These great literary artists understood Shakspeare so indifferently, that they were unable to picture him truly to themselves or to represent him naturally to others. Milton called sweetest Shakspeare ‘Fancy’s child.’ Dryden says his Fancy limped; and Addison hints that his sublimity rendered him obscure!
erhaps some among us may be inclined to smile at Mr. Tuckerman’s allusion, in his chapter on Pictures, to a portrait of ‘an American matronly belle of the days of Washington, by Stewart, which represents the type of mingled self-reliance and womanly loveliness that has made the ladies of our Republican court so memorably attractive.’ Of the attraction of the ladies there can be no doubt, but can a Republic care to pride itself on such an institution as a ‘court’? La Rochefoucauld said very well of royal courts in Europe that they did not render those that tarried in them happy, but that they prevented those who had tarried at them from being happy elsewhere. It may be added that there is only one royal court on record where every one was equal, and that was the proverbially celebrated ‘Cours du Roi Pétaut.’ But the equality there led to inextricable confusion, because every one wished to command and no one cared to obey. Now, the court of King Pétaut has very much extended itself. So wide, indeed, are its limits that it may be said to embrace all society, which has become a grand court where dissimulation and distrust, splendour without and anxieties within, abundantly prevail. Some one has compared that tremendous institution called ‘Society,’ as well as courts generally, to those magnificent, ill-regulated, gilt clocks to be seen in France. The exterior is dazzling with beauty, but inside everything is going wrong.
Among old court fashions of the last century was one of having a portrait of the eye. Of course this was only of ladies’ eyes—eyes that slew the peace of mortal man,—and the counterfeit presentiment of one of which was held to be a solace to the memory and a stimulant to hope. Lovers carried about with them the figure of one of the (presumed) two eyes of their respective ladies. There was an affected modesty in this fashion; and, if I may so speak, the mode most prevailed when modesty, or a decent reserve which might pass for it, was least in fashion.
It has been a disputed question whether painting or poetry was the earlier born. It would be as difficult to determine whether Calliope wrote heroic songs before Clio painted heroic deeds. Probably poetry, which preceded prose in the early festive ceremonies of the human race (bards sang of high deeds before less gifted men made long speeches about them), was earlier than painting. The actions of heroes were first fixed on the artist’s imagination by the songs of the bards and the praise of orators. But there is a prettier theory touching the origin of portrait-painting, in the story of the youth who drew the outline of the one face he loved by tracing with charcoal its shadow on the wall, purposely disposed to enable him to display this primitive effort of art and of affection.
As we may not take all portraits of our ancestors for veræ effigies, so are the portraits of more modern heroes not to be accepted without due reserve. There was, for instance, a series of Lives of the British Admirals, with illustrative portraits, and Charles Lamb sat for them all!
Desmahis says, rather saucily, of the ladies (but they must have been those of his time, and not the general sex), that when they go to have their portraits taken they wish the artist to be faithless and the portrait to be a likeness! Steele has similar satire. Clerimont, in the Tender Husband, says that his fancy is utterly exhausted with inventing faces for his sitters. ‘I gave my Lady Scornwell,’ he says, ‘the choice of a dozen frowns before she found one to her liking.’ I suppose in these days the fair are not so exacting. In the very ancient days noble sitters were even more so. It was death to the painter, as well as to his reputation, if he failed to please a Roman emperor. I shudder when I think of the artist who received a commission to paint a full-length of Nero. It was more than life size; it was a hundred and twenty feet high! and there was possible death in every inch of it.
Michael Angelo had a good idea of the simple dignity of an artist. On being told of one who painted pictures with his fingers, ‘The simpleton,’ said he; ‘he had better keep to his pencils.’ A picture painted without pencils is, however, not so curious a fact as publishing a book that never was written. Mr. Tuckerman’s volume reminds me of another set of essays, which were published in 1844, called Colloquies Desultory, but chiefly upon Poetry and Poets. It is a very agreeable volume of 250 pages, but not a word of it was really ever written. The clever printer and publisher, Mr. Lordan of Romsey, set up the types as fast as he mentally composed the book; and the latter is highly creditable to the author, who, however, never wrote it! Lord Palmerston respected this ingenious man; and collectors of singular books keep a good look out for a work that was published before the author penned a word of it.