A DISCUSSION CONCERNING THE QUESTION LAST PROPOSED.
Questo è bene un de' più profondi passi
Che noi habbiamo ancora oggi tentato;
E non è mica da huomini bassi.
AGNUOLO FIRENZUOLA.
Good and satisfactory likenesses may, beyond all doubt, be taken of Mr. Everydayman himself, and indeed of most persons: and were it otherwise, portrait-painting would be a worse profession than it is, though too many an unfortunate artist has reason bitterly to regret that he possessed the talents which tempted him to engage in it. There are few faces of which even a mediocre painter cannot produce what is called a staring likeness, and Sir Thomas Lawrence a handsome one; Sir Thomas is the painter who pleases every body!
But there are some few faces with which no artist can succeed so as to please himself, (if he has a true feeling for his own art,) or to content those persons who are best acquainted with the living countenance. This is the case where the character predominates over the features, and that character itself is one in which many and seemingly opposite qualities are compounded. Garrick in Abel Drugger, Garrick in Sir John Brute and Garrick in King Lear presented three faces as different as were the parts which he personated; yet the portraits which have been published of him in those parts, may be identified by the same marked features, which flexible as they were rendered by his histrionic power, still under all changes retained their strength and their peculiarity. But where the same flexibility exists and the features are not so peculiar or prominent, the character is then given by what is fleeting, not by what is fixed; and it is more difficult to hit a likeness of this kind than to paint a rainbow.
Now I cannot but think that the Doctor's countenance was of this kind. I can call it to mind as vividly as it appears to me in dreams; but I could impart no notion of it by description. Words cannot delineate a single feature of his face,—such words at least as my knowledge enables me to use. A sculptor, if he had measured it, might have given you technically the relative proportions of his face in all its parts: a painter might describe the facial angle, and how the eyes were set, and if they were well-slit, and how the lips were formed, and whether the chin was in the just mean between rueful length and spectatorial brevity; and whether he could have passed over Strasburgh Bridge without hearing any observations made upon his nose. My own opinion is that the centinel would have had something to say upon that subject; and if he had been a Protestant Soldier (which if an Alsacian, he was likely to be) and accustomed to read the Bible, he might have been reminded by it of the Tower of Lebanon, looking toward Damascus; for as an Italian Poet says,
in prospettiva
Ne mostra un barbacane sforacchiato.1
I might venture also to apply to the Doctor's nose that safe generality by which Alcina's is described in the Orlando Furioso.
“Quindi il naso, per mezzo il viso scende,
Che non trova l'invidia ove l'emende.”