worn heart wanders out free, beyond the grim city-world of stone and iron, smoky chimneys, and roaring wheels, into the world of beautiful things—the world which shall be hereafter—ay, which shall be! Believe it, toil-worn worker, in spite of thy foul alley, thy crowded lodging, thy grimed clothing, thy ill-fed children, thy thin, pale wife—believe it, thou too and thine, will some day have your share of beauty. God made you love beautiful things only because He intends hereafter to give you your fill of them. That pictured face on the wall is lovely, but lovelier still may the wife of thy bosom be when she meets thee on the resurrection morn! Those baby cherubs in the old Italian painting—how gracefully they flutter and sport among the soft clouds, full of rich young life and baby joy! Yes, beautiful indeed, but just such a one at this very moment is that once pining, deformed child of thine, over whose death-cradle thou wast weeping a month ago; now a child-angel, whom thou shalt meet again never to part! Those landscapes, too, painted by loving, wise old Claude, two hundred years ago, are still as fresh as ever. How still the meadows are! how pure and free that vault of deep blue sky! No wonder that thy worn heart, as thou lookest, sighs aloud, “Oh that I had wings as a dove, then would I flee away and be at rest.” Ah, but gayer meadows and bluer skies await thee in the world to come—that fairy-land made real—“the new heavens and the new earth,” which God has prepared for the pure and the loving, the just and the brave, who have conquered in this sore fight of life!
These thoughts may seem all too far-fetched to spring up in a man’s head from merely looking at pictures; but it is not so in practice. See, now, such
thoughts have sprung up in my head; how else did I write them down here? And why should not they, and better ones, too, spring up in your heads, friends? It is delightful to watch in a picture-gallery some street-boy enjoying himself; how first wonder creeps over his rough face, and then a sweeter, more earnest, awestruck look, till his countenance seems to grow handsomer and nobler on the spot, and drink in and reflect unknowingly, the beauty of the picture he is studying. See how some soldier’s face will light up before the painting which tells him a noble story of bye-gone days. And why? Because he feels as if he himself had a share in the story at which he looks. They may be noble and glorious men who are painted there; but they are still men of like passions with himself, and his man’s heart understands them and glories in them; and he begins, and rightly, to respect himself the more when he finds that he, too, has a fellow-feeling with noble men and noble deeds.
I say, pictures raise blessed thoughts in me—why not in you, my brothers? Your hearts are fresh, thoughtful, kindly; you only want to have these pictures explained to you, that you may know why and how they are beautiful, and what feelings they ought to stir in your minds. Look at the portraits on the walls, and let me explain one or two. Often the portraits are simpler than large pictures, and they speak of real men and women who once lived on this earth of ours—generally of remarkable and noble men—and man should be always interesting to man.
IV. A PORTRAIT IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY.
“Any one who goes to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, may see two large and beautiful pictures—the nearer of the two labelled ‘Titian,’ representing Bacchus leaping from a car drawn by leopards. The other, labelled ‘Francia,’ representing the Holy Family seated on a sort of throne, with several figures arranged below—one of them a man pierced with arrows. Between these two, low down, hangs a small picture, about two feet square, containing only the portrait of an old man, in a white cap and robe, and labelled on the picture itself, ‘Joannes Bellinus.’ Now this old man is a very ancient friend of mine, and has comforted my heart, and preached me a sharp sermon, too, many a time. I never enter that gallery without having five minutes’ converse with him; and yet he has been dead at least three hundred years, and, what is more, I don’t even know his name. But what more do I know of a man by knowing his name? Whether the man’s name be Brown, or whether he has as many names and titles as a Spanish grandee, what does that tell me about the man?—the spirit and character of the man—what the man will say when he is asked—what the man will do when he is stirred up to action? The man’s name is part of his clothes; his shell; his husk. Change his
name and all his titles, you don’t change him—‘a man’s a man for a’ that,’ as Burns says; and a goose a goose. Other men gave him his name; but his heart and his spirit—his love and his hatred—his wisdom and his folly—his power to do well and ill; those God and himself gave him. I must know those, and then I know the man. Let us see what we can make out from the picture itself about the man whom it represents. In the first place, we may see by his dress that he was in his day the Doge (or chief magistrate) of Venice—the island city, the queen of the seas. So we may guess that he had many a stirring time of it, and many a delicate game to play among those tyrannous and covetous old merchant-princes who had elected him; who were keeping up their own power at the expense of everyone’s liberty, by spies and nameless accusers, and secret councils, tortures, and prisons, whose horrors no one ever returned to describe. Nay, we may guess just the very men with whom he had to deal—the very battles he may have seen fought.
“But all these are circumstances—things which stand round the man (as the word means), and not the whole man himself—not the character and heart of the man: that we must get from the portrait; and if the portrait is a truly noble portrait we shall get it. If it is a merely vulgar picture, we shall get the man’s dress and shape of his face, but little or no expression: if it is a pathetic portrait, or picture of passion, we shall get one particular temporary expression of his face—perhaps joy, sorrow, anger, disgust—but still one which may have passed any moment, and left his face quite different; but if the picture is one of the noblest kind, we shall read the man’s whole character there; just all
his strength and weakness, his kindliness or his sternness, his thoughtfulness or his carelessness, written there once and for ever;—what he would be, though all the world passed away; what his immortal and eternal soul will be, unless God or the devil changed his heart, to all eternity.
“We may see at once that this man has been very handsome; but it is a peculiar sort of beauty. How delicate and graceful all the lines in his face are!—he is a gentleman of God’s own making, and not of the tailor’s making. He is such a gentleman as I have seen among working men and nine-shilling-a-week labourers, often and often; his nobleness is in his heart—it is God’s gift, therefore it shows in his noble looking face. No matter whether he were poor or rich; all the rags in the world, all the finery in the world, could not have made him look like a snob or a swell. He was a thoughtful man, too; no one with such a forehead could have been a trifler: a kindly man, too, and honest—one that may have played merrily enough with his grandchildren, and put his hand in his purse for many a widow and orphan. Look what a bright, clear, straightforward, gentle look he has, almost a smile; but he has gone through too many sad hours to smile much: he is a man of many sorrows, like all true and noble rulers; and, like a high mountain-side, his face bears the furrows of many storms. He has had a stern life of it, with the cares of a great nation on his shoulders. He has seen that in this world there is no rest for those who live like true men: you may see it by the wrinkles in his brow, and the sharp-cut furrows in his cheeks, and those firm-set, determined lips. His eyes almost show the marks of many noble tears,—tears such as good men shed over their nation’s