Book: Virginibus Puerisque

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Although the collection did not embrace, I understand,
nearly the whole of Raeburn's works, it was too large not to
contain some that were indifferent, whether as works of art or
as portraits. Certainly the standard was remarkably high, and
was wonderfully maintained, but there were one or two pictures
that might have been almost as well away - one or two that
seemed wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope were
not successful likenesses. Neither of the portraits of Sir
Walter Scott, for instance, were very agreeable to look upon.
You do not care to think that Scott looked quite so rustic and
puffy. And where is that peaked forehead which, according to
all written accounts and many portraits, was the
distinguishing characteristic of his face? Again, in spite of
his own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John Brown, I cannot
consider that Raeburn was very happy in hands. Without doubt,
he could paint one if he had taken the trouble to study it;
but it was by no means always that he gave himself the
trouble. Looking round one of these rooms hung about with his
portraits, you were struck with the array of expressive faces,
as compared with what you may have seen in looking round a
room full of living people. But it was not so with the hands.
The portraits differed from each other in face perhaps ten
times as much as they differed by the hand; whereas with
living people the two go pretty much together; and where one
is remarkable, the other will almost certainly not be
commonplace.

One interesting portrait was that of Duncan of
Camperdown. He stands in uniform beside a table, his feet
slightly straddled with the balance of an old sailor, his hand
poised upon a chart by the finger tips. The mouth is pursed,
the nostril spread and drawn up, the eyebrows very highly
arched. The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of iron, and
have the redness that comes from much exposure to salt sea
winds. From the whole figure, attitude and countenance, there
breathes something precise and decisive, something alert,
wiry, and strong. You can understand, from the look of him,
that sense, not so much of humour, as of what is grimmest and
driest in pleasantry, which inspired his address before the
fight at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet
under Admiral de Winter. "Gentlemen," says he, "you see a
severe winter approaching; I have only to advise you to keep
up a good fire." Somewhat of this same spirit of adamantine
drollery must have supported him in the days of the mutiny at
the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own flagship, the
VENERABLE, and only one other vessel, and kept up active
signals, as though he had a powerful fleet in the offing, to
intimidate the Dutch.

Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the eye,
was the half-length of Robert M'Queen, of Braxfield, Lord
Justice-Clerk. If I know gusto in painting when I see it,
this canvas was painted with rare enjoyment. The tart, rosy,
humorous look of the man, his nose like a cudgel, his face
resting squarely on the jowl, has been caught and perpetuated
with something that looks like brotherly love. A peculiarly
subtle expression haunts the lower part, sensual and
incredulous, like that of a man tasting good Bordeaux with
half a fancy it has been somewhat too long uncorked. From
under the pendulous eyelids of old age the eyes look out with
a half-youthful, half-frosty twinkle. Hands, with no pretence
to distinction, are folded on the judge's stomach. So
sympathetically is the character conceived by the portrait
painter, that it is hardly possible to avoid some movement of
sympathy on the part of the spectator. And sympathy is a
thing to be encouraged, apart from humane considerations,
because it supplies us with the materials for wisdom. It is
probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for
any unpopular person, and, among the rest, for Lord Braxfield,
than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation
against his abstract vices. He was the last judge on the
Scotch bench to employ the pure Scotch idiom. His opinions,
thus given in Doric, and conceived in a lively, rugged,
conversational style, were full of point and authority. Out
of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover
of wine, and one who "shone peculiarly" at tavern meetings.
He has left behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough and
cruel speech; and to this day his name smacks of the gallows.
It was he who presided at the trials of Muir and Skirving in
1793 and 1794; and his appearance on these occasions was
scarcely cut to the pattern of to-day. His summing up on Muir
began thus - the reader must supply for himself "the growling,
blacksmith's voice" and the broad Scotch accent: "Now this is
the question for consideration - Is the panel guilty of
sedition, or is he not? Now, before this can be answered, two
things must be attended to that require no proof: FIRST, that
the British constitution is the best that ever was since the
creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it
better." It's a pretty fair start, is it not, for a political
trial? A little later, he has occasion to refer to the
relations of Muir with "those wretches," the French. "I never
liked the French all my days," said his lordship, "but now I
hate them." And yet a little further on: "A government in any
country should be like a corporation; and in this country it
is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to
be represented. As for the rabble who have nothing but
personal property, what hold has the nation of them? They may
pack up their property on their backs, and leave the country
in the twinkling of an eye." After having made profession of
sentiments so cynically anti-popular as these, when the trials
were at an end, which was generally about midnight, Braxfield
would walk home to his house in George Square with no better
escort than an easy conscience. I think I see him getting his
cloak about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a lantern in one
hand, steering his way along the streets in the mirk January
night. It might have been that very day that Skirving had
defied him in these words: "It is altogether unavailing for
your lordship to menace me; for I have long learned to fear
not the face of man;" and I can fancy, as Braxfield reflected
on the number of what he called GRUMBLETONIANS in Edinburgh,
and of how many of them must bear special malice against so
upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might at that very
moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark close with hostile
intent - I can fancy that he indulged in a sour smile, as he
reflected that he also was not especially afraid of men's
faces or men's fists, and had hitherto found no occasion to
embody this insensibility in heroic words. For if he was an
inhumane old gentleman (and I am afraid it is a fact that he
was inhumane), he was also perfectly intrepid. You may look
into the queer face of that portrait for as long as you will,
but you will not see any hole or corner for timidity to enter
in.

Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were
even to name half of the portraits that were remarkable for
their execution, or interesting by association. There was one
picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill, which you might palm
off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by, you saw the
white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman
who, playing with pieces of cork on his own dining-table,
invented modern naval warfare. There was that portrait of
Neil Gow, to sit for which the old fiddler walked daily
through the streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with the Duke of
Athole. There was good Harry Erskine, with his satirical nose
and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to pop
out; Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking
altogether trim and narrow, and as if he cared more about
fossils than young ladies; full-blown John Robieson, in
hyperbolical red dressing-gown, and, every inch of him, a fine
old man of the world; Constable the publisher, upright beside
a table, and bearing a corporation with commercial dignity;
Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if ever anybody heard a cause
since the world began; Lord Newton just awakened from
clandestine slumber on the bench; and the second President
Dundas, with every feature so fat that he reminds you, in his
wig, of some droll old court officer in an illustrated nursery
story-book, and yet all these fat features instinct with
meaning, the fat lips curved and compressed, the nose
combining somehow the dignity of a beak with the good nature
of a bottle, and the very double chin with an air of
intelligence and insight. And all these portraits are so pat
and telling, and look at you so spiritedly from the walls,
that, compared with the sort of living people one sees about
the streets, they are as bright new sovereigns to fishy and
obliterated sixpences. Some disparaging thoughts upon our own
generation could hardly fail to present themselves; but it is
perhaps only the SACER VATES who is wanting; and we also,
painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may look in holiday
immortality upon our children and grandchildren.

Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are by no means of
the same order of merit. No one, of course, could be
insensible to the presence of Miss Janet Suttie or Mrs.
Campbell of Possil. When things are as pretty as that,
criticism is out of season. But, on the whole, it is only
with women of a certain age that he can be said to have
succeeded, in at all the same sense as we say he succeeded
with men. The younger women do not seem to be made of good
flesh and blood. They are not painted in rich and unctuous
touches. They are dry and diaphanous. And although young
ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I
would fain hope they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn
would have us believe. In all these pretty faces, you miss
character, you miss fire, you miss that spice of the devil
which is worth all the prettiness in the world; and what is
worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies are not womanly
to nearly the same degree as his men are masculine; they are
so in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young
ladies of the male novelist.

To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young and
pretty sitters; or he had stupefied himself with
sentimentalities; or else (and here is about the truth of it)
Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an obstinate blindness
in one direction, and know very little more about women after
all these centuries than Adam when he first saw Eve. This is
all the more likely, because we are by no means so
unintelligent in the matter of old women. There are some
capital old women, it seems to me, in books written by men.
And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs. Colin Campbell, of Park, or
the anonymous "Old lady with a large cap," which are done in
the same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his
men. He could look into their eyes without trouble; and he
was not withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from
recognising what he saw there and unsparingly putting it down
upon the canvas. But where people cannot meet without some
confusion and a good deal of involuntary humbug, and are
occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very
different vein of thought, there cannot be much room for
intelligent study nor much result in the shape of genuine
comprehension. Even women, who understand men so well for
practical purposes, do not know them well enough for the
purposes of art. Take even the very best of their male
creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find
he has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he
has a comb at the back of his head. Of course, no woman will
believe this, and many men will be so very polite as to humour
their incredulity.



CHAPTER IX - CHILD'S PLAY



THE regret we have for our childhood is not wholly
justifiable: so much a man may lay down without fear of public
ribaldry; for although we shake our heads over the change, we
are not unconscious of the manifold advantages of our new
state. What we lose in generous impulse, we more than gain in
the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity to
enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at
soldiers. Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no
longer see the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to
listen to the wind. We go to school no more; and if we have
only exchanged one drudgery for another (which is by no means
sure), we are set free for ever from the daily fear of
chastisement. And yet a great change has overtaken us; and
although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our
pleasure differently. We need pickles nowadays to make
Wednesday's cold mutton please our Friday's appetite; and I
can remember the time when to call it red venison, and tell
myself a hunter's story, would have made it more palatable
than the best of sauces. To the grown person, cold mutton is
cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever
invented by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad
fact, the clamant reality, of the mutton carries away before
it such seductive figments. But for the child it is still
possible to weave an enchantment over eatables; and if he has
but read of a dish in a story-book, it will be heavenly manna
to him for a week.

If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and
exercise, if he is not something positive in his tastes, it
means he has a feeble body and should have some medicine; but
children may be pure spirits, if they will, and take their
enjoyment in a world of moon-shine. Sensation does not count
for so much in our first years as afterwards; something of the
swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us; we see and
touch and hear through a sort of golden mist. Children, for
instance, are able enough to see, but they have no great
faculty for looking; they do not use their eyes for the
pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of their own; and the
things I call to mind seeing most vividly, were not beautiful
in themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to me as I
thought they might be turned to practical account in play.
Nor is the sense of touch so clean and poignant in children as
it is in a man. If you will turn over your old memories, I
think the sensations of this sort you remember will be
somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt,
general sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general
sense of wellbeing in bed. And here, of course, you will
understand pleasurable sensations; for overmastering pain -
the most deadly and tragical element in life, and the true
commander of man's soul and body - alas! pain has its own way
with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy
garden where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely than
it rules upon the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-
god whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more than
philosophy, can protect us from this sting. As for taste,
when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated sugar which
delight a youthful palate, "it is surely no very cynical
asperity" to think taste a character of the maturer growth.
Smell and hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many
scents, many voices, and a great deal of spring singing in the
woods. But hearing is capable of vast improvement as a means
of pleasure; and there is all the world between gaping
wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion with which
a man listens to articulate music.

At the same time, and step by step with this increase in
the definition and intensity of what we feel which accompanies
our growing age, another change takes place in the sphere of
intellect, by which all things are transformed and seen
through theories and associations as through coloured windows.
We make to ourselves day by day, out of history, and gossip,
and economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in
which we walk and through which we look abroad. We study shop
windows with other eyes than in our childhood, never to
wonder, not always to admire, but to make and modify our
little incongruous theories about life. It is no longer the
uniform of a soldier that arrests our attention; but perhaps
the flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a countenance that
has been vividly stamped with passion and carries an
adventurous story written in its lines. The pleasure of
surprise is passed away; sugar-loaves and water-carts seem
mighty tame to encounter; and we walk the streets to make
romances and to sociologise. Nor must we deny that a good
many of us walk them solely for the purposes of transit or in
the interest of a livelier digestion. These, indeed, may look
back with mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest
are in a better case; they know more than when they were
children, they understand better, their desires and sympathies
answer more nimbly to the provocation of the senses, and their
minds are brimming with interest as they go about the world.

According to my contention, this is a flight to which
children cannot rise. They are wheeled in perambulators or
dragged about by nurses in a pleasing stupor. A vague, faint,
abiding, wonderment possesses them. Here and there some
specially remarkable circumstance, such as a water-cart or a
guardsman, fairly penetrates into the seat of thought and
calls them, for half a moment, out of themselves; and you may
see them, still towed forward sideways by the inexorable nurse
as by a sort of destiny, but still staring at the bright
object in their wake. It may be some minutes before another
such moving spectacle reawakens them to the world in which
they dwell. For other children, they almost invariably show
some intelligent sympathy. "There is a fine fellow making mud
pies," they seem to say; "that I can understand, there is some
sense in mud pies." But the doings of their elders, unless
where they are speakingly picturesque or recommend themselves
by the quality of being easily imitable, they let them go over
their heads (as we say) without the least regard. If it were
not for this perpetual imitation, we should be tempted to
fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in the
light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly; among
whom they condescended to dwell in obedience like a
philosopher at a barbarous court. At times, indeed, they
display an arrogance of disregard that is truly staggering.
Once, when I was groaning aloud with physical pain, a young
gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired if I
had seen his bow and arrow. He made no account of my groans,
which he accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a
piece of the inexplicable conduct of his elders; and like a
wise young gentleman, he would waste no wonder on the subject.
Those elders, who care so little for rational enjoyment, and
are even the enemies of rational enjoyment for others, he had
accepted without understanding and without complaint, as the
rest of us accept the scheme of the universe.

We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take
strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry,
fall, and die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or
lying prone in bed. This is exactly what a child cannot do,
or does not do, at least, when he can find anything else. He
works all with lay figures and stage properties. When his
story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by
way of a sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture,
until he is out of breath. When he comes to ride with the
king's pardon, he must bestride a chair, which he will so
hurry and belabour and on which he will so furiously demean
himself, that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody with
spurring, at least fiery red with haste. If his romance
involves an accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person
about the chest of drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet,
before his imagination is satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls,
all toys, in short, are in the same category and answer the
same end. Nothing can stagger a child's faith; he accepts the
clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring
incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as a
castle, or valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon, is
taken away for the accommodation of a morning visitor, and he
is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by the hour with a
stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted
pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener
soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner. He can make
abstraction of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he
puts his eyes into his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an
unsavoury lane. And so it is, that although the ways of
children cross with those of their elders in a hundred places
daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as lie
in the same element. So may the telegraph wires intersect the
line of the high-road, or so might a landscape painter and a
bagman visit the same country, and yet move in different
worlds.

People struck with these spectacles cry aloud about the
power of imagination in the young. Indeed there may be two
words to that. It is, in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy
that the child exhibits. It is the grown people who make the
nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve
the text. One out of a dozen reasons why ROBINSON CRUSOE
should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level
in this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts
and had, in so many words, to PLAY at a great variety of
professions; and then the book is all about tools, and there
is nothing that delights a child so much. Hammers and saws
belong to a province of life that positively calls for
imitation. The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most
ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are
successively simulated to the running burthen "On a cold and
frosty morning," gives a good instance of the artistic taste
in children. And this need for overt action and lay figures
testifies to a defect in the child's imagination which
prevents him from carrying out his novels in the privacy of
his own heart. He does not yet know enough of the world and
men. His experience is incomplete. That stage-wardrobe and
scene-room that we call the memory is so ill provided, that he
can overtake few combinations and body out few stories, to his
own content, without some external aid. He is at the
experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel in
certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near
trying it as his means permit. And so here is young heroism
with a wooden sword, and mothers practice their kind vocation
over a bit of jointed stick. It may be laughable enough just
now; but it is these same people and these same thoughts, that
not long hence, when they are on the theatre of life, will
make you weep and tremble. For children think very much the
same thoughts and dream the same dreams, as bearded men and
marriageable women. No one is more romantic. Fame and
honour, the love of young men and the love of mothers, the
business man's pleasure in method, all these and others they
anticipate and rehearse in their play hours. Upon us, who are
further advanced and fairly dealing with the threads of
destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint
for their own mimetic reproduction. Two children playing at
soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of
the scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating. This is
perhaps the greatest oddity of all. "Art for art" is their
motto; and the doings of grown folk are only interesting as
the raw material for play. Not Theophile Gautier, not
Flaubert, can look more callously upon life, or rate the
reproduction more highly over the reality; and they will
parody an execution, a deathbed, or the funeral of the young
man of Nain, with all the cheerfulness in the world.

The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course,
in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is
itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon
philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood. It is
when we make castles in the air and personate the leading
character in our own romances, that we return to the spirit of
our first years. Only, there are several reasons why the
spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when
we admit this personal element into our divagations we are apt
to stir up uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind
ourselves sharply of old wounds. Our day-dreams can no longer
lie all in the air like a story in the ARABIAN NIGHTS; they
read to us rather like the history of a period in which we
ourselves had taken part, where we come across many
unfortunate passages and find our own conduct smartly
reprimanded. And then the child, mind you, acts his parts.
He does not merely repeat them to himself; he leaps, he runs,
and sets the blood agog over all his body. And so his play
breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion than he gives
it vent. Alas! when we betake ourselves to our intellectual
form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in
bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we can find no
outlet. Substitutes are not acceptable to the mature mind,
which desires the thing itself; and even to rehearse a
triumphant dialogue with one's enemy, although it is perhaps
the most satisfactory piece of play still left within our
reach, is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to lead to
a visit and an interview which may be the reverse of
triumphant after all.

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