DISTRAINING FOR RENT
Of this picture it is not easy to speak. We do not at first care to say much about feelings such as it produces. It is, to our liking, Wilkie's most perfect picture. If they were all to be destroyed but one, we would keep this. His "Blind Man's Buff," his "Penny Wedding," his "Village Politicians," and many others, have more humour, – his "John Knox preaching," more energy, – his "John Knox at the Sacrament," more of heaven and victorious faith; but there is more of human nature, more of the human heart, in this, than in any of the others. It is full of still and sad, but yet musical, by reason of its true ideality, the painter acting his part as reconciler of men to their circumstances. This is one great end of poetry and painting. Even when painful and terrible in their subjects, "they are of power, by raising pity and fear or terror, to purge the mind of suchlike passions, – that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight or, in the words of Charles Lamb, "they dispose the mind to a meditative tenderness."
"The still, sad music of humanity
But to return to this most touching and impressive picture. What an immediate hold it took of us! How that sad family was in our mind for days after, and how we found ourselves wondering if nothing could be done for them! It is just about as difficult to bring the mind to criticise it, as it would be to occupy ourselves in thinking why and how we were affected, if we were ourselves to witness the scene in actual life. We would be otherwise occupied. Our eyes first fell on what is the immediate occasion of it all, the paper warrant; you feel its sharp parallelogram cutting your retina, it is the whitest, and therefore the first thing you see; and then on the husband. What utter sadness, – what a sober certainty of misery, – how uncomplaining, as if he could not speak, his firm mouth keeping it to himself! His eyes are all but shut, – how their expression is given, seems to us quite marvellous; and his attitude cast down, but not abject – bearing it like a man. How his fingers are painted, and his careless, miserable limbs, his thin cheek, with that small hungry hollow mark in its centre! What a dignity and beauty in his face! This is to us a finer head than the wonderful one in Retzsch's "Man playing at Chess with the Devil for his Soul," and this is not saying little. Reason and steady purpose are still uppermost.
Not so with his poor wife: her heart is fast failing; she is silent too; but she is fainting, and just about to slip off her chair in utter unconsciousness; her eyes are blind; the bitterness of death is gathering on her soul. She is forgetting her sucking child, as she is all outward things; it is rolling off her knee, and is caught by her motherly daughter; while her younger brother, whose expressive back is only seen, is pulling his father's coat, as if to say, "Look at mother!" Behind are two neighbours come in, and sympathizing both, but differently; the meek look of the one farthest away, what can be finer than that! The paleness of the fainting mother is rendered with perfect truth. What an eye the painter must have had! – how rapid, how true, how retentive of every impression! Behind these silent sufferers goes on the action of the story. The brother, a young, good-looking, fearless fellow, is shaking his fist and fixing his angry eyes on the constable, who returns the look as resolutely, but without anger. This figure of the constable is in many respects as astonishing as anything in the picture. He is "a man with a presence" – inexorable, prompt, not to be trifled with; but he is not, as many other artists would have made him, and wished us to call him, "the brutal Bailiff." He is doing his duty, as he is plainly saying, pointing to his warrant, and nothing more: he cannot help it, and the law must have its course. What a fine figure he is, the only one standing erect, and what rich colour in his waistcoat! Seated on the bed is the smart, indifferent clerk, with his pale, smug countenance. A man of business, and of nothing else, he seems to be running up the value of these bedclothes, – that bed, with its sad-coloured curtains, and all its memories of births and deaths. Behind is a man whose face we don't exactly make out: he has a sleepy, tipsy, altogether unknowable sort of expression. We don't think this a defect in the painter: it is the most likely thing in the world that such a person would be there.
Then comes the cobbler, straight from his stall, where, as from a throne, he dispenses his "think," – and a strong think it is, – to all comers, upon all subjects. He has opinions of his own about most things, but chiefly upon civil, ecclesiastical, and marital jurisdiction, "with a power of law" in him. He is enjoining submission and composure upon all onlookers. His hands, how they speak! the one to the bailiff, deferential, confidential, gently deprecatory; the other, to the company in general, imperative, final, minatory. He is vindicating the law, and laying it down somewhat unseasonably, and is even hinting that they should rejoice at its arrangements. That brave old woman, inspired by anger, is bearing down upon both cobbler and bailiff, with occasional darts of her furious eye at the unconscious clerk. This woman's face is expressive beyond all description. Look at her fore-finger, as straight, as well-aimed, as unmistakably deadly in intention, as a sword, or rather pistol; and, could intensity of will have made a fire, we may reckon on its shot having been soon into the stately bailiff. But she has a sword in her tongue: how it is plying its work from behind these old straggling teeth! – no man can tame it; and her cruel, furious eyes, aiming every word, sending it home.
How well Shakspere describes this brilliant old lady! – "She is misusing him past the endurance of a block: an oak with but one green leaf would have answered her. She huddles jest upon jest, with such impossible conveyance, that he stands like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at him!"
What a contrast to her, the woman behind, "her face foul with weeping," crying her very eyes and soul out, like a child!
What a picture! so simple, so great, so full (to use a word of Wilkie's own) of intellectuality – and the result, though sad, salutary. How strange! We never saw these poor sufferers, and we know they have no actual existence; and yet our hearts go out to them, – we are moved by their simple sorrows. We shall never forget that enduring man and that fainting mother.
There is another personage yet to speak of. Some of our readers may never have seen him: we can assure them he has seen them. This is the dog, – the family dog, – the friend of them all, from baby upwards. We find him just where he should be, and at his own proper work. He is under his master's chair, and at his feet, looking out from between his legs. His master, as Burns has with wonderful meaning expressed it, is his god. "Man is the god of the dog." 37 How much may we learn from this!
Essay on Atheism. Burns improves it.
With that fine instinct, compounded of curiosity, experience, and affection, he has made his observations on the state of things! All is not right, he sees, – something very far wrong. He never before saw her look in that way, or him so quiet and strange. Accordingly, as he is eminently practical, and holds with Hume and many great men, that all we know of causation is one thing following upon another (being a dog, and not a philosopher, he pays no attention to the qualification "invariably"), and, putting two things together, he finds this dismal, unintelligible state of matters following upon the entrance of these three strange men. He has been doing diligence, and serving and executing warrants, in his own wild and vigorous way, upon their six legs – specially, we doubt not, upon the tight pantaloons of that cold-blooded clerk. They are so tempting! Having been well kicked by all for his pains, he has slunk into his den, where he sits biding his time. What a pair of wide awake, dangerous eyes! No "speculation" in them – no looking before or after; but looking into the present – the immediate. Poor fellow, his spare diet for some time back – his half-filled bicker – have not lessened his natural acuteness, his sharpness of teeth and temper. Our readers will, we fear, be tired of all this about a dog, and "such a vulgar little dog." We happen to hold high views on the moral and social bearings of dogs, especially of terriers, those affectionate and great-hearted little ruffians; but as our friends consider us not sane on this point, and as we (as is common in such cases) think quite the reverse, we shall not now dispute the matter. One thing wre may say, that we are sure Wilkie would have taken our side. He has a dog, and often more, in almost everyone of his pictures; and such dogs! not wee men in hairy skins, pretending to be dogs. His dogs are dogs in expression, as well as in body. Look, in his engravings, at the dog in the "Rent Day," in "Blind Man's Buff," that incomparable one, especially, who is flattened hopelessly and ludicrously under the weight of a chair and a man – how utterly quenched, and yet how he is giving a surly grin at his own misery; and the dog in the Gentle Shepherd, as gentle as his master; and that great-headed mastiff under the gun-carriage – a very "dog of war" – in "The Maid of Saragossa" – to us the hero of the picture; and, above all, the little pet dog in the "Only Daughter" – its speaking, imploring ways, as it looks to its dying mistress. What a wonderful art! We cannot leave this inestimable picture, without expressing our personal gratitude to our public-spirited Academy for furnishing us every year with some of this great master's works. We trust we shall have one of his, and one of Turner's every year. They elevate public feeling-; they tend, like all productions of high and pure genius, to the glory of God, and the good of mankind; they are a part of the common wealth. We end our notice of this picture by bidding our readers return to it, and read it over and over, through and through. Let them observe its moral effect – not to make the law and its execution hateful or unsightly, or vice or improvidence interesting or picturesque. Wilkie takes no side but that of our common nature, and does justice to the bailiff as well as to the distressed family. We have here no hysterical passions – no shaking of fists against the heavens, and sending up thither mingled blasphemy and prayer, as some melodramatic genius might have done. Let them remark the stillness of the great sufferers, and how you know what they have come through – the consummate art in arranging the parts of the subject – its simplicity at first – its fulness afterwards when looked into – more in it than meets the eye. Mind must be exercised upon it to bring out its mind. The white table-cloth, leading the eye at once to the heart of the picture; the table dividing the two groups, and preventing its being a crowd; the figure of the father given entire, indicating his total dejection from head to foot, – his hands, his finger-nails, – the dignity and self-containment of his sorrow: all the hands are wonderful, and above all, as we have noticed, the cobbler's; – the general air of the house not squalid – no beggarly elements – no horrors of actual starvation – all respectable, and poverty-stricken and scrimp; – the bone lying on the floor, on which our small four-footed Spartan may have been rehearsing his "'Pleasures of Memory," and whiling and whittling away his idle hours, and cheating his angry hunger: – the bed – its upright posts – the stately Bailiff alone as erect and firm; – the colour of the curtains – their very texture displayed; the colouring sober, powerful, not loud (to borrow from the ear); – the absence of all effort, or mere cleverness, or pretension; no trace of handicraft; you know it to be painted – you do not feel it; the composition as fine, as musical, as Raphael's; – the satisfying result; your whole nature, moral and affectionate – your inward and outward eye – fed with food convenient for them.
It has long been a question in the ethics of fiction, whether sympathy with ideal sorrows be beneficial or mischievous. That it is pleasurable we all know. And a distinction has been made between pity as an emotion ending with its own gratification, and pity as a motive, a moving power, passing, by a necessity of its nature, into action and practical performance.
But, without going into the subject, we may give, as a good practical rule, let your moral sense be so clear and healthy as to discern at once the genuine objects of pity; and then, let them be fictitious or real, you may pity them safely with all your might. In either case you will get good, and the good will not end with yourself, even in the first case.
The story of Joseph, for instance, is to us fictitious, or rather, it is ideal; and in weeping over him, or over his heart-broken father, we know we can do them no good, or give them no sympathy; but where will you find a merely human story more salutary, more delightful, more appropriate, to every one of our intellectual, moral, and, let us add, our imaginative and æsthetical faculties?
We are inclined to rank Hogarth and Wilkie as the most thoughtful of British painters, and two of the greatest of all painters.
Some people, even now, speak of Hogarth as being at best a sort of miraculous caricaturist, and a shockingly faithful delineator of low vice, and misery, and mirth, but deficient in knowledge of the human figure, and in academical skill, and as having fallen short of the requirements of "high art."
We thought Charles Lamb had disposed of this untruth long ago; and so he did. But some folks don't know Charles Lamb, and we shall, for their sakes, give them a practical illustration of his meaning, and of ours. If Hogarth did not know the naked human figure (and we deny that he did not), he knew the human face and the naked human heart – he knew what of infinite good and evil, joy and sorrow, life and death, proceeded out of it. Look at the second last of the series of "Mariage à la Mode."
If you would see what are the wages of sin, and how, after being earned, they are beginning to be paid, look on that dying man, – his body dissolving, falling not like his sword, firm and entire, but as nothing but a dying thing could fall, his eyes dim with the shadow of death, in his ears the waters of that tremendous river, all its billows going over him, the life of his comely body flowing out like water, the life of his soul! – who knows what it is doing? Fleeing through the open window, undressed, see the murderer and adulterer vanish into the outer darkness of night, anywhere, rather than remain; and that guilty, beautiful, utterly miserable creature on her knee, her whole soul, her whole life, in her eyes, fixed on her dying husband, dying for and by her! What is in that poor desperate brain, who can tell! Mad desires for life, for death, – prayers, affections, infinite tears, – the past, the future, – her maiden innocence, her marriage, his love, her guilt, – the grim end of it all, – the night-watch with their professional faces, – the weary wind blowing Through the room, the prelude, as it were, of that whirlwind in which that lost soul is soon to pass away. The man who could paint so as to suggest all this, is a great man and a great painter.
Wilkie has, in like manner, been often misunderstood and misplaced. He is not of the Dutch school, – he is not a mere joker upon canvas, – he can move other things besides laughter; and he rises with the unconscious ease of greatness to what ever height he chooses. Look at John Knox's head in "The Administering the Sacrament in Calder House." Was the eye of faith ever so expressed, the seeing things that are invisible?
Hogarth was more akin to Michael Angelo: they both sounded the same depths, and walked the same terrible road. Wilkie has more of Raphael, – his affectionate sweetness, his pleasantness, his grouping, his love of the beautiful.
THOMAS DUNCAN
Duncan possessed certain primary qualities of mind, without which no man, however gifted, can win and keep true fame. He had a vigorous and quick understanding, invincible diligence, a firm will, and that combination, in action, of our intellectual, moral, and physical natures, which all acknowledge, but cannot easily define, manliness.
As an artist, he had true genius, that incommunicable gift, which is born and dies with its possessor, never again to reappear with the same image and superscription. The direction of this faculty in him was towards beauty of colour and form, – its tendency was objective rather than subjective; the outward world came to him, and he noted with singular vigilance and truth all its phenomena. His perception of them was immediate, intense, and exact, and he could reproduce them on his canvas with astonishing dexterity and faithfulness. This made his sketches from nature quite startling, from their direct truth. There are two of them in Mr. Hay's gallery, – one, a girl with her bonnet on, sitting knitting at a Highland fireside; the other, a quaint old vacant room in George Heriot's Hospital.
But his glory, his peculiar excellence, was his colouring; there was a charm about it, a thing that could not be understood, but was felt. How transparent its depth, – how fresh, – how rich to gorgeousness, – how luminous, as from within!
His power over expression was inferior to his colouring. Not that he can be justly said to have failed in his exercise of this faculty; he rather did not attempt its highest range. His mind lingered delighted, at his eye; and if his mind did proceed inwards, it soon returned, and contented itself with that form of expression which, if we may so speak, lies in closest contact with material beauty. Therefore it is that he often brought out, with great felicity and force, some simple feeling, some fixed type of character common to a class, but did not care to ascend to the highest heaven of invention, or stir the depths of imagination and passion. Nature was perceived by him, rather than imagined; and he transferred rather than transfigured her likeness. As a consequence, his works delight more than move, interest more than arrest. In a remarkable sketch left behind him of an intended picture of Wishart administering the Sacrament before his execution, there is one truly ideal head, – a monk, who is overlooking the touching solemnity, and in whose pinched, withered face are concentrated the uttermost bigotry, malice, and vileness of nature, his cruel small eyes gleaming as if "set on fire of hell." Duncan's mind was romantic, rather than historical. We see this in his fine picture of "Prince Charles's Entry into Edinburgh." He brings that great pageant out of its own time into ours, rather than sends us back to it. This arose, as we have said, from the objective turn of his mind; and would have rendered him unsurpassed in the representation of contemporaneous events. What a picture, had he lived, would he have made of the Queen at Taymouth! the masterly, the inimitable sketch of which is now in the Exhibition. We have an ancient love of one of his early pictures, – "Cuddy Headrig and Jenny Dennistoun." Cuddy has just climbed up with infinite toil; and, breathless with it and love, he is resting on the window-sill on the tips of his toes and fingers, in an attitude of exquisite awkwardness, staring, with open mouth and eyes, and perfect blessedness, on his buxom, saucy Jenny. Duncan's fame will, we are sure, rest chiefly on his portraits. They are unmatched in modern times, except by one or two of Wilkie's, and that most noticeable "Head of a Lady," by Harvey, in the inner octagon. Duncan's portraits are liker than their originals. He puts an epitome of a man's character into one look. The likeness of Dr. Chalmers has something of everything in him, – the unconsciousness of childhood, – the fervour of victorious manhood, – the wise contemplativeness of old age, – the dreamy inexpressive eye of genius, in which his soul lies, "like music slumbering on its instrument," ready to awake when called – the entire loveableness of the man – the light of his countenance, – his heavenly smile, – are all there, and will carry to after times the express image of his person. How exquisite the head of D. O. Hill's daughter! so full of love and simpleness, the very realization of Wordsworth's lines: —
"Loving she is, and tractable, though wild,
And innocence hath privilege in her
To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes,
And feats of cunning."
There was something mournful and touching in the nature and progress of the last illness of this great artist. His unresting energy, his manly diligence, urged him beyond his powers; his brain gave way, and blindness crept slowly on him. It was a sort of melancholy consolation that, as the disease advanced, his intense susceptibility and activity were subdued, when their exercise must have only produced misery and regret. What is now infinitely more important is, that those who knew him best have little doubt, that while the outward world, with its cares, its honours, its wondrous beauty, its vain shows, was growing dim, and fast vanishing away, the eyes of his understanding became more and more enlightened, and that he died in the faith of the truth. If so, he is, we may rest assured, in a region where his intense perception of beauty, his delight in all lovely forms, and in the goodliness of all visible things, will have full exercise and satisfaction, and where that gift which he carries with him as a part of himself will be dedicated to the glory of its Giver, – the Father of Lights.
We believe it to be more than a pleasant dream, that in the regions of the blessed each man shall retain for ever his innate gifts, and shall receive and give delight by their specific exercise. Such a thought gives, as it ought, to this life an awful, but not undelightful significance. He who, in his soul, and by a necessity of his nature, is a poet or a painter, will, in a spiritual sense, remain so for ever.