XVII. THE QUAKER OF ART
ABOVE the chimney-piece in the Study at Abbotsford, and therefore on Sir Walter's right-hand as he wrote, hung – nay, hangs, if we may trust the evidence of a photograph before us – a copy of the Schiavonetti-cum-Heath engraving of Thomas Stothard's once-popular 'Canterbury Pilgrims.' With its dark oblong frame and gold corner-ornaments, it must still look much as it did on that rainy August morning described in Lockhart, when one of Scott's guests, occupied ostensibly with the last issues of the Bannatyne Club, sat listening in turn to the patter of the drops on the pane, and the 'dashing trot' of his host's pen across the paper to which he was then committing the first series of the 'Tales of a Grandfather.' The visitor (it was that acute and ingenious John Leycester Adolphus whose close-reasoned 'Letters to Richard Heber' had practically penetreated the mystery of the 'Waverley Novels') specially noticed the picture; and he also afterwards recalled and repeated a characteristic comment made upon it by Scott, with whom it was evidently a favourite, in one of those brief dialogues which generally took place when it became necessary to consult a book upon the shelves. Were the procession to move, remarked Sir Walter, the prancing young 'Squire in the foreground would be over his horse's head in a minute. The criticism was more of the riding-school than the studio; and too much might easily be inferred from it as to the speaker's equipments as an Art-critic. For Art itself, we are told, notwithstanding his genuine love of landscape and natural objects, Scott cared nothing; and Abbotsford was rich rather in works suggestive and commemorative, than in masterpieces of composition and colour. 'He talked of scenery as he wrote of it,' says Leslie in his 'Recollections,' 'like a painter; and yet for pictures, as works of art, he had little or no taste, nor did he pretend to any. To him they were interesting merely as representing some particular scene, person, or event, and very moderate merit in their execution contented him.' Stothard's cavalcade, progressing along the pleasantly undulated background of the Surrey Hills, with its drunken Miller droning on his bagpipes at the head, with its bibulous Cook at the tail, and between these, all that moving, many-coloured pageant of Middle-Age society upon which Geoffrey Chaucer looked five hundred years ago, must have been thoroughly to his liking, besides reaching to a higher artistic standard than he required. To one whose feeling for the past has never yet been rivalled, such a picture would serve as a perpetual fount of memory and association. He must besides have thoroughly appreciated its admitted accuracy of costume, and it would not have materially affected his enjoyment if the Dick Tintos or Dick Minims of his day had assured him that, as a composition, it was deficient in 'heroic grasp,' or had reiterated the stereotyped objection that the Wife of Bath was far too young-looking to have buried five lawful husbands.
The original oil-sketch from which the 'Canterbury Pilgrims' was engraved, is now in the National Gallery, having been bought some years ago, with Hogarth's 'Polly Peachum,' at the dispersal of the Leigh Court Collection. It is not, however, by his more ambitious efforts that Stothard is most regarded in our day. Now and then, it may be, the Abbotsford engraving, or 'The Flitch of Bacon,' or 'John Gilpin,' makes fitful apparition in the print-shop windows; now and then again, in some
culbute générale of the bric-à-brac
merchant, there comes forlornly to the front a card-cable contrived adroitly from the once famous Waterloo Shield. But it is not by these, or by the huge designs on the staircase at Burleigh ('Burleigh-house by Stamford-town'), or by any of the efforts which his pious biographer and daughter-in-law fondly ranked with Raphael and Rubens, that he best deserves remembrance. Time, dealing summarily with an unmanageable inheritance, has a trick of making rough and ready distinctions; and Time has decided, not that he did these things ill, but that he did other things better – for instance, book illustrations. And the modern collector is on the side of Time. Stothard as a colourist (and here perhaps is some injustice) he disregards: Stothard as a history-painter he disavows. But for Stothard as the pictorial interpreter of 'David Simple' and 'Betsy Thoughtless,' of 'The Virtuous Orphan' and the 'Tales of the Genii,' of 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles Grandison,' or (to cite another admirer, Charles Lamb) of that 'romantic tale'
'Where Glunis and Gawries wear mysterious things,
That serve at once for jackets and for wings,' —
to wit, 'The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins,'
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Coleridge is also extravagant on this theme in his 'Table Talk.' 'If it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high,' he says, 'for Stothard's designs .'
he cares very much indeed. He is not surprised that they gained their designer the friendship of Flaxman; and if he is not able to say with Elia, —
'In several ways distinct you make us feel, —
Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau genteel,' —
epithets which, in our modern acceptation of them, sound singularly ill-chosen, he can at least admit that if his favourite is occasionally a little monotonous and sometimes a little insipid, there are few artists in England in whose performances the un-English gift of grace is so unmistakably present.
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Strangely enough he set little more by this quality, but apparently valued himself more for his 'correctness' ('Bryan Waller Procter,' Bell, 1877, pp. 83-90).
Fifty years ago there were but few specimens of Stothard's works in the Print Room of the British Museum, and even those were not arranged so as to be easily accessible. To-day, this complaint, which Pye makes in that miscellany of unexpected information, his 'Patronage of British Art,' can no longer be renewed. In the huge Balmanno collection, a labour of five-and-twenty years, the student may now study his Stothard to his heart's content. Here is brought together his work of all sorts, his earliest and latest, his strongest and his feeblest, from the first tentative essays he made for the 'Lady's Magazine' and Hervey's 'Naval History' to those final designs, which, aided by the supreme imagination of Turner, did so much to vitalise the finicking and overlaboured blank verse of his faithful but fastidious patron at St. James's Place.
'Of Roger's "Italy," Luttrell relates,
It-would surely be dished, if 'twere not for the plates,'
said the wicked wits of 1830; and the sarcasm has its parallel in the 'Ce poëte se sauve du naufrage de planche en planche,' which the Abbé Galiani applied to Dorât embellished by Marillier and Eisen. But Stothard did many things besides illustrating Samuel Rogers. Almanack heads and spelling-books, spoon-handles and decanter labels, – nothing came amiss to his patient industry. And in his book illustrations he had one incalculable advantage, – he lived in the silver age of line-engraving, the age of the Cooks and Warrens and Heaths and Findens.
Shakespeare and Bunyan, Macpherson and Defoe, Boccaccio and Addison, – most of the older classics passed under his hand. It is the fashion in booksellers' catalogues to vaunt the elaborate volumes he did in later life for the banker poet. But it is not in these, nor his more ambitious efforts, that the true lover of Stothard finds his greatest charm. He is the draughtsman of fancy rather than imagination; and he is moreover better in the mellow copper of his early days than the 'cold steel' of his decline. If you would view your Stothard aright, you must take him as the illustrator of the eighteenth-century novelists, of Richardson, of Fielding, of Sterne, of Goldsmith, where the costume in which he delighted was not too far removed from his own day, and where the literary note was but seldom pitched among the more tumultuous passions. In this semidomestic atmosphere he moves always easily and gracefully. His conversations and interviews, his promenade and garden and tea-table scenes, his child-life with its pretty waywardnesses, his ladies full of sensibility and in charming caps, his men respectful and gallant in their ruffles and silk stockings, – in all these things he is at home. The bulk of his best work in this way is in Harrison's 'Novelist's Magazine,' and in the old double-column edition of the essayists, where it is set off for the most part by the quaint and pretty framework which was then regarded as an indispensable decoration to plates engraved for books. If there be anything else of his which the eclectic (not indiscriminate) collector should secure, it is two of the minor Rogers volumes for which the booksellers care little. One is the 'Pleasures of Memory' of 1802, if only for Heath's excellent engraving of 'Hunt the Slipper;' the other is the same poems of 1810 with Luke Clennell's admirable renderings of the artist's quill-drawings, – renderings to rival which, as almost faultless reproductions of pen-and-ink, we must go right back to Hans Lutzelburger, and Holbein's famous 'Dance of Death.'
There is usually one thing to be found in Stothard's designs which many of his latter-day successors, who seem to care for little except making an effective 'compo,' are often in the habit of neglecting. He is generally fairly loyal to his text, and honestly endeavours to interpret it pictorially. Take, for example, a sketch at random, – the episode of the accident to Count Galiano's baboon in Sharpe's 'Gil Blas.' You need scarcely look at Le Sage; the little picture gives the entire story. There, upon the side of the couch, is the Count in an undress, – effeminate, trembling, almost tearful. Beside him is his wounded favourite, turning plaintively to its agitated master, while the hastily summoned surgeon, his under lip protruded professionally, binds up the injured limb. Around are the servants in various attitudes of sycophantic sympathy. Or take from a mere annual, the 'Forget-me-not' of 1828, this little
genre
picture out of Sterne. Our old friend Corporal Trim is moralizing in the kitchen to the hushed Shandy servants on Master Bobby's death. He has let fall his hat upon the ground, 'as if a heavy lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown of it.' 'Are we not here now,' says Trim, 'and are we not gone! in a moment.' Holding her apron to her eyes, the sympathetic Susannah leans her hand confidingly upon Trim's shoulder; Jonathan the coachman, a mug of ale upon his knee, stares – with dropped chin – at the hat, as if he expected it to do something; Obadiah wonders at Trim; the cook pauses as she lifts the lid of a cauldron at the fire, and the 'foolish fat scullion' – the 'foolish fat scullion' who 'had been all autumn struggling with a dropsy' and is still immortal – looks up inquiringly from the fish-kettle she is scouring on her knees. It is all there; and Stothard has told us all of it that pencil could tell.
In the vestibule at Trafalgar Square is a bust of Stothard by Baily, which gives an excellent idea of the dignified yet deferential old gentleman, who said 'Sir' in speaking to you, like Dr. Johnson, and whose latter days were passed as Librarian of the Royal Academy. Another characteristic likeness is the portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, which was engraved by Scriven in 1833 for Arnold's 'Library of the Arts,' and once belonged to Samuel Rogers. The story of Stothard's life has little memorable but the work that filled and satisfied it. Placid, placable, unpretentious, modestly unsolicitous of advancement, labouring assiduously but cheerfully for miserable wage, he seems to have existed at equipoise, neither exalted nor depressed by the extremes of either fortune. He was an affectionate father and a tender husband; and yet so even-pulsed that on his wedding-day he went as üsual to the drawing-school; and he bore more than one heart-rending bereavement with uncomplaining patience. For nearly forty years he lived contentedly in one house (28, Newman Street) with little change beyond an occasional country excursion, when he would study butterflies for his fairies' wings, or a long walk in the London streets and suburbs, when he would note at every turn some new gesture or some fresh group for his ever-growing storehouse of imagination. It is to this unremitting habit of observation that we owe the extraordinary variety and fecundity of his compositions; to the manner of it also must be traced their occasional executive defects. That no two men will draw from the living model in exactly the same way, is a truism. But the artist, who, neglecting the model almost wholly, draws by preference from his note-book, is like a man who tells a story heard in the past of which he has retained the spirit rather than the details. He will give it the
cachet
of his personal qualities; he will reproduce it with unfettered ease and freedom; but those who afterwards compare it with the original will find to their surprise that the original was not exactly what they had been led to expect. In a case like the present where the artist's mind is so uniformly pure and innocent, so constitutionally gentle and refined, the gain of individuality is far greater than the loss of finish and academic accuracy. If to Stothard's grace and delicacy we add a certain primness of conception, a certain prudery of line, it is difficult not to recognize the fitness of that happy title which was bestowed upon him by the late James Smetham. He is the 'Quaker of Art.'
XVIII. BEWICK'S TAILPIECES
BETWEEN the years 1767 and 1785, travellers going southward to Newcastle along the right bank of the Tyne must frequently have encountered a springy, well-set lad walking, or oftener running, rapidly in the opposite direction. During the whole of that period, which begins with Thomas Bewick's apprenticeship and closes with the deaths of his father and mother, he never ceased to visit regularly the little farm at Cherryburn where he was born.
'Dank and foul, dank and foul,
By the smoky town in its murky cowl,'
is the Tyne at Newcastle, where he lived his working life; but at Ovingham, where he lies buried, and whence you can see the remains of his birthplace, it still flows like the river in the 'Water-Babies,' and one can easily conceive with what an eagerness the country-bred engraver's-apprentice must have turned, in those weekly escapes from the great, gloomy manufacturing city, to the familiar sights and sounds of nature which had filled his boyhood with delight. To his love for these things we are indebted for his best work; it was his intimate acquaintance with them that has kept his memory green; and, even when he was an old man, they prompted some of the most effective passages of those remarkable recollections which, despite their
longueurs et langueurs
, present so graphic a picture of his early life. 'I liked my master,' he says; 'I liked the business; but to part from the country, and to leave all its beauties behind me, with which I had been all my life charmed in an extreme degree, – and in a way I cannot describe, – I can only say my heart was like to break.' And then he goes on to show how vivid still, at a distance of sixty years, was that first scene of separation. 'As we passed away, I inwardly bade farewell to the whinny wilds, to Mickley bank, to the Stob-cross hill, to the water-banks, the woods, and to particular trees and even to the large hollow old elm, which had lain perhaps for centuries past, on the haugh near the ford we were about to pass, and which had sheltered the salmon-fishers, while at work there, from many a bitter blast.'
'Clear and cool,
By laughing shallow, and dreaming pool,'
As an artist on wood, as the reviver of the then disused art of Xylography – a subject hedged round with many delicate and hairsplitting controversies – it is not now necessary to speak of Bewick. Nor need anything be said here of his extraordinary skills – a skill still unrivalled – in delineating those 'beautiful and interesting aerial wanderers of the British Isles,' as he styles them in his old-fashioned language, the birds of his native country. In both of these respects, although he must always be accomplished, he may one day be surpassed. But as regards his vignettes or tailpieces ('tale-pieces' they might be called, since they always tell their story), it is not likely that a second Bewick will arise. They were imitated in his own day; they are imitated still – only to prove once more how rare and exceptional is the peculiarly individual combination that produced them. Some of his own pupils, Luke Clennell, for instance, working under his eye and in his atmosphere, have occasionally trodden hard upon his heels in landscape; others, as Robert Johnson, have caught at times a reflex of his distinctive humour; but, as a rule, a Bewick tailpiece of the best period is a thing
per se
, unapproachable, inimitable, unique; and they have contributed far more – these labours of his play-time – to found his reputation than might be supposed. If you ask a true Bewickian about Bewick, he will begin by dilating upon the markings of the Bittern, the exquisite downy plumage of the Short-eared Owl, the lustrous spring coat of the Starling, the relative and competitive excellences of the Woodcock and the White Grouse; but sooner or later he will wander off unconsciously to the close-packed pathos of the microscopic vignette where the cruel cur is tearing at the worried ewe, whose poor little knock-kneed lamb looks on in trembling terror; or to the patient, melancholy shapes of the black and white horses seen vaguely through the pouring rain in the tailpiece to the Missal Thrush; or to the excellent jest of the cat stealing the hypocrite's supper while he mumbles his long-winded grace. He will tell you how Charles Kingsley, the brave and manly, loved these things; how they fascinated the callow imagination of Charlotte Brontë in her dreary moorland parsonage; how they stirred the delicate insight of the gentle, pure-souled Leslie; and how Ruskin (albeit nothing if not critical) has lavished upon them some of the most royal of his epithets.
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Mr. Ruskin – it may be hinted – expounding the tailpieces solely by the light of his intuitive faculty, has sometimes neglected the well-established traditional interpretations of Bewick's work.
'No Greek work is grander than the angry dog,' he says, referring to a little picture of which an early proof, on the old rag-paper held by collectors to be the only fitting background for a Bewick, now lies before us. A tramp, with his wallet or poke at his side, his tattered trousers corded at the knees, and his head bound with a handkerchief under his shapeless hat, has shambled, in his furtive, sidelong fashion, through the open gates of a park, only to find himself confronted by a watchful and resolute mastiff. He lifts his stick, carved rudely with a bird's head, the minute eye and beak of which are perfectly clear through a magnifying glass, and holds it mechanically with both hands across his body, just as tramps have done immemorially since the days of the Dutchman Jacob Gats, in whose famous 'Emblems' there is an almost similar scene. The dog, which you may entirely cover with a shilling, is magnificent. There is not a line in its body which does not tell. The brindling of the back, the white marking of the neck and chest – to say nothing of the absolute moral superiority of the canine guardian to the cowering interloper – are all conveyed with the strictest economy of stroke. Another tailpiece, to which Ruskin gives the adjective 'superb,' shows a man crossing a river, probably the Tyne. The ice has thawed into dark pools on either side, and snow has fallen on what remains. He has strapped his bundle and stick at his back, and, with the foresight taught of necessity in those bridgeless days, is astride upon a long bough, so that if by any chance the ice gives way, or he plumps into some hidden fissure, he may still have hope of safety. From the bows of the moored ferryboat in the background his dog anxiously watches his progress. When its master is safe across, it will come bounding in his tracks. The desolate stillness of the spot, the bleak, inhospitable look of the snow-clad landscape, are admirably given. But Bewick is capable of even higher things than these. He is capable of suggesting, in these miniature compositions, moments of the keenest excitement, as, for example, in the tailpiece to the Baboon in the second edition of the 'Quadrupeds.' A vicious-looking colt is feeding in a meadow; a little tottering child of two or three plucks at its long tail. The colt's eye is turned backward; its heel is ominously raised; and over the North Country stile in the background a frightened relative comes rushing. The strain of the tiny group is intense; but as the little boy was Bewick's brother, who grew up to be a man, we know that no harm was done. Strangely enough, the incident depicted is not without a hitherto unnoticed parallel. Once, when Hartley Coleridge was a child, he came home with the mark of a horse hoof impressed unmistakably upon his pinafore. Being questioned, he admitted that he had been pulling hairs out of a horse's tail; and his father could only conclude that the animal, with intentional forbearance, had gently pushed him backward.
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Hartley Coleridge grew up to write sympathetically, in his papers entitled 'Ignoramus on the Fine Arts,' of these very tailpieces. In them, he says, Bewick is 'a poet – the silent poet of the waysides and hedges. He unites the accuracy and shrewdness of Crabbo with the homely pathos of Bloomfield.' (Blackwood's Magazine, October, 1831.)
In describing the tailpiece to the Baboon, we omitted to mention one minor detail, significant alike of the artist and his mode of work. The presence of a strayed child in a field of flowers is not, perhaps, a matter which calls urgently for comment. But Bewick leaves nothing unexplained. In the shadow of a thicket to the left of the spectator is the negligent nurse who should have watched over her charge, but who, at this precise moment of time, is wholly engrossed by the attentions of an admirer whose arm is round her waist; Nor is it in those accessories alone which aid the story that Bewick is so careful. His local colouring is scrupulously faithful to nature, and, although not always an actual transcript of it, is invariably marked by that accuracy of invention which, as some one said of Defoe, 'lies like truth.' Nothing in his designs is meaningless. If he draws a tree, its kind is always distinguishable; he tells you the nature of the soil, the time of year, often the direction of the wind. Referring to the 'little, exquisitely finished inch-and-a-half vignette' of the suicide in the 'Birds,' Henry Kingsley (of whom, equally with his brother Charles, it may be said, in the phrase of the latter,
Il sait son Bewick
) notes that the miserable creature has hanged himself 'in the month of June, on an oak bough, stretching over a shallow trout stream, which runs through carboniferous limestone.'
Sero sed serio
is the motto which Bewick has written under the dilapidated, desperate figure, whose dog, even as the dog of Sikes in 'Oliver Twist,' is running nervously backwards and forwards in its efforts to reach its pendent, motionless, strangely silent master. These legends and inscriptions, characteristic of the artist, are often most happily effective. Generally, like the
Justissima Tellus
of the vignette of the ploughman, or the
Grata sume
of the spring at which Bewick himself, on his Scotch tour, is drinking from the 'flipe' of his hat, they simply add to the restful or rural beauty of the scene; but sometimes they supply the needful key to the story. In the tailpiece to the Woodchat, for example, a man lies senseless on the ground. His eyes are closed, and his hat and wig have fallen backward. Is he dead, or in a fit, or simply, drunk? He is drunk. On a stone hard, by is the date '4 June, 1795,' and he has obviously been toasting the nativity of his Majesty George the Third.
But clearness of message, truth to nature, and skill in compressed suggestion are not Bewick's sole good qualities. He does not seem to have known much of Hogarth – perhaps the Juvenalian manner of that great graphic satirist was not entirely to his taste – but he is a humourist to some extent in Hogarth's manner, and, after the fashion of his day, he is a moralist. He delights in queer dilemmas and odd embarrassments. Now it is a miserly fellow who fords a river with his cow to save the bridge toll. The water proves deeper than he expected; the cow, to whose tail he is clinging, rather enjoys it; her master does not. Now it is an old man at a standstill on an obstinate horse. It is raining heavily, and there is a high wind.
He has lost his hat and broken his stick, but he is afraid to get down because he has a basket of excited live fowl on his arm. Occasionally the humour is a little grim, after the true North Country fashion. Such is the case in the tailpiece to the Curlew where a blacksmith (or is it a tanner?) looks on pitiless at the unhappy dog with a kettle dangling at its tail; such, again, in the vignette of the mischievous youngster who leads the blind man into mid-stream. As a moralist, Bewick is never tired of exhibiting the
lachrimo rerum
, the brevity of life, the emptiness of fame. The staved-in, useless boat; the ruined and deserted cottage, with the grass growing at the hearthstone; the ass rubbing itself against the pillar that celebrates the 'glorious victory;' the churchyard, with its rising moon, and its tombstone legend, 'Good Times, bad Times, and all Times got over,' are illustrations of this side of his genius. But the subject is one which could not be exhausted in many papers, for this little gallery is Bewick's 'criticism of life,' and he had seventy-five years' experience. His final effort was a ferryman waiting to carry a coffin from Eltringham to Ovingham; and on his death-bed he was meditating his favourite work. In a lucid moment of his last wanderings he was a