Indeed if this was not so, how would it be possible to hang one picture over another? and yet this is done, and with the greatest propriety.
I have often lamented the shifts to which painters are reduced, who have followed this rule in opposition to their senses. Laresse was so thoroughly possessed with it, that his idea of fitting up a room with pictures, was to have those which were below the eye to contain nothing but ground, and those which were above, the sky and clouds. But though he was convinced of the rectitude of his principle, he was struck with the oddity of the practice—he therefore recommended that there should be but one picture from the floor to the cieling, in which there might be a perfect coincidence of the natural and artificial horizon.
A portrait-painter sets the person he is to draw generally the height of his eye.——Suppose it to be a whole-length with a landscape in the back-ground: the artist considers his picture is to hang above the eye, and for that reason makes his horizon low, about the height of the knees. The consequence is, that there are two points of sight, which supposes an impossibility; for the eye cannot be in two places at the same time. If the eye be supposed on a level with the head of the figure, as it was on drawing the face, then the back-ground is too low; if equal to the horizon of the back-ground, then the figure is too high, unless we suppose it on an eminence, or ourselves in a pit; in that case, instead of seeing the face in front, we must have looked under the chin—but as we do not, the figure always appears to be falling forward.
Raffaele’s horizon is most commonly the height of his figures, so that they stand properly, and seem to be, whether in a print or a picture, the size of human creatures;—on the contrary, when the horizon is low, the figures always appear gigantic. When I was a boy, I had formed so very exalted an idea of the size of running horses, from seeing them drawn with the distant hills appearing under their bodies, that the first time I was at a course, it appeared but as a rat-race.
Every whole length picture will furnish you with an instance of this false principle, which would appear more disagreeable, if custom had not in some measure reconciled us to it. I am aware that the practice of so many great men is a strong objection to my argument; but as I conceive, with due submission to such authority, that there is demonstration on my side, I cannot easily retract what I have advanced.
LETTER XXII.
THE commentators of Shakspeare think themselves obliged to find some meaning in his nonsense; and to come at it, twist and turn his words without mercy: never considering, that in his scenes, as in common life, some part must be necessarily unimportant.
Many a passage has been criticised into consequence. The meaning, to use Shakspeare’s words on a like occasion, “is like a grain of wheat hid in a bushel of chaff; you shall seek all day e’er you find it, and when you have it, it is not worth the search.”
An expression of Shallow’s in the second part of Henry the fourth has been the subject of much criticism and hypercriticism. “We will eat a last year’s pippin with a dish of carraways;” and it is certain that there was such a dish, but if Shakspeare had meant it, he would have said, “A dish of last year’s pippins with carraways”—“with a dish, &c.” clearly means something distinct from the pippins. Roasted pippins stuck full of carraways, says one—carraway confect, or comfit well known to children, says another—as if every one did not know what carraway comfits were, says a third, laughing at the second. Dine with any of the natural inhabitants of Bath about Christmas, and they probably will give you after dinner a dish of pippins and carraways—which last is the name of an apple as well known in that country as nonpareil is in London, and as generally associated with golden pippins.