Arrived there (1759), Gainsborough sought out the musicians rather than the artists, and soon numbered Johann Christian Bach among his friends. He had the soul and sensitivity of a musician, and in his paintings he turned music into warmth of color -and grace of line. Bath had some good collections; now he could study landscapes by Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Poussin, and portraits by Vandyck; he became the inheritor of Vandyck’s English manner—portraits that added the highest refinement of art to distinction of personality and elegance of dress.
In Bath he did some of his best work. The Sheridans were living there; Gainsborough painted Richard’s lovely young wife.50 He lavished all his maturing artistry on The Honorable Mrs. Graham ,51 whose red robe, in its wrinkles and folds, allowed him to display the most delicate gradations of color and shade. When this portrait was exhibited in the Royal Academy at London (1777) it seemed to many observers to outshine anything that Reynolds had done. About 1770 Gainsborough transfigured Jonathan Buttal, son of an ironmonger, into The Blue Boy, for which the Huntington Art Gallery paid $500,000. Reynolds had expressed his conviction that no acceptable portrait could be done in blue; his rising rival met the challenge triumphantly; blue became henceforth a favorite color in English painting.
Now every notable in Bath wished to sit for Gainsborough. But “I’m sick of portraits,” he told a friend, “and wish very much to take my viol-da-gamba and walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landskips and enjoy the fag end of life in quietness and ease.”52 Instead he moved to London (1774) and rented sumptuous rooms in Schomberg House, Pall Mall, at £ 300 a year; he was not to be outdone by Reynolds’ display. He quarreled with the Academy on the hanging of his pictures; for four years (1773-77) he refused to exhibit there; and after 1783 his new work could be seen only at the annual opening of his studio. Art critics began an ungracious war of comparisons between Reynolds and Gainsborough; Reynolds was generally rated superior, but the royal family favored Gainsborough, and he painted them all. Soon half of the blue bloods of England flocked to Schomberg House, seeking the precarious immortality of paint. Now Gainsborough portrayed Sheridan, Burke, Johnson, Franklin, Blackstone, Pitt II, Clive … To establish himself, and pay his rent, he had to resign himself to portraiture.
His sitters found him hard to please. One lord put on all his airs as he posed; Gainsborough sent him away unpainted. Garrick’s features were so mobile and changeful (for this was half the secret of his superiority as an actor) that the artist could find no expression that lasted long enough to reveal the man. He had the same trouble with Garrick’s rival Samuel Foote. “Rot them for a couple of rogues,” exclaimed Gainsborough; “they have everybody’s face but their own.”53 He found a different difficulty with Mrs. Siddons: “Damn your nose, madam! There’s no end to it.”54 He was at his best with women; he felt their sexual attraction strongly, but he sublimated this into a poetry of soft colors and dreamy eyes.
When his expensive establishment allowed him he painted landscapes, for which there was little demand. Often he placed his sitters—or standees—against a rustic scene, as in Robert Andrews and His Wife (which brought $364,000 at an auction in 1960). Too busy to go and sketch in the face of living nature, he brought into his studio stumps, weeds, branches, flowers, animals, and arranged them—with dressed-up dolls to serve as people—into a tableau;55 from these objects, from his memories, and from his imagination, he painted landscapes. There was a certain artificial quality in them, a formalism and regularity seldom found in nature; even so the result conveyed an air of rural fragrance and peace. In his later years he painted some “fancy pictures,” in which he made no pretense to realism, but indulged his romantic temper; one of these, Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher, has all the sentiment of Greuze’s La Cruche cassée (The Broken Pitcher); both were painted in 1785.56
Only an artist can measure Gainsborough’s worth. In his own time he was ranked below Reynolds; his drawing was criticized as careless, his composition as lacking unity, his figures as improperly posed; but Reynolds himself praised the shimmering brilliance of his rival’s coloring. There was a poetry and music to Gainsborough’s work that the great portraitist could not warmly understand. Reynolds had a more masculine intellect, and succeeded better in portraying men; Gainsborough was a more romantic spirit, who preferred to paint women and boys. He had missed the classical training that Reynolds had received in Italy, and he lacked the stimulating associations that enriched Reynolds’ mind and art. Gainsborough did little reading, had few intellectual interests, shunned the circle of wits that gathered around Johnson. He was generous but impulsive and critical; he could never have listened with patience to Reynolds’ lectures or Johnson’s decrees. Yet he kept Sheridan’s friendship to the end.
As he grew older he turned melancholy, for the romantic spirit, unless it is religious, is helpless in the face of death. In many Gainsborough landscapes a dead tree intrudes itself as a memento mori amid rich foliage and lush grass. Probably he surmised that cancer was consuming him, and felt a rising bitterness at the thought of so prolonged an agony. A few days before he died he wrote a letter of reconciliation to Reynolds and asked the older man to visit him. Reynolds came, and the two men, who had not so much quarreled as been the subject of lesser men’s disputes, engaged in a friendly chat. When they parted Gainsborough remarked, “Goodbye till we meet in the hereafter, Vandyck in our company.”57 He died on August 2, 1788, in his sixty-first year.
Reynolds joined Sheridan in carrying the body to Kew Churchyard. Four months later Reynolds, in his Fourteenth Discourse, paid him a just tribute. He frankly noted defects as well as excellences in Gainsborough’s work, but he added: “If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honorable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of art, among the very first of that rising name.”58
George Romney struggled to reach the popularity of Reynolds and Gainsborough, but his defects of education, health, and character kept him to a more modest role. Without schooling after the age of twelve, he worked in his father’s carpentry shop in Lancashire till he was nineteen. His drawings won him instruction in painting from a local wastrel. At twenty-two he fell seriously ill; recovering, he married the nurse; soon restless, he left her to seek his fortune; he saw her only twice in the next thirty-seven years, but he sent her a part of his earnings. He made enough to visit Paris and Rome, where he was influenced by the neoclassical trend. Back in London, he attracted patronage by his ability to clothe his sitters in grace or dignity. One of these was Emma Lyon, the future Lady Hamilton; Romney was so captivated by her beauty that he portrayed her as goddess, Cassandra, Circe, Magdalen, Joan of Arc, and saint. In 1782 he painted a portrait of Lady Sutherland, for which he received £ 18; it was recently sold for $250,000. In 1799, broken in body and mind, he returned to his wife; she nursed him again, as she had done forty-four years before. He lingered through three years of paralysis, and died in 1802. Through him and Reynolds and Gainsborough England was now, in this half century, in painting as well as in politics and literature, in the full stream of European civilization.
CHAPTER XXXI
England’s Neighbors
1756-89
I. GRATTAN’S IRELAND
AN English traveler, visiting Ireland in 1764, explained why the poor a were taking to crime:
What dread of justice or punishment can be expected from an Irish peasant in a state of wretchedness and extreme penury, in which, if the first man that met him were to knock him on the head and give him an everlasting relief from his distressed and penurious life, he might have reason to think it a friendly and meritorious action? … That many of them bear their … abject state with patience is to me a sufficient proof of the natural civility of their disposition.1
The landlords, who were almost all Protestants, were not the direct or most brutal oppressors of the peasants, who were almost all Catholics; usually the owners lived i
n England and did not see the blood on the rents exacted by the middlemen to whom they leased their land; it was the middlemen who drew every possible penny from the peasants, until these had to feed on potatoes and dress in rags.
In 1758, because disease was decimating cattle in England, Ireland was allowed for five years to export livestock to Britain. Many acres in Ireland-including common lands formerly used by the tenant farmers—were changed from tillage to grazing or pasturage; the rich were enriched, the poor were further impoverished. They added to their problems by marrying early—“upon the first capacity,” as Sir William Petty put it;2 presumably they hoped that children would soon earn their keep and then help pay the rent. So, despite a high death rate, the population of Ireland grew from 3,191,000 in 1754 to 4,753,000 in 1791.3
The industrial picture was brightening. Many Protestants and some Catholics had gone into the production of linens, woolens, cotton goods, silk, or glass. In the final quarter of the century, after Grattan had secured a moderation of British restrictions on Irish manufactures and commerce, a middle class developed which provided economic leverage for liberal politics and cultural growth. Dublin became one of the leading centers of education, music, drama, and architecture in the British Isles. Trinity College was becoming a university, and already had a long roster of distinguished graduates. If Ireland had kept her shining lights at home—Burke, Goldsmith, and Sheridan as well as Swift and Berkeley—she would have shone with the most brilliant nations of the age. After 1766 the lord lieutenant made Dublin his permanent home instead of paying brief visits once a year. Now majestic public buildings rose, and elegamt mansions. Dublin’s theaters rivaled London’s in the excellence of their productions; here Handel’s Messiah received its first performance and welcome (1742), and Thomas Sheridan staged many successful plays, some of them written by his wife.
Religion, of course, was the pervading issue in Ireland. Dissenters—i.e., Presbyterians, Independents (Puritans), and Baptists—were excluded from office and from Parliament by the Test Act which required reception of the Sacrament according to the Anglican rite as a precondition to eligibility. The Toleration Act of 1689 was not extended to Ireland. The Presbyterians of Ulster protested in vain against these disabilities; thousands of them emigrated to America, where many of them fought devotedly in the Revolutionary armies.
The population of Ireland was eighty per cent Catholic, but no Catholic could be elected to Parliament. Only a few Catholics owned land. Protestant tenants were given leases for their lives, Catholic tenants for no more than thirty-one years; and they had to pay two thirds of their profits as rent.4 No Catholic schools were allowed, but the authorities did not enforce the law forbidding the Irish to seek education abroad. Some Catholic students were admitted to Trinity College, but they could not receive a degree. Catholic worship was permitted, but there were no legal means of preparing Catholic priests; candidates for the priesthood, however, might go to seminaries on the Continent. Some of these students adopted the genial manners and liberal views of the hierarchy in France and Italy; returning to Ireland as priests, they were welcomed at the tables of educated Protestants, and helped to soften bigotry on both sides. By the time that Henry Grattan entered the Irish Parliament (1775) the movement for Catholic emancipation had won the support of thousands of Protestants in both England and Ireland.
In 1760 Ireland was governed by a lord lieutenant, or viceroy, appointed by and responsible to the king of England; and by a Parliament dominated in the House of Lords by Anglican bishops, and in the House of Commons by Anglican landowners and governmental placemen, or pensioners. Elections to Parliament were subject to the same system of “rotten” and “pocket” boroughs as in England; a few leading families, known as “the Undertakers,” owned the vote of their boroughs as they owned their homes.5
Catholic resistance to English rule was sporadic and ineffective. In 1763 bands of Catholics called “Whiteboys”—from the white shirts they wore over their clothes—roamed the countryside, tearing down enclosure fences, crippling cattle, and assaulting the collectors of taxes or tithes; the leaders were caught and hanged, and the rebellion collapsed. The movement for national liberation fared better. In 1776 most British troops were taken from Ireland for service in America; at the same time the Irish economy was depressed by cessation of trade with America; to guard against domestic revolt or foreign invasion the Protestants of Ireland formed an army called the Volunteers. These grew in number and power until, by 1780, they were a redoubtable force in politics. It was through support by these forty thousand armed men that Henry Flood and Henry Grattan won their legislative victories.
Both of them were officers in the Volunteers, and both were among the greatest orators in a country which could send Burke and Richard Sheridan to England and still have a store of eloquence left. Flood entered the Irish Parliament in 1759. He led a brave campaign to reduce venality in a House where half the members were indebted to the government. He was defeated by wholesale bribery, and surrendered (1775) by accepting the office of vice-treasurer at a salary of £ 3,500.
In that year Henry Grattan was elected to the Parliament by a Dublin constituency. He soon took Flood’s place as leader of the opposition. He announced an ambitious program: to secure relief to Irish Catholics, to free Dissenters from the Test Act, to end English restrictions on Irish trade, and to establish the independence of the Irish Parliament. He pursued these aims with an energy, devotion, and success that made him the idol of the nation, Catholic or Protestant. In 1778 he secured passage of a bill enabling Catholics to take leases of ninety-nine years, and to inherit land on the same conditions as Protestants. A year later, on his urging, the Test Act was repealed, and full civil rights were assured to Dissenters. He and Flood persuaded the Irish Parliament and the Viceroy that the continuance of British obstructions to Irish trade would lead to revolutionary violence. Lord North, then heading the British government, favored repeal of the restrictions; English manufacturers bombarded him with petitions against repeal; he yielded to them. The Irish began to boycott British goods. The Volunteers assembled before the Irish Parliament House with arms in their hands and cannon labeled “Free Trade or This.” The English manufacturers, hurt by the boycott, withdrew their opposition; the English ministry withdrew its veto; the Free Trade Act was passed (1779).
Grattan next pressed for the independence of the Irish Parliament. Early in 1780 he moved that only the king of England, with the consent of the Parliament of Ireland, could legislate for Ireland, and that Great Britain and Ireland were united only by the bond of a common sovereign. His motion was defeated. The Volunteers, meeting at Dungannon 25,000 strong (February, 1782), announced that if legislative independence were not granted, their loyalty to England would cease. In March Lord North’s aged ministry fell; Rockingham and Fox came into power. Meanwhile Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown (1781); France and Spain had joined America in war against England; Britain could not afford to face an Irish revolution at this time. On April 16, 1782, the Irish Parliament, led by Grattan, declared its legislative independence; a month later this was conceded by England. The Irish Parliament voted a grant of £ 100,000 to Grattan, who was a relatively poor man; he accepted half.
This, of course, was a victory for the Protestants of Ireland, not for the Catholics. When Grattan—strongly supported by the Anglican Bishop Frederick Hervey—went on to campaign for a measure of Catholic emancipation, the best he could do (in what historians call “Grattan’s Parliament”) was to win the franchise for propertied Catholics (1792); these few received the right to vote but not the right to be elected to Parliament, to municipal office, or to the judiciary. Grattan went to England, secured election to the British Parliament, and there continued his campaign. He died in 1820, nine years before that Parliament passed the Catholic Relief Act, which admitted Catholics to the Irish Parliament. Justice is not only blind, it limps.
II. THE SCOTTISH BACKGROUND
When the Union of 1707
merged Scotland with England through a joint Parliament, London quipped that the whale had swallowed Jonah; when Bute (1762 f.) brought a score of Scots into the British government the wits grumbled that Jonah was swallowing the whale.6 Politically the whale won: the sixteen Scottish peers and forty-five commoners were engulfed by 108 English peers and 513 commoners. Scotland submitted its foreign policy, and in large measure its economy, to legislation dominated by English money and minds. The two countries did not forget their former enmity: the Scots complained of commercial inequalities between Jonah and the whale, and Samuel Johnson spoke for the whale in biting at Jonah with chauvinistic iteration.
Scotland in 1760 had a population of some 1,250,000 souls. The birth rate was high, but the death rate followed close. Said Adam Smith, toward 1770: “It is not uncommon, I have been told, in the Highlands of Scotland, for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive.”7 The Highland chieftains owned nearly all the land outside the towns, and kept the tenant farmers primitively poor on a rocky soil harassed by summer downpours, and by winter snow from September to May. Rents were repeatedly raised—on one farm from five pounds to £ 20 in twenty-five years.8 Many peasants, seeing no escape from poverty at home, emigrated to America; so, said Johnson, “a rapacious chief could make a wilderness of his estate.”9 The landlords pleaded depreciation of the currency as their excuse for raising rents. Conditions were even worse in the coal mines and salt pits, where, until 1775, workers were bound to their jobs as long as they lived.10
In the Lowland towns the Industrial Revolution brought prosperity to an expanding and enterprising middle class. Southwest Scotland was dotted with textile factories. Glasgow, through industries and foreign trade, grew from a population of 12,500 in 1707 to eighty thousand in 1800; it had rich suburbs, slum tenements, and a university. In 1768-90 a canal was dug connecting the Rivers Clyde and Forth, so establishing an all-water commercial route between the industrial southwest and the political southeast. Edinburgh—which had some fifty thousand inhabitants in 1740—was the focus of Scotland’s government, intellect, and fashion; every well-to-do Scottish family aspired to spend at least a part of the year there; here came Boswell and Burns, here lived Hume and Robertson and Raeburn; here were renowned lawyers like the Erskines, and a prestigious university, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. And here were the headquarters of Scottish Christianity.