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Something piquant was needed to arouse him; the mild ecstasies of common connoisseurship hardly appeal to a young man between life and death. He met the friends to whom he had brought introductions Mr. Joseph Severn, who had been Keats' companion, and was afterwards to be the genial Consul at Rome, and the two Messrs.
Lady Findon, indeed, had been away, nursing an invalid father; Madame de Pastourelles filled her place. The old fellow would talk freely politics, connoisseurship, art. Fenwick too was allowed his head, and said his say; though always surrounded and sometimes chafing under that discipline of good society which is its only or its best justification.
The King, with his thorough connoisseurship and fine taste, my father, and the other famous judges, how much more keenly they would perceive and define it!" Here she hesitated, for the blood had left Hermon's cheeks, and she saw with surprise the deep impression which the candid expression of her opinion had produced upon the artist, usually so independent and disposed to contradiction.
Thus all the world is pleased; the old proverb is justified, that it is an ill wind which blows nobody good; the amateur, from looking bilious and sulky, by too close an attention to virtue, begins to pick up his crumbs, and general hilarity prevails. Virtue has had her day; and henceforward, Vertu and Connoisseurship have leave to provide for themselves.
"'Ow do you mean paying you for your advice?" "Paying a valuer, then, if you won't accept his valuation." So unwilling was he to admit the sharpness of his father's practice that he tried to persuade himself that they had merely disagreed on a point of connoisseurship. "My advice, if you remember, was to withdraw decently, or pay a decent price."
He had held it for an incredible time. He let it go, and sighed a gentle and profound relief. He had been skating over the thinnest ice, and had reached the bank amid terrific crackings, and he began to appreciate the extent of the peril braved. He had been perfectly sure of his connoisseurship.
The scruples and terrors of the evening were gone. His intelligence rose to his task. This old man, already ill, liable at any moment to the accidents of age, and still madly absorbed, to the full extent of his powers and his time, in the pursuits of connoisseurship what could he really do in the way of effective supervision of his agent?
"Have you seen it, Lady Cecilia?" continued he; "it is beautiful; the birds seem to be absolutely coming out of the picture;" and he was going on with some of his connoisseurship, and telling of his mortification in having missed the purchase of that picture; but Warmsley got back to the hawking he had seen, and he became absolutely eloquent in describing the sport.
What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on Art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about color, style, chiaro 'scuro, composition, design, imitation, nature, schools, etc., painting has become rather a subject for the gratification of vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism, than a genuine source of enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and satisfaction, like music, literature, scenery, and other recognized intellectual recreations.
And he claims now to have succeeded in this to an extent which in the outset he did not dare to hope, and to have secured for the collection the approving verdict of European taste and connoisseurship in the recognition of it as a valuable historical gallery of original paintings of the epochs and schools they claim to represent.
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