‘The people—the debased, degraded people—had reached that maximum of suffering beyond which human endurance cannot go. They were famished in the midst of plenty, and, in regions the most genial and salubrious, were dying of diseases, the fearful attendants on want. Commerce was at a stand, agriculture was neglected, and the arts, under the perpetual dictatorship of a Spanish court-painter, had no favour but for the Seguaci of Lo Spagnuoletto.
‘In such times of general distress and oppression, when few had the means or the spirit to build, and still fewer had lands to measure or property to transfer, it is little wonderful that the humble architect and landsurveyor of Renella,’ &c.
And so she gets down to the humble parentage of her hero; and after telling us that his father was chiefly anxious that he should not be an artist, and that both parents resolved to dedicate him to religion, she proceeds to record, that he gave little heed to his future vocation, but manifested various signs of a disposition for all the fine arts. This occasioned considerable uneasiness and opposition on the part of those who had destined him to something very different; and ‘the cord of paternal authority, drawn to its extreme tension, was naturally snapped.’—And upon this her volatile pen again takes its roving flight.
‘The truant Salvatoriello fled from the restraints of an uncongenial home, from Albert Le Grand and Santa Caterina di Sienna, and took shelter among those sites and scenes whose imagery soon became a part of his own intellectual existence, and were received as impressions long before they were studied as subjects. Sometimes he was discovered by the Padre Cercatore of the convent of Renella, among the rocks and caverns of Baiæ, the ruined temples of Gods, and the haunts of Sibyls. Sometimes he was found by a gossip of Madonna Giulia, in her pilgrimage to a “maesta,” sleeping among the wastes of the Solfatara, beneath the scorched branches of a blasted tree, his head pillowed by lava, and his dream most probably the vision of an infant poet’s slumbers. For even then he was
“the youngest he
That sat in shadow of Apollo’s tree,”
seeing Nature with a poet’s eye, and sketching her beauties with a painter’s hand.’ p. 45.
Now this is well imagined and quaintly expressed; it pleases the fair writer, and should offend nobody else. But we cannot say quite so much of the note which is appended to it, and couched in the following terms.
‘Rosa drew his first impressions from the magnificent scenery of Pausilippo and Vesuvius; Hogarth found his in a pot-house at Highgate, where a drunken quarrel and a broken nose “first woke the God within him.” Both, however, reached the sublime in their respective vocations—Hogarth in the grotesque, and Salvator in the majestic!’
Really these critics who have crossed the Alps do take liberties with the rest of the world,—and do not recover from a certain giddiness ever after. In the eagerness of partisanship, the fair author here falsifies the class to which these two painters belonged. Hogarth did not excel in the ‘grotesque,’ but in the ludicrous and natural,—nor Salvator in the ‘majestic,’ but in the wild and gloomy features of man or nature; and in talent Hogarth had the advantage—a million to one. It would not be too much to say, that he was probably the greatest observer of manners, and the greatest comic genius, that ever lived. We know no one, whether painter, poet, or prose-writer, not even Shakspeare, who, in his peculiar department, was so teeming with life and invention, so over-informed with matter, so ‘full to overflowing,’ as Hogarth was. We shall not attempt to calculate the quantity of pleasure and amusement his pictures have afforded, for it is quite incalculable. As to the distinction between ‘high and low’ in matters of genius, we shall leave it to her Ladyship’s other critics. But shall Hogarth’s world of truth and nature (his huge total farce of human life) be reduced to ‘a drunken quarrel and a broken nose?’ We will not retort this sneer by any insult to Salvator; he did not paint his pictures in opposition to Hogarth. There is an air about his landscapes sacred to our imaginations, though different from the close atmosphere of Hogarth’s scenes; and not the less so, because the latter could paint something better than ‘a broken nose.’ Nothing provokes us more than these exclusive and invidious comparisons, which seek to raise one man of genius by setting down another, and which suppose that there is nothing to admire in the greatest talents, unless they can be made a foil to bring out the weak points or nominal imperfections of some fancied rival.