On a passage from William Hazlitt’s “On a Portrait of a Lady by Vandyke”
William Hazlitt — “On a Portrait of a Lady by Vandyke”
The neck of this picture [by Titian] is like a broad crystal mirror; and the hair which she holds so carelessly in her hand is like meshes of beaten gold. The eyes which roll in their ample sockets, like two shining orbs, and which are turned away from the spectator, only dart their glances the more powerfully into the soul; and the whole picture is a paragon of frank cordial grace, and transparent brilliancy of colouring. Her tight boddice compresses her full but finely proportioned waist; while the tucker in part conceals and almost clasps the snowy bosom. But you never think of any thing beyond the personal attractions, and a certain sparkling intelligence. She is not marble, but a fine piece of animated clay. There is none of that retired and shrinking character, that modesty of demeanour, that sensitive delicacy, that starts even at the shadow of evil — that are so evidently to be traced in the portrait by Vandyke.
As with Henry James, I’ve wondered how William Hazlitt composed his voluminous writings — the real nuts and bolts. In James’s “Art of Fiction” there is scarce mention of anything to do with syntax or the rhythm of the words — it’s all theme and characterization, while Virginia Woolf, next in line of the greatest essayists from Hazlitt to James, amply weighed in, being part of a generation who took apart the selves of the author: “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words….[R]hythm…goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.” This can be imbued by a few words of Marianne Moore: “Style is a radiograph of the personality.” Hazlitt’s method is more seated in his passion, that is passion for life, art, forms, poetry, Shakespeare. He added in another essay: “I have more satisfaction in my own thoughts than in dictating them to others: words are necessary to explain the impression of certain things upon me to the reader, but they rather weaken and draw a veil over than strengthen it to myself.” Why did he write the way he did might be a funny question in the face of his biography. Woolf also said of Hazlitt: “the growl and plaint of his grievances keeps breaking through, disturbing us, irritating us; and yet there is something so independent, subtle, fine, and enthusiastic about him — when he can forget himself he is so rapt in ardent speculation about other things — that dislike crumbles and turns to something much warmer and more complex…”
Hazlitt loved the Flemish painter Vandyke, finding a bejeweled element in him, but throughout this essay he has constant recourse to other painters, including Titian (in particular), Guido, Rafael, Reubens, and Poussin — all favorites. The above passage begins in medias res: “[t]he neck of this picture,” before ending on a crescendo: “the hair which she holds so carelessly in her hand is like meshes of beaten gold.” The “holds” and “gold” rhyme entrances, while the image compounds because she “carelessly holds.” But the eyes have the real power and “only dart their glances the more powerfully into the soul” — the soul flickering from the wind of the two previous long “o” words and the “only.” Semicolon, before “and the whole,” another long “o,” leads to “the whole picture is a paragon of frank cordial grace” — with the rat-tat-tat of “frank cordial grace,” a hard third epitrite of syllabication, while “waist” in the next sentence slant rhymes with that “grace” — extrusion. “She is not marble, but a fine piece of animated clay;” here is the thing itself, so simple, yet, so telling a judgment — “a fine piece of animated clay,” leaping to pronounce the totality of this Titian. The last sentence returns to the main subject of the essay, the Vandyke, and here Hazlitt glories in recounting and double-wrapping the qualities of that picture, that Lady and child, with delicate watercolor words that pattern no sash of negative capability over her shoulder, before the uncanny “that starts at the shadow of evil” — that is, “startles” at the shadow of evil. Now where does this truck back to? Titian is another vector (his woman is bolder and more worldly) and Vandyke is in a more modern condition, painted some fifty years later during the Baroque as it is. Before, he writes the Englishwoman’s forehead is “a little ruffled” and “the habitual gentleness of the character seems to have been dashed with some anxious thought or momentary disquiet.” Yet what Hazlitt started with on page one, becomes on page two a disquisition on French faces, which carry “a varnish of insincerity,” and then on page three, the quoted Titian introduction, only to circle back briefly to Vandyke and its “retired” look, “modesty,” and “shrinking character,” which is to say the Vandyke holds course to the little world of modest people, secure in their feelings and keeping to their own ambit, out of sight of that “shadow of evil” — the English lady of the portrait and her painter make sure of that. The comparison between the two painters takes us inside out of the Vandyke so we know it in a way we might never without Hazlitt’s passionate observation and intelligence, his “raptness” per Woolf.
In Hazlitt’s essay, we hold these first three pages as a cinematic montage for our imaginations, and now that we have them, Hazlitt adds more impression and goes onto Guido and Rafael before circling back to Titian and a sound three pages on portrait painting. For me to zone in on his words from Titian is not too off-base, since the phenomenon of Titian is the crux of the piece, while the portraiture of Vandyke, however accomplished, is more an afterthought. Maybe “the shadow of evil” was something Vandyke didn’t want to entertain too deeply and so he set off on the more idealized path. Hazlitt earmarks Titian’s portraits as more complex and breathing: “Titian’s portraits, on the other hand, frequently present a much more formidable than inviting appearance. You would hardly trust yourself in a room with them. You do not bestow a cold, leisurely approbation on them, but look to see what they may be thinking of you, not without some apprehension for the result,” before noting of portrait-painting in general:
The mere setting down what you see in this medley of successive, teasing, contradictory impressions, would never do; either you must continually efface what you have done the instant before, or if you retain it, you will produce a piece of patchwork, worse than any caricature. There must be a comprehension of the whole, and in truth a moral sense (as well as a literal one) to unravel the confusion, and guide you through the labyrinth of shifting muscles and features. You must feel what this means, and dive into the hidden soul, in order to know whether that is as it ought to be; for you cannot be sure that it remains as it was.
In this way, Hazlitt backtracks to the original quote — Titian is so overpowering that the viewing experience (“look to see what they may be thinking of you”) overleaps the moral sense, one more heightened in the Vandyke — but the rest of the essay recalibrates these early judgments and colors in the sanctum of the aesthetic experience. In Titian, rather than Vandyke, what you see isn’t necessarily what you get: you get a lot more, including those hauntings, and Hazlitt goes on to show how portrait painters might work, as in the above, but whether this was Titian’s way is debatable.
In the end, he goes to sum up the pictures in the Louvre he likes best — and he copied them (“when I look at them, I recall other times and the feelings with which they were done”) — followed by withering remarks at what trite rich collectors see in art, but it all comes back to Hazlitt’s mien, elan, style. The superstructure of the Hazlitt essay is that feelings melt into words and the words branch about in the large canopy of those over-arching feelings, but they do so in sentences of a most vaunted swing-master. As Woolf said in her essay:
He chooses some abstract idea, like Envy, or Egotism, or Reason and Imagination. He treats it with energy and independence. He explores its ramifications and scales its narrow paths as if it were a mountain road and the ascent both difficult and inspiring. Compared with this athletic progress, Lamb’s seems the flight of a butterfly cruising capriciously among the flowers and perching for a second incongruously here upon a barn, there upon a wheelbarrow. But every sentence in Hazlitt carries us forward. He has his end in view and, unless some accident intervenes, he strides towards it in that “pure conversational prose style” which, as he points out, is so much more difficult to practise than fine writing.
