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

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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