第78章

What a pleasant spacious garden our inn has, all sparkling with autumn flowers and bedizened with statues! At the end is a row of trees, and a summer-house, over the canal, where you might go and smoke a pipe with Mynheer Van Dunck, and quite cheerfully catch the ague.Yesterday, as we passed, they were making hay, and stacking it in a barge which was lying by the meadow, handy.Round about Kensington Palace there are houses, roofs, chimneys, and bricks like these.I feel that a Dutchman is a man and a brother.It is very funny to read the newspaper, one can understand it somehow.Sure it is the neatest, gayest little city--scores and hundreds of mansions looking like Cheyne Walk, or the ladies' schools about Chiswick and Hackney.

LE GROS LOT.--To a few lucky men the chance befalls of reaching fame at once, and (if it is of any profit morituro) retaining the admiration of the world.Did poor Oliver, when he was at Leyden yonder, ever think that he should paint a little picture which should secure him the applause and pity of all Europe for a century after? He and Sterne drew the twenty thousand prize of fame.The latter had splendid instalments during his lifetime.The ladies pressed round him; the wits admired him, the fashion hailed the successor of Rabelais.Goldsmith's little gem was hardly so valued until later days.Their works still form the wonder and delight of the lovers of English art; and the pictures of the Vicar and Uncle Toby are among the masterpieces of our English school.Here in the Hague Gallery is Paul Potter's pale, eager face, and yonder is the magnificent work by which the young fellow achieved his fame.How did you, so young, come to paint so well? What hidden power lay in that weakly lad that enabled him to achieve such a wonderful victory? Could little Mozart, when he was five years old, tell you how he came to play those wonderful sonatas? Potter was gone out of the world before he was thirty, but left this prodigy (and I know not how many more specimens of his genius and skill) behind him.

The details of this admirable picture are as curious as the effect is admirable and complete.The weather being unsettled, and clouds and sunshine in the gusty sky, we saw in our little tour numberless Paul Potters--the meadows streaked with sunshine and spotted with the cattle, the city twinkling in the distance, the thunderclouds glooming overhead.Napoleon carried off the picture (vide Murray)amongst the spoils of his bow and spear to decorate his triumph of the Louvre.If I were a conquering prince, I would have this picture certainly, and the Raphael "Madonna" from Dresden, and the Titian "Assumption" from Venice, and that matchless Rembrandt of the "Dissection." The prostrate nations would howl with rage as my gendarmes took off the pictures, nicely packed, and addressed to "Mr.the Director of my Imperial Palace of the Louvre, at Paris.

This side uppermost." The Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Italians, &c., should be free to come and visit my capital, and bleat with tears before the pictures torn from their native cities.Their ambassadors would meekly remonstrate, and with faded grins make allusions to the feeling of despair occasioned by the absence of the beloved works of art.Bah! I would offer them a pinch of snuff out of my box as I walked along my gallery, with their Excellencies cringing after me.Zenobia was a fine woman and a queen, but she had to walk in Aurelian's triumph.The procede was peu delicat? En usez vous, mon cher monsieur! (The marquis says the "Macaba" is delicious.) What a splendor of color there is in that cloud! What a richness, what a freedom of handling, and what a marvellous precision! I trod upon your Excellency's corn?--a thousand pardons.

His Excellency grins and declares that he rather likes to have his corns trodden on.Were you ever very angry with Soult--about that Murillo which we have bought? The veteran loved that picture because it saved the life of a fellow-creature--the fellow-creature who hid it, and whom the Duke intended to hang unless the picture was forthcoming.

We gave several thousand pounds for it--how many thousand? About its merit is a question of taste which we will not here argue.If you choose to place Murillo in the first class of painters, founding his claim upon these Virgin altar-pieces, I am your humble servant.

Tom Moore painted altar-pieces as well as Milton, and warbled Sacred Songs and Loves of the Angels after his fashion.I wonder did Watteau ever try historical subjects? And as for Greuze, you know that his heads will fetch 1,000L., 1,500L., 2,000L.--as much as a Sevres "cabaret" of Rose du Barri.If cost price is to be your criterion of worth, what shall we say to that little receipt for 10L.for the copyright of "Paradise Lost," which used to hang in old Mr.Rogers's room? When living painters, as frequently happens in our days, see their pictures sold at auctions for four or five times the sums which they originally received, are they enraged or elated?

A hundred years ago the state of the picture-market was different:

that dreary old Italian stock was much higher than at present;Rembrandt himself, a close man, was known to be in difficulties.If ghosts are fond of money still, what a wrath his must be at the present value of his works!

The Hague Rembrandt is the greatest and grandest of all his pieces to my mind.Some of the heads are as sweetly and lightly painted as Gainsborough; the faces not ugly, but delicate and high-bred; the exquisite gray tones are charming to mark and study; the heads not plastered, but painted with a free, liquid brush: the result, one of the great victories won by this consummate chief, and left for the wonder and delight of succeeding ages.