Eighteenth Century Vignettes

Later still – a year later – he writes to Newton: 'My greenhouse is never so pleasant as when we are just upon the point of being turned out of it. The gentleness of the autumnal suns, and the calmness of this latter season, make it a much more agreeable retreat than we ever find it in the summer; when, the winds being generally brisk, we cannot cool it by admitting a sufficient quantity of air, without being at the same time incommoded by it. But now I sit with all the windows and the door wide open, and am regaled with the scent of every flower, in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive, I should hardly hear more of their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they get out of it by a hum, which, though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that Nature utters are delightful, at least in this country.' But he goes on, nevertheless, to except the braying of an ass; and from another letter it seems that the serene quietude of his bower was at times invaded by the noise of a quadruped of this kind (inimical to poets!) which belonged to a neighbour.

It was in passing from the greenhouse to the barn that Cowper encountered the viper, whose prompt taking off gives motive and point to that admirable little lusus poeticus, – as Mr. Grimshawe condescendingly calls it, – the 'Colubriad,' and other memories cluster about this fragment paradise. Here 'lived happy prisoners' the two goldfinches celebrated in 'The Faithful Bird;' here he wrote 'The Task,' and, according to Mr. Thomas Wright, of Olney, it is to the stimulating environment of its myrtles and mignonette that we owe, if not the germ, at least the evolution, of 'John Gilpin.' Every one knows how, in the current story, Lady Austen's diverting narrative of the way in which a certain citizen 'of famous London town' rode out to celebrate the anniversary of his marriage, gradually seduced her listener from the moody melancholy which was fast overclouding him 'into a loud and hearty peal of laughter.' It 'made such an impression on his mind that at night he could not sleep; and his thoughts having taken the form of rhyme, he sprang from bed, and committed them to paper, and in the morning brought down to Mrs. Unwin the crude outline of "John Gilpin." All that day and for several days he secluded himself in the greenhouse, and went on with the task of polishing and improving what he had written. As he filled his slips of paper he sent them across the Market-place to Mr. Wilson, to the great delight and merriment of that jocular barber, who on several other occasions had been favoured with the first sight of some of Cowper's smaller poems. This version of the origin of "John Gilpin" differs, we are aware, from the one generally received, which represents the famous ballad as having been commenced and finished in a night; but that the facts here stated are accurate we have the authority of Mrs. Wilson; moreover, it has always been said in Olney that "John Gilpin" was written in the "greenhouse," and that the first person who saw the complete poem, and consequently the forerunner of that noble army who made merry over its drolleries, was William Wilson the barber.' 33

Cowper has been styled by a recent editor the best of English letter-writers, a term which Scott applied to Walpole, and it has been applied to others. Criticism loses its balance in these superlatives. To be the best – to use a schoolboy illustration – is to have the highest marks all round. For epistolary vigour, for vivacity, for wit, for humour, for ease, for simplicity, for subject – can you give Cowper the highest marks? The answer obviously must be 'no.' Other writers excel him in subject, in wit, in vigour. But you can certainly give him high marks for humour; and you can give him very high marks for simplicity and unaffectedness. He is one of the most unfeigned, most easy, most natural of English letter-writers. In the art of shedding a sedate playfulness over the least promising themes, in magnifying the incidents of his 'set gray life' into occurrences worthy of record, in communicating to his page all the variations of mood that sweep across him as he writes, he is unrivalled. Mandeville christened Addison a parson in a tye-wig; Cowper (at his best) is a humourist in a nightcap. It would be easy to select from his correspondence passages that show him in all these aspects – morbid and gloomy to Newton, genial and friendly to Hill and Unwin, confidential and caressing to Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh. But it is not uncommon for him to vary his tone to each of these, for which reason we close with an epistle to that austere friend and monitor who has perhaps been credited with a more baleful influence over his hypochondriac correspondent than is strictly borne out by the evidence. The reader may be told, since he must speedily discover it, that the following letter from Cowper to John Newton, like the title-page of Lowell's 'Fable for Critics,' is in rhymed prose:

My very dear Friend, – I am going to send, what when you have read, you may scratch your head, and say, I suppose, there's nobody knows whether what I have got be verse or not; – by the tune and the time, it ought to be rhyme, but if it be, did you ever see, of late or of yore, such a ditty before?

I have writ 'Charity,' not for popularity, but as well as I could, in hopes to do good; and if the Reviewer should say 'to be sure the gentleman's Muse wears Methodist shoes, you may know by her pace and talk about grace, that she and her bard have little regard for the taste and fashions, and ruling passions, and hoidening play, of the modern day; and though she assume a borrowed plume, and now and then wear a tittering air,'tis only her plan to catch, if she can, the giddy and gay, as they go that way, by a production on a new construction: she has baited her trap, and hopes to snap all that may come with a sugar plum.' – His opinion in this will not be amiss;'tis what I intend, my principal end, and, if I succeed, and folks should read, till a few are brought to a serious thought, I shall think I am paid for all I have said and all I have done, though I have run many a time, after a rhyme, as far as from hence to the end of my sense, and by hook or crook, write another book, if I live and am here, another year.

I have heard before of a room with a floor laid upon springs, and such like things, with so much art in every part, that when you went in you was forced to begin a minuet pace, with an air and a grace, swimming about, now in and now out, with a deal of state, in a figure of eight, without pipe, or string, or any such thing; and now I have writ, in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and, as you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penn'd, which that you may do, ere Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to the ground, from your humble me. – W. C.

XVII. THE QUAKER OF ART

ABOVE the chimney-piece in the Study at Abbotsford, and therefore on Sir Walter's right-hand as he wrote, hung – nay, hangs, if we may trust the evidence of a photograph before us – a copy of the Schiavonetti-cum-Heath engraving of Thomas Stothard's once-popular 'Canterbury Pilgrims.' With its dark oblong frame and gold corner-ornaments, it must still look much as it did on that rainy August morning described in Lockhart, when one of Scott's guests, occupied ostensibly with the last issues of the Bannatyne Club, sat listening in turn to the patter of the drops on the pane, and the 'dashing trot' of his host's pen across the paper to which he was then committing the first series of the 'Tales of a Grandfather.' The visitor (it was that acute and ingenious John Leycester Adolphus whose close-reasoned 'Letters to Richard Heber' had practically penetreated the mystery of the 'Waverley Novels') specially noticed the picture; and he also afterwards recalled and repeated a characteristic comment made upon it by Scott, with whom it was evidently a favourite, in one of those brief dialogues which generally took place when it became necessary to consult a book upon the shelves. Were the procession to move, remarked Sir Walter, the prancing young 'Squire in the foreground would be over his horse's head in a minute. The criticism was more of the riding-school than the studio; and too much might easily be inferred from it as to the speaker's equipments as an Art-critic. For Art itself, we are told, notwithstanding his genuine love of landscape and natural objects, Scott cared nothing; and Abbotsford was rich rather in works suggestive and commemorative, than in masterpieces of composition and colour. 'He talked of scenery as he wrote of it,' says Leslie in his 'Recollections,' 'like a painter; and yet for pictures, as works of art, he had little or no taste, nor did he pretend to any. To him they were interesting merely as representing some particular scene, person, or event, and very moderate merit in their execution contented him.' Stothard's cavalcade, progressing along the pleasantly undulated background of the Surrey Hills, with its drunken Miller droning on his bagpipes at the head, with its bibulous Cook at the tail, and between these, all that moving, many-coloured pageant of Middle-Age society upon which Geoffrey Chaucer looked five hundred years ago, must have been thoroughly to his liking, besides reaching to a higher artistic standard than he required. To one whose feeling for the past has never yet been rivalled, such a picture would serve as a perpetual fount of memory and association. He must besides have thoroughly appreciated its admitted accuracy of costume, and it would not have materially affected his enjoyment if the Dick Tintos or Dick Minims of his day had assured him that, as a composition, it was deficient in 'heroic grasp,' or had reiterated the stereotyped objection that the Wife of Bath was far too young-looking to have buried five lawful husbands.

The original oil-sketch from which the 'Canterbury Pilgrims' was engraved, is now in the National Gallery, having been bought some years ago, with Hogarth's 'Polly Peachum,' at the dispersal of the Leigh Court Collection. It is not, however, by his more ambitious efforts that Stothard is most regarded in our day. Now and then, it may be, the Abbotsford engraving, or 'The Flitch of Bacon,' or 'John Gilpin,' makes fitful apparition in the print-shop windows; now and then again, in some culbute générale of the bric-à-brac merchant, there comes forlornly to the front a card-cable contrived adroitly from the once famous Waterloo Shield. But it is not by these, or by the huge designs on the staircase at Burleigh ('Burleigh-house by Stamford-town'), or by any of the efforts which his pious biographer and daughter-in-law fondly ranked with Raphael and Rubens, that he best deserves remembrance. Time, dealing summarily with an unmanageable inheritance, has a trick of making rough and ready distinctions; and Time has decided, not that he did these things ill, but that he did other things better – for instance, book illustrations. And the modern collector is on the side of Time. Stothard as a colourist (and here perhaps is some injustice) he disregards: Stothard as a history-painter he disavows. But for Stothard as the pictorial interpreter of 'David Simple' and 'Betsy Thoughtless,' of 'The Virtuous Orphan' and the 'Tales of the Genii,' of 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles Grandison,' or (to cite another admirer, Charles Lamb) of that 'romantic tale'

'Where Glunis and Gawries wear mysterious things,That serve at once for jackets and for wings,' —

to wit, 'The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins,' 34 he cares very much indeed. He is not surprised that they gained their designer the friendship of Flaxman; and if he is not able to say with Elia, —

'In several ways distinct you make us feel, —Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau genteel,' —

epithets which, in our modern acceptation of them, sound singularly ill-chosen, he can at least admit that if his favourite is occasionally a little monotonous and sometimes a little insipid, there are few artists in England in whose performances the un-English gift of grace is so unmistakably present. 35

Fifty years ago there were but few specimens of Stothard's works in the Print Room of the British Museum, and even those were not arranged so as to be easily accessible. To-day, this complaint, which Pye makes in that miscellany of unexpected information, his 'Patronage of British Art,' can no longer be renewed. In the huge Balmanno collection, a labour of five-and-twenty years, the student may now study his Stothard to his heart's content. Here is brought together his work of all sorts, his earliest and latest, his strongest and his feeblest, from the first tentative essays he made for the 'Lady's Magazine' and Hervey's 'Naval History' to those final designs, which, aided by the supreme imagination of Turner, did so much to vitalise the finicking and overlaboured blank verse of his faithful but fastidious patron at St. James's Place.

'Of Roger's "Italy," Luttrell relates,It-would surely be dished, if 'twere not for the plates,'

said the wicked wits of 1830; and the sarcasm has its parallel in the 'Ce poëte se sauve du naufrage de planche en planche,' which the Abbé Galiani applied to Dorât embellished by Marillier and Eisen. But Stothard did many things besides illustrating Samuel Rogers. Almanack heads and spelling-books, spoon-handles and decanter labels, – nothing came amiss to his patient industry. And in his book illustrations he had one incalculable advantage, – he lived in the silver age of line-engraving, the age of the Cooks and Warrens and Heaths and Findens.

Shakespeare and Bunyan, Macpherson and Defoe, Boccaccio and Addison, – most of the older classics passed under his hand. It is the fashion in booksellers' catalogues to vaunt the elaborate volumes he did in later life for the banker poet. But it is not in these, nor his more ambitious efforts, that the true lover of Stothard finds his greatest charm. He is the draughtsman of fancy rather than imagination; and he is moreover better in the mellow copper of his early days than the 'cold steel' of his decline. If you would view your Stothard aright, you must take him as the illustrator of the eighteenth-century novelists, of Richardson, of Fielding, of Sterne, of Goldsmith, where the costume in which he delighted was not too far removed from his own day, and where the literary note was but seldom pitched among the more tumultuous passions. In this semidomestic atmosphere he moves always easily and gracefully. His conversations and interviews, his promenade and garden and tea-table scenes, his child-life with its pretty waywardnesses, his ladies full of sensibility and in charming caps, his men respectful and gallant in their ruffles and silk stockings, – in all these things he is at home. The bulk of his best work in this way is in Harrison's 'Novelist's Magazine,' and in the old double-column edition of the essayists, where it is set off for the most part by the quaint and pretty framework which was then regarded as an indispensable decoration to plates engraved for books. If there be anything else of his which the eclectic (not indiscriminate) collector should secure, it is two of the minor Rogers volumes for which the booksellers care little. One is the 'Pleasures of Memory' of 1802, if only for Heath's excellent engraving of 'Hunt the Slipper;' the other is the same poems of 1810 with Luke Clennell's admirable renderings of the artist's quill-drawings, – renderings to rival which, as almost faultless reproductions of pen-and-ink, we must go right back to Hans Lutzelburger, and Holbein's famous 'Dance of Death.'

There is usually one thing to be found in Stothard's designs which many of his latter-day successors, who seem to care for little except making an effective 'compo,' are often in the habit of neglecting. He is generally fairly loyal to his text, and honestly endeavours to interpret it pictorially. Take, for example, a sketch at random, – the episode of the accident to Count Galiano's baboon in Sharpe's 'Gil Blas.' You need scarcely look at Le Sage; the little picture gives the entire story. There, upon the side of the couch, is the Count in an undress, – effeminate, trembling, almost tearful. Beside him is his wounded favourite, turning plaintively to its agitated master, while the hastily summoned surgeon, his under lip protruded professionally, binds up the injured limb. Around are the servants in various attitudes of sycophantic sympathy. Or take from a mere annual, the 'Forget-me-not' of 1828, this little genre picture out of Sterne. Our old friend Corporal Trim is moralizing in the kitchen to the hushed Shandy servants on Master Bobby's death. He has let fall his hat upon the ground, 'as if a heavy lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown of it.' 'Are we not here now,' says Trim, 'and are we not gone! in a moment.' Holding her apron to her eyes, the sympathetic Susannah leans her hand confidingly upon Trim's shoulder; Jonathan the coachman, a mug of ale upon his knee, stares – with dropped chin – at the hat, as if he expected it to do something; Obadiah wonders at Trim; the cook pauses as she lifts the lid of a cauldron at the fire, and the 'foolish fat scullion' – the 'foolish fat scullion' who 'had been all autumn struggling with a dropsy' and is still immortal – looks up inquiringly from the fish-kettle she is scouring on her knees. It is all there; and Stothard has told us all of it that pencil could tell.

In the vestibule at Trafalgar Square is a bust of Stothard by Baily, which gives an excellent idea of the dignified yet deferential old gentleman, who said 'Sir' in speaking to you, like Dr. Johnson, and whose latter days were passed as Librarian of the Royal Academy. Another characteristic likeness is the portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, which was engraved by Scriven in 1833 for Arnold's 'Library of the Arts,' and once belonged to Samuel Rogers. The story of Stothard's life has little memorable but the work that filled and satisfied it. Placid, placable, unpretentious, modestly unsolicitous of advancement, labouring assiduously but cheerfully for miserable wage, he seems to have existed at equipoise, neither exalted nor depressed by the extremes of either fortune. He was an affectionate father and a tender husband; and yet so even-pulsed that on his wedding-day he went as üsual to the drawing-school; and he bore more than one heart-rending bereavement with uncomplaining patience. For nearly forty years he lived contentedly in one house (28, Newman Street) with little change beyond an occasional country excursion, when he would study butterflies for his fairies' wings, or a long walk in the London streets and suburbs, when he would note at every turn some new gesture or some fresh group for his ever-growing storehouse of imagination. It is to this unremitting habit of observation that we owe the extraordinary variety and fecundity of his compositions; to the manner of it also must be traced their occasional executive defects. That no two men will draw from the living model in exactly the same way, is a truism. But the artist, who, neglecting the model almost wholly, draws by preference from his note-book, is like a man who tells a story heard in the past of which he has retained the spirit rather than the details. He will give it the cachet of his personal qualities; he will reproduce it with unfettered ease and freedom; but those who afterwards compare it with the original will find to their surprise that the original was not exactly what they had been led to expect. In a case like the present where the artist's mind is so uniformly pure and innocent, so constitutionally gentle and refined, the gain of individuality is far greater than the loss of finish and academic accuracy. If to Stothard's grace and delicacy we add a certain primness of conception, a certain prudery of line, it is difficult not to recognize the fitness of that happy title which was bestowed upon him by the late James Smetham. He is the 'Quaker of Art.'

XVIII. BEWICK'S TAILPIECES

BETWEEN the years 1767 and 1785, travellers going southward to Newcastle along the right bank of the Tyne must frequently have encountered a springy, well-set lad walking, or oftener running, rapidly in the opposite direction. During the whole of that period, which begins with Thomas Bewick's apprenticeship and closes with the deaths of his father and mother, he never ceased to visit regularly the little farm at Cherryburn where he was born.

'Dank and foul, dank and foul,By the smoky town in its murky cowl,'

is the Tyne at Newcastle, where he lived his working life; but at Ovingham, where he lies buried, and whence you can see the remains of his birthplace, it still flows like the river in the 'Water-Babies,' and one can easily conceive with what an eagerness the country-bred engraver's-apprentice must have turned, in those weekly escapes from the great, gloomy manufacturing city, to the familiar sights and sounds of nature which had filled his boyhood with delight. To his love for these things we are indebted for his best work; it was his intimate acquaintance with them that has kept his memory green; and, even when he was an old man, they prompted some of the most effective passages of those remarkable recollections which, despite their longueurs et langueurs, present so graphic a picture of his early life. 'I liked my master,' he says; 'I liked the business; but to part from the country, and to leave all its beauties behind me, with which I had been all my life charmed in an extreme degree, – and in a way I cannot describe, – I can only say my heart was like to break.' And then he goes on to show how vivid still, at a distance of sixty years, was that first scene of separation. 'As we passed away, I inwardly bade farewell to the whinny wilds, to Mickley bank, to the Stob-cross hill, to the water-banks, the woods, and to particular trees and even to the large hollow old elm, which had lain perhaps for centuries past, on the haugh near the ford we were about to pass, and which had sheltered the salmon-fishers, while at work there, from many a bitter blast.'

'Clear and cool,By laughing shallow, and dreaming pool,'

As an artist on wood, as the reviver of the then disused art of Xylography – a subject hedged round with many delicate and hairsplitting controversies – it is not now necessary to speak of Bewick. Nor need anything be said here of his extraordinary skills – a skill still unrivalled – in delineating those 'beautiful and interesting aerial wanderers of the British Isles,' as he styles them in his old-fashioned language, the birds of his native country. In both of these respects, although he must always be accomplished, he may one day be surpassed. But as regards his vignettes or tailpieces ('tale-pieces' they might be called, since they always tell their story), it is not likely that a second Bewick will arise. They were imitated in his own day; they are imitated still – only to prove once more how rare and exceptional is the peculiarly individual combination that produced them. Some of his own pupils, Luke Clennell, for instance, working under his eye and in his atmosphere, have occasionally trodden hard upon his heels in landscape; others, as Robert Johnson, have caught at times a reflex of his distinctive humour; but, as a rule, a Bewick tailpiece of the best period is a thing per se, unapproachable, inimitable, unique; and they have contributed far more – these labours of his play-time – to found his reputation than might be supposed. If you ask a true Bewickian about Bewick, he will begin by dilating upon the markings of the Bittern, the exquisite downy plumage of the Short-eared Owl, the lustrous spring coat of the Starling, the relative and competitive excellences of the Woodcock and the White Grouse; but sooner or later he will wander off unconsciously to the close-packed pathos of the microscopic vignette where the cruel cur is tearing at the worried ewe, whose poor little knock-kneed lamb looks on in trembling terror; or to the patient, melancholy shapes of the black and white horses seen vaguely through the pouring rain in the tailpiece to the Missal Thrush; or to the excellent jest of the cat stealing the hypocrite's supper while he mumbles his long-winded grace. He will tell you how Charles Kingsley, the brave and manly, loved these things; how they fascinated the callow imagination of Charlotte Brontë in her dreary moorland parsonage; how they stirred the delicate insight of the gentle, pure-souled Leslie; and how Ruskin (albeit nothing if not critical) has lavished upon them some of the most royal of his epithets. 36