Raphael. He seems to me to have no sense of moral dignity and loveliness; and the energy for which he has been so much praised, appears to me to be a certain rude, external, mechanical quality, in comparison with anything possessed by Raphael; or even much inferior artists. His famous painting in the Sistine Chapel, seems to me deficient in beauty and majesty, both in the conception and the execution. He has been called the Dante of painting; but if we find some of the gross and strong outlines, which are employed in the few most distasteful passages of the Inferno, where shall we find your Francesca,—where, the spirit coming over the sea in a boat, like Mars rising from the vapours of the horizon,—where, Matilda gathering flowers, and all the exquisite tenderness, and sensibility, and ideal beauty, in which Dante excelled all poets except Shakespeare?
As to Michael Angelo's Moses—but you have seen a cast of that in England.—I write these things, Heaven knows why!
I have written something and finished it,[1] different from any thing else, and a new attempt for me; and I mean to dedicate it to you. I should not have done so without your approbation, but I asked your picture last night, and it smiled assent. If I did not think it in some degree worthy of you, I would not make you a public offering of it. I expect to have to write to you soon about it. If Ollier is not turned Christian, Jew, or become infected with the Murrain, he will publish it. Don't let him be frightened, for it is nothing which by any courtesy of language can be termed either moral or immoral.
Mary has written to Marianne for a parcel, in which I beg you will make Ollier enclose what you know would most interest me,—your "Calendar" (a sweet extract from which I saw in the Examiner), and the other poems belonging to you; and for some friends of mine, my Eclogue.
- ↑ The Cenci.
