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Posed on the model throne, the object of the painter's intense scrutiny, he swelled ingenuously with the conviction of his supreme importance. The lazy luxury of the model's life appealed to his sensuous temperament. He loved the warmth, the artistic setting of the studios; the pictures, the oriental rugs, the bits of armour, the old brocade, the rich cushions.
That one of the most accomplished roughs of the Midlands had fallen to the young painter's lot in that night's mêlée, he could not for a moment doubt; but this reflection did not go far to soothe him. He did not care for fighting for its own sake, while his pride revolted against thus being kept at bay by a brutal clown.
Watkiss Lloyd was there, and other friends came in the evening. I spent the day at home, writing, but I have an engagement for every night this week I am becoming a sort of professional diner-out. "I have been talking over the illustrations of the 'Painter's Camp' with George Leslie. He has promised to do twenty etchings of figure-subjects to illustrate it, and I shall do twenty landscapes.
These words revived all the young painter's fears; he colored as he looked at Adelaide's mother, but he saw nothing in her countenance but the expression of the frankest good-nature; no double meaning marred its charm; its keenness was not perifidious, its humor seemed kindly, and no trace of remorse disturbed its equanimity. He sat down to the card-table.
Imagination bodied forth the forms of things unknown in a deeper sense, perhaps, than the great dramatist meant. His poet's pen, his painter's pencil turned them to shapes, and gave to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. Nay, he denied that they were nothings.
It was in the kindly spirit of Vernons not to pass a painter's brush over these scratchings, records of the height of a child that lingered only in the memory of the old house. Phyl turned from them to the bookshelf and the books it contained.
Not one redeeming touch could be traced in the senseless caricatures, to whose authors' clumsy hands the mason's trowel would assuredly have been better adapted than the painter's pencil. It was the very dotage of incapacity. The colouring, the treatment, the coarse obtrusive mechanical touch, seemed those of a clumsily constructed automaton, rather than of a human painter.
As Gibbon said of the poetic praises of the painter's friends 'If they did not contribute much to his professional prosperity, they might be justly called an elegant advertisement of his merit. Sitters of all ranks now crowded to his studio. If his absence from England had done nothing else for him, it had wonderfully enhanced his reputation.
The fifth act contains much which the reader can hardly enjoy, but it opens with a scene so full of the glory of the mountains and the sea that I know nothing else in drama to compare with it. This again is followed by one of the finest shipwrecks in all poetry. Scene after scene, the first act portrays the cold and solemn beauty of Norwegian scenery as no painter's brush has contrived to do it.
Here it is easy to notice how the uncolloquial and even ugly English does not destroy the illusion of the scene, but entirely subserves it and makes these two or three pages fine painter's work for richness and still drama. I have not forgotten the Man in Black, though I gladly would. Not that I am any more in sympathy with his theology than Borrow's, if it is more interesting and venerable.
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