174 LONDON-POPULATION. an increase of salary, and no other argument to offer than that of his poverty,-and farmers are accused of being a little deaf to this argument. The salary of labour then lags behind the advance of everything else. This would take place, at any rate, from a more general cause, the increase of population beyond the demand for men; and this operates here likewise. Perhaps the two causes united, operate, after all, only as one,-the dose of misery necessary to retard population once administered, no matter by whom, and the effect produced, the scarcity of labourers enables them to command a higher salary. The interval between the paroxysms are no doubt the shorter, from the activity of the cause, but the remedy is always equal to the disease. This unfortunate struggle between a good and a bad principle, between hunger and pleasure, is, after all, inherent in our nature, and social institutions are not alone chargeable with its consequences. The savage who roves uncontrolled by laws, through the wilderness, is still more immediately under the tyranny of want than the labourer of the fields of Europe, and the unanswerable proof is, that he multiplies less. But the one is overtaken by an invisible hand, and the other sees it, and soon learns to detest it. The savage cannot feel resentment against the deer which flies before him, or the fish he cannot catch. The land he did not sow cannot be expected to yield anything to him; but the labourer, who sows and does not reap,-who sees abundance all around him,-who creates it in fact, and does not partake of it,—and against whom a terrible law pronounces sentence of death if he should enter that granary which he filled, to take what his salary does not suffice to purchase,-needs LONDON-POPULATION. 175 much virtue, and a sort of practical morality, very meritorious, to resign himself, and endure in peace. He has a wife and three children, perhaps, and earns their bread with great difficulty; but without this social order, he might be told, without this rigorous right of property, his family might have already died with hunger, or probably neither himself nor them would have ever existed. Under this social order his neighbour rolls in wealth, while himself is restricted to mere necessaries; but without it neither of them would have had those mere necessaries. All this is undeniable, but at the same time, if I may be allowed to use a common expression, more energetic than elegant, "ventre affamé n'a point d'oreilles." The general principles of population have been so successfully elucidated ten or twelve years ago, in a work * which has taken its place by the side of "the Wealth of Nations," and other works, forming the code of political economy, that I wish to refer my countrymen to it if translated, and if it is not, I mention it as one of the numerous works that would indemnify them so liberally for the trouble of studying a language almost unknown to them, and offering an inexhaustible mine of knowledge, of ideas, and of imagery. The French have heard, no doubt, of some of the English writers,-they know that Newton was a great mathematician, that Pope wrote the Essay on man,-they admire Young, whom nobody reads in England, and being " d'un beau noir," they think it quite English.-Shakespeare, they understand, has written a number of barbarous tragedies,-and Milton a mad poem on *The Essay on Population, by Mr Malthus. 176 LONDON-WEATHER PICTURES. Paradise lost:Add to these two historians, Robertson and Hume, and you will have the main body of English literature lost in a crowd of English novels fabricated at Paris. June 6. There has not been a drop of rain for the last six weeks; the verdure of the town gardens is destroyed, and the streets are very dusty, except the genteelest ones, which are inundated twice aday by means of carts and fire-plugs communicating with the pipes under-ground, which circulaté throughout the town. The windows are, however, universally adorned with plants quite fresh and luxuriant, the reseda particularly, which perfumes the air: this luxury is very general. This is the season of the fine arts. Several great collections of pictures are open to the public, or at least to the beau monde. We have just seen Lord Grosvenor's. The house is between a court and a garden, in the Parisian stile; and the ground-floor is composed of a suite of five large rooms, with a hall in the centre. These rooms are full of pictures, and all that is not picture is red cloth hangings, carpets, draperies over the windows, chairs and sofas-everything is as red and as sumptuous as possible; the fringe of the draperies cost six guineas a yard. Among the pictures, I noticed a Virgin, by Wanderwerf of Dusseldorf, most highly finished. A very fine Berghem. Another good landscape by Both. Two good N. Poussin's, and several very bad landscapes by G. Poussin. A most capital bear's fight by Snyder. Several bad, quite bad Raphaels, (I am a hardened sinner.) The original of Wolfe's death by West, not so good as the excellent engraving of that picture. The battle of the Hogue by the same artist is also an admirable one. If I had LONDON PAINTING. 177 seen nothing else of Mr West, I should have a very high idea indeed of his talents. It is amusing to sit in a corner, and observe, as they pass, the countenances of the visitors in places of this kind, staring round with a total absence of all pleasure and all feeling. Nine-tenths of them know and care absolutely nothing about the pictures they look at, particularly the men. Why then do they come? Because it is fashionable, and because it is dear; you give gold at the door. The English appear to me to have more esteem than liking for the fine arts. Drawing is no part of men's education; and I hold it to be the first requisite for an amateur to be also an artist; although I am aware that the contrary opinion has been maintained. The object of painting is to represent nature; yet a good picture is far from being a copy of nature. It is no new observation, that very green trees, and very blue water do not make a good landscape on canvas; although nature employs these very colours in their most vivid hues, with tolerable success. But nature spreads over her landscapes the luminous canopy of heaven; its brightness puts out terrestrial objects, and harmonizes the crude opposition of their colours. Artists have not the same resource, and, as they cannot illuminate their sky, they must obscure their earth; repeating on the lower keys of the instrument that harmony which nature gives on the higher. As the brightness of natural light is unattainable, so in some degree is its faintness, when reflected by distant objects; the effect called aërial perspective cannot be wholly produced on the canvas, without giving to distant objects larger dimensions than they really have; mountains represented under their true angle would look like ant hills. Historical sub 178 LONDON-PAINTING. jects, an dany others represented in the interior of buildings, have not the difficulty of the sky to encounter, but they are not wholly free from those of aërial perspective. There is a vigour and a distinctness in near objects so superior to those in the back-ground, that the artist is obliged to exaggerate lights and shades, in order to hollow out or to relieve the obstinate flatness of his canvas. The knowledge of the manner of producing the effect desired, might not, after all, be necessary to judge of the truth of that effect, if there was nothing arbitrary in it; but it cannot be disputed that the best picture does not make a similar impression on practised and unpractised eyes. I once found a servant mistaking the foam of a cascade for ladies and gentlemen walking up and down a hill, and another complaining that a white drapery was dirty on one side,-because it was in shadow. The practical skill displayed by the artist is another very considerable source of pleasure, which none but artists can feel. As to the poetry of painting, the power it has sometimes of speaking powerfully to our imagination and our feelings, does not depend so much on the practical knowledge of the art, as the other sources of pleasure received from it do. Few are susceptible of such feelings; and of those few there is no knowing how much of the emotion they experience is due to the intrinsic merit of the picture, or to their own overflowing sensibility. Some particular cast of feature, an attitude,-a look,-a distant likeness, -the very name of the artist,-the very time in which he lived,-may awaken in them feelings far beyond what the brush and canvas represent. Any picture which has some such effect upon most of these who are susceptible of it, has indeed |