NEW BOOKS.
B: OG rny....The Life and Correspondence of)
Sir Thomas Lawrence, Kt. Byi 2 Vols.
D. E. Williams, Esq. the Life and Writings of Henry Fused, Esq. M.A.R.A. Written .rola. Ditto. and Edited by John Knowles, '
F.R.S Colburn and Bentley.
FUSELI—LAWRENCE.
THE biographies of these two great painters appear about the same time ; there were a few years difference in the date of their deaths—many of their births. When LAWRENCE was a mere child, and his father was exhibiting his little prodigy at his inn, the Black Bear, at Devizes, to all comers, FUSELI was a man full of knowledge, charged with ancient literature, his mind teeming with invention, and had had experience in his native country of Switzerland, and in Germany. LAWRENCE lived to be sixty-one; FUSELI, of' hardy mountain breed, died at the age of eighty-five, with vigour but little impaired, and faculties none. No two men in this world were evermore different than FUSEL! and LAWRENCE: both were absolutely pre-eminent—they had not an equal in Europe—they excelled in the same art ; and yet we defy the minutest observer to detect the slightest trait of resem- blance between them. In the quality of their work, in the order of their invention, in their line of life, in their manner, temper, persons, and tastes, they were wholly dissimilar,—and yet both painters, both members of the same academy, intimate, and mu- tually respecting each other's gifts. LAWRENCE was a prodigy, and turned to the arts before he could read ; FUSEL! was a scholar before he was a painter, and only took them up after a career of literature. The father of LAWRENCE gloried in his son's early at- tempts, and soon openly lived upon them. The father of Fusin.' forbade him to touch a pencil, and it was only by stealth that he practised the rudiments of drawing. Little LAWRENCE drew first in crayons, but he was soon steeped in oils; whereas FUSELI did not touch an oil before he was five-and-twenty ; and while LAW- RENCE was perhaps one of the first colourists that ever lived, FUSEL! never even learned to mix his'eolours. He never set a pa- lette like other artists : sometimes he mixed the oil with spirits of turpentine, and sometimes he did not—he put on his colours almost by accident, and before the oil and the pigment had united. LAWRENCE lived all his life copying the human countenance ; FUSELI abandoned humanity, and scarcely ever introduced any thing into his pictures under a supernatural being. While the President of the Academy was occupied in throwing a grace be- yond mortality into the features of the fashionable world, the Pro- fessor of Painting was summoning Pandsemonium, the world of spirits, or the ideal forms of antiquity, to the celebration of some grand event entirely beyond the limits of a common imagination to understand, and within the powers only of a very high inventive faculty to conceive. While LAWRENCE kept crowned heads wait- ing upon his pencil, FUSELI communed only with the spirits of air and the monarchs of a world of fancy. LAWRENCE threw the godhead into man, and FUSELI drew down the creatures of other spheres within the ken of mortal imagination. A grace inimit- able was the characteristic of every thing LAWRENCE did ; while energy and supernatural vigour, moral power, and stern philo- sophy, were impressed upon every stroke of FUSELI'S pencil. FUSELI was an ideal painter ; LAWRENCE was an intellectual one. But although LAWRENCE painted nothing but portraits, he was not merely a portrait-painter,—he was a man of genius whose practice lay that way ; the two historical pictures he .painted, proved that he would have equally excelled in that as in any other depart- ment on which his taste had been exercised ; just as FUSELI'S two portraits—the only two he painted, one of Dr. PRIESTLEY and ano- ther of a lady—showed that it was no want of power which had kept him from the most lucrative department of art. But LAW- RENCE, brought up by a needy parent, and called upon to support his family by the exertion of his talents from his earliest years, was necessarily driven to money-making ; and he lived all his life
gaining great sums and spending greaser, not on himself; not on the gratification of the senses, not on any passion for splendour or dis- tinction—but on his art and on artists and his friends. He was not
content to be a on) would also be a MECMNAS. FUSEL1, on the contrary, horn and bred in a hardy and frugal country, where the circulating medium is but imperfectly known, never looked to it but as the means of satisfying immediate wants. He as little thought of giving as of taking money : his enjoyment was in the cultivation of his own refined tastes ; with his HOMER or his DANTE he lived in a world far removed above sovereigns and their coinage. All he knew of wealth was, that he must do with- out it and caring nothing about money itself; he eschewed its re- presentative, credit. It frequently happens that they who receive the most money have the most debt, but FUSELI was as ignorant of the negative as the positive side of the account. LAWRENCE, with the income of a prince, lived all his life in difficulties. He was but the receiver of his revenue, and kept bad accounts ; he began life wrongly, and they alone who have dt.ne so know how difficult it is to begin afresh. had LAWRENCE lived till lie was a century old, and continued to gain more and more, he would have continued getting poorer and poorer. Yet with all his difficulties he was a perfectly honourable and upright man : he had not the stoic self-denial of FUSEL', but he had a virtue of too fine a tem- per to permit any one to suffer by his irregularity: Fuszet was a republican ; LAWRENCE was a courtier, in an age of the most thorough refinement; and yet both were sincere men. LAWRENCE was as little of a hypocrite as FUSELI ; none can accuse the former of ever having deceived them, while the latter never concealed his opinions; but LAWRENCE was remarkable for the mildness and sweetness of his speech, while FUSELeS caustic severity moulded his censure into the form of epigrams. FUSELI was eloquent, energetic, and imaginative ; LAWRENCE was persua- sive, insinuating, and rational. Flamm spoke several of the lan- guages of Europe with fluency and power, but. each as a foreigner (his native tongue was a patois of German) ; while LAWRENCE knew no tongue but his own. Of that, however, he was a perfect master : in conversation his phrases fell from him like honey-dew ; his words were elegant, appropriate, and seemed as if fitted tose- flier by the very deity of speech; when he read, it was like the voice of an angel—it was music—an air ; and to hear him recite,. a fantasia—the listener seemed to fancy that he had never understood the passage before. The memory of each of these artists was alike remarkable ; but FUSELI'S was stored with antiquarian learning, with the knottiest points of the classics, with the scenes and senti- ments of the highest moral tone in all the chief authors of modern Europe. LAWRENCE, on the other hand, had had his heart im- pressed with the most felicitous and beautiful images in a few of the classics of his own tongue ; and they were always ready on his lips when the occasion demanded, and were never produced out of season. FUSEL! might have been a pedant if he had not been a man of genius ; LAWRENCE had too much hereditary elegance of taste ever to commit a breach against the nicest regulations of society. FusELr was a preacher in his youth, but his mind was of far too discursive a cast to permit him to remain a Swiss curate : but had fortune ever led LAWRENCE towards the church, lie would not have diverged intothe arts—he would have been a bishop, probably a primate. His lawn sleeves would have graced a court, his beautiful reading have drawn tears and bank-notes from charitable auditors—his fine form, his noble countenance, his mild but intellectual expression of face, his graceful dignity and gentlemanly ease, would have ad- mirably become the episcopal throne of Canterbury or York. Had FUSELI remained in the church, he might have frightened genera- tions upon generations into a terrific admission of his dogmas ; his flashing wit, his fertile imagination, his energy and learning, would have made a formidable controversialist ; but he had none of the meekness of Christianity, little of its tolerant spirit—his eagle eye and authoritative tone might have confounded, but they never would have persuaded: It LAWRENCE might have painted to his hearers the ecstatic bliss of heaven, there is no doubt that FUSELI couki have given a flaming description of the pains of hell.
Neither FUSELI nor LAWRENCE have left descendants. The former was married, the latter was not. The faine of neither has passed without challenge on the fatal subject of woman. The inti- macy of FUSEL' and MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT will, however, bear inquiry. Poor MARY conceived a philosophical passion fort he most erudite of painters ; and conceived that though Mrs. FUSELI had a right to his person, she, by congeniality of sentiment, was, or might become, the lawful claimant of his mind : site therefore meditated an ideal match, and had the simplicity to propose to Mrs. FUSELI to be- come an inmate of the same house, avowing that she could no longer bear to exist without the perpetual enjoyment of his con- versation. FUSELI had previously used every argument of reason to convince her of the folly and impracticability of her views. Mrs. FUSELI used a more summary mode of conviction, and turned her out of the house. MARY set off to France, in despair of the fruition she had fondly dreamed of securing over Mrs. FUSELfS tea and toast. Her intellectual charms were reserved for Mr. GODWIN ; and how far the views of MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT were purely ideal, may be detected in the consideration of her priagina- live offspring : had Mrs. Fume' been passive, and FUSELI less of a Scipio or other self-denying Roman, a finer result of a pure Plat onic can hardly be conceived than the authoress of Frankenstein. No man was ever more wooed than LAWRENCE, and it is to be believed that his trials were more arduous than those of FUSELI. A philosophical sloven, openly declaring a furious intellectual pas- sion, may be withstood by one who might succumb befcre the luxurious charms of youth and beauty, animated by hope, and heightened by all the delusions oft ank, fashion, talent, and fintune. LAWRENCE is accused of having been a male coquet ; his defence is, that he won a lady's heart before he knew what lie was about: his manner was so gentle, his voice so low, his tones so tender and so sweet, his little attentions so winning and so graceful, his air so devoted, so concentrated, that the pour moth was consumed to ashes before she was aware that the light which shone so steadily shone thus for all her sex.
But LAWRENCE was not merely a male coquet—he was a jilt— in one sad and fatal transaction at least. The story is thus told by his biographer. " Sir Thomas had carried his attentions to an exemplary young lady so far, that it required, on her part, the utmost magnanimity and hiehest exertion of fortitude and generosity, to subdue her f( clings, when lee de- eland himself the warn and admirer of her sister. The painful sacrifice was magnanimously' by the sister, and the courtship of the other proceeded to the time expected for the settlement of the day of marriage. The parent of the lady bad agreed to relieve Mr. Lawrence of all his pecu- niary embarrassments, when his wayward fancy too palpably reverted to his first attachment. He was, of necessity, for bidden further intercourse with the family, or at least with that branch of it. The pure, the excellent and beautiful girl' sunk into the grave, with wounded pride and broken spirits, the unsullied and deplored victim of his caprice. She was allied to a family more celebrated than any extant for talents of a peculiar de- scription, and was the daughter of a lady whose genius in her high pro •
fession was probably never equalled, and who with that genius combined a beauty and a physical perfection that created a union which hope can never expect again to see realized.
" Sir Thomas Lawrence was probably the more to be pitied of the two. From the day of her death to that of his own, he wore mourning, and always used black sealingwax. Uncontrollable fits of melancholy came over him ; and he mentioned not her name but to his most confidential friend, and then always with tenderness and respect. I do not mean to justify,' writes a mutual friend, ' what occurred, but still those who knew Sir Thomas as well as we did, might find much to palliate, and much to pity in the story.' "—Vol. II. pp. 98, 99. It is probable that this unfortunate event did more than give ad- ditional pallor to his fine countenance, and clothe in perpetual black his letters and his limbs : there is an elevation and chasteness in all the private thoughts, habits, and correspondence of this man of ge- fins, that perhaps took its rise from the pure sources of affliction. Amidst all his success—the triumphs of his art—we cannot detect the slightest emotion of vanity, the feeblest symptom of intoxica- - tion. Envy was a stranger to his breast ; his tolerance, charity, and long-suffering, were alike remarkable. He seemed to live with a chastened spirit. Nevertheless, his liaisons have been not unfrequently a subject of remark, and one with Mrs. WOLFF, for instance, a subject of scandal,—most unjustly so, however. A purer or more estimable person perhaps never existed, than this lady ; an attachment more refined or better founded than LAWRENCE'S, cannot he imagined; it was not sanctified by marriage, neither did it ever transgress the limits of the strictest propriety. Gross minds conceive that two persons of different sexes cannot maintain for each other a virtuous preference without offending against the regulations of society and the laws of morality. If they doubted be- fore, the present instance might satisfy them; and it was not the only friendship of the kind which LAWRENCE was blessed in. Mrs. WOLFF was separated from her husband, Mr. WOLFF, the Danish Consul— a circumstance which, perhaps, encouraged the scandalmongers in their odious office. Mrs. Wou.srolvEcamer, in her passion for FUSELI, was her own dupe; she admired him, and she habitually despised the received morality : her attachment was, as far as she knew, unmixed with 'passion, but there were no restraints upon her proceedings, had she found herself mistaken in that point. The friendship of LAWRENCE and Mrs. WOLFF might have had a basis in human feelings, but they were both by far too scrupulous respecters of the laws of decorum ever to be suspected of violating them.
In each of these biographies a copious use is made of corre- spondence. The letters of both these great men are characteristic of their respective qualities, but neither of the two excels in epistolary composition. FUSELI is too terse and epigrammatic, and LAW- RENCE wants that play of fancy and command of style which give the charm to letters. Still they are valuable, for their senti- ments, for their information, and for t he elevated views and pure thoughts and noble designs contained in several of them. All the letters of LAWRENCE, written to the ANGERSTEINS and their con- nexions, Mrs. BOUCHERETTE, and the Willingham family, are full of amiable feelings very beautifully expressed, and carry on the his- • tory of one of the purest and most honourable friendships ever maintained between an artist and the patrons of art. LAWRENCE had this fine quality—that he ennobled his profession : he did not disdain his brethren in the profession, like FUSELI, who said, after talking with them, "I feel humbled, as if I were one of them ;" but, by heading he raised the character of the whole body. The very Sovereigns at Aix-la-Chapelle paid court to him ; they treated with him. ALEXANDER inserted the pegs of his easel, and even FRANCIS put on a smile of benevolence when the aristocratic-looking representative of English art was pre- sented to him. The Pope was affectionate to him ; and his famous minister, Gorrsaevr, entreated his friendship. On the other hand, LAWRENCE knew himself and his position—one arrogant thought or look never escaped him ; and if ALEXAN- DER performed a menial office for him, he placed it not to his own greatness, but to the Emperor's condescension. But if LAWRENCE was sensitively alive to the distinctions of rank, FUSELI stood upon the equality of man—the nobility of genius. Nobody ever neglected him with impunity : he stung them with an epigram, or turned his back in scorn. Like most shy men, he was proud ; for shyness, so often mistaken for humility, is a common sign of self-estimation. FUSELI overvalued himself, and undervalued every body else. LAWRENCE, though fully acquainted with the extent of his own claims, was destitute of pride ; and if he honoured himself some- what, it was a sort of deference to his own excellence in the art he worshipped. If these men were exactly equal in any thing, it was in their reverence for this art, of which they were unrivalled and unrivalling professors : their devotion to it was extreme, their ideas of it in the highest degree noble and elevated : but FUSELI chiefly acknowledged the signs of it in the inventions of his own 'genius, and in the models presented to him in the writings of the classics ; while LAWRENCE sought them in the remains of his pre- decessors of all time. We never hear of FUSELI'S portfolio containing any other drawings than his own ; while LAWRENCE spent large sums in collecting the ideas, the designs, finished and unfinished, as well as the perfect works, of the great excellers in his own art.
A name entitled to rank with those of FUSELI and LAWRENCE, and who, though greatly differing from each, is equal to either, is FLAXMAN. The world of intellectual art in which he lived lost him about the same time.
The attention we have paid to these two Lives will show that they contain a great deal of interesting materials for thought and obser- vation. The Life of LAWRENCE is a collection of facts and papers which might have been put together with more taste and judg- ment : we should, however, have trembled to place them in the hands of Mr. CAMPBELL, to whom they were intrusted in the first instance for the purpose of writing the Life ; for though we should have had a very superior biography, we should have had very dimi- nished means of forming a full idea of the subject. The Life of FUSELI is accompanied by his Lectures and some other works, edited by his old and steady friend Mr. KNOWLES: we could not have wished the task confided to more judicious or more friendly care.
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