Thackeray as an Art-Critic

AMONG Thackeray’s very earliest writings — when his droll pseudonym, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, was little known, and before Yellowplush or Fitzboodle had gained celebrity in the pages of Punch — are some art-criticisms as characteristic of his genius as Vanity Fair or the Newcomes. Most of them were originally published anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine, sandwiched between essays by Carlyle and Homeric Ballads by Magnin and other famous compositions of famous men. To say that these criticisms show an amazing fondness for art is only to say what every reader of the Newcomes or the Paris Sketch-Book might expect. How could any but a lover of art paint in words such a character as J. J. Ridley ? Who but a wit, as well as an artlover, could invent so droll a name as Michael Angelo Titmarsh, with its sudden descent from the sublime to the ridiculous ?

These criticisms of Thackeray have all the freshness and vigor, as well as much of the peculiarity of style, of his later writings. They show, also, a vein of exaggerated merriment, which he afterward suppressed. His true nature is best revealed in the quiet and delicate humor and satire which abound in Vanity Fair, Pendennis, and his other novels. That evening at Vauxhall Gardens, for instance, where Joseph Sedley indulges in too much rock-punch and sentiment, — if Thackeray had yielded to the impulse which sometimes controls him in these art-criticisms, the scene might have been made more rollicking; but it would have lost half the fidelity which now marks it as unequaled among the descriptions of English tipsiness. David Copperfield’s first dissipation, good as that is, is broad burlesque in comparison.

In June, 1838, the first of his artcriticisms appears. Thackeray was then twenty-seven years old. He had seen much of life in various countries : at Weimar, where he enjoyed the society of Goethe ; at Rome, with Ingres, the French painter ; and at Paris, among all sorts of people. His first intention was to become a painter. It is doubtful if he would ever have succeeded as an artist. He had all the artist’s imagination, and some skill in sketching and in caricaturing; but his drawing was deficient in finish and faulty in perspective. He copied some of the most celebrated pictures at Paris and Rome ; but, after all, it was rather for enjoyment than as a serious business. At that time his means were ample. When, afterward, it came to working for a livelihood, literature, not art, was his chosen medium for addressing the world. His hand was not equal to the execution of the scenes in which his imagination reveled. Beyond sketches — of which hundreds are found scattered through the books he read — and the illustration of some of his own novels and stories, none of his art-work is known to exist. Yet there is a freedom and power in some of these which more than makes up for their other evident defects. Who would miss the striking individuality of his representations — such, for instance, as Miss Swartz Rehearsing for the Drawing-Room, or Mr. Osborne’s Welcome to Amelia — for any amount of technical skill and superiority ?

Perhaps the earlier part of Clive Newcome’s career is a fair representation of his own : that half-jocose, halfearnest playing at art, which never makes an artist. Yet such study as in his youth he gave to painting he afterward turned to better uses in literature. The satirical saying that the critics are those who have failed in their profession does not apply to Thackeray. Never was more kindly, or generous, or appreciative critic of painters. If there was any excellence in a picture, he was sure at least to try to find it; and if he could not say anything good, he said nothing. He never learned to wield the bludgeon or the broadsword. His whole spirit is helpful and encouraging to every kind of merit. Nowhere can one find an expression of his concerning a picture which is not good-tempered, honest, and frank. His own failure did not sour him, nor awaken any jealousy toward others more successful. His sense of justice told him the verdict was a correct one. His own generosity of spirit made him glad to recognize their success, however he might deplore his own lack of it.

His first published essay on art matters is under the rhythmical title, Strictures on Pictures. It is in the form of a letter from Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh, and bears date, with all that particularity which distinguishes the correspondence of Englishmen, “ Lord’s Hotel, New Street, Covent Garden, Tuesday, 15th May, 1838.” It is addressed with equal minuteness of detail to “ Monsieur Anatole Isidor Hyacinthe Achille Hereuse de Bricabrac, Peintre d’Histoire, Rue Mouffetard, à Paris.” It gives an elaborate account of the paintings exhibited in London, in the spring of 1838, in the three picture galleries of that city. It is full of the warm enthusiasm with which he always rejoiced to recognize merit in his contemporaries, and the bright humor and satire with which he always equally rejoiced to attack pretension. His anger is roused by the place of exhibition. The Royal Academy Exhibition is held “ in one wing of a little building like a ginshop.” He is so impressed with this that he repeats the same comment the next year. He then goes on : “ Thanks to your (the French) government patronage, your magnificent public galleries, and above all your delicious sky and sunshine, there is not a scavenger in your nation who has not a feeling for the beauty of nature, which is neither more nor less than art.” This love of the beauty of nature is the very key-note of all Thackeray’s writings about art. Without that, art and art-criticism are impossible.

He then proceeds with a lavish hand to bestow honors upon the artists who seem to him to deserve them. As royalty and the peerage are the greatest distinctions to which, in England, a human being can aspire, he raises his favorites to the very highest grades. Mulready is placed on the throne, a king ; Maclise becomes a Prince of the Blood ; then Baron Briggs ; Edwin, Earl of Landseer ; Lord Charles Landseer ; the Duke of Etty ; Archbishop Eastlake, and a long list of knights. Having bestowed these honors, he tells us why. Of Mulready’s Seven Ages he says, “ I can’t say much for the drawing, for here and there are queer-looking limbs ; but the intention is godlike.” (And it is because of this godlike intention that he is made king.) He then goes on : “ Not one of these figures but has a grace and soul of its own. No conventional copies of stony antique ; no distorted caricature like that of your classigues, the impostors ; but such expression as a great poet would draw, who thinks profoundly and truly, and never forgets (he could n’t if he would) grace and beauty withal.” After this subtle and thoughtful analysis — expressed so simply that it seems as though it thought itself out, unconsciously — he passes to Eastlake, whom he has consecrated archbishop, “ because,” he says, “ there is a certain purity and religious feeling in all he does which eminently entitles him to the honors of the prelacy.” It is almost with reverence that he speaks of his pictures ; two of which — one a portrait of Miss Bury, “ not a simple woman, but a glorified saint,” the other Saint Sebastian — “ would merit to hang in a gallery where there are only Raffaelles besides.”

While on the subject of religious pictures, he does not hesitate to express very heretical opinions about Titian and Rubens. “ I have heard a pious pupil of Mr. Ingres ” (doubtless himself) “ aver stoutly that, in matters of art, Titian was antichrist, and Rubens Martin Luther. They came with their brilliant colors and dashing worldly notions, upsetting that beautiful system of faith in which art had lived hitherto. Portraits of saints and martyrs, with pure eyes turned heavenward, and (as all true sanctity will) making those pure who came within their reach, now gave way to wicked likenesses of men of blood, or dangerous, devilish, sensual portraits of tempting women. Before Titian, a picture was a labor of years. . . . He drove the good angels away from the painters’ easels, and called down a sort of voluptuous spirits instead, who have ever since held the mastery at Rome. . . . Only a few artists of our country have kept the true faith. Mr. Eastlake is one of these.”

This criticism, whether well or ill founded, is certainly very ingenious and profound. It goes to the foundation of the essential canons of criticisms, all of which demand sincerity and elevation of spirit. He is not silenced, nor misled to indiscriminate praise, by the glamour of a great name. He gives his opinion, and the reasons for it, on the works of the very demigods of the artistic world as frankly and clearly as he does on those of the struggling, unknown tyro.

After Eastlake comes the Earl of Landseer. He can paint all manner of birds and beasts as no other man can. “But I don’t think he understands how to paint the great beast, man, quite as well ; or, at least, to do what is the highest quality of an artist, — to place a soul under the ribs as he draws them.” Of Leslie he says : “ He is the only man who can translate Shakespeare into form and color.” Severn’s picture of the Crusaders comes next : Godfrey and Tancred and Peter and the rest “ look like little wooden dolls. As for the horses belonging to the crusading cavalry, I have seen better in gingerbread. But what then ? There is a higher ingredient in beauty than mere form. A skillful hand is only the second artistical quality, — worthless without the first, which is a great heart.” Maclise’s Christmas touches a tender spot. “ I wish you could see the wonderful accuracy with which all these pigmies are drawn, and the extraordinary skill with which the artist has arranged to throw into a hundred different faces a hundred different characters and individualities of joy. Every one of these little people is smiling; but each has his own peculiar smile. As for the coloring of the picture, it is, between ourselves, atrocious ; but a man cannot have all the merits at once. Mr. Maclise has, for his share, humor such as few painters ever possessed, and a power of drawing such as never was possessed by any other, — no, not one, from Albert Dürer down.”

Etty is a duke ; his picture is the Prodigal Son. “ There are some figures,” says Thackeray, “ without a rag to cover them which look modest and decent for all that ; and others, which may be clothed to the chin, and yet not fit for modest eyes to gaze on.” He then describes the prodigal, — tempted, overcome, riotous, wasteful, till at last, with the loss of everything, comes misery, and then repentance. “It is a grand and touching picture, and looks as large as though the three-foot canvas had been twenty.” The visions conjured up by this picture are then portrayed : the loneliness, shame, sorrow, humiliation, on one side ; the tender-hearted love and yearning on the other, as none but Thackeray can describe such scenes and emotions. “ What a world of thought,” he exclaims, “ can be conjured up out of a few inches of painted canvas ! ”

The one thing observable in these notices is the keen analytic sense that never fails the writer ; the clearness with which he marks the distinction between the various modes in which genius manifests itself, and the quickness and fondness with which he seizes on whatever is excellent or lovely, and holds it up to admiration. Is not this the highest merit in art-criticism — to discern the dominant idea of the artist, and to tell it in words, as the artist has done in colors ? Whoever reads these criticisms sees at once, if he has any imagination, or any artistic fancy, exactly what Thackeray would have him see, as well as what was in the artist’s mind when he painted the picture. There is, too, a nobleness of soul and the truest manliness in conferring upon painters the honors which, in England, had always been reserved for warriors chiefly, or for lawyers ; for men of action and of affairs, not for men of sentiment and idealism. It is a sort of prophecy of a new departure, since partially fulfilled in the elevation of England’s greatest poet to the peerage, and one which the world may yet see realized.

The next year, 1839, Mr. Titmarsh once more makes the round of the galleries, and again gives his impressions in another letter to his friend M. Bricabrac, this time dating from “ Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead.” This letter is even more vivacious than the previous one. His attention is first attracted by Turner’s picture the Fighting Temeraire, “as grand a painting as ever figured on the walls of any academy, or came from the easel of any painter.” This was written before Mr. Ruskin’s enthusiastic praises of Turner had been published, and it is as strong commendation as any to be found in Mr. Ruskin’s elaborate works. But Thackeray is not blind to Turner’s faults, and declares that there is much in his paintings that is incomprehensible. “ O ye gods, why will he not stick to Nature, —copying her majestical countenance, instead of daubing it with some absurd antics and fards of his own ? ” Again we have the keynote : nature is supreme, the one great pattern whose mysteries the painter, as well as the poet and the man of science, must try to solve and exhibit, not confuse and obscure. If nature is not equal to an artist’s highest aspirations, what is ? Where can he turn, if not to this living fountain of beauty and grace and delight ?

Wilkie’s Grace before Meat is pronounced exquisite ; so powerful is its effect that the words with which Thackeray describes it become rhythmical : “ The eye loves to repose on this picture, and the heart to brood over it afterward. . . . When lines and colors come to be translated into sounds, this picture, I have no doubt, will turn out to be a sweet and touching hymn tune, with rude notes of cheerful voices, and peal of soft melodious organ, such as one hears stealing over the meadows on sunshiny Sabbath days, while waves under the cloudless sky the peaceful, golden corn.” Eastlake, the archbishop, again comes up for notice, the subject being Our Lord and Little Children. “ It gives a feeling of exquisite pleasure and content. Such pictures come straight to the heart, and all criticism and calculation vanish at once.” Evidently, Mr. Titmarsh has his favorites, as have all bestowers of reward and punishment. Among those whom he delights to honor are Leslie and Maclise. Their paintings have a humor to which his own is akin. Maclise is as different from Leslie “ as whiskey from rich Burgundy.” Leslie’s painted men and women “do not laugh themselves; they make you laugh, and there is where the esteemed American artist beats the dashing young Irish one.” Through several pages of description and comment, he brings before his readers the chief characteristics of the best pictures in the London galleries. It is pleasant reading, and the ancient pages of Fraser glow to-day, as they did nearly fifty years ago, with the fires of this bright, witty, kindly criticism.

In the same year in which this article appears is a description of art-work and art-life in Paris by Mr. Titmarsh. The chief part of it may now be found in the pages of the Paris Sketch-Book. It shows that Thackeray found as much delight in the society and the doings of the French artists as of the English, if not more. Where can one read a more graphic delineation of artistic Bohemia than in these letters ? “ The life of the young artist here is the easiest, merriest, dirtiest, existing, possible. He arrives, most likely, at sixteen from the province; his parents settle forty pounds a year on him, and pay his master ; he establishes himself in the Pays Latin or in the new Quartier of Notre Dame de Lorette, which is quite peopled with painters ; he arrives at his atelier at a tolerably early hour, and labors among a score of companions as merry and poor as himself. Each gentleman has his favorite tobacco pipe, and the pictures are painted in the midst of a dim cloud of smoke and a din of puns and choice French slang, and a roar of choruses, of which no one can form an idea that has not been present at such an assembly.” Then follows an account of the mode of life of these “ young men of genius,” and of the estimation in which they hold themselves and are held by the “ sober citizen.” “ From the height of their poverty they look down upon him with the greatest imaginable scorn,— a scorn, I think, by which the citizen seems dazzled, for his respect for the arts is intense.”

Out of such surroundings and by such training have been developed the abilities of Vernet, Delaroche, Delacroix, and numberless other noted French painters. Thackeray contrasts the homage paid to the artists, and the means placed at their disposal, in France and in England, greatly to the disparagement of the latter. “ Here they live in a luxury which surpasses all others, and spend their days in a palace which all the money of all the Rothschilds could not buy. They sleep, perhaps, in a garret, and dine in a cellar ; but no grandee in Europe has such a drawing-room. Kings’ houses have, at best, but damask hangings and gilt cornices. What are these to a wall covered with canvas by Paul Veronese, or a hundred yards of Rubens ? Artists from England, who have a national gallery that resembles a moderate sized gin-shop, who may not copy pictures except under particular restrictions and on rare and particular days, may revel here to their hearts’ content. Here is a room half a mile long, with as many windows as Aladdin’s palace, open from sunrise till evening, and free to all manners and all varieties of study. The only puzzle to the student is to select the one he shall begin upon, and keep his eyes away from the rest.”

If with such surroundings and under such stimulus French painters do not attain great skill and develop genius, the fault is in themselves, not in their stars. In his comments on their shortcomings and the causes, Thackeray again expresses the same principles which have already been referred to. He here shows as keen insight into the laws and nature of art as, in his novels, he does into human nature and the operations of the human soul. How fondly he lingers in the society of these struggling, careless, free - and - easy, happy - go - lucky, young fellows, frank, undisciplined, audacious, full of boundless faith in themselves and their future, yet, withal, not devoid of a certain modesty and veneration for their superiors ! He is not for a moment led away from the truth of nature by any of the great achievements of famous painters whose names are household words, and whose merits are recognized by decorations and titles. “ At the Ecole Royale des Beaux Arts you see two or three hundred specimens of their performances ; all the prize men since 1750, I think, being bound to leave here their prize sketch or picture. . . . The hundreds of French samples are, I think, not very satisfactory. The subjects are almost all what are called classical : Orestes pursued by every variety of Furies, numbers of wolf - sucking Romuluses, Hectors and Andromaches in a complication of parting embraces, etc.; for it was the absurd maxim of our forefathers that because these subjects had been the fashion twenty centuries ago, they must remain so in sæcula sæculorum ; because to these lofty heights giants had scaled, behold, the race of pigmies must get upon stilts and jump at them likewise ; and on the canvas and in the theatre the French frogs (excuse the pleasantry) were instructed to swell out and bellow as much as possible like bulls. What was the consequence ? In trying to make themselves into bulls, the frogs made themselves into jackasses, as might be expected. For one hundred and ten years the classical humbug oppressed the nation ; and you may see, in this gallery of the Beaux Arts, seventy years’ specimens of the dullness which it engendered. As Nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too ; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches. It is the study of Nature, surely, that profits us, and not of these imitations of her. . . . Because certain mighty men of old could make heroical statues and plays, must we not be told that there is no other beauty but classical beauty ? Must not every little whipster of a French poet chalk you out plays, Henriades, and such like, and vow that here was the real thing, the undeniable Kalon ? The undeniable fiddlestick ! ”

Throughout these sketches of French art and artists, which introduce us so intimately to their mode of life and make us all at home with them, there runs a deep vein of tender feeling, which shows how thoroughly Thackeray is imbued with the love both of art and of nature. His judgment is not coerced by great names ; his criticisms are not swayed by any temporary fashion or prevailing style of composition. He always brings every work into comparison with the everlasting law of nature and beauty. “ For a hundred years,” he says, “the world was humbugged by the so-called classical artists ; and it is curious to look at the pictorial traditions as here handed down. The consequence is that scarce one of the classical pictures exhibited is worth much more than two and sixpence. . . . Why is the classical reign to endure ? . . . In the same school of the Beaux Arts, where are to be found such a number of pale imitations of the antique, Monsieur Thiers (and he ought to be thanked for it) has caused to be placed a full-sized copy of the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, and a number of casts from statues by the same splendid hand. There is the sublime, if you please, — a new sublime, an original sublime, quite as sublime as the Greek sublime. See yonder, in the midst of his angels, the Judge of the world descending in glory ; and near him, beautiful and gentle, and yet indescribably august and pure, the Virgin by his side. There is the Moses, the grandest figure that ever was carved in stone. It has about it something frightfully majestic, if one may so speak. In examining this and the astonishing picture of the Judgment, or even a single picture of it, the spectator’s sense amounts almost to pain. I would not like to be left alone in a room with the Moses. How did the artist live among them and create them ? How did he suffer the painful labor of invention ? One fancies that he would have been scorched up, like Semele, by sights too tremendous for his vision to bear. One cannot imagine him with our small physical endowments and weaknesses, a man like ourselves.” . . . “ The only good the Academy has done by its pupils was to send them to Rome, where they might learn better things. At home, the intolerable, stupid classicalities taught by men who, belonging to the least erudite country in Europe, were themselves, from their profession, the least learned among their countrymen, only weighed the pupils down, and cramped their eyes, their hands, and their imaginations, — drove them away from natural beauty, which, thank God, is fresh and attainable by us all, to-day and yesterday, and to-morrow, and sent them rambling after artificial grace, without the proper means of judging or attaining it.”

In such a vein — of mingled admiration and satire — Thackeray goes through the whole series of pictures in the Luxembourg and the Louvre, giving, in clear and simple style, the effects of the pictures upon himself and his reasons for the impressions they produce. Appreciating the apparent and undeniable abilities of the French artists, he cannot resist the impulse to puncture the air-blown figures which belong to the heroic — to him mock-heroic — classical school ; “ as if no man could be a great poet unless he wrote a very big poem.” The tendency to celebrate tragic deaths is also duly condemned. “ It is a part of the scheme — the bloated, unnatural, stilted, spouting, sham sublime — that our teachers have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble servant and other anti-humbuggists should heartily, according to the strength that is in them, endeavor to pull down.”

These criticisms were written nearly fifty years ago. Since then, a great change — the change hoped for, and whose beginnings, indeed, were discerned by Thackeray — has come over French art. But the principles which he insists on are as important and as true now as then. Everywhere and always he pleads for sincerity, naturalness, truthfulness in art ; not, indeed, with the analysis and the rhetoric of Ruskin, but with equal directness and no less emphasis.

Indeed, to understand and appreciate Thackeray at the full, one must read his art-criticisms and study his illustrations, as well as read his novels, his sketchbooks, and his satires. While he never sacrifices what he believes to be the truth in his criticisms, he has only kind and encouraging words for the artist who faithfully and honestly strives to depict some natural scene, or person, or emotion. In his attacks on the French school, it is not against individual artists and their methods, but the system of which they are the unconscious victims, that he discharges the arrows of his satire. Every evidence of excellence he gladly recognizes. See with what generous words he speaks of Delacroix, of Delaroche, of Vernet, — of all those who love nature, and who paint with sincerity and fidelity. What he demands is that the artist shall see with his own eyes, and tell in his own style what he sees ; and that he shall not look through the distorted glasses of some classicist, and imitate the stilted or false style which has tyrannized over art and thought for so many years.

Thackeray recognizes that the decay of this classical school has already begun, and his method of accounting for it is characteristic. “ Jacques Louis David,” he says, in 1838 or 1839, “ is dead. He died about a year after his bodily demise, in 1825. The romanticism killed him. Walter Scott, from his castle of Abbotsford, sent out a troop of gallant young Scotch adventurers, merry outlaws, valiant knights, and savage Highlanders, who, with trunk, hosen, and buff jerkins, did challenge, combat, and overcome the heroes and demi-gods of Greece and Rome. Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert has borne Hector of Troy clear out of his saddle. Andromache may weep ; but her spouse is beyond the reach of physic. See ! Robin Hood twangs his bow, and the heathen gods fly howling. Down goes Ajax under the mace of Dunois ; and yonder are Leonidas and Romulus, begging their lives of Rob Roy Macgregor. Classicism is dead. Sir John Froissart has taken Dr. Lempriére by the nose, and reigns sovereign.”

These extracts do more than show Thackeray’s qualities as an art-critic : they give us an insight into the man ; they exhibit his thoroughly independent way of looking at works of art ; they show, also, a simplicity and clearness of style which belongs to all genuine art-criticism when the critic knows what he wants to say and is sure of his ground. It is not meant to assert that Thackeray’s judgment on art-matters is infallible, or that it is always sound. But it is his own ; it is the clear, strong judgment of a clear-eyed man who has had his eyes open. It is also more than that : it is the opinion of a highly poetic and imaginative nature, deeply moved by the sight of any great and noble painting or statue. All his writings show the same qualities of mind and heart whenever the occasion arises. He loves to linger in such places and among such scenes. In all his sketch-books of travel, whenever he visits a church or a gallery, we have some little touch which shows how fondly he regards a beautiful picture. Thus in his Little Travels and Road - Side Sketches, there are numerous references to the pictures and statuary one sees in the churches and galleries in Belgium. “ The picture to see here (in the museum at Brussels) is a portrait, by the great Peter Paul, of one of the governesses of the Netherlands. It is just the finest portrait that ever was seen. Only a half-length ; but such a majesty, such a force, such a splendor, such a simplicity, about it! The woman is in a stiff black dress, with a ruff, and a few pearls ; a yellow curtain is behind her, — the simplest arrangement that can be conceived. But this great man knew how to rise to his occasion ; and no better proof can be shown of what a fine gentleman he was than this his homage to the vice-queen. A common bungler would have painted her in her best clothes, with crown and sceptre, just as our queen has been painted by -; but comparisons are odious. Here stands this majestic woman in her everyday working dress of black satin, looking your hat off, as it were. Another portrait of the same personage hangs elsewhere in the gallery, and it is curious to observe the difference between the two, and see how a man of genius paints a portrait, and how a common limner executes it.”

Down to the time when the publication of Vanity Fair placed Thackeray at the head of English novel-writers, he continued occasionally to contribute artcriticisms to Fraser’s Magazine. Some of them have since been republished in his collected works ; others can be read only by referring to the pages of that magazine for the years 18411845. In 1850 he furnished the letter-press for a series of engravings undertaken by M. Louis Marvy, a French artist whom Thackeray had known in Paris in his younger days, now an exile, and driven to engraving for a livelihood. They are reproductions — rather poor ones — on steel of the works of such painters as Turner, Cattermole, Constable, Cox, Gainsborough, Roberts, Stanfield, and others. It is no exaggeration to say that the chief merit of the work, certainly at this day, is that part done by Thackeray. Whether M. Marvy was unequal to the task he had undertaken, or whether the art of steel - engraving at that time was at a low ebb, it is certain that most of the lithographs of the present day have greater artistic merit and are finer compositions. Thackeray, however, did what he could to secure their success. In every one of his comments is some characteristic sentence or sentiment. In speaking of Turner, he says, “ It is not given to all to understand ; but at times we have glimpses of comprehension, and in looking at such pictures as the Fighting Temeraire or the Slave Ship, we admire (and can find no words adequate to express our wonder) the stupendous skill and genius of this astonishing master. . . . Turner shows sublimity for the whole continent; and, when satiated with that, rest in more quiet scenes by our glens, shores, and mountains. His works seem to give him the very foremost place of the landscape artists, — epic works, so to speak ; the greatest in aim, the greatest in art, the greatest in truth to nature. . . . Admiring the early and comprehensible works of this painter is like admiring the early works of Swedenborg, and saying that he was a man of vast science and a skilled mathematician. He was all this, but his disciples only know how much besides.”

It is to be borne in mind that all these criticisms were written when Thackeray was obscure and unknown, — under a nom de plume. They therefore show, even more than his later and acknowledged works, the real bent of his genius and the unrepressed feelings of his heart. One hardly knows what most to wonder at, — the manly and heartfelt sentiment so freely shown in every line, or the keenness and independence of intellect that so clearly discriminates between the lower and the higher, the pagan and the Christian, in the great works of art which have been the admiration of all ages.

Ephraim Young.