TILE 1TNCATALOG1TED PICTURE.
AFTER visiting the exhibition of the Royal Academy this year, few persons can have failed to be struck by a picture which seizes the mind under a resistless spell, and yet remains in itself vague, as though it were not one but all the pictures, or a memory of many. Perhaps it should be sought among the miniatures, which are becoming the true works of high and mystic art; and yet to the memory it expands to proportions fit for Michelangelo. The ghastly sense which thepicture leaves on the soul is attended by a not less ghastly loss of memory as to its identity or place on the walls. Certainly it is not in the Catalogue, at least not under its own burning name : and yet who can forget it; and yet again, who can find it?
Although we conjecture to have seen it among the miniatures,
the memory of it is that of a large canvass, containing the e of a man in the middle of life—such as might find himse in strange woods and crooked ways ; and yet has he the appearance of a man of the world, a scholar and a gentleman ; a statesman in his robe-de-chambre ; a decorous man, who takes life easily, imper- turbable; a man of middle courses, master of those above not less than of those below him. It is a mild face, philosophical, passion- less' reserved, self-possessed, self-guarding. It must be a man of the dominant class, yet modest—a master-servant. Surely—no ! Can it be some gentleman in black, or is it only some commissioner ?
When Lord John Russell attained his success in ousting Peel for no object except one which was falsified in the sequel, did he not make some unhallowed bargain with a Spirit of Mischief ? Too many signs of such a compact crowd upon the mind; but none is more remarkable than the otherwise unaccountable doom which steadily condemned his Cabinet to destruction without any ap- parent cause extraneous to itself. It was a doomed Ministry. Its destiny was, to repeat professions until they palled upon the ear, but never to put those professions into act. It led a life that was a public nightmare. The next Ministry entered office under the fairest promises ; many of its members were of high descent and undoubted chivalry ; its cause was national, long sustained in the shades of Opposition, now culminating to victory. But no sooner was the Ministry in office than its chivalry turned craven, spontaneously craven; its professions were belied, spontaneously belied, reasserted, and be- lied again, but not for a moment attempted in act ; its promises burst like bubbles before the waterfall. Without a foe, without a danger, it is sinking to destruction, pining away in political decline, from the mere inability to live. It also is evidently a doomed Ministry. Three sacrifices does every Spirit of Mischief demand, and yet another Ministry is to be doomed. The next statesman " sent for " knows his fate.
The undiscoverable picture that glares upon the startled visitor, who looks for the "portrait of a gentleman "—the dread picture painted by a doomed artist in a doomed style—is no other than the revolting portrait of that daemon which has mastered the destiny of two Cabinets and of the one yet to come : it is the daemon that haunts the public offices—the daemon of Cant. " You'll find it, my boy," as Incledon used to say of the sacred authority that in- terlarded his profane discourse, " You'll find it, my boy, in any part of the Bible." So you will find the picture in almost any collection, or anywhere in this last; and "the sitter" himself is in many a place, in many a commission. The Spirit of Officialism has been sitting to the Spirit of Portrait-painting : for ever will he sit and she paint on, until both are exorcised. But statecraft still lacks its Prce-Raphaelite struggle to emancipation—has yet other sacrifices to make to its daemon.
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