Читать книгу Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art - Various - Страница 5

I am glad to be able in these pages to render tribute, however feeble, to one of the great but unappreciated geniuses of his time; a man of powerful intellect as well as powerful frame, a true artist of heroic mould and thought, who dwarfed the poor pigmies of the day in which his lot was cast by conceptions too grand to find a market: Patric Park, sculptor, who concealed under a somewhat rude and rough exterior as tender a heart as ever beat in a human bosom. Had he been an ancient Greek, his name might have become immortal. Had he been a modern Frenchman, the art in which he excelled would have brought him not only bread, but fortune. But as he was only a portrayer of the heroic in the very prosaic country in which his lot was cast, it was as much as he could do to pay his way by the scanty rewards of an art which few people appreciated, or even understood, and to waste upon the marble busts of rich men, who had a fancy for that style of portraiture, the talents, or rather the genius, which, had encouragement come, might have produced epics in stone to have rivalled the masterpieces of antiquity.

Patrick, or, as he usually signed himself, Patric, Park was born in Glasgow in 1809, and I made his acquaintance in the Morning Chronicle office in 1842, when he was in the prime of his early manhood. He sent a letter to the editor to request the insertion of a modest paragraph in reference to a work of his which had found a tardy purchaser in Stirling, where it was destined to adorn the beautiful public cemetery of the city. The paragraph was inserted not as he wrote it, but with a kindly addition in praise of his work and of his genius. He came to the office next day to know the writer’s name. And when the writer avowed himself, a friendship sprung up between the two, which suffered no abatement during the too short life of the grateful man of genius, who, for the first time, had been publicly recognized by the humble pen of one who could command, in artistic and literary matters, the columns of a powerful journal. Park’s nature was broad and bold, and scorned conventionalities and false pretence. George Outram, a lawyer and editor of a Glasgow newspaper, author of several humorous songs and lyrics upon the odds and ends of legal practice, among which the “Annuity” survives in perennial youth in Edinburgh and Glasgow society, and brother of the gallant Sir James Outram, of Indian fame, used to say of Park, that he liked him because he was not smooth and conventional. “There is not in the world,” he said to me on one occasion, “another man with so many delightful corners in his character as Park. We are all of us much too smooth and rounded off. Give me Park and genuine nature, and all the more corners the better.”

Park had a very loud voice, and sang Scotch songs perhaps with more vehemence than many people would admire, but with a hearty appreciation that was pleasant to witness. It is related that a deputation of Glasgow bailies came up to London, with Lord Provost Lumsden at their head, in reference to the Loch Katrine Water Bill, for the supply of Glasgow with pure water, which was then before Parliament, and that they invited their distinguished townsman to dine with them at the Victoria Hotel, Euston Square. After dinner Park was called upon for a song, and as there was nobody in the dining-room but one old gentleman, who, according to the waiter, was very deaf, Park consented to sing, and sang in his very best style the triumphant Jacobite ballad of “Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye wauking yet,” till, as one of the bailies said, “he made the rafters ring, and might have been heard at St. Paul’s.” The deaf gentleman, as soon as the song was concluded, is reported to have made his way to the table, and apologising for addressing a company of strangers, to have turned to Park and said, with extraordinary fervor and emotion, “May God Almighty bless you, sir, and pour his choicest blessings upon your head! For thirty years I have been stone deaf and have not heard the sound of the human voice. But I heard your song, every word of it; God bless you!”

Upon one occasion, when we were travelling together in the Western Highlands, the captain of one of the Hutcheson steamers was exceedingly courteous and attentive to his passengers, and took great pains to point out to those who were making this delightful journey for the first time all the picturesque objects on the route. At one of the landing-places the young Earl of Durham was taken on board, with his servants, and from that moment the captain had neither eyes nor ears for any other person in the vessel. He lavished the most obsequious and fulsome attention upon his lordship, and when Park asked him a question, cut him short with a snappish reply. Park was disgusted, and expressed his opinion of the captain in a manner more forcible than polite. As there was a break in the navigation in consequence of some repairs that were being effected in one of the locks, the passengers had to disembark and proceed by omnibus to another steamer that awaited their arrival at Loch Lochy. Park mounted on the box by the side of the driver, and was immediately addressed by the captain, “Come down out of that, you sir! That seat’s reserved for his lordship!” Park’s anger flashed forth like an electric spark, “And who are you, sir, that you dare address a gentleman in that manner?”

“I am the captain of the boat, sir, and I order you to come down out of that.”

“Captain, be hanged!” said Park, “the coachman might as well call himself a captain as you. The only difference between you is, that he is the driver of a land omnibus and that you are the driver of an aquatic omnibus.” The young Earl laughed, and quietly took his place in the interior of the vehicle, leaving Park in undisputed possession of the box-seat.

His contempt for toadyism in all its shapes and manifestations was extreme. There was an engineer of some repute in his day, with whom he had often come into contact, and whom he especially disliked for his slavish subservience to rank and title. The engineer meeting Park on board of the boat, said, “Mr. Park, I wish you not to talk about me! I am told that you said, I was not worth a damn! Is it true?” “Well,” replied Park, “it may be; but if I said so I underrated you. I think you are worth two damns, and I damn you twice!”

On another occasion, when attending a soirée at Lady Byron’s, he was so annoyed at finding no other refreshment than tea, which he did not care for, and very weak port wine negus, which he detested as an unmanly and unheroic drink, that he took his departure, resolved to go in search of some stronger potation. The footman in the hall, addressing him deferentially in search of a “tip,” said, “Shall I call your carriage, my lord?” “I’m not a lord,” said Park, in a voice like that of a stentor. “I beg pardon, sir, shall I call your carriage?” “I have not got a carriage! Give me my walking stick! And now,” he added, slipping a shilling into the man’s hand, “can you tell me of any decent public-house in the neighborhood where I can get a glass of brandy-and-water? The very smell of her ladyship’s negus is enough to make one sick.”

Park resided for a year or two in Edinburgh, and procured several commissions for the busts of legal and other notabilities, and, what was in a higher degree in accordance with his tastes, for some life-size statues of characters in the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott, to complete the Scott monument in Princes Street. He also executed, without a commission, a gigantic model for a statue of Sir William Wallace, for whose name and fame he had the most enthusiastic veneration, with the idea that the patriotic feelings of the Scottish nation would be so far excited by his work as to justify an appeal to the public to set it up in bronze or marble (he preferred bronze,) on the Calton Hill, amid other monuments to the memory of illustrious Scotsmen. But the deeds of Wallace were too far back in the haze of bygone ages to excite much contemporary interest. The model was a noble work, eighteen feet high, and wholly nude. Some of his friends suggested to him that a little drapery would be more in accordance with Scottish ideas, than a figure so nude that it dispensed even with the customary fig-leaf. Park revolted at the notion of the fig-leaf, “a cowardly, indecent subterfuge,” he said. “To the pure all things are pure, as St. Paul says. There is nothing impure in nature, but only in the mind of man. Rather than put on the fig-leaf I would dash the model to pieces.” “But the drapery?” said a friend, the late Alexander Russel of the Scotsman. “What I have done I have done, and I will not spoil my design. Wallace was once a man, and if he had lived in the last century and I had to model his statue, I would have draped it or put it in armor as if he had been the Duke of Marlborough or Prince Eugene. But the memory of Wallace is scarcely the memory of a man but of a demigod. Wallace is a myth; and as a myth he does not require clothes.” “Very true,” said Russel, “but you are anxious to procure the public support and the public guineas, and you’ll never get them for a naked giant.” “Then I’ll smash the model,” said the indignant and dispirited artist. And he did so, and a beautiful work was lost to the world for ever.

At the time of our first acquaintance Park was somewhat smitten by the charms of a beautiful young woman in Greenock, the daughter of one of his oldest and best friends. The lady had no knowledge of art, and scarcely knew what was meant by the word sculptor. She asked him one day whether he cut marble chimney-pieces? This was too much. He was désillusionné and humiliated, and the amatory flame flickered out, no more to be relighted.

Park and I and three or four friends were once together on the top of Ben Lomond, on a fine clear day in August. The weather was lovely, but oppressively hot, and the fatigue of climbing was great, but not excessive. At the summit, so pure was the atmosphere that looking eastward we could distinctly see Arthur’s Seat, overlooking Edinburgh, and the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, twenty miles beyond. Looking westward, we could distinctly see Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde. Thus the eye surveyed the whole diameter of Scotland. By a strange effect of atmosphere the peak of Goatfell in Arran, separated optically from the mountain by a belt of thick white cloud, seemed to be preternaturally raised to a height of at least 20,000 feet above the sea. I pointed it out to Park. “Nonsense!” he said. “Why Goatfell would be higher than the Himalayas if your notion were correct.” “But I know the shape of the peak,” I replied; “I have been on the top of Goatfell at least half-a-dozen times, and would swear to it, as to the nose on your face.” And as we were speaking the white cloud was dissipated, and the Himalayan peak seemed to descend slowly and take its place on the body of Goatfell, from which it had appeared to have been dissevered. “Well,” he said, “things are not what they seem, and I maintain that it was as high as the Himalayas or Chimborazo while the appearance lasted.”

The mountain at this time shone in pale rose-like glow, and Park, inspired by the grandeur of the scene, preached us a very eloquent little sermon, addressing himself to the sun, on the inherent dignity and beauty of sun-worship as practised by the modern Parsees and the ancient Druids. He concluded by a lament that his own art was powerless to represent or personify the grand forces of nature as the Greeks had attempted to do. “The Apollo Belvidere,” he said, “is the representative of a beautiful young man. But it is not Apollo. Art can represent Venus – the perfection of female beauty, and Mars – the perfection of manly vigor; but Apollo; no! Yet I think I would have tried Apollo myself if I had lived in Athens two thousand years ago.”

“‘A living dog is better than a dead lion.’”

“True,” said Park, “I am a living dog, Phidias is a dead lion. I have to model the unintellectual faces of rich cheesemongers, or grocers, or iron masters, and put dignity into them, if I can, which is difficult. And when I add the dignity, they complain of the bad likeness, so that I often think I’d rather be a cheesemonger than a sculptor.”

I called at Park’s studio one morning, and was informed that he every minute expected a visit from the great General Sir Charles James Napier – for whose character and achievements he had the highest admiration. He considered him by far the greatest soldier of modern times – and had prevailed upon the general to sit to him for his bust. Park asked me to stay and be introduced to him, and nothing loth, I readily consented. I had not long to wait. The general had a nose like the beak of an eagle – larger and more conspicuous on his leonine and intellectual face than that of the Duke of Wellington, whose nose was familiar in the purlieus of the Horse Guards. It procured for him the title of “conkey” from the street urchins, and I recognised him at a glance as soon as he entered. On his taking the seat for Park to model his face in clay, the sculptor asked him not to think of too many things at a time, but to keep his mind fixed on one subject. The general did his best to comply with the request, with the result that his face soon assumed a fixed and sleepy expression, without a trace of intellectual animation. Park suddenly startled him by inquiring, “Is it true, general, that you gave way – retreated in fact – at the battle of – ?” (naming the place, which I have forgotten). The general’s eyes flashed sudden fire, and he was about to reply indignantly when Park quietly remarked, plying his modelling tool on the face at the time, “That’ll do, general, the expression is admirable!” The general saw through the manœuvre, and laughed heartily.

The general’s statue in Trafalgar Square is an admirable likeness. Park was much disappointed at not receiving the commission to execute it.

Park modelled a bust of myself, for which he would not accept payment. He found it a very difficult task to perform. I had to sit to him at least fifty times before he could please himself with his work. On one occasion he lost all patience, and swearing lustily, more suo, dashed the clay into a shapeless mass with his fist. “D – n you,” he said, “why don’t you keep to one face? You seem to have fifty faces in a minute, and all different! I never but once had another face that gave me half the trouble.”

“And whose was the other?” I inquired.

“Sir Charles Barry’s” (architect of the Houses of Parliament at Westminster). “He drove me to despair with his sudden changes of expression. He was a very Proteus as far as his face was concerned, and you’re another. Why don’t you keep thinking of one thing while I am modelling, or why can’t you retain one expression for at least five minutes?”