Joseph Farington: The Horace Walpole of the Arts

rightly postulates a 'plural' text admitting several different readings, which is surely inherent in the Varranian method and the range of possible allusions. The relation of the poem to the real world is often tantalizing, the more so when recent events had defied probability as boldly as Johnson thought the poem does. Settle, at the end of Absalom Senior, professed he did not know what to make ofJames the vindicated successor: Though of a Faith that propagates in blood, Of passions unforgiving, less withstood Than seas and tempests, and as deaf as they; Yet all divine shall be his God-like sway, And his calm reign but one long halcyon day. As an opposition writer Settle could rest his case on the incompatibility of national policy with national prejudices (amply exemplified in his own rabid words); it was not for him to reconcile the possible that had happened with the probable that ought to have happened (and subsequently in fact did). Dryden, with his twenty years' commitment to constructive public writing, aims to reconcile the apparent opposites: to associate Tory policy with the national interest and the natural state of things, and to redefine Whig prejudices as inimical to reasonable government. Therein lies the essential wit of the poem. He appeals to a King and other Englishmen capable of contemplating the perplexities of life, of looking at them in as many different ways as the poem does, and of recognizing an inherent order conducive to intelligent action in an age of partisanship and passion. Joseph Farington: The Horace Walpole of the Arts G.E. BENTLEY, JR The Diary ofJoseph Faringlon. Ed Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre Volume I: July 179J- December '794; volume 11: January 1795-August 1795) is Mrs [mlay (late Mrs Wollstonecraft); a man called 'Richd. Johnstone' on one page (p 799) is called 'B. Johnson' on another(p 808) - which is correct? A patron of Fuseli is once called 'Mr. Roverie' (p 1044) and once 'Raider' (p 1113), but his real name was Du Roveray. A very few of these figures, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and the first Du Roveray reference, are identified within discrete brackets, but the vast majority are not. Such annotation is badly needed. Naturally Mr Garlick and Mr Macintyre not only wanted to provide current annotations but had actually begun to make them, but admirable desires to keep down costs and speed up production determined them to produce merely a 'plain text.' Instead, 'When the complete text has been published, we shall provide a full Index, in one or more volumes, and a further volume, A Companion to the Farington Diary, which will incorporate in an encyclopaedic form the editorial materials and commentary collected originally for the purpose of annotation' (I, v). This is a very lame substitution, but it is difficult to see how any other solution would have been practicable; at $25 a volume, the set will still cost $350. Consequently the index volume(s) will be of enormous importance. Not only must they be voluminous and accurate, not only must they have detailed breakdowns for the larger entries such as Sir Thomas Lawrence and Benjamin West and the Royal Academy, but they must have significant biographical detail, such as 'Cromek, Robert Hartley (1770-1812), engraver and publishing entrepreneur, patron of Blake and Stothard.' Since the current volumes have no index at all, scholars will yet have to wait eagerly for these index volumes to make a full and proper use of this important edition of the Farington Diary. The production standards of the volume seem less admirable than the contributions by Farington, Garlick, and Macintyre. The type face of display pages such as title-pages and month-headings is stark and unattractive, far too much of the leading has worked its way up to leave irrelevant marks on the page, the illustrations do not have cross-references to the text (nor vice versa) so that their relevance is sometimes obscure, the paper is unnecessarily heavy and glossy (presumably in order to bear the very sparse reproductions of designs from Farington's Diary). and the margins are narrow, giving the page an undesirable crowded effect. On the other hand, the regular...