February 11. — Court sat till halfpast one. I had but a trifle to do, so wrote letters to Mrs. Maclean Clephane and nephew Walter. Sent the last, £40 in addition to £240 sent on the 6th, making his full equipment £280. A man, calling himself Charles Gray of Carse, wrote to me, expressing sympathy for my misfortunes, and offering me half the profits of what, if I understand him right, is a patent medicine, to which I suppose he expects me to stand trumpeter. He endeavours to get over my objections to accepting his liberality (supposing me to entertain them) by assuring me his conduct is founded on a sage selfishness. This is diverting enough. I suppose the Commissioners of, Police will next send me a letter of condolence, begging my acceptance of a broom, a shovel, and a scavenger’s greatcoat, and assuring me that they had appointed me to all the emoluments of a well-frequented crossing. It would be doing more than they have done of late for the cleanliness of the streets, which, witness my shoes, are in a piteous pickle. I thanked the selfish sage with due decorum — for what purpose can anger serve? I remember once before, a mad woman, from about Alnwick, baited me with letters and plans — first for charity to herself or some protégé. I gave my guinea. Then she wanted to have half the profit of a novel which I was to publish under my name and auspices. She sent me the manuscript, and a moving tale it was, for some of the scenes lay in the cabinet à l’eau. I declined the partnership. Lastly, my fair correspondent insisted I was a lover of speculation, and would be much profited by going shares in a patent medicine which she had invented for the benefit of little babies, I believe. I dreaded to have anything to do with such a Herod-like affair, and begged to decline the honour of her correspondence in future. I should have thought the thing a quiz, but that the novel was real and substantial. Anne goes to Ravelston to-day to remain tomorrow. Sir Alexander Don called, and we had a good laugh together.
February 12. — Having ended the second volume of Woodstock last night, I have to begin the third this morning. Now I have not the slightest idea how the story is to be wound up to a catastrophe. I am just in the same case as I used to be when I lost myself in former days in some country to which I was a stranger. I always pushed for the pleasantest road, and either found or made it the nearest. It is the same in writing, I never could lay down a plan — or, having laid it down, I never could adhere to it; the action of composition always diluted some passages, and abridged or omitted others; and personages were rendered important or insignificant, not according to their agency in the original conception of the plan, but according to the success, or otherwise, with which I was able to bring them out. I only tried to make that which I was actually writing diverting and interesting, leaving the rest to fate. I have been often amused with the critics distinguishing some passages as particularly laboured, when the pen passed over the whole as fast as it could move, and the eye never again saw them, except in proof. Verse I write twice, and sometimes three times over. This may be called in Spanish the Dar donde diere mode of composition, in English hab nab at a venture; it is a perilous style, I grant, but I cannot help it. When I chain my mind to ideas which are purely imaginative — for argument is a different thing — it seems to me that the sun leaves the landscape, that I think away the whole vivacity and spirit of my original conception, and that the results are cold, tame, and spiritless. It is the difference between a written oration and one bursting from the unpremeditated exertions of the speaker, which have always something the air of enthusiasm and inspiration. I would not have young authors imitate my carelessness, however; consilium non currum eape.
Read a few pages of Will D’Avenant, who was fond of having it supposed that Shakespeare intrigued with his mother. I think the pretension can only be treated as Phaeton’s was, according to Fielding’s farce —
“Besides, by all the village boys I’m shamed,
You, the sun’s son, you rascal? — you be damn’d.”
Egad — I’ll put that into Woodstock. It might come well from the old admirer of Shakespeare. Then Fielding’s lines were not written. What then? — it is an anachronism for some sly rogue to detect. Besides, it is easy to swear they were written, and that Fielding adopted them from tradition. Walked with Skene on the Calton Hill.
February 13. — The Institution for the Encouragment of the Fine Arts opens to-day, with a handsome entertainment in the Exhibition-room, as at Somerset House. It strikes me that the direction given by amateurs and professors to their protégés and pupils, who aspire to be artists, is upon a pedantic and false principle. All the Fine Arts have it for their highest and more legitimate end and purpose, to affect the human passions, or smooth and alleviate for a time the more unquiet feelings of the mind — to excite wonder, or terror, or pleasure, or emotion of some kind or other. It often happens that, in the very rise and origin of these arts, as in the instance of Homer, the principal object is obtained in a degree not equalled by his successors. But there is a degree of execution which, in more refined times, the poet or musician begins to study, which gives a value of its own to their productions of a different kind from the rude strength of their predecessors. Poetry becomes complicated in its rules — music learned in its cadences and harmonies — rhetoric subtle in its periods. There is more given to the labour of executing — less attained by the effect produced. Still the nobler and popular end of these arts is not forgotten; and if we have some productions too learned, too recherchés for public feeling, we have, every now and then, music that electrifies a whole assembly, eloquence which shakes the forum, and poetry which carries men up to the third heaven. But in painting it is different; it is all become a mystery, the secret of which is lodged in a few connoisseurs, whose object is not to praise the works of such painters as produce effect on mankind at large, but to class them according to their proficiency in the inferior rules of the art, which, though most necessary to be taught and learned, should yet only be considered as the Gradus ad Parnassum — the steps by which the higher and ultimate object of a great popular effect is to be attained. They have all embraced the very style of criticism which induced Michael Angelo to call some Pope a poor creature, when, turning his attention from the general effect of a noble statue, his Holiness began to criticise the hem of the robe. This seems to me the cause of the decay of this delightful art, especially in history, its noblest branch. As I speak to myself, I may say that a painting should, to be excellent, have something to say to the mind of a man, like myself, well-educated, and susceptible of those feelings which anything strongly recalling natural emotion is likely to inspire. But how seldom do I see anything that moves me much! Wilkie, the far more than Teniers of Scotland, certainly gave many new ideas. So does Will Allan, though overwhelmed with their rebukes about colouring and grouping, against which they are not willing to place his general and original merits. Landseer’s dogs were the most magnificent things I ever saw — leaping, and bounding, and grinning on the canvas. Leslie has great powers; and the scenes from Moliere by [Newton] are excellent. Yet painting wants a regenerator — some one who will sweep the cobwebs out of his head before he takes the palette, as Chantrey has done in the sister art. At present we are painting pictures from the ancients, as authors in the days of Louis Quatorze wrote epic poems according to the recipe of Madame Dacier and Co. The poor reader or spectator has no remedy; the compositions are secundum artem, and if he does not like them, he is no judge — that’s all.