An interpretation offered by any one who had studied the parable pictures was eagerly accepted, and further thoughts suggested. ‘You can’t see Judgment’s face for his arm,’ perhaps had, perhaps had not, more meaning in it than the speaker meant; while in reference to the woman’s listless dropping of her flowers from her lap in ‘Time, Death, and Judgment,’ the remark, ‘Death does not want the flowers now she’s got ’em,’ told of thoughtful suffering at the apparent wastefulness of death. ‘Time is young yet, then,’ made one feel that the speaker had caught a glimpse of life’s possibilities with which probably any number of homilies had failed to impress him.
‘Sleep and Death,’ depicting the strong, pale warrior borne on the shoulders of Sleep, while being gently lifted into the arms of Death—so simple in colour, pure in idea, rich in suggestion—was good for the poor to see, among whom Death is robbed of none of its terrors by the coarse familiarity with which it is treated. With them funerals are too often a time of great rowdiness, and ‘a beautiful corpse’ a fit spectacle for all the neighbours—even the youngest child—to be invited to see. Death treated as a tender mother-woman, hidden in the cold grey vastness surrounding her, was a bright idea, producing, perhaps, greater modesty about the great mystery. ‘That’s the best of the whole lot, to my mind,’ came, after a long gaze, from a pale, trouble-stricken man, whose sorrows Sleep had not always helped to bear, whose loveless life had made Death’s enfolding arms seem wondrous kind.
Sometimes there were discussions as to which was Sleep and which Death, ended once summarily by the loudly expressed opinion, ‘It don’t much matter which. I don’t call it proper, anyhow, to see a man pickaback of an angel!’—a hypercritical sense of propriety which was hardly to be expected from the appearance of the critic.
Munkacsy’s picture of the ‘Lint Pickers,’ lent by Mr. J. S. Forbes, aroused much interest. In the catalogue, after a short account of the artist’s life and works, it was described thus: ‘A soldier, with a bandaged leg, is telling the story of the war to the women and children who are picking lint to dress wounds. The different feelings with which the news is received are shown with wonderful skill in the different faces. Some are waiting to hear the worst; another has already heard it, and can only bury her face in her hands. To others it is but an interesting story; while the little child is only intent on his basket of lint.
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.’
The gloom of the picture, the utter dejection of the workers, relieved nowhere by a gleam of light—even the child (around whom Hope might have hovered) finding a grim plaything in the lint—all combine to tell the tale of what the artist evidently felt—the cruelty of war. Much interest was taken in finding out, amid the darkness, the different figures in their various attitudes of active or crushed woe. It spoke, though, a little sadly for the want of joyousness in East London entertainments that more than one sightseer, before reading the catalogue or being helped by a verbal explanation, thought ‘it was a lot of poor people at tea.’
The frames of all the pictures excited wonder, sometimes admiration not accorded to the pictures themselves; and the oft-reiterated questions, ‘What, now, is it all worth? How much would it fetch?’ became a little wearisome, not the less so because expressive of one of the signs of the times.
‘All beautiful! and most of them [the pictures] done by machinery, I suppose,’ showed greater mechanical than artistic appreciation; while the cross-examination to which we were put as to why the Exhibition was held was sometimes interesting rather than edifying. ‘Oh, yes, it’ll pay, sure enough, if you only go on long enough,’ was one woman’s comforting assurance; and the answer, ‘I hardly see how, considering that it is open free,’ carried so little force to her mind that its only effect was to make her repeat her belief in a still more confidently cheery tone. But many and hearty were the thanks that were given at the end of some such chats; and the gentlemen who explained the pictures and talked to the little groups which quickly gathered round ‘some one who would tell about it all’ were more than once offered reward-money—a flattering tribute to their powers, and illustrative of the living sense of justice in the workman’s mind and the conviction that ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire.’