thing for such an age as this. We are a different race altogether from the men of old time we live in drawing-rooms instead of deserts, and work by the light of chandeliers instead of volcanoes. I have been perfectly prostrated these two or three days back by my first acquaintance with Tintoret; but then I feel as if I had got introduced to a being from a planet a million of miles nearer the sun, not to a mere earthly painter. As for our little bits of R. A.'s calling themselves painters, it ought to be stopped directly. One might make a mosaic of R. A.'s, perhaps, with a good magnifyingglass, big enough for Tintoret to stand with one leg upon if he balanced himself like a gondolier. I thought the mischief was chiefly confined to the architecture here, but Tintoret is going quite as fast; the Emperor of Austria is his George Robins. disgusting in large ones. I never hear one word of genuine feeling issue from any one's mouth but yours and the two Richmonds'; and if it did, I don't be lieve the public of the present day would understand it. It is not the love of fresco that we want: it is the love of God and his creatures; it is humility, and charity, and self-denial, and fasting, and prayer; it is a total change of character. We want more faith and less reasoning, less strength and more trust. You neither want walls, nor plaster, nor colors, - ça ne fait rien à l'affaire; it is Giotto and Ghirlandaio and Angelico that you want, and that you will and must want until this disgusting nineteenth century has I can't say breathed, but steamed its last. You want a serious love of art in the people and a faithful love of art in the artist, not a desire to be R. A. and to dine with the Queen; and you want something like decent teaching in the Academy itself, good training of the thoughts, not of the fingers, and good inpouring of knowledge, not of knocks. Never tell, or think to tell, your lank, cockney, leaden-headed pupil what great art is, but make a great man of him and he'll find out. And a pretty way, by the bye, Mr. Eastlake takes to teach our British pub- I am glad to hear that the subjects for lic a love of the right thing, going and our frescoes are to be selected from pobuying a disgusting, rubbishy, good-for- ets instead of historians; but I don't jike nothing, bad-for-everything Rubens and the selection of poets. I think in a ra two brutal Guidos, when we have n't got tional work one ought not to allow any a Perugino to bless ourselves with! But appearance of acknowledgment of irreliit don't matter, not a straw's balance. I gious principle, and we ought to select see what the world is coming to. We those poets chiefly who have best illustratshall put it into a chain armor of railroad, ed English character, or have contributed and then everybody will go everywhere to form the prevailing tones of the Engevery day, until every place is like every lish mind. Byron and Shelley I think other place; and then when they are tired inadmissible. I should substitute Wordsof changing stations and police they will worth and Keats or Coleridge, and put congregate in knots in great cities, which Scott instead of Pope, whom one does n't will consist of club-houses, coffee-houses, want with Dryden. I think The Ancient and newspaper offices; the churches will Mariner would afford the highest and be turned into assembly rooms; and peo- most imaginative method of touching on ple will eat, sleep, and gamble to their England's sea character. From Wordsgraves. worth you get her pastoral and patriIt is n't of any use to try and do any- archal character; from Scott her chival I went to the Scuola di San Rocco the other day, in heavy rain, and found the floor half under water, from large pools from droppings through the pictures on the ceiling, the ceiling, not through the sides or mouldings, but the pictures themselves. They won't take care of them, nor sell them, nor let anybody take care of them. resque ; I don't know what you would get from either Dryden or Pope, but I suppose you must have one of them. However, anything is better than history, the most insipid of subjects. One often talks of historical painting, but I mean religious always, for how often does one see a picture of history worth a straw? I declare I cannot at this instant think of any one historical work that ever interested me. I beg your pardon very much for this hurried sulky scrawl; but conceive how little one is fit for when one finds them covering the marble palaces with stucco and painting them in stripes! Allow me again to thank you exceedingly for your kind letter and to express my delight at the good news it contains, and believe me, with compliments to Mrs. Severn, Ever most truly yours, J. RUSKIN. It In a short article which appeared recently, it was asserted that, with all his good qualities, Severn was singularly lacking in common sense. The writer could have known little of Severn, and still less of his correspondence. A remarkably acute and straightforward common sense was, as it happens, one of his most characteristic traits. Scores of his letters, from youth to old age, might be selected to bear out this counter-assertion, but a single one will suffice. is taken from his correspondence with his friend Uwins, and was written in his thirty-third year, a time when, though by temperament and habit youthful in aspect and tastes to a remarkable degree, his character was developed. Thomas Uwins was his elder by about ten years, and, like himself, began his art life as an engraver's apprentice. In 1824 he went to Italy, and stayed there till 1831. He gained his position both as an Associate and Royal Academician as a painter in water-colors; nevertheless, when, in 1850, he began to paint in oils, it was with marked success. He was elected surveyor of the Queen's pictures in 1845, and two years later was appointed keeper of the National Gallery. One of his best works in watercolors is The Hay Harvest, now in the South Kensington Museum, and in oils The Vintage in the Claret Vineyards, in the Dundee Gallery. After some preliminaries Severn proceeds: — I think it is a most important defect in any one to be entirely without vanity, because there is nothing brings out and applies so well all the inner man. I mean all the grasping and achieving comes of this; for, you see, a man with this feels his own importance (he overfeels it, but what of that?), and tries. grand things and succeeds, when another may have the greatest talents, but nothing to bring them out. I know you will call this by some fine name, as laudable ambition, aspiring virtue, and so forth; but, as the preacher says, "all is vanity" at bottom, so we will be honest and let it stand as vanity. The Germans are a people making little figure and doing little good in the world, on this account. They have the highest talents and morals, but pursue their intellectual aims only as solitary pleasures, and so society is nothing the better for them. Then your English, who have the vanity to seek perpetual notice, are always benefiting the world with useful intuitions or innocent pleasures, and all this with but a small part of the talent of the Germans. When a man underrates himself he blunts his talents and minces his steps in life; and, on the contrary, if he overrates, although it may make his manners displeasing at the moment, yet if there is genuine talent in his matter he will sink into that at last, with his first presumption modified into something useful or pleasing. Such a man as for instance, would never have done anything but from his vanity; his talents are very mediocre, but he has humbugged himself into the same high notion of his genius with which he has humbugged others, and produced works of some stamp, whereas his energy is all he has. Now I would contrast you with him. You have the finest talents, and even advantages of gentlemanlike accomplishments, but withal such a shameful way of underrating your self that I always doubt if you have ever truly exercised your powers to their true extent in anything; nor can you while you have not the vanity of an aim. I can well remember the days (some three or four years back) when I thought myself a very poor creature; but yet I was too vain to tell it to all, and my little vanity kept up a show, even in abortions, and even lost more than putting my shoulder to the wheel; and now I have persuaded myself into my fancied capability, like one who, loving an untruth and telling it oft, makes such a sinner of his memory as to credit his own lie. Here lies the mystery: you will consider yourself the "wax taper," and not the gaslight, when you can say that you have turned on your gas to the full. Now all this means that you should undertake a work to the full extent of your power; not a great ugly mess, but something dictated by your own feeling of beauty and splendor. Let us have some of your magnificent Neapolitan background, with equally magnificent groups upon it, only one picture as a trial, and then you'll see. I must tell you that I don't quite estimate your praises about my talent in painting, since you judge so ill of your own for a true taste would also extend to the judging its own productions, or how do they come forth? Now take up your brush and answer all this, and prove me right, and truly your friend and admirer, J. SEVERN. The following letters are not only readable in themselves, but are further inter esting as coming from so distinguished a man as Seymour Kirkup. He was for long the most notable English resident in Florence, and even in earlier days ranked only second to Walter Savage Landor, with whom and the Brownings and many others, from first to last, he was intimate. He was a painter of singular delicacy, and as a student of art was as thorough and conscientious as his lifelong friend Charles Eastlake. In his later years he devoted much time to literary studies, and in particular to occult problems and speculations. No doubt he is best known to the present generation as the discoverer of the now famous youthful portrait of Dante, -a discovery for which, as he tells us in one of these letters, he was created a baron (count?) of the Italian kingdom. These letters may be read as representative examples of his long-continued correspondence with Severn. The second was written after an interval of a year's silence on the part of Severn, which was broken at last by a letter narrating the circumstances of Mrs. Severn's death, in April, 1862. Late in the fifties Kirkup turned his attention to Spiritualism, and erelong became a confirmned believer in the actuality of spiritualistic phenomena. The Miss Ironsides to whom he alludes as a medium was a young American artist of great promise, whose early death prevented her making a name as a painter, like Kirkup's "old friend William Blake," or as a more conventional illustrator of " worn-out Bible subjects." It is strange to learn that, in the early part of our century, not only William Blake, but Flaxman, Fuseli, and even artists such as Stothard and Varley, were looked upon as in some degree mad. scribed his great picture to me with admiration and equal ignorance. The subject was a bad one, a collection of portraits of old painters, taken, as you say, from prints, all the schools, the English represented by an infant. This dauber of brick dust and pewter, without drawing, presumed in his ignorance to despise such giants compared to him as Reynolds, Opie, Stothard, West, Lawrence, Fuseli, Turner, Flaxman, etc., etc., ignorance and vanity. As for his imitation of the ancients, he should have looked at the works of Giotto here for color, and he would not have abounded in such detestable lead-color as I have seen. In fact, he has only copied the defects of the old time, namely, hardness, meagreness, and sameness. Nay, he may look at the Florentine M. Angelo in the Sistine, and he will see effects of color worthy of Venice, — the Jerome, Daniel, Zechariah, Sibyls, etc. You say he is devout to the political church. So is many a solemn ass and many a Jesuitic knave. What is your Gothic or Christian treatment of The Marriage? What would you call that of Paul Veronese? Neither, but the princely magnificence and worldly splendor of Venice, eclipsing even the story itself. Wealth, luxury, palaces, concerts, and a blaze of color, so fine in its way as to make the subject commonplace, and leave it beyond the reach of any follower. You have no chance, nor Miss Ironsides, who is all wrong, and has mistaken her vocation. Scripture subjects are worn out. They make no impression, like old-fashioned music or sermons. The public sleep over them, like the bedstead of Baucis that was turned into pews, "Which still their old employment keep The Venetians sacrificed their Christianity, if they had any, to worldly magnificence. That fine picture of Bonifazio, Dives and Lazarus, is another example of it. Lazarus is disgusting, and therefore eclipsed by the prevailing wealth of Dives pervading all the scene, but The Marriage at Cana has one contradiction beyond this. Here is a wedding dinner of poor country people, so poor that even the wine falls short. Then think of the scene of Paul Veronese! An absurdity, but such execution conquers all. Who can hope to surpass that? I do not like sacred subjects in general, nor costume painters. David was a failure, but the classic is not exhausted by him. There is still a field open drawing from nature, with the help of the antique, and color like Titian's. Our Bacchus and Ariadne and the Spanish Sleeping Ariadne are the models of a new school, which somebody will find out. We are too old. There are other specimens and hints even in Rome (the Borghese). Etty might have done much if he had hit on it, or Haydon. A combination of great talents in those two elements, and then a genius of imagination worthy of the rest. Who can bear to think of the poor child's-play of the solemn Mr. Overbeck, and you, coming from England, and I suppose Paris! But I am in the dark about them in the present day. I fear they are wofully gone down. Eastlake had better have stuck to his palette than the study of after-dinner speechifying! Detestable! By the bye, they said that you had been favored by him at the expense of Haydon in the affair of the cartoons. Take care 66 of yourself. You talk a new Jerusalem of art, and speak of breathing in company of its immortal spirits." Now, real Spiritualism is a science that requires the greatest exercise of reason. You are afraid of being carried off your feet. I hate the cant about art and artists, So-and-So's art and my art, artistic gossip of art and artists, and early art and primitive art, etc., etc. I never called myself an artist. I said painter at once. I had rather have added "glazier" than "artist." All the tea-drinking old maids were full of their pretty artists, and all the little drawing-masters, daubers, and parasites of art were full of the name, while "the great" were always sneering at it. One told me he had a clever artist traveling with him. It was his cook. A lady bestowed the title on her hairdresser. It is not that I care for such classification, for I am very democratic; but I am sick of the vulgar cant, and find that others are so too. So if you publish anything avoid it. The word is prostituted and blackballed. Your "pergola is better than columns [that is, in the composition of Severn's picture of The Marriage at Cana], and your idea of the water in the act of changing is new, but I fear it is not enough to be "the making of it," even if it can be done, which is difficult. I have a drawing of Miss Ironsides' of an angel and a child which she saw in a crystal of mine. It is not much, but it is enough to prove that she has the faculty, a rare one, and more valuable than worn-out Bible pictures! I have some wonderful and curious drawings of visions. I have only wished to succeed, myself, as has been done in America, but I have not the power; I have only that of bringing it out in others. I know no one to carry books to Rome. They won't do it, they are afraid; and I have lost so many books that I have lent, or commissions sent, that I have long refused, and have a paper pasted in my library many years ago to say so. I am a collector, and have many thousand. I have a hundred and more of Dante, and seven manuscripts of his; many on our English Round Table, in all languages; a great many on occult sciences, literature, antiquities, painting, etc. They amuse me more than painting. Yours sincerely, S. KIRKUP. V. FROM THE SAME. FLORENCE, April 12, 1863. MY DEAR SEVERN, Your sad news is the history of a great affliction, and I condole with you most sincerely. I suppose the illness must have been a long one for a landlord to claim so large an indemnity. Time is the great consoler, and your children. Have you none of them with you? Your continual occupation is now a benefit, if it is not too much for your health. That is the first thing. All the benevolence that you are engaged in will be a comfort to you. I supposed you were too busy to be able to write. You must have an immense deal to do in your present difficult and unusual station, and more than unusual; it is what has never happened till now. You say the Roman finances are tottering to a close. What will be the consequence? Will there be a great number of innocent and ignorant people ruined by a national bankruptcy? Will it affect the finances of the kingdom of Italy? I have put all the money I could raise into these funds to provide for my little Italian daughter, and they give a good interest, about double what the English funds afford. I found an old letter of yours of forty years ago. The handwriting is the same as now, and so are the thoughts. Strange it is, for your whole carcass has been renewed thirteen times in that period. I look on that as a greater sign of the immortality of the soul than all the nonsense of an old Jewish book of forgeries and falsifications. But I have more positive proofs than either. You should see the life of my friend Daniel Home, just published. Books are no proof, for they lie as much as living men; but I know that a part of that book is true. If you had the means of knowing the truth that Home has, I make no doubt you would see, hear, and feel with joy that your poor wife is often with you. A satisfaction of that sort I have often had, and it continues. |