The Press. — London, England, 1854-07-29 00:00:00

MEM= :~~ 712 '..1= 1 philanthropy has still much less to boast of than to achieve. When Mrs. Stowe was shown (vol. i., 27) a " ragged school," and found the children " anything but ragged, being tidily " dressed, remarkably clean, with glowing " cheeks and bright eyes," and heard them sing, " I thank the goodness and the grace That on my birth have smiled, And made me in these Christian days A happy English child," and, moreover, found them all familiar with the fortunes of Uncle Tom and Topsy, she must have thought our land peculiarly favoured. She seems never to ha% e penetrated beyond these got-up displays. With her sense of humour, she must have seen some thing to smile at as well as to admire in suJi phases of society as came under her observa tion ; but a feeling of delicacy, perhaps, re strained her from describing more than mere externals. Be this as it may, the book touches not one of our sore places, either in St. James's or St. Giles's : it is silent on our faults and our dangers—it gives us no hint of reproof or warning—and is likely to be less acceptable to our public for its extreme amiability of tone. Her friends must wish that, as this work is issued under her own sanction, she had bestowed a little more care on its preparation. Making every allowance for the " sacred simplicity " of her life in the State of Maine, there are inexcusable mistakes in the book. At the gathering of Stafford•house there were present, she says (i , 290), " Lord Shaftesbury, with his beautiful lady, and her father and mother, Lord and Lady Palmerston." Lady Shaftesbury's father has been dead many years : Lord Palmerston married Lady Cowper, her mother, but that connection cannot con stitute, even in common parlance, a title to her parentage. Lady Constance Grosvenor is said (1., 297) " to be celebrated in the annals of " the Court Journal as one of the handsomest " ladies in England," but what those " annals" are we cannot tell, as we never heard of them before. Abbotsford is stated (i., 135) "to be " the property of Scott's only surviving . " daughter," though Mrs. Stnw'e might surely have learnt from her visit to the plate that there was no daughter of Scott surviving. Abbotsford has descended to Mr. Lock haves daughter, Mrs. Hope. The Earl of Albemarle is said to have " served many years under Wellington ;" but, as the earl ava.= born in 1799, he could only have been sixteen at the battle of Waterloo. His chief service, we believe, has been under Lord John Russell as private secretary. In a notice of Clarkson it is said that his eftbrts were generously aided by " a Mr. Whitbread." She is often even more careless in her language than her facts. Describing the impression made on her by Rubens's " Descent of the Cross," she writes—" I was lifted eifiny.feet as ." much as by Cologne Cathedral, or Niagara " Falls." At Abbotsford, stating her resolve to see Melrose by moonlight. she says—" I " intend to walk the whole .figure while I am " about it: It is a pity that she should use French words she does not understand. Distingtof she employs as a noun. " Arrived " at the hall, we found quite a number of " distinguic—bishops, lords, and clergy, be " sides numbers of others." And the word is used by her in this sense more than once. It is the critic's duty to point out these blemishes, but we arc sorry that the necessity for doing so should exist. Her opinions on poetry are delivered with as much freedom as on art. Scott is one of her favourite authors, yet we are told that a person Christianly-educated can hardly read some of his descriptions in " The Lady of the lake " and " Maranon ' without an emotion of disgust like what is excited by the saute things in Homer. What, then, shall be said of the historioal books of the Old Testament? In the same spirit she asserts that the English literature and poetry of the time of Pope and Dryden betray a stale of association so completely heathenised that an old Greek or Roman raised from the dead could soiree learn from them that any change had taken place in the religion of the world. The " Religio Lahti" of one poet and the " Essay ou Man " of the other, though perhaps repugnant to the tastes of such pietists as Mr. Sherman and Mr. Sturge, are not exactly r~ THE PRESS. heathen in their tone. Whatever may be their faults, they show some advance on the time when the life of a slave was thought of no more value in Rome than it now is in the Carolinas, and a slave might be crucified for licking gravy from a dish. But it is by the freedom of her strictures on paintings that Mrs. Stowe perplexes us most. She arrived here confessedly ignorant of art; she had scarcely ever seen a first rate picture ; yet she supposes herself competent to pro nounce a decided judgment on the works of the greatest masters, and to set aside as of no value the opinions which have been formed on them up to the hour when they caught her eye. Ou her visit to the Dulwich collection she writes : I had a great curiosity to see Claude Lorraine's . . I knew them by a certain misty quality in the atmosphere. I was disappointed in them very much. Certainly they were good paintings. I had nothing to object to them. Pretty well for a first view. The Murillos fare no better : There was a Virgin and Child, with clouds around them. The Virgin was a very pretty girl, such as you may see by the dozen in any boarding school, and the child was a pretty child. Call it the Young Mather and Son, and it. is a very pretty picture; but call it Mary and the Infant Jesus, and it is as utter failure. We do not understand why Mrs. Stowe should call Mary " a Jewish princess," or why she should desire a representation of her in that character. Mrs. Stowe's notion of painting is, that it should always excite some violent emotion in the mind—that it, is nothing if it has not power to " lift her off her feet" : As to Vandyke, though evidently a fine painter, he is one whose mind does not move me. He adds nothing to my stock of thought—awakens no emotions. . . Ruhens, on the contrary, whose pictures I detested with all the energy of my soul, I knew, and all the time by the very pain he gave me,to be a real living artist. In another place Vandyke is called " a true "court painter —a master of splendid conven " tionalities." Considering how much she ex pected, we can scarcely wonder at her disap pointment. In Lord Ellesmere's gallery there were four Raffaelles, the first I had ever seen. Must I confess the truth Raffaelle had been my dream for years. I expected something which would overcome and bewilder me. I expected a divine baptism, a celestial mesmerism ; and I found four very beautiful pictures — pictures which left me quite in possession of my senses, and at liberty to ask myself am 1 pleased, and how much? It was not that I did not admire, fur 1 did; but that I did not admire enough. In the Louvre there were Raffselles which still disappointed me, be cause from Raffaelle I asked and expected more. I wished to feel his hand on my soul with a stronger grasp ; these were too passionless in their serenity and almost effemi nate in their tenderness. She is not to be satisfied unless a painter can give her such a romping as a country lass expects in a hayfield : But Rubens—the great, joyous, full-souled, all.powerful Rubene ! there he was, full as ever of triumphant abounding life ; disgusting and pleasing ; making me laugh and making me angry; defying me to dislike him ; drag ging me at his chariot wheels; in despite of my protests, forcing me to confess there was no other but he. If it was the object of painting to raise all this storm and tumult in the mind, it would be little worthy of the cultivation it has received. Mrs. Stowe mistakes the true purpose of art, which is less to excite than to refine, soften, and elevate the soul. Her raw rapture and crude censure are equally false. It is too often overlooked that the finest performances of art require some degree of education for the discernment of their beauties, and it would be strange if they did not; as there were required for their achievement—in the first place, the finest natural genius; then long instruction and continued study and practice ; and, lastly, the combination of the inventive genius and the acquired skill, — working harmoniously together, when, from some peculiar circumstances, the mind was stimulated to throw forth its happiest concep tions. And how is it to be supposed that a totally uneducated or very partially educated taste, that, for example, of a lady leading a retired life in the State of Maine, could at once discern those beauties which were thus slowly revealed to the artist himself ? The cant criticism on art has now reached that point at which it may reasonably be hoped that it will receive some check from its own SATURDAY, excess Wo strongly advise all such amateurs as Mrs. Stowe to keep their opinions to them selves, as an ostentatious display of ignorance on art is surely not less offensive thou a dis play of ignorance on any other subject. The "journal," which occupies part of the second volume, is from the pen of the Rev. C. Beecher we are told. It was a mistake to admit it, as it is an exaggeration or caricature of Mrs. Stowe's most ccnspicuous demerits. It may possibly find some admirers on the other side of the Atlantic, but here it can only expose the writer to ridicule. In walking through the gay Tuileries and boulevards he opines that under all this there lie, as under the cultivated crust of this fair world, deep abysses of soul, where volcanic masses of molten lava surge and shake the tremulous earth. We must enter a vtrong protest against the language in which this reverend gentleman thinks it becoming to express his rapture at his first view of the Alps. Here is a speci men : Higher and still higher, those apocalyptic splendours seemed lifting their spectral, spiritual forms, seeming to rise as we rose, seeming to start like giants hidden trout behind the black brow of intervening ranges, opening wider the amphitheatre of glory, until, as we reached the highest point in our road, the whole unearthly vision stood revealed in sublime perspective. The language of the Revelations came rushing through my soul. This is, as it were, a door opened in heaven. Here are some of those everlasting mountain ranges, whose light is not of the sun, nor of the moon, but of the Lord God and of the Lamb. Here is, as it were, a great white throne, on which One might sit before whose face heaven and earth might flee ; and here a sea of glass mingled with fire. Again : Wednesday morning, June 20.—The day is intensely hot; the weather is exceedingly fair, but Mont Blanc is not visible. Not a vestige—not a truce. All vanished. It does not seem possible. There do not seem to exist the conditions for such celestial pageant to have stood there. What! there—where my eyes now looked steadily and piercingly into the blue, into the seemingly fathomless azure—there, will they tell me, I saw that enraptured vision, as it were, the city descending from God out of heaven, as a bride adorned for her husband? Incredible f. It must be a dream, a vision of the night. We suppose this gentleman is to be con sidered sane, but we must confess we should feel very uncomfortable were we travelling in a railway-carriage with any person who expressed himself after a. similar fashion. We have dwelt longer than we intended on the faults of this book, and now gladly turn to portions we can conscientiously approve. Mrs. Stowe gives some pleasing descriptions of natural objects, and a few of her earlier letters admirably express those distinctive features of our rural scenery which struck her most from their euntrast with the vegetation of the New World, In excuse of her de fects, it is to be remembered that she had but two months to stay among us, but that period was certainly well employed. Landing in Liverpool early in April, she set off for Scotland after a few days' rest, attended great anti slavery meetings at Glasgow and Edin burgh, and paid a visit to Abbotsford. The moonlight visit to Melrose suggests a delicate illustration of Scott's adherence to nature in his verse : In the daytime we had criticised Walter Scott's moor.- light description in the lines which say,— " The distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave." " We hear nothing of the Tweed, at any rate," said we ; " that must be a poetic licence." But now at midnight, as we walked silently through the mouldering aisles, the brawl of the Tweed was so distinctly heard that it seemed as if it was close by the old, lonely pile : nor can any term describe the sound more exactly than the word " rave" which the poet has chosen. It was the precise accuracy of this little item of description which made me feel as if Scott must have been here in the night. On her route southwards she stopped at Birmingham to visit Stratford-on-Avon and Kenilworth. There is some agreeable reading in her description of Shakspeare's birthplace, though she scarcely seems to " realise —to use one of her favourite words—the poet's character and genius, and sure y does him injustice in likening him to Rubens. Elizabeth is with her merely " a belligerent old Gorgon," and " a most repulsive and disagreeable " woman." From quiet Stratford she plunges into the tumults of London society. Her narrative of what she did and what she saw, superficial as it is, will no doubt be eagerly read. The description of Stafford-house is well written, and conveys a good idea of the