MR. TUPPER AS ARTIST.*

THE many admirers of our great proverbial poet ought to know

that in this gorgeous new edition of his Proverbial Philosophy he appears before us in anew character,—as designer, as well as poet. In three separate instances, each of them individually worthy of more study than all the host of other illustrations by common artists who are not poets, Martin Farquhar Tupper has trans- lated his own sublime conceptions from written verse into the poetry of form. In so doing he is competing with no unknown men. Gustave Dore himself, in a frontispiece on which we need not pronounce any greater praise than that it is thoroughly Tupperian in style and conception, though in sublimity not nearly up to the level of Mr. Tupper's own designs, is amongst the multitude of rival designers ; but Gustave Dore, though he has evidently deeply studied Tupper, cannot be expected to rise with his theme so high as the poet who inspired him.

Gustave Dore's frontispiece presents us with a large book called Tabulae Proverbiorum, before which a picturesque bearded figure in a Spanish hat is kneeling in profound study, carrying in his left hand apparently one of those bags pendant from the end of a wand which are used in churches for collecting money out of pews inaccessible to the ordinary length of the human arm. A lady behind him has a similar instrument,- from which we may suppose that a collection for a cheap edition of the Proverbial Philosophy is impending. On each side of the Tabulae Pro- verbiorum stand figures in white, the one holding a cross, the other evidently angelic, with a highly developed pair of wings rising very perpendicularly out of her shoulders, a drawn sword in her left hand, downcast eyes, and an expression as of satiety caused by eau suer& on her amiable countenance, such, indeed, as we have observed to follow excessive indulgence in the Proverbial Philosophy. A formidable dragon is rather tamely wriggling at her feet. In the background of the picture various sinister forms of dismal aspect appear to be crouching in, or retreating into, the outer darkness, forms which seem to represent in some obscure way the heathen for whose benefit the impending collection is, perhaps, to be made by the Spanish gentleman and lady aforesaid, —the only difficulty being that there seem to be no pews from which to collect. It is impossible that the dark-faced and uncomfortable audience in the background can be supposed to possess cash. They are quite the other sort of people, the " objects " of collections ; and we suppose a meeting-house must be imagined somewhere in the background, to whom the spectacle of this large work on "Proverbs," and the sated angel guarding it, and the dragon at her feet, can be shown with satisfactory results to the pendant money bags referred to. The angel is a great creation. Dore has steeped her smile in the Proverbial Philosophy till the very heart of Tupper seems to have passed into those parted lips.

But if M. Dore has done more justice to Mr. Tupper than we could have expected of a Frenchman,—so much indeed, that we may forgive him the obscure allegorical elements and the unworked- out suggestion of the wands with pendant money-bags,—he can- not of course be expected to interpret Mr. Tupper as that great mind interprets itself. The first of his own designing is the illus- tration on page 5 to the beautiful and original metaphor which his own genius has suggested for the "Words of wisdom" :—

" They be chance pearls, thing among the rocks by the sullen waters of Oblivion,

Which Diligence loveth to gather, and hang round the neck of Memory ; They be white-winged seeds of happiness, wafted from the islands of the blessed,

Which Thought carefully tendeth in the kindly garden of the heart."

Mr. Tupper has conceived for us, in illustration of these remark- able words, a magnificent scene of lonely grandeur,—a gloomy

tarn,—the Waters of Oblivion,—enclosed by black and almost per- pendicular rocks, down which a waterfall rushes in a thread of light, bringing, no doubt, the pearls into the Waters of Oblivion

* Proverbial Philosophy. First and Second Series. By Marlin F. Tupper, M.A., D.C.L., P.N.S., of Christ Church, Oxford. Illustrated. A New Edition. London : Moxou, 1867.

which Diligence gathers on its shores. Perhaps airs from the same quarter waft the white-winged seeds of happiness from the islands of the blessed which Thought tends in the "kindly garden of the heart," for there seems a slight tendency to islands of the blessed in the distance. On this side of the Waters of Oblivion,—Diligence, stripped to the waist, is kneeling with the string of pearls,—very big ones,—a little too like the monster paste pearls,—in her hand, which she stretches out towards Memory, seated in a cloud of glory, a little above the tarn. We are rather puzzled, however, to know why Memory's principal feature is not so much her neck as her legs, especially her right leg, of which Mr. Tupper has displayed the whole naked force to view. Indeed she is kicking out with it, as though she wished Diligence to observe it, and garter it with the pearls, while with her right hand she points upwards towards the source of the Waterfall. Perhaps Mr. Tupper wishes to teach us that Memory, though she can sit on a cloud of glory, must use her earthly powers of motion industriously before she can be thus glorified ;—such are the homely lessons Mr. Tupper is always teaching us. The pearls, the true honour, are reserved for the well developed leg of Memory after all, though the poet intended it for her neck. Mr. Tupper " taketh no pleasure in any man's leg," but in Memory's leg he evidently takes a pardonable pride.

On p. 38 Mr. Tupper has made a grand design for the verses on the "Dream of Ambition " :—

" I left the happy fields that smile around the village of Content,

And sought with wayward feet the torrid desert of Ambition. Long time, parched and weary, I travelled that burning sand, And the hooded basilisk and adder were strewed in my way for palms;

Black scorpions thronged me round, -with sharp uplifted stings, Seeming to mock me as I ran; (then I guessed it was a dream,—

But life is oft so like a dream, we know not where we are.) So I toiled on, doubting in myself, up a steep gravel cliff, Whose yellow summit shot up far into the brazen sky ; And quickly, I was wafted to the top, as upon unseen wings Carrying me upward like a leaf : (then I thought it was a dream,— Yet life is oft so like a dream, we know not where we are.) So I stood on the mountain, and behold! before me a giant pyramid, And I elomb with eager haste its high and difficult steps; For I longed, like another Belus, to mount up, yea, to heaven, Nor sought I rest until my feet had spurned the crest of earth.

"Then I sat on my granite throne under the burning situ, And the world lay smiling beneath me, but I was vrrapt in flames ; (And I hoped, in glimmering consciousness, that all this torture was a

dream,—

Yet life is oft so like a dream, we know not where we are.) And anon, as I sat scorching, the pyramid shuddered to its root, And I felt the quarried mass leap from its sand foundations :

Awhile it tottered and tilted, as raised by invisible levers,—

(And now my reason spake with me ; I knew it was a dream: Yet I hushed that whisper into silence, for I hoped to learn of wisdom, By tracking up my truant thoughts, whereunto they might lead.) And suddenly, as rolling upon wheels, adown the cliff it rushed, And I thought, in my hot brain, of the Muscovites' icy slope."

It is difficult to say whether the poem or the illustration is the grander. In the latter Mr. Tupper has just reached the top of his pyramid. Forked tongues of fire are leaping up at him. Be- fore him is the ocean, with the sun's (or moon's) half disc lingering above the horizon, a distant ship in relief against it, and between the sea and the rushing pyramid lie some of the fields belonging to the happy village of Content, —which the pyramid is destined to plough up, and then, as we know, to rush into "the foaming, wild

Atlantic," on its way through "the pavement of the sea" to "the bolted doors of hell," which it batters in. The picture is indeed grandly conceived. The setting sun prefigures the setting sun of Ambition; the pyramid in full career towards the Atlantic, with Mr. Tupper's exultant figure—"sharp-set," as Charles Lamb said of the men who dined at the top of St. Paul's—at the summit, and with its track of devouring flames in the rear, gives us a full conception of the grandeur of Mr. Tupper's dreams,—dreams such as even his verse could not adequately give us,—dreams such as make even the sleep of that great man seem more glorious than the vigilance of lesser intellects. When others dream of being run away with by a modest gig, or at most by those tabular quadru- peds, which the spirit-rappers often represent as " taking " a chair or stool, at an easy gallop, Mr. Tupper in his dreams gets astride of the oldest, heaviest, and mightiest monument of human labour, and dashes upon it with a train of flame into the Atlantic, and through the floor of the Atlantic through the bolted doors of hell. And you see in the picture that it is not Mr. Tupper who is going thus to hell, but only his attenuated, sleeping imagina- tion. It is the intellectual ghost, the phantom only of Mr. Tupper who crowns that pyramid. There stands a mere shadowy form in the act of "hushing the whisper" that it is but a dream "into silence," because he hopes "to learn of wisdom by tracking up his truant thoughts, whereunto they might lead." There is a dramatic " hist !" in the very attitude of that Tupperian shade on the top of the pyramid, a determination to ritu this freak of a mighty imagination to earth, without awakening the closed eyes of the Tupperian reason.

Perhaps, however, the grandest of the Tupperian conceptions is the picture of Destiny on p. 53 :—

"And ceaselessly, like Lapland swarms, that miserable crowd sped along To the mist-involved banks of a dark and sullen river.

There saw I, midway in the water, standing a giant fisher, And he held many lines in his hand, and they called him Iron Destiny. So I tracked those subtle chains, and each held one among the multi- tude: Then I understood what hindered, that they rested not in their path: For the fisher had sport in his fishing, and drew in his lines con- tinually, • And the new-born babe, and the aged man, were dragged into that dark river : And he pulled all those myriads along, and none might rest by the way, Till many, for sheer we ariness, were eager to plunge into the drown- ing stream."

"Iron Destiny," who is lugging the multitudes into the river, is a scowling, grimy, and gaunt giant, with a crown, standing in the water, and fishing his human victims by myriads into the water, in- stead of, like other fishermen, out of it. Mr. Tupper has made us see in that black angler's face that his sport does not consist in the skill with which he baits his line, for apparently the lines are all fastened to the victims before he begins his fishing, but only in the exercise of the main force which lugs such enormous crowds into the river. Mr. Tupper suggests in fact,—though he draws a line-fisher, not a net-fisher,—both by the minuteness, helplessness, and hosts of the victims and the expression of brute force in the face of the fisher, rather a shrimper of men than a fisher of men in this glorious design. "Iron Destiny" lugging on men to their destruction as a shrimper scours up his shrimps, and with a certain cannibalistic expression in the glare of his eyes, as if he were contemplating breakfasting on them, is evidently Mr. Tupper's conception. Had Mr. Tupper designed all the illustrations, instead of only three, the book would have been doubled in value. But the other artists fall sadly short of the sublime level of the Proverbial Philosophy.