Lydia.—Don’t mention the things! I am sure they make hypocrites. I saw one the other day in a cottage; it was of the “Benevolent Visitors”—I am not sure of the title; if any good ladies gave it, it was a vile vanity; if bought as a compliment, it was a worse corruption.
Gratian.—Do you know that we have historical painters for modern saintology, and that a picture was actually painted of St Joanna Southcote, for the chapel at Newington Butts, in a sky-blue dress, leading the devil with a long chain, like a dancing bear, surrounded by adoring angels? I met with the anecdote in a very amusing book of Mr Duncan’s, the “Literary Conglomerate,” wherein he treats of the subjects of pictures.
Aquilius.—I know it; I only quarrel with him for classing Hogarth with the comic painters. To me, he is the most tragic of all modern, I would almost say of all painters. The tragic power of two of the series of “Marriage á la mode,” is not surpassed in art. The murdered husband, the one: the other, the death of the adulteress. They are too tragic for any position but a public gallery. He was the greatest of moral painters; and the most serious, the gravest of satirists. He is so close to the real tragedies of life, and his moral is so distinct, that he seems to have aimed at teaching rather than pleasing. And perhaps, if the truth were known, it might be that he has in no small degree improved the world in its humanities. He has pictured vice odious in the eyes of the pure, but not so as to quench their pity; and has made it so wonderfully human, that we shudder as we acknowledge the liabilities of our nature. He exhibited strongly that man is the instrument of his own punishment, and that there was no need of painted monsters and demons to persecute him. He showed the scorpion that stings himself to death. He brought the thunder and lightning, the whirlwind, not from the clouds to expend their power on the fair face of the earth, but out of the heart, to drive and crush the criminals with their own tempestuous passions. And is not this tragic power? Is such a man to be classed among the painters of drolls? His pictures would convert into sermons, and would you call the preacher of them a buffoon?
Gratian.—There is, indeed, little drollery in Hogarth: even his wit was a sharp sword, so sharp that the spectator is wounded, and dangerously, before he is aware of it.
Curate.—I could not live comfortably in a room with his prints. I would possess them in my library as I would Crabbe’s Tales, but would not have them always before my eye. Nor would I, indeed, some of the finest works of man’s genius—as Raffaele’s “Incendio.” I would have them to refer to, but a home is, or ought to be, too gentle for such disturbance.
Gratian.—There is an anecdote told of Fuseli, that when on a visit to some friend at Birmingham, a lady in a party said to him—“Oh, Mr Fuseli, you should have been here last week, there was such a subject for your pencil, a man was taken up for eating a live cat.”—“Madam,” said the veritable Fuseli, “I paint terrors, not horrors.” For my own part, life has so many terrors, and horrors too, that I should prefer mitigating their effect, by having more constantly before me the agreeabilities—pleasant domestic scenes, soft landscapes, or such gay scenes and figures as my favourite Teniers occasionally painted, or the sunny De Hooge; or why not bring forward some of our pleasant home-scene English painters? Did you not see, and quite love, that little delight of a picture, the hay-making scene in the Vicar of Wakefield, by our own, and who will be the wide world’s own, Mulready? Such scenes ravish me. Did you not long to walk quietly round and look in the vicar’s face, as he and Mrs Primrose sat apart with their backs to you? Mulready, you see, had the sense to leave something to the imagination.
Aquilius.—Yes, pictures of this kind have a very great charm: they are for us in our domestic mood, and that is our general mood—they should gently move our love and pity. But I cannot conceive a greater mistake than to make “familiar life” as it is called, doleful, uncheerful subjects, that are out of the rule of love and pity, very easily run into the class of terror; there is scarcely a between, and if one—it is insipidity.
Gratian.—Now, I shall probably commit an offence against general taste if I confess that, in my eyes, Wilkie is very apt to paint insipid subjects. He seems too often to have been led to a matter of fact, because it had some accessories that would paint rather well, than because the fact was worth telling, either for its moral or its amusement. Some of his pieces, notwithstanding their excellent painting and perfectly graphic power, rather displease me. I never could take any interest in his celebrated “Blind Fiddler.” It may be nature, but there is nothing to touch the feelings in it: had I been present, I should not have given the man a sixpence. And as for the hideous grimace-making boy, I could have laid the stick with pleasure on his back. I don’t think I could ever have kissed the ugly child.
Aquilius.—Wilkie was a man of great observation, great good sense, manifest proof of which his correspondence sets forth; but that necessary virtue of a painter of familiar life, which he possessed in so great a degree, observation, led him oftener to look for character than beauty. Oddity would strike him before regularity. Nor was he a cheerful painter. His “Blind Man’s Buff,” is contrived to be without hilarity, and it is singularly unfortunate in the sharp angles of hips and elbows. His best picture of this kind is certainly the “Chelsea Pensioners”—or “Battle of Waterloo,” very finely painted; but there is an acting joy in it,—it is joy staid in its motion, and bid sit for its portrait. So his “Village Wake” in our national gallery, is not joyous as a whole; the figures are spots, and the mass of the picture is dingy. Pictures, like poems, should not only be fair but touching, “dulcia sunto,” and this is more imperatively essential to domestic scenes. The story should always be worth telling. Painters seem to have taken it into their heads that any thing, which presents a good means for exhibiting light and shade and colour, makes a picture. If an incident or a scene be not worth seeing, it is not worth painting.
Gratian.—That is never more true than when they are figure pieces. Our likings and our antipathies are stronger in all representations of the ways and manners of men, than in all the varieties of other nature. We can bear a low and mean landscape, but degraded humanity seldom is, and never ought to be pleasing.