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348 PRÆTERITA-II
toys were what we happened to take a fancy to in pleasant places-a cow in stalactite from Matlock, a fisher-wife doll from Calais, a Swiss farm from Berne, Bacchus and Ariadne from Carrara.1 But, among these toys, principal on the drawing-room chimney-piece, always put away by my mother at night, and “put out” in the afternoon, were some pieces of Spanish clay, to which, without knowing it, I owed a quantity of strenuous teaching. Native baked clay figures, painted and gilded by untaught persons who had the gift; manufacture mainly practised along the Xeres coast, I believe, and of late much decayed, but then flourishing, and its work as good as the worker could make it. There was a Don Whiskerandos contrabandista, splendidly handsome and good-natured, on a magnificent horse at the trot, brightly caparisoned: everything finely finished, his gun loose in his hand. There was a lemonade seller, a pomegranate seller, a matador with his bull-animate all, and graceful, the colouring chiefly ruddy brown. Things of constant interest to me, and altogether wholesome; vestiges of living sculpture come down into the Herne Hill times, from the days of Tanagra.
For loftier admiration, as before told,2 Chantrey in Lichfield, Roubilliac in Westminster, were set forth to me, and honestly felt; a scratched white outline or two from Greek vases on the black Derbyshire marble did not interfere with my first general feeling about sculpture, that it should be living, and emotional; that the flesh should be like flesh, and the drapery like clothes; and that, whether trotting contrabandista, dancing girl, or dying gladiator, the subject should have an interest of its own, and not consist merely of figures with torches or garlands standing alternately on their right and left legs. Of “ideal” form and the like, I fortunately heard and thought nothing.
114. The point of connoisseurship I had reached, at sixteen, with these advantages and instincts, is curiously
+1 [See above, § 26 (p. 267).]
2 [See, again, above, p. 267.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
