Paul Veronese and his contemporaries knew how to make their works last. We in our day are not so fortunate. It is sad to think how many pictures of our own English School are gradually fading away; how many men have put their best powers into pictures which are now (among them some of Sir Joshua Reynolds's most beautiful creations) rapidly becoming "ghosts of ghosts." With Turner the general wreck is more complete. "Turner," Constable said, "seems to paint with tinted steam,—so evanescent, and so airy." Alas! evanescent indeed. Reynolds devoted much time and attention to finding out durable pigments. Trying to discover the secret, he even cut up some old Italian pictures. It was a vain quest. The old masters are long ago buried, and they have carried their secret to the grave.
Sadder still is the case of those artists whose pictures themselves have not faded, but the fashion for whose pictures has gone. Sir Benjamin West, who died some sixty odd years ago, enjoyed very great fame during his life. He painted many large historical canvases, all painstaking, and, in their way, of undoubted merit. They gained high prices in their day, and are now mostly consigned either to cellars or to the darkest rooms of suburban galleries.
Time is, after all, the greatest of art critics, and its judgment is sure. The best of all the centuries adorns the walls of the National Museum. It is the best only that survives. To us, in all our painful twentieth-century newness, it is given to inherit the mystery and magic of the old Greeks and Egyptians; the charming imagery of Raphael, filled with simple faith and sweet imagination; the quaint beauty of Botticelli, and of the early Florentines, whose art was a part of their life; the gay voluptuousness of the later Venetians; "the courtly Spanish grace" of Velasquez; the charming affectations of Sir Joshua Reynolds, shown in the fair ladies whose portraits, in their beauty, once filled the halls of England. All is given to us, unsparingly. For us and for the enrichment of the walls of our National Gallery, did the rude barbarians, in the sack of Italian cities, stay the hand of destruction; for us the treasures of art were wrested from many a palace of antiquity; it was for the delight of thousands of modern Londoners that the monasteries of the Middle Ages were plundered. Altar-pieces painted for adoration in the private chapel of some patron saint are now seen dimly, through London fog and smoke, hanging, maybe, next to some pagan Bacchus and Ariadne, or Venus and the Loves. For our sake were battles fought, to include masterpieces among the spoils; for us did the Italian nobles sell their treasures into the hands of money-lenders. Could Botticelli, that fervent follower of Savonarola, he who "worked and prayed in silence," have guessed that his beloved Nativity of Christ would, centuries hence, be removed to barbarous London, and be stared at by crowds of wondering Philistines, who should see in it only the curious uncouthness of its gestures,—he would, surely, have held his hand.
The National Gallery is the natural haunt of such dreams. Sitting there in the quickly-growing twilight, how easily it becomes peopled with ghosts, ghosts even more intangible than Reynolds's. Our thoughts wander back into the past, the walls grow dim, they seem to melt away into distance; we hear the sound of music, and see the glimmer of gay banners, as Cimabue's Madonna is carried past, amid the acclamation of a multitude; or a gay court appears before our eyes, filled with fine ladies, grandees, and inquisitors; and, apart from all, a great King conversing eagerly with a little dark painter, whose only ornament, beyond his lace ruffles, is the red cross of the Order of Santiago on his breast; or we seem to be in Italy, in a poetic "Romeo and Juliet" time and atmosphere, in a rich noble's house, bright with splendid hangings and works of art; a painted wedding-chest, or cassone, has just been presented, on the occasion of a marriage, and the young bride herself gazes down lovingly into its depths, which she has just stored with rich silks and brocaded velvets, and all her treasures; just such a chest as Ginevra might have hid and perished in; just such a bride as Ginevra herself. Or the scene changes again to a dusty gallery in a dingy street, with a little ugly old man mounted high on a stool, painting furiously away amid a horde of tailless cats; and anon a transformation, and we see a brilliant illumination of Queen Mab's Grotto, with fairies in wonderful gondolas, gliding to and fro; a ball in Venice.... We, too, are invited, but, as we hesitate to trust ourselves to Turner's airy structures, a voice sounds in our ear,—a prosaic voice, however: "Closin' time, ma'am, closin' time!"
CHAPTER XV
HISTORIC HOUSES AND THEIR TENANTS
"I have seen various places ... which have been rendered interesting by great men and their works; ... I seem to have made friends with them in their own houses; to have walked and talked, and suffered and enjoyed with them.... Even in London I find the principle hold good in me.... I once had duties to perform which kept me out late at night, and severely taxed my health and spirits. My path lay through a neighbourhood in which Dryden lived; and though nothing could be more commonplace, and I used to be tired to the heart and soul of me, I never hesitated to go a little out of my way purely that I might pass through Gerrard Street, and so give myself the shadow of a pleasant thought."—Leigh Hunt.
"Our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shellfish which builds all manner of smaller shell into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant is."—Oliver Wendell Holmes.
At the Club.