They are strong in homeliness and ugliness, weak in their efforts at the
beautiful. Sir Thomas Lawrence attains a sort of grace, which you feel
to be a trick, and therefore get disgusted with it. Reynolds is not
quite genuine, though certainly he has produced some noble and beautiful
heads. But Hogarth is the only English painter, except in the landscape
department; there are no others who interpret life to me at all, unless
it be some of the modern Pre-Raphaelites. Pretty village scenes of
common life,--pleasant domestic passages, with a touch of easy humor in
them,--little pathoses and fancynesses, are abundant enough; and Wilkie,
to be sure, has done more than this, though not a great deal more. His
merit lies, not in a high aim, but in accomplishing his aim so perfectly.
It is unaccountable that the English painters' achievements should be so
much inferior to those of the English poets, who have really elevated the
human mind; but, to be sure, painting has only become an English art
subsequently to the epochs of the greatest poets, and since the beginning
of the last century, during which England had no poets. I respect Haydon
more than I once did, not for his pictures, they being detestable to see,
but for his heroic rejection of whatever his countrymen and he himself
could really do, and his bitter resolve to achieve something higher,--
failing in which, he died.
No doubt I am doing vast injustice to a great many gifted men in what I
have here written,--as, for instance, Copley, who certainly has painted a
slain man to the life; and to a crowd of landscape-painters, who have
made wonderful reproductions of little English streams and shrubbery, and
cottage doors and country lanes.
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