[54]. I may be allowed to mention here (not for the sake of invidious comparison, but to explain my meaning,) Mr. Martin’s picture of Adam and Eve asleep in Paradise. It has this capital defect, that there is no repose in it. You see two insignificant naked figures, and a preposterous architectural landscape, like a range of buildings over-looking them. They might as well have been represented on the top of the pinnacle of the Temple, with the world and all the glories thereof spread out before them. They ought to have been painted imparadised in one another’s arms, shut up in measureless content, with Eden’s choicest bowers closing round them, and Nature stooping to clothe them with vernal flowers. Nothing could be too retired, too voluptuous, too sacred from ‘day’s garish eye;’ on the contrary, you have a gaudy panoramic view, a glittering barren waste, a triple row of clouds, of rocks, and mountains, piled one upon the other, as if the imagination already bent its idle gaze over that wide world which was so soon to be our place of exile, and the aching, restless spirit of the artist was occupied in building a stately prison for our first parents, instead of decking their bridal bed, and wrapping them in a short-lived dream of bliss.
[55]. The Duke of Wellington, it is said, cannot enter into the merits of Raphael; but he admires ‘the spirit and fire’ of Tintoret. I do not wonder at this bias. A sentiment probably never dawned upon his Grace’s mind; but he may be supposed to relish the dashing execution and hit or miss manner of the Venetian artist. Oh, Raphael! well is it that it was one who did not understand thee, that blundered upon the destruction of humanity!
[56]. I remember Mr. Wordsworth saying, that he thought we had pleasanter days in the outset of life, but that our years slid on pretty even one with another, as we gained in variety and richness what we lost in intensity. This balance of pleasure can however only be hoped for by those who retain the best feelings of their early youth, and sometimes deign to look out of their own minds into those of others: for without this we shall grow weary of the continual contemplation of self, particularly as that self will be a very shabby one.
[57]. A splendid edition of Goldsmith has been lately got up under the superintendence of Mr. Washington Irvine, with a preface and a portrait of each author. By what concatenation of ideas that gentleman arrived at the necessity of placing his own portrait before a collection of Goldsmith’s works, one must have been early imprisoned in transatlantic solitudes to understand.
[58]. I would as soon try to remove one side of the Seine or of the Thames to the other. By the time an author begins to be much talked of abroad, he is going out of fashion at home. We have many little Lord Byrons among ourselves, who think they can write nearly, if not quite as well. I am not anxious to spread Shakespear’s fame, or to increase the number of his admirers. ‘What’s he that wishes for more men from England?’ &c. It is enough if he is admired by all those who understand him. He may be very inferior to many French writers, for what I know; but I am quite sure he is superior to all English ones. We may say that, without national prejudice or vanity.
[59]. I have heard the popularity of Sir Walter Scott in France ingeniously, and somewhat whimsically traced to Buonaparte. He did not like the dissipation and frivolity of Paris, and relegated the country-gentlemen to their seats for eight months in the year. Here they yawn and gasp for breath, and would not know what to do without the aid of the author of Waverley. They ask impatiently when the ‘Tales of the Crusaders’ will be out; and what you think of ‘Redgauntlet?’ To the same cause is to be attributed the change of manners. Messieurs, je veux des mœurs, was constantly in the French Ruler’s mouth. Manners, according to my informant, were necessary to consolidate his plans of tyranny;—how, I do not know. Forty years ago no man was ever seen in company with Madame sa femme. A Comedy was written on the ridicule of a man being in love with his wife. Now he must be with her three-and-twenty hours out of the four-and-twenty; it is from this that they date the decline of happiness in France; and the unfortunate couple endeavour to pass the time and get rid of ennui as well as they can, by reading the Scotch Novels together.
[60]. The author of Virginius.
[61]. In Paris, to be popular, you must wear out, they say, twenty pair of pumps and twenty pair of silk stockings, in calls upon the different Newspaper Editors. In England, you have only to give in your resignation at the Treasury, and you receive your passport to the John Bull Parnassus; otherwise you are shut out and made a bye word. Literary jealousy and littleness is still the motive, politics the pretext, and blackguardism the mode.
[62]. Buonaparte got a committee of the French Institute to draw up a report of the Kantean Philosophy; he might as well have ordered them to draw up a report of the geography of the moon. It is difficult for an Englishman to understand Kant; for a Frenchman impossible. The latter has a certain routine of phrases into which his ideas run habitually as into a mould, and you cannot get him out of them.
[63]. Even her j’existe in Valeria (when she first acquires the use of sight) is pointed like an epigram, and put in italics, like a technical or metaphysical distinction, instead of being a pure effusion of joy. Accordingly a French pit-critic took up the phrase, insisting that to exist was common to all things, and asked what the expression was in the original German. This treatment of passion is topical and extraneous, and seldom strikes at the seat of the disorder, the heart.