by Thomas Medwin.
Originally published in Bentley's Miscellany (Richard Bentley) vol.3 (1838).
There are in the beautiful cabinet of Monsieur Schamps at Ghent two pictures by Jean Stein, one of those masters whose works show not only that he was a humorist, but a close observer of mankind.
His favourite studies were the lowest beings in the scale of existence, and his subjects generally taken from the guingette or the cabaret. His boors have a character of their own, and show in every feature the consequences of habitual debauchery and obscenity. He is no great colourist, like most of the Dutch or Flemish school, and seems to have cared little about the finish or minutiæ of his art. His principal aim and accomplishment being effect, and truth to nature; plain, unadulterated, disgusting, degraded nature, without caricature or exaggeration; struck off at once, and left as struck off. As a moralist he sometimes reminds us of our Hogarth; and to me one of his interiors, with their hard-outlined figures, sketches as they are, is worth more than the mellowest Ostade, or a Teniers with all its silveriness.
But to return to the pictures of which I am speaking. They are called in the catalogue, "The Cuisine gros," and "The Cuisine maigre."
It is to the latter only I mean to confine my remarks. Such was the impression it made on me, that I seem not only to have it before my eyes, but to have been present at the spot whence it was taken.
In a dilapidated grenier, with a raftered roof, is a scene such as we have only to go to Manchester, or one of our manufacturing towns to parallel. All the furniture the room contains is some wooden benches and a table. Over this table leans, at the further extremity, an emaciated tall woman, whose age it would be difficult to determine,—for misery has no age,—the wretched mother of a numerous wretched offspring. She has just been attempting to suckle an infant; but, from the appearance of her breasts, which hang down like the dugs of some wild forest beast, and the face of the child, who is evidently crying for food, attempting it in vain.
The husband, seated on the bench, a man of forty, in squalidness and rags, matches well with his helpmate. His countenance expresses none of the deformity of vice, or emaciation of drankenness, usually seen in Jean Stein's pictures; but is marked by the griping hand of penury and destitution. We may trace in his fine, manly form and features that he has seen better days; that he has been reduced to what he is, by the pressure of circumstances, by the force of some overwhelming destiny, rather than by extravagance or dissipation. It is no temporary misfortune that has fallen upon him; but for years and years he has been familiar with every extreme of human ill,— with cold, nakedness, hunger, and degradation.
The woman has just handed to him, in an earthen vessel, a dish of muscles; which he is sharing among the half-famished groupe that encircle him.
These faces bear a strong resemblance to his, and are, as it were, the reflex of his own. They are faces such as I remember at Forli, and other of the Neapolitan mountain villages. Children who had never been young, dwarfish, hard-featured, capable of any crime, exhibiting a premature decrepitude, counterparts of those we sometimes see standing shivering about the purlieus of St. Giles's, or perched against some wall opposite to a gas-light in one of the crowded thoroughfares of the metropolis. Mendicancy has been long their only resource and employment; and it appears probable that the meal they are about to partake, scanty as it is, has been purchased with the earnings of the day. No ingenuity could possibly have conceived any dish less satisfactory—less calculated to assuage hunger,—than the one before them.
The father's right hand is immersed among the muscles, and he is continuing what he has already begun, the distribution of their truly cuisine maigre.
In front stands erect a boy of perhaps thirteen, and roars at the top of his voice, which, doubtless, is shrill and piercing. It struck me that he was not to be served; perhaps as a punishment, he having brought no alms home with him,—for he jealously eyes the portion that has just been distributed to his opposite brother, whose back being towards us, we cannot see him devour it. Another, with tears in his eyes, is represented stretching out his skinny hands—more like talons than hands—for his pittance, with all the eagerness of a hawk about to pounce upon its prey. A third wolfish-looking child, with long stringy hair trailing over his face, casts savage glances at his brothers, as though he were equal to any excess in order to appease the gnawings of hunger. Whilst the osseous profile of an old hag, doubtless the grandam,—a match for one of Michael Angelo's Fates,—peeps from under the arm of the mother. She is watching intently the process of distribution; but without any hope or expectation of participating in the meal.
Between the table and the chimney, are lying on the floor two children, a boy and a girl in tattered weeds, who have got between them, and are quarrelling and fighting over the pot in which the shell-fish have been boiled. One is sucking the fingers of her right hand, and dipping the other in the half turned-up vessel; as the brother, breechless,—an urchin of five or six,—brandishes high the wooden ladle, which is about to descend on the head of his sister as a reward for her imputed greediness.
To complete the scene. Over the ashes of the hearth—for there is no fire—I observed, crouching on his knees, a sixth boy, the eldest of the party, who may suggest the fate of the rest. His head is enwrapped in a handkerchief; he is evidently pining with sickness,—perhaps in the last stage of consumption,—and now loathes the food for which the rest are craving.
From this picture it would not be difficult to make a tale, and how true and common a tale let statesmen and politicians guess.