Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2097 page)

— There is an old Latin adage, — ’Vis videri pauper, et pauper es,’ Poor you profess yourself to be, and poor therefore you are, and will remain. The prosperous feel only with the prosperous, and if you subtract from the whole sum of their feeling for all the gratifications of vanity, and all their calculations of
lending to the Lord,
both of which are best answered by conferring the superfluity of their superfluities on advertised and advertisable distress — or on such as are known to be in all respects their inferiors — you will have, I fear, but a scanty remainder. All this is too true; but then, what is that man to do whom no distress can bribe to swindle or deceive; who cannot reply as Theophilus Gibber did to his father Colley Gibber, (who, seeing him in a rich suit of clothes whispered to him as he passed, ‘THE’! THE’! I pity thee!’) ‘Pity me! pity my tailor.’

“Spite of the decided approbation which my plan of delivering lectures has received from several judicious and highly respectable individuals, it is still too histrionic, too much like a retail dealer in instruction and pastime, not to be depressing. If the duty of living were not far more awful to my conscience than life itself is agreeable to my feelings, I should sink under it. But, getting nothing by my publications, which I have not the power of making estimable by the public without loss of self-estimation, what can I do? The few who have won the present age, while they have secured the praise of posterity, — as, Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Southey, Lord Byron, etc., have been in happier circumstances. And lecturing is the only means by which I can enable myself to go on at all with the great philosophical work to which the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years of my life have been devoted. Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings, from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum. Yet sometimes, spite of myself, I cannot help bursting out into the affecting exclamation of our Spenser, (his ‘wine’ and ‘ivy garland’ interpreted as competence and joyous circumstances,)

‘Thou kenn’st not, Percy, how the rhyme should rage!
Oh if my temples were bedewed with wine,
And girt with garlands of wild ivy-twine,
How, I could rear the Muse on stately stage!
And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine,
With queen’d Bellona in her equipage
But ah, my courage cools ere it be warm! * * * ‘

“But God’s will be done. To feel the full force of the Christian religion, it is perhaps necessary, for many tempers, that they should first be made to feel, experimentally, the hollowness of human friendship, the presumptuous emptiness of human hopes. I find more substantial comfort, now, in pious George Herbert’s ‘Temple,’ which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness in short, only to laugh at than in all the poetry, since the poems of Milton. If you have not read Herbert, I can recommend the book to you confidently. The poem entitled ‘The Flower,’ is especially affecting; and, to me, such a phrase as, ‘and relish versing,’ expresses a sincerity, a reality, which I would unwillingly exchange for the more dignified, ‘and once more love the Muse,’ &c. And so, with many other of Herbert’s homely phrases.

“We are all anxious to hear from, and of, our excellent transatlantic friend.* I need not repeat that your company, with or without our friend Leslie, will gratify

“Your sincere,

“S. T. COLERIDGE.”

* Mr. Allston.

During his tour to the North, one of the painter’s objects was to collect materials for a picture he had been desired to paint by the late Sir J. F. Leicester — afterwards Lord de Tabley — to whose liberality and enthusiasm, as a patron of modern Art, too much praise cannot be accorded. On my father’s return to London, his first employment was to commence the execution of this commission to which slight reference has been already made in a note at a former page. The work was to be of the same size as one by Wilson, to which it was to hang as a pendent in Sir John’s Gallery. The compliment to his powers and reputation, implied in this honourable comparison, was deeply felt by Mr. Collins, who laboured on his subject — a landscape with figures — with even more than his usual care and industry, in order to deserve the flattering confidence that had been reposed in his abilities. When his work had made some progress towards completion, Sir John Leicester forwarded his first opinion of it to the painter, in the following letter.

To W. COLLINS, ESQ., A.R.A.

December 6th, 1818.

“Dear Sir, — With the warmest wish for your advancement as an ornament of the British School, and hoping by my frankness, in the present instance, to conduce to your reputation and promote your best interests, I avail myself of my view of the picture yesterday, in its present state, to express my apprehensions that the class of subject which you have selected, although so congenial to your taste and general style, will not enable you to display your genius against so formidable a pendent as the Wilson, to as much advantage as I think you could, on a subject of fewer parts, and more simplicity and breadth in the masses. What strikes me as the feature most likely to operate against you in the comparison is, that his picture has but few objects, and those are largely treated, and the grandeur of his colouring consists in its sobriety and harmony. The landscape which would form a fit companion for his must partake of this magnificent character without servility or imitation.

“I offer these plain thoughts to your better judgment as an artist, with a reliance on your candid allowance. I am confident that your wish is to meet the public favourably, and to give me satisfaction; and you may assure yourself that my most earnest desire is to see your genius fully displayed and fully appreciated. I know you would be concerned were I to suppress what I think, on an occasion where my openness may be for your benefit; and I therefore leave it to your own choice, either to proceed and finish the picture for me, and send it, if you please, to the Exhibition at Somerset House, as it might not fulfil all our expectations opposed to the Wilson in my Gallery; or, as you have ten weeks yet, if you will, (having a compensation for what you have done on the present picture,) begin another with fewer parts and more simplicity, you will no doubt have it finished in time.

“The sketch which I saw and admired yesterday will, I think, with your powers, place you on a much higher ground of competition with Wilson. * * *

“I remain, dear sir,

“Yours truly,

“J. F. LEICESTER.”

To this somewhat perplexing communication for the artist, Mr. Collins thus replied:

“Dec. 16th, 1818.

“Sir, — I know no event of my professional life attended with so unpleasant a result as the one upon which you have written to me this day.

“With the most gentlemanlike regard for my feelings as a man, and a solicitude for my reputation as an artist, you have thrown me into a situation from which I must confess my utter inability to extricate myself, — each of your proposals being so entirely impracticable. That a picture unfit to hang with a Wilson should yet have nothing to fear upon a comparison with the works of living artists at Somerset House, (notwithstanding the very high estimation I feel of Wilson’s powers) is a reflection upon the painters of this day to which I can never subscribe.

“Respecting the other proposal. — When I take the liberty to assure you that my present picture engrossed my thoughts during the whole of my tour in the north; that the principal sketches I made there were done with a reference to this work; that I have already been actually engaged upon it for nearly two months; and that I have also put aside many considerable and lucrative commissions, which it would be highly imprudent longer to neglect, solely for the purpose of availing myself of an opportunity of painting upon a larger scale, I trust you will see the futility of my attempting to complete another picture, either by February, or for some time to come.

“I remain, Sir,

“Your most obedient servant,

“WILLIAM COLLINS.”

Further correspondence and explanations upon this subject ensued, before Sir John Leicester found reason to change his opinion. Ultimately, however — as might be conjectured from the candour, delicacy, and liberality, displayed by the patron, and from the firmness and courtesy preserved by the painter, throughout the correspondence of which the above was the commencement — the picture was placed in the position in the Gallery originally intended for it. The scene of this production (which was never exhibited) is laid in Cumberland. The middle distance is occupied by a mill, peculiar to that country — the stream from which winds smoothly onward, until it dashes out, into the foreground, over rocks, stones and brambles, that intercept it, to the left hand, in its course. To the right, some villagers approach the spectator down a mountain path, over-shaded by a large tree. Around the mill, and partly behind it, the summer foliage waves in thick and various clusters; while beside and beyond it, the open country — lake, plain, and river — stretches smoothly and shadily onward to the far mountains that close the distant view. The sky is at one point charged with showery vapour, at another varied by light, large clouds — tinged at their tips with a soft, mellow light, and floating lazily on the brighter atmosphere whose transparency they partly veil. The tone of colour pervading this picture was pure, deep and harmonious — it was considered by all who saw it to be one of the painter’s most elabourate and successful works.

To the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1819, my father contributed two pictures:- “Portraits of Lords Charles and Thomas Pelham Clinton,” painted for the Duke of Newcastle, and a new sea-piece, painted for the Earl of Liverpool, entitled “Fishermen on the Look Out.” This picture is beautifully engraved by Phelps. It displays, throughout, that bold and successful simplicity, which at once strikes the eye as natural and true. On an eminence in the foreground of the picture, stands a fisherman, with his back to the spectator, looking through his telescope towards the distant horizon. By his side a lad reclines on the ground; and, at his feet sits a dog, looking up inquiringly into his master’s face. The beach stretches beyond, through the rest of the picture, with its native accompaniments of distant figures, and fishing boats, while still further, smooth and brilliant beneath the morning sun, lies the peaceful ocean on which the fisherman’s attention is fixed. In solemn, true, and vigorous
“chiaroscuro”
and in the poetical composition of the sky — in that power of presenting original and faithful combinations of atmosphere and cloud, for which, in Wilkie’s opinion, his friend stood unmatched among his contemporaries — this picture surpasses all its predecessors. The pure harmony of the sky seems to shed an influence of Elysian repose over the rest of the scene, the sentiment of which is at once aided and reflected by the still, contemplative attitudes of the figures, and the deep shadows that appear to steal, at intervals, over the expanse of the distant beach.

As it is a remarkable fact that Mr. Collins’s pictures, from the earliest dates, are still in as perfect a state of preservation, as regards colour and surface, as on the day when they were first painted, an extract from his Diary of 1819, mentioning incidentally a few of the mechanical aids to painting which he then adopted, may not be uninteresting — at least to such readers as happen to be intimately connected with the Arts:

“10th February, 1819. Lost my election at the Academy by one vote; Hilton chosen. Sent home, after having made considerable alterations, the large landscape to Sir John’s Gallery, with a letter containing my sentiments upon this most unhappy commission. 23rd. — Took up my new subject — ’Fishermen on the Look Out,’ which I had previously painted upon during one morning. ‘The Harvest Shower’ has been purchased by Mr. Currie at one hundred guineas. ‘Fishermen on the Look Out,’ is painted entirely in copal, thinned with turpentine, without wax. From 23rd February, to 5th April, painted upon ‘Fishermen on the Look Out;’ I believe in all about thirteen days; also upon the picture of the ‘Twin Sons’ of the Duke of Newcastle, about ten — a few days in October, and many at Clumber. April 5th. — Began the portraits of Master Cecil and Miss Fanny Boothby. 12th. — Began a ‘three-quarter’ of the ‘Fisherman’s Return’ (in linseed oil, boiled with copal varnish — copal varnish in the colours, as a dryer), upon an unprimed cloth.* 13th and 14th. — Finished Mrs. Gurney’s portrait. 15th. — Began a copy of Lord Radstock’s Rembrandt, and a river scene for Mrs. Hand, in copal varnish. 16th. — Went to Coombe Wood to finish the heads in Lady Liverpool’s picture of the ‘Boothby Children.’ 18th. — Returned from Coombe Wood. 19th. — Began a portrait of the Duchess of Newcastle — the face in copalled oil, the other parts in copal varnish. Engaged as above, until 20th May, at which time I had painted about six days, or rather,
times,
upon the Boothby Children, and about sixteen ditto, on the portrait of the Duchess of Newcastle — painting at the Academy, viewing Galleries, and sundry idle days making the balance, ‘Fishermen on the Look Out’ when at the Academy, I rubbed over with copalled oil, which I wiped as nearly off as I could. 8th, 9th, 10th, 18th, and 19th. — Making alterations upon the never-to-be-done-with picture at Sir John’s. Sketch of Boothby Children, begun 29th March. 1st April. — Varnished the whole thickly in copal and finished it in the same.”