PART THE SECOND
CONVERSATION THE SIXTEENTH
N.—That is your diffidence, which I can’t help thinking you carry too far. For any one of real strength, you are the humblest person I ever knew.
H.—It is owing to pride.
N.—You deny you have invention too. But it is want of practice. Your ideas run on before your executive power. It is a common case. There was Ramsay, of whom Sir Joshua used to say that he was the most sensible among all the painters of his time; but he has left little to show it. His manner was dry and timid. He stopped short in the middle of his work, because he knew exactly how much it wanted. Now and then we find hints and sketches which show what he might have been, if his hand had been equal to his conceptions. I have seen a picture of his of the Queen, soon after she was married—a profile, and slightly done; but it was a paragon of elegance. She had a fan in her hand: Lord! how she held that fan! It was weak in execution and ordinary in features—all I can say of it is, that it was the farthest possible removed from everything like vulgarity. A professor might despise it; but in the mental part, I have never seen any thing of Vandyke’s equal to it. I could have looked at it forever. I showed it to J—n; and he, I believe, came into my opinion of it. I don’t know where it is now; but I saw in it enough to convince me that Sir Joshua was right in what he said of Ramsay’s great superiority. His own picture of the King, which is at the Academy, is a finer composition and shows greater boldness and mastery of hand; but I should find it difficult to produce any thing of Sir Joshua’s that conveys an idea of more grace and delicacy than the one I have mentioned. Reynolds would have finished it better: the other was afraid of spoiling what he had done, and so left it a mere outline. He was frightened before he was hurt.
H.—Taste and even genius is but a misfortune, without a correspondent degree of manual dexterity or power of language to make it manifest.
N.—W— was here the other day. I believe you met him going out. He came, he said, to ask me about the famous people of the last age, Johnson, Burke, &c. (as I was almost the only person left who remembered them), and was curious to know what figure Sir Walter Scott would have made among them.
H.—That is so like a North-Briton—‘to make assurance doubly sure,’ and to procure a signature to an acknowledged reputation as if it were a receipt for the delivery of a bale of goods.
N.—I told him it was not for me to pronounce upon such men as Sir Walter Scott: they came before another tribunal. They were of that height that they were seen by all the world, and must stand or fall by the verdict of posterity. It signified little what any individual thought in such cases, it being equally an impertinence to set one’s self against or to add one’s testimony to the public voice; but as far as I could judge, I told him, that Sir Walter would have stood his ground in any company: neither Burke nor Johnson nor any of their admirers would have been disposed or able to set aside his pretensions. These men were not looked upon in their day as they are at present: Johnson had his Lexiphanes, and Goldsmith was laughed at—their merits were to the full as much called in question, nay, more so, than those of the Author of Waverley have ever been, who has been singularly fortunate in himself or in lighting upon a barren age: but because their names have since become established, and as it were sacred, we think they were always so; and W— wanted me, as a competent witness and as having seen both parties, to affix the same seal to his countryman’s reputation, which it is not in the power of the whole of the present generation to do, much less of any single person in it. No, we must wait for this! Time alone can give the final stamp: no living reputation can ever be of the same value or quality as posthumous fame. We must throw lofty objects to a distance in order to judge of them: if we are standing close under the Monument, it looks higher than St. Paul’s. Posterity has this advantage over us-not that they are really wiser, but they see the proportions better from being placed further off. For instance, I liked Sir Walter, because he had an easy, unaffected manner, and was ready to converse on all subjects alike. He was not like your friends, the L— poets, who talk about nothing but their own poetry. If, on the contrary, he had been stiff and pedantic, I should, perhaps, have been inclined to think less highly of the author from not liking the man; so that we can never judge fairly of men’s abilities till we are no longer liable to come in contact with their persons. Friends are as little to be trusted as enemies: favour or prejudice makes the votes in either case more or less suspected; though ‘the vital signs that a name shall live’ are in some instances so strong, that we can hardly refuse to put faith in them, and I think this is one. I was much pleased with Sir Walter, and I believe he expressed a favourable opinion of me. I said to him, ‘I admire the way in which you begin your novels. You set out so abruptly, that you quite surprise me. I can’t at all tell what’s coming.’—‘No!’ says Sir Walter, ‘nor I neither.’ I then told him, that when I first read Waverley, I said it was no novel: nobody could invent like that. Either he had heard the story related by one of the surviving parties, or he had found the materials in a manuscript concealed in some old chest: to which he replied, ‘You’re not so far out of the way in thinking so.’ You don’t know him, do you? He’d be a pattern to you. Oh! he has a very fine manner. You would learn to rub off some of your asperities. But you admire him, I believe.
H.—Yes; on this side of idolatry and Toryism.