‘Life was now wearing away with such obvious rapidity, that his friends, both clerical and laical, urged him in the most strenuous manner to submit to the ceremonies and forms prescribed by the Roman Catholic church in such awful moments. How much the solemn sadness of those moments may be increased, even to terror and despair, by such pompous and lugubrious pageants all who have visited Italy—all who still visit it, can testify. Salvator demanded what they required of him. They replied, “in the first instance to receive the sacrament as it is administered in Rome to the dying.”—“To receiving the sacrament,” says his confesser Baldovini, “he showed no repugnance (non se mostrò repugnante); but he vehemently and positively refused to allow the host, with all the solemn pomp of its procession, to be brought to his house, which he deemed unworthy of the divine presence.”
‘The rejection of a ceremony which was deemed in Rome indispensably necessary to salvation, and by one who was already stamped with the church’s reprobation, soon took air; report exaggerated the circumstance into a positive expression of infidelity; and the gossipry of the Roman Anterooms was supplied for the time with a subject of discussion, in perfect harmony with their slander, bigotry, and idleness. “As I went forth from Salvator’s door,” relates the worthy Baldovini, “I met the Canonica Scornio, a man who has taken out a license to speak of all men as he pleases. ‘And how goes it with Salvator?’ demands of me this Canonico. ‘Bad enough, I fear.’—‘Well, a few nights back, happening to be in the anteroom of a certain great prelate, I found myself in the centre of a circle of disputants, who were busily discussing whether the aforesaid Salvator would die a schismatic, a Huguenot, a Calvinist, or a Lutheran?’—‘He will die, Signor Canonico,’ I replied, ‘when it pleases God, a better Catholic than any of those who now speak so slightingly of him!’—and so I pursued my way.”
‘On the 15th of March Baldovini entered the patient’s chamber. But, to all appearance, Salvator was suffering great agony. “How goes it with thee, Rosa?” asked Baldovini kindly, as he approached him. “Bad, bad!” was the emphatic reply. While writhing with pain, the sufferer after a moment added:—“To judge by what I now endure, the hand of death grasps me sharply.”
‘In the restlessness of pain, he now threw himself on the edge of the bed, and placed his head on the bosom of Lucrezia, who sat supporting and weeping over him. His afflicted son and friend took their station at the other side of his couch, and stood watching the issue of these sudden and frightful spasms in mournful silence. At that moment a celebrated Roman physician, the Doctor Catanni, entered the apartment. He felt the pulse of Salvator, and perceived that he was fast sinking. He communicated his approaching dissolution to those most interested in the melancholy intelligence, and it struck all present with unutterable grief. Baldovini, however, true to his sacred calling, even in the depth of his human affliction, instantly despatched the young Agosto to the neighbouring Convent della Trinità, for the holy Viaticum. While life was still fluttering at the heart of Salvator, the officiating priest of the day arrived, bearing with him the holy apparatus of the last mysterious ceremony of the church. The shoulders of Salvator were laid bare, and anointed with the consecrated oil: some prayed fervently, others wept, and all even still hoped; but the taper which the Doctor Catanni held to the lips of Salvator, while the Viaticum was administered, burned brightly and steadily! Life’s last sigh had transpired, as Religion performed her last rite.’ p. 205.
Salvator left a wife and son, (a boy of about thirteen), who inherited a considerable property, in books, prints, and bills of exchange, which his father had left in his banker’s hands for pictures painted in the last few years of his life.
We confess we close these volumes with something of a melancholy feeling. We have, in this great artist, another instance added to the list of those who, being born to give delight to others, appear to have lived only to torment themselves, and, with all the ingredients of happiness placed within their reach, to have derived no benefit either from talents or success. Is it, that the outset of such persons in life (who are raised by their own efforts from want and obscurity) jars their feelings and sours their tempers? Or that painters, being often men without education or general knowledge, overrate their own pretensions, and meet with continual mortifications in the rebuffs they receive from the world, who do not judge by the same individual standard? Or is a morbid irritability the inseparable concomitant of genius? None of these suppositions fairly solves the difficulty; for many of the old painters (and those the greatest) were men of mild manners, of great modesty, and good temper. Painting, however, speaks a language known to few, and of which all pretend to judge; and may thus, perhaps, afford more occasion to pamper sensibility into a disease, where the seeds of it are sown too deeply in the constitution, and not checked by proportionable self-knowledge and reflection. Where an artist of genius, however, is not made the victim of his own impatience, or of idle censures, or of the good fortune of others, we cannot conceive of a more delightful or enviable life. There is none that implies a greater degree of thoughtful abstraction, or a more entire freedom from angry differences of opinion, or that leads the mind more out of itself, and reposes more calmly on the grand and beautiful, or the most casual object in nature. Salvator died young. He had done enough for fame; and had he been happier, he would perhaps have lived longer. We do not, in one sense, feel the loss of painters so much as that of other eminent men. They may still be said to be present with us bodily in their works: we can revive their memory by every object we see; and it seems as if they could never wholly die, while the ideas and thoughts that occupied their minds while living survive, and have a palpable and permanent existence in the forms of external nature.
AMERICAN LITERATURE—DR. CHANNING
Vol. i.] [October 1829.
Of the later American writers, who, besides Dr. Channing, have acquired some reputation in England, we can only recollect Mr. Washington Irving, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Cooper. To the first of these we formerly paid an ample tribute of respect; nor do we wish to retract a tittle of what we said on that occasion, or of the praise due to him for brilliancy, ease, and a faultless equability of style. Throughout his polished pages, no thought shocks by its extravagance, no word offends by vulgarity or affectation. All is gay, but guarded,—heedless, but sensitive of the smallest blemish. We cannot deny it—nor can we conceal it from ourselves or the world, if we would—that he is, at the same time, deficient in nerve and originality. Almost all his sketches are like patterns taken in silk paper from our classic writers;—the traditional manners of the last age are still kept up (stuffed in glass cases) in Mr. Irving’s modern version of them. The only variation is in the transposition of dates; and herein the author is chargeable with a fond and amiable anachronism. He takes Old England for granted as he finds it described in our stock-books of a century ago—gives us a Sir Roger de Coverley in the year 1819, instead of the year 1709; and supposes old English hospitality and manners, relegated from the metropolis, to have taken refuge somewhere in Yorkshire, or the fens of Lincolnshire. In some sequestered spot or green savannah, we can conceive Mr. Irving enchanted with the style of the wits of Queen Anne;—in the bare, broad, straight, mathematical streets of his native city, his busy fancy wandered through the blind alleys and huddled zig-zag sinuosities of London, and the signs of Lothbury and East-Cheap swung and creaked in his delighted ears. The air of his own country was too poor and thin to satisfy the pantings of youthful ambition; he gasped for British popularity,—he came, and found it. He was received, caressed, applauded, made giddy: the national politeness owed him some return, for he imitated, admired, deferred to us; and, if his notions were sometimes wrong, yet it was plain he thought of nothing else, and was ready to sacrifice every thing to obtain a smile or a look of approbation. It is true, he brought no new earth, no sprig of laurel gathered in the wilderness, no red bird’s wing, no gleam from crystal lake or new-discovered fountain, (neither grace nor grandeur plucked from the bosom of this Eden-state like that which belongs to cradled infancy); but he brought us rifaciméntos of our own thoughts—copies of our favourite authors: we saw our self admiration reflected in an accomplished stranger’s eyes; and the lover received from his mistress, the British public, her most envied favours.
Mr. Brown, who preceded him, and was the author of several novels which made some noise in this country, was a writer of a different stamp. Instead of hesitating before a scruple, and aspiring to avoid a fault, he braved criticism, and aimed only at effect. He was an inventor, but without materials. His strength and his efforts are convulsive throes—his works are a banquet of horrors. The hint of some of them is taken from Caleb Williams and St. Leon, but infinitely exaggerated, and carried to disgust and outrage. They are full (to disease) of imagination,—but it is forced, violent, and shocking. This is to be expected, we apprehend, in attempts of this kind in a country like America, where there is, generally speaking, no natural imagination. The mind must be excited by overstraining, by pulleys and levers. Mr. Brown was a man of genius, of strong passion, and active fancy; but his genius was not seconded by early habit, or by surrounding sympathy. His story and his interests are not wrought out, therefore, in the ordinary course of nature; but are, like the monster in Frankenstein, a man made by art and determined will. For instance, it may be said of him, as of Gawin Douglas, ‘Of Brownies and Bogilis full is his Buik.’ But no ghost, we will venture to say, was ever seen in North America. They do not walk in broad day; and the night of ignorance and superstition which favours their appearance, was long past before the United States lifted up their head beyond the Atlantic wave. The inspired poet’s tongue must have an echo in the state of public feeling, or of involuntary belief, or it soon grows harsh or mute. In America, they are ‘so well policied,’ so exempt from the knowledge of fraud or force, so free from the assaults of the flesh and the devil, that in pure hardness of belief they hoot the Beggar’s Opera from the stage: with them, poverty and crime, pickpockets and highwaymen, the lock-up-house and the gallows, are things incredible to sense! In this orderly and undramatic state of security and freedom from natural foes, Mr. Brown has provided one of his heroes with a demon to torment him, and fixed him at his back;—but what is to keep him there? Not any prejudice or lurking superstition on the part of the American reader: for the lack of such, the writer is obliged to make up by incessant rodomontade, and face-making. The want of genuine imagination is always proved by caricature: monsters are the growth, not of passion, but of the attempt forcibly to stimulate it. In our own unrivalled Novelist, and the great exemplar of this kind of writing, we see how ease and strength are united. Tradition and invention meet half way; and nature scarce knows how to distinguish them. The reason is, there is here an old and solid ground in previous manners and opinion for imagination to rest upon. The air of this bleak northern clime is filled with legendary lore: Not a castle without the stain of blood upon its floor or winding steps: not a glen without its ambush or its feat of arms: not a lake without its Lady! But the map of America is not historical; and, therefore, works of fiction do not take root in it; for the fiction, to be good for any thing, must not be in the author’s mind, but belong to the age or country in which he lives. The genius of America is essentially mechanical and modern.