N.—It is curious to what perfection these things are brought, and how cheap they are. It is that which makes them sell and ensures the fortune of those who publish them. Great fortunes are made out of small profits, which allow all the world to become purchasers. That is the reason the Colosseum will hardly answer. There never was an example of an exhibition in England answering at a crown a-piece. People look twice at their money before they will part with it, if it be more than they are accustomed to pay. It becomes a question, and perhaps a few stragglers go; whereas they ought to go in a stream and as a matter of course. If people have to pay a little more than usual, though a mere trifle, they consider it in the light of an imposition, and resent it as such; if the price be a little under the mark, they think they have saved so much money, and snap at it as a bargain. The publishers of the work on Edinburgh are the same who brought out the Views of London; and it is said, the success of that undertaking enabled them to buy up Lackington’s business. E— the architect, I am told, suggested the plan, but declined a share that was offered him in it, because he said nothing that he had been engaged in had ever succeeded. The event would not belie the notion of his own ill-luck. It is singular on what slight turns good or ill fortune depends. Lackington (I understood from the person who brought the Edinburgh Views here) died worth near half a million: nobody could tell how he had made it. At thirty he was not worth a shilling. The great difficulty is in the first hundred pounds.
H.—It is sympathy with the mass of mankind, and finding out from yourself what is they want and must have.
N.—It seems a good deal owing to the most minute circumstances. A difference of sixpence in the price will make all the difference in the sale of a book. Sometimes a work lies on the shelf for a time, and then runs like wild-fire. There was Drelincourt on Death, which is a fortune in itself; it hung on hand; nobody read it, till Defoe put a ghost-story into it, and it has been a stock-book ever since. It is the same in prints. A catching subject or name will make one thing an universal favourite, while another of ten times the merit is never noticed. I have known this happen to myself in more than one instance. This is the provoking part in W—l and some other painters, who, taking advantage of the externals and accidents of their art, have run away with nearly all the popularity of their time. Jack T— was here the other day to say that W— and his friends complained bitterly of the things I said about him. I replied that I had only spoken of him as an artist, which I was at liberty to do; and that if he were offended, I would recommend to him to read the story of Charles II. and the Duchess of Cleveland, who came to the king with a complaint, that whenever she met Nell Gwyn in the street, the latter put her head out of the coach and made mouths at her. ‘Well then,’says Charles II. ‘the next time you meet Nelly and she repeats the offence, do you make mouths at her again!’ So if Mr. W—l is hurt at my saying things of him, all he has to do is to say things of me in return.
H.—I confess, I never liked W—1. It was one of the errors of my youth that I did not think him equal to Raphael and Rubens united, as Payne Knight contended: and I have fought many a battle with numbers (if not odds) against me on that point.
N.—Then you must have the satisfaction of seeing a change of opinion at present.
H.—Pardon me, I have not that satisfaction; I have only a double annoyance from it. It is no consolation to me that an individual was overrated by the folly of the public formerly, and that he suffers from their injustice and fickleness at present. It is no satisfaction to me that poor I—g is reduced to his primitive congregation, and that the stream of coronet-coaches no longer rolls down Holborn or Oxford-street to his chapel. They ought never to have done so, or they ought to continue to do so. The world (whatever in their petulance and profligacy they may think) have no right to intoxicate poor human nature with the full tide of popular applause, and then to drive it to despair for the want of it. There are no words to express the cruelty, the weakness, the shamelessness of such conduct, which resembles that of the little girl who dresses up her doll in the most extravagant finery, and then in mere wantonness strips it naked to its wool and bits of wood again—with this difference that the doll has no feeling, whereas the world’s idols are wholly sensitive.
(Of some one who preferred appearances to realities.)
N.—I can understand the character, because it is exactly the reverse of what I should do and feel. It is like dressing out of one’s sphere, or any other species of affectation and imposture. I cannot bear to be taken for any thing but what I am. It is like what the country-people call ‘having a halfpenny head and a farthing tail.’ That is what makes me mad when people sometimes come and pay their court to me by saying—‘Bless me! how sagacious you look! What a penetrating countenance! ‘No, I say, that is but the title-page—what is there in the book? Your dwelling so much on the exterior seems to imply that the inside does not correspond to it. Don’t let me look wise and be foolish, but let me be wise though I am taken for a fool! Any thing else is quackery: it is as if there was no real excellence in the world, but in opinion. I used to blame Sir Joshua for this: he sometimes wanted to get Collins’s earth, but did not like to have it known. Then there were certain oils that he made a great fuss and mystery about. I have said to myself, surely there is something deeper and nobler in the art that does not depend on all this trick and handicraft. Give Titian and a common painter the same materials and tools to work with, and then see the difference between them. This is all that is worth contending for. If Sir Joshua had had no other advantage than the using Collins’s earth and some particular sort of megilp, we should not now have been talking about him. When W— was here the other day, he asked about Mengs and his school; and when I told him what I thought, he said, ‘Is that your own opinion, or did you take it from Sir Joshua?’ I answered, that if I admired Sir Joshua, it was because there was something congenial in our tastes, and not because I was his pupil. I saw his faults, and differed with him often enough. If I have any bias, it is the other way, to take fancies into my head and run into singularity and cavils. In what I said to you about Ramsay’s picture of the Queen, for instance, I don’t know that any one ever thought so before, or that any one else would agree with me. It might be set down as mere whim and caprice; but I can’t help it, if it is so. All I know is, that such is my feeling about it, which I can no more part with than I can part with my own existence. It is the same in other things, as in music. There was an awkward composer at the Opera many years ago, of the name of Boccarelli; what he did was stupid enough in general, but I remember he sung an air one day at Cosway’s, which they said Shield had transferred into the Flitch of Bacon. I cannot describe the effect it had upon me—it seemed as if it wound into my very soul—I would give any thing to hear it sung again. So I could have listened to Dignum’s singing the lines out of Shakspeare—‘Come unto these yellow sands, and then take hands’—a hundred times over. But I am not sure that others would be affected in the same manner by it: there may be some quaint association of ideas in the case. But at least, if I am wrong, the folly is my own.
H.—There is no danger of the sort, except from affectation, which I am sure is not your case. All the real taste and feeling in the world is made up of what people take in their heads in this manner. Even if you were right only once in five times in these hazardous experiments and shrewd guesses, that would be a fifth part of the truth; whereas, if you merely repeated after others by rote or waited to have all the world on your side, there could be absolutely nothing gained at all. If any one had come in and had expressed the same idea of Ramsay’s portrait of the Queen, this would doubtless be a confirmation of your opinion, like two persons finding out a likeness; but suppose W— had gone away with your opinion in his pocket, and had spread it about everywhere what a fine painter Ramsay was, I do not see how this would have strengthened your conclusion; nay, perhaps the people whom he got as converts would entirely mistake the meaning, and come to you with the very reverse of what you had said as a prodigious discovery. This is the way in which these unanimous verdicts are commonly obtained. You might say that Ramsay was not a fine painter, but a man of real genius. The world, not comprehending the distinction, would merely come to the gross conclusion, that he was both one and the other. Thus even truth is vulgarly debased into common-place and nonsense. So that it is not simply as Mr. Locke observed—‘That there are not so many wrong opinions in the world as is generally imagined, for most people have no opinion at all, but take up with those of others or with mere hearsay and echoes;’ but these echoes are often false ones and no more like the original idea than the rhyming echoes in Hudibras or than Slender’s Mum and Budget.
N.—But don’t you think the contrary extreme would be just as bad, if every one set up to judge for himself and every question was split into an endless variety of opinions?