Chapter XIV: Sir Joshua at Home

In another instant there entered a fresh, almost chubby-faced gentleman, with a dint in his nether lip, and an ear-trumpet in his hand. He was not without a certain dapperness in the unexceptionable brown coat and spotless ruffles, which he had substituted for his painting-coat and plain cuffs.

He was the briskest of gentlemen, the most obliging of geniuses who ever kept sitters in good humour and under control, by the very ease of his dignity in bearing with their airs and oddities.

The contemporary of the glorious, careless good-fellow Gainsborough, of Romney in his arrogant, one-sided power, and later of Opie, the most self-taught and the most self-asserting painter among them—Sir Joshua beat them all.

It may be true that his art was pervaded with an artificial, aristocratic flavour, and that he made a little lady of his strawberry girl, and modern English my lords of every historical personage who passed under his pencil.

Painters may feel it their duty, from their watch-tower of technical knowledge, to impress on the world their grieved conviction, that the president of the old Academy, so widely cultivated, so full of sense and acumen, in addition to his professional ability, and to the industry which “never passed a day and lost a line,” the chosen friend of the most public-spirited men of his time—yet painted deliberately for a single generation.

He was, according to his brethren, wilful and regardless of the destructive nature of the pigment which he used, so that they produced a certain effect to last his time. His accusers point in proof of their charge to the fading lines and cracking canvas of the very works of which all Englishmen are proud.

So be it, if it must be so; we have still the poetry (let some hold it fantastic) of the Tragic Muse, the gallant heroism of Keppel, the thoughtful benevolence of Johnson, the broad archness of Nelly O’Brien; and we have following on the dainty playfulness of “Pick-a-back” a long train of fresh and delicate, lovely and stately, English maids and matrons, with Sir Joshua’s quaint sweet children bringing up the rear.

In Lady Bell’s day there was no thought, unless it were among the chemically skilled, that these softly glowing, wonderfully blended colours would wane, or the fine surface give way. Sir Joshua was regarded as the quintessence of inspired and courtly painters, treading in the footsteps of Van-dyck.

Sir Joshua had only a few of his paintings to show the eager, intelligent young lady, whose grace was so winning to his eye, and her eloquence so grateful to his ear—through his trumpet—as it reached him. There were fair ladies sacrificing to the graces and to the muses, very interesting to Lady Bell. There was Dr. Beattie in his gown as an Oxford Doctor of Laws, with his book on “The Immutability of Truth” under his arm, and the Angel of Truth going before him, beating down the gruesome figures of Sophistry, Scepticism, and Infidelity, said to personify Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hume, which was carefully studied by Captain Fane. There was the doom of Count Ugolino and his sons, which enchained with the fascination of horror both of the gazers. There was the portrait of a plump little woman, sprightly even on canvas, her high-dressed hair wreathed with pearls, a shawl girdle binding loosely the short waist and bodice, which Sir Joshua strove to paint into fashion—a great improvement on the earlier elongated steel-bound waist and laced-up bodice.

As Sir Joshua was about to name the original, the real lady ran unushered, in her hat and cloak, into the room.

The new-comer had not a moment to stay to be introduced to Lady Bell Trevor and Captain Fane. She was in haste to tell Sir Joshua that she had just come down from the Burgh, where she had left her master at his place of business, but nearly as ailing as the Doctor (good lack, what a load she had on her head and shoulders!). She wished to know whether Sir Joshua had done the re-touching which he had taken it into his head to throw away on a barn-door face beyond improvement. Give her joy on the audacity of complimenting herself; but she did not mean to compliment—not that she was not well enough pleased with her own, she would never deny it. She would like the picture packed and sent out without loss of time. Queeney and the rest of the young fry might care to look at it one day, when it was all that was left of their mother. Good day to him and to all.

“You are in luck, Lady Bell,” announced Sir Joshua, returning, briskly rubbing his hands, from seeing the lady to her coach, “if you have not had a previous opportunity of meeting my friend. That is Mrs. Thrale, the wife of the great brewer, who is himself an exceedingly liberal gentleman and well-read scholar; but his wife excels him in the classics.”

“She was one of the west country Lynches,” said Lady Bell, showing her acquaintance with the lady’s antecedents.

“It is she who has made a home for the great Doctor at that pattern of country houses, Streatham,” continued Sir Joshua. “She has preserved an invaluable life, madam, years longer to the country, by taking Dr. Johnson’s health under her care, as she has often told us, and by nursing him out of some of his worst attacks and most injurious habits. Would to God her efforts could continue successful, both with him and Mr. Thrale, who is, I fear, in a bad way, and on the brink of an apoplexy.”

“She deserves all honour,” said Lady Bell warmly.

“The more so that her cares seem to sit lightly on her.” Captain Fane could not resist the sly hit.

Lady Bell flashed a little reproach upon him from her eyes, which looked as if she were condescending to take his manners, as Mrs. Thrale had taken Dr. Johnson’s health, under her special superintendence.

“A matter of temperament,” pronounced the genially philosophic painter.

Sir Joshua, who enjoyed his own reputation as an urbane and accomplished man of the world, as he enjoyed most things in the pleasantly prosperous places in which his lines were cast, began to talk to Captain Fane of Captain Cook, with whom the painter’s friend, Dr. Burney’s son, had made a voyage round the world; and of Sir Joseph Banks’s collection of objects of natural history, which Captain Fane had seen under the care of young Mr. Jenner, the favourite pupil of Dr. Hunter.

Sir Joshua had made a happy choice of subjects to which Captain Fane was alive, and in which he was well informed. The gentlemen talked like kindred spirits, while Lady Bell, to her credit, was content to remain in the background, and listen with deference and delight. She was innocently proud of her companion.

How very different was the figure which Captain Fane cut to-day, in company with a genius who was at the same time a finished gentleman of any school, from the figure which Captain Fane had presented at the sailing-party!

What other male friend of Lady Bell’s could have stood so severe a test, and come out of it so splendidly? Not Sir George Waring, in spite of his elegance and his musical talents, any more than Master Charles. Lady Bell was deeply impressed by Captain Fane’s gifts, which he was really in the habit of hiding under a bushel. She was almost provoked when Sir Joshua remembered his duty to her, not guessing how well pleased she was that he should forget it, and began to tell her of the one lady who belonged to the Royal Society of Artists, Mrs. Angelica Kauffman.

It was not a difficult process to make a digression to those ladies who were amateur artists, and to render Lady Bell, in spite of her _savoir faire_, bashfully grateful, by deigning to drop a hint for her benefit on the mixing and laying-on of colours, and on the drawing of such slight designs as Sir Joshua had himself afforded to Poggi for his fans.

“I thought t’other morning we spent together was very happy,” Lady Bell spoke out of the fulness of her heart to her squire when they were in the square, and he was looking out for a chair that she might get home in time to keep an appointment with her mantua-maker; “but I shall be always recalling this day and its lessons when I am busiest and happiest at Summerhill.”

“Don’t you think I shall recall it, Lady Bell,” asked Harry Fane, “when for a studio in which to busy myself, I shall be reduced to ‘between decks,’ and for my fine arts shall be setting men to rig spars and haul in sails, varied by pointing a gun instead of a telescope, and submitting to be carried down into the cockpit?”

“Oh, no; you won’t be carried there!” cried Lady Bell, with impetuous haste.

“At least I did not mean to crave pity from you,” protested Harry with unconscious tenderness shaking his firm voice. “A grumpy, hulking fellow who has been so much at sea that he has lost the manœuvre of giving a wide berth to what displeases his crotchets on shore, is of no good save to shout orders in a storm, or to keep a look-out against the national enemy.”

Lady Bell did not contradict him, but she looked in his face, somewhat set and lined for a man of his age, but an honest and manly face, which had looked its kindest on her, the hardness in which she could melt, as she had said, like the melting of a block of ice before a meridian sun.

She gave him a parting look as the chair-men lifted her chair, which raised a mighty commotion, for which Lady Bell was decidedly answerable, in the blue-coated breast of the young man—thought so long-headed and calm-hearted, so rational, discreet, and obdurate, that he could be let cast stones at all the follies and extravagancies of his time. Lady Bell’s look said, “You are good for all that is cleverest, truest, bravest—not to the world, perhaps, for you know, none better, that the world is a giddy, vicious, Vanity Fair—but to me. You need not tell others that I say so, but I say it; and you need not forget that I said it, in the long days during which I am mixing with people whom you justly despise, or have taken refuge at Summerhill; and when you are sailing on the high seas, doing your duty like a man, guarding our shores, and fighting our foes.”