but said, Mr. S— could only just endure Lord Byron’s company. This seemed to me odd; for though he might be neither orator nor philosopher, yet any thing he might say or only stammer out in broken sentences, must be interesting: a glance, a gesture would be full of meaning; or he would make one look about one like the tree in Virgil, that expressed itself by groans. To this she assented, and observed—“At least S— and myself found it so; for we generally sat with him till morning. He was perhaps a little moody and reserved at first; but by touching on certain strings, he began to unbend, and gave the most extraordinary accounts of his own feelings and adventures that could be imagined. Besides, he was very handsome, and it was some satisfaction to look at a head at once so beautiful and expressive!” I repeated what H— told me, that when he and Lord Byron met in Italy, they did not know one another; he himself from having grown so thin, and Byron from having grown so fat, like a great chubby school-boy—a circumstance which shocked his lordship so much, that he took to drinking vinegar at a great rate, that he might recover the figure of the stripling God. I mentioned some things that H— had reported of Lord Byron; such as his saying, “He never cared for any thing above a day,”—which might be merely in a fit of spleen, or from the spirit of contradiction, or to avoid an imputation of sentimentality.’—‘Oh!’ said Northcote, ‘that will never do, to take things literally that are uttered in a moment of irritation. You do not express your own opinion, but one as opposite as possible to that of the person that has provoked you. You get as far from a person you have taken a pique against as you can, just as you turn off the pavement to get out of the way of a chimney-sweeper; but it is not to be supposed you prefer walking in the mud, for all that! I have often been ashamed myself of speeches I have made in that way, which have been repeated to me as good things, when all I meant was that I would say any thing sooner than agree to the nonsense or affectation I heard. You then set yourself against what you think a wrong bias in another, and are not like a wall but a buttress—as far from the right line as your antagonist; and the more absurd he is, the more so do you become. Before you attend to what any one says, you should ask, Was he talking to a fool or a wise man? No; H— would make Lord Byron tributary to him, or would make him out to be nothing. I wonder you admire him as you do, and compare him to the wits of Charles II. It isn’t writing verses or painting a picture—that, as Sir Joshua used to say, is what every body can do: but it is the doing something more than any body else can do that entitles the poet or the artist to distinction, or makes the work live. But these people shut themselves up in a little circle of their own, and fancy all the world are looking at them.’ I said, H— had been spoiled by flattery when he was young. ‘Oh! no,’ he said, ‘it was not that. Sir Joshua was not spoiled by flattery, and yet he had as much of it as any body need have; but he was looking out to see what the world said of him, or thinking what figure he should make by the side of Correggio or Vandyke, not pluming himself on being a better painter than some one in the next street, or being surprised that the people at his own table spoke in praise of his pictures. It is a little mind that is taken up with the nearest object, or puffed up with immediate notice: to do any thing great, we must look out of ourselves and see things upon a broader scale.’

I told Northcote I had promised H— I would bring him to see him; and then, said I, you would think as favourably of him as I do, and every body else that knows him. ‘But you didn’t say any thing in my praise to induce him to come?’—‘Oh! yes; I exerted all my eloquence.’—‘That wasn’t the way. You should have said I was a poor creature, perhaps amusing for half an hour or so, or curious to see like a little dried mummy in a museum: but he would not hear of your having two idols! Depend upon it, he’ll not come. Such characters only want to be surrounded with satellites or echoes: and that is one reason they never improve. True genius, as well as wisdom, is ever docile, humble, vigilant, and ready to acknowledge the merit it seeks to appropriate from every quarter. That was Fuseli’s mistake. Nothing was good enough for him, that was not a repetition of himself. So once when I told him of a very fine Vandyke, he made answer—“And what is it? A little bit of colour. I wouldn’t go across the way to see it.” On my telling this to Sir Joshua, he said—“Ay, he’ll repent it, he’ll repent it!” W— is another of those who would narrow the universe to their own standard. It is droll to see how hard you labour to prop him up too, and seem to fancy he’ll live.’—‘I think he stands a better chance than Lord Byron. He has added one original feature to our poetry, which the other has not; and this, you know, Sir, by your own rule, gives him the best title.’—‘Yes; but the little bit that he has added is not enough. None but great objects can be seen at a distance. If posterity looked at it with your eyes, they might think his poetry curious and pretty. But consider how many Sir Walter Scotts, how many Lord Byrons, how many Dr. Johnsons there will be in the next hundred years; how many reputations will rise and sink in that time; and do you imagine, amid these conflicting and important claims, such trifles as descriptions of daisies and idiot-boys (however well they may be done) will not be swept away in the tide of time, like straws and weeds by the torrent? No; the world can only keep in view the principal and most perfect productions of human ingenuity; such works as Dryden’s, Pope’s, and a few others, that from their unity, their completeness, their polish have the stamp of immortality upon them, and seem indestructible like an element of nature. There are few of these: I fear your friend W— is not one.’

I said, I thought one circumstance against him was the want of popularity in his life-time. Few people made much noise after their deaths who did not do so while they were living. Posterity could not be supposed to rake into the records of past times for the Illustrious Obscure; and only ratified or annulled the lists of great names handed down to them by the voice of common fame. Few people recovered from the neglect or obloquy of their contemporaries. The public would hardly be at the pains to try the same cause twice over, or did not like to reverse its own sentence, at least when on the unfavourable side. There was Hobbes, for instance: he had a bad name while living, and it was of no use to think at this time of day of doing him justice. While the priests and politicians were tearing him in pieces for his atheism and arbitrary principles, Mr. Locke stole his philosophy from him; and I would fain see any one restore it to the right owner. Quote the passages one by one, show that every principle of the modern metaphysical system was contained in Hobbes, and that all that succeeding writers have done was to deduce from Mr. Locke’s imperfect concessions the very consequences, ‘armed all in proof,’ that already existed in an entire and unmutilated state in his predecessor; and you shall the next day hear Mr. Locke spoken of as the father of English philosophy as currently and confidently as if not the shadow of a doubt had ever been started on the subject. Mr. Hobbes, by the boldness and comprehensiveness of his views, had shocked the prejudices and drawn down upon his head the enmity of his contemporaries: Mr. Locke, by going more cautiously to work, and only admitting as much at a time as the public mind would bear, prepared the way for the rest of Mr. Hobbes’s philosophy, and for a vast reputation for himself, which nothing can impugn. Stat nominis umbra. The world are too far off to distinguish names from things; and call Mr. Locke the first of English philosophers, as they call a star by a particular name, because others call it so. They also dislike to have their confidence in a great name destroyed, and fear, that by displacing one of their favoured idols from its niche in the Temple of Fame, they may endanger the whole building.

Northcote—‘Why, I thought Hobbes stood as high as any body. I have always heard him spoken of in that light. It is not his capacity that people dispute, but they object to his character. The world will not encourage vice, for their own sakes; and they give a casting-vote in favour of virtue. Mr. Locke was a modest, conscientious enquirer after truth, and the world had the sagacity to see this and to be willing to give him a hearing; the other, I conceive, was a bully, and a bad man into the bargain, and they did not want to be bullied into truth or to sanction licentiousness. This is unavoidable; for the desire of knowledge is but one principle of the mind. It was the same with Tom Paine. Nobody can deny that he was a very fine writer and a very sensible man; but he flew in the face of a whole generation, and no wonder that they were too much for him, and that his name is become a bye-word with such multitudes, for no other reason than that he did not care what offence he gave them by contradicting all their most inveterate prejudices. If you insult a room-full of people, you will be kicked out of it. So neither will the world at large be insulted with impunity. If you tell a whole country that they are fools and knaves, they will not return the compliment by crying you up as the pink of wisdom and honesty. Nor will those who come after be very apt to take up your quarrel. It was not so much Paine’s being a republican or an unbeliever, as the manner in which he brought his opinions forward (which showed self-conceit and want of feeling) that subjected him to obloquy. People did not like the temper of the man: it falls under the article of moral virtue. There are some reputations that are great, merely because they are amiable. There is Dr. Watts: look at the encomiums passed on him by Dr. Johnson; and yet to what, according to his statement, does his merit amount? Why only to this, that he did that best which none can do well, and employed his talents uniformly for the welfare of mankind. He was a good man, and the voice of the public has given him credit for being a great one. The world may be forced to do homage to great talents, but they only bow willingly to these when they are joined with benevolence and modesty; nor will they put weapons into the hands of the bold and unprincipled sophist to be turned against their own interests and wishes.’ I said, there was a great deal in the manner of bringing truth forward to influence its reception with the reader; for not only did we resent unwelcome novelties advanced with an insolent and dogmatical air; but we were even ready to give up our favourite notions, when we saw them advocated in a harsh and intolerant manner by those of our own party, sooner than submit to the pretensions of blindfold presumption. If any thing could make me a bigot, it would be the arrogance of the free-thinker; if any thing could make me a slave, it would be the sordid sneering fopperies and sweeping clauses of the liberal party. Renegadoes are generally made so, not by the overtures of their adversaries, but by disgust at the want of candour and moderation in their friends. Northcote replied—‘To be sure, there was nothing more painful than to have one’s own opinions disfigured or thrust down one’s throat by impertinence and folly; and that once when a pedantic coxcomb was crying up Raphael to the skies, he could not help saying—“If there was nothing in Raphael but what you see in him, we should not now have been talking of him!”’

CONVERSATION THE SECOND

When I called, I found Mr. Northcote painting a portrait of himself. Another stood on an easel. He asked me, which I thought most like? I said, the one he was about was the best, but not good enough. It looks like a physician or a member of parliament, but it ought to look like something more—a Cardinal or a Spanish Inquisitor! I do not think you ought to proceed in painting your own face as you do with some others—that is, by trying to improve upon it: you have only to make it like; for the more like it is, the better it will be as a picture. ‘Oh! he tried to make it like.’ I found I had got upon a wrong scent. Mr. Northcote, as an artist, was not bound to have a fine head, but he was bound to paint one. I am always a very bad courtier; and think of what strikes me, and not of the effect upon others. So I once tried to compliment a very handsome brunette, by telling her how much I admired dark beauties. ‘Oh!’ said Northcote, ‘you should have told her she was fair. She did not like black, though you did!’ After all, there is a kind of selfishness in this plain-speaking. In the present case, it set us wrong the whole morning, and I had to stay longer than usual to recover the old track. I was continually in danger of oversetting a stand with a small looking-glass, which Northcote particularly cautioned me not to touch; and every now and then he was prying into the glass by stealth, to see if the portrait was like. He had on a green velvet-cap, and looked very like Titian.

Northcote then turning round, said, ‘I wanted to ask you about a speech you made the other day: you said you thought you could have made something of portrait, but that you never could have painted history. What did you mean by that?’—‘Oh! all I meant was, that sometimes when I see a fine Titian or Rembrandt, I feel as if I could have done something of the same kind with the proper pains, but I have never the same feeling with respect to Raphael. My admiration is there utterly unmixed with emulation or regret. In fact, I see what is before me, but I have no invention.’

Northcote—‘You do not know till you try. There is not so much difference as you imagine. Portrait often runs into history, and history into portrait, without our knowing it. Expression is common to both, and that is the chief difficulty. The greatest history-painters have always been able portrait-painters. How should a man paint a thing in motion, if he cannot paint it still? But the great point is to catch the prevailing look and character: if you are master of this, you can make almost what use of it you please. If a portrait has force, it will do for history; and if history is well painted, it will do for portrait. This is what gave dignity to Sir Joshua: his portraits had always that determined air and character that you know what to think of them as if you had seen them engaged in the most decided action. So Fuseli said of Titian’s picture of Paul III. and his two nephews, “That is true history!” Many of the groups in the Vatican, by Raphael, are only collections of fine portraits. That is why West, Barry, and others pretended to despise portrait, because they could not do it, and it would only expose their want of truth and nature. No! if you can give the look, you need not fear painting history. Yet how difficult that is, and on what slight causes it depends! It is not enough that it is seen, unless it is at the same time felt. How odd it seems, that often while you are looking at a face, and though you perceive no difference in the features, yet you find they have undergone a total alteration of expression! What a fine hand then is required to trace what the eye can scarcely be said to distinguish! So I used to contend against Sir Joshua that Raphael had triumphed over this difficulty in the Miracle of Bolsena, where he has given the internal blush of the unbelieving priest at seeing the wafer turned into blood—the colour to be sure assists, but the look of stupefaction and shame is also there in the most marked degree. Sir Joshua said it was my fancy, but I am as convinced of it as I am of my existence; and the proof is that otherwise he has done nothing. There is no story without it; but he has trusted to the expression to tell the story, instead of leaving the expression to be made out from the story. I have often observed the same thing in myself, when I have blamed any one as mildly as I could, not using any violence of language, nor indeed intending to hurt; and I have afterwards wondered at the effect; my sister has said, “You should have seen your look,” but I did not know of it myself.—I said, ‘If you had, it would have been less felt by others.’ An instance of this made me laugh not long ago. I was offended at a waiter for very ill behaviour at an inn at Calais; and while he was out of the room, I was putting on as angry a look as I could, but I found this sort of previous rehearsal to no purpose. The instant he returned into the room, I gave him a look that I felt made it unnecessary to tell him what I thought.’—‘To be sure, he would see it immediately.’—‘And don’t you think, Sir,’ I said, ‘that this explains the difficulty of fine acting, and the difference between good acting and bad—that is, between face-making or mouthing and genuine passion? To give the last, an actor must possess the highest truth of imagination, and must undergo an entire revolution of feeling. Is it wonderful that so many prefer an artificial to a natural actor, the mask to the man, the pompous pretension to the simple expression? Not at all; the wonder rather is that people in general judge so right as they do, when they have such doubtful grounds to go upon; and they would not, but they trust less to rules or reasoning than to their feelings.’

Northcote—‘You must come to that at last. The common sense of mankind (whether a good or a bad one) is the best criterion you have to appeal to. You necessarily impose upon yourself in judging of your own works. Whenever I am trying at an expression, I hang up the picture in the room and ask people what it means, and if they guess right, I think I have succeeded. You yourself see the thing as you wish it, or according to what you have been endeavouring to make it. When I was doing the figures of Argyll in prison and of his enemy who comes and finds him asleep, I had a great difficulty to encounter in conveying the expression of the last—indeed I did it from myself—I wanted to give a look of mingled remorse and admiration; and when I found that others saw this look in the sketch I had made, I left off. By going on, I might lose it again. There is a point of felicity which, whether you fall short of or have gone beyond it, can only be determined by the effect on the unprejudiced observer. You cannot be always with your picture to explain it to others: it must be left to speak for itself. Those who stand before their pictures and make fine speeches about them, do themselves a world of harm: a painter should cut out his tongue, if he wishes to succeed. His language addresses itself not to the ear, but the eye. He should stick to that as much as possible. Sometimes you hit off an effect without knowing it. Indeed the happiest results are frequently the most unconscious. Boaden was here the other day. You don’t remember Henderson, I suppose?’—‘No.’—‘He says his reading was the most perfect he ever knew. He thought himself a pretty good reader and a tolerable mimic; that he succeeded tolerably well in imitating Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, and others, but that there was something in Henderson’s reading so superior to all the rest, that he never could come any thing near it. I told him, You don’t know that: if you were to hear him now, you might think him even worse than your own imitation of him. We deceive ourselves as much with respect to the excellences of others as we do with respect to our own, by dwelling on a favourite idea. In order to judge, you should ask some one else who remembered him. I spoke to him about Kemble, whose life he has been lately writing. I said, when he sat to me for the Richard III. meeting the children, he lent me no assistance whatever in the expression I wished to give, but remained quite immoveable, as if he were sitting for an ordinary portrait. Boaden said, This was his way: he never put himself to any exertion, except in his professional character. If any one wanted to know his idea of a part or of a particular passage, his reply always was, “You must come and see me do it.”’

Northcote then spoke of the boy, as he always calls him (Master Betty). He asked if I had ever seen him act, and I said, Yes, and was one of his admirers. He answered, ‘Oh! yes, it was such a beautiful effusion of natural sensibility; and then that graceful play of the limbs in youth gave such an advantage over every one about him. Humphreys (the artist) said, “He had never seen the little Apollo off the pedestal before.” You see the same thing in the boys at Westminster-School. But no one was equal to him.’ Mr. Northcote alluded with pleasure to his unaffected manners when a boy, and mentioned as an instance of his simplicity, his saying one day, ‘If they admire me so much, what would they say to Mr. Harley?’ (a tragedian in the same strolling company with himself.) We then spoke of his acting since he was grown up. Northcote said, ‘He went to see him one night with Fuseli, in Alexander the Great, and that he observed coming out, they could get nobody to do it better.’—‘Nor so well,’ said Fuseli. A question being put, ‘Why then could he not succeed at present?’—‘Because,’ said Northcote, ‘the world will never admire twice. The first surprise was excited by his being a boy; and when that was over, nothing could bring them back again to the same point, not though he had turned out a second Roscius. They had taken a surfeit of their idol, and wanted something new. Nothing he could do could astonish them so much the second time, as the youthful prodigy had done the first time; and therefore he must always appear as a foil to himself, and seem comparatively flat and insipid. Garrick kept up the fever of public admiration as long as any body; but when he returned to the stage after a short absence, no one went to see him. It was the same with Sir Joshua: latterly Romney drew all his sitters from him. So they say the Exhibition is worse every year, though it is just the same, there are the same subjects and the same painters. Admiration is a forced tribute, and to extort it from mankind (envious and ignorant as they are) they must be taken unawares.’ I remarked—‘It was the same in books; if an author was only equal to himself, he was always said to fall off. The blow to make the same impression must be doubled, because we are prepared for it. We give him the whole credit of his first successful production, because it was altogether unexpected; but if he does not rise as much above himself in the second instance, as the first was above nothing, we are disappointed and say he has fallen off, for our feelings are not equally excited.’—‘Just,’ said Northcote, ‘as in painting a portrait: people are surprised at the first sitting, and wonder to see how you have got on: but I tell them they will never see so much done again; for at first there was nothing but a blank canvas to work upon, but afterwards you have to improve upon your own design, and this at every step becomes more and more difficult. It puts me in mind of an observation of Opie’s, that it was wrong to suppose that people went on improving to the last in any art or profession: on the contrary, they put their best ideas into their first works (which they have been qualifying themselves to undertake all their lives before); and what they gain afterwards in correctness and refinement, they lose in originality and vigour.’ I assented to this as a very striking and (as I thought) sound remark. He said, ‘I wish you had known Opie: he was a very original-minded man. Mrs. Siddons used to say—“I like to meet Mr. Opie; for then I always hear something I did not know before.” I do not say that he was always right; but he always put your thoughts into a new track, that was worth following. I was very fond of Opie’s conversation; and I remember once when I was expressing my surprise at his having so little of the Cornish dialect; “Why,” he said, “the reason is, I never spoke at all till I knew you and Wolcott.” He was a true genius. Mr. — is a person of great judgment; but I do not learn so much from him. I think this is the difference between sense and genius;—a man of genius judges for himself, and you hear nothing but what is original from him: but a man of sense or with a knowledge of the world, judges as others do; and he is on this account the safest guide to follow, though not, perhaps, the most instructive companion. I recollect Miss Reynolds making nearly the same observation. She said—“I don’t know how it is; I don’t think Miss C— a very clever woman, and yet, whenever I am at a loss about any thing, I always go to consult her, and her advice is almost sure to be right.” The reason was, that this lady, instead of taking her own view of the subject (as a person of superior capacity might have been tempted to do) considered only what light others would view it in, and pronounced her decision according to the prevailing rules and maxims of the world. When old Dr. — married his housemaid, Sterne, on hearing of it, exclaimed, “Ay, I always thought him a genius, and now I’m sure of it!” The truth was (and this was what Sterne meant), that Dr. — saw a thousand virtues in this woman which nobody else did, and could give a thousand reasons for his choice, that no one about him had the wit to answer: but nature took its usual course, and the event turned out as he had been forewarned, according to the former experience of the world in such matters. His being in the wrong did not prove him to be less a genius, though it might impeach his judgment or prudence. He was, in fact, wiser, and saw more of the matter than any one of his neighbours, who might advise him to the contrary; but he was not so wise as the collective experience or common sense of mankind on the subject, which his more cautious friends merely echoed. It is only the man of genius who has any right or temptation to make a fool of himself, by setting up his own unsupported decision against that of the majority. He feels himself superior to any individual in the crowd, and therefore rashly undertakes to act in defiance of the whole mass of prejudice and opinion opposed to him. It is safe and easy to travel in a stage-coach from London to Salisbury: but it would require great strength, boldness, and sagacity to go in a straight line across the country.’

CONVERSATION THE THIRD

Northcote began by saying, ‘You don’t much like Sir Joshua, I know; but I think that is one of your prejudices. If I was to compare him with Vandyke and Titian, I should say that Vandyke’s portraits are like pictures (very perfect ones, no doubt), Sir Joshua’s like the reflection in a looking-glass, and Titian’s like the real people. There is an atmosphere of light and shade about Sir Joshua’s, which neither of the others have in the same degree, together with a vagueness that gives them a visionary and romantic character, and makes them seem like dreams or vivid recollections of persons we have seen. I never could mistake Vandyke’s for any thing but pictures, and I go up to them to examine them as such: when I see a fine Sir Joshua, I can neither suppose it to be a mere picture nor a man; and I almost involuntarily turn back to ascertain if it is not some one behind me reflected in the glass: when I see a Titian, I am riveted to it, and I can no more take my eye off from it, than if it were the very individual in the room. That,’ he said, ‘is, I think, peculiar to Titian, that you feel on your good behaviour in the presence of his keen-looking heads, as if you were before company.’ I mentioned that I thought Sir Joshua more like Rembrandt than like either Titian or Vandyke: he enveloped objects in the same brilliant haze of a previous mental conception.—‘Yes,’ he said; ‘but though Sir Joshua borrowed a great deal, he drew largely from himself: or rather, it was a strong and peculiar feeling of nature working in him and forcing its way out in spite of all impediments, and that made whatever he touched his own. In spite of his deficiency in drawing, and his want of academic rules and a proper education, you see this breaking out like a devil in all his works. It is this that has stamped him. There is a charm in his portraits, a mingled softness and force, a grasping at the end with nothing harsh or unpleasant in the means, that you will find nowhere else. He may go out of fashion for a time: but you must come back to him again, while a thousand imitators and academic triflers are forgotten. This proves him to have been a real genius. The same thing, however, made him a very bad master. He knew nothing of rules which are alone to be taught; and he could not communicate his instinctive feeling of beauty or character to others. I learnt nothing from him while I was with him: and none of his scholars (if I may except myself) ever made any figure at all. He only gave us his pictures to copy. Sir Joshua undoubtedly got his first ideas of the art from Gandy, though he lost them under Hudson; but he easily recovered them afterwards. That is a picture of Gandy’s there (pointing to a portrait of a little girl). If you look into it, you will find the same broken surface and varying outline, that was so marked a characteristic of Sir Joshua. There was nothing he hated so much as a distinct outline, as you see it in Mengs and the French school. Indeed, he ran into the opposite extreme; but it is one of the great beauties of art to show it waving and retiring, now losing and then recovering itself again, as it always does in nature, without any of that stiff, edgy appearance, which only pedants affect or admire. Gandy was never out of Devonshire: but his portraits are common there. His father was patronized by the Duke of Ormond, and one reason why the son never came out of his native county was, that when the Duke of Ormond was implicated in the rebellion to restore the Pretender in 1715, he affected to be thought too deep in his Grace’s confidence and a person of too much consequence to venture up to London, so that he chose to remain in a voluntary exile.’ I asked Northcote if he remembered the name of Stringer at the Academy, when he first came up to town. He said he did, and that he drew very well, and once put the figure for him in a better position to catch the foreshortening. He inquired if I knew any thing about him, and I said I had once vainly tried to copy a head of a youth by him admirably drawn and coloured, and in which he had attempted to give the effect of double vision by a second outline accompanying the contour of the face and features. Though the design might not be in good taste, it was executed in a way that made it next to impossible to imitate. I called on him afterwards at his house at Knutsford, where I saw some spirited comic sketches in an unfinished state,[^[89]] and a capital female figure by Cignani. All his skill and love of art had, I found, been sacrificed to his delight in Cheshire ale and the company of country-squires. Tom Kershaw, of Manchester, used to say, that he would rather have been Dan Stringer than Sir Joshua Reynolds at twenty years of age. Kershaw, like other North-country critics, thought more of the executive power than of the æsthetical faculty; forgetting that it signifies comparatively little how well you execute a thing, if it is not worth executing.—In consequence of something that was said of the egotism of artists, he observed, ‘I am sometimes thought cold and cynical myself; but I hope it is not from any such over-weening opinion of myself. I remember once going with Wilkie to Angerstein’s, and because I stood looking and said nothing, he seemed dissatisfied, and said, “I suppose you are too much occupied with admiring, to give me your opinion?” And I answered hastily, “No, indeed! I was saying to myself, ‘And is this all that the art can do?’” But this was not, I am sure, an expression of triumph, but of mortification at the defects which I could not help observing even in the most accomplished works. I knew they were the best, but I could have wished them to be a hundred times better than they were.’

Northcote mentioned a conceited painter of the name of Edwards, who went with Romney to Rome; and when they got into the Sistine Chapel, turning round to him, said, ‘’Egad! George, we’re bit!’—He then spoke of his own journey to Rome, of the beauty of the climate, of the manners of the people, of the imposing effect of the Roman Catholic religion, of its favourableness to the fine arts, of the churches full of pictures, of the manner in which he passed his time, studying and looking into all the rooms in the Vatican: he had no fault to find with Italy, and no wish to leave it. ‘Gracious and sweet was all he saw in her!’ As he talked, he looked as if he saw the different objects pass before him, and his eye glittered with familiar recollections. He said, Raphael did not scorn to look out of himself or to be beholden to others. He took whole figures from Masaccio to enrich his designs, because all he wanted was to advance the art and ennoble human nature. After he saw Michael Angelo, he improved in freedom and breadth; and if he had lived to see Titian, he would have done all he could to avail himself of his colouring. All his works are an effusion of the sweetness and dignity of his own character. He did not know how to make a picture; but for the conduct of the fable and the development of passion and feeling (noble but full of tenderness) there is nobody like him. This is why Hogarth can never come into the lists. He does not lift us above ourselves: our curiosity may be gratified by seeing what men are, but our pride must be soothed by seeing them made better. Why else is Milton preferred to Hudibras, but because the one aggrandises our notions of human nature, and the other degrades it? Who will make any comparison between a Madona of Raphael and a drunken prostitute by Hogarth? Do we not feel more respect for an inspired Apostle than for a blackguard in the streets? Raphael points out the highest perfection of which the human form and faculties are capable, and Hogarth their lowest degradation or most wretched perversion. Look at his attempts to paint the good or beautiful, and you see how faint the impressions of these were in his mind. Yet these are what every one must wish to cherish in his own bosom, and must feel most thankful for to those who lend him the powerful assistance of their unrivalled conceptions of true grandeur and beauty. Sir Joshua strove to do this in his portraits, and this it was that raised him in public estimation; for we all wish to get rid of defects and peculiarities as much as we can. He then said of Michael Angelo, he did not wonder at the fame he had acquired. You are to consider the state of the art before his time, and that he burst through the mean and little manner even of such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Pietro Perugino and through the trammels that confined them, and gave all at once a gigantic breadth and expansion that had never been seen before, so that the world were struck with it as with a display of almost supernatural power, and have never ceased to admire since. We are not to compare it with the examples of art that have followed since, and that would never have existed but for him, but with those that preceded it. He found fault with the figure of the flying monk in the St. Peter Martyr, as fluttering and theatrical, but agreed with me in admiring this picture and in my fondness for Titian in general. He mentioned his going with Prince Hoare and Day to take leave of some fine portraits of Titian’s that hung in a dark corner of a Gallery at Naples; and as Day looked at them for the last time with tears in his eyes, he said ‘Ah! he was a fine old mouser!’—I said, I had repeated this expression (which I had heard him allude to before) somewhere in writing, and was surprised that people did not know what to make of it. Northcote said, ‘Why, that is exactly what I should have thought. There is the difference between writing and speaking. In writing, you address the average quantity of sense or information in the world; in speaking, you pick your audience, or at least know what they are prepared for, or else previously explain what you think necessary. You understand the epithet because you have seen a great number of Titian’s pictures, and know that cat-like, watchful, penetrating look he gives to all his faces, which nothing else expresses, perhaps, so well as the phrase Day made use of: but the world in general know nothing of this; all they know or believe is, that Titian is a great painter like Raphael or any other famous person. Suppose any one was to tell you, Raphael was a fine old mouser: would you not laugh at this as absurd? And yet the other is equally nonsense or incomprehensible to them. No, there is a limit, a conversational licence which you cannot carry into writing. This is one difficulty I have in writing: I do not know the point of familiarity at which I am to stop; and yet I believe I have ideas, and you say I know how to express myself in talking.’

I inquired if he remembered much of Johnson, Burke, and that set of persons? He said, Yes, a good deal, as he had often seen them. Burke came into Sir Joshua’s painting-room one day, when Northcote, who was then a young man, was sitting for one of the children in Count Ugolino. (It is the one in profile with the hand to the face.) He was introduced as a pupil of Sir Joshua’s, and, on his looking up, Mr. Burke said, ‘Then I see that Mr. Northcote is not only an artist, but has a head that would do for Titian to paint.’—Goldsmith and Burke had often violent disputes about politics; the one being a staunch Tory, and the other at that time a Whig and outrageous anti-courtier. One day he came into the room, when Goldsmith was there, full of ire and abuse against the late king, and went on in such a torrent of the most unqualified invective that Goldsmith threatened to leave the room. The other, however, persisted; and Goldsmith went out, unable to bear it any longer. So much for Mr. Burke’s pretended consistency and uniform loyalty! When Northcote first came to Sir Joshua, he wished very much to see Goldsmith; and one day Sir Joshua, on introducing him, asked why he had been so anxious to see him? ‘Because,’ said Northcote, ‘he is a notable[^[90]] man.’ This expression, notable, in its ordinary sense, was so contrary to Goldsmith’s character, that they both burst out a-laughing very heartily. Goldsmith was two thousand pounds in debt at the time of his death, which was hastened by his chagrin and distressed circumstances: and when ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ was performed, he was so choked all dinner-time that he could not swallow a mouthful. A party went from Sir Joshua’s to support it. The present title was not fixed upon till that morning. Northcote went with Ralph, Sir Joshua’s man, into the gallery, to see how it went off; and after the second act, there was no doubt of its success. Northcote says, people had a great notion of the literary parties at Sir Joshua’s. He once asked Lord B— to dine with Dr. Johnson and the rest; but though a man of rank and also of good information, he seemed as much alarmed at the idea as if you had tried to force him into one of the cages at Exeter-’Change. Northcote remarked that he thought people of talents had their full share of admiration. He had seen young ladies of quality, Lady Marys and Lady Dorothys, peeping into a room where Mrs. Siddons was sitting, with all the same timidity and curiosity as if it were some preternatural being—he was sure more than if it had been the Queen. He then made some observations on the respect paid to rank, and said, ‘However ridiculous it might seem, it was no more than the natural expression of the highest respect in other cases. For instance, as to that of bowing out of the King’s presence backwards, would you not do the same if you were introduced to Dr. Johnson for the first time? You would contrive not to turn your back upon him, till you were out of the room.’ He said, ‘You violent politicians make more rout about royalty than it is worth: it is only the highest place, and somebody must fill it, no matter who: neither do the persons themselves think so much of it as you imagine. They are glad to get into privacy as much as they can. Nor is it a sinecure. The late King (I have been told) used often to have to sign his name to papers, and do nothing else for three hours together, till his fingers fairly ached, and then he would take a walk in the garden, and come back to repeat the same drudgery for three hours more. So, when they told Louis XV. that if he went on with his extravagance, he would bring about a Revolution and be sent over to England with a pension, he merely asked, “Do you think the pension would be a pretty good one?”’ He noticed the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, and praised them for their extreme vivacity and great insight into human nature. Once when the mob had besieged the palace, and the Cardinal was obliged to go and appease them, a brick-bat was flung at him and knocked him down, and one of the assailants presenting a bayonet at his throat, he suddenly called out, ‘Oh, you wretch! if your father could have seen you in this barbarous action, what would he have said?’ The man immediately withdrew, though, says the Cardinal, ‘I knew no more of his father than the babe unborn.’ Northcote then adverted to the talent of players for drollery and sudden shifts and expedients, and said that by living in an element of comic invention, they imbibed a portion of it. He repeated that jest of F. Reynolds, who filled up the blank in a militia paper that was sent him with the description, ‘Old, lame, and a coward;’ and another story told of Matthews, the comedian, who being left in the room with an old gentleman and a little child, and the former putting the question to it, ‘Well, my dear, which do you like best, the dog or the cat?’ by exercising his powers of ventriloquism, made the child seem to answer, ‘I don’t care a d—mn for either,’—to the utter confusion of the old gentleman, who immediately took the father to task for bringing up his son in such profaneness and total want of common humanity.

He then returned to the question of the inconsistent and unreasonable expectations of mankind as to their success in different pursuits, and answered the common complaint, ‘What a shame it was that Milton only got thirteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence for “Paradise Lost.”’ He said, ‘Not at all; he did not write it to get money, he had gained what he had proposed by writing it, not thirteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence, but an immortal reputation. When Dr. Johnson was asked why he was not invited out to dine as Garrick was, he answered, as if it was a triumph to him, “Because great lords and ladies don’t like to have their mouths stopped!” But who does like to have their mouths stopped? Did he, more than others? People like to be amused in general; but they did not give him the less credit for wisdom and a capacity to instruct them by his writings. In like manner, it has been said, that the King only sought one interview with Dr. Johnson; whereas, if he had been a buffoon or a sycophant, he would have asked for more. No, there was nothing to complain of: it was a compliment paid by rank to letters, and once was enough. The King was more afraid of this interview than Dr. Johnson was; and went to it as a school-boy to his task. But he did not want to have this trial repeated every day, nor was it necessary. The very jealousy of his self-love marked his respect: and if he had thought less of Dr. Johnson, he would have been more willing to risk the encounter. They had each their place to fill, and would best preserve their self-respect, and perhaps their respect for each other, by remaining in their proper sphere. So they make an outcry about the Prince leaving Sheridan to die in absolute want. He had left him long before: was he to send every day to know if he was dying? These things cannot be helped, without exacting too much of human nature.’ I agreed to this view of the subject, and said,—I did not see why literary people should repine if they met with their deserts in their own way, without expecting to get rich; but that they often got nothing for their pains but unmerited abuse and party obloquy.—‘Oh, it is not party-spite,’ said he, ‘but the envy of human nature. Do you think to distinguish yourself with impunity? Do you imagine that your superiority will be delightful to others? Or that they will not strive all they can, and to the last moment, to pull you down? I remember myself once saying to Opie, how hard it was upon the poor author or player to be hunted down for not succeeding in an innocent and laudable attempt, just as if they had committed some heinous crime! And he answered, “They have committed the greatest crime in the eyes of mankind, that of pretending to a superiority over them!” Do you think that party abuse, and the running down particular authors is any thing new? Look at the manner in which Pope and Dryden were assailed by a set of reptiles. Do you believe the modern periodicals had not their prototypes in the party-publications of that day? Depend upon it, what you take for political cabal and hostility is (nine parts in ten) private pique and malice oozing out through those authorized channels.’

We now got into a dispute about nicknames; and H—me coming in and sitting down at my elbow, my old pugnacious habit seemed to return upon me. Northcote contended, that they had always an appropriate meaning: and I said,—‘Their whole force consisted in their having absolutely none but the most vague and general.’—‘Why,’ said Northcote, ‘did my father give me the name of “Fat Jack,” but because I was lean?’ He gave an instance which I thought made against himself, of a man at Plymouth, a baker by profession, who had got the name of Tiddydoll—he could not tell how. ‘Then,’ said I, ‘it was a name without any sense or meaning.’—‘Be that as it may,’ said Northcote, ‘it almost drove him mad. The boys called after him in the street, besieged his shop-windows; even the soldiers took it up, and marched to parade, beating time with their feet, and repeating, Tiddydoll, Tiddydoll, as they passed by his door. He flew out upon them at the sound with inextinguishable fury, and was knocked down and rolled in the kennel, and got up in an agony of rage and shame, his white clothes covered all over with mud. A gentleman, a physician in the neighbourhood, one day called him in and remonstrated with him on the subject. He advised him to take no notice of his persecutors. “What,” he said, “does it signify? Suppose they were to call me Tiddydoll?”—“There,” said the man, “you called me so yourself; you only sent for me in to insult me!” and, after heaping every epithet of abuse upon him, flew out of the house in a most ungovernable passion.’ I told Northcote this was just the thing I meant. Even if a name had confessedly no meaning, by applying it constantly and by way of excellence to another, it seemed as if he must be an abstraction of insignificance: whereas, if it pointed to any positive defect or specific charge, it was at least limited to the one, and you stood a chance of repelling the other. The virtue of a nickname consisted in its being indefinable and baffling all proof or reply. When H—me was gone, Northcote extolled his proficiency in Hebrew, which astonished me not a little, as I had never heard of it. I said, he was a very excellent man, and a good specimen of the character of the old Presbyterians, who had more of the idea of an attachment to principle, and less of an obedience to fashion or convenience, from their education and tenets, than any other class of people. Northcote assented to this statement, and concluded by saying, that H—me was certainly a very good man, and had no fault but that of not being fat.

CONVERSATION THE FOURTH

Northcote said, he had been reading Kelly’s ‘Reminiscences.’ I asked what he thought of them? He said, they were the work of a well meaning man, who fancied all those about him good people, and every thing they uttered clever. I said, I recollected his singing formerly with Mrs. Crouch, and that he used to give great effect to some things of sentiment, such as ‘Oh! had I been by fate decreed,’ &c. in Love in a Village. Northcote said, he did not much like him: there was a jerk, a kind of brogue in his singing; though he had, no doubt, considerable advantages in being brought up with all the great singers and having performed on all the first stages in Italy. I said, there was no echo of all that now. ‘No,’ said Northcote, ‘nor in my time, though I was there just after him. He asked me once, many years ago, if I had heard of him in Italy, and I said no, though I excused myself by stating that I had only been at Rome, where the stage was less an object, the Pope there performing the chief part himself.’ I answered, that I meant there was no echo of the fine singing at present in Italy, music being there dead as well as painting, or reduced to mere screaming, noise and rant. ‘It is odd,’ he said, ‘how their genius seems to have left them. Every thing of that sort appears to be at present no better than it is with us in a country-town: or rather it wants the simplicity and rustic innocence, and is more like the draggle-tailed finery of a lady’s waiting-maid. They have nothing of their own: all is at second-hand. Did you see Thorwaldsen’s things while you were there? A young artist brought me all his designs the other day, as miracles that I was to wonder at and be delighted with. But I could find nothing in them but repetitions of the Antique, over and over, till I was surfeited.’ ‘He would be pleased at this.’ ‘Why, no! that is not enough: it is easy to imitate the Antique:—if you want to last, you must invent something. The other is only pouring liquors from one vessel into another, that become staler and staler every time. We are tired of the Antique; yet, at any rate, it is better than the vapid imitation of it. The world wants something new, and will have it. No matter whether it is better or worse, if there is but an infusion of new life and spirit, it will go down to posterity; otherwise, you are soon forgotten. Canova, too, is nothing for the same reason—he is only a feeble copy of the Antique; or a mixture of two things the most incompatible, that and opera-dancing. But there is Bernini; he is full of faults; he has too much of that florid, redundant, fluttering style, that was objected to Rubens; but then he has given an appearance of flesh that was never given before. The Antique always looks like marble, you never for a moment can divest yourself of the idea; but go up to a statue of Bernini’s, and it seems as if it must yield to your touch. This excellence he was the first to give, and therefore it must always remain with him. It is true, it is also in the Elgin marbles; but they were not known in his time; so that he indisputably was a genius. Then there is Michael Angelo; how utterly different from the Antique, and in some things how superior! For instance, there is his statue of Cosmo de Medici, leaning on his hand, in the chapel of St. Lorenzo at Florence; I declare it has that look of reality in it, that it almost terrifies you to be near it. It has something of the same effect as the mixture of life and death that is perceivable in wax-work; though that is a bad illustration, as this last is disagreeable and mechanical, and the other is produced by a powerful and masterly conception. It was the same with Handel too: he made music speak a new language, with a pathos and a power that had never been dreamt of till his time. Is it not the same with Titian, Correggio, Raphael? These painters did not imitate one another, but were as unlike as possible, and yet were all excellent. If excellence were one thing, they must have been all wrong. Still, originality is not caprice or affectation; it is an excellence that is always to be found in nature, but has never had a place in art before. So Romney said of Sir Joshua, that there was that in his pictures which we had not been used to see in other painters, but we had seen it often enough in nature. Give this in your works, and nothing can ever rob you of the credit of it.

‘I was looking into Mandeville since I saw you (I thought I had lost it, but I found it among a parcel of old books). You may judge by that of the hold that any thing like originality takes of the world: for though there is a great deal that is questionable and liable to very strong objection, yet they will not give it up, because it is the very reverse of common-place; and they must go to that source to learn what can be said on that side of the question. Even if you receive a shock, you feel your faculties roused by it and set on the alert. Mankind do not choose to go to sleep.’—I replied, that I thought this was true, yet at the same time the world seemed to have a wonderful propensity to admire the trite and traditional. I could only account for this from a reflection of our self-love. We could few of us invent, but most of us could imitate and repeat by rote; and as we thought we could get up and ride in the same jog-trot machine of learning, we affected to look up to this elevation as the post of honour. Northcote said, ‘You are to consider that learning is of great use to society; and though it may not add to the stock, is a necessary vehicle to transmit it to others. Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountain-heads. They are only wrong in often claiming respect on a false ground, and mistaking their own province. They are so accustomed to ring the changes on words and received notions, that they lose their perception of things. I remember being struck with this at the time of the Ireland controversy:—only to think of a man like Dr. Parr going down on his knees and kissing the pretended Manuscript! It was not that he knew or cared any thing about Shakspeare (or he would not have been so imposed upon); he merely worshipped a name, as a Catholic priest worships the shrine that contains some favourite relic.’ I said, the passages in Ireland’s play that were brought forward to prove the identity, were the very thing that proved the contrary; for they were obvious parodies of celebrated passages in Shakspeare, such as that on death in Richard II.—‘And there the antic sits,’ &c. Now, Shakspeare never parodied himself; but these learned critics were only struck with the verbal coincidence, and never thought of the general character or spirit of the writer. ‘Or without that,’ said Northcote, ‘who that attended to the common sense of the question would not perceive that Shakspeare was a person who would be glad to dispose of his plays as soon as he wrote them? If it had been such a man as Sir Philip Sidney, indeed, he might have written a play at his leisure, and locked it up in some private drawer at Penshurst, where it might have been found two hundred years after: but Shakspeare had no opportunity to leave such precious hoards behind him, nor place to deposit them in. Tresham made me very mad one day at Cosway’s, by saying they had found a lock of his hair and a picture; and Caleb Whitefoord, who ought to have known better, asked me if I did not think Sheridan a judge, and that he believed in the authenticity of the Ireland papers? I said, “Do you bring him as a fair witness? He wants to fill his theatre, and would write a play himself, and swear it was Shakspeare’s. He knows better than to cry stale fish.”’

I observed, this was what made me dislike the conversation of learned or literary men. I got nothing from them but what I already knew, and hardly that: they poured the same ideas and phrases and cant of knowledge out of books into my ears, as apothecaries’ apprentices made prescriptions out of the same bottles; but there were no new drugs or simples in their materia medica. Go to a Scotch professor, and he bores you to death by an eternal rhapsody about rent and taxes, gold and paper-currency, population and capital, and the Teutonic Races—all which you have heard a thousand times before: go to a linen-draper in the city, without education but with common sense and shrewdness, and you pick up something new, because nature is inexhaustible, and he sees it from his own point of view, when not cramped and hood-winked by pedantic prejudices. A person of this character said to me the other day, in speaking of the morals of foreign nations—‘It’s all a mistake to suppose there can be such a difference, Sir: the world are, and must be moral; for when people grow up and get married, they teach their children to be moral. No man wishes to have them turn out profligate.’ I said I had never heard this before, and it seemed to me to be putting society on new rollers. Northcote agreed, it was an excellent observation. I added, this self-taught shrewdness had its weak sides too. This same person was arguing that mankind remained much the same, and always would do so. Cows and horses did not change: and why then should men? He had forgot that cows and horses do not learn to read and write.—‘Ay, that was very well too,’ said Northcote; ‘I don’t know but I agree with him rather than with you. I was thinking of the same thing the other day in looking over an old Magazine, in which there was a long debate on an Act of Parliament to license gin-drinking. The effect was quite droll. There was one person who made a most eloquent speech to point out all the dreadful consequences of allowing this practice. It would debauch the morals, ruin the health, and dissolve all the bonds of society, and leave a poor, puny, miserable, Lilliputian race, equally unfit for peace or war. You would suppose that the world was going to be at an end. Why, no! the answer would have been, the world will go on much the same as before. You attribute too much power to an Act of Parliament. Providence has not taken its measure so ill as to leave it to an Act of Parliament to continue or discontinue the species. If it depended on our wisdom and contrivances whether it should last or not, it would be at an end before twenty years! People are wrong about this; some say the world is getting better, others complain it is getting worse, when, in fact, it is just the same, and neither better nor worse.’—What a lesson, I said to myself, for our pragmatical legislators and idle projectors!

I said, I had lately been led to think of the little real progress that was made by the human mind, and how the same errors and vices revived under a different shape at different periods, from observing just the same humour in our Ultra-reformers at present, and in their predecessors in the time of John Knox. Our modern wiseacres were for banishing all the fine arts and finer affections, whatever was pleasurable and ornamental, from the Commonwealth, on the score of utility, exactly as the others did on the score of religion. The real motive in either case was nothing but a sour, envious, malignant disposition, incapable of enjoyment in itself, and averse to every appearance or tendency to it in others. Our peccant humours broke out and formed into what Milton called ‘a crust of formality’ on the surface; and while we fancied we were doing God or man good service, we were only indulging our spleen, self-opinion, and self-will, according to the fashion of the day. The existing race of free-thinkers and sophists would be mortified to find themselves the counterpart of the monks and ascetics of old; but so it was. The dislike of the Westminster Reviewers to polite literature was only the old exploded Puritanic objection to human learning. Names and modes of opinion changed, but human nature was much the same.—‘I know nothing of the persons you speak of,’ said Northcote; ‘but they must be fools if they expect to get rid of the showy and superficial, and let only the solid and useful remain. The surface is a part of nature, and will always continue so. Besides, how many useful inventions owe their existence to ornamental contrivances! If the ingenuity and industry of man were not tasked to produce luxuries, we should soon be without necessaries. We must go back to the savage state. I myself am as little prejudiced in favour of poetry as almost any one can be; but surely there are things in poetry that the world cannot afford to do without. What is of absolute necessity is only a part; and the next question is, how to occupy the remainder of our time and thoughts (not so employed) agreeably and innocently. Works of fiction and poetry are of incalculable use in this respect. If people did not read the Scotch novels, they would not read Mr. Bentham’s philosophy. There is nothing to me more disagreeable than the abstract idea of a Quaker, which falls under the same article. They object to colours; and why do they object to colours? Do we not see that Nature delights in them? Do we not see the same purpose of prodigal and ostentatious display run through all her works? Do we not find the most beautiful and dazzling colours bestowed on plants and flowers, on the plumage of birds, on fishes and shells, even to the very bottom of the sea? All this profusion of ornament, we may be sure, is not in vain. To judge otherwise is to fly in the face of Nature, and substitute an exclusive and intolerant spirit in the place of philosophy, which includes the greatest variety of man’s wants and tastes, and makes all the favourable allowances it can. The Quaker will not wear coloured clothes; though he would not have a coat to his back if men had never studied any thing but the mortification of their appetites and desires. But he takes care of his personal convenience by wearing a piece of good broad-cloth, and gratifies his vanity, not by finery, but by having it of a different cut from every body else, so that he may seem better and wiser than they. Yet this humour, too, is not without its advantages: it serves to correct the contrary absurdity. I look upon the Quaker and the fop as two sentinels placed by Nature at the two extremes of vanity and selfishness, and to guard, as it were, all the common-sense and virtue that lie between.’ I observed that these contemptible narrow-minded prejudices made me feel irritable and impatient. ‘You should not suffer that,’ said Northcote; ‘for then you will run into the contrary mistake, and lay yourself open to your antagonist. The monks, for instance, have been too hardly dealt with—not that I would defend many abuses and instances of oppression in them—but is it not as well to have bodies of men shut up in cells and monasteries, as to let them loose to make soldiers of them and to cut one another’s throats? And out of that lazy ignorance and leisure, what benefits have not sprung? It is to them we owe those beautiful specimens of Gothic architecture which can never be surpassed; many of the discoveries in medicine and in mechanics are also theirs; and, I believe, the restoration of classical learning is owing to them. Not that I would be understood to say that all or a great deal of this could not have been done without them; but their leisure, their independence, and the want of some employment to exercise their minds were the actual cause of many advantages we now enjoy; and what I mean is, that Nature is satisfied with imperfect instruments. Instead of snarling at every thing that differs from us we had better take Shakspeare’s advice, and try to find

“Tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”’

It was at this time that Mr. Northcote read to me the following letter, addressed by him to a very young lady, who earnestly desired him to write a letter to her:—

‘MY DEAR MISS K—,

‘What in the world can make you desire a letter from me? Indeed, if I was a fine Dandy of one-and-twenty, with a pair of stays properly padded and also an iron busk, and whiskers under my nose, with my hair standing upright on my head, all in the present fashion, then it might be accounted for, as I might write you a fine answer in poetry about Cupids and burning hearts, and sighs and angels and darts, such a letter as Mr. —, the poet, might write. But it is long past the time for me to sing love-songs under your window, with a guitar, and catch my death in some cold night, and so die in your service.

‘But what has a poor gray-headed old man of eighty got to say to a blooming young lady of eighteen, but to relate to her his illness and pains, and tell her that past life is little better than a dream, and that he finds that all he has been doing is only vanity. Indeed, I may console myself with the pleasure of having gained the flattering attention of a young lady of such amiable qualities as yourself, and have the honour to assure you, that I am your grateful friend and most obliged humble servant,

‘James Northcote.’

‘Argyll Place, 1826.’

I said, the hardest lesson seemed to be to look beyond ourselves. ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘I remember when we were young and were making remarks upon the neighbours, an old maiden aunt of ours used to say, “I wish to God you could see yourselves!” And yet, perhaps, after all, this was not very desirable. Many people pass their whole lives in a very comfortable dream, who, if they could see themselves in the glass, would start back with affright. I remember once being at the Academy, when Sir Joshua wished to propose a monument to Dr. Johnson in St. Paul’s, and West got up and said, that the King, he knew, was averse to any thing of the kind, for he had been proposing a similar monument in Westminster Abbey for a man of the greatest genius and celebrity—one whose works were in all the cabinets of the curious throughout Europe—one whose name they would all hear with the greatest respect—and then it came out, after a long preamble, that he meant Woollett, who had engraved his Death of Wolfe. I was provoked, and I could not help exclaiming—“My God! what, do you put him upon a footing with such a man as Dr. Johnson—one of the greatest philosophers and moralists that ever lived? We have thousands of engravers at any time!”—and there was such a burst of laughter at this—Dance, who was a grave gentlemanly man, laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks; and Farington used afterwards to say to me, “Why don’t you speak in the Academy, and begin with ‘My God!’ as you do sometimes?”’ I said, I had seen in a certain painter something of this humour, who once very good-naturedly showed me a Rubens he had, and observed with great nonchalance, ‘What a pity that this man wanted expression!’ I imagined Rubens to have looked round his gallery. ‘Yet,’ he continued, ‘it is the consciousness of defect, too, that often stimulates the utmost exertions. If Pope had been a fine, handsome man, would he have left those masterpieces that he has? But he knew and felt his own deformity, and therefore was determined to leave nothing undone to extend that corner of power that he possessed. He said to himself, They shall have no fault to find there. I have often thought when very good-looking young men have come here intending to draw, “What! are you going to bury yourselves in a garret?” And it has generally happened that they have given up the art before long, and married or otherwise disposed of themselves.’ I had heard an anecdote of Nelson, that, when appointed post-captain, and on going to take possession of his ship at Yarmouth, the crowd on the quay almost jostled him, and exclaimed—‘What! have they made that little insignificant fellow a captain? He will do much, to be sure!’ I thought this might have urged him to dare as he did, in order to get the better of their prejudices and his own sense of mortification. ‘No doubt,’ said Northcote, ‘personal defects or disgrace operate in this way. I knew an admiral who had got the nickname of “Dirty Dick” among the sailors, and, on his being congratulated on obtaining some desperate victory, all he said was, “I hope they’ll call me Dirty Dick no more!”—There was a Sir John Grenville or Greenfield formerly, who was appointed to convoy a fleet of merchant-ships, and had to defend them against a Spanish man-of-war, and did so with the utmost bravery and resolution, so that the convoy got safe off; but after that, he would not yield till he was struck senseless by a ball, and then the crew delivered up the vessel to the enemy, who, on coming on board and entering the cabin where he lay, were astonished to find a mere puny shrivelled spider of a man, instead of the Devil they had expected to see. He was taken on shore in Spain, and died of his wounds there; and the Spanish women afterwards used to frighten their children, by telling them “Don John of the Greenfield was coming!”’

CONVERSATION THE FIFTH

Northcote mentioned the death of poor —, who had been with him a few days before, laughing and in great spirits; and the next thing he heard was that he had put an end to himself. I asked if there was any particular reason? He said ‘No; that he had left a note upon the table, saying that his friends had forsaken him, that he knew no cause, and that he was tired of life. His patron, C—, of the Admiralty, had, it seems, set him to paint a picture of Louis the Eighteenth receiving the Order of the Garter. He had probably been teazed about that. These insipid court-subjects were destined to be fatal to artists. Poor Bird had been employed to paint a picture of Louis the Eighteenth landing at Calais, and had died of chagrin and disappointment at his failure. Who could make any thing of such a figure and such a subject? There was nothing to be done; and yet if the artist added any thing of his own, he was called to order by his would-be patrons, as falsifying what appeared to them an important event in history. It was only a person like Rubens who could succeed in such subjects by taking what licences he thought proper, and having authority enough to dictate to his advisers.’ A gentleman came in, who asked if — was likely to have succeeded in his art? Northcote answered, ‘There were several things against it. He was good-looking, good-natured, and a wit. He was accordingly asked out to dine, and caressed by those who knew him; and a young man after receiving these flattering marks of attention and enjoying the height of luxury and splendour, was not inclined to return to his painting-room, to brood over a design that would cost him infinite trouble, and the success of which was at last doubtful. Few young men of agreeable persons or conversation turned out great artists. It was easier to look in the glass than to make a dull canvas shine like a lucid mirror; and, as to talking, Sir Joshua used to say, a painter should sew up his mouth. It was only the love of distinction that produced eminence; and if a man was admired for one thing, that was enough. We only work out our way to excellence by being imprisoned in defects. It requires a long apprenticeship, great pains, and prodigious self-denial, which no man will submit to, except from necessity, or as the only chance he has of escaping from obscurity. I remember when Mr. Locke (of Norbury Park) first came over from Italy; and old Dr. Moore, who had a high opinion of him, was crying up his drawings and asked me, if I did not think he would make a great painter? I said, ‘No, never!’—‘Why not?’—‘Because he has six thousand a year.’ No one would throw away all the advantages and indulgences this ensured him, to shut himself up in a garret to pore over that which after all may expose him to contempt and ridicule. Artists, to be sure, have gone on painting after they have got rich, such as Rubens and Titian, and indeed Sir Joshua; but then it had by this time become a habit and a source of pleasure instead of a toil to them, and the honours and distinction they had acquired by it counter-balanced every other consideration. Their love of the art had become greater than their love of riches or of idleness: but at first this is not the case, and the repugnance to labour is only mastered by the absolute necessity for it. People apply to study only when they cannot help it. No one was ever known to succeed without this stimulus.’ I ventured to say that, generally speaking, no one, I believed, ever succeeded in a profession without great application; but that where there was a strong turn for any thing, a man in this sense could not help himself, and the application followed of course, and was, in fact, comparatively easy. Northcote turned short round upon me, and said, ‘Then you admit original genius? I cannot agree with you there.’ I said, ‘Waiving that, and not inquiring how the inclination comes, but early in life a fondness, a passion for a certain pursuit is imbibed; the mind is haunted by this object, it cannot rest without it (any more than the body without food), it becomes the strongest feeling we have, and then, I think, the most intense application follows naturally, just as in the case of a love of money or any other passion—the most unremitting application without this is forced and of no use; and where this original bias exists, no other motive is required.’—‘Oh! but,’ said Northcote, ‘if you had to labour on by yourself without competitors or admirers, you would soon lay down your pencil or your pen in disgust. It is the hope of shining, or the fear of being eclipsed, that urges you on. Do you think if nobody took any notice of what you did, this would not damp your ardour?’—‘Yes; after I had done anything that I thought worth notice, it might considerably: but how many minds (almost all the great ones) were formed in secresy and solitude, without knowing whether they should ever make a figure or not! All they knew was, that they liked what they were about, and gave their whole souls to it. There was Hogarth, there was Correggio: what enabled these artists to arrive at the perfection in their several ways, which afterwards gained them the attention of the world? Not the premature applause of the by-standers, but the vivid tingling delight with which the one seized upon a grotesque incident or expression—“the wrapt soul sitting in the eyes,” of the other, as he drew a saint or angel from the skies. If they had been brought forward very early, before they had served this thorough apprenticeship to their own minds (the opinion of the world apart), it might have damped or made coxcombs of them. It was the love and perception of excellence (or the favouring smile of the Muse) that in my view produced excellence and formed the man of genius. Some, like Milton, had gone on with a great work all their lives with little encouragement but the hope of posthumous fame.’—‘It is not that,’ said Northcote; ‘you cannot see so far. It is not those who have gone before you or those who are to come after you, but those who are by your side, running the same race, that make you look about you. What made Titian jealous of Tintoret? Because he stood immediately in his way, and their works were compared together. If there had been a hundred Tintorets a thousand miles off, he would not have cared about them. That is what takes off the edge and stimulus of exertion in old age: those who were our competitors in early life, whom we wished to excel or whose good opinion we were most anxious about, are gone, and have left us in a manner by ourselves, in a sort of new world, where we know and are as little known as on entering a strange country. Our ambition is cold with the ashes of those whom we feared or loved. I remember old Alderman Boydell using an expression which explained this. Once when I was in the coach with him, in reply to some compliment of mine on his success in life, he said, “Ah! there was one who would have been pleased at it; but her I have lost!” The fine coach and all the city-trappings were nothing to him without his wife, who remembered what he was and the gradations and anxious cares by which he rose to his present affluence, and was a kind of monitor to remind him of his former self and of the different vicissitudes of his fortune.’

Northcote then spoke of old Alderman Boydell with great regret, and said, ‘He was a man of sense and liberality, and a true patron of the art. His nephew, who came after him, had not the same capacity, and wanted to dictate to the artists what they were to do. N. mentioned some instance of his wanting him to paint a picture on a subject for which he was totally unfit, and figures of a size which he had never been accustomed to, and he told him “he must get somebody else to do it.”’ I said, ‘Booksellers and editors had the same infirmity, and always wanted you to express their ideas, not your own. Sir R. P— had once gone up to Coleridge, after hearing him talk in a large party, and offered him “nine guineas a sheet for his conversation!” He calculated that the “nine guineas a sheet” would be at least as strong a stimulus to his imagination as the wasting his words in a room full of company.’ Northcote: ‘Ay, he came to me once, and wished me to do a work which was to contain a history of art in all countries and from the beginning of the world. I said it would be an invaluable work if it could be done; but that there was no one alive who could do it.’

Northcote afterwards, by some transition, spoke of the characters of women, and asked my opinion. I said, ‘All my metaphysics leaned to the vulgar side of these questions: I thought there was a difference of original genius, a difference in the character of the sexes, &c. Women appeared to me to do some things better than men; and therefore I concluded they must do other things worse.’ Northcote mentioned Annibal Caracci, and said, ‘How odd it was, that in looking at any work of his, you could swear it was done by a man! Ludovico Caracci had a finer and more intellectual expression, but not the same bold and workmanlike character. There was Michael Angelo again—what woman would ever have thought of painting the figures in the Sistine chapel? There was Dryden too, what a thorough manly character there was in his style! And Pope’—[I interrupted, ‘seemed to me between a man and a woman.’]—‘It was not,’ he continued, ‘that women were not often very clever (cleverer than many men), but there was a point of excellence which they never reached. Yet the greatest pains had been taken with several. Angelica Kauffmann had been brought up from a child to the art, and had been taken by her father (in boy’s clothes) to the Academy to learn to draw; but there was an effeminate and feeble look in all her works, though not without merit. There was not the man’s hand, or what Fuseli used to call a “fist” in them; that is, something coarse and clumsy enough, perhaps, but still with strength and muscle. Even in common things, you would see a carpenter drive a nail in a way that a women never would; or if you had a suit of clothes made by a woman, they would hang quite loose about you and seem ready to fall off. Yet it is extraordinary too, said Northcote, that in what has sometimes been thought the peculiar province of men, courage and heroism, there have been women fully upon a par with any men, such as Joan of Arc and many others, who have never been surpassed as leaders in battle.’ I observed that of all the women I had ever seen or known any thing of, Mrs. Siddons struck me as the grandest. He said,—‘Oh! it is her outward form, which stamps her so completely for tragedy, no less than the mental part. Both she and her brother were cut out by Nature for a tragedy-king and queen. It is what Mrs. Hannah More has said of her, “Her’s is the afflicted!”’ I replied, that she seemed to me equally great in anger or in contempt or in any stately part as she was in grief, witness her Lady Macbeth. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that, to be sure, was a masterpiece.’ I asked what he thought of Mrs. Inchbald? He said, ‘Oh! very highly: there was no affectation in her. I once took up her Simple Story (which my sister had borrowed from the circulating library) and looking into it, I said, “My God! what have you got here?” and I never moved from the chair till I had finished it. Her Nature and Art is equally fine—the very marrow of genius.’ She seems to me, I added, like Venus writing books. ‘Yes, women have certainly been successful in writing novels; and in plays too. I think Mrs. Centlivre’s are better than Congreve’s. Their letters, too, are admirable: it is only when they put on the breeches and try to write like men, that they become pedantic and tiresome. In giving advice, too, I have often found that they excelled; and when I have been irritated by any trifling circumstance and have laid more stress upon it than it was worth, they have seen the thing in a right point of view and tamed down my asperities.’ On this I remarked, that I thought, in general, it might be said that the faculties of women were of a passive character. They judged by the simple effect upon their feelings, without inquiring into causes. Men had to act; women had the coolness and the advantages of by-standers, and were neither implicated in the theories nor passions of men. While we were proving a thing to be wrong, they would feel it to be ridiculous. I said, I thought they had more of common sense, though less of acquired capacity than men. They were freer from the absurdities of creeds and dogmas, from the virulence of party in religion and politics (by which we strove to show our sense and superiority), nor were their heads so much filled with the lumber of learned folios. I mentioned as an illustration, that when old Baxter (the celebrated casuist and nonconformist divine) first went to Kidderminster to preach, he was almost pelted by the women for maintaining from the pulpit the then fashionable and orthodox doctrine, that ‘Hell was paved with infants’ skulls.’ The theory, which the learned divine had piled up on arguments and authorities, is now exploded: the common-sense feeling on the subject, which the women of that day took up in opposition to it as a dictate of humanity, would be now thought the philosophical one. ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘but this exploded doctrine was knocked down by some man, as it had been set up by one: the women would let things remain as they are, without making any progress in error or wisdom. We do best together: our strength and our weakness mutually correct each other.’ Northcote then read me from a manuscript volume lying by him, a character drawn of his deceased wife by a Dissenting Minister (a Mr. Fox, of Plymouth) which is so beautiful that I shall transcribe it here.

‘Written by Mr. John Fox, on the death of his wife, who was the daughter of the Rev. Mr. Isaac Gelling.

‘My dear wife died to my unspeakable grief, Dec. 19th, 1762. With the loss of my dear companion died all the pleasure of my life; and no wonder: I had lived with her forty years, in which time nothing happened to abate the strictness of our Friendship, or to create a coolness or indifference so common and even unregarded by many in the world. I thank God I enjoyed my full liberty, my health, such pleasures and diversions as I liked, perfect peace and competence during the time; which were all seasoned and heightened every day more or less by constant marks of friendship, most inviolable affection, and a most cheerful endeavour to make my life agreeable. Nothing disturbed me but her many and constant disorders; under all which I could see how her faithful heart was strongly attached to me. And who could stand the shock of seeing the attacks of Death upon and then her final dissolution? The consequences to me were fatal. Old age rushed upon me like an armed man: my appetite failed, my strength was gone, every amusement became flat and dull; my countenance fell, and I have nothing to do but to drag on a heavy chain for the rest of my life; which I hope a good God will enable me to do without murmuring, and in conclusion, to say with all my soul—

Te Deum Laudamus.

‘This was written on a paper blotted by tears, and stuck with wafers into the first page of the family Bible.

‘Mr. John Fox died 22d of October, 1763. He was born May 10th, 1693.’

CONVERSATION THE SIXTH

Northcote alluded to a printed story of his having hung an early picture of H—’s out of sight, and of Fuseli’s observing on the occasion—‘By G—d, you are sending him to heaven before his time!’ He said there was not the least foundation for this story; nor could there be, he not having been hanger that year. He read out of the same publication a letter from Burke to a young artist of the name of Barrow, full of excellent sense, advising him by no means to give up his profession as an engraver till he was sure he could succeed as a painter, out of idle ambition and an unfounded contempt for the humbler and more laborious walks of life. ‘I could not have thought it of him,’ said Northcote; ‘I confess he never appeared to me so great a man.’ I asked what kind of looking man he was? Northcote answered, ‘You have seen the picture? There was something I did not like; a thinness in the features, and an expression of hauteur, though mixed with condescension and the manners of a gentleman. I can’t help thinking he had a hand in the Discourses; that he gave some of the fine, graceful turns; for Sir Joshua paid a greater deference to him than to any body else, and put up with freedoms that he would only have submitted to from some peculiar obligation. Indeed, Miss Reynolds used to complain that whenever any of Burke’s poor Irish relations came over, they were all poured in upon them to dinner; but Sir Joshua never took any notice, but bore it all with the greatest patience and tranquillity. To be sure, there was another reason: he expected Burke to write his Life, and for this he would have paid almost any price. This was what made him submit to the intrusions of Boswell, to the insipidity of Malone, and to the magisterial dictation of Burke: he made sure that out of these three one would certainly write his Life, and ensure him immortality that way. He thought no more of the person who actually did write it afterwards than he would have suspected his dog of writing it. Indeed, I wish he could have known; for it would have been of some advantage to me, and he might have left me something not to dwell on his defects; though he was as free from them as any man; but you can make any one ridiculous with whom you live on terms of intimacy.

‘I remember an instance of this that happened with respect to old Mr. M— whom you must have heard me speak of, and who was esteemed an idol by Burke, Dr. Johnson, and many others. Sir Joshua wanted to reprint his Sermons and prefix a Life to them, and asked me to get together any particulars I could learn of him. So I gave him a manuscript account of Mr. M—, written by an old school-fellow of his (Mr. Fox, a dissenting minister in the West of England); after which I heard no more of the Life. Mr. M— was in fact a man of extraordinary talents and great eloquence; and by representing in a manner the High-Church notions both of Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua (for both were inclined the same way) they came to consider him as a sort of miracle of virtue and wisdom. There was, however, something in Mr. Fox’s plain account that would strike Sir Joshua, for he had an eye for nature; and he would at once perceive it was nearer the truth than Dr. Johnson’s pompous character of him, which was proper only for a tombstone—it was like one of Kneller’s portraits,—it would do for any body! That,’ said Northcote, ‘is old Mr. M—’s definition of beauty, which Sir Joshua has adopted in the Discourses—that it is the medium of form. For what is a handsome nose? A long nose is not a handsome nose; neither is a short nose a handsome one: it must then be one that is neither long nor short, but in the middle between both. Even Burke bowed to his authority; and Sir Joshua thought him the wisest man he ever knew. Once when Sir Joshua was expressing his impatience of some innovation, and I said, “At that rate, the Christian Religion could never have been established.” “Oh!” he said, “Mr. M— has answered that!” which seemed to satisfy him.’

I made some remark that I wondered he did not come up to London, though the same feeling seemed to belong to other clever men born in Devonshire (as Gandy) whose ambition was confined to their native county, so that there must be some charm in the place. ‘You are to consider,’ he replied, ‘it is almost a peninsula, so that there is no thorough-fare, and people are therefore more stationary in one spot. It is for this reason they necessarily intermarry among themselves, and you can trace the genealogies of families for centuries back; whereas in other places, and particularly here in London, where every thing of that kind is jumbled together, you never know who any man’s grandfather was. There are country-squires and plain gentry down in that part of the world, who have occupied the same estates long before the Conquest (as the Suckbitches in particular,—not a very sounding name) and who look down upon the Courtneys and others as upstarts. Certainly, Devonshire for its extent has produced a number of eminent men, Sir Joshua, the Mudges, Dunning, Gay, Lord Chancellor King, Raleigh, Drake, and Sir Richard Granville in Queen Elizabeth’s time, who made that gallant defence in an engagement with the Spanish fleet, and was the ancestor of Pope’s Lord Lansdowne, “What Muse for Granville will refuse to sing, &c.” Foster, the celebrated preacher, was also, I believe, from the West of England. He first became popular from the Lord Chancellor Hardwicke stopping in the porch of his chapel in the Old Jewry, out of a shower of rain; and thinking he might as well hear what was going on, he went in, and was so well pleased that he sent all the great folks to hear him, and he was run after as much as Irving has been in our time. An old fellow-student from the country, going to wait on him at his house in London, found a Shakspeare on the window-seat; and remarking the circumstance with some surprise as out of the usual course of clerical studies, the other apologised by saying that he wished to know something of the world, that his situation and habits precluded him from the common opportunities, and that he found no way of supplying the deficiency so agreeable or effectual as looking into a volume of Shakspeare. Pope has immortalised him in the well-known lines:—

‘Let modest Foster, if he will, excel

Ten Metropolitans in preaching well!’

Dr. Mudge, the son of Mr. Zachary Mudge, who was a physician, was an intimate friend of my father’s, and I remember him perfectly well. He was one of the most delightful persons I ever knew. Every one was enchanted with his society. It was not wit that he possessed, but such perfect cheerfulness and good-humour, that it was like health coming into the room. He was a most agreeable companion, quite natural and unaffected. His reading was the most beautiful I have ever heard. I remember his once reading Moore’s fable of the Female Seducers with such feeling and sweetness that every one was delighted, and Dr. Mudge himself was so much affected that he burst into tears in the middle of it. The family are still respectable, but derive their chief lustre from the first two founders, like clouds that reflect the sun’s rays, after he has sunk below the horizon, but in time turn grey and are lost in obscurity!’

I asked Northcote if he had ever happened to meet with a letter of Warburton’s in answer to one of Dr. Doddridge’s, complimenting the author of the Divine Legation of Moses on the evident zeal and earnestness with which he wrote—to which the latter candidly replied, that he wrote with great haste and unwillingness; that he never sat down to compose till the printer’s boy was waiting at the door for the manuscript, and that he should never write at all but as a relief to a morbid lowness of spirits, and to drive away uneasy thoughts that often assailed him.[^[91]] ‘That indeed,’ observed Northcote, ‘gives a different turn to the statement; I thought at first it was only the common coquetry both of authors and artists, to be supposed to do what excites the admiration of others with the greatest ease and indifference, and almost without knowing what they are about. If what surprises you costs them nothing, the wonder is so much increased. When Michael Angelo proposed to fortify his native city, Florence, and he was desired to keep to his painting and sculpture, he answered, that those were his recreations, but what he really understood was architecture. That is what Sir Joshua considers as the praise of Rubens, that he seemed to make a play-thing of the art. In fact, the work is never complete unless it has this appearance: and therefore Sir Joshua has laid himself open to criticism, in saying that ‘a picture must not only be done well, it must seem to have been done easily.’ It cannot be said to be done well, unless it has this look. That is the fault of those laboured and timid productions of the modern French and Italian schools; they are the result of such a tedious, petty, mechanical process, that it is as difficult for you to admire as it has been for the artist to execute them. Whereas, when a work seems stamped on the canvas by a blow, you are taken by surprise; and your admiration is as instantaneous and electrical as the impulse of genius which has caused it. I have seen a whole-length portrait by Velasquez, that seemed done while the colours were yet wet; every thing was touched in, as it were, by a wish; there was such a power that it thrilled through your whole frame, and you felt as if you could take up the brush and do any thing. It is this sense of power and freedom which delights and communicates its own inspiration, just as the opposite drudgery and attention to details is painful and disheartening. There was a little picture of one of the Infants of Spain on horseback, also by Velasquez, which Mr. Agar had,[^[92]] and with which Gainsborough was so transported, that he said in a fit of bravado to the servant who showed it, “Tell your master I will give him a thousand pounds for that picture.” Mr. Agar began to consider what pictures he could purchase with the money if he parted with this, and at last, having made up his mind, sent Gainsborough word he might have the picture; who not at all expecting this result, was a good deal confused, and declared, however he might admire it, he could not afford to give so large a sum for it.’

CONVERSATION THE SEVENTH

Northcote complained of being unwell, though he said he could hardly expect it to be otherwise at his age. He must think of making up the accounts of his life, such as it had been, though he added (checking himself) that he ought not to say that, for he had had his share of good as well as others. He had been reading in Boccaccio, where it was frequently observed, that ‘such a one departed this wretched life at such a time;’—so that in Boccaccio’s time they complained of the wretchedness of life as much as we do. He alluded to an expression of Coleridge’s, which he had seen quoted in a newspaper, and which he thought very fine, ‘That an old Gothic cathedral always seemed to him like a petrified religion!’ Some one asked, Why does he not go and turn Black Monk? Because, I said, he never does anything that he should do. ‘There are some things,’ said N., ‘with respect to which I am in the same state that a blind man is as to colours. Homer is one of these. I am utterly in the dark about it. I can make nothing of his heroes or his Gods. Whether this is owing to my not knowing the language or to a change of manners, I cannot say.’ He was here interrupted by the entrance of the beautiful Mrs. G—, beautiful even in years. She said she had brought him a book to look at. She could not stop, for she had a lady waiting for her below, but she would call in some morning and have a long chat. After she was gone, I remarked how handsome she still was; and he said, ‘I don’t know why she is so kind as to come, except that I am the last link in the chain that connects her with all those she most esteemed when she was young, Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith—and remind her of the most delightful period of her life.’ I said, Not only so, but you remember what she was at twenty; and you thus bring back to her the triumphs of her youth—that pride of beauty which must be the more fondly cherished as it has no external vouchers, and lives chiefly in the bosom of its once lovely possessor. In her, however, the Graces had triumphed over time; she was one of Ninon de l’Enclos’ people, of the list of the Immortals. I could almost fancy the shade of Goldsmith in the room, looking round with complacency. ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘that is what Sir Joshua used to mention as the severest test of beauty—it was not then skin-deep only. She had gone through all the stages, and had lent a grace to each. There are beauties that are old in a year. Take away the bloom and freshness of youth, and there is no trace of what they were. Their beauty is not grounded in first principles. Good temper is one of the great preservers of the features.’ I observed, it was the same in the mind as in the body. There were persons of premature ability who soon ran to seed, and others who made no figure till they were advanced in life. I had known several who were very clever at seventeen or eighteen, but who had turned out nothing afterwards. ‘That is what my father used to say, that at that time of life the effervescence and intoxication of youth did a great deal, but that we must wait till the gaiety and dance of the animal spirits had subsided to see what people really were. It is wonderful’ (said Northcote, reverting to the former subject) ‘what a charm there is in those early associations, in whatever recals that first dawn and outset of life. Jack-the-Giant-Killer is the first book I ever read, and I cannot describe the pleasure it gives me even now. I cannot look into it without my eyes filling with tears. I do not know what it is (whether good or bad), but it is to me, from early impressions, the most heroic of performances. I remember once not having money to buy it, and I transcribed it all out with my own hand. This is what I was going to say about Homer. I cannot help thinking that one cause of the high admiration in which it is held is its being the first book that is put into the hands of young people at school: it is the first spell which opens to them the enchantments of the unreal world. Had I been bred a scholar, I dare say Homer would have been my Jack-the-Giant-Killer!—There is an innocence and simplicity in that early age which makes every thing relating to it delightful. It seems to me that it is the absence of all affectation or even of consciousness, that constitutes the perfection of nature or art. That is what makes it so interesting to see girls and boys dancing at school—there is such natural gaiety and freedom, such unaffected, unpretending, unknown grace. That is the true dancing, and not what you see at the Opera. And again, in the most ordinary actions of children, what an ease, what a playfulness, what flames of beauty do they throw out without being in the smallest degree aware of it! I have sometimes thought it a pity there should be such a precious essence, and that those who possess it should be quite ignorant of it: yet if they knew it, that alone would kill it! The whole depends on the utter absence of all egotism, of the remotest reflection upon self. It is the same in works of art—the simplest are the best. That is what makes me hate those stuffed characters that are so full of themselves that I think they cannot have much else in them. A man who admires himself prevents me from admiring him, just as by praising himself he stops my mouth; though the vulgar take their cue from a man’s opinion of himself, and admire none but coxcombs and pedants. This is the best excuse for impudence and quackery, that the world will not be gained without it. The true favourites of Nature, however, have their eyes turned towards the Goddess, instead of looking at themselves in the glass. There is no pretence or assumption about them. It seems difficult indeed for any one who is the object of attention to others not to be thinking of himself: but the greatest men have always been the most free from this bias, the weakest have been the soonest puffed up by self-conceit. If you had asked Correggio why he painted as he did, he would have answered, “Because he could not help it.” Look at Dryden’s verses, which he wrote just like a school-boy who brings up his task without knowing whether he shall be rewarded or flogged for it. Do you suppose he wrote the description of Cymon for any other reason than because he could not help it, or that he had any more power to stop himself in his headlong career than the mountain-torrent? Or turn to Shakspeare, who evidently does not know the value, the dreadful value (as I may say) of the expressions he uses. Genius gathers up its beauties, like the child, without knowing whether they are weeds or flowers: those productions that are destined to give forth an everlasting odour, grow up without labour or design.’

Mr. P— came in, and complimenting Northcote on a large picture he was about, the latter said, It was his last great work: he was getting too old for such extensive undertakings. His friend replied, that Titian went on painting till near a hundred. ‘Aye,’ said Northcote, ‘but he had the Devil to help him, and I have never been able to retain him in my service. It is a dreadful thing to see an immense blank canvas spread out before you to commit sins upon.’ Something was said of the Academy, and P— made answer, ‘I know your admiration of corporate bodies.’ N. said, ‘They were no worse than others; they all began well and ended ill. When the Academy first began, one would suppose that the Members were so many angels sent from heaven to fill the different situations, and that was the reason why it began: now the difficulty was to find any body fit for them, and the deficiency was supplied by interest, intrigue, and cabal. Not that I object to the individuals neither. As Swift said, I like Jack, Tom, and Harry very well by themselves; but altogether, they are not to be endured. We see the effect of people acting in concert in animals (for men are only a more vicious sort of animals): a single dog will let you kick and cuff him as you please, and will submit to any treatment; but if you meet a pack of hounds, they will set upon you and tear you to pieces with the greatest impudence.’ P.: ‘The same complaint was made of the Academy in Barry’s time, which is now thirty or forty years ago.’[^[93]] Northcote: ‘Oh! yes, they very soon degenerated. It is the same in all human institutions. The thing is, there has been no way found yet to keep the Devil out. It will be a curious thing to see whether that experiment of the American Government will last. If it does, it will be the first instance of the kind.’ P.: ‘I should think not. There is something very complicated and mysterious in the mode of their Elections, which I am given to understand are managed in an under-hand manner by the leaders of parties; and besides, in all governments the great desideratum is to combine activity with a freedom from selfish passions. But it unfortunately happens that in human life, the selfish passions are the strongest and most active; and on this rock society seems to split. There is a certain period in a man’s life when he is at his best (when he combines the activity of youth with the experience of manhood), after which he declines; and perhaps it may be the same with states. Things are not best in the beginning or at the end, but in the middle, which is but a point.’ Northcote: ‘Nothing stands still; it therefore either grows better or worse. When a thing has reached its utmost perfection, it then borders on excess; and excess leads to ruin and decay.’

Lord G. had bought a picture of Northcote’s: an allusion was made to his enormous and increasing wealth. Northcote said he could be little the better for it. After a certain point, it became a mere nominal distinction. He only thought of that which passed through his hands and fell under his immediate notice. He knew no more of the rest than you or I did: he was merely perplexed by it. This was what often made persons in his situation tenacious of the most trifling sums, for this was the only positive or tangible wealth they had: the remote contingency was like a thing in the clouds, or mountains of silver and gold seen in the distant horizon. It was the same with Nollekens: he died worth £200,000: but the money he had accumulated at his banker’s was out of his reach and contemplation—out of sight, out of mind—he was only muddling about with what he had in his hands, and lived like a beggar in actual fear of want. P. said, he was an odd little man, but he believed clever in his profession. Northcote assented, and observed ‘he was an instance of what might be done by concentrating the attention on a single object. If you collect the rays of the sun in a focus, you could set any object on fire. Great talents were often dissipated to no purpose: but time and patience conquered every thing. Without them, you could do nothing. So Giardini, when asked how long it would take to learn to play on the fiddle, answered—“Twelve hours a-day for twenty years together.” A few great geniuses may trifle with the arts, like Rubens; but in general nothing can be more fatal than to suppose one’s-self a great genius.’ P. observed, that in common business those who gave up their whole time and thoughts to any pursuit generally succeeded in it, though far from bright men: and we often found those who had acquired a name for some one excellence, people of moderate capacity in other respects. After Mr. P. was gone, Northcote said he was one of the persons of the soundest judgment he had ever known, and like Mr. P. H. the least liable to be imposed upon by appearances. Northcote made the remark that he thought it improper in any one to refuse lending a favourite picture for public exhibition, as it seemed not exclusively to belong to one person. A jewel of this value belongs rather to the public than to the individual. Consider the multitudes you deprive of an advantage they cannot receive again: the idle of amusement, the studious of instruction and improvement. I said, this kind of indifference to the wishes of the public was sending the world to Coventry! We then spoke of a celebrated courtier, of whom I said I was willing to believe every thing that was amiable, though I had some difficulty, while thinking of him, to keep the valet out of my head. Northcote: ‘He has certainly endeavoured to behave well; but there is no altering character. I myself might have been a courtier if I could have cringed and held my tongue; but I could no more exist in that element than a fish out of water. At one time I knew Lord R. and Lord H. S—, who were intimate with the Prince and recommended my pictures to him. Sir Joshua once asked me, “What do you know of the Prince of —, that he so often speaks to me about you?” I remember I made him laugh by my answer, for I said, “Oh! he knows nothing of me, nor I of him—it’s only his bragging!”—“Well,” said he, “that is spoken like a King!”‘... It was to-day I asked leave to write down one or two of these Conversations: he said ‘I might, if I thought it worth while; but I do assure you that you overrate them. You have not lived enough in society to be a judge. What is new to you, you think will seem so to others. To be sure, there is one thing, I have had the advantage of having lived in good society myself. I not only passed a great deal of my younger days in the company of Reynolds, Johnson, and that circle, but I was brought up among the Mudges, of whom Sir Joshua (who was certainly used to the most brilliant society of the metropolis) thought so highly, that he had them at his house for weeks, and even sometimes gave up his own bed-room to receive them. Yet they were not thought superior to several other persons at Plymouth, who were distinguished, some for their satirical wit, others for their delightful fancy, others for their information or sound sense, and with all of whom my father was familiar when I was a boy. Really after what I recollect of these, some of the present people appear to me mere wretched pretenders, muttering out their own emptiness.’ I said, We had a specimen of Lord Byron’s Conversations. Northcote.—‘Yes; but he was a tyrant, and a person of that disposition never learns any thing, because he will only associate with inferiors. If, however, you think you can make any thing of it and can keep clear of personalities, I have no objection to your trying; only I think after the first attempt, you will give it up as turning out quite differently from what you expected.’

CONVERSATION THE EIGHTH

Northcote spoke again of Sir Joshua, and said, he was in some degree ignorant of what might be called the grammatical part of the art, or scholarship of academic skill; but he made up for it by an eye for nature, or rather by a feeling of harmony and beauty. Dance (he that was afterwards Sir Nathaniel Holland) drew the figure well, gave a strong likeness and a certain studied air to his portraits; yet they were so stiff and forced that they seemed as if put into a vice. Sir Joshua, with the defect of proportion and drawing, threw his figures into such natural and graceful attitudes, that they might be taken for the very people sitting or standing there. An arm might be too long or too short, but from the apparent ease of the position he had chosen, it looked like a real arm and neither too long nor too short. The mechanical measurements might be wrong: the general conception of nature and character was right; and this, which he felt most strongly himself, he conveyed in a corresponding degree to the spectator. Nature is not one thing, but a variety of things, considered under different points of view; and he who seizes forcibly and happily on any one of these, does enough for fame. He will be the most popular artist, who gives that view with which the world in general sympathise. A merely professional reputation is not very extensive, nor will it last long. W—, who prided himself on his drawing, had no idea of any thing but a certain rigid outline, never considering the use of the limbs in moving, the effects of light and shade, &c. so that his figures, even the best of them, look as if cut out of wood. Therefore no one now goes to see them: while Sir Joshua’s are as much sought after as ever, from their answering to a feeling in the mind, though deficient as literal representations of external nature. Speaking of artists who were said, in the cant of connoisseurship, to be jealous of their outline, he said, ‘Rembrandt was not one of these. He took good care to lose it as fast as he could.’ Northcote then spoke of the breadth of Titian, and observed, that though particularly in his early pictures, he had finished highly and copied every thing from nature, this never interfered with the general effect, there was no confusion or littleness: he threw such a broad light on the objects, that every thing was seen in connection with the masses and in its place. He then mentioned some pictures of his own, some of them painted forty years ago, that had lately sold very well at a sale at Plymouth: he was much gratified at this, and said it was almost like looking out of the grave to see how one’s reputation got on.

Northcote told an anecdote of Sir George B—, to show the credulity of mankind. When a young man, he put an advertisement in the papers to say that a Mynheer —, just come over from Germany, had found out a method of taking a likeness much superior to any other by the person’s looking into a mirror and having the glass heated so as to bake the impression. He stated this wonderful artist to live at a perfumer’s shop in Bond-street, opposite to an hotel where he lodged, and amused himself the next day to see the numbers of people who flocked to have their likenesses taken in this surprising manner. At last, he went over himself to ask for Monsieur —, and was driven out of the shop by the perfumer in a rage, who said there was no Monsieur — nor Monsieur Devil lived there. At another time Sir G. was going in a coach to a tavern with a party of gay young men. The waiter came to the coach-door with a light, and as he was holding this up to the others, those who had already got out went round, and getting in at the opposite coach-door came out again, so that there seemed to be no end of the procession, and the waiter ran into the house, frightened out of his wits. The same story is told of Swift and four clergymen dressed in canonicals.

Speaking of titles, Northcote said, ‘It was strange what blunders were often made in this way. R—, (the engraver) had stuck Lord John Boringdon under his print after Sir Joshua—it should be John Lord Boringdon—and he calls the Earl of Carlisle Lord Carlisle—Lord Carlisle denotes only a Baron. I was once dining at Sir John Leicester’s, and a gentleman who was there was expressing his wonder what connection a Prince of Denmark and a Duke of Gloucester could have with Queen Anne, that prints of them should be inserted in a history that he had just purchased of her reign. No other, I said, than that one of them was her son, and the other her husband. The boy died when he was eleven years old of a fever caught at a ball dancing, or he would have succeeded to the throne. He was a very promising youth, though that indeed is what is said of all princes. Queen Anne took his death greatly to heart, and that was the reason why she never would appoint a successor. She wished her brother to come in, rather than the present family. That makes me wonder, after thrones have been overturned and kingdoms torn asunder to keep the Catholics out, to see the pains that are now taken to bring them in. It was this that made the late King say it was inconsistent with his Coronation-oath. Not that I object to tolerate any religion (even the Jewish), but they are the only one that will not tolerate any other. They are such devils (what with their cunning, their numbers, and their zeal), that if they once get a footing, they will never rest till they get the whole power into their hands. It was but the other day that the Jesuits nearly overturned the empire of China; and if they were obliged to make laws and take the utmost precautions against their crafty encroachments, shall we open a door to them, who have only just escaped out of their hands?’ I said, I had thrown a radical reformer into a violent passion lately by maintaining that the Pope and Cardinals of Rome were a set of as good-looking men as so many Protestant Bishops or Methodist parsons, and that the Italians were the only people who seemed to have any faith in their religion as an object of imagination or feeling. My opponent grew almost black in the face, while inveighing against the enormous absurdity of transubstantiation; it was in vain I pleaded the beauty, innocence, and cheerfulness of the peasant-girls near Rome, who believed in this dreadful superstition, and who thought me damned and would probably have been glad to see me burnt at a stake as a heretic. At length I said, that I thought reason and truth very excellent things in themselves; and that when I saw the rest of the world grow as fond of them as they were of absurdity and superstition, I should be entirely of his way of thinking; but I liked an interest in something (a wafer or a crucifix) better than an interest in nothing. What have philosophers gained by unloosing their hold of the ideal world, but to be hooted at and pelted by the rabble, and envied and vilified by one another for want of a common bond of union and interest between them? I just now met the son of an old literary friend in the street, who seemed disposed to cut me for some hereditary pique, jealousy, or mistrust. Suppose his father and I had been Catholic priests (saving the bar-sinister) how different would have been my reception! He is short-sighted indeed; but had I been a Cardinal, he would have seen me fast enough: the costume alone would have assisted him. Where there is no frame-work of respectability founded on the esprit de corps and on public opinion cemented into a prejudice, the jarring pretensions of individuals fall into a chaos of elementary particles, neutralising each other by mutual antipathy, and soon become the sport and laughter of the multitude. Where the whole is referred to intrinsic, real merit, this creates a standard of conceit, egotism, and envy in every one’s own mind, lowering the class, not raising the individual. A Catholic priest walking along the street is looked up to as a link in the chain let down from heaven: a poet or philosopher is looked down upon as a poor creature, deprived of certain advantages, and with very questionable pretensions in other respects. Abstract intellect requires the weight of the other world to be thrown into the scale, to make it a match for the prejudices, vulgarity, ignorance, and selfishness of this! ‘You are right,’ said Northcote. ‘It was Archimedes who said he could move the earth if he had a place to fix his levers on: the priests have always found this purchase in the skies. After all, we have not much reason to complain, if they give us so splendid a reversion to look forward to. That is what I said to G— when he had been trying to unsettle the opinions of a young artist whom I knew. Why should you wish to turn him out of one house, till you have provided another for him? Besides, what do you know of the matter more than he does? His nonsense is as good as your nonsense, when both are equally in the dark. As to what your friend said of the follies of the Catholics, I do not think that the Protestants can pretend to be quite free from them. So when a chaplain of Lord Bath’s was teazing a Popish clergyman to know how he could make up his mind to admit that absurdity of Transubstantiation, the other made answer, “Why, I’ll tell you: when I was young, I was taught to swallow Adam’s Apple; and since that, I have found no difficulty with any thing else!” We may say what we will of the Catholic religion; but it is more easy to abuse than to overturn it. I have for myself no objection to it but its insatiable ambition, and its being such a dreadful engine of power. It is its very perfection as a system of profound policy and moral influence, that renders it so formidable. Indeed, I have been sometimes suspected of a leaning to it myself; and when Godwin wrote his Life of Chaucer, he was said to have turned Papist from his making use of something I had said to him about confession. I don’t know but unfair advantages may be taken of it for state-purposes; but I cannot help thinking it is of signal benefit in the regulation of private life. If servants have cheated or lied or done any thing wrong, they are obliged to tell it to the priest, which makes them bear it in mind, and then a certain penance is assigned which they must go through, though they do not like it. All this acts as a timely check, which is better than letting them go on till their vices get head, and then hanging them! The Great indeed may buy themselves off (as where are they not privileged?) but this certainly does not apply to the community at large. I remember our saying to that old man (a Dominican friar) whose picture you see there, that we wished he could be made a Royal Confessor; to which he replied, that he would not for the world be Confessor to a King, because it would prevent him from the conscientious discharge of his duty. In former times, in truth, the traffic in indulgences was carried to great lengths; and this it was that broke up the system and gave a handle to the Protestants. The excellence of the scheme produced the power, and then the power led to the abuse of it. Infidel Popes went the farthest in extending the privileges of the Church; and being held back by no scruples of faith or conscience, nearly ruined it. When some pious ecclesiastic was insisting to Leo X. on the necessity of reforming certain scandalous abuses, he pointed to a crucifix and said, “Behold the fate of a reformer! The system, as it is, is good enough for us!” They have taken the morality of the Gospel and engrafted upon it a system of superstition and priestcraft; but still perhaps the former prevails over the latter. Even that duty of humanity to animals is beautifully provided for; for on St. Antony’s day, the patron of animals, the horses, &c. pass under a certain arch, and the priest sprinkles the Holy Water over them, so that they are virtually taken under the protection of the church. We think we have a right to treat them any how, because they have no souls. The Roman Catholic is not a barbarous religion; and it is also much milder than it was. This is a necessary consequence of the state of things. When three Englishmen were presented to Benedict XIV. (Lambertini) who was a man of wit and letters, he observed to them smiling, “I know that you must look upon our religion as false and spurious, but I suppose you will have no objection to receive the blessing of an old man!” When Fuseli and I were there, an Englishman of the name of Brown had taken the pains to convert a Roman artist: the Englishman was sent from Rome, and the student was taken to the Inquisition, where he was shown the hooks in the wall and the instruments of torture used in former times, reprimanded, and soon after dismissed.’ I asked Northcote whereabouts the Inquisition was? He said, ‘In a street behind the Vatican.’ He and Mr. Prince Hoare once took shelter in the portico out of a violent shower of rain, and considered it a great piece of inhumanity to be turned out into the street. He then noticed a curious mistake in Mrs. Radcliffe’s Italian, where some one is brought from Naples to the Inquisition, and made to enter Rome through the Porta di Popolo, and then the other streets on the English side of Rome are described with great formality, which is as if any one was described as coming by the coach from Exeter, and after entering at Whitechapel, proceeding through Cheapside and the Strand to Charing Cross. Northcote related a story told him by Nollekens of a singular instance of the effects of passion that he saw in the Trastevere, the oldest and most disorderly part of Rome.[^[94]] Two women were quarrelling, when having used the most opprobrious language, one of them drew a knife from her bosom, and tried to plunge it into her rival’s breast, but missing her blow and the other retiring to a short distance and laughing at her, in a fit of impotent rage she struck it into her own bosom. Her passion had been worked up to an uncontrolable pitch, and being disappointed of its first object, must find vent somewhere. I remarked it was what we did every day of our lives in a less degree, according to the vulgar proverb of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face!

Northcote then returned to the subject of the sale of his pictures. He said it was a satisfaction, though a melancholy one, to think that one’s works might fetch more after one’s death than during one’s life-time. He had once shewn Farington a landscape of Wilson’s, for which a gentleman had given three hundred guineas at the first word; and Farington said he remembered Wilson’s painting it, and how delighted he was when he got thirty pounds for it. Barrett rode in his coach, while Wilson nearly starved and was obliged to borrow ten pounds to go and die in Wales: yet he used to say that his pictures would be admired, when the name of Barrett was forgotten. Northcote said he also thought it a great hardship upon authors, that copyright should be restricted to a few years, instead of being continued for the benefit of the family, as in the case of Hudibras, Paradise Lost, and other works, by which booksellers made fortunes every year, though the descendants of the authors were still living in obscurity and distress. I said that in France a successful drama brought something to the author or his heirs every time it was acted. Northcote seemed to approve of this, and remarked that he always thought it very hard upon Richardson, just at the time he had brought out his Pamela or Clarissa, to have it pirated by an Irish bookseller through a treacherous servant whom he kept in his shop, and thus to lose all the profits of his immortal labours.

CONVERSATION THE NINTH

Northcote remarked to-day that artists were more particular than authors as to character—the latter did not seem to care whom they associated with. He, N—, was disposed to attribute this to greater refinement of moral perception in his own profession. I said I thought it was owing to authors being more upon the town than painters, who were dependent upon particular individuals and in a manner accountable to them for the persons they might be seen in company with or might occasionally bring into contact with them. For instance, I said I thought H— was wrong in asking me to his Private Day, where I might meet with Lord M—, who was so loyal a man that he affected not to know that such a person as Admiral Blake had ever existed. On the same principle this Noble Critic was blind to the merit of Milton, in whom he could see nothing, though Mr. Pitt had been at the pains to repeat several fine passages to him. N— said, ‘It’s extraordinary how particular the world sometimes are, and what prejudices they take up against people, even where there is no objection to character, merely on the score of opinion. There is G—, who is a very good man; yet when Mr. H— and myself wished to introduce him at the house of a lady who lives in a round of society, and has a strong tinge of the blue-stocking, she would not hear of it. The sound of the name seemed to terrify her. It was his writings she was afraid of. Even Cosway made a difficulty too.’

I replied—‘I should not have expected this of him, who was as great a visionary and as violent a politician as any body could be.’

Northcote—‘It passed off in Cosway as whim. He was one of those butterfly characters that nobody minded: so that his opinion went for nothing: but it would not do to bring any one else there, whose opinion might be more regarded and equally unpalatable. G—’s case is particularly hard in this respect: he is a profligate in theory, and a bigot in conduct. He does not seem at all to practise what he preaches, though this does not appear to avail him any thing.’—‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he writes, against himself. He has written against matrimony, and has been twice married. He has scouted all the common-place duties, and yet is a good husband and a kind father. He is a strange composition of contrary qualities. He is a cold formalist, and full of ardour and enthusiasm of mind; dealing in magnificent projects and petty cavils; naturally dull, and brilliant by dint of study; pedantic and playful; a dry logician and a writer of romances.’

‘You describe him,’ said N—, ‘as I remember Baretti once did Sir Joshua Reynolds at his own table, saying to him, “You are extravagant and mean, generous and selfish, envious and candid, 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, Sir Joshua was a mixed character, like the rest of mankind in that respect; but knew his own failings, and was on his guard to keep them back as much as possible, though the defects would break out sometimes.’ ‘G—, on the contrary,’ I said, ‘is aiming to let his out and to magnify them into virtues in a kind of hot-bed of speculation. He is shocking on paper and tame in reality.’

‘How is that?’ said Northcote.

‘Why, I think it is easy enough to be accounted for; he is naturally a cold speculative character, and indulges in certain metaphysical extravagances as an agreeable exercise for the imagination, which alarm persons of a grosser temperament, but to which he attaches no practical consequences whatever. So it has been asked how some very immoral or irreligious writers, such as Helveticus and others, have been remarked to be men of good moral character? and I think the answer is the same. Persons of a studious, phlegmatic disposition can with impunity give a license to their thoughts, which they are under no temptation to reduce into practice. The sting is taken out of evil by their constitutional indifference, and they look on virtue and vice as little more than words without meaning or the black and white pieces of the chess-board, in combining which the same skill and ingenuity may be shewn. More depraved and combustible temperaments are warned of the danger of any latitude of opinion by their very proneness to mischief, and are forced by a secret consciousness to impose the utmost restraint both upon themselves and others. The greatest prudes are not always supposed to be the greatest enemies to pleasure. Besides, authors are very much confined by habit to a life of study and speculation, sow their wild oats in their books, and unless where their passions are very strong indeed, take their swing in theory and conform in practice to the ordinary rules and examples of the world.’

Northcote said, ‘Certainly people are tenacious of appearances in proportion to the depravity of manners, as we may see in the simplicity of country-places. To be sure, a rake like Hodge in Love in a Village gets amongst them now and then; but in general they do many gross things without the least notion of impropriety, as if vice were a thing they had no more to do with than children.’ He then mentioned an instance of some young country-people who had to sleep on the floor in the same room and they parted the men from the women by some sacks of corn, which served for a line of demarcation and an inviolable partition between them. I told N— a story of a countrywoman who coming to an inn in the West of England wanted a bed; and being told they had none to spare, still persisted till the landlady said in a joke, ‘I tell you, good woman, I have none, unless you can prevail with the ostler to give you half of his.’—‘Well,’ said she, ‘if he is a sober, prudent man, I should not mind.’

Something was then said of the manners of people abroad, who sometimes managed to unite an absence of mauvaise honte with what could hardly be construed into an ignorance of vice. The Princess Borghese (Buonaparte’s sister) who was no saint, sat to Canova for a model, and being asked, ‘If she did not feel a little uncomfortable,’ answered, ‘No, there was a fire in the room.’

‘Custom,’ said N—, ‘makes a wonderful difference in taking off the sharpness of the first inflammable impression. People for instance were mightily shocked when they first heard that the boys at the Academy drew from a living model. But the effect almost immediately wears off with them. It is exactly like copying from a statue. The stillness, the artificial light, the attention to what they are about, the publicity even, draws off any idle thoughts, and they regard the figure and point out its defects or beauties, precisely as if it were of clay or marble.’ I said I had perceived this effect myself, that the anxiety to copy the object before one deadened every other feeling; but as this drew to a close, the figure seemed almost like something coming to life again, and that this was a very critical minute. He said, he found the students sometimes watched the women out, though they were not of a very attractive appearance, as none but those who were past their prime would sit in this way: they looked upon it as an additional disgrace to what their profession imposed upon them, and as something unnatural. One in particular (he remembered) always came in a mask. Several of the young men in his time had however been lured into a course of dissipation and ruined by such connexions; one in particular, a young fellow of great promise but affected, and who thought that profligacy was a part of genius. I said, It was the easiest part. This was an advantage foreign art had over ours. A battered courtesan sat for Sir Joshua’s Iphigene; innocent girls sat for Canova’s Graces, as I had been informed.

Northcote asked, if I had sent my son to school? I said, I thought of the Charter-House, if I could compass it. I liked those old established places where learning grew for hundreds of years, better than any new-fangled experiments or modern seminaries. He inquired if I had ever thought of putting him to school on the Continent; to which I answered, No, for I wished him to have an idea of home, before I took him abroad; by beginning in the contrary method, I thought I deprived him both of the habitual attachment to the one and of the romantic pleasure in the other. N— observed there were very fine schools at Rome in his time, one was an Italian, and another a Spanish College, at the last of which they acted plays of Voltaire’s, such as Zara, Mahomet, &c. at some of which he had been present. The hall that served for the theatre was beautifully decorated; and just as the curtain was about to draw up, a hatch-way was opened and showered down play-bills on their heads with the names of the actors; such a part being by a Spanish Grandee of the first class, another by a Spanish Grandee of the second class, and they were covered with jewels of the highest value. Several Cardinals were also present (who did not attend the public theatres) and it was easy to gain admittance from the attention always shewn to strangers. N— then spoke of the courtesy and decorum of the Roman clergy in terms of warm praise, and said he thought it in a great measure owing to the conclave being composed of dignitaries of all nations, Spanish, German, Italian, which merged individual asperities and national prejudices in a spirit of general philanthropy and mutual forbearance. I said I had never met with a look from a Catholic priest (from the highest to the lowest) that seemed to reproach me with being a tramontane. This absence of all impertinence was to me the first of virtues. He repeated, I have no fault to find with Italy. There may be vice in Rome, as in all great capitals (though I did not see it)—but in Parma and the remoter towns, they seem all like one great and exemplary family. Their kindness to strangers was remarkable. He said he had himself travelled all the way from Lyons to Genoa, and from Genoa to Rome without speaking a word of the language and in the power of a single person without meeting with the smallest indignity; and everywhere, both at the inns and on the road, every attention was paid to his feelings, and pains taken to alleviate the uncomfortableness of his situation. Set a Frenchman down in England to go from London to York in the same circumstances, and see what treatment he will be exposed to. He recollected a person of the name of Gogain who had been educated in France and could not speak English—on landing, he held out half-a-guinea to pay the boatman who had rowed him only about twenty yards from the vessel, which the fellow put in his pocket and left him without a single farthing. Abroad, he would have been had before the magistrate for such a thing, and probably sent to the galleys. There is a qualifying property in nature that makes most things equal. In England they cannot drag you out of your bed to a scaffold, or take an estate from you without some reason assigned: but as the law prevents any flagrant acts of injustice, so it makes it more difficult to obtain redress. ‘We pay,’ continued Northcote, ‘for every advantage we possess by the loss of some other. Poor Goblet, the other day, after making himself a drudge to Nollekens all his life, with difficulty recovered eight hundred pounds compensation; and though he was clearly entitled, by the will, to the models which the sculptor left behind him, he was afraid to risk the law expenses, and gave it up.’ Some person had been remarking, that every one had a right to leave his property to whom he pleased. ‘Not,’ said N—, ‘when he has promised it to another.’ I asked if Mr. — was not the same person I had once seen come into his painting-room, in a rusty black coat and brown worsted stockings, very much with the air of a man who carries a pistol in an inside pocket? He said, ‘It might be: he was a dull man, but a great scholar—one of those described in the epigram:—

Oh! ho, quoth Time to Thomas Heame,

Whatever I forget, you learn.’

We then alluded to an attack of Cobbett’s on some spruce legacy-hunter, quoted in the last Sunday’s Examiner; and N— spoke in raptures of the power in Cobbett’s writings, and asked me if I had ever seen him. I said, I had for a short time; that he called rogue and scoundrel at every second word in the coolest way imaginable, and went on just the same in a room as on paper.

I returned to what N— lately said of his travels in Italy, and asked if there were fine Titians at Genoa or Naples. ‘Oh, yes!’ he said, ‘heaps at the latter place. Titian had painted them for one of the Farnese family; and when the second son succeeded the eldest as King of Spain, the youngest, who was Prince of Parma, went to Naples, and took them with him. There is that fine one (which you have heard me speak of) of Paul III. and his two natural sons or nephews, as they were called. My God! what a look it has! The old man is sitting in his chair, and looking up to one of the sons, with his hands grasping the arm-chair, and his long spider fingers, and seems to say (as plain as words can speak), “You wretch! what do you want now?”—while the young fellow is advancing with an humble hypocritical air. It is true history, as Fuseli said, and indeed it turned out so; for the son (or nephew) was afterwards thrown out of the palace-windows by the mob, and torn to pieces by them.’ In speaking of the different degrees of information abroad, he remarked, ‘One of the persons where I lodged at Rome did not even know the family name of the reigning Pope, and only spoke of him as the Papa; another person, who was also my landlady, knew all their history, and could tell me the names of the Cardinals from my describing their coats of arms to her.’

N— related an anecdote of Mr. Moore (brother of the general), who was on board an English frigate in the American war, and coming in sight of another vessel which did not answer their signals, they expected an action, when the Captain called his men together, and addressed them in the following manner:—‘You dirty, ill-looking blackguards! do you suppose I can agree to deliver up such a set of scarecrows as you as prisoners to that smart, frippery Frenchman? I can’t think of such a thing. No! by G—d, you must fight till not a man of you is left, for I should be ashamed of owning such a ragamuffin crew!’ This was received with loud shouts and assurances of victory, but the vessel turned out to be an English one.

I asked if he had seen the American novels, in one of which (the Pilot) there was an excellent description of an American privateer expecting the approach of an English man-of-war in a thick fog, when some one saw what appeared to be a bright cloud rising over the fog, but it proved to be the topsail of a seventy-four. N— thought this was striking, but had not seen the book. ‘Was it one of I—’s?’ Oh! no, he is a mere trifler—a filigree man—an English littérateur at second-hand; but the Pilot gave a true and unvarnished picture of American character and manners. The storm, the fight, the whole account of the ship’s crew, and in particular of an old boatswain, were done to the life—every thing

Suffered a sea-change

Into something new and strange.

On land he did not do so well. The fault of American literature (when not a mere vapid imitation of ours) was, that it ran too much into dry, minute, literal description; or if it made an effort to rise above this ground of matter-of-fact, it was forced and exaggerated, ‘horrors accumulating on horror’s head.’ They had no natural imagination. This was likely to be the case in a new country like America, where there were no dim traces of the past—no venerable monuments—no romantic associations; where all (except the physical) remained to be created, and where fiction, if they attempted it, would take as preposterous and extravagant a shape as their local descriptions were jejune and servile. Cooper’s novels and Brown’s romances (something on the model of Godwin’s) were the two extremes.

Some remark was made on the failure of a great bookseller, and on the supposition that now we should find out the author of the Scotch novels. ‘Aye,’ said N—, ‘we shall find more than one.’ I said, I thought not; to say nothing of the beauties, the peculiarities of style and grammar in every page proved them to be by the same hand. Nobody else could write so well—or so ill, in point of mere negligence. N— said, ‘It was a pity he should fling away a fortune twice. There were some people who could not keep money when they had got it. It was a kind of incontinence of the purse. Zoffani did the same thing. He made a fortune in England by his pictures, which he soon got rid of, and another in India, which went the same way.’

We somehow got from Sir Walter to the Queen’s trial, and the scenes at Brandenburg House. I said they were a strong illustration of that instinct of servility—that hankering after rank and power, which appeared to me to be the base part of human nature. Here were all the patriots and Jacobins of London and Westminster, who scorned and hated the King, going to pay their homage to the Queen, and ready to worship the very rags of royalty. The wives and daughters of popular caricaturists and of forgotten demagogues were ready to pull caps in the presence-chamber for precedence, till they were parted by Mr. Alderman Wood. Every fool must go to kiss hands; ‘our maid’s aunt of Brentford’ must sip loyalty from the Queen’s hand! That was the true court to which they were admitted: the instant there was the smallest opening, all must rush in, tag-rag and bobtail. All the fierceness of independence and all the bristling prejudices of popular jealousy were smoothed down in a moment by the velvet touch of the Queen’s hand! No matter what else she was (whether her cause were right or wrong)—it was the mock-equality with sovereign rank, the acting in a farce of state, that was the secret charm. That was what drove them mad. The world must have something to admire; and the more worthless and stupid their idol is, the better, provided it is fine: for it equally flatters their appetite for wonder, and hurts their self-love less. This is the reason why people formerly were so fond of idols: they fell down and worshipped them, and made others do the same, for theatrical effect; while, all the while, they knew they were but wood and stone painted over. We in modern times have got from the dead to the living idol, and bow to hereditary imbecility. The less of genius and virtue, the greater our self-complacency. We do not care how high the elevation, so that it is wholly undeserved. True greatness excites our envy; mere rank, our unqualified respect. That is the reason of our antipathy to new-made dynasties, and of our acquiescence in old-established despotism. We think we could sit upon a throne, if we had had the good luck to be born to one; but we feel that we have neither talent nor courage to raise ourselves to one. If any one does, he seems to have got the start of us; and we are glad to pull him back again. I remember Mr. R—, of Liverpool (a very excellent man, and a good patriot,) saying, many years ago, in reference to Buonaparte and George III., that ‘the superiority of rank was quite enough for him, without the intellectual superiority.’ That is what has made so many renegadoes and furious Anti-Buonapartists among our poets and politicians, because he got before them in the race of power. N— ‘And the same thing made you stick to him, because you thought he was your fellow! It is wonderful how much of our virtues, as well as of our vices, is referable to self. Did you ever read Rochefoucault?’—Yes. ‘And don’t you think he is right?’ In a great measure: but I like Mandeville better. He goes more into his subject. ‘Oh! he is a devil. There is a description of a clergyman’s hand he has given, which I have always had in my eye whenever I have had to paint a fine gentleman’s hand. I thought him too metaphysical, but it is long since I read him. His book was burnt by the common hangman; was it not?’ Yes; but he did not at all like this circumstance, and is always recurring to it.—‘No one can like this kind of condemnation, because every sensible man knows he is not a judge in his own cause; and besides, is conscious, if the verdict were on the other side, how ready he would be to catch at it as decisive in his favour.’ I said, it was amusing to see the way in which he fell upon Steele, Shaftesbury, and other amiable writers, and the terror you were in for your favourites, just as when a hawk is hovering over and going to pounce upon some of the more harmless feathered tribe. He added, ‘It was surprising how Swift had escaped with so little censure; but the Gulliver’s Travels passed off as a story-book, and you might say in verse what you would be pelted for in plain prose.—The same thing you have observed in politics may be observed in religion too. You see the anxiety to divide and bring nearer to our own level. The Creator of the universe is too high an object for us to approach; the Catholics therefore have introduced the Virgin Mary and a host of saints, with whom their votaries feel more at their ease and on a par. The real object of worship is kept almost out of sight. Dignum the singer (who is a Catholic) was arguing on this subject with some one, who wanted to convert him, and he replied in his own defence—“If you had a favour to ask of some great person, would you not first apply to a common friend to intercede for you?”’ In some part of the foregoing conversation, N— remarked that ‘West used to say, you could always tell the highest nobility at court, from their profound humility to the King: the others kept at a distance, and did not seem to care about it. The more the former raised the highest person, the more they raised themselves who were next in point of rank. They had a greater interest in the question; and the King would have a greater jealousy of them than of others. When B— was painting the Queen, with whom he used to be quite familiar, he was one day surprised, when the Prince-Regent came into the room, to see the profound homage and dignified respect with which he approached her. “Good God!” said he to himself, “here is the second person in the kingdom comes into the room in this manner, while I have been using the greatest freedoms!” To be sure! that was the very reason: the second person in the kingdom wished to invest the first with all possible respect, so much of which was naturally reflected back upon himself. B— had nothing to lose or gain in this game of royal ceremony, and was accordingly treated as a cypher.’

CONVERSATION THE TENTH

Northcote shewed me a printed circular from the Academy, with blanks to be filled up by Academicians, recommending young students to draw. One of these related to an assurance as to the moral character of the candidate; Northcote said, ‘What can I know about that? This zeal for morality begins with inviting me to tell a lie. I know whether he can draw or not, because he brings me specimens of his drawings; but what am I to know of the moral character of a person I have never seen before? Or what business have the Academy to inquire into it? I suppose they are not afraid he will steal the Farnese Hercules; and as to idleness and debauchery, he will not be cured of these by cutting him off from the pursuit of a study on which he has set his mind, and in which he has a fair chance to succeed. I told one of them, with as grave a face as I could, that, as to his moral character, he must go to his god-fathers and god-mothers for that. He answered very simply, that they were a great way off, and that he had nobody to appeal to but his apothecary! The Academy is not an institution for the suppression of vice, but for the encouragement of the Fine Arts. Why then go out of their way to meddle with what was provided for by other means—the law and the pulpit? It would not have happened in Sir Joshua’s time,’ continued Northcote, ‘nor even in Fuseli’s: but the present men are “dressed in a little brief authority,” and they wish to make the most of it, without perceiving the limits. No good can possibly come of this busy-body spirit. The dragging morality into every thing, in season and out of season, is only giving a handle to hypocrisy, and turning virtue into a bye-word for impertinence!’

Here Northcote stopped suddenly, to ask if there was not such a word as rivulet in the language? I said it was as much a word in the language as it was a thing in itself. He replied, it was not to be found in Johnson; the word was riveret there. I thought this must be in some of the new editions; Dr. Johnson would have knocked any body down, who had used the word riveret. It put me in mind of a story of Y— the actor, who being asked how he was, made answer that he had been indisposed for some days with a feveret. The same person, speaking of the impossibility of escaping from too great publicity, related an anecdote of his being once in a remote part of the Highlands, and seeing an old gentleman fishing, he went up to inquire some particulars as to the mode of catching the salmon at what are called ‘salmon-leaps.’—The old gentleman began his reply—‘Why, Mr. Y—,’ at which the actor started back in great surprise. ‘Good God!’ said Northcote, ‘did he consider this as a matter of wonder, that, after shewing himself on a stage for a number of years, people should know his face? If an artist or an author were recognised in that manner, it might be a proof of celebrity, because it would shew that they had been sought for; but an actor is so much seen in public, that it is no wonder he is known by all the world. I once went with Opie in the stage-coach to Exeter; and when we parted; he to go on to Cornwall and I to Plymouth, there was a young gentleman in the coach who asked me, “Who it was that I had been conversing with?” I said it was Mr. Opie, the painter; at which he expressed the greatest surprise, and was exceedingly concerned to think he had not known it before. I did not tell him who I was, to see if my name would electrify him in the same manner. That brings to my mind the story I perhaps may have told you before, of a Mr. A— and Dr. Pennick of the Museum. They got into some quarrel at the theatre; and the former presenting his card, said with great pomposity, “My name is A—, Sir;” to which the other answered, “I hear it, Sir, and am not terrified!”’ I asked if this was the A— who fought the duel with F—. He said he could not tell, but he was our ambassador to some of the petty German States.

A country-gentleman came in, who complimented Northcote on his pictures of animals and birds, which I knew he would not like. He muttered something when he was gone, in allusion to the proverb of giving snuff to a cat. Afterwards, a miniature-painter brought some copies he had made of a portrait of a young lady by Northcote. They were really very well, and we learned he was to have five guineas for the larger size, and two for the smaller ones. I could now account for the humility and shabby appearance of the artist. He paid his court better than his rustic predecessor; for being asked by Northcote if the portrait of the young lady was approved? he said the mother had told him, before she engaged him to copy it, that ‘it was one of the loveliest pictures (that was her expression) that had ever been seen!’ This praise was better relished than that of his dogs and parrots.

I took notice to Northcote that the man had a very good head; but that he put me in mind of the state and pretensions of the art before artists wrote Esquire after their names. He said, Yes, he was like Andrew Taffi, or some of those in Vasari. I observed how little he was paid for what he really did so well; to which Northcote merely replied, ‘In all things that are not necessary, those in the second class must always be miserably paid. Copying pictures is like plain-work among women, it is what any body can do, and, therefore, nothing but a bare living is to be got by it.’ He added, that the young lady, whose portrait her family was so anxious to have copied, was dead, and this was a kind of diversion to their grief. It was a very natural mode of softening it down; it was still recurring to the object of their regret, and yet dwelling on it in an agreeable point of view. ‘The wife of General H—, (he continued) many years ago, came to me to do a picture of her son, a lieutenant in the navy, who was killed in battle, but whom I had never seen. There was no picture of him to go by, but she insisted on my doing one under her direction. I attempted a profile as the easiest; and she sat behind me and sang in a soft manner to herself, and told me what I was to do. It was a wretched business, as you may suppose, being made out from description; but she would have it to be a great likeness, and brought all the family and even the servants to see it, who probably did not dare to be of a different opinion. I said to her, “What a pity it was Sir Joshua had not done a portrait of him in his life-time!” At this she expressed great contempt, and declared she would not give two-pence for all Sir Joshua’s pictures; indeed, she had one which I was very welcome to have if I chose to come for it. I lost no time in going to her house, and when I came there, she led me up into an old garret which was used as a lumber-room, and taking it carefully out of a shabby frame not worth a groat, said “There, take it, I am not sorry to get it out of the house.” I asked what it was that made her so indifferent about this picture? and she answered, “It was a likeness of a young gentleman who had been kind enough to die, by which means the estate came to the General.” She spoke in this unfeeling manner, though her own son had just died in the same circumstances; and she had had a monument made for him, and strewed flowers upon it, and made such a fuss about his death, that she would hardly have known what to do if he had come to life again!’ I asked what was her reason for disliking Reynolds’s pictures? ‘Oh! that was her ignorance, she did not know why!’

Northcote said, ‘G— called here with his daughter. I asked her about Lord Byron; she said his temper was so bad that nobody could live with him. The only way to pass the day tolerably well with him was to contradict him the first thing in the morning. I have known tempers of that kind myself; you must quarrel with them in order to be friends. If you did not conquer them, they would conquer you.’ Something was observed about Byron and Tom Paine, as to their attacks upon religion; and I said that sceptics and philosophical unbelievers appeared to me to have just as little liberality or enlargement of view as the most bigoted fanatic. They could not bear to make the least concession to the opposite side. They denied the argument that because the Scriptures were fine they were therefore of divine origin, and yet they virtually admitted it; for, not believing their truth, they thought themselves bound to maintain that they were good for nothing. I had once, I said, given great offence to a knot of persons of this description, by contending that Jacob’s Dream was finer than any thing in Shakspeare; and that Hamlet would bear no comparison with, at least, one character in the New Testament. A young poet had said on this occasion, he did not like the Bible, because there was nothing about flowers in it; and I asked him if he had forgot that passage, ‘Behold the lilies of the field,’ &c.? ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘and in the Psalms and in the book of Job, there are passages of unrivalled beauty. In the latter there is the description of the war-horse, that has been so often referred to, and of the days of Job’s prosperity; and in the Psalms, I think there is that passage, “He openeth his hands, and the earth is filled with plenteousness; he turneth away his face, and we are troubled; he hideth himself, and we are left in darkness;” or, again, how fine is that expression, “All the beasts of the forests are mine, and so are the cattle upon a thousand hills!” What an expanse, and what a grasp of the subject! Every thing is done upon so large a scale, and yet with such ease, as if seen from the highest point of view. It has mightily a look of inspiration or of being dictated by a superior intelligence. They say mere English readers cannot understand Homer, because it is a translation; but why will it not bear a translation as well as the book of Job, if it is as fine? In Shakspeare, undoubtedly, there is a prodigious variety and force of human character and passion, but he does not take us out of ourselves; he has a wonderful, almost a miraculous fellow-feeling with human nature in every possible way, but that is all. Macbeth is full of sublimity, but the sublimity is that of the earth, it does not reach to heaven. It is a still stronger objection that is made to Hogarth; he, too, gave the incidents and characters of human life with infinite truth and ability; but then it was in the lowest forms of all, and he could not rise even to common dignity or beauty. There is a faculty that enlarges and beautifies objects, even beyond nature. It is for this reason that we must, reluctantly perhaps, give the preference to Milton over Shakspeare; for his Paradise (to go no further) is certainly a scene of greater beauty and happiness, than was ever found on earth, though so vividly described that we easily make the transition, and transport ourselves there. It is the same difference that there is between Raphael and Michael Angelo, though Raphael, too, in many of his works merited the epithet of divine.’—I mentioned some lines from Shakspeare I had seen quoted in a translation of a French work, and applied to those who adhered to Buonaparte in his misfortunes:

—He that can endure

To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,

Does conquer him that did his master conquer,

And earns a place i’ the story.

I said I was struck to see how finely they came in. ‘Oh!’ replied Northcote, ‘if they were Shakspeare’s, they were sure to be fine. What a power there always is in any bit brought in from him or Milton among other things! How it shines like a jewel! I think Milton reads best in this way; he is too fine for a continuance. Don’t you think Shakspeare and the writers of that day had a prodigious advantage in using phrases and combinations of style, which could not be admitted now that the language is reduced to a more precise and uniform standard, but which yet have a peculiar force and felicity when they can be justified by the privilege of age?’ He said, he had been struck with this idea lately, in reading an old translation of Boccacio (about the time of Queen Elizabeth) in which the language, though quaint, had often a beauty that could not well be conveyed in any modern translation.

He spoke of Lord Byron’s notions about Shakspeare. I said I did not care much about his opinions. Northcote replied, they were evidently capricious, and taken up in the spirit of contradiction. I said, not only so (as far as I can judge), but without any better founded ones in his own mind. They appear to me conclusions without premises or any previous process of thought or inquiry. I like old opinions with new reasons, not new opinions without any—not mere ipse dixits. He was too arrogant to assign a reason to others or to need one for himself. It was quite enough that he subscribed to any assertion, to make it clear to the world, as well as binding on his valet!

Northcote said, there were people who could not argue. Fuseli was one of these. He could throw out very brilliant and striking things; but if you at all questioned him, he could no more give an answer than a child of three years old. He had no resources, nor any corps de reserve of argument beyond his first line of battle. That was imposing and glittering enough. Neither was Lord Byron a philosopher, with all his sententiousness and force of expression. Probably one ought not to expect the two things together; for to produce a startling and immediate effect, one must keep pretty much upon the surface; and the search after truth is a very slow and obscure process.

CONVERSATION THE ELEVENTH

As soon as I went in to-day, Northcote asked me if that was my character of Shakspeare, which had been quoted in a newspaper the day before? It was so like what he had thought a thousand times that he could almost swear he had written it himself. I said no; it was from Kendall’s Letters on Ireland; though I believed I had expressed nearly the same idea in print. I had seen the passage myself, and hardly knew at first whether to be pleased or vexed at it. It was provoking to have one’s words taken out of one’s mouth as it were by another; and yet it seemed also an encouragement to reflect, that if one only threw one’s bread upon the waters, one was sure to find it again after many days. The world, if they do not listen to an observation the first time, will listen to it at second-hand from those who have a more agreeable method of insinuating it, or who do not tell them too many truths at once. N— said, he thought the account undoubtedly just, to whomever it belonged.[^[95]] The greatest genius (such as that of Shakspeare) implied the greatest power, and this implied the greatest ease and unconsciousness of effort, or of any thing extraordinary effected. As this writer stated—‘He would as soon think of being vain of putting one foot before another, as of writing Macbeth or Hamlet.’ Or as Hudibras has expressed it, poetry was to him

—a thing no more difficile

Than to a blackbird ’tis to whistle.

‘This (said he) is what I have always said of Correggio’s style, that he could not help it: it was his nature. Besides, use familiarizes us to every thing. How could Shakspeare be expected to be astonished at what he did every day? No; he was thinking either merely of the subject before him, or of gaining his bread. It is only upstarts or pretenders, who do not know what to make of their good fortune or undeserved reputation. It comes to the same thing that I have heard my brother remark with respect to my father and old Mr. Tolcher, whose picture you see there. He had a great friendship for my father and a great opinion of his integrity; and whenever he came to see him, always began with saying, “Well, honest Mr. Samuel Northcote, how do you?” This he repeated so often, and they were so used to it, that my brother said they became like words of course, and conveyed no more impression of any thing peculiar than if he had merely said, “Well, good Mr. Northcote, et cetera,” or used any common expression. So Shakspeare was accustomed to write his fine speeches till he ceased to wonder at them himself, and would have been surprised to find that you did.’

The conversation now turned on an answer in a newspaper to Canning’s assertion, that ‘Slavery was not inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity, inasmuch as it was the beauty of Christianity to accommodate itself to all conditions and circumstances.’ Did Canning mean to say, because Christianity accommodated itself to, or made the best of all situations, it did not therefore give the preference to any? Because it recommended mildness and fortitude under sufferings, did it not therefore condemn the infliction of them? Or did it not forbid injustice and cruelty in the strongest terms? This were indeed a daring calumny on its founder: it were an insolent irony. Don Quixote would not have said so. It was like the Italian banditti, who when they have cut off the ears of their victims, make them go down on their knees, and return thanks to an image of the Virgin Mary for the favour they have done them. It was because such things do exist, that Christ came to set his face against them, and to establish the maxim, ‘Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.’ If Mr. Canning will say that the masters would like to be treated as they treat their slaves, then he may say that slavery is consistent with the spirit of Christianity. No; the meaning of those maxims of forbearance and submission, which the Quakers have taken too literally, is, that you are not to drive out one devil by another; it aims at discouraging a resort to violence and anger, for if the temper it inculcates could become universal, there would be no injuries to resent. It objects against the power of the sword, but it is to substitute a power ten thousand times stronger than the sword—that which subdues and conquers the affections, and strikes at the very root and thought of evil. All that is meant by such sayings, as that if a person ‘smites us on one cheek, we are to turn to him the other,’ is, that we are to keep as clear as possible of a disposition to retaliate and exasperate injuries; or there is a Spanish proverb which explains this, that says, ‘It is he who gives the second blow that begins the quarrel.’

On my referring to what had been sometimes asserted of the inefficacy of pictures in Protestant churches, Northcote said he might be allowed to observe in favour of his own art, that though they might not strike at first from a difference in our own belief, yet they would gain upon the spectator by the force of habit. The practice of image-worship was probably an after-thought of the Papists themselves, from seeing the effects produced on the minds of the rude and ignorant by visible representations of saints and martyrs. The rulers of the church at first only thought to amuse and attract the people by pictures and statues (as they did by music and rich dresses, from which no inference was to be drawn); but when these representations of sacred subjects were once placed before the senses of an uninstructed but imaginative people, they looked at them with wonder and eagerness, till they began to think they saw them move; and then miracles were worked; and as this became a source of wealth and great resort to the several shrines and churches, every means were used to encourage the superstition and a belief in the supernatural virtues of the objects by the clergy and government. So he thought that if pictures were set up in our churches, they would by degrees inspire the mind with all the feelings of awe or interest that were necessary or proper. It was less difficult to excite enthusiasm than to keep it under due restraint. So in Italy, the higher powers did not much relish those processions of naked figures, taken from scriptural stories (such as Adam and Eve) on particular holidays, for they led to scandal and abuse; but they fell in with the humour of the rabble, and were lucrative to the lower orders of priests and friars, and the Pope could not expressly discountenance them. He said we were in little danger (either from our religion or temperament) of running into those disgraceful and fanciful extremes; but should rather do every thing in our power to avoid the opposite error of a dry and repulsive asceticism. We could not give too much encouragement to the fine arts.

Our talk of to-day concluded by his saying, that he often blamed himself for uttering what might be thought harsh things; and that on mentioning this once to Kemble, and saying it sometimes kept him from sleep after he had been out in company, Kemble had replied, ‘Oh! you need not trouble yourself so much about them: others never think of them afterwards!’

CONVERSATION THE TWELFTH

Northcote was painting from a little girl when I went in. B— was there. Something was said of a portrait of Dunning by Sir Joshua (an unfinished head), and B— observed, ‘Ah! my good friend, if you and I had known at that time what those things would fetch, we might have made our fortunes now. By laying out a few pounds on the loose sketches and sweepings of the lumber-room, we might have made as many hundreds.’ ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘it was thought they would soon be forgot, and they went for nothing on that account: but they are more sought after than ever, because those imperfect hints and studies seem to bring one more in contact with the artist, and explain the process of his mind in the several stages. A finished work is, in a manner, detached from and independent of its author, like a child that can go alone: in the other case, it seems to be still in progress, and to await his hand to finish it; or we supply the absence of well-known excellences out of our own imagination, so that we have a two-fold property in it.’

Northcote read something out of a newspaper about the Suffolk-street Exhibition, in which his own name was mentioned, and M—’s, the landscape-painter. B— said, his pictures were a trick—a streak of red, and then a streak of blue. But, said Northcote, there is some merit in finding out a new trick. I ventured to hint, that the receipt for his was, clouds upon mountains, and mountains upon clouds—that there was number and quantity, but neither form nor colour. He appeared to me an instance of a total want of imagination; he mistook the character of the feelings associated with every thing, and I mentioned as an instance his Adam and Eve, which had been much admired, but which was a panoramic view of the map of Asia, instead of a representation of our first parents in Paradise.

After B— was gone, we spoke of X—. I regretted his want of delicacy towards the public as well as towards his private friends. I did not think he had failed so much from want of capacity, as from attempting to bully the public into a premature or overstrained admiration of him, instead of gaining ground upon them by improving on himself; and he now felt the ill effects of the re-action of this injudicious proceeding. He had no real love of his art, and therefore did not apply or give his whole mind sedulously to it; and was more bent on bespeaking notoriety beforehand by puffs and announcements of his works, than on giving them that degree of perfection which would ensure lasting reputation. No one would ever attain the highest excellence, who had so little nervous sensibility as to take credit for it (either with himself or others) without being at the trouble of producing it. It was securing the reward in the first instance; and afterwards, it would be too much to expect the necessary exertion or sacrifices. Unlimited credit was as dangerous to success in art as in business. ‘And yet he still finds dupes,’ said Northcote; to which I replied, it was impossible to resist him, as long as you kept on terms with him: any difference of opinion or reluctance on your part made no impression on him, and unless you quarrelled with him downright, you must do as he wished you.—‘And how then,’ said Northcote, ‘do you think it possible for a person of this hard unyielding disposition to be a painter, where every thing depends on seizing the nicest inflections of feeling and the most evanescent shades of beauty?

‘No, I’ll tell you why he cannot be a painter. He has not virtue enough. No one can give out to others what he has not in himself, and there is nothing in his mind to delight or captivate the world. I will not deny the mechanical dexterity, but he fails in the mental part. There was Sir Peter Lely: he is full of defects; but he was the fine gentleman of his age, and you see this character stamped on every one of his works;—even his errors prove it; and this is one of those things that the world receive with gratitude. Sir Joshua again was not without his faults: he had not grandeur, but he was a man of a mild, bland, amiable character; and this predominant feeling appears so strongly in his works, that you cannot mistake it; and this is what makes them so delightful to look at, and constitutes their charm to others, even without their being conscious of it. There was such a look of nature too. I remember once going through a suite of rooms where they were shewing me several fine Vandykes; and we came to one where there were some children, by Sir Joshua, seen through a door—it was like looking at the reality, they were so full of life—the branches of the trees waved over their heads, and the fresh air seemed to play on their cheeks—I soon forgot Vandyke!

‘So, in the famous St. Jerome of Correggio, Garrick used to say, that the Saint resembled a Satyr, and that the child was like a monkey; but then there is such a look of life in the last, it dazzles you with spirit and vivacity; you can hardly believe but it will move or fly;—indeed, Sir Joshua took his Puck from it, only a little varied in the attitude.’ I said I had seen it not long ago, and that it had remarkably the look of a spirit or a faery or preternatural being, though neither beautiful nor dignified. I remarked to Northcote, that I had never sufficiently relished Correggio; that I had tried several times to work myself up to the proper degree of admiration, but that I always fell back again into my former state of lukewarmness and scepticism; though I could not help allowing, that what he did, he appeared to me to do with more feeling than any body else; that I could conceive Raphael or even Titian to have represented objects from mere natural capacity (as we see them in a looking-glass) without being absolutely wound up in them, but that I could fancy Correggio’s pencil to thrill with sensibility: he brooded over the idea of grace or beauty in his mind till the sense grew faint with it; and like a lover or a devotee, he carried his enthusiasm to the brink of extravagance and affectation, so enamoured was he of his art! Northcote assented to this as a just criticism, and said, ‘That is why his works must live: but X— is a hardened egotist, devoted to nothing but himself!’ Northcote then asked about —, and if she was handsome? I said she might sit for the portrait of Rebecca in Ivanhoe!

He then turned the conversation to Brambletye-House. He thought the writer had failed in Charles II. and Rochester. Indeed, it was a daring attempt to make bons mots for two such characters. The wit must be sharp and fine indeed, that would do to put into their mouths: even Sir Walter might tremble to undertake it! He had made Milton speak too: this was almost as dangerous an attempt as for Milton to put words into the mouth of the Deity. The great difficulty was to know where to stop, and not to trespass on forbidden ground. Cervantes was one of the boldest and most original inventors; yet he had never ventured beyond his depth. He had in the person of his hero really represented the maxims of benevolence and generosity inculcated by the Christian religion: that was a law to him; and by his fine conception of the subject, he had miraculously succeeded. Shakspeare alone could be said in his grotesque creations to be above all law. Richardson had succeeded admirably in Clarissa, because he had a certain rule to go by or certain things to avoid, for a perfect woman was a negative character; but he had failed in Sir Charles Grandison, and made him a lump of odious affectation, because a perfect man is not a negative, but a positive character; and in aiming at faultlessness, he had produced only the most vapid effeminacy. After all, Brambletye-House was about as good as the Rejected Addresses. There was very little difference between a parody and an imitation. The defects and peculiarities are equally seized upon in either case.

He did not know how Sir Walter would take it. To have imitators seemed at first a compliment, yet no one liked it. You could not put Fuseli in a greater passion than by calling Maria Cosway an imitator of his. Nothing made Sir Joshua so mad, as Miss Reynolds’s portraits, which were an exact imitation of all his defects. Indeed, she was obliged to keep them out of his way. He said, ‘They made every body else laugh, and himself cry.’ It is that which makes every one dread a mimic. Your self-love is alarmed, without being so easily reassured. You know there is a difference, but it is not great enough to make you feel quite at ease. The line of demarcation between the true and the spurious is not sufficiently broad and palpable. The copy you see is vile or indifferent; and the original, you suspect (but for your partiality to yourself) is not perhaps much better.

This is what I have often felt in looking at the drawings of the students at the Academy, or when young artists have brought their first crude attempts for my opinion. The glaring defects, the abortive efforts have almost disgusted me with the profession. Good G—d! I have said, is this what the art is made up of? How do I know that my own productions may not appear in the same light to others? Whereas the seeing the finest specimens of art, instead of disheartening, gives me courage to proceed: one cannot be wrong in treading in the same footsteps, and to fall short of them is no disgrace, while the faintest reflection of their excellence is glorious. It was this that made Correggio cry out on seeing Raphael’s works, ‘I also am a painter’: he felt a kindred spirit in his own breast.—I said, I recollected when I was formerly trying to paint, nothing gave me the horrors so much as passing the old battered portraits at the doors of brokers’ shops, with the morning-sun flaring full upon them. I was generally inclined to prolong my walk, and put off painting for that day; but the sight of a fine picture had a contrary effect, and I went back and set to work with redoubled ardour.

Northcote happened to speak of a gentleman married to one of the —, of whom a friend had said, laughing, ‘There’s a man that’s in love with his own wife!’ He mentioned the beautiful Lady F— P—, and said her hair, which was in great quantities and very fine, was remarkable for having a single lock different from all the rest, which he supposed she cherished as a beauty. I told him I had not long ago seen the hair of Lucretia Borgia, of Milton, Buonaparte, and Dr. Johnson, all folded up in the same paper. It had belonged to Lord Byron. Northcote replied, one could not be sure of that; it was easy to get a lock of hair, and call it by any name one pleased. In some cases, however, one might rely on its being the same. Mrs. G— had certainly a lock of Goldsmith’s hair, for she and her sister (Miss Horneck) had wished to have some remembrance of him after his death; and though the coffin was nailed up, it was opened again at their request (such was the regard Goldsmith was known to have for them!), and a lock of his hair was cut off, which Mrs. G— still has. Northcote said, Goldsmith’s death was the severest blow Sir Joshua ever received—he did not paint all that day! It was proposed to make a grand funeral for him, but Reynolds objected to this, as it would be over in a day, and said it would be better to lay by the money to erect a monument to him in Westminster Abbey; and he went himself and chose the spot. Goldsmith had begun another novel, of which he read the first chapter to the Miss Hornecks a little before his death. Northcote asked, what I thought of the Vicar of Wakefield? And I answered, What every body else did. He said there was that mixture of the ludicrous and the pathetic running through it, which particularly delighted him: it gave a stronger resemblance to nature. He thought this justified Shakspeare in mingling up farce and tragedy together: life itself was a tragi-comedy. Instead of being pure, every thing was chequered. If you went to an execution, you would perhaps see an apple-woman in the greatest distress, because her stall was overturned, at which you could not help smiling. We then spoke of ‘Retaliation,’ and praised the character of Burke in particular as a masterpiece. Nothing that he had ever said or done but what was foretold in it; nor was he painted as the principal figure in the foreground with the partiality of a friend, or as the great man of the day, but with a back-ground of history, showing both what he was and what he might have been. Northcote repeated some lines from the ‘Traveller,’ which were distinguished by a beautiful transparency, by simplicity and originality. He confirmed Boswell’s account of Goldsmith, as being about the middle height, rather clumsy, and tawdry in his dress.

A gentleman came in who had just shown his good taste in purchasing three pictures of Northcote, one a head of Sir Joshua by himself, and the other two by Northcote, a whole-length portrait of an Italian girl, and a copy of Omai, the South-Sea Chief. I could hear the artist in the outer room expressing some scruples as to the consistency of his parting with one of them which he had brought from abroad, according to the strict letter of his Custom-House oath—an objection which the purchaser, a Member of Parliament, over-ruled by assuring him that ‘the peculiar case could not be contemplated by the spirit of the act.’ Northcote also expressed some regret at the separation from pictures that had become old friends. He however comforted himself that they would now find a respectable asylum, which was better than being knocked about in garrets and auction-rooms, as they would inevitably be at his death. ‘You may at least depend upon it,’ said Mr. — ‘that they will not be sold again for many generations!’ This view into futurity brought back to my mind the time when I had first known these pictures: since then, my life was flown, and with it the hope of fame as an artist (with which I had once regarded them), and I felt a momentary pang. Northcote took me out into the other room, when his friend was gone, to look at them; and on my expressing my admiration of the portrait of the Italian lady, he said she was the mother of Madame Bellochi, and was still living; that he had painted it at Rome about the year 1780; that her family was originally Greek, and that he had known her, her daughter, her mother, and grandmother. She and a sister who was with her, were at that time full of the most charming gaiety and innocence. The old woman used to sit upon the ground without moving or speaking, with her arm over her head, and exactly like a bundle of old clothes. Alas! thought I, what are we but a heap of clay resting upon the earth, and ready to crumble again into dust and ashes!

CONVERSATION THE THIRTEENTH

Northcote spoke about the failure of some print-sellers. He said, ‘He did not wonder at it; it was a just punishment of their presumption and ignorance. They went into an Exhibition, looked round them, fixed upon some contemptible performance, and without knowing any thing about the matter or consulting any body, ordered two or three thousand pounds’ worth of prints from it, merely out of purse-proud insolence, and because the money burnt in their pockets. Such people fancied that the more money they laid out, the more they must get; so that extravagance became (by the turn their vanity gave to it) another name for thrift.’ Having spoken of a living artist’s pictures as mere portraits that were interesting to no one except the people who sat for them, he remarked, ‘There was always something in the meanest face that a great artist could take advantage of. That was the merit of Sir Joshua, who contrived to throw a certain air and character even over ugliness and folly, that disarmed criticism and made you wonder how he did it. This, at least, is the case with his portraits; for though he made his beggars look like heroes, he sometimes, in attempting history, made his heroes look like beggars. Grandi, the Italian colour-grinder, sat to him for King Henry VI. in the Death of Cardinal Beaufort, and he looks not much better than a train-bearer or one in a low and mean station: if he had sat to him for his portrait, he would have made him look like a king! That was what made Fuseli observe in joke that “Grandi never held up his head after Sir Joshua painted him in his Cardinal Beaufort!” But the pictures I speak of are poor dry fac-similes (in a little timid manner and with an attempt at drapery) of imbecile creatures, whose appearance is a satire on themselves and mankind. Neither can I conceive why L— should be sent over to paint Charles X. A French artist said to me on that occasion, ‘We have very fine portrait-painters in Paris, Sir!’... The poor engraver would be the greatest sufferer by these expensive prints. Tradespeople now-a-days did not look at the thing with an eye to business, but ruined themselves and others by setting up for would-be patrons and judges of the art.

‘Some demon whisper’d, Visto, have a taste!’

I said I thought L—’s pictures might do very well as mirrors for personal vanity to contemplate itself in (as you looked in the glass to see how you were dressed), but that it was a mistake to suppose they would interest any one else or were addressed to the world at large. They were private, not public property. They never caught the eye in a shop window; but were (as it appeared to me) a kind of lithographic painting, or thin, meagre outlines without the depth and richness of the art. I mentioned to Northcote the pleasure I had formerly taken in a little print of Gadshill from a sketch of his own, which I used at one time to pass a certain shop-window on purpose to look at. He said, ‘It was impossible to tell beforehand what would hit the public. You might as well pretend to say what ticket would turn up a prize in the lottery. It was not chance neither, but some unforeseen coincidence between the subject and the prevailing taste, that you could not possibly be a judge of. I had once painted two pictures; one of a Fortune-teller (a boy with a monkey), and another called ‘The Visit to the Grandmother;’ and Raphael Smith came to me and wanted to engrave them, being willing to give a handsome sum for the first, but only to do the last as an experiment. He sold ten times as many of the last as of the first, and told me that there were not less than five different impressions done of it in Paris; and once when I went to his house to get one to complete a set of engravings after my designs, they asked me six guineas for a proof-impression! This was too much, but I was delighted that I could not afford to pay for my own work, from the value that was set upon it!’—I said, people were much alarmed at the late failures, and thought there would be a ‘blow-up,’ in the vulgar phrase.—‘Surely you can’t suppose so? A blow-up! Yes, of adventurers and upstarts, but not of the country, if they mean that. This is like the man who thought that gin-drinking would put an end to the world. Oh! no—the country will go on just as before, bating the distress to individuals. You may form an idea on the subject if you ever go to look at the effects of a fire the day after: you see nothing but smoke and ruins and bare walls, and think the damage can never be repaired; but if you pass by the same way a week after, you will find the houses all built up just as they were before or even better than ever! No, there is the same wealth, the same industry and ingenuity in the country as there was before; and till you destroy that, you cannot destroy the country. These temporary distresses are only like disorders in the body, that carry off its bad and superfluous humours.

‘My neighbour Mr. Rowe, the bookseller, informed me the other day that Signora Cecilia Davies frequently came to his shop, and always inquired after me. Did you ever hear of her?’ No never! ‘She must be very old now. Fifty years ago, in the time of Garrick, she made a vast sensation. All England rang with her name. I do assure you, that in this respect Madame Catalani was not more talked of. Afterwards she had retired to Florence, and was the Prima Donna there, when Storace first came out. This was at the time when Mr. Hoare and myself were in Italy; and I remember we went to call upon her. She had then in a great measure fallen off, but she was still very much admired. What a strange thing a reputation of this kind is, that the person herself survives, and sees the meteors of fashion rise and fall one after another, while she remains totally disregarded as if there had been no such person, yet thinking all the while that she was better than any of them! I have hardly heard her name mentioned in the last thirty years, though in her time she was quite as famous as any one since.’ I said, an Opera-reputation was after all but a kind of Private Theatricals and confined to a small circle, compared with that of the regular stage, which all the world were judges of and took an interest in. It was but the echo of a sound, or like the blaze of phosphorus that did not communicate to the surrounding objects. It belonged to a fashionable coterie, rather than to the public, and might easily die away at the end of the season. I then observed I was more affected by the fate of players than by that of any other class of people. They seemed to me more to be pitied than any body—the contrast was so great between the glare, the noise, and intoxication of their first success, and the mortifications and neglect of their declining years. They were made drunk with popular applause; and when this stimulus was withdrawn, must feel the insignificance of ordinary life particularly vapid and distressing. There were no sots like the sots of vanity. There were no traces left of what they had been, any more than of a forgotten dream; and they had no consolation but in their own conceit, which, when it was without other vouchers, was a very uneasy comforter. I had seen some actors who had been favourites in my youth and ‘cried up in the top of the compass,’ treated, from having grown old and infirm, with the utmost indignity and almost hooted from the stage. I had seen poor — come forward under these circumstances to stammer out an apology with the tears in his eyes (which almost brought them into mine) to a set of apprentice-boys and box-lobby loungers, who neither knew nor cared what a fine performer and a fine gentleman he was thought twenty years ago. Players were so far particularly unfortunate. The theatrical public have a very short memory. Every four or five years there is a new audience, who know nothing but of what they have before their eyes, and who pronounce summarily upon this, without any regard to past obligations or past services, and with whom the veterans of the stage stand a bad chance indeed, as their former triumphs are entirely forgotten, while they appear as living vouchers against themselves. ‘Do you remember,’ said Northcote, ‘Sheridan’s beautiful lines on the subject in his Monody on Garrick?’ I said, I did; and that it was probably the reading them early that had impressed this feeling so strongly on my mind. Northcote then remarked, ‘I think a great beauty is most to be pitied. She completely outlives herself. She has been used to the most bewitching homage, to have the highest court paid and the most flattering things said to her by all those who approach her, and to be received with looks of delight and surprise wherever she comes; and she afterwards not only finds herself deprived of all this and reduced to a cypher, but sees it all transferred to another, who has become the reigning toast and beauty of the day in her stead. It must be a most violent shock. It is like a king who is dethroned and reduced to serve as a page in his own palace. I remember once being struck with seeing the Duchess of —, the same that Sir Joshua painted, and who was a miracle of beauty when she was young, and followed by crowds wherever she went—I was coming out of Mrs. W—’s; and on the landing-place, there was she standing by herself, and calling over the bannister for her servant to come to her. If she had been as she once was, a thousand admirers would have flown to her assistance; but her face was painted over like a mask, and there was hardly any appearance of life left but the restless motion of her eyes. I was really hurt.’ I answered, the late Queen had much the same painful look that he described—her face highly rouged, and her eyes rolling in her head like an automaton, but she had not the mortification of having ever been a great beauty. ‘There was a Miss —, too,’ Northcote added, ‘who was a celebrated beauty when she was a girl, and who also sat to Sir Joshua. I saw her not long ago and she was grown as coarse and vulgar as possible; she was like an apple-woman or would do to keep the Three Tuns. The change must be very mortifying. To be sure, there is one thing, it comes on by degrees. The ravages of the small-pox must formerly have been a dreadful blow!’ He said, literary men or men of talent in general were the best off in this respect. The reputation they acquired was not only lasting, but gradually grew stronger, if it was deserved. I agreed they were seldom spoiled by flattery, and had no reason to complain after they were dead. ‘Nor while they are living,’ said N—, ‘if it is not their own fault.’ He mentioned an instance of a trial about an engraving where he, West, and others had to appear, and of the respect that was shown them. Erskine after flourishing away, made an attempt to puzzle Stothard by drawing two angles on a piece of paper, an acute and an obtuse one, and asking, ‘Do you mean to say these two are alike?’ ‘Yes, I do,’ was the answer. ‘I see,’ said Erskine, turning round, ‘there is nothing to be got by angling here!’ West was then called upon to give his evidence, and there was immediately a lane made for him to come forward, and a stillness that you could hear a pin drop. The Judge (Lord Kenyon) then addressed him, ‘Sir Benjamin, we shall be glad to hear your opinion!’ Mr. West answered, ‘He had never received the honour of a title from his Majesty;’ and proceeded to explain the difference between the two engravings which were charged with being copies the one of the other, with such clearness and knowledge of the art, though in general he was a bad speaker, that Lord Kenyon said when he had done, ‘I suppose, gentlemen, you are perfectly satisfied—I perceive there is much more in this than I had any idea of, and am sorry I did not make it more my study when I was young!’ I remarked that I believed corporations of art or letters might meet with a certain attention; but it was the stragglers and candidates that were knocked about with very little ceremony. Talent or merit only wanted a frame of some sort or other to set it off to advantage. Those of my way of thinking were ‘bitter bad judges’ on this point. A Tory scribe who treated mankind as rabble and canaille, was regarded by them in return as a fine gentleman: a reformer like myself, who stood up for liberty and equality, was taken at his word by the very journeymen that set up his paragraphs, and could not get a civil answer from the meanest shop-boy in the employ of those on his own side of the question. N— laughed and said, I irritated myself too much about such things. He said it was one of Sir Joshua’s maxims that the art of life consisted in not being overset by trifles. We should look at the bottom of the account, not at each individual item in it, and see how the balance stands at the end of the year. We should be satisfied if the path of life is clear before us, and not fret at the straws or pebbles that lie in our way. What you have to look to is whether you can get what you write printed, and whether the public will read it, and not to busy yourself with the remarks of shop-boys or printers’ devils. They can do you neither harm nor good. The impertinence of mankind is a thing that no one can guard against.

CONVERSATION THE FOURTEENTH

Northcote shewed me a poem with engravings of Dartmoor, which were too fine by half. I said I supposed Dartmoor would look more gay and smiling after having been thus illustrated, like a dull author who has been praised by a Reviewer. I had once been nearly benighted there and was delighted to get to the inn at Ashburton. ‘That,’ said N—, ‘is the only good of such places that you are glad to escape from them, and look back to them with a pleasing horror ever after. Commend me to the Valdarno or Vallambrosa, where you are never weary of new charms, and which you quit with a sigh of regret. I have, however, told my young friend who sent me the poem, that he has shown his genius in creating beauties where there were none, and extracting enthusiasm from rocks and quagmires. After that, he may write a very interesting poem on Kamschatka!’ He then spoke of the Panorama of the North Pole which had been lately exhibited, of the ice-bergs, the seals lying asleep on the shore, and the strange twilight as well worth seeing. He said, it would be curious to know the effect, if they could get to the Pole itself, though it must be impossible: the veins, he should suppose, would burst, and the vessel itself go to pieces from the extreme cold. I asked if he had ever read an account of twelve men who had been left all the winter in Greenland, and of the dreadful shifts to which they were reduced? He said, he had not.—They were obliged to build two booths of wood one within the other; and if they had to go into the outer one during the severity of the weather, unless they used great precaution, their hands were blistered by whatever they took hold of as if it had been red-hot iron. The most interesting part was the account of their waiting for the return of light at the approach of spring, and the delight with which they first saw the sun shining on the tops of the frozen mountains. N— said, ‘This is the great advantage of descriptions of extraordinary situations by uninformed men: Nature as it were holds the pen for them; they give you what is most striking in the circumstances, and there is nothing to draw off the attention from the strong and actual impression, so that it is the next thing to the reality. G— was here the other day, and I showed him the note from my bookseller about the Fables, with which you were so much pleased, but he saw nothing in it. I then said G— is not one of those who look attentively at nature or draw much from that source. Yet the rest is but like building castles in the air, if it is not founded in observation and experience. Or it is like the enchanted money in the Arabian Nights, which turned to dry leaves when you came to make use of it. It is ingenious and amusing, and so far it is well to be amused when you can; but you learn nothing from the fine hypothesis you have been reading, which is only a better sort of dream, bright and vague and utterly inapplicable to the purposes of common life. G— does not appeal to nature, but to art and execution. There is another thing (which it seems harsh and presumptuous to say, but) he appears to me not always to perceive the difference between right and wrong. There are many others in the same predicament, though not such splendid examples of it. He is satisfied to make out a plausible case, to give the pros and cons like a lawyer; but he has no instinctive bias or feeling one way or other, except as he can give a studied reason for it. Common sense is out of the question: such people despise common sense, and the quarrel between them is a mutual one. Caleb Williams, notwithstanding, is a decidedly original work: the rest are the sweepings of his study. That is but one thing, to be sure; but no one does more than one thing. Northcote said that Sir Joshua used to say that no one produced more than six original things. I always said it was wrong to fix upon this number—five out of the six would be found upon examination to be repetitions of the first. A man can no more produce six original works than he can be six individuals at once. Whatever is the strong and prevailing bent of his genius, he will stamp upon some master-work; and what he does else, will be only the same thing over again, a little better or a little worse; or if he goes out of his way in search of variety and to avoid himself, he will merely become a common-place man or an imitator of others. You see this plainly enough in Cervantes—that he has exhausted himself in the Don Quixote. He has put his whole strength into it: his other works are no better than what other people could write. If there is any exception, it is Shakspeare: he seems to have had the faculty of dividing himself into a number of persons. His writings stand out from every thing else, and from one another. Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff are striking and original characters; but they die a natural death at the end of the fifth act, and no more come to life again than the people themselves would. He is not reduced to repeat himself or revive former inventions under feigned names. This is peculiar to him; still it is to be considered that plays are short works and only allow room for the expression of a part. But in a work of the extent of Don Quixote, the writer had scope to bring in all he wanted; and indeed there is no point of excellence which he has not touched from the highest courtly grace and most romantic enthusiasm down to the lowest ribaldry and rustic ignorance, yet carried off with such an air that you wish nothing away, and do not see what can be added to it. Every bit is perfect; and the author has evidently given his whole mind to it. That is why I believe that the Scotch Novels are the production of several hands. Some parts are careless, others straggling: it is only where there is an opening for effect that the master-hand comes in, and in general he leaves his work for others to get on with it. But in Don Quixote there is not a single line that you may not swear belongs to Cervantes.’—I inquired if he had read Woodstock? He answered, No, he had not been able to get it. I said, I had been obliged to pay five shillings for the loan of it at a regular bookseller’s shop (I could not procure it at the circulating libraries), and that from the understood feeling about Sir Walter no objection was made to this proposal, which would in ordinary cases have been construed into an affront. I had well nigh repented my bargain, but there were one or two scenes that repaid me (though none equal to his best,) and in general it was very indifferent. The plot turned chiefly on English Ghost-scenes, a very mechanical sort of phantoms who dealt in practical jokes and personal annoyances, turning beds upside down and sousing you all over with water, instead of supernatural and visionary horrors. It was very bad indeed, but might be intended to contrast the literal, matter-of-fact imagination of the Southron with the loftier impulses of Highland superstition. Charles II. was not spared, and was brought in admirably (when in disguise) as a raw, awkward Scotch lad, Master Kerneguy. Cromwell was made a fine, bluff, overbearing blackguard, who exercised a personal superiority wherever he came, but was put in situations which I thought wholly out of character, and for which I apprehended there was no warrant in the history of the times. They were therefore so far improper. A romance-writer might take an incident and work it out according to his fancy or might build an imaginary superstructure on the ground of history, but he had no right to transpose the facts. For instance, he had made Cromwell act as his own tip-staff and go to Woodstock to take Charles II. in person. To be sure, he had made him display considerable firmness and courage in the execution of this errand (as Lavender might in being the first to enter a window to secure a desperate robber)—but the plan itself, to say nothing of the immediate danger, was contrary to Cromwell’s dignity as well as policy. Instead of wishing to seize Charles with his own hand, he would naturally keep as far aloof from such a scene as he could, and be desirous to have it understood that he was anxious to shed as little more blood as possible. Besides, he had higher objects in view, and would, I should think, care not much more about Charles than about Master Kerneguy. He would be glad to let him get away. In another place, he had made Cromwell start back in the utmost terror at seeing a picture of Charles I. and act all the phrenzy of Macbeth over again at the sight of Banquo’s ghost. This I should also suppose to be quite out of character in a person of Cromwell’s prosaic, determined habits to fear a painted devil. ‘No,’ said N—, ‘that is not the way he would look at it; it is seeing only a part: but Cromwell was a greater philosopher than to act so. The other story is more probable of his visiting the dead body of Charles in a mask, and exclaiming in great agitation as he left the room, Cruel necessity! Yet even this is not sufficiently authenticated. No; he knew that it was come to this, that it was gone too far for either party to turn back, and that it must be final with one of them. The only question was whether he should give himself up as the victim, and so render all that had been done useless, or exact the penalty from what he thought the offending party. It was like a battle which must end fatally either way, and no one thought of lamenting, because he was not on the losing side. In a great public quarrel there was no room for these domestic and personal regards: all you had to do was to consider well the justice of the cause, before you appealed to the sword. Would Charles I. if he had been victorious, have started at the sight of a picture of Cromwell? Yet Cromwell was as much of a man as he, and as firm as the other was obstinate.’ Northcote said, he wished he could remember the subject of a dispute he had with G— to see if I did not think he had the best of it. I replied, I should be more curious to hear something in which G— was right, for he generally made it a rule to be in the wrong when speaking of any thing. I mentioned having once had a very smart debate with him about a young lady, of whom I had been speaking as very much like her aunt, a celebrated authoress, and as what the latter, I conceived, might have been at her time of life. G— said, when Miss — did any thing like Evelina or Cecilia, he should then believe she was as clever as Madame d’Arblay. I asked him whether he did not think Miss Burney was as clever before she wrote those novels as she was after; or whether in general an author wrote a successful work for being clever, or was clever because he had written a successful work! Northcote laughed and said, ‘That was so like G—.’ I observed that it arose out of his bigoted admiration of literature, so that he could see no merit in any thing else; nor trust to any evidence of talent but what was printed. It was much the same fallacy that had sometimes struck me in the divines, who deduced original sin from Adam’s eating the apple, and not his eating the apple from original sin or a previous inclination to do something, that he should not. Northcote remarked, that speaking of Evelina put him in mind of what Opie had once told him, that when Dr. Johnson sat to him for his picture, on his first coming to town, he asked him if it was true that he had sat up all night to read Miss Burney’s new novel, as it had been reported? And he made answer, ‘I never read it through at all, though I don’t wish this to be known.’ Sir Joshua also pretended to have read it through at a sitting, though it appeared to him (Northcote) affectation in them both, who were thorough-paced men of the world, and hackneyed in literature, to pretend to be so delighted with the performance of a girl, in which they could find neither instruction nor any great amusement, except from the partiality of friendship. So Johnson cried up Savage, because they had slept on bulks when they were young; and lest he should be degraded into a vagabond by the association, had elevated the other into a genius. Such prevarication or tampering with his own convictions was not consistent with the strict and formal tone of morality which he assumed on other and sometimes very trifling occasions, such as correcting Mrs. Thrale for saying that a bird flew in at the door, instead of the window. I said, Savage, in my mind, was one of those writers (like Chatterton) whose vices and misfortunes the world made a set-off to their genius, because glad to connect these ideas together. They were only severe upon those who attacked their prejudices or their consequence. Northcote replied, ‘Savage the architect was here the other day, and asked me why I had abused his name-sake, and called him an impostor. I answered, I had heard that character of him from a person in an obscure rank of life, who had known him a little before his death.’ Northcote proceeded: ‘People in that class are better judges than poets and moralists, who explain away every thing by fine words and doubtful theories. The mob are generally right in their summary judgments upon offenders. A man is seldom ducked or pumped upon or roughly handled by them, unless he has deserved it. You see that in the galleries at the play-house. They never let any thing pass that is immoral; and they are even fastidious judges of wit. I remember there was some gross expression in Goldsmith’s comedy the first night it came out; and there was a great uproar in the gallery, and it was obliged to be suppressed. Though rude and vulgar themselves, they do not like vulgarity on the stage; they come there to be taught manners.’ I said, they paid more attention than any body else; and after the curtain drew up (though somewhat noisy before) were the best-behaved part of the audience, unless something went wrong. As the common people sought for refinement as a treat, people in high life were fond of grossness and ribaldry as a relief to their overstrained affectation of gentility. I could account in no other way for their being amused with the wretched slang in certain magazines and newspapers. I asked Northcote if he had seen the third series of —? He had not. I said they were like the composition of a footman, and I believed greatly admired in the upper circles, who were glad to see an author arrange a side-board for them over again with servile alacrity. He said, ‘They delight in low, coarse buffoonery, because it sets off their own superiority: whereas the rabble resent it when obtruded upon them, because they think it is meant against themselves. They require the utmost elegance and propriety for their money: as the showman says in Goldsmith’s comedy—“My bear dances to none but the genteelest of tunes, Water parted from the Sea, or the minuet in Ariadne!”’

Northcote then alluded to a new novel he had been reading. He said he never read a book so full of words; which seemed ridiculous enough to say, for a book was necessarily composed of words, but here there was nothing else but words, to a degree that was surprising. Yet he believed it was sought after, and indeed he could not get it at the common library. ‘You are to consider, there must be books for all tastes and all ages. You may despise it, but the world do not. There are books for children till the time they are six years of age, such as Jack-the-Giant-Killer, the Seven Champions of Christendom, Guy of Warwick and others.[^[96]] From that to twelve they like to read the Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and then Fielding’s Novels and Don Quixote: from twenty to thirty books of poetry, Milton, Pope, Shakspeare: and from thirty history and philosophy—what suits us then will serve us for the rest of our lives. For boarding-school girls Thomson’s Seasons has an immense attraction, though I never could read it. Some people cannot get beyond a newspaper or a geographical dictionary. What I mean to infer is that we ought not to condemn too hastily, for a work may be approved by the public, though it does not exactly hit our taste; nay, those may seem beauties to others which seem faults to us. Why else do we pride ourselves on the superiority of our judgment, if we are not more advanced in this respect than the majority of readers? But our very fastidiousness should teach us toleration. You have said very well of this novel, that it is a mixture of genteel and romantic affectation. One objection to the excessive rhodomontade which abounds in it is that you can learn nothing from such extravagant fictions:—they are like nothing in the known world. I remember once speaking to Richardson (Sheridan’s friend) about Shakspeare’s want of morality, and he replied—“What! Shakspeare not moral? He is the most moral of all writers, because he is the most natural!” And in this he was right: for though Shakspeare did not intend to be moral, yet he could not be otherwise as long as he adhered to the path of nature. Morality only teaches us our duty by showing us the natural consequences of our actions; and the poet does the same while he continues to give us faithful and affecting pictures of human life—rewarding the good and punishing the bad. So far truth and virtue are one. But that kind of poetry which has not its foundation in nature, and is only calculated to shock and surprise, tends to unhinge our notions of morality and of every thing else in the ordinary course of Providence.’

Something being said of an artist who had attempted to revive the great style in our times, and the question being put, whether Michael Angelo and Raphael, had they lived now, would not have accommodated themselves to the modern practice, I said, it appeared to me that (whether this was the case or not) they could not have done what they did without the aid of circumstances; that for an artist to raise himself above all surrounding opinions, customs, and institutions by a mere effort of the will, was affectation and folly, like attempting to fly in the air; and that, though great genius might exist without the opportunities favourable to its development, yet it must draw its nourishment from circumstances, and suck in inspiration from its native air. There was Hogarth—he was surely a genius; still the manners of his age were necessary to him: teeming as his works were with life, character, and spirit, they would have been poor and vapid without the night-cellars of St. Giles’s, the drawing-rooms of St. James’s! Would he in any circumstances have been a Raphael or a Phidias? I think not. But had he been twenty times a Raphael or a Phidias, I am quite sure it would never have appeared in the circumstances in which he was placed. Two things are necessary to all great works and great excellence, the mind of the individual and the mind of the age or country co-operating with his own genius. The last brings out the first, but the first does not imply or supersede the last. Pictures for Protestant churches are a contradiction in terms, where they are not objects of worship but of idle curiosity:—where there is not the adoration, the enthusiasm in the spectator, how can it exist in the artist? The spark of genius is only kindled into a flame by sympathy.—Northcote spoke highly of Vanbrugh and of the calm superiority with which he bore the attacks of Swift, Pope, and that set who made a point of decrying all who did not belong to their party. He said Burke and Sir Joshua thought his architecture far from contemptible; and his comedies were certainly first-rate. Richards (the scene-painter) had told him, the players thought the Provoked Husband the best acting play on the stage; and Godwin said the City-Wives’ Confederacy (taken from an indifferent French play) was the best written one. I ventured to add, that the Trip to Scarborough (altered but not improved by Sheridan) was not inferior to either of the others. I should doubt whether the direction given at Sir Tunbelly’s castle on the arrival of Young Fashion—‘Let loose the grey-hound, and lock up Miss Hoyden!’—would be in Sheridan’s version, who, like most of his countrymen, had a prodigious ambition of elegance. Northcote observed, that talking of this put him in mind of a droll speech that was made when the officers got up a play on board the vessel that went lately to find out the North-West passage:—one of the sailors, who was admiring the performance, and saying how clever it was, was interrupted by the boatswain, who exclaimed—‘Clever! did you say? I call it philosophy, by G—d!’ He asked, if he had ever mentioned to me that anecdote of Lord Mansfield, who, when an old woman was brought before him as a witch, and was charged, among other improbable things, with walking through the air, attended coolly to the evidence, and then dismissed the complaint by saying, ‘My opinion is that this good woman be suffered to return home, and whether she shall do this, walking on the ground or riding through the air, must be left entirely to her own pleasure, for there is nothing contrary to the laws of England in either!’ I mentioned a very fine dancer at the Opera (Mademoiselle Brocard) with whom I was much delighted; and Northcote observed that where there was grace and beauty accompanying the bodily movements, it was very hard to deny the mental refinement or the merit of this art. He could not see why that which was so difficult to do, and which gave so much pleasure to others, was to be despised. He remembered seeing some young people at Parma (though merely in a country-dance) exhibit a degree of perfection in their movements that seemed to be inspired by the very genius of grace and gaiety. Miss Reynolds used to say that perfection was much the same in everything—nobody could assign the limits. I said authors alone were privileged to suppose that all excellence was confined to words. Till I was twenty I thought there was nothing in the world but books: when I began to paint I found there were two things, both difficult to do and worth doing; and I concluded from that time there might be fifty. At least I was willing to allow every one his own choice. I recollect a certain poet saying ‘he should like to ham-string those fellows at the Opera’—I suppose because the Great would rather see them dance than read Kehama. Whatever can be done in such a manner that you can fancy a God to do it, must have something in its nature divine. The ancients had assigned Gods to dancing as well as to music and poetry, to the different attributes and perfections both of body and mind; and perhaps the plurality of the heathen deities was favourable to a liberality of taste and opinion. Northcote: ‘The most wretched scribbler looks down upon the greatest painter as a mere mechanic: but who would compare Lord Byron with Titian?’

CONVERSATION THE FIFTEENTH

I went to Northcote in the evening to consult about his Fables. He was downstairs in the parlour, and talked much as usual: but the difference of the accompaniments, the sitting down, the preparations for tea, the carpet and furniture, and a little fat lap-dog interfered with old associations and took something from the charm of his conversation. He spoke of a Mr. Laird who had been employed to see his Life of Sir Joshua through the press, and whom he went to call upon in an upper story in Peterborough-Court, Fleet-street, where he was surrounded by his books, his implements of writing, a hand-organ, and his coffee-pots; and he said he envied him this retreat more than any palace he had ever happened to enter. Northcote was not very well, and repeated his complaints. I said I thought the air (now summer was coming on) would do him more good than physic. His apothecary had been describing the dissection of the elephant, which had just been killed at Exeter ‘Change. It appeared that instead of the oil which usually is found in the joints of animals, the interstices were in this case filled up with a substance resembling a kind of white paint. This Northcote considered as a curious instance of the wise contrivance of nature in the adaptation of means to ends; for even in pieces of artificial mechanism, though they use oil to lubricate the springs and wheels of clocks and other common-sized instruments, yet in very large and heavy ones, such as steam-engines, &c. they are obliged to use grease, pitch, and other more solid substances, to prevent the friction. If they could dissect a flea, what a fine, evanescent fluid would be found to lubricate its slender joints and assist its light movements! Northcote said the bookseller wished to keep the original copy of the Fables to bind up as a literary curiosity. I objected to this proceeding as unfair. There were several slips of the pen and slovenlinesses of style (for which I did not think him at all accountable, since an artist wrote with his left hand, and painted with his right) and I did not see why these accidental inadvertences, arising from diffidence and want of practice, should be as it were enshrined and brought against him. He said, ‘Mr. P— H— tasked me the hardest in what I wrote in the Artist. He pointed out where I was wrong, and sent it back to me to correct it. After all, what I did there was thought the best!’ I said Mr. H— was too fastidious, and spoiled what he did from a wish to have it perfect. He dreaded that a shadow of objection should be brought against any thing he advanced, so that his opinions at last amounted to a kind of genteel truisms. One must risk something in order to do any thing. I observed that this was remarkable in so clever a man; but it seemed as if there were some fatality by which the most lively and whimsical writers, if they went out of their own eccentric path and attempted to be serious, became exceedingly grave and even insipid. His farces were certainly very spirited and original: No Song no Supper was the first play I had ever seen, and I felt grateful to him for this. Northcote agreed that it was very delightful; and said there was a volume of it when he first read it to them one night at Mrs. Rundle’s, and that the players cut it down a good deal and supplied a number of things. There was a great piece of work to alter the songs for Madame Storace, who played in it and who could not pronounce half the English terminations. My Grandmother, too, was a laughable idea, very ingeniously executed; and some of the songs in this had an equal portion of elegance and drollery, such as that in particular—

For alas! long before I was born,

My fair one had died of old age!

Still some of his warmest admirers were hurt at their being farces—if they had been comedies, they would have been satisfied, for nothing could be greater than their success. They were the next to O’Keefe’s, who in that line was the English Moliere.

Northcote asked if I remembered the bringing out of any of O’Keefe’s? I answered, No. He said ‘It had the oddest effect imaginable—at one moment they seemed on the point of being damned, and the next moment you were convulsed with laughter. Edwin was inimitable in some of them. He was one of those actors, it is true, who carried a great deal off the stage with him, that he would willingly have left behind, and so far could not help himself. But his awkward, shambling figure in Bowkitt the dancing-master, was enough to make one die with laughing. He was also unrivalled in Lingo, where he was admirably supported by Mrs. Wells in Cowslip, when she prefers “a roast duck” to all the birds in the Heathen Mythology—and in Peeping Tom, where he merely puts his head out, the faces that he made threw the audience into a roar.’ I said, I remembered no further back than B—, who used to delight me excessively in Lenitive in the Prize, when I was a boy. Northcote said, he was an imitator of Edwin, but at a considerable distance. He was a good-natured, agreeable man; and the audience were delighted with him, because he was evidently delighted with them. In some respects he was a caricaturist: for instance, in Lenitive he stuck his pigtail on end, which he had no right to do, for no one had ever done it but himself. I said Liston appeared to me to have more comic humour than any one in my time, though he was not properly an actor. Northcote asked if he was not low-spirited; and told the story (I suspect an old one) of his consulting a physician on the state of his health, who recommended him to go and see Liston. I said he was grave and prosing, but I did not know there was any thing the matter with him, though I had seen him walking along the street the other day with his face as fixed as if had a lock-jaw, a book in his hand, looking neither to the right nor the left, and very much like his own Lord Duberly. I did not see why he and Matthews should both of them be so hipped, except from their having the player’s melancholy, arising from their not seeing six hundred faces on the broad grin before them at all other times as well as when they were acting. He was, however, exceedingly unaffected, and remarkably candid in judging of other actors. He always spoke in the highest terms of Munden, whom I considered as overdoing his parts.[^[97]] Northcote said, ‘Munden was excellent but an artificial actor. You should have seen Weston,’ he continued. ‘It was impossible, from looking at him, for any one to say that he was acting. You would suppose they had gone out and found the actual character they wanted, and brought him upon the stage without his knowing it. Even when they interrupted him with peals of laughter and applause, he looked about him as if he was not at all conscious of having any thing to do with it, and then went on as before. In Scrub, Dr. Last, and other parts of that kind, he was perfection itself. Garrick would never attempt Abel Drugger after him. There was something peculiar in his face; for I knew an old school-fellow of his who told me he used to produce the same effect when a boy, and when the master asked what was the matter, his companions would make answer—‘Weston looked at me, Sir!’ Yet he came out in tragedy, as indeed they all did! Northcote inquired if I had seen Garrick? I answered, ‘No—I could not very well, as he died the same year I was born!’ I mentioned having lately met with a striking instance of genealogical taste in a family, the grandfather of which thought nothing of Garrick, the father thought nothing of Mrs. Siddons, and the daughter could make nothing of the Scotch Novels, but admired Mr. Theodore Hook’s ‘Sayings and Doings!’

Northcote then returned to the subject of his book and said, ‘Sir Richard Phillips once wished me to do a very magnificent work indeed on the subject of art. He was like Curil, who had a number of fine title-pages, if any one could have written books to answer them. He came here once with Godwin to shew me a picture which they had just discovered of Chaucer, and which was to embellish Godwin’s Life of him. I told them it was certainly no picture of Chaucer, nor was any such picture painted at that time.’ I said, Godwin had got a portrait about a year ago which he wished me to suppose was a likeness of President Bradshaw: I saw no reason for his thinking so, but that in that case it would be worth a hundred pounds to him! Northcote expressed a curiosity to have seen it, as he knew the descendants of the family at Plymouth. He remembered one of them, an old lady of the name of Wilcox, who used to walk about in Gibson’s-Field near the town, so prim and starched, holding up her fan spread out like a peacock’s tail with such an air, on account of her supposed relationship to one of the Regicides! They paid, however (in the vulgar opinion) for this distinction; for others of them bled to death at the nose, or died of the bursting of a blood-vessel, which their wise neighbours did not fail to consider as a judgment upon them.

Speaking of Dr. M—, he said, he had such a feeling of beauty in his heart, that it made angels of every one around him. To check a person who was running on against another, he once said, ‘You should not speak in that manner, for you lead me to suppose you have the bad qualities you are so prone to dwell upon in others.’—A transition was here made to Lord Byron, who used to tell a story of a little red-haired girl, who, when countesses and ladies of fashion were leaving the room where he was in crowds (to cut him after his quarrel with his wife) stopped short near a table against which he was leaning, gave him a familiar nod, and said, ‘You should have married me, and then this would not have happened to you!’ A question being started whether Dr. M— was handsome, Northcote answered, ‘I could see no beauty in him as to his outward person, but there was an angelic sweetness of disposition that spread its influence over his whole conversation and manner. He had not wit, but a fine romantic enthusiasm which deceived himself and enchanted others. I remember once his describing a picture by Rosa de Tivoli (at Saltram) of Two Bulls fighting, and he gave such an account of their rage and manner of tearing up the ground that I could not rest till we went over to see it—when we came there, it was nothing but a coarse daub like what might be expected from the painter: but he had made the rest out of a vivid imagination. So my father told him a story of a bull-bait he had seen in which the bull had run so furiously at the dog that he broke the chain and pitched upon his head and was killed. Soon after, he came and told us the same story as an incident he himself had witnessed. He did not mean to deceive, but the image had made such an impression on his fancy, that he believed it to be one that he had himself been an eye-witness of.’ I was much amused with this account and I offered to get him a copy of a whimsical production, of which a new edition had been printed. I also recommended to him the Spanish Rogue, as a fine mixture of drollery and grave moralizing. He spoke of Lazarillo de Tormes and of the Cheats of Scapin, the last of which he rated rather low. The work was written by Scarron, whose widow, the famous Madame de Maintenon, afterwards became mistress to Louis XIV.