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When there was a cry in the land about scarcity of food, they did not heed the panic; they were accustomed to a minimum of sustenance, they could hardly be deprived of that. Fuseli, who sowed his satire broadcast, exclaimed one day: 'What! does Northcote keep a dog? What does he live upon?
We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery 'snapped instead of folded'; faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated into skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's shop, and expression forced into caricature.... That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity deserves no quarter at the hands of the public."
A person who desired to speak with the Keeper of the Academy, followed so close upon the porter whose business it was to introduce him, that he announced himself with, "I hope I don't intrude." "You do intrude," said Fuseli, in a surly tone. "Do I?" said the visitor; "then, sir, I will come to-morrow, if you please."
Here, too, I saw Rembrandt's celebrated "Battle of Death," with a skeleton blowing a horn, and helmeted and plumed, and having a thigh-bone for a battle-axe, shadows on the shoulders of horsemen, and skeleton feet; on the whole, a monstrous nightmare, such as you might expect from Fuseli after a supper on raw beef, but never from such a painter as Rembrandt. Phrenology.
Sincerity was more valued by them than standard forms of politeness. When Dr. Geddes was indignant with Fuseli, he did not disguise his feelings, but in the face of the assembled company rushed out of the room to walk two or three times around Saint Paul's Churchyard, and then, when his rage had diminished, to return and resume the argument.
Milton, Shakespear, and Richardson, have also engaged much of his attention. The nearest rival of Homer, I believe, if Homer can have a rival, is Jean Jacques Rousseau. A young man embraces entire the opinions of a favourite writer, and Mr. Fuseli has not had leisure to bring the opinions of his youth to a revision.
'This young man, thus he wrote in one of his early criticisms, 'would do well to look at nature again; his flesh is too glassy. Lawrence showed his sense of his monitor's accuracy by following the advice." Fuseli, on the whole, was liked as Keeper.
Fuseli, as well as Mary, translated for Johnson, and contributed to the "Analytical Review." He was an intimate friend of Lavater, whose work on Physiognomy Mary had translated with the liveliest interest. There was thus a strong bond of sympathy between them, and many ways in which they could help and consult with each other in their literary tasks.
He had fine taste in matters of high import; he drew the boundary line between the terrible and the horrible, and he never passed it; the former he knew was allied to grandeur, the latter to deformity and disgust. An eminent metaphysician visited the gallery before the public exhibition; he saw the Hamlet's Ghost of Fuseli, and exclaimed, like Burns' rustic in Halloween, "Lord, preserve me!"
But Fuseli's hot temper and fondness for a joke brought their amusement to a sudden end. They were watching the masks, when one among the latter, dressed as a devil, danced up to them, and, with howls and many mad pranks, made merry at their expense. Fuseli, when he found he could not rid himself of the tormentor, called out half angrily, half facetiously, "Go to Hell!"
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