Table-Talk | Page 7

treated with neglect and indifference, have sometimes a
forward self-sufficiency of manner; but this is not so much their fault as
that of others. Perhaps their want of regular education may also be in
fault in such cases. Richardson, who is very tenacious of the respect in
which the profession ought to be held, tells a story of Michael Angelo,
that after a quarrel between him and Pope Julius II., 'upon account of a
slight the artist conceived the pontiff had put upon him, Michael
Angelo was introduced by a bishop, who, thinking to serve the artist by
it, made it an argument that the Pope should be reconciled to him,
because men of his profession were commonly ignorant, and of no
consequence otherwise; his holiness, enraged at the bishop, struck him
with his staff, and told him, it was he that was the blockhead, and
affronted the man himself would not offend: the prelate was driven out
of the chamber, and Michael Angelo had the Pope's benediction,
accompanied with presents. This bishop had fallen into the vulgar error,
and was rebuked accordingly.'
Besides the exercise of the mind, painting exercises the body. It is a
mechanical as well as a liberal art. To do anything, to dig a hole in the
ground, to plant a cabbage, to hit a mark, to move a shuttle, to work a

pattern,--in a word, to attempt to produce any effect, and to succeed,
has something in it that gratifies the love of power, and carries off the
restless activity of the mind of man. Indolence is a delightful but
distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no
less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human
frame; and painting combines them both incessantly.[4] The hand is
furnished a practical test of the correctness of the eye; and the eye, thus
admonished, imposes fresh tasks of skill and industry upon the hand.
Every stroke tells as the verifying of a new truth; and every new
observation, the instant it is made, passes into an act and emanation of
the will. Every step is nearer what we wish, and yet there is always
more to do. In spite of the facility, the fluttering grace, the evanescent
hues, that play round the pencil of Rubens and Van-dyke, however I
may admire, I do not envy them this power so much as I do the slow,
patient, laborious execution of Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and
Andrea del Sarto, where every touch appears conscious of its charge,
emulous of truth, and where the painful artist has so distinctly wrought,
That you might almost say his picture thought.
In the one case the colours seem breathed on the canvas as if by magic,
the work and the wonder of a moment; in the other they seem inlaid in
the body of the work, and as if it took the artist years of unremitting
labour, and of delightful never-ending progress to perfection.[5] Who
would wish ever to come to the close of such works,--not to dwell on
them, to return to them, to be wedded to them to the last? Rubens, with
his florid, rapid style, complains that when he had just learned his art,
he should be forced to die. Leonardo, in the slow advances of his, had
lived long enough!
Painting is not, like writing, what is properly understood by a sedentary
employment. It requires not indeed a strong, but a continued and steady
exertion of muscular power. The precision and delicacy of the manual
operation, makes up for the want of vehemence,--as to balance himself
for any time in the same position the rope-dancer must strain every
nerve. Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an appetite
for one's dinner as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by riding over

Banstead Downs. It is related of Sir Joshua Reynolds, that 'he took no
other exercise than what he used in his painting-room,'--the writer
means, in walking backwards and forwards to look at his picture; but
the act of painting itself, of laying on the colours in the proper place
and proper quantity, was a much harder exercise than this alternate
receding from and returning to the picture. This last would be rather a
relaxation and relief than an effort. It is not to be wondered at, that an
artist like Sir Joshua, who delighted so much in the sensual and
practical part of his art, should have found himself at a considerable
loss when the decay of his sight precluded him, for the last year or two
of his life, from the following up of his profession,--'the source,'
according to his own remark, 'of thirty years' uninterrupted enjoyment
and prosperity to him.' It is only those who never think at