All things both great and small.”
Not only did Landseer rival some of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century in painting fur and feathers, but he depicted animals with sympathy, as if he believed that “the dumb, driven cattle” possess souls. His dogs and other animals are so human as to look as if they were able to speak. The painter was the son of John Landseer, the engraver, and was born in London. He received art lessons from his father, and, when little more than a baby, would sketch donkeys, horses, and cows at Hampstead Heath. Some of these sketches, made when Landseer was five, seven, and ten years old, are at Kensington. He was only fourteen when he exhibited the heads of “A Pointer Bitch and Puppy.” When between sixteen and seventeen he produced “Dogs Fighting,” which was engraved by the painter’s father. Still more popular was “The Dogs of St. Gothard rescuing a Distressed Traveler,” which appeared when its author was eighteen. Landseer was not a pupil of Haydon, but he had occasional counsel from him. He dissected a lion. As soon as he reached the age of twenty-four he was elected A.R.A., and exhibited at the Academy “The Hunting of Chevy Chase.” This was in 1826, and in 1831 he became a full member of the Academy. Landseer had visited Scotland in 1826, and from that date we trace a change in his style, which thenceforth was far less solid, true and searching, and became more free and bold. The introduction of deer into his pictures, as in “The Children of the Mist,” “Seeking Sanctuary,” and “The Stag at Bay,” marked the influence of Scotch associations. Landseer was knighted in 1850, and at the French exhibition of 1855 was awarded the only large gold medal given to an English artist. Prosperous, popular, and the guest of the highest personages of the realm, he was visited about 1852 by an illness which compelled him to retire from society. From this he recovered, but the effects of a railway accident in 1868 brought on a relapse. He died in 1873, and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. On the death of Sir Charles Eastlake, in 1865, he was offered the Presidentship of the Royal Academy, but this honor he declined. In the National Gallery are “Spaniels of King Charles’s Breed,” “Low Life and High Life,” “Highland Music” (a highland piper disturbing a group of five hungry dogs, at their meal, with a blast on the pipes), “The Hunted Stag,” “Peace,” “War” (dying and dead horses, and their riders lying amidst the burning ruins of a cottage), “Dignity and Impudence,” “Alexander and Diogenes,” “The Defeat of Comus,” a sketch painted for a fresco in the Queen’s summer house, Buckingham Palace. Sixteen of Landseer’s works are in the Sheepshanks Collection, including the touching “Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner,” of which Mr. Ruskin said that “it stamps its author not as the neat imitator of the texture of a skin, or the fold of a drapery, but as the man of mind.”
CRITICISMS ON AMERICAN LITERATURE.
CONDITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.
The conditions under which the communities of the New World were established, and the terms on which they hitherto existed, have been unfavorable to Art. The religious and commercial enthusiasms of the first adventurers to her shores, supplying themes for the romancers of a later age, were themselves antagonistic to romance. The spirit which tore down the aisles of St. Regulus, and was revived in England in a reaction against music, painting and poetry, the Pilgrim Fathers bore with them in the “Mayflower” and planted across the seas. The life of the early colonists left no leisure for refinement. They had to conquer nature before admiring it, to feed and clothe before analyzing themselves. The ordinary cares of existence beset them to the exclusion of its embellishments. While Dryden, Pope and Addison were polishing stanzas and adding grace to English prose, they were felling trees, navigating rivers, and fertilizing valleys.… An enlightened people in a new land “where almost every one has facilities elsewhere unknown for making his fortune,” it is not to be wondered that the pursuit of wealth has been their leading impulse; nor is it perhaps to be regretted that much of their originality has been expended upon inventing machines instead of manufacturing verses, or that their religion itself has taken a practical turn. One of their own authors confesses that the “common New England life is still a lean, impoverished life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one,” but it is there alone that the speculative and artistic tendencies of recent years have found room and occasion for development. Our travelers find a peculiar charm in the manly force and rough adventurous spirit of the Far West, but the poetry of the pioneer is unconscious. The attractive culture of the South has been limited in extent and degree. The hothouse fruit of wealth and leisure, it has never struck its roots deeply into native soil.… All the best transatlantic literature is inspired by the spirit of confidence—often of over-confidence—in labor. It has only flourished freely in a free soil; and for almost all its vitality and aspirations, its comparatively scant performance and large promise we must turn to New England. Its defects and merits are those of the national character as developed in the northern states, and we must seek for an explanation of its peculiarities in the physical and moral circumstances which surround them.
When European poets and essayists write of nature it is to contrast her permanence with the mutability of human life. We talk of the everlasting hills, the perennial fountains, the ever-recurring seasons.… In America, on the other hand, it is the extent of nature that is dwelt upon—the infinity of space, rather than the infinity of time, is opposed to the limited rather than to the transient existence of man. Nothing strikes a traveler in that country so much as this feature of magnitude. The rivers like rolling lakes, the lakes which are inland seas, the forests, the plains, Niagara itself, with its world of waters, owe their magnificence to their immensity; and by a transference, not unnatural, although fallacious, the Americans generally have modeled their ideas of art after the same standard of size. Their wars, their hotels, their language, are pitched on the huge scale of their distances. “Orphaned of the solemn inspiration of antiquity,” they gain in surface what they have lost in age; in hope, what they have lost in memory.
“That untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when they move,”