E381020C. Findens’ Tableaux (1839).
The United Service Gazette, 20 October 1838, p. 7.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 403–404.
We have already borne our testimony to the beauty and interest of the series to which this volume belongs; and, although we prefer the variety of styles with its corresponding competition for supremacy, which characterises works in which several artists are employed, we are bound to admit that Mr. Perring’s tableaux are, most of them, very graceful and elegant. The figure (somewhat absurdly) designated “The Coronation,” but which is, in fact, intended for Madame Cottin’s Elizabeth, kneeling before a shrine, is extremely simple and beautiful. “The Buccaneer,” similarly misnamed, by the way, “a Mexican Girl contemplating a Portrait[,]” “Treason of Gomez Arias,” “a Moorish Lady flying from her Pursuers with a Page.” “The Greek Wife,” “A Story of the Woods,” and the “Novice,” are pleasing and graceful compositions. “The Minstrel of Provence” would also be worthy of mention were it not too palpable a plagiarism from Middleton’s “Dorothea.” In our review of the last volume of this work we took occasion to complain of the harsh, and, as we thought, unjust spirit in which its literature was criticised by some of our would-be cynical contemporaries. It is now pretty notorious that, unless the proprietors of such works will invoke the assistance of certain “ladies” and “gentlemen of the press,” the collaborateurs of newspapers and magazines, and reward them in an inverse ratio to the merits of their contributions, they must expect to be demolished without mercy. Let them, however, but pay the accustomed black mail, and the affair is arranged in the most agreeable manner possible. Not content, however, with drafting them into her pages, Miss Mitford has felt it necessary to offer them the most extravagant compliments in her preface:—
It would gratify me to particularise each separate production (says the fair editress) whether in prose or verse; but that may hardly be; and only naming Mr. Chorley and Mr. Kenyon, whom it must always be honour to name; Mrs. Osgood, our fair American; and Amelia Opie, that truest friend; I cannot but be proud that my book should contain such poems as Mr. Townsend’s pure and high-souled “Elizabeth;” Mr. Hughes’s “Minstrel of Provence,” a fine old feudal tale, in whose chivalrous friend his friend Sir Walter would have delighted; and last, because best and dearest, Miss Barrett’s “Romaunt of the Page,” a ballad, which seems to me worthy even the genius of the translatress of the “Prometheus Bound,” and the authoress of the “Seraphim.” Can I say more?
Now, putting the bad English of this glowing coruscation of eulogiums wholly aside, and even that is hardly excusable in so practised a writer as Miss Mitford, what option does she leave, either to her readers or critics, of judging of her work for themselves, without dissenting somewhat ungallantly from her opinions. Had her literature been from the pens of Shakspeare, Milton, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, &c., she could hardly have complimented them in a higher strain. Living, however, in the midst of the world of letters, and constantly on the look-out for any new star that may arise in the literary hemisphere, we are yet ignorant of the immortal works of the Chorleys, the Kenyons, the Osgoods, the Hughess, the Townshends, and the Barretts of her contributory heaven. Not deeming it safe, however, to dissent from such high authority as we here have, for their genius, we shall take the liberty of quoting a few passages from their works, leaving it to our readers to estimate their value. To begin with the “best and dearest.” We have a ballad, occupying, in double columns, five folio pages, by Miss Barrett, entitled “The Romaunt of the Page,” which opens with the following stanza:—
A knight upon a battle steed
And a page on a steed beside,
From the holy war in Palestine
As slow and thoughtful ride,
As each were a palmer and told for bead
The dew of eventide.
The story is the very old one of a ladye love, or wife, we hardly know which, following her knight in page’s attire. The authoress, who appears to have muddled her brains at the hippocrene of the poet Coleridge, makes a discovery worthy of the gold medal of the British Association, namely—that the wind is a sentient creature, with a “soul.” Ex gra.
From leaf to leaf the soul of the wind
Is sliding with the dew.
She then gives us a parody upon one of Coleridge’s fine Invocations, of which, perhaps, the following will suffice:—
From the convent on the sea,
As over wood and over lea,
Bodily the wind did carry
The great altar of St. Mary,
And the fifty tapers paling* o’er it,
And the Lady Abbess stark before it.
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*Query swaling.—Printer’s Devil.
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Of a superfine sketch, entitled the “Sister of Charity,” by one of those gentlemen, “whom it must always be an honour to name,” the following exquisite piece of bombast is the exordium:—
“Avant pendant et apres,” I have often thought, is the motto most suitable to any scene in Paris of moderate extent—to any gathered score of its motley inhabitants. La Madelene and the Luxor Obelisk, for instance, how harmonious in effect, but how odd, in reality, is their juxta position. The Louvre, and the Palais de Justice, come into the same picture; the Pont D’Arcole, and Notre Dame, made even more ancient to the eye by the magical associations gathered round it—thanks to Victor Hugo! So too the right eye will take in some republican artist of jeune France, in his melo-dramatic toilette of low-crowned Spanish hat and Spalatro moustache, as he hurries on “violent and smoking” to finish his frightful copy of his frightful original, Gericault’s Medusa, perhaps, in the Louvre; while the left (eye) is more pleasantly busied with the pretty coquettish grisette—Sterne’s grisette unchanged—not so wholly absorbed in the little orison she is about to deposit in St. Germain L’Auxerrois, but that she will turn back as she enters its time-eaten porch with a smile, and a look for the passing stranger. We have nothing in London, save the occasional pageant of Punch in the Quadrant, to match this “jumble of times, dynasties, and creeds.”
To what an amiable squint must this immortal writer have coined his countenance, to have been enabled to look to the right with one eye, and the left with the other; to “take in” with his “right eye” the republican artist, and with his left the “grisette,” who is about to “deposit her little orison” in the church of St. Germain L’Auxerrois! But this is all, we dare say, very possible and practicable. The author of this sublime passage is, we are told, a leading contributor to a popular weekly newspaper, in which capacity he will probably have to sit in judgment on this very volume. But we have said enough, we trust, to impress Miss Mitford with the absurdity of calling her geese swans; and will now turn to the pleasanter part of our task. Her own pleasing and graceful lines are all more or less good of their kind. Mr. R. Townshend’s poem, entitled “The Coronation,” is also a chaste and beautiful production, and almost the only poem that does not discredit the fair editress’s couleur-de-rose eulogiums. We had almost forgotten to say, that the engravings are carefully executed, as are, we believe, most of the works under Messrs. Findens’ superintendence.
Reviewed:
Findens’ Tableaux, ed. M.R. Mitford, London: 1839.
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