Power of a Child's Face

EVERY intelligent American, in crossing the ocean, has a lively desire of confrontinof the works of the old masters of painting. He wants to see Poussin and Correggio as certainly as Ben Lomond and the Splugen Pass.

If he happen first to look in upon the picture gallery of Holyrood, where the faces of a hundred Scottish kings are hung, his first feeling will be one of gladness that they are all dead, for such another villanous brood of faces no man ever looked upon. Such eyes, such mouths, such noses, would confound any rogues’ -gallery in any city. We believe the whole gallery a slander by 4 Flemish master,

29 and that Scotland never had any such atrocious men or women to rule over her. We say nothing against homely features in the abstract. Any man has an inalienable right to carry such a nose as he will. That is a right patent on the face of it. Lord Wellington had a hooked nose, and Thackeray a turnup nose, and Robert Bruce a nose all over the face; but to have a nose that looks as if intended to be thrust into everybody else’s business, or to be stuck up in scorn, or to blossom with dissipations, or to snuff at the cause of virtue — we protest against any man’s right to carry such an infamous proboscis. We are certain that no such-looking faces as we see in Holyrood ought to have been perpetuated by a master. Let the extinct species of such megatheriums never hear the clang of the crowbar. It is not fair that the Royal College of Surgeons should keep the cancer of which Napoleon died. There should be no immortality of cancers.

But no one can forget the place, or the day, or the hour, when he first ofazed on a genuine work of one of the old masters. We had seen for years pieces of canvas which pretended to have come from Italy or Germany, and to be three or four hundred years old. The chief glory of them was that they were cracked, and wrinkled, and dull, and inexplicable, and had great antiquity of varnish, immensity of daub, and infinity of botch. The great-grandfather of the exhibitor got the heirloom from a Portuguese peddler, who was wrecked at Venice in the middle of the last century, and went ashore just as one of the descendants of the celebrated Braggadocia Thundergusto, of the fourteenth century, was hard up for money, and must have a drink or die.

But I find in my diary this record:

‘’June 30th, 1870, at two o’clock P. M., in the National Gallery of Scotland, I first saw a ‘Titian.’

“July 9th, 1870, at ten minutes of three o’clock, in the National Gallery of England, first saw a ‘Murillo.’”

It seemed to require a sacred subject to call out the eenius of the old masters. On secular themes they often failed. They knew not, as do the moderns, how to pluck up a plant from the earth and make it live on canvas.

Delmonico, for the adornment of a shoulder of bacon, with his knife cuts out of a red beet a rose more natural than the forget-me-not of old Sigismond Holbein, or the lily by Lo Spagna. Their battle - pieces are a Cincinnati slaughter-house. Their Cupid scenes are merely a nursery of babies that rush out from the bath-tub into the hall before their mother has time to dress them. The masters failed with a fiddle, but shook the earth with a diapason. Give them a “Crucifixion” or a “Judgment,” and they triumph.

Indeed, when men paint or write or act from the heart, they are potent. By the time that a thought, starting from the artist’s brain, can come down through the neck into the shoulder, and through the right arm to the fingers, and off the finger-tips to the point of the pencil, it has lost its momentum, and languishes on the canvas; but a thought that starts from the brain, and streams to the heart, there to be taken with a strong throb, and as by the stroke of a piston, forced through the arm to the canvas, arrives unspent and redoubled. The old masters succeeded not in depicting what they thought so well as In what they felt. Thoughts are often hard, and green, and touorh, till the warm sunshine of the heart ripens them.

Most of the ancient artists tried their hand at the Virgin and the Child, always evidencing their own nationality In the style of infantile beauty selected. The Dutch school gives a Dutch child, the Roman school a Roman child, the Spanish school a Spanish child. Rubens’s Christ was not born at Bethlehem, but at Antwerp. And as parents are not apt to undervalue their children, It is probable that they took the model which sat in their own nursery, gathering around it their own ideal of the infant Jesus. Francesco Tacconi represents the Holy Child as very thoughtful, a young philosopher at one year of age, with very red hair. VIvarIni gives us a startled child. Duccio paints for us a child wrapped up in admiration of Its mother. But Lo Spagna gives us the look of a glad child that would romp If It were not afraid of jumping out of the picture. Why not a glad child? The burdens had not yet rolled over on him. Those were good days to him. Joseph and Mary walked and trudged, but he always had a soft carriage to ride in — that of his mother’s bosom. He had enough to wear, for he was wrapped in swaddling - clothes. He probably had enough to eat, for mothers in those days were not pinched to death with corsets, and so the child need not go outside of its mother’s arms for abundant supply.

But any pleasant afternoon when the children of our city are out taking an airing, I could find a score of infanf faces more like Jesus than any I have seen on ancient canvas. Perhaps, after a while, an American artist will give us the Virgin and the Child. It would be more apt to be impartial than that of any of the ancients. They put their own nationality into the picture, and it was a German Christ, or a Venetian Christ, or a Tuscan Christ; but the American, having in him the blood of many lands, and in his face a commingling of the features of all nations, when he gives us upon canvas Mary and the Child, it will be a world’s affection bending over a world’s Christ.

Not only in the Madonnas, but in nearly all the chief pictures, the painters show their liking for children. You see a child peeping out somewhere. If there is no other way to get him into the picture, Paul Veronese will slide him down in the shape of a cherub on a plank of sunbeams.

You would hardly expect children in Raphael’s “Peter and John Healing the Lame Man.” You expect that the majesty of the scene will crowd out all familiarities. You would say that children ought to get out of the way when such exciting work is going on. There lies a lame man, his hand in the hand of the apostle. The sufferer looks up with a face that has anguish scorched into every feature; for though born a cripple, he had never got used to it. No man that I ever saw before wanted so much to get well. His twisted foot no human doctor could straighten. The muscles that bound it on the wrong side might have been cut, but the muscles on the other side would not have drawn it back to the right place. There lay the helpless, distorted foot, making its dumb prayer. Yonder is another deformed beggar hobbling up. If

Peter is successful with the first case, this lame man would like to have his limbs looked at. Still, he is not anxious. He is angry with the world and angry with heaven. His manner seems to say: “How did God dare to make me thus?” The wretch had been kicked off of people’s steps, and jeered at by the boys of the town, till he did not much care what became of him. A face full of everything hard, bitter, malicious. He is ready either to receive help at the hand of the apostle, or to strike him with the crutch. Does not much believe there is any cure, does not much care. Has not heard a kind word for twenty years, and would not be at all surprised if he were howled away now. A foul face — even the hair on the chin curls with scorn. He has the fierceness of an adder, which, trod on, curls up to bite its pursuer. The distortion of the body has struck in and deformed the soul. You feel that your only safety in his presence is that he cannot walk. His figure haunts a man for days.

It is a scene that puts the heart in a vice, and starts the cold sweat on the forehead, and holds you with a spell from which you are trying to break away, until you look just over the head of the vicious mendicant, and see the clear, innocent face of a child hushed in its mother’s arms, and then look to the left, and see two round-limbed children boundincr into the scene, wondering- what is the matter. With their dimpled hands, they pull out the thorns of the picture. It is a stubborn sea of trouble that will not divide when four baby feet go paddling in it. We are glad that Raphael did not choose for the picture cherubs with wings fastened at the backbone, ready any moment to fly away with them, but children that look as if they had come to stay. Rather thinly dressed, indeed, for cool weather. Raphael’s picture-children did not cost him much for clothes. You know it was a warm climate.

Though a bachelor, Raphael knew the worth of children in a picture. With their little hands they open the inside door of the heart, and let us pass in, when otherwise we might have been kept standing on the cold steps, looking at the corbeils and caryatides of the

POWER OF A CHILD’S FACE.

outside architecture. It was a little maid that directed Naaman to the Jordan for healing, and it is a child in the picture that shows the leper of harsh criticism where to wash his scales off. It is by the introduction of children into their paintings that Canaletto gives warmth to the ice-white castles of Venice, and Gainsborough simplicity to the hollowness of a watering-place, and Turner pathos to the “Decline of Carthage,” and Ruysdale life to a dead landscape; and Giotto and Tacconi and Orcagna and Joshua Reynolds follow in the track of a boy’s foot. “And a little child shall lead them.”