It is on this account that we are compelled to find fault with the Collection at Fonthill Abbey, because it exhibits no picture of remarkable eminence that can be ranked as an heir-loom of the imagination—which cannot be spoken of but our thoughts take wing and stretch themselves towards it—the very name of which is music to the instructed ear. We would not give a rush to see any Collection that does not contain some single picture at least, that haunts us with an uneasy sense of joy for twenty miles of road, that may cheer us at intervals for twenty years of life to come. Without some such thoughts as these riveted in the brain, the lover and disciple of art would truly be ‘of all men the most miserable:’ but with them hovering round him, and ever and anon shining with their glad lustre into his sleepless soul, he has nothing to fear from fate, or fortune. We look, and lo! here is one at our side, facing us, though far-distant. It is the Young Man’s Head, in the Louvre, by Titian, that is not unlike Jeronymo della Porretta in Sir Charles Grandison. What a look is there of calm, unalterable self-possession—
‘Above all pain, all passion, and all pride;’
that draws the evil out of human life, that while we look at it transfers the same sentiment to our own breasts, and makes us feel as if nothing mean or little could ever disturb us again! This is high art; the rest is mechanical. But there is nothing like this at Fonthill (oh! no), but every thing which is the very reverse. As this, however, is an extreme opinion of ours, and may be a prejudice, we shall endeavour to support it by facts. There is not then a single Titian in all this boasted and expensive Collection—there is not a Raphael—there is not a Rubens (except one small sketch)—there is not a Guido, nor a Vandyke—there is not a Rembrandt, there is not a Nicolo Poussin, nor a fine Claude. The two Altieri Claudes, which might have redeemed Fonthill, Mr. Beckford sold. What shall we say to a Collection, which uniformly and deliberately rejects every great work, and every great name in art, to make room for idle rarities and curiosities of mechanical skill? It was hardly necessary to build a cathedral to set up a toy-shop! Who would paint a miniature-picture to hang it at the top of the Monument? This huge pile (capable of better things) is cut up into a parcel of little rooms, and those little rooms are stuck full of little pictures, and bijouterie. Mr. Beckford may talk of his Diamond Berchem, and so on: this is but the language of a petit-maitre in art; but the author of Vathek (with his leave) is not a petit-maitre. His genius, as a writer, ‘hath a devil:’ his taste in pictures is the quintessence and rectified spirit of still-life. He seems not to be susceptible of the poetry of painting, or else to set his face against it. It is obviously a first principle with him to exclude whatever has feeling or imagination—to polish the surface, and suppress the soul of art—to proscribe, by a sweeping clause or at one fell swoop, every thing approaching to grace, or beauty, or grandeur—to crush the sense of pleasure or of power in embryo—and to reduce all nature and art, as far as possible, to the texture and level of a China dish—smooth, glittering, cold, and unfeeling! We do not object so much to the predilection for Teniers, Wouvermans, or Ostade—we like to see natural objects naturally painted—but we unequivocally hate the affectedly mean, the elaborately little, the ostentatiously perverse and distorted, Polemberg’s walls of amber, Mieris’s groups of steel, Vanderwerf’s ivory flesh;—yet these are the chief delights of the late proprietor of Fonthill-abbey! Is it that his mind is ‘a volcano burnt out,’ and that he likes his senses to repose and be gratified with Persian carpets and enamelled pictures? Or are there not traces of the same infirmity of feeling even in the high-souled Vathek, who compliments the complexion of the two pages of Fakreddin as being equal to ‘the porcelain of Franguestan?’ Alas! Who would have thought that the Caliph Vathek would have dwindled down into an Emperor of China and King of Japan? But so it is.—
Stourhead, the seat of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, did not answer our expectations. But Stourton, the village where it stands, made up for our disappointment. After passing the park-gate, which is a beautiful and venerable relic, you descend into Stourton by a sharp-winding declivity, almost like going underground, between high hedges of laurel trees, and with an expanse of woods and water spread beneath. It is a sort of rural Herculaneum, a subterranean retreat. The inn is like a modernized guard-house; the village-church stands on a lawn without any inclosure; a row of cottages facing it, with their white-washed walls and flaunting honey-suckles, are neatness itself. Every thing has an air of elegance, and yet tells a tale of other times. It is a place that might be held sacred to stillness and solitary musing!—The adjoining mansion of Stourhead commands an extensive view of Salisbury Plain, whose undulating swells shew the earth in its primeval simplicity, bare, with naked breasts, and varied in its appearance only by the shadows of the clouds that pass across it. The view without is pleasing and singular: there is little within-doors to beguile attention. There is one master-piece of colouring by Paul Veronese, a naked child with a dog. The tone of the flesh is perfection itself. On praising this picture (which we always do when we like a thing) we were told it had been criticized by a great judge, Mr. Beckford of Fonthill, who had found fault with the execution as too coarse and muscular. We do not wonder—it is not like his own turnery-ware! We should also mention an exquisite Holbein, the Head of a Child, and a very pleasing little landscape by Wilson. Besides these, there are some capital pen-and-ink drawings (views in Venice), by Canaletti, and three large copies after Guido of the Venus attired by the Graces, the Andromeda, and Herodias’s Daughter. They breathe the soul of softness and grace, and remind one of those fair, sylph-like forms that sometimes descend upon the earth with fatal, fascinating looks, and that ‘tempt but to betray.’ After the cabinet-pictures at Fonthill, even a good copy of a Guido is a luxury and a relief to the mind: it is something to inhale the divine airs that play around his figures, and we are satisfied if we can but ‘trace his footsteps, and his skirts far-off behold.’ The rest of this Collection is, for the most part, trash: either Italian pictures painted in the beginning of the last century, or English ones in the beginning of this. It gave us pain to see some of the latter; and we willingly draw a veil over the humiliation of the art, in the age and country that we live in. We ought, however, to mention a portrait of a youth (the present proprietor of Stourhead) by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is elegant, brilliant, ‘though in ruins;’ and a spirited portrait by Northcote, of a lady talking on her fingers, may, perhaps, challenge an exception for itself to the above general censure.
We wish our readers to go to Petworth, the seat of Lord Egremont, where they will find the coolest grottos and the finest Vandykes in the world. There are eight or ten of the latter that are not to be surpassed by the art of man, and that we have no power either to admire or praise as they deserve. For simplicity, for richness, for truth of nature, for airiness of execution, nothing ever was or can be finer. We will only mention those of the Earl and Countess of Northumberland, Lord Newport, and Lord Goring, Lord Strafford, and Lady Carr, and the Duchess of Devonshire. He who possesses these portraits is rich indeed, if he has an eye to see, and a heart to feel them. The one of Lord Northumberland in the Tower is not so good, though it is thought better by the multitude. That is, there is a subject—something to talk about; but in fact, the expression is not that of grief, or thought, or of dignified resignation, but of a man in ill health. Vandyke was a mere portrait-painter, but he was a perfect one. His forte was not the romantic or pathetic; he was ‘of the court, courtly.’ He had a patent from the hand of nature to paint lords and ladies in prosperity and quite at their ease. There are some portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds in this Collection; and there are people who persist in naming him and Vandyke in the same day. The rest of the Collection consists (for the most part) of staircase and family pictures. But there are some admirable statues to be seen here, that it would ask a morning’s leisure to study properly.
PICTURES AT BURLEIGH HOUSE[[10]]
Burleigh! thy groves are leafless, thy walls are naked—
‘And dull, cold winter does inhabit here.’
The yellow evening rays gleam through thy fretted Gothic windows; but I only feel the rustling of withered branches strike chill to my breast; it was not so twenty years ago. Thy groves were leafless then as now: it was the middle of winter twice that I visited thee before; but the lark mounted in the sky, and the sun smote my youthful blood with its slant ray, and the ploughman whistled as he drove his team afield; Hope spread out its glad vistas through thy fair domains, oh, Burleigh! Fancy decked thy walls with works of sovereign art, and it was spring, not winter, in my breast. All is still the same, like a petrification of the mind—the same things in the same places; but their effect is not the same upon me. I am twenty years the worse for wear and tear. What is become of the never-ending studious thoughts that brought their own reward or promised good to mankind? of the tears that started welcome and unbidden? of the sighs that whispered future peace? of the smiles that shone, not in my face indeed, but that cheered my heart, and made a sunshine there when all was gloom around? That fairy vision—that invisible glory, by which I was once attended—ushered into life, has left my side, and ‘faded to the light of common day,’ and I now see what is, or has been—not what may lie hid in Time’s bright circle and golden chaplet! Perhaps this is the characteristic difference between youth and a later period of life—that we, by degrees, learn to take things more as we find them, call them more by their right names; that we feel the warmth of summer, but the winter’s cold as well; that we see beauties, but can spy defects in the fairest face; and no longer look at every thing through the genial atmosphere of our own existence. We grow more literal and less credulous every day, lose much enjoyment, and gain some useful, and more useless knowledge. The second time I passed along the road that skirts Burleigh Park, the morning was dank and ‘ways were mire.’ I saw and felt it not: my mind was otherwise engaged. Ah! thought I, there is that fine old head by Rembrandt; there within those cold grey walls, the painter of old age is enshrined, immortalized in some of his inimitable works! The name of Rembrandt lives in the fame of him who stamped it with renown, while the name of Burleigh is kept up by the present owner. An artist survives in the issue of his brain to all posterity—a lord is nothing without the issue of his body lawfully begotten, and is lost in a long line of illustrious ancestors. So much higher is genius than rank—such is the difference between fame and title! A great name in art lasts for centuries—it requires twenty generations of a noble house to keep alive the memory of the first founder for the same length of time. So I reasoned, and was not a little proud of my discovery.
In this dreaming mood, dreaming of deathless works and deathless names, I went on to Peterborough, passing, as it were, under an arch-way of Fame,