Chapter XXXVII: Act V: Sc. 3 (2)

Michael Angelo took his ideas of painting from sculpture, and Sir
Joshua from Michael Angelo.

Footnote 21:

Why fabulous or obscure?

Footnote 22:

The personification of the Deity is another instance of critical
contradiction and conceit. Objecting to the figures of Raphael and
Michael Angelo as mythological and sensible, he introduces a little
golden triangle behind a cloud (_triangulum in nube_) as a
philosophical emblem of the Trinity!

Footnote 23:

When the writer of this article was in France twelve years ago, a
young French artist began to copy in pencil a figure of the Virgin by
Leonardo da Vinci. He returned to it day after day, and week after
week. He was always there. He would first retouch an eyebrow or an
eyelash, then do something to one of the fingers, then mark in a bit
of the drapery, and then return to the face again. All this he did,
sometimes leaning over the railing before the picture, sometimes
sitting on a stool, mechanically screwed on to it, sometimes standing
on one leg. He also relieved the monotony of his undertaking, by
retiring to a small distance to compare his copy with the original, or
shewed it to some one near him, or went round to look over others who
were copying, or stood at the fire for an hour together, or loitered
into the sculpture room, or walked round the gallery, and generally
observed at his return that Poussin was excellent ‘pour la
composition,’ Raphael ‘pour l’expression,’ Titian ‘pour les beaux
coloris,’ but that David and his pupils united all these qualities to
the fine forms of the antique. At the end of eleven weeks, we left him
perfecting his copy. For anything we know, he may be at it still.

Footnote 24:

It is not correct to say that the French always colour from their
casts. They sometimes rouge them over with a beautiful rose-colour, or
cover their lay-figures with flesh-coloured Nankin, like that which
adorns the bodies of their opera dancers. We were at a loss to account
for the colouring of David, till we heard of this contrivance. It is
thus that these accomplished persons think to rival the hues of Titian
and Correggio!

Footnote 25:

A radical objection to it, in point of composition, is, that it is
addressing the spectator, and has its back turned to the audience.

Footnote 26:

The waiter drawing the cork in the Rent-day, is another exception, and
quite Hogarthian.

Footnote 27:

Mr. Wilkie’s pictures are in general much better painted than
Hogarth’s: but the Marriage a-la-mode is superior both in colour and
execution to any of Wilkie’s.

Footnote 28:

‘And see! how dark the backward stream
A little moment past how smiling!
And still perhaps, with faithless gleam,
Some other loiterer beguiling.’
_Wordsworth._

Footnote 29:

Mr. Southey is, it is hoped, politically reconciled to Mr. Dryden,
since his succession to the Laureatship. Which of these two writers is
the better poet, it would be presumptuous in us to determine. We could
sooner determine which was the honester man. Mr. Dryden, we believe,
never wrote Regicide Sonnets, Jacobin Odes, or Revolutionary Epic
Poems. How the Prince must laugh, if he can laugh at any thing. He
might as well have made his chaplain his historical painter!

Footnote 30:

As a contrast to the story at the beginning of this article, it will
be not amiss to mention that of Sir Isaac Newton, on a somewhat
similar occasion. He had prepared some papers for the press with great
care and study, but happening to leave a lighted candle on the table
with them, his dog Diamond overturned the candle, and the labour of
several years was destroyed. This great man, on seeing what was done,
only shook his head, and said with a smile, ‘Ah, Diamond, you don’t
know what mischief you have done!’

Footnote 31:

We have an instance in our own times of a man, equally devoid of
understanding and principle, but who manages the House of Commons by
his _manner_ alone.

Footnote 32:

Sheer impudence answers almost the same purpose. ‘Those impenetrable
whiskers have confronted flames.’ Many persons, by looking big and
talking loud, make their way through the world without any one good
quality. We have here said nothing of mere personal qualifications,
which are another set-off against sterling merit. Fielding was of
opinion that ‘the more solid pretensions of virtue and understanding
vanish before perfect beauty.’ ‘A certain lady of a manor’ (says _Don
Quixote_ in defence of his attachment to _Dulcinea_, which however was
quite of the Platonic kind), ‘had cast the eyes of affection on a
certain squat, brawny lay brother of a neighbouring monastery, to whom
she was lavish of her favours. The head of the order remonstrated with
her on this preference shown to one whom he represented as a very low,
ignorant fellow, and set forth the superior pretensions of himself,
and his more learned brethren. The lady having heard him to an end,
made answer: All that you have said may be very true; but know, that
in those points which I admire, Brother Chrysostom is as great a
philosopher, nay greater than Aristotle himself!’ So the _Wife of
Bath_:

‘To church was mine husband borne on the morrow
With neighbours that for him maden sorrow,
And Jenkin our clerk was one of tho:
As help me God, when that I saw him go
After the bier, methought he had a pair
Of legs and feet, so clean and fair,
That all my heart I gave unto his hold.’

‘All which, though we most potently believe, yet we hold it not
honesty to have it thus set down.’

Footnote 33:

At Salisbury, which is a cathedral and county town, you cannot get a
copy of Congreve or Wycherley at any of the shops.

Footnote 34:

The knack of off-hand, unprincipled, idle fabrication is not assisted,
but the contrary, by general knowledge or regular education. Women,
for this reason, have the better of their husbands in trumping up
sudden excuses and contrivances that have no foundation in fact or
reason; and their servant maids, who are more uneducated still, beat
them hollow at the same paltry game of cross-purposes.

Footnote 35:

It is observed and perhaps justly that the members of the Established
Church are the pleasantest sort of people to deal with. Dissenters are
more soured by the leaven of religion. The others do not trouble
themselves enough about it to come to a conclusion of their own, or to
quarrel with other people who do. They are religious merely out of
conformity to the practice of the age and country in which they live,
and follow that which has authority and numbers on its side.

Footnote 36:

There is a common inversion of this opinion, which is _desperation_;
or the becoming reckless of all consequences, poverty, disease, or
death, from disappointment in some one thing that the mind is set
upon, no matter what. A man who has been jilted of his first choice
marries out of spite the first woman he meets. A girl, whose
sweetheart goes to sea, because she will not have him, as soon as he
is gone, and she is baulked of her fancy, runs a-muck at ruin and
infamy—

‘As men should serve a cucumber,
She throws herself away!’

Losing gamesters act nearly on the same infatuated principle. Harrel,
in _Cecilia_, makes a fine hair-brained mock-heroic exit. I declare I
prefer it to the termination of Gray’s Bard. Gamesters and highwaymen
are so far heroes that it is neck or nothing with them: they set
consequences at defiance. Their actions are disinterested; but their
motives are not so. A fortune-hunting General stands much in the same
predicament. The abstracted, the _ideal_, is necessary to the true
heroic. But before a man can fight for an idea, he must have an idea
in his head to fight for. Now there are some Generals that are not
understood to possess this qualification of the heroic character.

Footnote 37:

It has been suggested whether this phrase ‘insulted’ is not too
modern.

Footnote 38:

Mr. Canning, when on a tour to the Lakes, did Mr. Wordsworth the
honour of paying him a visit. The favour was duly appreciated, but
quite unexpected. Really, we do not know any one so little capable of
appreciating the _Lyrical Ballads_.

Footnote 39:

We once heard it said, that ‘Mr. Canning had the most elegant mind
since Virgil.’ But we could not assent to this remark, as we just then
happened to think of Claude Lorraine.

Footnote 40:

We have said nothing here of the impiety of Mr. Canning’s parodies,
though a great deal has been said of the impiety of Mr. Hone’s, which
unfortunately happen to be on the other side of the question. It is
true that _one man may steal a horse sooner than another can look over
a hedge_. Mr. Hone is not a Cabinet Minister, and therefore is not
allowed to take liberties with the Liturgy. It is to no purpose to
urge that Mr. Hone is a very good-natured man, that he is mild and
inoffensive in his manners, that he is utterly void of guile, with a
great deal of sincere piety, and that his greatest vice is that he is
fond of a joke, and given to black-letter reading. The answer is—‘But
he has written parodies’—and it is to no purpose to reply—So has Mr.
Canning! He is a Cabinet Minister, and therefore incapable of any
thing vulgar or profane. One would think that the triumphant question
put by Mr. Hone to his Jury, ‘Whether Mr. Jekyll’s Parody on
Black-eyed Susan was meant to ridicule Sir William Curtis or the
Ballad of Black-eyed Susan?’ would have put an end for ever to the
cant on this subject, if reason could put an end to cant on any
subject. The fate of different men is curious. Mr. Canning, who has
all his life been defending the most odious and mischievous men and
measures, passes, on that very account, for a most amiable character
and an accomplished statesman. Mr. Hone, who defended himself against
a charge of blasphemy for a parody on the _Church Service_ of which
Mr. Canning had furnished him with a precedent, rose from the attack
by the force of good-nature, and by that noble spirit of freedom and
honesty in which to be unjustly accused is to be superior to all fear,
and to speak truth is to be eloquent—but that he did not suffer
himself to be crushed to atoms, and made a willing sacrifice to the
prejudice, talent, and authority arrayed against him, is a resistance
to the opinions of the world and the insolence of power, that can
never be overlooked or forgiven.

‘A wit’s a feather, and a chief’s a rod:
An honest man’s the noblest work of God!’

Footnote 41:

It is amusing to see an English woman in the streets of Paris looking
like a dowdy, and scarcely able to put one foot before another for
very awkwardness and shame, who but a week before she left home had
perhaps trampled on a dress brought home to her, in a fit of
uncontrollable rage, thrown a cap into the fire, and kicked her
milliner down stairs for bringing her such unfashionable trumpery. One
would scarcely believe that a mere change of place would make such an
alteration in behaviour. When we see our country-women so unpleasantly
situated, we are naturally both ashamed and sorry for them: but, as in
this case, we pity many of them more than they deserve.

Footnote 42:

Lady Byron, when a girl, was so affected at seeing Mrs. Siddons as
_Isabella_, in the _Fatal Marriage_, that she was carried out fainting
into the lobbies, and kept sobbing and exclaiming involuntarily ‘Oh,
Byron, Byron!’ Egad, she had enough of Byron afterwards. This
good-natured remark is not ours. Whose, reader, do you suppose it is?
We have heard the late Mr. Curran say, that when he was a young man
studying the law at the Temple, his supreme delight was to see Mrs.
Siddons in her great parts, and all he wanted was a couple of _pails_
on each side of him to fill them with his tears! Such things have
been.

Footnote 43:

‘Lodging-houses for the Universe,’ and ‘Stage-coaches of the
Universe.’

Footnote 44:

In this sort of representative Government the utility of the Press
seems by no means superseded.

Footnote 45:

Papers on Codification. What an odd title. Mr. Bentham writes a style
of his own, and in his titlepages he puts his best foot foremost.

Footnote 46:

Venice.

Footnote 47:

There is a false concord here.

Footnote 48:

This word is not English, nor its meaning clear.

Footnote 49:

Why is the word _portion_ here used, as if it were a portion of
Scripture?

‘Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
He wales a _portion_ with judicious care.’
_Cottar’s Saturday Night._

Now, Mr. Wordsworth’s poems, though not profane, yet neither are they
sacred, to deserve this solemn style, though some of his admirers have
gone so far as to compare them for primitive, patriarchal simplicity,
to the historical parts of the Bible. Much has been said of the merits
and defects of this large poem, which is ‘portion of a
larger;’—perhaps Horace’s rule has been a double bar to its
success—_Non satis est pulchra poemata esse, dulcia sunto_. The
features of this author’s muse want sweetness of expression as well as
regularity of outline.

Footnote 50:

A French teacher, in reading Titus and Berenice with an English pupil,
used to exclaim, in raptures, at the best passages, ‘What have you in
Shakespeare equal to this?’ This showed that he had a taste for
Racine, and a power of appreciating his beauties, though he might want
an equal taste for Shakespeare.

Footnote 51:

It is a fashion among the scientific or pedantic part of the musical
world to decry Miss Stephens’s singing as feeble and insipid. This it
is to take things by their contraries. Her excellence does not lie in
force or contrast, but in sweetness and simplicity. To give only one
instance. Any person who does not feel the beauty of her singing the
lines in Artaxerxes, ‘What was my pride is now my shame,’ &c., in
which the notes seem to fall from her lips like languid drops from the
bending flower, and her voice flutters and dies away with the expiring
conflict of passion in her bosom, may console himself with the
possession of other faculties, but assuredly he has no ear for music.

Footnote 52:

There is a very striking and spirited picture of this subject by an
ingenious living artist (Mr. Alston), in the present exhibition of the
Royal Academy. The academic skill in it is admirable, and many of the
forms are truly elegant and beautiful; but I may be permitted to add,
that the scene (as he represents it) too much resembles the courtly
designs of Vitruvius or Palladio, rather than ‘a temple not made with
hands, eternal in the heavens’; and that the angels seem rather
preparing to dance a minuet or grand ballet on the marble pavement
which they tread, than descending the air in a dream of love, of hope,
and gratitude.

Footnote 53:

I apprehend that natural is of more importance than acquired
sensibility. Thus, any one, without having been at an opera, may judge
of opera dancing, only from having seen (with judicious eyes) a stag
bound across a lawn, or a tree wave its branches in the air. In all,
the general principles of motion are the same.

Footnote 54:

In answer to a criticism by Mr. Godwin on his poem called _Sympathy_.

Footnote 55:

‘Liberty is a custom of England,’ said a Member of Congress; who seems
also to be of opinion, that _it is a custom more honoured in the
breach than the observance_.

Footnote 56:

I by no means wish to preclude Mr. Phillips from trying annually to
naturalize his favourite mode of oratory at watering-places in this
country, or in Evangelical Societies held at the Egyptian-hall, where
it is not out of character. He may there assure his hearers, with
great impunity, that Dr. Franklin’s orthodoxy was never called in
question; and rank Moses and Mahomet together as true prophets, (by
virtue of the first letter of their names) in opposition to the
infidelity of Paine and Priestly, who go together for the same reason—

Like Juno’s Swans, link’d and inseparable.

Footnote 57:

The best speeches are the worst reported, the worst are made better
than they are. They both find a convenient newspaper level.

Footnote 58:

His Lordship is said to speak French with as little hesitation as he
does his native tongue; and once made a speech in that language to the
Congress for three hours without interruption. The sentiments, we may
be sure, were not English. Or was it on that occasion that Prince
Tallyrand made his observation, ‘that speech was given to man to
conceal his thoughts’? I cannot agree with Mr. Hobhouse in his
compliment to the expression which Isabey has given to Lord
Castlereagh’s face in the _insulated_ figure of him in the picture of
the Congress. An old classical friend of Mr. Hobhouse’s would have
supplied a better interpretation of it. But I do not think the French
artist has done his Lordship justice. His features are marked, but the
expression is dormant.

Footnote 59:

See his panegyric on the late King, his defence of the House of
Commons, and his eulogy on the practical liberty of the English
Constitution in his Liverpool Dinner Speech.

Footnote 60:

Letter to **** ****** on the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the
Life and Writings of Pope. By the Right Hon. Lord Byron. Third
Edition. Murray.

Footnote 61:

We have ‘purest architecture’ just before; and ‘the prior fabric which
preceded,’ is rather more than an inelegant pleonasm.

Footnote 62:

See Mr. Bowles’s Two Letters.

Footnote 63:

Coleridge.

Footnote 64:

Most people have felt the _ennui_ of being detained under a gateway in
a shower of rain. Happy is he who has an umbrella, and can escape when
the first fury of the storm has abated. Turn this gateway into a
broker’s shop, full of second-hand furniture—tables, chairs,
bedsteads, bolsters, and all the accommodations of man’s life,—the
case will not be mended. On the other hand, convert it into a wild
natural cave, and we may idle away whole hours in it, marking a streak
in the rock, or a flower that grows on the sides, without feeling time
hang heavy on us. The reason is, that where we are surrounded with the
works of man—the sympathy with the art and purposes of man, as it
were, irritates our own will, and makes us impatient of whatever
interferes with it: while, on the contrary, the presence of nature, of
objects existing without our intervention and controul, disarms the
will of its restless activity, and disposes us to submit to accidents
that we cannot help, and the course of outward events, without
repining. We are thrown into the hands of nature, and become converts
to her power. Thus the idea of the artificial, the conventional, the
voluntary, is fatal to the romantic and imaginary. To us it seems,
that the free spirit of nature rushes through the soul, like a stream
with a murmuring sound, the echo of which is poetry.

Footnote 65:

This, we are sorry to say, relates only to the three first volumes.
The fourth is in a very mixed style indeed. It looks as if the author
was tired, and got somebody to help him.

Footnote 66:

See Mackenzie’s Life of Home, the author of Douglas.

Footnote 67:

The Duke of Wellington, it is said, cannot enter into the merits of
Raphael, but he admires ‘the spirit and fire of Tintoret.’ I do not
wonder at this bias. A sentiment, probably, never dawned upon his
Grace’s mind; but he may be supposed to relish the dashing execution
and _hit or miss_ manner of the Venetian artist. Oh, Raphael! well is
it that it was one who did not understand thee that blundered upon the
destruction of humanity!

Footnote 68:

Hazlitt refers to what _The Examiner_ calls the ‘regal raree-show’ in
the Parks at the beginning of August 1814. A sham fight on the
Serpentine was one of the features.

Footnote 69:

_Paradise Lost_, III. 550.

Footnote 70:

Wordsworth himself says (_Hart-Leap Well_) ‘The moving accident is not
my trade.’

Footnote 71:

_Lycidas_, 161.

Footnote 72:

Wordsworth’s Ode, _Intimations of Immortality_, 206–7.

Footnote 73:

See _ante_, note to p. 48.

Footnote 74:

This opening paragraph is certainly very like Hazlitt. Cf. the review
by anticipation of Coleridge’s _Lay Sermon_ in _Political Essays_,
vol. III. pp. 138–142.

Footnote 75:

Query, a misprint for ‘delicacy.’

Footnote 76:

Ben Jonson’s _Underwoods_, XXX., ‘An Epistle to Sir Edward Sackville.
A favourite quotation of Hazlitt’s.

Footnote 77:

_The Faerie Queene_, III. VII. 7.

Footnote 78:

Haydon.

Footnote 79:

_Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.

Footnote 80:

Leigh Hunt, _The Story of Rimini_, III. 32.

Footnote 81:

See vol. I. p. 218–221.

Footnote 82:

Acts xix. 28.

Footnote 83:

To the line ‘And to the ragged infant threaten war,’ Hazlitt appends
the footnote, ‘This is a pleasing line; because the unconsciousness to
the mischief in the child is a playful relief to the mind, and the
picturesqueness of the imagery gives it double point and _naiveté_.’

Footnote 84:

To the line ‘See them beneath the dog-stars raging heat,’ Hazlitt has
a footnote: ‘This seems almost a parody on the lines in Shakespeare.
“Not all these, laid in bed majestical,” etc. [_Henry V._, Act IV. Sc.
1, ll. 284–297.] Who shall decide where two such authorities
disagree!’

Footnote 85:

_1 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 1.

Footnote 86:

To the line ‘Or wipes the tear that stagnates in his eyes,’ Hazlitt
adds a footnote: ‘And the motion unsettles a tear.—Wordsworth.’ [_The
Convict_, (Lyrical Ballads) l. 42.]

Footnote 87:

_The Parish Register_, I. 107–10.

Footnote 88:

_Ibid._ I. 230–1.

Footnote 89:

_The Parish Register_, I. 301–4.

Footnote 90:

_A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act IV. Sc. 1.

Footnote 91:

_The Parish Register_, I. 454–7.

Footnote 92:

_Ibid._ II. 319–20.

Footnote 93:

Dryden, Prologue to _The Tempest_, 20.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.