DEATH ON THE PALE HORSE, AND ON THE DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE WHICH ACCOMPANIES IT.

MR WEST'S name stands deservedly high in the annals of art in this country-too high for him to condescend to be his own puffer, even at second-hand. He comes forward, in the present instance, as the painter and the showman of the piece; as the candidate for public applause, and the judge who awards himself the prize; as the idol on the altar, and the priest who offers up the grateful incense of praise. He places himself, as it were, before his own performance, with a Catalogue Raisonné in his hand, and, before the spectator can form a judgment on the work itself, dazzles him with an account of the prodigies of art which are there conceived and executed. This is not quite fair. It is a proceeding which, though "it sets on a quantity of barren spectators to admire, cannot but make the judicious grieve." Mr West, by thus taking to himself unlimited credit for "the high endeavour and the glad success," by proclaiming aloud that he has aimed at the highest sublimities of his art, and as loudly, with a singular mixture of pomposity and phlegm, that he has fully accomplished all that his most ardent hopes had anticipated,—must, we should think, obtain a great deal of spurious, catchpenny reputation, and lose a great deal of that genuine tribute of approbation to which he is otherwise entitled, by turning the attention of the well-informed and unprejudiced part of the community from his real and undoubted merits to his groundless and

it is said, is no praise: but it is worse than this. It either shows great weakness and vanity for an artist to talk (or to get another to talk) of his own work, which was produced yesterday, and may be forgotten to-morrow, with the same lofty, emphatic, solemn tone, as if it were already stamped with the voice of ages, and had become sacred to the imagination of the beholder; or else the doing so is a deliberate attempt to encroach on the right of private judgment and public opinion, which those who are not its dupes will resent accordingly, and endeavour to repel by acts of precaution or hostility. An unsuccessful effort to extort admiration is sure to involve its own punishment.

We should not have made these remarks, if the "Description of the Picture of Death" had been a solitary instance of the kind; but it is one of a series of descriptions of the same sort-it is a part of a system of selfadulation which cannot be too much discouraged. Perhaps Mr West may say, that the Descriptive Catalogue is not his; that he has nothing to do with its composition or absurdities. But it must be written with his consent and approbation; and this is a sanction which it ought not to receive. We presume the artist would have it in his option to put a negative on any undue censure or flagrant abuse of his picture; it must be equally in his power, and it is equally incumbent upon him, to reject, with dignified modesty, the gross and palpable flatteries which it contains, direct or by implication.

The first notice we received of this picture was by an advertisement in a

morning paper, (the editor of which is not apt to hazard extravagant opinions without a prompter,) purporting, that, "in consequence of the President's having devoted a year and a half to its completion, and of its having for its subject the Terrible Sublime, it would place Great Britain in the same conspicuous relation to the rest of Europe in arts that the battle of Waterloo had done in arms!" We shall not stay to decide between the battle and the picture; but the writer follows up the same idea of the Terrible Sublime in the Catalogue, the first paragraph of which is conceived in the following terms:

"The general effect proposed to be excited by this picture is the terrible sublime, and its various modifications, until lost in the opposite extremes of pity and horror, a sentiment which painting has so seldom attempted to awaken, that a particular description of the subject will probably be accept able to the public.'

"So shall my anticipation prevent your discovery.' Mr West here, like Bayes in the Rehearsal, insinuates the plot very profoundly. He has, it seeins, opened a new walk in art with its alternate ramifications into the opposite regions of horror and pity, and kindly takes the reader by the hand, to show him how triumphantly he has arrived at the end of his journey.

"In poetry," continues the writer, "the same effect is produced by a few abrupt and rapid gleams of description, touching, as it were, with fire, the features and edges of a general mass of awful obscurity; but in painting, such indistinctness would be a defect, and imply, that the artist wanted the power to pourtray the con.ceptions of his fancy. Mr West was of opinion that to delineate a physical form, which in its moral impression would approximate to that of the visionary Death of Milton, it was necessary to endow it, if possible, with the appearance of superhuman strength and energy. He has, therefore, exerted the utmost force and perspicuity of his pencil on the central figure." This is "spoken with authority, and not as the scribes." Poetry, according to the definition here introduced of it, resembles a candle-light picture, which g ves merely the rim and outlines of things in a vivid and dazzling, but confused and imperfect

manner. We cannot tell whether this account will be considered as satisfactory. But Mr West, or his commentator, should tread cautiously on this ground. He may otherwise commit himself, not only in a comparison with the epic poet, but with the inspired writer, who only uses words. It will hardly be contended, for instance, that the account of Death on the Pale Horse in the book of Revelations, never produced its due effect of the terrible sublime, till the deficiencies of the pen were supplied by the pencil. Neither do we see how the endowing a physical form with superhuman strength, has any necessary connection with the moral impression of the visionary Death of Milton. There seems to be here some radical mistake in Mr West's theory. The moral attributes of Death are powers and effects of an infinitely wide and general description, which no individual or physical form can possibly represent, but by courtesy of speech or by a distant analogy. The moral impression of Death is essentially visionary; its reality is in the mind's eye. Words are here the only things; and things, physical forms, the mere mockeries of the understanding. The less definite the conception, the less bodily, the more vast, unformed, and unsubstantial, the nearer does it approach to some resemblance of that omnipresent, lasting, universal, irresistible principle, which everywhere, and at some time or other, exerts its power over all things. Death is a mighty abstraction, like Night, or Space, or Time. He is an ugly customer, who will not be invited to supper, or to sit for his picture. He is with us and about us, but we do not see him. He stalks on before us, and we do not mind him; he follows us behind, and we do not look back at him. We do not see him making faces at us in our lifetime! we do not feel him tickling our bare ribs afterwards, nor look at him through the empty grating of our hollow eyes! Does Mr West really sup-. pose that he has put the very image of Death upon his canvas; that he has taken the fear of him out of our hearts; that he has circumscribed his power with a pair of compasses; that he has measured the length of his arm with a two-foot rule; that he has suspended the stroke of his dart with a stroke of his pencil; that he has laid

hands on the universal principle of destruction, and hemined him in with lines and lineaments, and made a gazing-stock and a show of him, " under the patronage of the Prince Regent," (as that illustrious person has taken, and confined, and made a show of another enemy of the human race)-so that the work of decay and dissolution is no longer going on in nature; that all we have heard or felt of death is but a fable compared with this distinct, living, and warranted likeness of him? Oh no! There is no power in the pencil actually to embody an abstraction, to impound the imagination, to circumvent the powers of the soul, which hold communion with the universe. The painter cannot make the general particular, the infinite and imaginary defined and palpable, that which is only believed and dreaded, an object of sight.

As Mr West appears to have wrong notions of the powers of his art, so he seems not to put in practice all that it is capable of. The only way in which the painter of genius can represent the force of moral truth, is by translating it into an artificial language of his own,-by substituting hieroglyphics for words, and presenting the closest and most striking affinities his fancy and observation can suggest between the general idea and the visible illustration of it. Here we think Mr West has failed. The artist has represented Death riding over his prostrate victims in all the rage of impotent despair. He is in a great splutter, and seems making a last effort to frighten his foes by an explosion of red-hot thunder bolts, and a pompous display of his allegorical parapharnalia. He has not the calm, still, majestic form of Death, killing by a look, withering by a touch. His presence does not make the still air cold. His flesh is not stony or cadaverous, but is crusted over with a yellow glutinous paste, as if it had been baked in a pye. Milton makes Death "grin horrible a ghastly smile," with an evident allusion to the common Death's head; but in the picture he seems grinning for a wager, with a full row of loose, rotten teeth; and his terrible form is covered with a long black drapery, which would cut a figure in an undertaker's shop, and which cuts a figure where it is (for it is finely painted), but which serves only

as a disguise for the King of Terrors. We have no idea of such a swaggering and blustering Death as this of Mr West's. He has not invoked a ghastly spectre from the tomb, but has called up an old squalid ruffian from a night cellar, and crowned him inonarch of the universal world." The horse on which he rides is not "pale," but white. There is no gusto, no imagination in Mr West's colouring. As to his figure, the description gives an accurate idea of it enough. "His horse rushes forward with the universal wildness of a tempestuous element, breathing livid pestilence, and rearing and trampling with the vehemence of unbridled fury." The style of the figure corresponds to the style of the description. It is over-loaded and top-heavy. The chest of the animal is a great deal too long for the legs.

The painter has made amends for this splashing figure of the Pale Horse, by those of the White and Red Horse. They are like a couple of rockinghorses, and go as easy. Mr West's vicarious egotism obtrudes itself again offensively in speaking of the Rider on the White Horse. As he is supposed," says the Catalogue, to represent the Gospel, it was requisite that he should be invested with those exterior indications of purity, excellence, and dignity, which are associated in our minds with the name and offices of the Messiah. But it was not THE SAVIOUR healing and comforting the afflicted, or the meek and lowly JESUS, bearing with resignation the scorn and hatred of the scoffing multitude, that was to be represented;-it was the King of Kings going forth, conquering and to conquer. He is therefore painted with a solemn countenance, expressive of a mind filled with the thoughts of a great enterprise; and he advances onward in his sublime career with that serene Majcsty," &c. Now this is surely an unwarrantable assumption of public opinion in a matter of taste. Christ is not represented in this picture as he was in Mr West's two former pictures; but in all three he gives you to understand that he has reflected the true countenance and divine character of the Messiah. Multum abludit imago.

The Christs in each picture have a different character indeed, but they only present a variety of meanness and insipidity.

But the unwary spectator, who looks at the catalogue to know what he is to think of the picture, and reads all these therefores of sublimity, serenity, purity, &c. considers them as so many infallible inferences and demonstrations of the painter's skill.

Mr West has been tolerably successful in the delineation of the neutral character of the Man on the Black Horse; but "the two wretched emaciated figures" of a man and woman before him," absorbed in the feelings of their own particular misery," are not likely to excite any sympathy in the beholders. They exhibit the lowest stage of mental and physical imbecility, that could never by any possibility come to any good. In the domestic groupe in the foreground, "the painter has attempted to excite the strongest degree of pity which his subject admitted, and to contrast the surrounding objects with images of tenderness and beauty;" and it is here that he has principally failed. The Dying Mother appears to have been in her lifetime a plaster-cast from the antique, stained with a little purple and yellow, to imitate the life. The "Lovely Infant" that is falling from her breast, is a hideous little creature, with glazed eyes, and livid aspect, borrowed from the infant who is falling out of his mother's lap over the bridge, in Hogarth's Print of GinLane. The Husband's features, who is placed in so pathetic an attitude, are cut out of the hardest wood, and of the deepest dye; and the surviving Daughter, who is stated "to be sensible only to the loss she has sustained by the death of so kind a parent," is neither better nor worse than the figures we meet with in the elegant frontispieces to history-books, or family stories, intended as Christmas presents to good little boys and girls. The foreshortening of the lower extremities, both of the Mother and Child, is wretchedly defective, either in drawing or colouring.

In describing the anarchy of the combats of men with beasts," Mr . West has attained that sort of excellence which always arises from a knowledge of the rules of composition. His lion, however, looks as if his face and velvet paws were covered with a calf's skin, or leather gloves pulled carefully over them. So little is the appearance of hair given! The youth in this group, whom Mr West celebrates for

his muscular manly courage, has a fine rustic look of health and strength about him; but we think the other figure, with a scowling swarthy face, striking at an animal, is superior in force of character and expression. In the back figure of the man holding his hand to his head, (with no yery dignified action,) the artist has well imitated the bad colouring, and stiff inanimate drawing of Poussin. The remaining figures are not of much importance, or are striking only from their defects. Mr West, however, omits no opportunity of discreetly sounding his own praise. "The story of this group," it is said, "would have been incomplete, had the lions not been shown conquerors to a certain extent, by the two wounded men," &c. As it is, it is perfect! Admirable critic! Again we are told, "The pyramidal form of this large division is perfected by a furious bull," &c. Nay, indeed, the form of the pyramid is even preserved in the title-page of the catalogue. The prettiest incident in the picture is the dove lamenting over its mate, just killed by the serpent. We do not deny Mr West the praise of invention. Upon the whole, we think this the best coloured and most picturesque of all Mr West's productions; and in all that relates to composition, and the introduction of the adjuncts of historical design, it shows, like his other works, the hand of a master. In the same room is the picture of Christ Rejected. Alas! how changed, and in how short a time! The colours are scarcely dry, and it already looks dingy, flat, and faded. W. H.

ON THE POLITICAL STATE OF ALGIERS, THE EFFECTS OF THE RECENT ENGLISH EXPEDITION, AND THE BEST LINE OF POLICY IN REGARD TO THE BARBARY STATES; WITH OBSERVATIONS BY AN ITALIAN GENTLEMAN, RECENTLY RETURNED FROM CAPTIVITY IN THAT COUNTRY.

distinguished foreigner, will, we trust, be [The following article, written by a found equally interesting from its subject and execution. We have the satisfaction to state, that it was communicated to us by Professor Playfair, who, on his late tour on the Continent, received it from the author.]

In the state of universal suffering which Europe experiences from a want