L’Art.
DU MAURIER.THE DANCING LESSON.

And then came the overwhelming pressure of the old masters. After the forlorn condition of colouring brought about by David and Carstens, it was so vitally necessary to restore the artistic tradition and technique of the old masters, that it was at first thought necessary to adopt the old subject-matter also—especially the splendid robes of the city of the lagoons—in order to test the newly acquired secrets of the palette. Faltering unsteadily under influences derived from the old artists, modern painting did not yet feel itself able to create finished works of art out of the novel elements which the century placed at its disposal. It still needed to be carried in the arms of a Venetian or Flemish nurse.

And æsthetic criticism bestowed its blessing on these attempts. The Romanticists had been forced to the treatment of history and the deification of the past by disgust with the grey and colourless present; the younger generation were long afterwards held captive in this province by æsthetic views of the dignity of history. To paint one’s own age was reckoned a crime. One had to paint the age of other people. For this purpose the prix de Rome was instituted. The spirit which produced the pictures of Cabanel and Bouguereau was the same that induced David to write to Gros, that the battles of the empire might afford the material for occasional pictures done under the inspiration of chance, but not for great and earnest works of art worthy of an historical painter. That æsthetic criticism which taught that, whatever the subject be, and whatever personages may be represented, if they belong to the present time the picture is merely a genre picture, still held the field. Whilst the world was laughing and crying, the painter, with the colossal power of doing everything, amused himself by trying not to appear the child of his own time. No one perceived the refinement and grace, the corruption and wantonness, of modern life as it is in great cities. No one laid hold on the mighty social problems which the growing century threw out with a seething creative force. Whoever wishes to know how the men of the time lived and moved, what hopes and sorrows they bore in their breasts, whoever seeks for works in which the heart-beat of the century is alive and throbbing, must have his attention directed to the works of the draughtsmen, to the illustrations of certain periodicals. It was in the nineteenth century as in the Middle Ages. As then, when painting was still an ecclesiastical art, the slowly awakening feeling for nature, the joy of life was first expressed in miniatures, woodcuts, and engravings, so also the great draughtsmen of the nineteenth century were the first who set themselves with their whole strength to bring modern life and all that it contained earnestly and sincerely within the range of art, the first who held up the glass to their own time and gave the abridged chronicle of their age. Their calling as caricaturists led them to direct observation of the world, and lent them the aptitude of rendering their impressions with ease; and that at a time when the academical methods of depicting physiognomy obtained elsewhere in every direction. It necessitated their representing subjects to which, in accordance with the æsthetic views of the period, they would not otherwise have addressed themselves; it led them to discover beauties in spheres of life by which they would otherwise have been repelled. London, the capital of a free people ruling in all quarters of the globe, the home of millions, where intricate old corners and back streets left more space than in other cities for old-fashioned “characters,” for odd, eccentric creatures and better-class charlatans of every description, afforded a ground peculiarly favourable for caricature. In this province, therefore, England holds the first place beyond dispute.

L’Art.
DU MAURIER.A RECOLLECTION OF DIEPPE.
L’Art.
DU MAURIER.DOWN TO DINNER.

Direct from Hogarth come the group of political caricaturists, in whom the sour, bilious temper of John Bull lives on in a new and improved edition. Men like James Gillray were a power in the political warfare of their time; bold liberals who fought for the cause of freedom with a divine rage and slashing irony, while at the same time they were masterly draughtsmen in a vehement and forceful style. The worst of it is, that the interest excited by political caricature is always of a very ephemeral nature. The antagonism of Pitt and Fox, Shelburne and Burke, the avarice and stupidity of George III, the Union, the conjugal troubles of the Prince of Wales, and the war with France, seem very uninteresting matters in these days. On the other hand, Rowlandson, who was not purely a politician, appeals to us in an intelligible language even after a hundred years have gone by.

Like Hogarth, he was the antithesis of a humorist. Something bitter and gloomily pessimistic runs through all he touches. He is brutal, with an inborn power and an indecorous coarseness. His laughter is loud and his cursing barbarous. Ear-piercing notes escape from the widely opened lips of his singers, and the tears come thickly from the eyes of his sentimental old ladies who are hanging on the declamation of a tragic actress. His comedy is produced by the simplest means. As a rule any sort of contrast is enough: fat and thin, big and little, young wife and old husband, young husband and old wife, shying horse and helpless rider on a Sunday out. Or else he brings the physical and moral qualities of his figures into an absurd contrast with their age, calling, or behaviour: musicians are deaf, dancing masters bandy-legged, servants wear the dresscoats and orders of lords, hideous old maids demean themselves like coquettes, parsons get drunk, and grave dignitaries of state dance the cancan. And so, when the servant gets a thrashing, and the coquette a refusal, and the diplomatist loses his orders by getting a fall, it is their punishment for having forgotten their proper place. They are all of them “careers on slippery ground,” with the same punishments as Hogarth delighted to depict. But Rowlandson became another man when he set himself to represent the life of the people.

L’Art.
DU MAURIER.A WINTRY WALK.
Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
KEENE.FROM “OUR PEOPLE.”    THE PERILS OF THE DEEP.

Born in July 1756, in a narrow alley of old London, he grew up amidst the people. As a young man he saw Paris, Germany, and the Low Countries. He went regularly to all clubs where there was high play. As man, painter, and draughtsman alike, he stood in the midst of life. Street scenes in Paris and London engage his pencil, especially scenes from Vauxhall Gardens, the meeting-place of fashionable London, and there is often a touch of Menzel in the palpitating life of these pictures—in these lords and ladies, fops and ballad-singers, who pass through the grounds of the gardens in a billowy stream. His illustrations include everything: soldiers, navvies, life at home and in the tavern, in town and in village, on the stage and behind the scenes, at masquerades and in Parliament. When he died at seventy, on 22nd April 1827, the obituaries were able to say of him with truth that he had drawn all England in the years between 1774 and 1809. And all these leaves torn from the life of sailors and peasants, these fairs and markets, beggars, huntsmen, smiths, artizans, and day labourers, were not caricatures, but sketches keenly observed and sharply executed from life. His countrymen have at times a magnificent Michelangelesque stir of life which almost suggests Millet. He was fond of staying at fashionable watering-places, and came back with charming scenes from high life. But his peculiar field of observation was the poor quarter of London. Here are the artizans, the living machines. Endurance, persistence, and resignation may be read in their long, dismal, angular faces. Here are the women of the people, wasted and hectic. Their eyes are set deep in their sockets, their noses sharp and their skin blotched with red spots. They have suffered much and had many children; they have a sodden, depressed, stoically callous appearance; they have borne much, and can bear still more. And then the devastations of gin! that long train of wretched women who of an evening prostitute themselves in the Strand to pay for their lodging! those terrible streets of London, where pallid children beg, and tattered spectres, either sullen or drunken, rove from public-house to public-house, with torn linen and rags hanging about them in shreds! The cry of misery rising from the pavement of great cities was first heard by Rowlandson, and the pages on which he drew the poor of London are a living dance of death of the most ghastly veracity.