Chapter XXVIII: Introduction: To an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (15)

Every step told: every sentence went to account. I cannot say that there was any thing very profound or original in argument, imposing in imagination, or impassioned in sentiment, in any part of this address—but it was throughout impregnated with as much thought, imagination and passion as the House would be likely to understand or sympathise with. It acted like a loadstone to the feelings of the House; and the speaker raised their enthusiasm, and carried their convictions as far as he wished, or as it was practicable. The effect was extraordinary: the impression grew stronger from first to last. No one stirred the whole time, and, at the end, the lobbies were crowded with members going up stairs and saying, ‘Well, this is a speech worth going without one’s dinner to hear,’ (Oh, unequivocal testimony of applause!) ‘there has been nothing like this since the time of Fox,’ etc. For myself, I never heard any other speech that I would have given three farthings to have made. It did not make the same figure in the newspapers the next day; for it was but indifferently reported, owing to the extreme fluency with which it was delivered. There was no boggling, no straggling, irrelevant matter;—you could not wait for him at the end of a long parenthesis, and go on with your report as if nothing had happened in the interval, as is sometimes the case,[57]—and besides, for the reason above given, it was a speech better calculated to strike in the hearing than the perusal; for though it was fully up to the tone of the House, the public mind can bear stronger meats. Another such speech would have decided the question, and made the difference of four votes by which it was lost. While the impression was fresh in the mind, it was not easy for any one, pretending to honesty, to look his neighbour in the face and vote against the motion. But Mr. Plunkett, in the mean time, sailed for Ireland. Any one who can speak as he can, and is a friend to his own, or any other country, ought not to let the present men retain their seats six months longer. Nothing but the will is wanting.—The ability, I will venture to say, is there.

And what shall I say of Lord Castlereagh—that spouter without beginning, middle, or end—who has not an idea in his head, nor a word to say for himself—who carries the House of Commons by his manner alone—who bows and smiles assent and dissent—who makes a dangling proposition of his person, and is himself a drooping figure of speech—what shall I say of this inanimate automaton? Nothing! For what can be said of him?

‘Come then, expressive silence, muse his praise.’[58]

Neither have I any thing to say of the style of eloquence of Mr. Alderman Wood, or Mr. Waithman, or Sir. W. Curtis—except that the latter always appears to me a very fit and lively representative of the good living, drinking, and eating of the city. This is but reasonable. The bodies of the city, not their minds, should be represented. A large turtle in the House (with a proxy to the minister) would answer the purpose just as well.

Mr. Wilberforce is a speaker whom it is difficult to class either with ministers or opposition. His character and his pretensions are altogether equivocal. He is a man of some ability, and, at one time, had considerable influence. He is what might be called ‘a sweet speaker’: his silver voice floats and glides up and down in the air, as if it was avoiding every occasion of offence, and dodging the question through its various avenues of reason and interest.

——‘In many a winding bout
Of melting softness long drawn out.’

There is a finical flexibility of purpose, and a cautious curiosity of research, that would put you in pain for him, if the want of proper self-respect did not take away all common fellow-feeling. His stratagems are so over-wrought that you wish them to fail: his evasions are so slippery and yet so palpable that you laugh in his face. Mr. Wilberforce is a man that has always two strings to his bow: as an orator, he is a kind of lay-preacher in parliament. He is at continual _hawk and buzzard_ between character and conscience, between popularity and court favour, between his loyalty and his religion, between this world and the next. Is not this something like trying to serve God and Mammon? He is anxious to stand fair with the reflecting part of the community, without giving umbrage to power. He is shocked at vice in low stations:

‘But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore;
Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more.’

He would go with the popular cause as long as it was popular, and gave him more weight than he lost by it; but would desert it the instant it became obnoxious, and that an obstinate adherence to it was likely to deprive him of future opportunities of doing good. He had rather be on the right side than the wrong, if he loses nothing by it. His reputation costs him nothing; though he always takes care to save appearances. His virtues compound for his vices in a very amicable manner. His humanity is at the horizon, three thousand miles off,—his servility stays at home, at the beck of the minister. He unbinds the chains of Africa, and helps (we trust without meaning it) to rivet those of his own country, and of Europe. As a general truth,—(not meaning any undue application in the present instance,) it may be affirmed, that there is not a more insignificant as well as a dangerous character crawling between heaven and earth, than that of the pretended patriot, and philanthropist, who has not courage to take the plain reward of vice or virtue—who crouches to authority, and yet dreads the censure of the world, who gives a sneaking casting vote on the side of conscience only when he can do it with impunity,—or else throws the weight of his reputation into the scale of his interest and the profligacy of others—who makes an affectation of principle a stalking-horse to his pitiful desire of distinction, and betrays a cause, sooner than commit himself.

‘Out upon such half-faced fellowship.’ We have another example of trumpery ambition in the person of Mr. C. Wynne; who, officious, indefatigable in his petty warfare with the abuses of power, is chiefly anxious to stand well with those who sanction them. He interprets the text literally, _not to do evil that good may come_. He is so fearful of the imputation of the least wrong, that he will never do or let any one else do the greatest right. _Summum jus summa injuria_, has never entered his head. He is the dog in the political manger: a technical marplot. He takes a systematic delight in giving a lift to his enemies, and in hampering his friends. He is a regular whipper-in on the side of opposition, to all those who go but a hairs-breadth beyond his pragmatical notions of discretion and propriety. He sets up for a balance-master of the constitution and, by insisting on its never deviating from its erect, perpendicular position, is sure to have it overturned. He professes to be greatly scandalized at the abuses and corruptions in our ancient institutions, which are ‘as notorious as the sun at noon-day,’ and would have them removed—but he is much more scandalized at those indiscreet persons who bring to light any of these notorious abuses, in order to have them remedied. He is more angry at those with whom he differs in the smallest iota than at those who differ from him _toto cælo_: and is at mortal enmity with every antiministerial measure that is not so clogged with imbecility and objections as to be impracticable or absolutely unavailing. He is therefore a bad partisan, and does little mischief, only because he is little attended to. Indeed, his voice is against him.

I did not much like Sir Samuel Romilly’s significant, oracular way of laying down the law in the House:—his self-important assumption of second-hand truths, and his impatience of contradiction, as if he gave his time there to humanity for _nothing_. He was too solemn a speaker: as Garrow was too flippant and fluent. The latter appeared to have nothing to do but to talk nonsense _by the yard_, for the pleasure of exposing himself or being exposed by others. He might be said to hold in his hand a general retainer for absurdity, and to hold his head up in the pillory of his own folly with a very unabashed and unblushing gaiety of demeanour. Lawyers, as a general rule, are the very worst speakers in the House: if there are a few nominal exceptions, it is because they are not lawyers.

I do not recollect any other speaker of importance but Mr. Canning; and he requires a chapter by himself. Thus then I would try to estimate him.—The orator and the writer do not always belong to the same class of intellectual character; nor is it, I think, in general, fair to judge of the merit of popular harangues by reducing them to the standard of literary compositions. Something,—a great deal,—is to be given to the suddenness of the emergency, the want of preparation, the instantaneous and effectual, but passing appeal to individual characters, feelings, and events. The speaker has less time allowed him to enforce his purpose, and to procure the impression he aims at than the writer; and he is therefore entitled to produce it by less scrupulous, by more obvious and fugitive means. He must strike the iron while it is hot. The blow must be prompt and decisive. He must mould the convictions and purposes of his hearers while they are under the influence of passion and circumstances,—as the glass-blower moulds the vitreous fluid with his breath. If he can take the popular mind by surprise, and stamp on it, while warm, the impression desired, it is not to be demanded whether the same means would have been equally successful on cool reflection or after the most mature deliberation. That is not the question at issue. At a moment’s notice the expert debater is able to start some topic, some view of a subject, which answers the purpose of the moment. He can suggest a dextrous evasion of his adversaries’ objections, he knows when to seize and take advantage of the impulse of popular feeling, he is master of the dazzling fence of argument, ‘the punto, the stoccado, the reverso,’ the shifts, and quirks, and palpable topics of debate; he can wield these at pleasure, and employ them to advantage on the spur of the occasion—this is all that can be required of him; for it is all that is necessary, and all that he undertakes to do. That another could bring forward more weighty reasons, offer more wholesome advice, convey more sound and extensive information in an indefinite period, is nothing to the purpose; for all this wisdom and knowledge would be of no avail in the supposed circumstances; the critical opportunity for action would be lost, before any use could be made of it. The one thing needful in public speaking is not to say what is best, but the best that can be said in a given time, place, and circumstance. The great qualification therefore of a leader in debate (as of a leader in fight) is presence of mind: he who has not this, wants every thing, and he who has it, may be forgiven almost all other deficiencies. The current coin of his discourses may be light and worthless in itself; but if it is always kept bright and ready for immediate use, it will pass unquestioned; and the public voice will affix to his name the praise of a sharp-witted, able, fluent, and eloquent speaker. We ‘no further seek his merits to disclose, or scan his frailties in their brief abode,’—the popular ear and echo of popular applause. What he says may be trite, pert, shallow, contradictory, false, unfounded, and sophistical; but it was what was wanted for the occasion, and it told with those who heard it. Let it stop there, and all is well. The rest is forgotten; nor is it worth remembering.

But Mr. Canning has an ill habit of printing his speeches: and I doubt where the same oratorical privileges can be extended to _printed_ speeches; or to this gentleman’s speeches in general, even though they should not be printed. Whether afterwards committed to the press or not, they have evidently, I think, been first committed, with great care, to paper or to memory. They have all the marks, and are chargeable with all the _malice prepense_ of written compositions. They are not occasional effusions, but set harangues. They are elaborate _impromptus_; deeply concerted and highly polished pieces of extempore ingenuity. The repartee has been conceived many months before the luckless observation which gives ostensible birth to it; and an argument woven into a debate is sure to be the counterpart or fag-end of some worn-out sophism of several years’ standing. Mr. Canning is not so properly an orator as an author reciting his own compositions. He foresees (without much of the spirit of prophecy) what will, may, or can be said on some well-conned subject, and gets up, by anticipation, a tissue of excellent good conceits, indifferent bad arguments, classical quotations, and showy similes, which he contrives, by a sort of rhetorical join-hand, to tack on to some straggling observation dropped by some Honourable Member,—and so goes on, with folded arms and sonorous voice, neither quickened nor retarded, neither elevated nor depressed by the _hear him’s_ that now rise on the one side, or are now echoed from the other;—never diverted into laughing gaiety, never hurried into incontrolable passion—till he is regularly delivered in the course of the same number of hours of the labour of weeks and months. To those who are in the secret of the arts of debating, who are versed in the complicated tactics of parliamentary common-place, there is nothing very mysterious in the process, though it startles the uninitiated. The fluency, the monotony, the unimpressible, imposing style of his elocution,—‘swinging slow with sullen roar,’ like the alternate oscillation of a pendulum—afraid of being thrown off his balance—never trusting himself with the smallest inflection of tone or manner from the impulse of the moment,—all shew that the speaker relies on the tenaciousness of his memory, not on the quickness and fertility of his invention. Mr. Canning, I apprehend, never answered a speech: he answers, or affects to answer some observation in a speech, and then manufactures a long _tirade_ out of his own ‘mother-wit and arts _well-known_ before.’ He _caps_ an oration, as school-boys cap verses; and gets up his oracular responses, as Sidrophel and Whackum did theirs, by having met with his customers of old. From that time he has the debate entirely in his own hands, and exercises over it ‘sole sovereign sway and masterdom.’ One of these spontaneous mechanical sallies of his resembles a _voluntary_ played on a barrel-organ: it is a kind of Pan-harmonic display of wit and wisdom—such as Mr. Canning possesses! The amplest stores of his mind are unfolded to their inmost source—the classic lore, the historic page, the philosophic doubt, the sage reply, the sprightly allusion, the delicate irony, the happy turning of a period or insinuation of a paragraph with senatorial dignity and Ovidian grace—are all here concocted, studied, revised, varnished over, till the sense aches at their glossy beauty and sickens at hopeless perfection. Our modern orator’s thoughts have been declared by some to have all the elegance of the antique; I should say, they have only the fragility and smoothness of plaster-cast copies!

If I were compelled to characterize Mr. Canning’s style by a single trait, I should say that he is a mere _parodist_ in verse or prose, in reasoning or in wit. He transposes arguments as he does images, and makes sophistry of the one, and burlesque of the other. ‘What’s serious, he turns to farce.’ This is perhaps, not art in him, so much as nature. The specific levity of his mind causes it to subsist best in the rarified atmosphere of indifference and scorn: it attaches most interest and importance to the slight and worthless. There is a striking want of solidity and keeping in this person’s character. The frivolous, the equivocal, is his delight—the element in which he speaks, and writes, and has his being, as an orator and poet. By applying to low and contemptible objects the language or ideas which have been appropriated to high and swelling contemplations, he reduces the latter to the same paltry level, or renders the former doubly ridiculous. On the same principle, or from not feeling the due force and weight of different things, as they affect either the imagination or the understanding, he brings the slenderest and most evanescent analogies to bear out the most important conclusions; establishes some fact in history by giving it the form of an idle interrogation, like a school-boy declaiming on he knows not what; and thinks to overturn the fixed sentiment of a whole people by an interjection of surprise at what he knows to be unavoidable and unanswerable. There is none of the gravity of the statesman, of the enthusiasm of the patriot, the impatient zeal of the partizan, in Mr. Canning. We distinguish through the disguise of pompous declamation, or the affectation of personal consequence, only the elegant trifler, the thoughtless epigrammatist, spreading ‘a windy fan of painted plumes,’ to catch the breath of popular applause, or to flutter in the tainted breeze of court-favour. ‘As those same plumes, so seems he vain and light,’—never applying his hand to useful action, or his mind to sober truth. A thing’s being evident, is to him a reason for attempting to falsify it: its being right is a reason for straining every nerve to evade or defeat it at all events. It might appear, that with him inversion is the order of nature. ‘Trifles light as air, are’ to his understanding, ‘confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ:’ and he winks and shuts his apprehension up to the most solemn and momentous truths as gross and vulgar errors. His political creed is of an entirely fanciful and fictitious texture—a kind of moral, religious, political, and sentimental _filligre-work_: or it is made up of monstrous pretexts, and idle shadows, and spurious theories, and mock-alarms. Hence his gravest reasonings have very much an air of concealed irony; and it might sometimes almost be suspected that, by his partial, loose, and unguarded sophisms, he meant to abandon the very cause he professes to magnify and extol.[59] It is indeed, his boast, his pride, his pleasure, ‘to make the worse appear the better reason,’ which he does with the pertness of a school-boy and the effrontery of a prostitute: he assumes indecent postures in the debate, confounds the sense of right and wrong by his licentious disregard of both, puts honesty out of countenance by the familiarity of his proposals, makes a jest of principle,—‘takes the rose from the fair forehead of a virtuous cause, and plants a blister there.’

The House of Lords does not at present display much of the aristocracy of talent. The scene is by no means so amusing or dramatic here as in the House of Commons. Every speaker seems to claim his privilege of peerage in the awful attention of his auditors, which is granted while there is any reasonable hope of a return: but it is not easy to hear Lord Grenville repeat the same thing regularly four times over, in different words—to listen to the Marquis of Wellesley who never lowers his voice for four hours from the time he begins, nor utters the commonest syllable in a tone below that in which Pierre curses the Senate—Lord Holland might have other pretensions to alacrity of mind than an impediment of speech, and Lord Liverpool might introduce less of the _vis inertiæ_ of office into his official harangues, than he does. Lord Ellenborough was great ‘in the extremity of an oath.’ Lord Eldon, ‘his face ’twixt tears and smiles contending,’ never loses his place or his temper. It is a pity to see Lord Erskine sit silent, who was once a popular and powerful speaker; and when he does get up to speak, you wish he had said nothing. This nobleman, the other day, on his return to Scotland after an absence of fifty years, made a striking speech on the instinctive and indissoluble attachment of all persons to the country where they are born,—which he considered as an innate and unerring principle of the human mind; and, in expatiating on the advantages of patriotism, argued by way of illustration, that if it were not for this original dispensation of Providence, attaching, and, as it were, _rooting_ every one to the spot where he was bred and born,—civil society should never have existed, nor mankind have been reclaimed from the barbarous and wandering way of life, to which they were in the first instance addicted! How these persons should become attached by habit to places where it appears, from their vagabond dispositions, they never stayed at all, is an oversight of the speaker which remains unexplained. On the same occasion, the learned Lord, in order to produce an effect, observed that when, advancing farther north, he should come to the old playground near his father’s mansion, where he used to play at ball when a child, his sensations would be of a most affecting description. This is possible; but his Lordship returned homewards the next day, thinking, no doubt, he had anticipated all the sentiment of the situation. This puts one in mind of the story one has heard of Tom Sheridan, who told his father he had been down to the bottom of a coal-pit. ‘Then, you are a fool, Tom,’ said the father. ‘Why so, Sir?’ ‘Because,’ said the other, ‘it would have answered all the same purpose _to have said you had been down_!’

HAYDON’S ‘CHRIST’S AGONY IN THE GARDEN’

_The London Magazine._] [_May, 1821._

We have prefixed to the present number an engraved outline of this picture (which we hope will be thought satisfactory), and we subjoin the following description of it in the words of the artist’s catalogue.

‘_Christ’s Agony in the Garden._—The manner of treating this subject in the present picture has not been taken from the account of any one Apostle [Evangelist] in particular, but from the united relations of the whole four.

‘The moment selected for the expression of our Saviour is the moment when he acquiesces to (in) the necessity of his approaching sacrifice, after the previous struggle of apprehension.

“_Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done._”

‘It is wished to give an air of submissive tenderness, while a quiver of agony still trembles on his features. The Apostles are resting a little behind, on a sort of garden-bank; St. John in an unsound doze—St. James in a deep sleep—St. Peter has fallen into a disturbed slumber against a tree, while keeping guard with his sword, and is on the point of waking at the approach of light. Behind St. Peter, and stealing round the edge of the bank, comes the mean traitor, Judas, with a centurion, soldiers, and a crowd; the centurion has stepped forward from his soldiers (who are marching up) to look with his torch, where Christ is retired and praying; while Judas, alarmed lest he might be surprised too suddenly, presses back his hand to enforce caution and silence, and crouching down his malignant and imbecile face beneath his shoulders, he crawls forward like a reptile to his prey, his features shining with the anticipated rapture of successful treachery.

‘It is an inherent feeling in human beings, to rejoice at the instant of a successful exercise of their own power, however despicably directed.

‘The Apostles are supposed to be lit by the glory which emanates from Christ’s head, and the crowd by the torches and lights about them.’

The printed catalogue contains also elaborate and able descriptions of Macbeth, the murder of Dentatus, and the judgment of Solomon, which have been already before the public.

We do not think _Christ’s Agony in the Garden_ the best picture in this collection, nor the most striking effort of Mr. Haydon’s pencil. On the contrary, we must take leave to say, that we consider it as a comparative failure, both in execution and probable effect. We doubt whether, in point of policy, the celebrated artist would not have consulted his reputation and his ultimate interest more, by waiting till he had produced another work on the same grand and magnificent scale as his last, instead of trusting to the ebb of popularity, resulting from the exhibition of Christ’s Entrance into Jerusalem, to float him through the present season. It is well, it may be argued, to keep much before the public, since they are apt to forget their greatest favourites: but they are also fastidious; and it is safest not to appear always before them in the same, or a less imposing, attitude. It is better to rise upon them at every step, if possible (and there is yet room for improvement in our artist’s productions), to take them by surprise, and compel admiration by new and extraordinary exertions—than to trust to their generosity or gratitude, to the lingering remains of their affection for old works, or their candid construction of some less arduous undertaking. A liberal and friendly critic has, indeed, declared on this occasion, that if the spirits of great men and lofty geniuses take delight in the other world, in contemplating what delighted them in this, then the shades of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Correggio, can find no better employment than to descend again upon the earth, once more teeming with the birth of high art, and stand with hands crossed, and eyes uplifted in mute wonder, before Mr. Haydon’s picture of Christ’s Agony in the Garden. If we believed that the public in general sympathised seriously in this sentiment, we would not let a murmur escape us to disturb it;—the opinion of the world, however erroneous, is not easily altered; and if they are happy in their ignorance, let them remain so;—but if the artist himself, to whom this august compliment has been paid, should find the hollowness of such hyperbolical commendation, a hint to him, as to its cause in the present instance, may not be thrown away. The public may, and must, be managed to a certain point; that is, a little noise, and bustle, and officious enthusiasm, is necessary to catch their notice and fix their attention; but then they should be left to see for themselves; and after that, an artist should fling himself boldly and fairly into the huge stream of popularity (as Lord Byron swam across the Hellespont), stemming the tide with manly heart and hands, instead of buoying himself up with borrowed bloated bladders, and flimsy newspaper paragraphs. When a man feels his own strength, and the public confidence, he has nothing to do but to use the one, and not abuse the other. As his suspicions of the lukewarmness or backwardness of the public taste are removed, his jealousy of himself should increase. The town and the country have shown themselves willing, eager patrons of Mr. Haydon’s AT HOME:—he ought to feel particular obligations not to invite them by sound of trumpet and beat of drum to an inferior entertainment; but, like our advertising friend, Matthews, compass ‘sea, earth, and air,’ to keep up the eclat of his first and overwhelming _accueil_! So much for advice; now to criticism.

We have said, that we regard the present performance as a comparative failure; and our reasons are briefly and plainly these following:—First, this picture is inferior in size to those that Mr. Haydon has of late years painted, and is so far a falling off. It does not fill a given _stipulated_ space in the world’s eye. It does not occupy one side of a great room. It is the Iliad in a nutshell. It is only twelve feet by nine, instead of nineteen by sixteen; and that circumstance tells against it with the unenlightened many, and with the judicious few. One great merit of Mr. Haydon’s pictures is their size. Reduce him within narrow limits, and you cut off half his resources. His genius is gigantic. He is of the race of Brobdingnag, and not of Lilliput. He can manage a groupe better than a single figure: he can manage ten groupes better than one. He bestrides his art like a Colossus. The more you give him to do, the better he does it. Ardour, energy, boundless ambition, are the categories of his mind, the springs of his enterprises. He only asks ‘ample room and verge enough.’ Vastness does not confound him, difficulty rouses him, impossibility is the element in which he glories. He does not concentrate his powers in a single point, but expands them to the utmost circumference of his subject, with increasing impetus and rapidity. He must move great masses, he must combine extreme points, he must have striking contrasts and situations, he must have all sorts of characters and expressions; these he hurries over, and dashes in with a decided, undistracted hand;—set him to finish any one of these to an exact perfection, to make ‘a hand, an ear, an eye,’ that, in the words of an old poet, shall be ‘worth an history,’ and his power is gone. His _forte_ is in motion, not in rest; in complication and sudden effects, not in simplicity, subtlety, and endless refinement. As it was said in the Edinburgh Review, Mr. Haydon’s compositions are masterly sketches;—they are not, as it was said in Blackwood’s Magazine, finished miniature pictures. We ourselves thought the Christ in the triumphant Entry into Jerusalem, the least successful part of that much admired picture: but there it was lost, or borne along in a crowd of bold and busy figures, in varied or violent actions. Here it is, not only the principal, but a solitary, and almost the only important figure: it is thrown in one corner of the picture like a lay-figure in a painter’s room; the attitude is much like still-life: and the expression is (in our deliberate judgment) listless, feeble, laboured, neither expressing the agony of grief, nor the triumph of faith and resignation over it. It may be, we are wrong: but if so, we cannot help it. It is evident, however, that this head is painted on a different principle from that of the Christ last year. It is wrought with care, and even with precision, in the more detailed outlines: but it is timid, without relief, and without effect. The colour of the whole figure is, as if it had been smeared over, and neutralized, with some chalky tint. It does not stand out from the canvas, either in the general masses, or in the nicer inflections of the muscles and surface of the skin. It has a veil over it, not a glory round it. We ought, in justice, to add, that a black and white copy (we understand by a young lady) of the head of Christ has a more decided and finer apparent character. To what can this anomaly be owing? Is it that Mr. Haydon’s conception and drawing of character is good, but that his mastery in this respect leaves him, when he resigns the port-crayon; and that, instead of giving additional force and beauty to the variations of form and expression, by the aid of colour and real light and shade, he only _smudges_ them over with the pencil, and leaves the indications of truth and feeling more imperfect than he found them? We believe that Mr. Haydon generally copies from nature only with his port-crayon; and paints from conjecture or fancy. If so, it would account for what we have here considered as a difficulty. We have reason to believe that the old painters copied form, colour,—every thing, to the last syllable,—from nature. Indeed, we have seen two of the heads in the celebrated Madonna of the Garland, the Mother, and the fine head of Joseph, as original, finished studies of heads (the very same as they are in the large composition) in the collection at Burleigh-house. By the contrary practice, Mr. Haydon, as it appears to us, has habituated his hand and eye to giving only the contour of the features or the grosser masses:—when he comes to the details of those masses, he fails. Some one, we suspect from the style of this picture, has been advising our adventurous and spirited artist to try to finish, and he has been taking the advice: we would advise him to turn back, and consult the natural bent of his own genius. A man may avoid great faults or absurdities by the suggestion of friends: he can only attain positive excellence, or overcome great difficulties, by the unbiassed force of his own mind.

The crowd coming, with Judas at their head, to surprise our Saviour, is not to our taste. We dislike mobs in a picture. There is, however, a good deal of bustle and movement in the advancing group, and it contrasts almost too abruptly with the unimpassioned stillness and retirement of the figure of Christ. Judas makes a bad figure both in Mr. Haydon’s catalogue, and on his canvas. We think the original must have been a more profound and plausible-looking character than he is here represented. He should not grin and show his teeth. He was by all accounts, a grave, plodding, calculating personage, usurious, and with a cast of melancholy, and soon after went and hanged himself. Had Mr. Haydon been in Scotland when he made this sketch? Judas was not a laughing, careless wag; he was one of the ‘Melancholy Andrews.’—The best part of this picture is decidedly (in our opinion) the middle ground, containing the figures of the three Apostles. There is a dignity, a grace, a shadowy repose about them which approaches close indeed upon the great style in painting. We have only to regret that a person, who does so well at times, does not do well always. We are inclined to attribute such inequalities, and an appearance of haste and unconcoctedness in some of Mr. Haydon’s plans, to distraction and hurry of mind, arising from a struggle with the difficulties both of art and of fortune; and as the last of these is now removed, we trust this circumstance will leave him at leisure to prosecute the grand design he has begun (the Raising of Lazarus) with a mind free and unembarrassed; and enable him to conclude it in a manner worthy of his own reputation, and that of his country!

POPE, LORD BYRON, AND MR. BOWLES[60]

_The London Magazine._] [_June 1821._

This is a very proper letter for a lord to write to his bookseller, and for Mr. Murray to show about among his friends, as it contains some dry rubs at Mr. Bowles, and some good hits at Mr. Southey and his ‘invariable principles.’ There is some good _hating_, and some good writing in it, some coarse jests, and some dogmatical assertions; but that it is by any means a _settler_ of the question, is what we are in all due form inclined to doubt. His Lordship, as a poet, is a little headstrong and self-willed, a spoiled child of nature and fortune: his philosophy and criticism have a tincture of the same spirit: he doles out his opinions with a great deal of frankness and spleen, saying, ‘this I like, that I loathe;’ but he does not trouble himself, or the reader, with his reasons, any more than he accounts to his servants for the directions he gives them. This might seem too great a compliment in his Lordship to the public.

All this _pribble prabble_ about Pope, and Milton, and Shakspeare, and what foreigners say of us, and the Venus, and Antinous, and the Acropolis, and the Grand Canal at Venice, and the Turkish fleet, and Falconer’s Shipwreck, and ethics, and ethical poetry (with the single exception of some bold picturesque sketches in the poet’s best prose-style) is what might be talked by any Bond-street lounger of them all, after a last night’s debauch, in the intervals between the splashings of the soda-water and the acid taste of the port wine rising in the mouth. It is no better than that. If his Lordship had sent it in from Long’s, or the Albany, to be handed about in Albemarle-street, in slips as he wrote it, it would have been very well. But all the way from Ravenna, cannot he contrive to send us something better than his own ill-humour and our own common-places—than the discovery that Pope was a poet, and that Cowper was none; and the old story that Canova, in forming a statue, takes a hand from one, a foot from another, and a nose from a third, and so makes out the idea of perfect beauty! (We would advise his Lordship to say less about this subject of _virtù_, for he knows little about it: and besides, his perceptions are at variance with his theories.) In truth, his Lordship has the worst of this controversy, though he throws out a number of pert, smart, flashy things, with the air of a man who sees company on subjects of taste, while his reverend antagonist, who is the better critic and logician of the two, goes prosing on in a tone of obsequious pertinacity and sore pleasantry, as if he were sitting (an unwelcome guest) at his Lordship’s table, and were awed, yet galled, by the cavalier assumption of patrician manners. We cannot understand these startling _voluntaries_, played off before the public on the ground of personal rank, nor the controversial under-song, like the drone of a bagpipe that forms a tedious accompaniment to them. As Jem Belcher, when asked if he did not feel a little awkward at facing Gamble the tall Irishman, made answer, ‘An please ye, sir, when I am stript to my shirt, I am afraid of no man;’—so we would advise Mr. Bowles, in a question of naked argument, to fear no man, and to let no man bite his thumb at him. If his Lordship were to invite his brother-poet to his house, and to eke out a sour jest by the flavour of Monte-Pulciano or Frontiniac,—if in the dearth of argument he were to ply his friend’s weak side with rich sauces and well seasoned hospitality, ‘_Ah! ça est bon, ah! goutez ça!_‘—if he were to point, in illustration of Pope’s style, to the marble pillars, the virandas, the pier glasses, the classic busts, the flowering dessert, and were to exclaim, ‘You see, my dear Bowles, the superiority of art over nature, the triumph of polished life over Gothic barbarism: we have here neither the ghosts nor fairies of Shakspeare, nor Milton’s Heaven, nor _his_ Hell, yet we contrive to do without them;’—it might require Parson Supple’s command of countenance to smile off this uncourteous address; but the divine would not have to digest such awkward raillery on an empty stomach—he would have his _quid pro quo_: his Lordship would have paid for the liberty of using his privilege of peerage. But why any man should carry the _rôle_ of his Lordship’s chaplain out of his Lordship’s house, is what we see no reason for.—Lord Byron, in the Preface to his Tragedy, complains that Horace Walpole has had hard measure dealt him by the critics, ‘firstly, because he was a lord, and secondly, because he was a gentleman.’ We do not know how the case may stand between the public and a dead nobleman: but a living lord has every reasonable allowance made him, and can do what no one else can. If Lord Byron chooses to make a bad joke, by means of an ill-spelt pun, it is a condescension in his Lordship:—if he puts off a set of smart assertions and school-boy instances for pithy proofs, it is not because he is not able, but because he cannot be at the pains of going deeper into the question:—if he is rude to an antagonist, it is construed into agreeable familiarity; any notice from so great a man appears like a favour:—if he tells or recommends ‘a tale of bawdry,’ he is not to be tied down by the petty rules which restrict common men:—if he publishes a work, which is thought of too equivocal a description for the delicate air of Albemarle-street, his Lordship’s own name in the title-page is sufficient to back it without the formality of a bookseller’s; if a wire-drawn tragedy of his is acted, in spite of his protestations against such an appeal to the taste of a vulgar audience, the storm of pitiless damnation is not let loose upon it, because it is felt that it would fall harmless on so high and proud a head; the gilded coronet serves as a conductor to carry off the lightning of popular criticism, which might blast the merely laurelled bard; the blame, the disappointment, the flat effect, is thrown upon the manager, upon the actors—upon any body but the Noble Poet! This sounding title swells the mouth of Fame, and lends her voice a thousand circling echoes: the rank of the Author, and the public charity extended to him, as he does not want it, cover a multitude of sins. What does his Lordship mean, then by this whining over the neglect of Horace Walpole,—this uncalled-for sympathy with the faded lustre of patrician and gentlemanly pretensions? Has _he_ had only half his fame! Or, does he already feel, with morbid anticipation, the retiring ebb of that overwhelming tide of popularity, which having been raised too high by adventitious circumstances, is lost in flats and shallows, as soon as their influence is withdrawn? Lord Byron has been twice as much talked of as he would have been, had he not been Lord Byron. His rank and genius have been happily placed ‘each other’s beams to share,’ and both together, by their mutually reflected splendour, may be said to have melted the public coldness into the very wantonness of praise: the faults of the man (real or supposed) have only given a dramatic interest to his works. Whence, then, this repining, this ungracious cavilling, this _got up_ ill-humour? We load his Lordship with ecstatic admiration, with unqualified ostentatious eulogies; and he throws them stifling back in our face: he thanks us with cool, cutting contempt: he asks us for our voices, ‘our sweet voices,’ like Coriolanus; and, like Coriolanus, disdains us for the unwholesome gift. Why, then does he ask for it? If, as a lord, he holds in contempt and abhorrence the willing, delighted homage, which the public pay to the poet, let him retire and feed the pride of birth in stately solitude, or take his place among his equals: but if he does not find this enough, and wants our wondering tribute of applause to satisfy his craving vanity, and make him something more than a mere vulgar lord among hundreds of other lords, why dash the cup of delicious poison, which, at his uneasy request, we tender him, to the ground, with indignant reckless hands, and tell us he scorns equally our censure or our praise? If he looks upon both as equal impertinence, he can easily escape out of the reach of both by ceasing to write; we shall in that case soon cease to think of his Lordship: but if he cannot do without our good opinion, why affect all this coyness, coldness, and contempt? If he says he writes not to please us, but to live by us, that only alters the nature of the obligation, and he might still be civil to Mr. Murray’s customers. Whether he is independent of public opinion, or dependent on it, he need not be always sending his readers to Coventry. When we come to offer him our demonstrations of good will, he should not kick us down stairs. If he persists in this humour, the distaste may in time ‘become mutual.’

Before we proceed, there is one thing in which we must say we heartily agree with Lord Byron; and that is the ridicule with which he treats Mr. Bowles’s editorial inquisition into the moral character of Pope. It is a pure piece of clerical priggism. If Pope was not free from vice, we should like to know who is. He was one of the most faultless of poets, both in his life and in his writings. We should not care to throw the first stone at him. We do not wonder at Lord Byron’s laughing outright at Mr. Bowles’s hysterical horrors at poor Pope’s platonic peccadillos, nor at his being a little impatient of the other’s attempt to make himself a _make-believe_ character of perfection out of the ‘most small faults’ he could rake up against the reputation of an author, whom he was bound either not to edite or not to injure. But we think his Lordship turns the tables upon the divine, and gets up into the reading desk himself, without the proper canonical credentials, when he makes such a fuss as he does about didactic or moral poetry as the highest of all others, because moral truth and moral conduct are of such vast and paramount concernment in human life. But because they are such good things in themselves, does it follow that they are the better for being put into rhyme? We see no connection between ‘ends of verse, and sayings of philosophers.’ This reasoning reminds us of the critic who said, that the only poetry he knew of, good for any thing, was the four lines, beginning ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,’ for that these were really of some use in finding out the number of days in the different months of the year. The rules of arithmetic are important in many respects, but we do not know that they are the fittest subjects of poetry. Besides, Pope was not the only moral poet, nor are we sure that we understand his moral system, or that Lord Byron understands it, or that he understood it himself. Addison paraphrased the Psalms, and Blackmore sung the Creation: yet Pope has written a lampoon upon the one, and put the other in his Dunciad. Mr. Bowles has numbers of manuscript sermons by him, the morality of which, we will venture to say, is quite as pure, as orthodox, as that of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan; yet we doubt whether Mr. Murray, the Mecænas of poetry and orthodoxy, would give as much for the one as for the other. We do not look for the flowers of fancy in moral treatises, nor for a homily in his Lordship’s irregular stanzas. The Decalogue, as a practical prose composition, or as a body of moral laws and precepts, is of sufficient weight and authority; but we should not regard the putting this into heroic verse, as an effort of the highest poetry. That ‘Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms’ is no imputation on the pious raptures of the Hebrew bard: and we suspect his Lordship himself would object to the allegory in Spenser, as a drawback on the poetry, if it is in other respects to his Lordship’s taste, which is more than we can pretend to determine. The Noble Letter-writer thus moralizes on this subject and transposes the ordinary critical canons somewhat arbitrarily and sophistically.

‘The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenuous boast,

“That not in Fancy’s maze he wander’d long,
But _stoop’d_ to Truth, and moraliz’d his song.”

‘He should have written “rose to truth.” In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human hands except Milton’s and Dante’s, and even Dante’s powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though in supernatural circumstances. What made Socrates the greatest of men? His moral truth—his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts. And if ethics have made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it, whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the _very first order_ of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one of the priesthood? It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the “forests” that ever were “walked” for their “description,” and all the epics that ever were founded upon fields of battle. The Georgics are indisputably, and, I believe, _undisputedly_, even a finer poem than the Æneid. Virgil knew this: he did not order _them_ to be burnt.

“The proper study of mankind is man.”

‘It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call “imagination” and “invention,”—the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect: his moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious.’ P. 42.

Really this is very inconsequential, incongruous reasoning. An Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, would not fall upon more blunders, contradictions, and defective conclusions. Lord Byron talks of the ethical systems of Socrates and Jesus Christ. What made the former the great man he supposes?—The invention of his system—the discovery of sublime moral truths. Does Lord Byron mean to say, that the mere repetition of the same precepts in prose, or the turning them into verse, will make others as great, or will make a great man at all? The two things compared are wholly disparates. The finding out the 48th proposition in Euclid made Pythagoras a great man. Shall we say that the putting this into a grave, didactic distich would make either a great mathematician or a great poet? It would do neither one nor the other; though, according to Lord Byron, this distich would belong to the highest class of poetry, ‘because it would do that in verse, which one of the greatest of men had wished to accomplish in prose.’ Such is the way in which his Lordship transposes the common sense of the question,—because it is his humour! The value of any moral truth depends on the philosophic invention implied in it. But this rests with the first author, and the general idea, which forms the basis of didactic poetry, remains the same, through all its mechanical transmissions afterwards. The merit of the ethical poet must therefore consist in his manner of adorning and illustrating a number of these general truths which are not his own, that is, in the poetical invention and imagination he brings to the subject, as Mr. Bowles has well shown, with respect to the episodes in the Essay on Man, the description of the poor Indian and the lamb doomed to death, which are all the unsophisticated reader ever remembers of that much-talked-of production. Lord Byron clownishly chooses to consider all poetry but what relates to this ethical or didactic truth as ‘a lie.’ Is Lear a lie? Or does his Lordship prefer the story, or the moral, in Æsop’s Fables? He asks ‘why must the _poet_ mean the _liar_, the _feigner_, the _tale-teller_? A man may make and create better things than these.’—He may make and create better things than a common-place, and he who does not, makes and creates nothing. The ethical or didactic poet necessarily repeats after others, because general truths and maxims are limited. The individual instances and illustrations, which his Lordship qualifies as ‘lies,’ ‘feigning,’ and ‘tale-telling,’ are infinite, and give endless scope to the genius of the true poet. The rank of poetry is to be judged of by the truth and purity of the moral—so we find it ‘in the bond,’—and yet Cowper, we are told, was no poet. Is there any keeping in this, or is it merely an air? Again, we are given to understand that didactic poetry ‘requires more mind, more power than all the descriptive or epic poetry that ever was written:’ and as a proof of this, his Lordship lays it down, that the Georgics are a finer poem than the Æneid. We do not perceive the inference here. ‘Virgil knew this: he did not order _them_ to be burnt.

“The proper study of mankind is man.”’