One thing may be said in regard to Darwin; with art as with everything else, he was absolutely free from pretense. He says of one writer, ‘The pretentiousness of her style is extremely disagreeable, not to say nauseous to many persons.’[331] Anything artificial, anything affected, was peculiarly repugnant to him, and never under any circumstances would he have pretended to admire or to appreciate a work of art that really left him cold. Indeed it was partly his intense wish not to appear to feel what he did not feel that made him inclined to underestimate his artistic pleasure as compared with the raptures of those who exclaimed conventionally over what they neither understood nor enjoyed. Nevertheless, it seems unquestionable that art in its varied forms hardly afforded Darwin the delight and solace that it brings to many persons. The theater he cared little for at any period of his life. The effort, fatigue, and constraint outweighed the charm. Mrs. Darwin, who was a lover of average plays, though she found Shakespeare tedious and said so with something of her husband’s candor, is quite anxious on the subject: ‘The real crook in my lot I have withheld from you, but I must own it to you sooner or later. It is that he has a great dislike of going to the play, so that I am afraid we shall have some domestic dissensions on that head.’[332] Later she takes him to see Macready in ‘Richelieu’ and hopes that he is getting converted, but there are no signs that the hopes were finally realized. With the plastic arts the case is somewhat better. There is little reference to architecture. One passage in a letter seems to suggest the feeling of cathedral grandeur, but the æsthetic quickly turns into the scientific bearing: ‘Possibly the sense of sublimity excited by a grand cathedral may have some connection with the vague feelings of terror and superstition in our savage ancestors, when they entered a great cavern or gloomy forest.’[333] As regards pictures, his son thinks that he did keep up his love of them to a certain extent.[334] His biographer remarks: ‘His love of pictures as a young man is almost a proof that he must have had an appreciation of a portrait as a work of art, not as a likeness.’[335] And the biographer adds, with entire justice: ‘This way of looking at himself as an ignoramus in all matters of art, was strengthened by the absence of pretence, which was part of his character.’[336] The immediate recognition of a Salvator Rosa scene in one of the Beagle experiences shows an acquaintance with painting in its different forms and periods.[337] Yet pictures make a different showing in Darwin’s letters from what they have in Edward FitzGerald’s, for instance.