[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge said that the conclusion of this great work was the finest specimen of historic eulogy he had ever read in English;—that it was more than a campaign to the duke's fame.—ED.]
July 7. 1831.
PATRONAGE OF THE FINE ARTS.—OLD WOMEN.
The darkest despotisms on the Continent have done more for the growth and elevation of the fine arts than the English government. A great musical composer in Germany and Italy is a great man in society, and a real dignity and rank are universally conceded to him. So it is with a sculptor, or painter, or architect. Without this sort of encouragement and patronage such arts as music and painting will never come into great eminence. In this country there is no general reverence for the fine arts; and the sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial maxim,—Laissez faire. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but Mozart himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have been done for him here.
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There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided:—1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch.
July 24. 1831.
PICTURES.[1]
Observe the remarkable difference between Claude and Teniers in their power of painting vacant space. Claude makes his whole landscape a plenum: the air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. Hence there are no true distances, and every thing presses at once and equally upon the eye. There is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of some of Claude's sunsets. Never did any one paint air, the thin air, the absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as Teniers. That picture of the Archers[2] exemplifies this excellence. See the distances between those ugly louts! how perfectly true to the fact!
But oh! what a wonderful picture is that Triumph of Silenus![3] It is the very revelry of hell. Every evil passion is there that could in any way be forced into juxtaposition with joyance. Mark the lust, and, hard by, the hate. Every part is pregnant with libidinous nature without one spark of the grace of Heaven. The animal is triumphing—not over, but—in the absence, in the non-existence, of the spiritual part of man. I could fancy that Rubens had seen in a vision—