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Title: Coasting Bohemia

Author: J. Comyns Carr

Release date: November 28, 2021 [eBook #66838]

Language: English

Credits: David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COASTING BOHEMIA ***




COASTING BOHEMIA




  [Illustration]

  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
  DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
  TORONTO




  COASTING BOHEMIA

  BY
  J. COMYNS CARR
  AUTHOR OF ‘KING ARTHUR,’ ‘TRISTRAM AND ISEULT,’ ‘PAPERS ON ART,’
  ‘SOME EMINENT VICTORIANS,’ ETC. ETC.


  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
  1914




COPYRIGHT




INTRODUCTORY NOTE


Many of the papers which give to the present volume its title first
appeared in the columns of the _Daily Telegraph_, and are here
reprinted by the courteous permission of the proprietors of that
journal.

A portion of the essay on Burne-Jones was originally designed as an
introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his collected works
held, shortly after his death, at the New Gallery. The essay on Sex in
Tragedy was written on the occasion of Sir Henry Irving’s last revival
of the play of _Macbeth_ at the Lyceum Theatre.




CONTENTS


                                                             PAGE

  BOHEMIA PAST AND PRESENT                                      1

  SOME MEMORIES OF MILLAIS                                     12

  AT HOME WITH ALMA-TADEMA                                     26

  WITH ROSSETTI IN CHEYNE WALK                                 42

  EDWARD BURNE-JONES                                           56

  JAMES M‘NEIL WHISTLER                                        89

  THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING AT THE ROMAN EXHIBITION      101

  WITH GEORGE MEREDITH ON BOX HILL                            134

  THE LEGEND OF PARSIFAL                                      147

  SEX IN TRAGEDY                                              162

  HENRY IRVING                                                199

  A SENSE OF HUMOUR                                           213

  SITTING AT A PLAY                                           227

  SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN                                         242

  THE JUNIOR OF THE CIRCUIT                                   253

  BY THE SIDE OF A STREAM                                     264


  INDEX                                                       279




BOHEMIA PAST AND PRESENT


The papers which compose this volume make no claim to any sort of
ordered plan in their composition. They reflect in some measure the
varied activities of a life that has been passed in close association
with more than one of the arts, and therein lies their sole title to so
much of coherence as they may be found to possess.

Lord Beaconsfield once defined critics as men who had failed in art.
The reproach, however, is not always deserved, for youth is often
confident in its judgment of others at a time when it is still too
timorous to make any adventure of its own. For myself I may confess
that I had adopted the calling of a critic long before I had found
the courage to make even the most modest incursion into the field of
authorship. My first essays in journalism, made at a time when I was
still a student at the bar, were chiefly concerned with the art of
painting, and I look back now with feelings almost of dismay at the
spirit of reckless assurance in which I then assumed to measure and
appraise the achievement of contemporary masters. A little later in
my career I was brought into still closer contact with the art of the
theatre, and in both these worlds, as well as in that of literature
itself, I was fortunate in the formation of many valued and enduring
friendships which have enabled me, in such of the following chapters
as bear a distinctively biographical character, to record my personal
impressions of some of the notable figures in the literature and art of
the later Victorian era.

The reader who accompanies me in my voyage along the shores of the
Bohemia of that time will quickly realise that it is not quite the
Bohemia of to-day. Indeed since Shakespeare first boldly conceded
to the kingdom a seaboard, each succeeding age, and almost every
generation, has claimed the liberty to refashion this enchanted country
in accordance with its own ideals. The coast-line has been recharted
by every voyager who has newly cruised upon its encompassing seas, and
in recent days its boundaries have been enlarged by the occasional
incursions of Society which has lately condescended to include the
concerns of art within the sphere of its patronage. But although no
longer retaining its old outlines upon the map, there is enough of
continuity in the character of the inhabitants and in the subjects of
their preoccupation to render a brief survey of earlier conditions of
something more than merely archaeological interest. If much has been
gained, something also has been lost, and the traveller who survives to
set down the experiences of that earlier time may perhaps be pardoned
if he cannot always accept the changes which have transformed the face
of the country, or modified the mental attitude of its citizens, as
improvements upon the prospect that first dawned upon his vision forty
years ago.

I read the other day a confident pronouncement made by one of the
apostles of the more modern spirit which gave me the measure of the
revolution that has been effected in all that concerns our judgment
upon matters of art. “Art,” declared this authority, “cannot stop: the
moment it rests and repeats itself, or imitates the past, it dies.”
There is here no faltering or uncertainty in the assertion of those
principles of faith and criticism which are embodied in the newer
gospel, and it took me a little time to steady myself in the face of
a declaration which seemed to overturn the settled convictions of a
lifetime. But after much pondering my courage returned. I perceived
that apart from the underlying truism that life implies movement, and
that art as its image must share its vitality, there is nothing here
that is not highly disputable or wholly false. Art indeed never stops
but it does not always go forward: the movement perceptible at every
stage of its history has been as often retrograde as progressive, and
although it can never repeat itself, there have been again and again
long seasons of rest when after a period of great productivity the land
which has yielded so rich a harvest lies fallow.

But the final clause of the proposition, that imitation of the past
heralds approaching dissolution, is demonstrably untrue of every great
epoch of artistic activity. A fearless spirit of imitation, born of the
worship yielded to the achievements of an earlier time, may, on the
contrary, be claimed as the hall-mark of genius, and is indeed most
frankly confessed in the work of men of unchallenged supremacy. Raphael
exhibited neither shame nor fear in the frank reliance of his youth
upon the example of Perugino: the painting of Titian, with an equal
candour, confesses the extent of his debt to Giovanni Bellini, and
Tintoret, who certainly could not be cited as a man deficient in the
spirit of independence, made it his boast that he combined the design
of Michelangelo with the colouring of Titian: while of Michelangelo
himself we have it on record that in one of his earlier efforts as a
sculptor a deliberate imitation of the antique carried him near to
the confines of forgery. And when we pass from individuals to the
epoch which produced them, was not the main impulse which governed
the movement of the Renaissance inspired by a renewed sense of the
beauty that was left resident in the surviving examples of the Art of
the antique world? And all later time yields a similar experience.
That newly born spirit in modern painting associated with what is
known as the pre-Raphaelite movement rested upon the untiring effort
of its professors to recapture the forgotten or neglected qualities
of the painting of an earlier time, not indeed of the time which
was its immediate forerunner, but of that still younger day when by
simple means and with technical resources not yet assured, the earlier
painters of Italy sought to interpret the beauty they found in nature.
The spirit of imitation, conscious and unabashed, was of the very life
blood of the movement, and it was in their devotion to that period in
Italian painting which preceded the crowning glory of the Renaissance
that the artists whose work constitutes the most important contribution
to the painting of modern Europe were led to a stricter veracity in the
rendering of the facts in nature which they sought to interpret.

But the men who laboured in that day were not greatly affected by
the declared ambitions of the present generation. Originality had
not yet been accepted as the cardinal virtue in any of the fields
of imaginative production, and the illusion of progress, which may
be said to rank as the special vice of the moment, found no place in
the teaching of the time. Thinking over this widely desired and much
vaunted quality of Originality in art, I was minded to turn to old
Samuel Johnson to discover what particular meaning was then attached to
a term that is now in such constant use. But my curiosity was baffled,
for I discovered to my disappointment that this much treasured word
finds no place at all in the pages of his _Dictionary_. The world is
therefore free to conjecture in what way, if he were living in this
hour, that sane and virile intelligence might have sought to describe
it. As applied to matters of art, whether literary or pictorial, he
would perhaps have been tempted to define it as “a word in vulgar use
employed to indicate a vulgar ambition.” But without burdening the
great lexicographer with views which the exigencies of the time did not
provoke him to express, this at least may be confidently affirmed, that
the pursuit of whatever virtue the word implies can have no place in
the conscious equipment of any great artist. Certainly it was unknown
or unregarded in every great epoch of the past. It is impossible to
think of even the least of the mighty race of Florentine painters,
from Giotto to Michelangelo, sparing one foolish moment from the
eager intentness of their labour to ponder whether the judgment of
aftertime should hail their work as original. That work, in common
with all else that is produced in obedience to the impulse which is
constantly shaping the beauties of the outer world till they are tuned
into harmony with the spirit resident in the breast of the artist, had
no need of any spur to production beyond that which is provided by a
reverent love and an unceasing devotion, and it survives to prove, if
proof were needed, that this boasted attribute of Originality, though
it may fitly find a place in the epitaph upon an artist’s tomb, never
since the world began formed any part in the impulse that governed the
work of his hand.

The undue importance now assigned to this coveted quality of
Originality is partly the outcome of the illusion to which I have
already referred,--that art is in its nature progressive and is in
fact constantly and steadily progressing. It must be obvious, however,
to any one who has followed the fortunes of the imaginative spirit in
the past, that history affords no warrant for any such pretension.
In whatever field of artistic industry we choose to enter, in the
world of letters no less than the world of art, strictly so called,
the testimony of the ages bears witness to the fact that the sense
of restless and unceasing movement is not always accompanied by any
real advancement. Fate has scattered over the centuries with impartial
indifference to the onward march of time those signal examples of
individual genius which mark for us the summit of human invention.
No one supposes that Dryden was a greater dramatist than Shakespeare
because he came later: no one would be so foolish as to suggest that a
comparison between Lycidas and Adonais can be decided by reference to
the historical position of their authors.

And yet it is not difficult to understand how in our more modern day
this illusion of progress has fastened itself upon the judgment and
consideration of the things of art. The rapid strides made by science
during the last fifty or sixty years, yielding at every step some
new discovery to arrest the admiration of a wondering world, has not
unnaturally bred an inappropriate spirit of rivalry in the minds of
men whose mission it was to deal with the widely divergent problems of
the imagination. Indeed it is easy to discern in the literature of the
Victorian era that some of its professors were apt to be haunted by the
fear that their different appeal might be partly overborne or wholly
silenced unless they too could prove to their generation that what
they had to offer for its acceptance registered something of a like
superiority to the product of earlier times.

The sense of inexhaustible variety, characteristic of all art
that truly images the spirit of man, has by a false analogy been
confused with the onward march of science where every addition to
the accumulated harvest garnered in the past uplifts each succeeding
generation upon the shoulders of its forerunner. Art cannot compete on
such terms, and any comparison so conducted must relegate its claims
to an inferior place; yet though so much may be freely confessed, it
does not therefore follow that its unchanging appeal is to be counted
as an unequal factor in shaping the destinies of humanity. The work of
the man of science, however pre-eminent the place assigned to him in
his generation, must of necessity yield place to the larger discoveries
made by even the humblest of his followers; while the work of the
artist, the outcome of individual vision engaged upon the unchanging
passions of man and the unfading beauty of the world he inhabits,
stands secure against any assault from the future; in its nature
distinct from all that has preceded it as from all that may follow in
the time to come. It knows neither rivalry nor competition, for in the
temple wherein the artist worships, each worshipper has his separate
and appointed place. In the matchless words of Shelley,

  Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
  Stains the white radiance of eternity,

and although the light beyond to which the artist lifts his eyes is
of unchanging purity, the myriad hues through which it is transmitted
yields to each separate vision the impress of an individuality which no
after achievement can challenge or destroy.

But there are recurring seasons in the history of every art when the
worker becomes unduly conscious of the medium in which he labours,
and correspondingly forgetful of the truth he seeks to interpret.
It was this that Wordsworth had in his mind when he urged upon the
poet the necessity of keeping his eye upon the object, and it is not
difficult to perceive how easily in the present hour the reiterated
demand for Originality, enforced by the vulgar illusion that art to be
a living force must be a progressive force, invites the invasion of
the charlatan. It would perhaps not be too much to say that the little
corner of time we now inhabit constitutes a veritable paradise for the
antics of every form of conscious imposture.

But this fact, even if it be conceded, need not greatly disturb us.
The patient labour of men more worthily inspired still survives. The
more aggressive spirits in every department of art, who in their
haste to secure the verdict of the future are eager to cast overboard
the hoarded treasure of the past, may find when time’s award comes
to be recorded that they have won nothing but the gaping wonder of
the fleeting moment. The judgment of posterity refuses to be hustled
however loud or shrill the voices that call upon it, and we may take
comfort in the thought that the whispered message, perhaps only half
audible in its generation, has often been the first to win the ear of
the future.




SOME MEMORIES OF MILLAIS


There are men in every walk of life who would seem deliberately to
shun the outward trappings of their calling. During his later years,
when I knew Robert Browning well, it always appeared to me that he was
at particular pains not to make any social appeal which could be held
to rest on his claims as a poet. The homage that fell to him on that
score he accepted as his due, but always, as I thought, on the implied
understanding that in the daily traffic of social life the subject
should not be rashly intruded. In the many and varied circles in which
he moved he made no demand of any formal tribute to the distinguished
place he held in the world of letters; and it was sometimes matter for
wonder to those who met him constantly to note with what apparently
eager and sincere interest he entered into the discussion of any
trivial topic in which it was not to be supposed that he could have
been very deeply concerned. Like Lord Byron, whose gifts as a poet
he held in no great esteem, he was rather anxious--at any rate, in
the earlier stages of acquaintanceship--that his position as a poet
should be regarded as a thing apart; and he was apt, I think, to be
embarrassed by any persistent endeavour to penetrate the outward shard
of the man of the world, wherein he preferred to render himself easily
accessible to a wide circle of friends, few of whom would have deemed
themselves competent to enter into any sustained discussion of literary
topics.

Among the painters of his time Millais would, I think, have owned to
a like inclination. Neither in his personality nor in his bearing was
he at any pains to announce himself to the world as an artist; and
if not in his earlier days, at any rate at the time I first began
to know him, he seemed to seek by preference the comradeship of men
whose distinction had been won in another field. In self-esteem he was
certainly at no time lacking; he could accept in full measure praise
of his own work from whatever quarter it came; and in that respect he
differed from Browning, whose nature seemed to stand in less need of
flattery, or even of expressed appreciation. On occasion, indeed, and
with only moderate encouragement, Millais could be beguiled into a
confession of confident faith in his own powers that might sometimes
seem to border on arrogance, but at the worst it was no more than
the arrogance of an overgrown boy, put forward with such genuine
conviction as to rob it of all offence. At these times he would give
you the impression that, having won the top place in his class, he
intended to hold it. He could not readily endure the thought, or even
the suspicion, that there was anybody qualified to supplant him, and
he was apt to be impatient, and even restive, when other claims were
advanced, as though he felt the world was wasting time till it reached
the consideration of what he was genuinely convinced was a higher
manifestation of artistic power. And yet thee judgments upon himself,
even when they were delivered in the most buoyant and conquering
spirit, never left the savour of pretentious vanity. There was an air
of impartiality that I think was genuine, even when his self-esteem was
most emphatically expressed, as though he were recording the award of
a higher tribunal, in whose verdict his own personality was in no way
involved.

And then there was so much that was immediately lovable in the man
himself as distinguished from the artist! I have heard it said by an
older friend who knew him in the season of his youth that when, as a
mere boy, he quitted the schools of the Academy to begin the practice
of his art, he had the face and form of an Adonis, and his handsome
and commanding presence when I first met him, toward the close of the
seventies, a man then nearing fifty years of age, made it easy to
believe that this record of the charm of his youthful appearance was
in no way exaggerated. And yet the frank outlook of the face, with its
clear blue eyes, and firm, yet finely-modelled mouth, though it spoke
clearly of power and resource, and betrayed in every changing mood of
expression the unconquerable optimism of a nature that retained its
full vitality to the last, did not, I think, then, or at any time,
yield any decisive indication of the direction in which his gifts
were employed. Afterwards I learned to find in his features the true
index of the finer qualities of his genius, but at our first encounter
it seemed to me rather that I stood in the presence of a robust
personality that had been bred and nurtured in the free air of the
country.

It was always, indeed, easier to think of him as one of a happy and
careless company during those annual fishing and shooting holidays in
which he so greatly delighted, than to picture him a prisoner in a
London studio, arduously applying himself to the problems of his art.
And, in point of fact, he always brought something of that sense of
breezy, outdoor life into the spacious studio at Palace Gate. Perhaps,
if he could have followed his own inclination, he would have passed
a greater part of his life on the banks of the northern river that
he loved so well. Quite in the later years of his life, when he was
rebuking his old friend and comrade, Holman Hunt, upon a too obstinate
indifference to the taste of his time, he said to him: “Why, if I were
to go on like that, I should never be able to go away in the autumn to
fish and shoot. You take my advice, old boy, and just take the world
as it is, and don’t make it your business to rub up people the wrong
way.” Millais’s ready acquiescence in the demands of his generation
was to some extent an element of weakness in his artistic character,
leading him occasionally, as he more than once confessed to me himself,
into errors of taste that he was afterwards shrewd enough to detect
and candid enough to deplore; but however far he may on occasion have
been led astray towards a certain triviality in choice of subject, this
tendency never impugned or injured his integrity as a painter in the
chosen task he had set himself to accomplish. The presence of nature,
either in human face or form, or in the facts of the external world,
proved a tonic that sufficed to restore his artistic conscience, and
I do not think he was ever satisfied by the exercise of any acquired
facility, for it was both the strength and the weakness of his art that
his ultimate success in any particular adventure largely depended upon
the inspiration supplied by his model.

One day we were talking of technique, and I remember Millais, who was
at the time in some trouble with a portrait that he could not get to
his satisfaction, roundly declared that, for an artist worth the name,
there was no such thing as technique. “Look at me now,” he said; “I
can’t get this face right, and it has been the same with me all through
my life--with every fresh subject I have to learn my art all over
again.” Such a confession came well from a man who, from the earliest
time of his precocious and marvellous boyhood, had in the native gifts
of a painter clearly outpaced and outdistanced the most accomplished of
his contemporaries, and yet it was made in no spirit of mock modesty,
but out of a clear conviction that an artist’s conflict with nature is
ceaseless and unending, no matter what degree of mastery the world may
choose to accord him.

We first met at the Old Arts Club, in Hanover Square. He was not a very
constant visitor there, for his inclination, as I have already hinted,
did not often carry him into a mixed company of his fellow-workers; but
he occasionally looked in of an evening after dinner, and sometimes
I used to walk away with him towards his home in Kensington. In his
talk at the club he was apt to exhibit a genuine impatience of any
desponding view of the present condition or the future prospects of
English art, and the unbroken success of his own career--for at that
time he had long outlived, and perhaps almost forgotten, the struggles
of his youth--made it, I think, really difficult for him to comprehend
that the arena in which he had won his undisputed place was not the
best of all possible worlds. But this overbearing optimism of view was
not always entirely sympathetic in its appeal; he was apt to brush
aside with imperfect consideration the comparative failure of his less
fortunate contemporaries, and it was not until long afterwards that
I grew to realise that this apparent indifference to the fortunes of
others sprang less from any natural lack of sympathy than from an
intellectual incapacity to understand the possibility of real merit
failing to secure recognition. Something of an egotism that was at
times almost aggressive must indeed be allowed to him--an egotism which
I believe left him with a genuine belief that nearly all other ideals
than those he followed were misguided, and that lesser achievements
than his own scarcely merited prolonged consideration.

But when we had left the club and were alone together in the street
the more human and sympathetic side of his character often came into
play. Not that he was, even then, apt to lavish extravagant praise
upon his immediate contemporaries, but he could speak often and
lovingly of the men with whom he had been brought into association in
his earlier days, both in literature and in art, always reverting, in
terms of special affection, to his friendship for John Leech, of whom
he was wont to say that he was “the greatest gentleman of them all.”
Dickens, too, he genuinely admired, though the great novelist had
failed to recognise the earlier efforts of his genius; and he had many
interesting anecdotes of Thackeray, with whom he had been brought into
close contact during the time when he was engaged in the practice of
illustration, telling me how, during periods of illness, he would be
summoned to the distinguished editor’s bedside to receive instructions
for the drawings he was commissioned to execute for the _Cornhill
Magazine_.

It was during one of those talks about Thackeray that he related how he
came to make his first acquaintance with the name of Frederic Leighton,
in an anecdote which he afterwards told with telling effect, as part
of a speech at the Arts Club, on the occasion of Leighton’s election
to the post of President of the Academy. He recounted how Thackeray
had warmly praised the talents of the young painter, whom he had met
in Rome, prophesying for him the final distinction he afterwards
achieved; and Millais confessed how, even then, he had felt a certain
measure of jealousy in the novelist’s warmth of appreciation, conscious
that he already cherished the idea that he himself would one day
occupy the presidential chair. And so, indeed, he did, but the honour
fell upon him almost too late, when he was already in the grip of the
malady that was destined to carry him to the grave. But his reference
to the work of other painters, however distinguished, was, as I have
already hinted, comparatively rare, and the dominant impression left
from all our talks of that time was of a man whose own ever-increasing
prosperity had left him partially blind to qualities in others that had
missed an equal measure of recognition. He could perceive little or no
flaw in a world which had accorded to him his unchallenged position.

The finer and gentler side of Millais, half hidden from me then under
an overpowering and impenetrable armour of optimism, I learned to
know better when, as one of the directors of the Grosvenor Gallery,
I assisted in the arrangement of the collected display of his life’s
work. That was in the year 1886, and I can vividly recall with what
easy self-complacency he anticipated the pleasure which he would derive
from this long-looked-for opportunity of seeing the product of many
years of labour displayed in a single exhibition. Before the arrival
of the paintings themselves, many of which he had not seen from the
time they had left his easel, he was afflicted by no trace of the
nervous apprehension which I have found not uncommonly betrayed by
other artists in similar circumstances. But the triumphant buoyancy
of this earlier mood was replaced by many an hour of deep dejection
when the works themselves appeared in their place; and that dejection
again was sometimes as swiftly replaced by a spirit of almost unlimited
self-esteem as he discovered in some particular example qualities
greater than his recollection had accorded it.

The essential charm of the man’s nature shone out very clearly
during that fortnight of preparation, and the invulnerable armour of
self-esteem in which he was wont to appear before the world would
sometimes fall from him in an instant, leaving in its place a spirit
of humility that belonged to the deeper part of his nature. It was
sometimes almost touching to note the mood of obvious dejection in
which he would quit the gallery at the close of the day’s work, and
no less interesting to observe with what alacrity the next morning he
would recapture the confident outlook that was a part of the necessity
of his being. He would sometimes be in the gallery half an hour or
more before the usual time for the work of hanging to begin, and we
would find him on our arrival with his short cherrywood pipe in his
mouth surveying with evident satisfaction the pictures already placed
upon the walls. And on those occasions he would often run his arm
through mine and draw me away to compel my admiration of some forgotten
excellence in this picture or in that, the renewed vision of which had
sufficed completely to restore his self-complacency.

But these moments of exultation were not long-enduring, and it was
an integral part of the fascinating _naïveté_ of his character that
he could with equal emphasis in the presence of some less desirable
performance accuse himself roundly of having slipped into vulgarity and
bad taste. There was one thing, however, he never could endure, and
that was the suggestion that his latest achievement was not also his
best, and this conviction so entirely possessed him that he set himself
in very vigorous fashion to the task of correcting what he conceived
to be the faults of some of his earlier works. I confess I looked upon
this adventure with something approaching dismay, for it was evident
enough, though he was in no way conscious of it, that the Millais of
1886 was not the Millais of thirty years before, who had laboured under
the influence of earlier and different ideals. Happily the emphatic
protests of one or two of the owners from whom the pictures had been
borrowed cut short this crusade of fancied improvement upon which he
had embarked, and in one instance, although sorely against his will, he
was forced to remove the fresh painting from the surface of the canvas.

Some of the essays of that earlier time of youthful impulse and more
poetic design had grown unfamiliar to him. Many of them he had not
seen from the date when they first left his studio, and I recall in
particular with what eager and yet nervous expectation he awaited the
arrival of “The Huguenot,” a picture that had served as the foundation
of his fame as a young man. I think as he saw it unpacked, with its
delicate beauty untarnished by time, that for the moment his faith in
the uninterrupted progress of his career was partly shaken. I know at
least that his voice trembled with emotion as he muttered some blunt
words of praise for a picture which, as he said, was “not so bad for
a youngster,” and I remember that as it took its place upon the wall,
after gazing at it intently for some time in silence, he relit his pipe
and took his way thoughtfully down the stairs into the street.

Millais used to contend that, until the advent of Watteau, the beauty
of women had found no fit interpreters in art, and he would cite the
example of Rembrandt as showing how poorly the feminine features which
he portrayed compared with the lovely faces imaged by Reynolds and
Gainsborough. Perhaps he was hardly equipped to deliver final judgment
on such a subject, for I do not think he leaned with any enthusiasm
towards those finer examples of Italian painting wherein the subtleties
of feminine beauty have certainly not suffered by neglect. But these
dogmatic assertions of men of genius, if they are not irrefutable in
themselves, are often instructive in illuminating the finer tendencies
of their own achievement; and it will remain as one of Millais’s
indestructible claims to recognition that both in his earlier and
in his later time he was able to interpret with matchless power the
finer shades of emotional expression in the faces of beautiful women.
When the chosen model rightly inspired him--and without that model
his invention was often vapid and inert--he could succeed in a degree
which no other artist has matched or surpassed in registering not only
the permanent facts of beauty in form and feature, but in arresting
with equal felicity the most fleeting moments of tender or passionate
expression.

In the later days of his life it was at the Garrick Club that I saw
most of Millais, for there, in the card-room, he was to be found
nearly every afternoon, and as we both then dwelt in Kensington we
often wandered homeward together. The buoyancy of his youth and early
manhood never quite deserted him, even at that sadder season, when
he was already in conflict with that dread opponent against whom his
all-conquering spirit was powerless, and I never heard from him,
however great the dejection of spirit he must have suffered, a single
sour word concerning life or nature. His outlook on the world was
never tainted by self-compassion, never clouded by any bitterness of
personal experience, and one came to recognise then, as his life and
strength gradually waned and failed, that the spirit of optimism which
seemed sometimes unsympathetic in the season of his opulent vigour and
virility was indeed a beauty deeply resident in his character, which
even the shadow of coming death was powerless to cloud or darken.




AT HOME WITH ALMA-TADEMA


The death of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, following only too closely upon
the loss of his gracious and gifted wife, finally closed the doors
of one of the most delightful houses that overlooked the shores of
Bohemia. They both possessed in rare measure the genius of friendship,
and to both belonged the fine and generous sympathy of nature which is
the abiding secret of true hospitality. And in their case a friendship
once formed was steadfastly held. There are men and women not a few,
who, as they advance along the path that leads to fame and distinction,
contrive to shed the friends and comrades of an earlier day in haste to
make room for guests more important or influential. This was never true
of Tadema at any period of his career, and those who can recall the
earlier Tuesday evenings at Townshend House, which looked across the
waters of the canal to the green shade of the Regent’s Park, can bear
witness that the simplest and most modest of his associates of that
time found as cordial a welcome in the more spacious premises which he
afterwards built for himself in the Grove End Road.

It was in the year 1877 that I first became an intimate guest at the
pleasant weekly receptions at Townshend House, and I remember that
what first struck me about them was the delightful sense of ease and
informality that the host and hostess contrived to infuse into every
gathering. Sometimes the friends assembled might number only a few;
sometimes the rooms would be thronged with all that was most notable
in the world of literature and art; but the party, whether large or
small, knew no constraint of dulness, nor were we ever oppressed by
that overpowering sense of social decorum which is apt to benumb the
best-intentioned efforts of ordinary English hospitality. And, this I
think, was due in great measure to an element in Tadema’s character
that was almost unique.

Shakespeare has told us of the “boy eternal,” and many men of
distinction have owned and kept that quality to the end of their days.
But Tadema went one better, for he retained throughout his life some
of the simple impulses and attributes of a veritable child. He had
the wondering delight of a child in each new experience as it came
within the range of his vision, and there were times when some passing
ebullition of temper would betray something also of a child’s wayward
petulance. It was characteristic of this side of his nature, which
for the rest ranked among the most masculine and virile I have known,
that he preserved to the last a child’s abiding delight in all forms
of mechanical toys. This was a weakness well known to his intimate
friends, who, on the annual occasion of his birthday, would vie with
one another in presenting him with the most admired achievements of the
toy-maker’s art. I remember, in particular, a certain ferocious tiger,
which moved by clock-work across the polished floor of the studio.
Tadema was absolutely fascinated by the antics of this mimic beast,
remaining under the spell of its enchantment during the whole of the
evening; and whenever a pause in the music permitted it, I could hear
the whirr of the wheels of the clock as the delighted owner of this new
plaything prepared to start it again upon an excursion round the room.

These birthday parties were occasions fondly cherished by our host. He
loved every detail in the little ceremonial that might be arranged for
their celebration, and would reckon up with the earnest intentness of
a schoolboy over his first sum in arithmetic, the candles set around
his birthday cake, that counted the sum of his years. And then followed
the inevitable speech proposing his health--a task which usually fell
to my lot; whereupon Tadema, who always thought that whatever was done
in his honour exceeded in excellence any tribute accorded to another,
would stoutly maintain that, as an effort in oratory, it far surpassed
any speech he had ever heard made. This naïve delight of his in little
things, that remained as a constant element of his character, was
linked with a large generosity of nature in all that concerned the
greater issues of life. And if he exacted from all who came within
the range of his influence the little acts of homage and respect that
he thought were his due, there was no one who would so freely place
himself at the disposal of those whom he believed he could serve. He
loved to gather round him the young students of his craft, ever on
the alert to note and welcome new talent as it appeared, and when his
counsel or advice was needed, he would spare neither time nor pains to
afford the aid and encouragement which his superb technical resources
so well fitted him to bestow. I have heard artists of position declare
that if they had reached some crux in a picture that proved difficult
of solution, there was no one so helpful as Tadema; and this, I
think, was due mainly to the fact that his quick sympathy and swift
apprehension enabled him at once to appreciate the point of view of the
comrade who had sought his advice.

The last of those pleasant Tuesday evenings at Townshend House, which
occurred in the spring of 1885, brought with it a certain feeling of
sadness that found constant expression as the evening wore on. We had
all become deeply attached to the quaintly-adorned dwelling where so
many joyous evenings had been passed, and some there were who may have
been conscious of a lurking fear lest the more spacious premises that
were then in course of reconstruction in the Grove End Road should rob
these festive gatherings of some part of the ease and intimacy that had
hitherto been their most delightful characteristic. Certain it was that
for his friends during many months to come, the week would contain no
Tuesday worth the name, and as we parted that night I think there was a
wide-spread feeling that the new order of things could never rival the
old. But such fears, so often justified by experience, proved in this
case wholly without foundation, and when, in the autumn of 1887, we
were bidden to the richly-decorated new studio, in the construction of
which Tadema had taken such infinite delight, it was found that the old
spirit of hospitality, unchanged and unimpaired, was able quickly to
accommodate itself to its more imposing surroundings.

I had known the house in Grove End Road before it took on the stamp
of Tadema’s quaint invention and fanciful ingenuity. It had been
inhabited by the French painter Tissot during a great part of his
residence in England, and I recall a dinner party given by him on an
occasion shortly after the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, at which
he announced to me his serious and solemn intention of making a radical
revolution in the purpose and direction of his art. Up to that time
the pictures of this most adroit of craftsmen had been wholly mundane,
it might even be said demi-mundane, in character; but he had been
profoundly impressed by the recent display of the works of Burne-Jones,
to which the public for the first time had accorded a larger welcome;
and it immediately struck the shrewd spirit of Tissot that there were
commercial possibilities in the region of ideal art of which he was
bound as a practical man to take account and advantage. As he himself
naïvely expressed it on that evening: “Vraiment, mon ami, je vois qu’il
y a quelque chose à faire”; and he forthwith led the way to his studio,
where he had already commenced a group of allegorical subjects, to the
infinite amusement of his friend Heilbuth, who at that time, I think,
knew him better than he knew himself.

In those days, Tadema and Burne-Jones were scarcely acquainted.
Their real friendship came a little later, but when it came it was
very genuine and sincere, resting on a certain quality of simplicity
which they owned in common and a strong feeling of mutual respect and
esteem. Their ways in art lay far asunder, but each knew how to value
at their true worth the gifts of the other. From time to time they
would both join me in little Bohemian feasts at Previtali’s Restaurant
in Coventry Street, where we would sit till the closing hours in
pleasant converse that was never permitted to be protractedly serious.
Tadema generally prefaced the evening with an anecdote which he always
believed to be entirely new, and even when its hoary antiquity was not
in doubt, Burne-Jones never failed to supply a full measure of the
laughing appreciation that was due to novelty. In his more serious
moods, however, Tadema’s talk was marked by deep conviction and entire
sincerity. He never acquired complete mastery over our language, but he
could always find the word or phrase that reached the heart of what he
wanted to say. In his art, no less than in his views on art and life,
he was desperately in earnest, and there was something even in the
quality of his voice that aptly mirrored the mind and character of the
man. Indeed, to be quite correct, it was not one voice, but two, for
sometimes even within the compass of a single sentence the tone would
swiftly change from the guttural notes that betrayed his northern
origin to those softer cadences that seemed to echo from some southern
belfry.

I have often thought that this contrast of intonation in his speech
reflected in a measure the dual influences that dominated his painting.
By his heart’s desire, he belonged to a land that was not the land of
his birth and to an epoch far removed from the present. The call of
the spirit led him backward and southward--to the streets of ancient
Rome and the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean; but, for all his
journeyings, his genius as a painter remained securely domiciled under
northern skies. The saving grace of his art, whatever the material
upon which it was employed, differed little, indeed, from that which
gives its surviving charm to the art of his countryman De Hoogh. Both
will live in virtue of their unfailing love of light. It is that,
or, at least, that above all else, that will make their achievements
delightful and indestructible. “No man has ever lived,” Burne-Jones
once said to me, “who has interpreted with Tadema’s power the incidence
of sunlight on metal and marble.” And although Tadema left the simple
interiors of De Hoogh far behind him in his learned reconstruction of
the buildings of antiquity, it was with a temper and purpose closely
allied to that of De Hoogh that he loved to revel in quaintly-chosen
effects of light and shade, admitting sometimes only the tiniest corner
of the full sunshine from the outer world, just to illumine as with the
dazzling brilliance of a jewel the imprisoned half-tones that flood the
foregrounds of his pictures.

To those who can look below the surface, this central quality of his
genius, which he inherited as part of his birthright, will be found
reappearing in unbroken continuity throughout the splendid series of
his work that lately adorned the walls of Burlington House. Their
fertile invention, and the strong and vivid sense of drama that often
moves that invention; the patient industry and wide learning which
have served to recreate the classic environment wherein his chosen
characters live and have their being--these things would count for
little in the final impression left by his art, if he had not carried
with him in all his wanderings into the past and towards the south,
that vitalising principle of light, which, in hands fitly inspired,
is able to bestow even upon inanimate things a pulsing and sentient
existence. “There is nothing either beautiful or ugly,” as Constable
once said, “but light and shade makes it so.” Alma-Tadema had learnt
this secret long ago, when he was little more than a boy, and before he
had quitted his native land, and he retained it to the very end of his
career.

This is not the occasion to appraise at its full value the worth
of Tadema’s artistic achievement, nor would even those who are his
warmest admirers seek to deny that in many of its aspects it is open
to criticism. But at a time when the antics of the charlatan are
invading almost every realm of art, his patient and unswerving loyalty
to a chosen ideal stands forth as a shining example to all who may
come after him. That his powers in the region of design confessed
some inherent limitations he himself was entirely conscious. I
remember one day when we were discussing the claims of several of his
contemporaries, he said to me suddenly, “You know, my dear fellow,
there are some painters who are colour-blind, and some painters who are
form-blind. Now, Leighton, for instance, is colour-blind, and I--well,
I, you know, am form-blind.” The criticism was perhaps unduly severe in
both directions, but it announced a pregnant truth and proved that he
was not unaware of those particular qualities in which his weakness was
apt to betray itself.

This was said during the time when Hallé and I were arranging the
collected exhibition of his works at the Grosvenor Gallery, and when
he had had a full opportunity of passing in review the gathered
achievement of many years’ labour. Those days we passed together
superintending the process of hanging were wholly delightful, and
served to bring out many interesting characteristics of Tadema’s
nature. When the exhibition was first projected Tadema had laid
down a rule for our guidance, which he emphatically declared must
not be departed from. “The arrangement,” he said, “must be strictly
chronological”; for the whole interest of such a collection, as he
held, lay in the image it presented of an artist’s gradual development.
We offered no objection at the time, though we knew well by previous
experience that adherence to so rigid a principle was inconsistent with
decorative effect; and we were, therefore, not unduly surprised when
Tadema appeared one morning with the revolutionary announcement that
the chronological arrangement must go by the board; insisting, with
the air of a man who had hitherto unwillingly yielded to our pedantic
tradition, that the only fit way to hang an exhibition was to make the
pictures look well upon the walls.

The last time I met Alma-Tadema was at a little supper party given by
Sir Herbert Tree on the occasion of the first performance of _Macbeth_.
It was impossible for those who had known him in the days of his full
vigour not to be conscious even then that his health was failing. From
the time of his wife’s death, he had never, indeed, shown the same
elasticity of spirit, though with valiant courage he had set himself to
take up the broken thread of his life, retaining even to the last that
loving and humorous welcome of his friends that had been his unfailing
characteristic in happier days. But although admittedly no longer
robust, his unflagging interest in the theatre and his friendship for
Tree had brought him from home on that evening, and availed to hold him
a prisoner for the little impromptu feast that followed the play.

My first experience of Tadema’s work for the theatre was on the
occasion of the production of Mr. Ogilvie’s play of _Hypatia_, when I
had persuaded him, at Tree’s invitation, to undertake the designs for
the scenery and costumes. This is a kind of work to which many gifted
painters cannot readily adapt themselves. But Tadema’s constructive
talent, his rare ingenuity in dealing with architectural problems, and,
above all, his unrivalled gifts in contriving diversified effects of
light and shade, amply fitted him for such a task; and the difficulty
which some painters experience of yoking their intended design with the
interpretative resources of the scenic artists, proved no difficulty
to him. He loved their art with all its infinite devices for the
production of illusion, and he knew how to treat them in a spirit of
true and loyal comradeship. At the first I had been a little nervous
on this score, but, one day, when I asked him how he and the principal
scene-painter were progressing, he relieved me of all anxiety upon the
matter by the emphatic announcement that he and his associate were in
such complete agreement that, as he quaintly phrased it from a peasant
formula recalled from the land of his birth, “we are like two hands
on one stomach.” As the production neared completion, I remember one
evening, we were waiting for Tadema, who had been detained by a council
meeting at the Royal Academy. The most important scene was ready set,
and, as it seemed to us, with really admirable effect; but when Tadema
arrived everything was wrong. He scattered objection and criticism in
every direction, sometimes, as I thought, with so little reason that
I cast about to discover what could be the source of his discontent.
Suddenly I remembered that the hour was late, and that, as he had come
straight from Burlington House to keep the appointment, the probability
was that he had not dined. I put the question to him, and his answer
was immediate, “Of course I have not dined.” “Then,” I said, “let us
dine, and leave the men to put these matters right.” The cure acted
like magic, for when we returned to the theatre an hour later, Tadema
readily found a way by which every defect might be set right.

I was associated with him at a later time with several other
productions which he made for the stage, notably the _Coriolanus_, in
the later days of the Lyceum, and, in a lesser degree as far as my work
was concerned, in the _Julius Caesar_ presented by Sir Herbert Tree.
I think such work was always a pleasure to him, because it brought
into play qualities that are not directly involved in the work of
a painter. His talent had always a strongly practical side, and it
was that which made the construction and perfecting of his own house
so keen a pleasure to him. His labours there would, I believe, have
remained incomplete even if he had lived for another twenty years. He
was always discovering new possibilities that opened the door for fresh
improvements, and his knowledge of the details of every craft employed
in his service was so exacting and complete that the skilled artificers
who laboured for him knew well that they were under the trained eye of
a master as well as of an employer.

When I called at his house on the day that brought the news of his
death, the quaintly covered way that leads to the front door was girt
on either side by a wealth of varied blooms that had been made ready
by his gardener to greet his expected return from abroad; and then, a
few days later, as I stood beside his coffin that had been reverently
set down in the great studio, I found it buried beneath an avalanche
of flowers, which his countless friends had sent as a last mark of
love and affection. And it was, indeed, a fitting tribute to the
dead artist; for Tadema, while he lived, had an absolute passion for
flowers. As a painter he would linger with untiring devotion over each
separate petal of every separate bloom, and yet with such a sustained
sense of mastery in the rendering of their beauty that when the result
was complete the infinite mass of perfected detail was found to be
firmly bound together by the controlling force of a single effect of
light and shade. To a young man who stood beside his easel on a day
when he was making a careful study of azaleas that formed an integral
part of the design upon which he was engaged, Tadema summed up in
a single sentence the spirit in which he constantly laboured: “The
people of to-day, they will tell you,” he said, “that all this minute
detail--that is not art!” And then, turning again to his picture, he
added in his quaint English: “But it has given me so much pleasure to
paint him that I cannot help thinking it will give, at least, some one
pleasure to look at him, too.” This was the spirit of the older men
before the pestilent pursuit of originality came to infect the modest
worship of Nature, and it will remain as the dominant quality of all
art, whether of to-day or to-morrow, that is destined to outlive the
passing fashion of an hour.




WITH ROSSETTI IN CHEYNE WALK


Passing along the Chelsea Embankment a while ago I was reminded by the
sight of Rossetti’s old house of the number of studios where I was once
a constant visitor, which time had long since left untenanted. Millais,
Leighton, Whistler, Fred Walker, Cecil Lawson, and Burne-Jones were
among the names that crowded upon my recollection; and thinking of
these men and of their work, I could not but be reminded of the changed
spirit in which art has come to be regarded in these later days of
restless experiment and ceaseless research after novelty of form and
expression.

And yet those earlier times of which I am speaking were also marked
by conflict and controversy; for even in the seventies, when I first
became actively engaged in the study of painting, the stirring spirit
of English Art still throbbed in response to the message that had
been delivered by the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood more than twenty
years before. It may be a fancy, but I hardly think the workers or
students of a later generation can quite understand the concentrated
eagerness and expectation which awaited each new achievement of that
small group of men upon whom the hope of the time had been set. We did
not, perhaps, then quite realise that the revolution, so far as they
were concerned, was already complete, and that what was to come was
not destined to signalise any new or important development of what had
already been accomplished.

Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti, the three men who stand as the
authentic founders of the pre-Raphaelite movement, had all, in the only
sense in which their names still stand in linked association, produced
the work by which they will be best remembered. During the twenty years
that had passed since the movement took birth, the output of these
three men, at first bitterly disputed and sometimes keenly resented,
was in a sense the best that any or all of them were destined to give
to the world--in a sense, I say, because their after-career, whatever
new triumphs it proclaimed, exhibited a partial desertion of the aims
which had held them in close comradeship during the brief season of
their youth. It is probable that no three stronger or more distinct
personalities ever laboured in the pursuit of a common purpose; and it
was therefore inevitable that as the years passed they should each
assert in separate ways the widely divergent tendencies which at the
time I am speaking of were held in subjection to a common ideal. But
when it is remembered what their combined efforts had already produced,
the result must stand, I think, as a record unmatched in the domain
of painting by any contemporary achievement in the art of Europe.
Millais had painted and exhibited, among many other and less notable
works, “The Feast of Lorenzo,” “The Carpenter’s Shop,” the “Ophelia,”
the “Huguenot,” and the “Blind Girl”; Holman Hunt, whose methods as
a painter were not calculated to win such ready acceptance, had none
the less firmly established his fame by his picture of the “Light of
the World,” at first roundly denounced by most of the organs of public
opinion, but in the end, as much perhaps by reason of its intense
religious sentiment as by its qualities of pure art, achieving through
the advocacy of Mr. Ruskin a settled place in public esteem; and
Rossetti, although during these years little or nothing had been shown
to the world, was already accepted by those of the inner circle who
were admitted to his confidence as the chief exponent of the spiritual
tendencies of the new movement.

In 1873, when I first made the acquaintance of Rossetti, I knew more of
his verse than of his painting. The first volume of his poems had been
before the world for nearly three years, and it was hardly wonderful
that the picturesque beauty of his writing, with its occasional direct
reference to paintings and designs of his own, should have stirred
within me an eager curiosity to make acquaintance with the pictures
themselves. It happened about this time that I gained access to the
small but choice collection of Mr. Rae of Birkenhead, which contained
several of the most beautiful of Rossetti’s works; and filled with
admiration of what I had seen, I had written, over the signature of
Ignotus, an article in one of the daily papers containing an incomplete
but enthusiastic appreciation of Rossetti’s powers. Searching where I
could, I afterwards made myself acquainted with some of his designs in
black and white; but still eager for a wider knowledge of a man whose
poetic invention had laid so strong a hold upon me, I ventured to
address myself directly to the recluse of Cheyne Walk, praying that if
he could see his way to grant my request I might be permitted to visit
his studio. From that time our acquaintance began. His letter in reply
to mine, wherein I had mentioned a project then in my mind of enlarging
my brief essay so as to make it more worthy of its subject, already
revealed to me some part of that reticent side of his nature which our
later friendship helped me the better to understand.

“My youth,” he wrote to me, “was spent chiefly in planning and
designing, and whether I shall still have time to do anything I cannot
tell.” And then, in conclusion, he added: “As to what you ask me about
views connected with my work, I never had any theories on the subject,
or derived, as far as a painter may say so, suggestions of style or
tendency from any source save my own natural impulse.”

This letter, dated, as I have said, in 1873, shows how little an artist
may be aware what part of his life’s work is destined to constitute his
enduring title to fame. Still eagerly looking forward, he had already
produced the work by which he will be best remembered, for although
in years a young man--he was not more than forty-five at the time of
our first acquaintance--his progress as a painter was not afterwards
destined to record any notable development. “Beata Beatrix,” “The
Loving Cup,” “The Beloved,” the “Monna Vanna,” the “Blue Bower,” and
the “Lady Lilith” already stood to his credit, besides the series of
water-colours, including “Paolo and Francesca,” and the beautiful
pen-and-ink design of “Cassandra.”

The room into which I was shown on the occasion of my first visit to
Cheyne Walk came to seem to me as aptly characteristic of the man. It
offered few or none of the ordinary features of a studio, and in its
array of books around the walls spoke rather of the man of letters than
of the painter; and the careless disposition of the simple furniture,
though it bore some tokens of the newer fashion introduced by William
Morris and Rossetti himself, made no very serious appeal on the score
of deliberate decoration. It was obviously the painter’s living room
as well as his workshop, and as I came to know it afterwards, remains
associated in my mind with many long evenings of vivid and fascinating
talk, in which Rossetti roamed at will over the fields of literature
and art. But the thing that at once took me by surprise on that first
visit was the masculine and energetic personality of the man himself.

From what I knew of his persistent seclusion, and in part, also, from
what I had gleaned from the subtle and delicate qualities expressed
both in his painting and in his poetry, I was prepared to find in
their author a man of comparatively frail physique and of subdued
and retiring address. Nothing could be less like the reality that
confronted me on that May afternoon, as he stood beside his easel at
work upon the picture before him. It was not till much later, and then
only by indications half-consciously conveyed, that I recaptured the
picture of Rossetti as I had first found it reflected in his verse
and in his painting. Little by little, as I got to know him better,
I realised that my fancied image of him did indeed mirror qualities
that lay deeply resident in his character; but at the first encounter
it was the dominating strength and vigour of his intellect and the
overpowering influence of a personality rich in varied sympathies, that
struck itself in vivid outline upon the imagination of the observer.

As our intercourse and our friendship advanced, it was easy enough to
comprehend the source of that potent spell which he wielded over all
who came within the sphere of his influence. Without any reservation, I
may say of him that he was beyond comparison the most inspiring talker
with whom I have ever been brought into contact: certainly the most
inspiring to a youth, for his conversation, although it sought no set
phrase of eloquence, flowed in a stream that was irresistible; and
yet so quick was his appreciation and so keen his sympathy that the
youngest man of the company could always draw from him encouragement
to speak without fear upon any theme that sincerely engaged him. I
have heard him sometimes “gore and toss” without mercy any one who
ventured to enter the debate with an empty ambition of display. Of
insincerity of view, of any mere flimsy preciousness or prettiness
of phrase, he was always impatiently intolerant; but he was equally
quick to recognise and to welcome a thought truly held and modestly
stated. At such times his ready power of evoking a full and fearless
statement of what even the most insignificant of his visitors had to
say was scarcely less inspiring than the rich and rounded tones of his
own voice, as it glowed in enthusiastic appreciation of some worshipped
hero in the field of art or letters. And though his work owns to a
concentration and intensity of purpose that would seem sometimes to
imply a corresponding narrowness of vision, it was in his work only
that such a limited outlook could be said to be characteristic of the
man.

That he dwelt by preference on the imaginative side of life, and
chiefly chose for eulogy achievements in which the imagination was
the dominating factor, is unquestionably true; but his taste within
the wide limits of the region he had explored was catholic and
comprehensive to a degree that I have not known equalled by any of
his contemporaries. And lest this should seem an exaggerated estimate
of the man as I knew him then, I may here quote the testimony of
others who stood nearer to him than I did. Burne-Jones, his pupil and
disciple, wrote long afterwards: “Towards other men’s ideas he was
decidedly the most generous man I ever knew. No one so threw himself
into the ideas of the other men; but it was part of his enormous
imagination. The praises he had first lavished upon me, had I not had
any inborn grains of modesty, would have been enough to turn my head
altogether.” And at another time he wrote: “What I chiefly gained from
him was not to be afraid of myself, and to do the thing I liked most;
but in those first years I only wanted to think as he did, and all
he did and said fitted me through and through. He never harangued or
persuaded; he had a gift of saying things authoritatively, such as I
have never heard in any man.”

But there is, indeed, no surer testimony to the magic of his
personality than is betrayed in the restive spirit with which his two
comrades of those earlier days endeavoured afterwards to assert their
independence of his influence. Both Sir John Millais and Mr. Holman
Hunt, in their later life, went out of their way to try to prove to
the world that the pre-Raphaelite movement would have been in no way
changed in its direction if Rossetti had not been one of the original
group. I often talked with Millais on this subject, and it was easy to
perceive that he harboured something almost of resentment at the bare
suggestion that the direction of his art was in any sense due to the
example or teaching of Rossetti; and of the Millais of later years,
who had partly discarded the poetic impulses of his youth, it may be
readily conceded that he owed nothing to the man whose art, whether in
its splendour or in its decay, was governed always by the spirit of
imaginative design.

And equally of Holman Hunt who, in his two long volumes, has
so laboriously and so needlessly laboured to vindicate his own
independence, it may be admitted without reservation that his kinship
with the spirit in which Rossetti worked was transient and almost
accidental. But it remains, nevertheless, unquestionably true that
during that brief season of close comradeship, the supremacy of
Rossetti’s genius is very clearly reflected in the work of both. The
aftergrowth of talents as great as--and in some respects greater
than--his, led each of these men into ways of Art that owned, it may be
freely confessed, no obligation to Rossetti; and of the rich gifts of
Millais as a painter, extraordinary in their precocity and developed in
increasing power almost to the end of his career, no one could exhibit
keener or truer appreciation than Rossetti himself. I recall on one of
those nights in Cheyne Walk with what power and fulness of expression
he paid willing homage to Millais’ genius. “Since painting began,”
he said, “I do not believe there has ever been a man more greatly
endowed.” And then he went on to speak with genuine humility of his own
many shortcomings in technical accomplishment, wherein he admitted that
Millais stood as the unchallenged master of his time.

Rossetti was the kindest, but most careless, of hosts, and the many
little dinners at which I was permitted to be a guest always had about
them something of the air of improvisation. Of the actual details of
the feast, from a culinary point of view, he seemed to take little
heed, and there was something quaint and humorous in the way in which,
at the head of his table, he would attack the fowl or joint that
happened to be set before him, lunging at it with the carving knife
and fork almost as if it were an armoured foe who had challenged him
to mortal combat. I remember on one of those occasions an incident
occurred that showed in striking fashion the quick warmth of his heart
at the sudden call of friendship. We were in the midst of cheeriest
converse. Fred Leyland, one of his staunchest and earliest patrons,
was of the company, when the news came by special messenger that young
Oliver Madox Brown was stricken with serious illness. It chanced that
we had been talking of the young man’s youthful essays, both in art and
in literature, and Rossetti had spoken in almost exaggerated praise
of the promise they displayed, when the letter was handed to him. He
remained silent for a moment, though it was easy to see by the working
of his face that he was deeply distressed. “Brown is my oldest friend,”
he said. “His boy is ill, and I must go to him; but that need not break
the evening for you.” And then, without any added word of farewell, he
left us where we sat, and in a moment we heard the street door close,
and we knew that he had gone. For a time we lingered over the table,
but Cheyne Walk was no longer itself without the presence of its host.
We passed into the studio, where Rossetti was wont to coil himself up
on the sofa in preparation for long hours of talk, and we felt as by
common consent that the evening was at an end.

The circumstance was slight enough in itself, but I remember feeling
afresh how magical and inspiring was the spell he exercised over us
all, and I little realised then that this friendship with Rossetti,
which had proved so powerful a factor in moulding the intellectual
tendencies of my own life, was not destined much longer to endure. For
a time, indeed, the old welcome always awaited me, but after a time I
thought I detected a certain reserve and restraint in our intercourse
which I was unable to explain. A little later those longed-for
invitations to dine at Cheyne Walk ceased altogether, and once or
twice when I called the studio door, always open to me heretofore, was
closed, on the excuse that the painter was too busily engaged. It was
not, indeed, until after his death, that I learnt from his truest and
most trusted friend the cause of our alienation.

Rossetti, although he never exposed his own pictures to public
criticism, was, like every artist who has ever lived, eager for the
praise of those whose praise he valued; and his nature, already grown
morbid under the stress of influences that were undermining his
health, was not without an element of jealousy that seemed strangely
inconsistent with the tribute he could on many an occasion offer to
the work of others. He saw but little of Burne-Jones in those days,
but he knew that I saw him often. He knew, also, from my published
criticism, that I was strongly attracted to his genius, and although I
have heard Rossetti himself speak of his pupil and follower in terms of
laudation that could not be surpassed, the thought, as I learnt later,
had already begun to poison his mind that my allegiance to himself had
suffered diminution; and he frankly confessed to the friend from whom
little in his life was hidden that my presence in Cheyne Walk became to
him, for this reason, a source of irritation, which, in the condition
of his health, he was unable to endure.

Such flaws in a nature so splendidly endowed count for nothing in
remembrance of the picture of him that remains to me as I first knew
him in the plenitude of his intellectual powers. For a time it seemed
as if the great movement at the head of which his name must enduringly
remain was likely to suffer eclipse. The taste of later years had taken
an entirely different direction, and the ideals which the small band he
led had striven so manfully to recapture from a renewed study of nature
and a finer understanding of the artistic achievements of the past
appeared to have sunk into oblivion. It was therefore a delight to find
in Rome in the spring of two years ago how enthusiastic was the welcome
accorded to a man who, while he ranks so high among English painters,
owned in his veins the blood of Italy and from whose painters, at that
bewitching season when the spirit of the Renaissance was in its youth,
he had drawn the inspiration which was destined to kindle his own
genius.




EDWARD BURNE-JONES


“I think Morris’s friendship began everything for me; everything that I
afterwards cared for; we were freshmen together at Exeter. When I left
Oxford I got to know Rossetti, whose friendship I sought and obtained.
He is, you know, the most generous of men to the young. I couldn’t bear
with a young man’s dreadful sensitiveness and conceit as he bore with
mine. He taught me practically all I ever learnt; afterwards I made
a method for myself to suit my nature. He gave me courage to commit
myself to imagination without shame--a thing both bad and good for me.
It was Watts, much later, who compelled me to try and draw better.

“I quarrel now with Morris about Art. He journeys to Iceland, and I to
Italy--which is a symbol--and I quarrel, too, with Rossetti. If I could
travel backwards I think my heart’s desire would take me to Florence in
the time of Botticelli.”

So Burne-Jones wrote of himself more than forty years ago. It chanced
I had just then written a series of papers on living English painters;
and, with the thought of their re-publication, had asked him for
some particulars of his earlier career. The scheme, I remember, was
never carried into effect; but his answer to my inquiry, from which I
have drawn this interesting fragment of autobiography, served as the
beginning of a long friendship that was interrupted only by death.

In those boyish essays of mine there was, as I now see, not a little
of that quality of youthful conceit that could never, I think, have
entered very largely into his composition; and if I recall them now
with any sort of gratification, it is mainly because they included an
enthusiastic appreciation of so much as was then known to me of the
work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Of Rossetti’s art I have already
spoken, and perhaps the time has not yet arrived to record a final
verdict upon the worth of his achievement as a painter. I have also
sought to indicate how irresistible in my own case was the influence
of his strongly marked personality, an influence which enabled me the
more readily to understand how deep may have been the debt that is
here so generously acknowledged. In this matter the witness of his
contemporaries is irrefutable. Even though posterity should not accord
to him the unstinted praise bestowed upon his art by those who then
accepted him as a master, no later judgment can dispute or disturb the
authority he exercised over those who came within the sphere of his
personal fascination.

Little wonder then that to the dream-fed soul of the younger painter,
whose art as yet lacked the means to fix in form and colour the
thronging visions that must have already crowded his brain, the
friendship of such a man must have seemed a priceless possession; and
although, with the patient and gradual assertion of Burne-Jones’s
individuality, their ways in the world of Art divided, yet even in that
later day each knew well how to measure the worth of the other. Of what
was highest and noblest in the art of Rossetti, no praise ever outran
the praise offered by Burne-Jones to the man he had sought and owned
as his master; and I can recall an evening in Cheyne Walk more than
forty years ago, when there fell from the lips of Rossetti the most
generous tribute I have ever heard to the genius of the painter who
was still his disciple. “If, as I hold,” he said, in those round and
ringing tones that seemed at once to invite and to defy contradiction,
“the noblest picture is a painted poem, then I say that in the whole
history of Art there has never been a painter more greatly gifted than
Burne-Jones with the highest qualities of poetical invention.” Here we
have praise indeed; but there is at least one painter, he whose long
life still kept the stainless record of unswerving loyalty to a noble
ideal, to whom also Burne-Jones has here owned his indebtedness, who
would, I believe, have accepted and endorsed even such a judgment as
this. And if an artist’s fame lives most sweetly, most securely, in the
regard of his fellows, who could ask aught higher of the living or the
dead of our times, than that the award of Rossetti should be confirmed
and enforced by the painter of “Love and Death”?

“A picture is a painted poem.” Upon that Rossetti never tired of
insisting. “Those who deny it,” he used to add in his vehement way,
“are simply men who have no poetry in their composition.” We know
there are many who deny it,--many, indeed, who think it savours of the
rankest heresy; for herein, as they would warn us, lurks the insidious
poison of “the literary idea.” Nor can such warning ever be without
its uses. The literary idea, it must be owned, has often played sad
havoc in the domain of art. Much, both in painting and sculpture that
the world has rightly forgotten or would fain forget, found the source
of its failure in misguided loyalty to a literary ideal; much even
that survives still claims a spurious dignity from its fortuitous
attachment to an imaginative conception that had never been rightly
subdued to the service of Art.

But though the warning be timely, the definition which it confronts is
not on that account to be lightly dismissed. It is true, as Rossetti
stoutly maintained, and must ever remain true, of all men who have
poetry in their nature. It was true, from the beginning of his career
to its close, of the art of Burne-Jones. From “The Merciful Knight” to
the unfinished “Avalon,” wherein, as it would seem, he had designed to
give us all that was most winning in the brightly-coloured dreams of
youth, combined with all that was richest in the gathered resources
of maturity, his every picture was a painted poem. Nay, more, every
drawing from his hand, every fragment of design, each patient study
of leaf or flower or drapery, has in it something of that imaginative
impulse which controls and informs the completed work. I have lately
been turning over the leaves of some of those countless books of
studies he has left behind him, studies which prove with what untiring
and absorbing industry he approached every task he had set himself to
accomplish. And yet, amongst them all, of mere studies there are none.
Again and again he went back to nature, but ever under the compelling
impulse of an idea, always taking with him an integral part of what he
came to capture. That unprejudiced inspection of the facts of nature
which, in the preliminary stages of their work, may content those who
are moved by a keener and colder spirit of scientific research, he had
not the will, he had not the power to make. For every force carries
with it its own limitation; nor would it ever have been his boast that
nature owned no more than she was fain to yield to him. If, then, with
unwearied application he was constantly re-seeking the support of
nature, it was with a purpose so frankly confessed, that even in the
presence of the model the sense of mere portraiture is already seen to
be passing under the dominion of the idea. At their first encounter the
artist’s invention asserts its authority over his subject; and not all
the allurements of individual face or form which to men of a different
temperament are often all-sufficing, could find or leave him unmindful
of the single purpose that filled his mind and guided all the work of
his hand.

It is this which gives to the drawings of Burne-Jones their
extraordinary charm and fascination. He who possesses one of these
pencil studies has something more than a leaf torn from an artist’s
sketch-book. He has in the slightest of them a fragment that images
the man: that is compact of all the qualities of his art; and that
reveals his ideal as surely as it interprets the facts upon which
he was immediately engaged. And yet we see in them how strenuously,
how resolutely, he set himself to wring from nature the vindication
of his own design. There is no realist of them all who looked more
persistently at life, who spared himself so little where patient labour
might serve to perfect what he had in his mind to do; and if the
treasure he bore away still left a rich store for others, it is because
the house of beauty holds many mansions, and no man can hope to inhabit
them all.

“A picture is a painted poem.” Like all definitions that pass the
limits of barren negation it contains only half a truth. Like most
definitions forged by men of genius it is chiefly valuable as a
confession of faith. There is a long line of artists to whom, save in
a forced and figurative sense, it has no kind of relevancy. And they
boast a mighty company. Flanders and Spain serve under their banner.
Rubens and Velasquez, Vandyck and Franz Hals, aye, and at no unworthy
distance, our own Reynolds and Gainsborough are to be counted among
the leaders of their host. And long before the first of these men had
arisen, the tradition they acknowledged had been firmly established. It
was Venice that gave it birth. Venice, where not even the commanding
influence of Mantegna could hold back the flowing tide of naturalism
that rose under the spell of Titian’s genius. Out of his art, which
contained them both, came those twin currents of portraiture and
landscape that were destined to supply all that was vital in the after
development of painting in Europe. All that was vital; for though
Religion and Allegory, History and Symbol, still played their formal
part in many a grandiose and rhetorical design, these things were no
longer of the essence of the achievement. To the painters who employed
them, nature itself was already all-absorbing. The true poetry of
their work, whatever other claims it may seem to advance, resides in
the mastery of the craftsman; it cannot be detached from the markings
of the brush that give it life and being. To wring from nature its
countless harmonies of tone and colour, to seize and interpret the
endless subtleties of individual form and character--these are the
ideals that have inspired and have satisfied many of the greatest
painters the world has produced. Who then shall say that Art has need
of any other, any wider ambition?

And yet, as I have said, the house of beauty has so many mansions
that no single ideal can furnish them all. Nature is prodigal to
those who worship her; there is fire for every altar truly raised
in her service. And so it happened that while Venice was perfecting
a tradition destined for many a generation to sway the schools of
Northern Europe, there had risen and fallen at Florence a race of
artists, such as the world had not seen before and may haply not see
again, who had asked of Nature a different gift, and had won another
reward. That imperishable series of “painted poems” which had been
first lisped in the limpid accents of Giotto, had found their final
utterance in the perfected dialect of Michael Angelo. In the years that
intervened many hands had tilled the field; many a harvest had been
gathered in: but so rich had been the yield that the land perforce lay
fallow at the last; and when Michael Angelo died, Florence had nothing
to bequeath that the temper of the time was fit to inherit.

From that day almost to our own the ideal of the Florentine painters
has slept the sleep of Arthur in Avalon. Those who from time to time
have sought to recapture their secret have gone in their quest, not to
the source, but to the sea. They have tried to begin where Lionardo,
Raphael, and Michael Angelo left off; to repeat in poorer phrase what
had been said once and for all in language that needed no enlargement,
that would suffer no translation. They made the mistake of thinking
that the forms and modes of art are separable things, independent
of its essence; that the coinage moulded by the might of individual
genius could be imported and adopted as common currency; and so even
the most gifted of them carried away only the last faltering message
of a style already waning and outworn. To look only to the painters of
our own land, we know well what disaster waited upon men like Barry,
Fuseli, and Haydon in their hapless endeavours to recover the graces
of the grand style; and even Reynolds, though he never wearied in
praise of Michael Angelo, was drawn by a surer instinct as to his own
powers into a field of Art that owed nothing to the great Florentine.
A truer perception of what was needed, and of what was possible, in
order to revive a feeling for the almost forgotten art of design, came
in a later time, and was due, as I have always thought, mainly to the
initiative of Rossetti. Not because he stood alone in the demand for
a more searching veracity of interpretation; that was also the urgent
cry of men whose native gifts were widely different from his, men like
the young Millais, who owned and paid only a passing allegiance to the
purely poetic impulse which youth grants to all, and age saves only for
a few, and then sped onwards to claim the rich inheritance that awaited
him in quite another world of Art. But if this new worship of nature
was indeed at the time a passion common to them all, yet amongst
them all Rossetti stands pre-eminent, if not absolutely alone, in his
endeavour to rescue from the traditions of the past, and to refashion
according to present needs, a language that might aptly render the
visions of legend and romance.

And this in a larger and wider sense became afterwards the mission of
Burne-Jones. This was his life-work--to find fitting utterance in line
and colour for dreams of beauty that in England at least had till now
been shaped only in verse. And to accomplish his task he was driven,
as he has said, to make a method to suit his own nature. The surviving
traditions of style could avail him little, for he already possessed by
right of birth a secret long lost to them. With him there never was any
question of grafting the perfected flower of one art upon the barren
stem of another. There, and there only, lurks the peril of the literary
idea. But it could have had no terrors for him, who from the outset
of his career submitted himself, as by instinct, to the essential
conditions of the medium in which he worked, moving easily in those
shackles which make of every art either an empire or a prison. Of the
visions that came to him he took only what was his by right, leaving
untouched and unspoiled all that the workers in another realm might
justly claim as theirs. Every thought, every symbol, as it passed the
threshold of his imagination, struck itself into form; he saw life and
beauty in no other way. There was no laboured process of translation,
for his spirit lived in the language of design; but labour there must
have been, and, as we know, there was, in perfecting an instrument that
had been so long disused. To be sure of his way he had to seek again
the path where it had been first marked out by men of like ambitions
to his own; and it was by innate kinship of ideas, not by any forced
affectation of archaic form, that at the outset of his career he found
himself following in the footsteps of the painters of an earlier day.

“If I could travel backwards I think my heart’s desire would take me
to Florence in the time of Botticelli.” It was by no accident that he
chose this one name among many, for of all the painters of his school
Botticelli’s art asserts the closest, the most affectionate attachment
to the ideas which gave it birth. Others could be cited whose work
bears the stamp of a deeper religious conviction; others again whose
technical mastery was more complete, who could boast a readier command
of the mere graces of decoration. But he was the poet of them all.
For him, more than for all the rest of his fellows, the beauty of the
chosen legend exercised the most constant, the most supreme authority.
It was the source of his invention and the dominating influence which
guided every subtle detail of his design. It made his art, as it formed
and controlled all the processes of his art, leaving the indelible
record of individual and personal feeling upon the delicate beauty of
every face that he pressed into his service. It is not wonderful then
that the poet-painter of our day should have recognised with almost
passionate sympathy the genius of the earlier master, or that he should
sometimes have travelled backwards in spirit to the city wherein he
dwelt; and if that longer journey upon which he has now set forth
should lead him not to Florence, who is there who shall declare that he
may not have met with Botticelli by the way?

It is no part of my present purpose to offer any laboured vindication
of the art of Burne-Jones. That is not needed now. The generous
appreciation of a wider circle has long ago overtaken the praise of
those who first gave him welcome; and for others who have yet to learn
the secret of his influence, the fruit of his life’s labour is there
to speak for itself. But in the presence of work that is clearly
marked off from so much else produced in our time, it may be well
to ask ourselves what are the qualities we have a right to demand,
what, on the other hand, are the limitations we may fitly concede to
a painter whose special ambition is so frankly avowed. For there is
no individual and there is no school whose claims embrace all the
secrets of nature, whose practice exhausts all the resources of art.
To combine the design of Michael Angelo with the colouring of Titian
was a task that lay not merely beyond the powers of a Tintoret. It
is an achievement impossible in itself; and even could we suppose it
possible, it would be destructive and disastrous. Titian had design,
but its qualities were of right and need subordinated to the dominant
control of his colour; Michael Angelo used colour, but it served only
as the fitting complement of his design; and although the result
achieved by both has the ring of purest metal, there is no power on
earth that can suffice to fuse the two. These two names, we may say,
stand as the representatives of opposite ideals, which have been fixed
and separated by laws that are elemental and enduring; and if between
these ideals--leaning on the one hand towards symbolism, on the other
towards illusion--the pendulum of art is for ever swaying, this at
least we know, that it can never halt midway.

And between these ideals Burne-Jones made no hesitating choice. For
him, from the outset of his career, design was all in all, and the
forms and colours of the real world were in their essence only so many
symbols that he employed for the expression of an idea. His chosen
types of face and form are fashioned and subdued to bear the message
of his own individuality. No art was ever more personal in its aim,
or, to borrow an image of literature, more lyrical in its direction.
The scheme in which he chose to work did not admit of wide variety
of characterisation, but for what is lacking here we have, by way of
compensation, a certainty, an intensity of vision that supplies its
own saving grace of vitality. There is nothing of cold abstraction
or formal classicism. Though his art affects no mere transcript of
nature, and can boast not all the allurements of nature, yet nature
follows close at its heels; and if the beauty he presents has been
formed to inhabit a world of its own, remote from our actual world,
we are conscious none the less that he had fortified himself at every
step by reference to so much of life as he had the power or the will to
use. And again we may see that while his mind was bent upon the poetic
beauty of Romantic legend, he never suffered himself to depend upon
that merely scenic quality that seeks for mystery in vague suggestion
or uncertain definition. His design, whatever the theme upon which
it is engaged, has the simplicity, the directness of conviction. He
needs no rhetoric to enforce his ideas. All that he sees is clearly
and sharply seen, with something of a child’s wondering vision, with
something also of the unsuspecting faith and fearless familiarity of a
child.

And, as with his design, so also with his colour. He worked in both at
a measured distance from reality, never passing beyond the limits he
had assigned to himself, and using only so much of illusion as seemed
needful for the illustration of his idea. The accidents of light and
shade, with their infinite varieties of tint and tone, which yield a
special charm to work differently inspired, were not of his seeking.
He would indeed, on occasion, so narrow his palette as to give to the
result little more than the effect of sculptured relief; he could
equally, when so minded, range and order upon his canvas an assemblage
of the most brilliant hues that nature offers. But in either case he
employed what he had chosen always with a specific purpose--for the
enrichment of his design, not for any mere triumph of imitation. Few
will deny to the painter of the _Chant d’Amour_ and _Laus Veneris_
the native gift of a colourist, but we may recognise in both these
examples, and, indeed, in all he has left us, that the painter disposes
his colours as a jeweller uses his gems. They are locked and guarded in
the golden tracery that surrounds and combines them. And they may not
overrun their setting, for to him, as to all whose genius is governed
by the spirit of design, the setting is even more precious than the
stone.

These qualities of Burne-Jones’s art are not peculiar to him. They
find their warrant, as we have seen, in all the work of that earlier
school to which he loved to own his obligation. But they were strange
to the time in which he first appeared; and to their presence, I think,
must be ascribed no small part of the hostility he then encountered.
Something, no doubt, was due to the immaturity of resource which marked
his earlier efforts. And he knew that. At a time when his imagination
had already ripened, he was but poorly equipped in a purely technical
sense; and although there is no education so rapid as that which genius
bestows upon itself, it was long before his hand could keep pace with
the pressing demands of the ideas that called for interpretation. But
apart from mere technical failure, there was in his own individuality,
and still more in the means which he recognised as the only means that
could rightly serve him, not a little that was sure of protest from a
generation to whom both were unfamiliar. This also he well knew; and
I think it was the clear perception of it which gave him patience and
courage to press forward to the goal.

And there were times when he had need of both. The critics who saw in
his earlier efforts only the signs of affectation greeted him with
ridicule. We are reported a grave nation, but laughter is a safe refuge
for dulness that does not understand; and as there were few of the
comic spirits then engaged upon art criticism who had the faintest
apprehension of the ideal which inspired his art, they found in it only
a theme for the exercise of a somewhat rough and boisterous humour. But
they never moved him from his purpose; never, I think, even provoked
in him any strong feeling of resentment. His nature was too gentle for
that, his strength of conviction too deep and too secure. No one ever
possessed a larger quality of personal sympathy; no one, it might seem,
was on that account so much exposed to the influence of others. And in
a sense this was so. In the lighter traffic of life his spirit flew
to the mood of the hour. His appreciation was so quick, his power of
identifying himself with the thoughts and feelings of others so ready
and so real, that he seemed at such moments to have no care to assert
his own personality. Nor had he; for of all men he was surely the most
indifferent to those petty dues that greatness sometimes loves to
exact. That was not the sort of homage he had any desire to win; and as
he put forward no such poor claim on his own behalf, his keen sense of
humour made him quick to detect in others the presence or assumption
of mere parochial dignity. Of that he was always intolerant; indeed,
I think there was scarcely any other human failing for which he could
not find some measure of sympathy. But although in the free converse of
friends his spirit passed swiftly and easily from the gravest to the
lightest themes, anxious, as it would seem, rather to leap with the
lead of others than to assert his own individuality, it was easy to see
how firmly, how resolutely, he refused all concession in matters that
concerned the deeper convictions of his life. To touch him there was to
touch a rock. Behind the affectionate gentleness of his nature, that
was accessible to every winning influence, lay a faith that nothing
could shake or weaken. It was never obtruded, but it lay ready for all
who cared to make trial of it. In its service he was prepared to make
all sacrifice of time and strength and labour. His friends claimed
much of him, and he yielded much; generous both in act and thought,
there was probably no man of such concentrated purpose who ever placed
himself so freely at the service of those he loved; but there was no
friend of them all who could boast of having won any particle of the
allegiance that the artist owed to his art. That was a world in which
he dwelt alone, from which he rigorously excluded all thoughts save
those that were born of his task; and though every artist has need of
encouragement, and he certainly loved it not less than others, yet such
was the tenacity of his purpose, such a fund of obstinate persistence
lay at the root of a nature that was in many ways soft and yielding,
that even without it I think he would have laboured on patiently to the
end.

A mind so constituted was therefore little likely to yield to ridicule.
Such attacks as he had to endure may have wounded, but they did not
weaken his spirit; and with a playful humour that would have surprised
his censors, he would sometimes affect to join the ranks of his
assailants, and wage a mock warfare upon his own ideals. I have in my
possession a delightful drawing of his which is supposed to represent
a determination to introduce into his design a type of beauty that
was more acceptable to the temper of his time. He had been diligently
studying, as he assured me, the style and method of the great Flemish
masters, and he sent me as earnest of his new resolve a charming
design of “Susanna and the Elders,”--“after the manner of Rubens.”
On another occasion he wrote to me that he felt he had striven too
long to stem the tide of popular taste, that he was determined now
to make a fresh departure, and that with this view he had projected
a series of pictures which were to be called the “Homes of England.”
He enclosed for my sympathetic criticism the design for the first of
the series. It was indeed a masterpiece. Upon a Victorian sofa, whose
every hideous and bulging curve was outlined with the kind of intimate
knowledge that is born only of love or of detestation, lay stretched,
in stertorous slumber, the monstrous form of some unchastened hero of
finance. A blazing solitaire stud shone as a beacon in a trackless
field of shirt-front: while from his puffy hand the sheets of a great
daily journal had fallen fluttering to the floor. There were others of
the series, but none, I think, which imaged with happier humour that
masculine type, whose sympathies at the time he was so often charged
with neglecting.

For it must not be forgotten that when ridicule had done its work,
Burne-Jones was very seriously taken to task by “the apostles of the
robust.” There are men so constituted that all delicate beauty seems to
move them to resentment; men who would require of a lily that it should
be nurtured in a gymnasium; and who go about the world constantly
reassuring themselves of their own virility by denouncing what they
conceive to be the effeminate weakness of others. To this class the art
of Burne-Jones came in the nature of a personal offence. They raged
against it, warning their generation not to yield to its insidious
and enervating influence; and the more it gathered strength the more
urgently did they feel impelled to insist on its inherent weakness.
But, as Shakespeare asked of us long ago:

  How with this rage shall Beauty hold a plea
  Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

They forgot that: forgot that something of a feminine, not an
effeminate spirit enters into the re-creation of all forms of beauty;
that an artist, by the very nature of his task, cannot always be in the
mood to pose as an athlete. And, even if they had desired to define
the special direction of Burne-Jones’s art, or to mark the limits of
its exercise--limits that no admirer, however ardent, would seek to
deny--they need not surely have been so angry.

So at least it seemed to me then. And yet, rightly viewed, the very
vehemence of such opposition was in its own way a tribute to his
power. Any new artistic growth that passes without challenge may
perhaps be justly suspected of being produced without individuality,
and certainly such work as his, that bears so clearly the stamp of a
strong individual presence, could hardly escape a disputed welcome.
It must even now in a measure repel many of those whom it does not
powerfully attract and charm; for it cannot be regarded with the sort
of indifference that is the fate of work less certainly inspired; it
must therefore always find both friends and foes. But so does much else
in the world of art that speaks with even higher authority than his.
There are many to whom the matchless spell of Lionardo’s genius remains
always an enigma; many again who yield only a respectful assent to the
verdict which would set Michael Angelo above all his fellows.

We may be patient, then, if the genius of Burne-Jones wins not yet the
applause of all. It bears with it a special message, and is secure
of homage from those for whom that message is written. They are many
to-day, who at the first numbered only a few: they are many, and I
think even the earliest of them would say that their debt to him was
greatest at the last. In praise and love they followed him without
faltering to the close of a life that knew no swerving from its ideal;
a life of incessant labour spent in loyal service to the mistress
he worshipped; and even though he had won no wider reward, this, I
believe, would have seemed to him enough.

Painting is perhaps the only art which offers in its practice
opportunities of social converse. The writer and musician work alone,
or, if their solitude is invaded, it is only by way of interruption.
But the practice of the painter’s art admits a measure of comradeship,
and the progress of his work is sometimes even advanced rather than
hindered by the presence of a friend. The element of manual labour
that enters into painting leaves the painter free at many points of
his work to enjoy friendly converse with the visitor to his studio;
and I have known many an interesting discussion carried on for several
hours without the painter ceasing for a moment from his work upon
the canvas before him. This might not apply to every stage in the
growth and structure of a picture. There are times which demand entire
concentration both of brain and hand, and when the painter needs to
be as solitary as the poet. But these tenser moments yield to longer
intervals wherein the manual element in the painter’s calling holds
for a season a more dominating place; and it is at such times that an
intimate friend may safely invade the artist’s sanctuary.

Some of the most enjoyable hours of my life have been passed in
this intimacy of the studio, and it is interesting to recall, as
it was always interesting to note, the different ways in which the
individuality of the artist expresses itself in the processes of his
work--interesting also to observe how the litter of the studio in its
varying degrees of disorder reflects something of the mind of the man.
There are studios which seem deliberately fashioned for an effect of
beauty--rooms so ornate and so adorned, that the picture in progress
upon the easel seems the last thing calculated to arrest the gaze of
the spectator. And there are others again, so completely barren of
all decoration, and so deliberately stripped of every incident in the
way of bric-à-brac or collected treasures, of carven furniture or
woven tissue, that were it not for the half-finished canvas, it would
be impossible to guess the vocation of its inhabitant. Between these
two extremes there is room for every degree of careless or conscious
environment; and although it is not always possible to define the exact
measure of association between the workman and his surroundings, the
visitor becomes gradually aware of a certain element of fitness in the
seemingly accidental accumulation of the varied objects which find
their way into a painter’s workshop.

It would certainly, however, be erroneous to assume that the disorder
of the studio is to be taken as the direct reflex of the habit of an
artist’s mind. No man, in the conduct of his work, ever surrendered
himself to a stricter discipline of labour than Burne-Jones, though
his studio in many respects was a model of apparent disorder. No man
certainly in his work ever aimed at a more settled and nicely balanced
beauty of design supported by deliberate harmonies of colour; and yet
the bare white-washed walls of his studio in the North End Road gave no
hint of the coloured glories of the invention that he was seeking to
fix upon his canvas; while the litter that scattered the floor or was
unceremoniously hustled into the corners of the room seemed strangely
inconsistent with the ordered completeness of design that marked every
picture from his hand.

There were few more delightful companions in the studio--none,
according to my experience, whose talk leapt with such easy alertness
from the gravest to the gayest themes. His almost child-like spirit
invited humour; and yet his lightest moods of laughter left you
never in doubt of the sense of deep conviction that lay at the root
of his character. As he stood beside you at his work, his figure
relieved against three or four half-completed designs, it was
sometimes difficult to find the link which joined the lighter moods
of his comradeship with the wistful beauty of the faces that he
sought to image in his pictures. But almost at the next moment the
difficulty would be solved by a sudden transition to a graver train
of thought, and before either of us would be well aware of the swift
change of tone, our converse had wandered off to the consideration
of some larger ideal of art or life. It was a unique attraction of
Burne-Jones’s studio that it nearly always contained a rich and varied
record of his work, for the chosen method of his painting rendered it
necessary for him to keep several pictures in almost equal states of
progress, each being put aside in turn till the surface of pigment was
so fixed and hardened as to render it ready for the added layer of
colour which was to form the next stage in its progress.

Very often on these occasions our talk was not directly concerned with
painting at all, but strayed away into many worlds of the present or
the past. As a painter every artist must stand or fall by his command
of the particular aspect of beauty which can be rendered by that art,
and by no other. If a picture fails, it is no excuse that its author is
a poet. If a poet fails, it is idle to plead in his defence that he is
an accomplished musician. What added burdens of the spirit the worker
in any art chooses to carry, concerns himself alone; what concerns
the world is that the result--whatever other message it may undertake
to convey--must be perfect according to the laws of the medium he has
chosen. In speaking, therefore, of the deep poetic impulse that lay
at the back of all Burne-Jones’s achievement in design, I have no
thought of seeking to rest the reputation which he will ultimately
hold upon any other considerations than those which are proper to the
field in which he laboured. He has left enough, and more than enough,
to vindicate his high claim to rank among the masters of art, but it
is certain, none the less, that his profound interest in those other
fields of expression in which the imagination finds utterance, gave him
infinite charm as a man.

There was little lovable in literature that he did not keenly love,
though in regard to the literature of the past, I think his heart
turned by preference to the legendary beauty of the earlier romances,
where the story, freshly emerging from its mythical form, may still
be captured with equal right of possession by the poet, the musician,
or the painter. Great drama, even the drama of Shakespeare, never so
strongly appealed to him; and, indeed, I have always noticed in my
companionship with painters that in their judgment of the work of the
theatre what is most essentially dramatic in drama is not, as a rule,
that upon which their imagination most eagerly fixes itself. And yet,
in the case of Burne-Jones, it was curious to observe that among the
narrative writers of our time the highly dramatised work of Charles
Dickens most strongly appealed to him. For Dickens’s genius, its
pathos, not less than its humour, he owned an unbounded admiration;
and I suppose there were few of the worshippers of the great novelist,
except, perhaps, Mr. Swinburne, who could boast so full and so complete
a knowledge of his work. The sense of humour, which was a dominating
quality in the character of Burne-Jones, could, perhaps, scarcely
be surmised by those who know the man only through his painting.
His claims in this regard, which could not be ignored by those who
knew him, must always be received with a sense of surprise--even of
incredulity--by those to whom he was a stranger. And yet, when he
was so minded, his pencil could give proof of it in many essays in
caricature; while in conversation it was an ever-present quality that
lay in wait for the fit occasion.

When Burne-Jones spoke of his own art it was always with complete
understanding of its many and divergent ideals, and I have heard him
appraise at its true value the genius of men with whom he himself had
little in common. Among his contemporaries he could speak with generous
appreciation of the great gifts of Millais, and of the acknowledged
masters of the past. However little their ideals sorted with his own,
his power of appreciation was too liberal and too keen to permit him to
ignore or to belittle their claims though his heart’s abiding-place
was as I have said with the Florentines of the fifteenth century.

My visits to Burne-Jones’s studio began very early in our acquaintance,
and the several errands which took me there varied as time went on.
While he was painting his picture of King Cophetua, he asked that my
eldest son--who was then a child--should be allowed to serve as model
for one of the heads in the picture. I am afraid that, like most
children, my boy gave some trouble to the master, who one day rebuked
him as being an incorrigibly bad sitter, and the boy, who had been kept
standing during the whole of the morning, promptly replied with the
indignant inquiry as to whether Burne-Jones called standing sitting--a
response that immensely delighted the painter himself, who recognised
the justice of the claim by at once releasing him from further service
for the day. At a later time I saw much of him in his studio while he
was designing the scenery and costumes for my play of _King Arthur_. I
read him the play one afternoon while he was at work upon his own great
design of King Arthur’s sleep in Avalon, in the lower studio, which
stood at the foot of his garden; and the task, which he straightway
accepted, of assisting in the production of the drama at the Lyceum
Theatre, led to many later meetings, at which our talk turned
constantly on that great cycle of romance--one phase of which I had
sought to illustrate.

His own mind was steeped in their beauty, as may be seen in his
constant recurrence to these legends as chosen subjects for his design,
and I fancy it was their common love for this subject in romance which
formed one of the strongest links of fellowship between himself and
William Morris. I have said that to Rossetti he always confessed his
deep obligations as an artist, but there can, I think, be little doubt
that of all living comrades it was Morris whom he most loved. Though,
as he has himself confessed, they had parted company in regard to some
of the problems that beset the artist, in the graver issues of life,
no less than in the lighter moods of social comradeship, they were
at one to the end. He told me that once in the earlier days of their
association they had gone with Charles Faulkner on a boating excursion
up the Thames. At that time Morris was apprehensive that he was growing
too stout, and at one of the river inns where they had to share the
same room the painter conceived the mischievous idea of unduly alarming
the poet as to his condition. Morris had retired earlier than the
others, and was fast asleep, when Burne-Jones, having procured a needle
and thread from the landlady, took a large slice out of the lining
of his companion’s waistcoat, and then sewed the two sides together
as neatly as he could. In the morning Morris was up betimes, and
Burne-Jones, still feigning to be asleep, watched with eager excitement
the terror and consternation with which the poet sought, in vain, to
make the shrivelled garment meet around his waist. The victim of the
plot fancied that his increasing proportions had suddenly taken on a
miraculous acceleration of pace, and it was not until the smothered
laughter of the painter greeted his ears that he was relieved from the
panic of anxiety into which he had been suddenly thrown.

Burne-Jones could sometimes, on occasion, be himself the victim of
a practical joke, and once when I paid him a sudden and unexpected
visit at his little cottage in Rottingdean, I contrived to play, very
successfully, upon what I knew to be his horror of the professional
interviewer. I announced myself to the servant as an American colonel,
who had called as the special correspondent of the _Cincinnati Record_,
and on the message being conveyed to her master, she returned, as I
expected, with the curt intimation that he was not at home. But he
evidently felt that no precaution was too great to be taken in the face
of this threatened invasion, for as I crept by the window that looks
out on to the little Village green I saw him, in company with his son,
stealthily crawling under the table, and when I afterwards returned and
announced myself in my own name, he related with childish delight how
skilfully he had avoided the attack of the enemy.




JAMES M‘NEIL WHISTLER


The many pleasant hours I spent in Whistler’s studio in Cheyne Walk are
dominated in recollection by the striking personality of the artist.
In physical no less than in mental equipment, he stood apart from his
generation, and the characteristic peculiarities of his appearance,
joined to the marked idiosyncrasy of his temperament, must remain
unforgettable to all who knew him. It is easy indeed to recall the
tones of the sometimes strident voice as he let slip some barbed shaft
in ruthless characterisation of one or other of his contemporaries:
easier still to summon again, as though he stood before me now, the
oddly fashioned figure, lithe and muscular, yet finely delicate in its
outline, as he skipped to and fro in front of his canvas, now with
brush poised in the air between those long slender fingers, seeming,
as he gazed at the model, to challenge the supremacy of nature, now
passing swiftly to the easel to lay on that single touch of colour that
was to record his victory. It is not so easy, however, to convey in
words the intellectual impression left by the agile movement of his
mind, as it leaped in sudden transition from the graver utterance of
some pregnant thought concerning the immutable laws of his art, to
those lighter sallies of wit and humour that found their readiest and
most congenial exercise in the half-playful, half-malicious portraiture
of men we both knew.

So notable indeed and so notorious became the sayings of Whistler,
uttered in such moods of laughing irony, that the more deeply serious
side of his nature was apt in his own time to be ignored or even
denied. And for this he himself was partly to blame. His own manifest
enjoyment in the free play of a ready and relentless wit was apt
sometimes to obscure that deeper insight into the essential principles
of the art he practised, to which no one on occasion could give a finer
or more subtle expression.

No one, surely, perceived more clearly that there is in every art an
essential quality born of its material and resting with instinctive
security upon its special resources and limitations, without which it
can make no lasting claim to recognition. He never forgot that the
painter or the poet who ventures to take upon himself added burthens of
the spirit which he is unable to subdue to the conditions of the medium
in which he works, can find no just defence for the violation of any
of the conditions the chosen vehicle imposes, by an appeal to the
intellectual or emotional value of the ideas he has sought to express.
He looked perhaps with even excessive suspicion upon the interpretation
through painting of subjects that suggested any sort of reliance upon
the modes appropriate to other arts, with the result that the effects
he achieved bear sometimes too strongly the stamp of calculated
effort. Science was a word he was very fond of employing with regard
to painting, and though it implied a just rebuke to those who were
wont to make a merely sentimental appeal, it sometimes fettered his
own processes and left upon some of the work he produced rather the
sense of a protest against the false ideals of others than of the free
and spontaneous enjoyment of the beauty in nature that he intended to
convey.

But an artist, after all, is either something better or something worse
than his theories, and Whistler was infinitely better. His instinct
was sure, and within the limits he assigned to himself he moved with
faultless security of taste. If the realm he conquered was not over
richly furnished it was at any rate kept jealously free from the
intrusion of inappropriate elements. Whatever was admitted there had an
indisputable right to its artistic existence, and while he excluded
much that other men, differently gifted, might equally have subdued to
the conditions he was so careful to obey, such beauty as he found in
nature was at least always of a kind that painting alone could fitly
render.

To watch Whistler at work in his studio was quickly to forget that he
had any theories at all. Nothing certainly could less resemble the
assured processes of science than his own tentative and sometimes even
timid practice; for although the result, when it received the final
stamp of his approval, seemed often slight and was always free from
the evidence of labour, labour most surely had not been absent, for
the ultimate shape given to his design, though it may have represented
in itself only a brief period employed in its execution, had in many
cases been preceded by unwearying experiment and by many a misdirected
adventure that never reached completion at all.

Whistler’s talk in the studio was not often concerned with the subject
of Art, and even when Art was the topic it was nearly always his
own. His admiration of the genius he unquestionably possessed was
unstinted and sincere, and if he avoided any prolonged discussion of
the competing claims of his contemporaries, it was, I think, in the
unfeigned belief that they deserved no larger consideration. He had his
chosen heroes among the masters of the past, but they were few, and
their superior pretensions, in his judgment, were so manifest that it
seemed sufficient to him to announce their supremacy without further
parley as to the inferior claims of their fellows. The position they
occupied in his regard was as little open to argument as the place
of incontestable superiority he was wont to assign to himself in his
own generation. I remember once, when a friend in his presence rashly
ventured to accuse him of a lack of catholicity in taste, Whistler in
swift response admitted the justice of the charge and excused himself
on the ground that he only liked what was good.

But there were causes, apart from the convinced egotism of his nature,
which led him by preference towards other topics of conversation. He
has written in his lectures and in his letters both wisely and wittily
of the proper mission of painting; so wittily, indeed, that his humour
and satire are apt sometimes to obscure the sound and serious thought
which, on this subject, coloured even his most playful utterances.
For, underlying all he said or wrote, was a conviction he took no
pains to conceal--that the principles of Art, together with its aims
and ideals, were the proper concern only of artists and could scarcely
be debated without impropriety by that larger and profaner circle
whose praise and appreciation, however, he was by no means disposed to
resent. At times he was even greedy of applause, and provided it was
full and emphatic enough, showed no inclination to question its source
or authority. There were moments, indeed, when, if it appeared to lack
volume or vehemence, he was ready himself to supply what was deficient.

It was partly therefore upon principle that he forbore to discuss at
any length subjects with which he deemed the layman had no proper
concern; partly also because in intimate conversation his innate and
powerful sense of humour so loved to assert itself that he wandered,
by preference, into fields where it found unfettered play. And so it
happened in the long and intimate talks in the studio, while he was
at his work, he loved to speak of things that belonged to the outer
world, and to let his wit play vividly, sometimes mischievously and
even maliciously, upon the qualities and foibles of his friends. Here
he was never reticent, and so relentless were his raillery and his
sarcasm that one was sometimes tempted to think that his acquaintances,
and even his friends, only existed for the purpose of displaying his
powers of attack and annihilation. I remember very well, when he was
decorating what afterwards became known as the “Peacock Room” in
Mr. Leyland’s house, that I used often to visit him at his work, and
sometimes shared with him the picnic meals which a devoted satellite
would prepare for him in the empty mansion. He was certainly very proud
of the elaborate scheme of blue and gold ornament he had devised, but I
believe this unalloyed admiration of his own achievement was scarcely
so great or so keen as his delighted anticipation of the owner’s shock
of surprise when he should return to discover that the handsome and
costly stamped leather, which originally adorned the walls of the
apartment, had been completely effaced to make room for the newly
fashioned pattern of decoration. He already scented the joy of the
battle that impended, and this added a peculiar zest to his labours in
the accomplishment of a purely artistic task. As he had hoped so indeed
it happened, and in the long controversy and conflict that ensued, he
found, I believe, the most perfect and unalloyed satisfaction.

His nature, in short, at every stage of his career was impishly
militant, and whereas other men are so constituted as to desire peace
at any price, there was with Whistler scarcely any cost he deemed too
great to secure a hostile encounter. To baulk him of a controversy was
to rob him of his peace of mind, and so deeply implanted in him was
the fighting spirit that he was sometimes only half-conscious of the
wounds he inflicted. Certain it is that, the lists once entered, he was
relentless in attack, and availed himself without scruple of any weapon
that came to his hand. And yet even in his most saturnine sallies there
was an underlying sense of humour that yielded to the onlooker at least
a part of the enjoyment that he himself drew from the encounter; while
his after recital of the tortuous ingenuity with which he had whipped
a harmless misunderstanding into a grave estrangement was always
irresistible in its appeal.

But though pitiless in combat, Whistler was not without a chivalrous
side to his nature. He was fond enough, to use his own expression,
of “collecting scalps,” but his tomahawk was never employed against
members of the gentler sex. His manner towards women was unfailingly
courteous and even deferential. In their company he laid aside the
weapons of war, exhibiting towards them on all occasions a delicacy
of sympathy and perception which they instinctively recognised and
appreciated. It set them at their ease. They felt they could listen
with interest and amusement to his recital of those fearless and
sometimes savage contests with the male, in complete security from any
danger of the war being carried into their own country. They were
conscious, in his presence, of an enduring truce between the sexes: a
truce so artfully established and so chivalrously conceded as to arouse
no suspicion that they were being treated with the indulgence due to
inferiors. There was, indeed, in his own character and personality
something of the charm, something also of the weakness, that is
commonly supposed to be exclusively feminine. The alertness of his
temperament betrayed an intuitive quickness in identifying himself
with the mood of the moment that found in them a ready response; and
his natural vanity, though it might sometimes seem overpowering to
members of his own sex, was so exercised as to leave no doubt that he
still held in reserve a full measure of the admiration which was due to
theirs.

Even as a craftsman there was something delicately feminine in
Whistler’s modes of work. I have often watched him at his own
printing-press when he was preparing a plate of one of his etchings,
and it was always fascinating to follow the deft and agile movements
of his hands as he inked the surface of the copper and then, with
successive touches, graduated the varying force of the impression to be
taken. Here, as I used to think, his method seemed more assured, his
alliance with the mechanical resources of his art more confident, than
when he was struggling with the subtler and more complex problems of
colour.

I have already spoken of those physical peculiarities with which he
had been liberally endowed by nature. They were such as to make him a
marked figure in any company in which he appeared, and, so far from
being a source of embarrassment to himself, he regarded them as a
substantial asset to be carefully cultivated and artfully obtruded
upon public notice. He even went so far as to enforce and emphasise
what there was of inherited eccentricity in his personal appearance.
The single tuft of white hair which lay embedded in the coiling black
locks adorning his brow, he regarded with a special complacency and
pride; and I was amused one evening in Cheyne Walk, while I watched him
dressing for dinner, to observe the infinite pains he bestowed upon
this particular item of his toilet. It was already past the hour when
we should both have been seated at our friend’s table, but this fact in
no way abbreviated the care with which he cultivated and arranged this
unique feature in his appearance.

And yet it would be wrong, perhaps, to ascribe the delay only to
vanity, because to be late for dinner was with Whistler almost a
religion. Certain it was, however, that he took a childish delight in
any little studied departures from the rules of ordinary costume.
At one time he ostentatiously abandoned the white neck-tie which was
the accepted accompaniment of evening dress; at another, a delicate
wand-like cane was deemed to be a necessary ornament to be carried in
his walks abroad; and yet again he would announce an approved change in
fashion by appearing in a pair of spotless white ducks beneath his long
black frock-coat. These calculated eccentricities induced in the minds
of the crowd the conviction that Whistler deliberately sought a cheap
notoriety, and it must be conceded, even by those who recognised the
serious side of his nature, that he exhibited at times a strange blend
of the man of genius and the showman. And yet this admission might
easily be made to convey a false impression. He was in a sense both
the one and the other, but their separate functions were never merged
or confused. Till his task as an artist was completed no man was more
serious in his purpose or more exacting or fastidious in the demands
he made upon himself. There was nothing of the charlatan in that part
of him which he dedicated to his work; and it was not until the artist
was satisfied that he availed himself of such antics as attracted,
and perhaps were designed to attract, the astonished attention of the
public.

One charge that was often urged against him by his enemies, arose out
of the singular choice of titles for his pictures. But it was not,
I think, in any spirit of affectation that he elected to describe
some of his works in terms only strictly appropriate to music. His
“Harmonies” and his “Nocturnes,” though they seemed at the time to
indicate a certain wilful perversity, had in reality a true relation to
principles in Art which he was earnestly seeking to establish. It has
been rightly held of music that, in its detachment from the things of
the intellect and its independence of defined human emotion, it stands
as a model to all other modes of expression by its jealous guardianship
of those indefinable qualities which are of the essence of Art itself.
And in a sense it may be said of Whistler that he discharged a like
function in the realm of painting. For all appeal made through other
means than those strictly belonging to the chosen medium he had neither
sympathy nor pity. It was for the incommunicable element in painting,
incommunicable save through the unassisted resources of painting
itself, that he was constantly striving, and it was his revolt against
all alien pretensions that led him to seek and to adopt the analogy of
music wherein the saving efficacy of such elements is never questioned.




THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING AT THE ROMAN EXHIBITION[1]


The British Section of the International Fine Arts Exhibition, to the
study of which these pages are designed to serve as introduction, may
claim to possess one or two features of exceptional interest. It is
the first time that in any exhibition held outside the British Isles a
serious endeavour has been made to illustrate the progressive movement
of the English school of painting. The works of English painters have
time and again been shown in the different capitals of Europe, and it
is no longer possible to allege that the masters whose achievements we
prize are unknown beyond the limits of our own shores. But the present
occasion is the first wherein a serious and successful experiment has
been made to render the chosen examples of the art of the past truly
representative of the birth and growth of modern art in England and of
the distinctive developments of style which have marked its history.
And it is peculiarly fitting that this connected panorama of English
art should be offered in the capital of a kingdom to whose example the
art of every land has at some time owned its indebtedness. If it be
true that every road leads to Rome, it is no less true that, since the
dawn of the Renaissance, the footsteps of the artists of all northern
lands have worn the several ways that make for Italy; and it will be
seen, as we come to trace the story of painting in England, that,
not only in its earlier appeal but again and again in the successive
revolutions of style and method that have marked its progress, it has
found renewed encouragement and fresh inspiration in the splendid
and varied achievements of the great Italian masters, from Giotto to
Michael Angelo, from Bellini to Tintoretto.

The history of painting in England precedes by more than a century
the history of English painting. The force of the Reformation had
unquestionably the effect of suddenly snapping the artistic tradition.
At an earlier time England could boast of a race of artists who, as the
illuminated manuscripts of the period clearly show, were able to hold
their own with the most perfect masters in that kind that Europe could
show; but with the advent of the Reformation the imaginative impulse of
our people found a different channel. The strength of our Renaissance
sought expression in our literature, and for a considerable period we
became and remained indebted for all expression of pictorial design
to a race of foreign artists who enjoyed the hospitality of our land.
Even before the Reformation was complete Holbein had found a home at
the English Court, and at a later period Rubens and his great pupil
Van Dyck were invited to our shores. They brought with them to England
the great tradition in portraiture that may be traced back to Italy--a
tradition having its spring in the style and practice of the masters of
Venice, whose devotion to Nature survived as an inheritance to Northern
Europe when the more imaginative design of the school of Florence had
fallen into decay.

It may be said of all modern art in whatever land we follow its
story, that its master currents flow in the direction of portrait and
landscape, and it was in these twin streams that the English school,
when a century later it came into being, was destined to prove its
acknowledged supremacy. But the realistic spirit which from the first
had stamped itself upon the great Venetians, even at a period when they
seemed to be labouring wholly or mainly in the service of religion,
had gathered in its passage towards our shores yet another impulse,
which found its first expression in the art of the Low Countries.

Of the painting of _genre_--that art which dwells lovingly upon the
illustration of the social manners of the time--there is already a hint
even in Venice itself; but it was in Holland that it first claimed
a separate and secure existence; and it was to the examples in this
kind, perfected by the Dutch masters, that we owe the achievement of
the great painter who may be claimed as the founder of the modern
English school. That school may be said, indeed, to date from the
birth of William Hogarth. English painters--not a few--had practised
before his time, but their work only followed, without rivalling,
that of foreign contemporaries under whose influence they laboured.
Hogarth was the first who by the independence of his genius gave the
seal and stamp of national character to the pictorial illustration of
the manners of his age. It was the fashion at one time to dwell almost
exclusively upon Hogarth’s qualities as a satirist, to the neglect of
those more enduring claims which are now conceded to him as a great
master of the art he professed; but the criticism of a later time has
repaired that injustice, and Hogarth takes his place now not merely in
virtue of the social message he sought to convey, but even more by
reason of his great qualities as a colourist and a master of tone. Not
that we need underrate or ignore those dramatic elements by which he
still makes so strong an appeal to our admiration. It is rare enough,
even among the supreme painters of _genre_, to find so faithful, so
penetrating an insight into character. Of all the great Dutchmen whom
he succeeded Jan Steen alone can, in this particular, claim to be his
rival; and although the English school is specially rich in the class
of composition which his genius and invention had initiated, there are
none of all those who have practised in a later day who would not still
own him as their master.

The two examples secured for the present exhibition show Hogarth at
his best, both as a painter and as an inventor. “The Lady’s Last
Stake”--contributed by Mr. Pierpont Morgan--even when our admiration
has been glutted by the rich evidence it affords of Hogarth’s
unrivalled control of a kind of truth that might have found expression
in an art other than the art of the painter, still draws from us the
unstinted homage due to a great colourist whose chosen tints are
submitted with unfailing skill to every delicate and subtle gradation
of tone; while in “The Card Party,” lent by Sir Frederick Cook, where
these qualities are not less clearly announced, we are left at leisure
to follow and appreciate the unflagging observation which registers
every detail that serves for the dramatic presentation of the chosen
theme.

From the time of Hogarth to our own day this particular style, which he
may claim to have originated, has never lacked professors. As it passed
into the hands of Wilkie satire is softened by sympathy, the foibles
of character are touched with a gentler and more tender spirit, and
the adroitly ordered groups, with which he sometimes loves to crowd
his canvas, tell, in their final impression, of the presence of a kind
of sentiment, sometimes perhaps even of a measure of sentimentalism,
which scarcely came within the range of Hogarth’s fiercer survey of
life. And, again, in the later work of Orchardson sentiment and satire
have both yielded to another ambition that was content to render with
unfailing sympathy and distinction of style the finer graces of social
life. In the superb picture of “The Young Duke” we may note how clearly
the gifts of the painter dominate the scene, his eye ever on the alert
for the opportunities of rich and delicate harmonies supplied by every
chosen accessory of costume and furniture; and no less eager to exhibit
and to record by means of the subtle resources of his art those finer
shades of social breeding that the subject suggests. In this power of
granting a nameless dignity to the art of _genre_--a dignity resident
in the painter which by some strange magic he contrives to confer
upon the people of his creation--Sir William Orchardson sometimes
recalls the art of Watteau, who indeed remains unrivalled in his power
to perceive and his ability to register those slighter realities of
gesture and bearing which give to the rendering of trivial things a
distinction which only style can bestow.

It is interesting to turn from this characteristic example of Sir
William Orchardson’s style to the work of an elder contemporary in
the person of Frith. The two artists--though both may be said to be
engaged in the same task--make a widely contrasted appeal. With the
former, whatever other message he may intend to convey, the claims
of the painter stand foremost. We are conscious of the controlling
influence of the colourist and the master of pictorial composition
before we are permitted to study or to enjoy the human realities that
he has chosen to depict. With Frith, on the other hand, it is the
human element in the design that first arrests our attention. Gifts of
a purely artistic kind he undoubtedly possessed, as the example here
exhibited sufficiently proves--gifts which at one time criticism tended
to ignore or to undervalue; but it remains finally true nevertheless
that it is as a student of manners, presented in a form sometimes
recalling the arts of the theatre, that Frith makes his first appeal to
our attention. In this respect he claims kinship with Hogarth himself,
whose influence, I doubt not, he would have been proud to acknowledge.

“Coming of Age in the Olden Time,” necessitating, by the choice of
its subject, the employment of historic costume, illustrates only one
aspect of Frith’s varied talent, and he will perhaps be best remembered
by such works as “The Railway Station” and “Ramsgate Sands,” where
he is called upon to render with unflinching fidelity those facts
of contemporary dress in which painters differently gifted find no
picturesque opportunity; and whatever may be Time’s final judgment upon
Frith’s claim in the region of pure art, it cannot be questioned that
such richly peopled canvases must for ever remain an invaluable record
of the outward realities of the generation for which he labored.

The historic side of _genre_ painting is further illustrated in the
present collection in the person of Maclise, who, like his great
forerunner, William Hogarth, was attracted again and again by the
art of the theatre. But Maclise brought to his task certain larger
qualities of design and composition which he had won from the study of
the great masters of style; and although he never achieved the highest
triumphs in the region of the ideal his efforts in that direction
left an impress upon his painting that served to distinguish it from
the achievements of those who laboured in obedience to a more modest
tradition.

The English theatre has attracted the talent of a long line of artists,
some of whom, like Clint, are little known in any other sphere. Perhaps
the greatest of them all (if we except the name of Hogarth himself) was
Johann Zoffany, whose paintings, admirable in the rendering of incident
and character, are even more remarkable for his great qualities as
a colourist and his perfect mastery over the secrets of tone. As a
student of the theatre he may perhaps be seen to best advantage in the
several fine examples in the possession of the Garrick Club; but Lord
O’Hagan’s picture of Charles Townley the collector, presented in his
library with his marbles, asserts with convincing force his right to
rank among the great painters of his time.

Among other pictures in this category whose high claims deserve a
fulness of consideration which the exigencies of space alone forbid me
to grant, I may mention the Eastern study by Lewis, the “Dawn” by E. J.
Gregory, and the group of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle by John Pettie.

I have hinted already that in the brief story of our national school of
painting we are constantly reminded of the abiding splendours of the
art of Italy, and even in the work of men whose genuine victories were
won in another sphere there are constant echoes of the larger language
moulded by the great masters of the south. For although, at the first,
it is only in the allied departments of portrait and landscape that
the art of England claims and owns unquestioned supremacy, yet in the
career of the gifted painter who may be said to have first firmly
established our claim to rank among the schools of Europe we are not
allowed to forget the glorious victories of the Italian Renaissance.

It has been sometimes alleged of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s occasional
experiments in the grand style that their failure to rival the masters
he most admired proves how futile were his studies in that branch
of art in which he could never hope to excel. But this, I think,
is to take only a shallow and superficial view of the factors that
make for excellence in any chosen field of artistic endeavour; for
if Sir Joshua’s essays in ideal design now fade into insignificance
by comparison with the solid and enduring work he achieved in
portraiture, it remains none the less true that the study of those
great models towards which his ambition led him has served to grant
to his interpretation of individual face and form a measure of added
dignity and power that could have been won from no other source. His
sketch-book--preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum--while
it forms an interesting record of his sojourn in Italy is no less
instructive as illustrating his untiring devotion to those great
masters who laboured in a realm of art that his own genius was never
destined to inhabit; and there is something infinitely touching in the
concluding sentences of his valedictory address to the students of the
Royal Academy wherein, while frankly confessing his own failure, he
reiterates his undiminished admiration of the greatest of the great
Florentines. “It will not,” he says, “I hope, be thought presumptuous
in me to appear in the train, I cannot say of his imitators, but of his
admirers. I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities
and to the tastes of the time in which I live. Yet, however unequal
I feel myself to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again I
would tread in the steps of that great master. To kiss the hem of his
garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory and
distinction enough for an ambitious man. I feel a self-congratulation
in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite.
I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony
of my admiration of that truly divine man; and I desire that the last
words I should pronounce in this academy and from this place might be
the name of Michael Angelo.”

In the same year in which these words were uttered there is yet another
reference to his earlier ambitions which is scarcely less pathetic.
Writing to Sheridan, who desired to purchase the beautiful picture of
St. Cecilia, for which Mrs. Sheridan had served as the model, he says:

“It is with great regret that I part with the best picture I ever
painted; for though I have every year hoped to paint better and better,
and may truly say ‘Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum,’
it has not been always the case. However, there is now an end of the
pursuit; the race is over, whether it is won or lost.”

The judgment of Time has left the land that owned him in no doubt
that the race had been worthily won. The prize awarded to him by the
acclaim of subsequent generations was not perhaps the prize he coveted
the most; and yet if the goal towards which he set his feet was never
reached, the time spent in the study of the great masters of the past
affords no story of wasted ambition. For without the example of those
great masters he loved to study, his own achievement would have been
shorn of certain elements of greatness which have served to place him
foremost in the ranks of the portrait painters of his time.

In certain styles of painting we are rightly modest in asserting the
claims of the English school, but in that goodly list of artists at
whose head stands the name of Sir Joshua we may boast a national
possession which the art of the time could scarcely rival and most
assuredly could not surpass. Europe was then in no mood to take over
the rich inheritance of the great Florentines; the successful study of
the principles they had expounded had to wait the coming of a later
day; but in those departments wherein the art of Europe was still vital
England certainly was, at that time, not lagging behind her rivals.
Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Hoppner, Raeburn--what names in the
contemporary art of the Continent can be cited as their superiors in
those branches of painting which they cultivated? Disparagement is
no part of the business of criticism, and the victories of one land
assuredly take nothing from the triumphs justly won in another. France,
too, at that epoch could boast gifted artists greatly distinguished
in various fields; but when it is remembered that Watteau, the most
distinguished of French colourists, had died two years before Reynolds
was born, the outburst of artistic activity, which the men whose names
I have cited heralded to the world, may well be viewed as a phenomenon
almost unparalleled in the modern history of painting. For it is as
colourists, in the truest and highest sense of the term, that the
English school at this period of revival makes its claim to supremacy;
and it was here that the teaching of Italy--not as expounded through
the work of the Florentines, but rather as it travelled northwards,
carrying with it the surviving splendours of the Venetians--found a
full and worthy response from these gifted exponents of our native art.

The present collection is rich in finely chosen examples of the
masters I have named. Reynolds boasted to Malone that he had painted
two generations of the beauties of England, and as we turn from the
“Kitty Fisher,” lent by the Earl of Crewe, to the portrait of “Anne
Dashwood,” or to that of the “Marchioness of Thomond,” from Sir Carl
Meyer’s collection, we may well own that no man was more rightly
equipped for the task that had fallen upon him. No man save perhaps
his rival, Thomas Gainsborough, who, in the alertness and delicacy of
his observation as well as by a natural affinity with the gentler sex
that was born of a sweet and gracious disposition, seemed specially
destined to interpret with loving fidelity the lightest no less than
the most characteristic realities of feminine beauty. In weight and
dignity of style, the outcome, as I have already hinted, of a diligent
study of the great models of the past, in masculine grip and gravity
of interpretation, displayed more especially in the portraiture of the
most distinguished men of his time, Reynolds, it must be conceded,
remains even to this day without a rival in our school. But in the
native gifts of a painter Gainsborough owned no superior, and it would
be difficult to trace to any individual master of the past, or indeed
to any other source than his inborn love of nature, those peculiar
qualities of sweetness and grace which set the finest achievements of
his brush in a category of their own. A measure of kinship with the
great Dutchmen may be discerned in his earlier essays in landscape--a
branch of art which he may be said almost to have founded in England;
and the final words with which he took leave of the world, “We are
all going to heaven and Van Dyck is of the company,” give warrant for
the belief that even in portraiture he would willingly have owned his
allegiance to the famous pupil of Rubens; but in his actual practice
as a portrait painter his own modest and yet commanding personality
quickly effaced all record of indebtedness to any other influence than
his own inspiration.

It would be easy, if space permitted, to institute an interesting
comparison between his own accomplishment and that of his contemporary
Sir Joshua. The same personalities sometimes figure upon the canvases
of both. The winning beauty of Miss Linley’s face, employed by Sir
Joshua in his picture of St. Cecilia, had no less strongly attracted
the genius of Gainsborough; and here, as well as in the rendering of
the features of Mrs. Siddons, we may note the divergent gifts which
these painters separately brought to their task and the varying and
matchless qualities which nature surrendered ungrudgingly to both.
Speaking generally, it may, I think, be conceded that Gainsborough’s
art registered with greater felicity those fleeting graces of gesture
and expression that would sometimes escape his more serious rival;
while Reynolds, constantly preoccupied by the intellectual appeal
made by his sitter, was perhaps more apt to dwell in the features he
portrayed upon those deeper and more permanent truths that would serve
to mirror mind and character.

That Gainsborough’s vision was not, however, limited to forms of female
beauty is shown clearly enough by the several notable examples here
exhibited. His portraits of John Eld and Dr. William Pearce, no less
than the head of the artist himself, prove that he could acquit himself
nobly even when he was not engaged in the more sympathetic task of
presenting with faultless grace the lovely women of his time; while
Lord Jersey’s “Landscape and Cattle” affords sufficient evidence of
what the school of English landscape owes to his initiative.

Of the other distinguished masters of portrait in the century in
which these two great names stand pre-eminent we find here adequate
representation. Romney is not always faultless as a colourist, nor
does his draughtsmanship yield the searching penetration displayed
by Reynolds or the more delicate apprehension of the finer facts
of expression which constitutes so large a part of Gainsborough’s
ineffable charm; but judged at his best, and art may justly appeal
against any less generous verdict, he takes his rightful place by
the side of both. How good was his best may be seen in Mr. Pierpont
Morgan’s fine full-length of Mrs. Scott Jackson, as well as in the
group of Mrs. Clay and her child, lent by Mrs. Fleischmann. But Romney
had one sitter whose beauty overpowered all others in the appeal it
made to the artist, and it is therefore fortunate that the collection
includes a portrait of Lady Hamilton, whose fame may be said to be
inseparably linked with his own. She, too, in her own person awakens
echoes from Italy, for it was at Rome she won the admiration of Goethe
in those dramatic assumptions of classical character that are preserved
for succeeding generations in Romney’s constantly repeated studies of
the face he worshipped.

From these three commanding personalities, which yield brightness
to the dawn of our English school of portraiture, we advance by no
inglorious progression to the masters who, though now deceased, belong
of right to our own day. Hoppner, the younger contemporary of the
men I have named, whose career carries us into the next century, is
here superbly represented in the contributions from Mrs. Fleischmann
and Lord Darnley. Raeburn also, whose masculine and sometimes rugged
genius speaks to us with the accent of the north--Raeburn, who at
the instigation of Sir Joshua journeyed to Italy to study the great
Italian masters--is here seen at his best in the splendid portrait of
“The MacNab,” lent by Mrs. Baillie-Hamilton; while near by we find
characteristic examples of the art of his fellow-countrymen, Allan
Ramsay and Andrew Geddes. Sir Thomas Lawrence may be said to have
brought to a close the tradition established by Reynolds, and his
practice may therefore be held to form a link with the more modern
school. His claims here receive justice in the two portraits lent
by Lord Bathurst and Lord Plymouth; nor is the collection without
worthy specimens of the art of Opie, whose practice frankly confesses
the example and influence of Sir Joshua himself. Among the portrait
painters of the younger day, in whose ranks may be counted Frank Holl
and Frederick Sandys, Brough, and Furse, two names stand pre-eminent.
Watts and Millais in their different appeal register the high-water
mark of portraiture during what may be called the Victorian era. The
former owned in common with Sir Joshua an unswerving devotion to the
great traditions of Italian painting, and may claim equally with Sir
Joshua to have won for his work in this kind an imaginative quality
legitimately imported from the study of ideal design. Millais stands
alone. Of both I shall have to speak again in respect of other claims
which their art puts forward, but the position of Millais as a painter
of portrait is as independent in its appeal as that of Gainsborough
himself.

The incursions into the realm of ideal and decorative art made by
English painters of the eighteenth century may not be reckoned among
the accepted triumphs of our school. Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, all
alike inspired by high ambition and capable, as was shown by their
untiring devotion and sacrifice in the cause they had espoused, lacked
the means and the endowment to appear with any solid measure of success
to an age that was in itself unfitted to receive the message they
sought to convey. The untutored and undisciplined genius of William
Blake affords an isolated example in his time of a true and deeper
understanding of the secrets of the kind of art which these men vainly
pursued; but even if Blake had possessed more ample resources as a
painter he would none the less have spoken in a language that was
strange to the temper of his time; and it was reserved for a later
day to forge the means which would secure a genuine revival of the
forgotten glories of imaginative design.

The movement associated with the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
stands as a landmark in the modern history of our school, nor has it
been without lasting influence upon the art of Europe. In the year
1848, which gave it birth, the outlook for painting which aimed at
the presentation of any imaginative ideal was not encouraging. Etty,
a painter of genuine endowment, still survived, and his unquestioned
gifts as a colourist are plainly asserted in the single example
included in the present exhibition; but the practice of his later
years, as Holman Hunt has justly observed, scarcely offered the most
fitting model to a young artist of serious ambition. On the other
hand, the waning accomplishment of men who had passed their prime
cried aloud for the need of a new return to nature; and the accepted
conventions of style, either in themselves outworn or else imperfectly
revealed by hands enfeebled and grown old, left the hour ripe for
the advent of that small but greatly gifted group of young men whose
rebel practice was destined to leave so strong an imprint upon their
own and succeeding generations. It would perhaps be difficult to find
three painters of equal power whose art was so differently inspired
and whose achievement was destined to take such separate and widely
divergent forms as Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, who stand as the acknowledged heads in this new movement; but
their efforts, at the time of which I am speaking, were bound together
by a common purpose which prevailed then and has since continued to
keep their names linked together in the modern history of our English
school. In protest against the fetters imposed upon painting by the
tradition of the past--fetters that were by common consent only to be
removed by a renewed return to the facts of nature--they trod, in the
season of their youth, the same road, although the ultimate development
of their separate personalities led them, before many years passed,
into paths widely divergent from one another. To judge Rossetti’s
talent justly from works collected on the present occasion we must
group together the examples in oil and water-colour. The religious
phase in his career is indicated by “The Annunciation of the Virgin,”
lent by Mrs. Boyce; while the freedom with which his imagination
afterwards roamed over those great legends already made memorable in
literature is shown by the “Mariana” and the “Dante meeting Beatrice”
among the paintings in oil, and perhaps even more conclusively in the
exquisite water-colour drawing of “Paolo and Francesca,” lent by Mr.
Davis, which may be accepted as a capital instance of his unrivalled
power to render the truths of human passion without violating the
laws inherent in the art he professed. In his water-colours even more
decisively than in his paintings in oil Rossetti clearly announces his
great claims as a colourist; and his paintings bear this distinctive
mark in their invention of colour that the ordered harmonies he can
command are not only beautiful in themselves but that their beauty
stands in clear and direct response to the nature of the chosen
subject. In this regard assuredly neither of the two men who stand
associated with him in the Pre-Raphaelite movement can claim to be his
superior. It is perhaps unfortunate for purposes of comparison that
the range of Millais’s talent is here not completely represented. “Sir
Isumbras at the Ford” is indeed a characteristic example of his earlier
period, though it hardly shows the qualities he could then command in
the same degree of perfection as would be rendered by the presence of
“Lorenzo and Isabella” or of “Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop.” We have,
on the other hand, in the “Black Brunswicker” a notable example of
that transitional period in Millais’s art wherein the claims of fancy
and invention and the overmastering gifts of the realist--gifts that
afterwards availed to set him as the greatest portrait painter of his
time--are held in momentary balance; and we may find herein expressed
an element of Millais’s painting which had already received supreme
embodiment in the famous picture of “The Huguenot.” No artist of his
time--perhaps no artist of any time--has ever excelled him in the
rendering of certain phases of human emotion that transfigure without
disturbing the permanent beauty of feminine character. This power
remained to him to the end of his career, and it was the perception of
it which caused Watts to write to him in 1878, in regard to “The Bride
of Lammermoor,” which had received deserved decoration in Paris: “Lucy
Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” It is impossible to
say in the presence of work of this kind how much has been contributed
by the model, how much conferred by the artist; but that the artist’s
share in the result is predominant is proved by the fact that nobody
else has combined in the same fashion the portraiture of individual
features with the most delicate suggestion of the emotion that moves
them. In the art of Holman Hunt, always masculine in its character
and marked by the signs of indefatigable industry, emphasis is so
evenly laid upon all the confluent qualities that contribute to the
result that it is hard to signalise or to describe the dominating
characteristics of his personality. In his treatment of religious
subjects he showed a constant reverence that nevertheless scarcely
touched the confines of worship; for the same earnestness of purpose,
the same reverent research of truth, asserts itself no less in whatever
subject engages his brush. Rare qualities of a purely pictorial kind
nearly all his work may claim, and yet it is not always possible
to concede to the result, however astonishing in its power, that
final seal of beauty without which Art’s victory can never be deemed
absolutely complete. “The Scapegoat,” here exhibited, was fiercely
disputed at the date of his first appearance, and it is even now not
difficult to understand that its appeal must have seemed strange to
the temper of the time; but there can be no barrier at any rate to the
generous appreciation of the noble qualities displayed in the “Finding
of the Saviour in the Temple” or the austere simplicity and sincerity
of “Morning Prayer.”

Around these three men who bravely heralded the new movement in English
art are grouped the names of others who in different degrees were
equally inspired by the principles the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
sought to enforce. For although their earlier efforts encountered
bitter attack from the accredited organs of public opinion, they met
at the outset with warm response from within the ranks of art itself.
The company of their followers at first, indeed, was small; but the
quickened spirit of the time had already been in part prepared for
the reception of the message they bore. The writings of John Ruskin,
in whatever degree his particular judgments upon art matters may be
disputed, had already availed to stir the conscience of his generation
and to restore to art its rightful place in life. Henceforth it was not
possible to think of painting as a thing of mere dilettantism, serving
only to minister to the trivial demands of the taste of the hour. He
proved to the world that at every season when art has held a dominating
place its spirit has been fast linked with the heart and life of the
people; and the deep earnestness which in _Modern Painters_ he brought
to the task of historical criticism found a ready reflex in the more
serious and concentrated intensity of feeling which coloured the work
of men of the younger school.

William Dyce, by his declared devotion to the painters of the
Quattrocento, had already in part anticipated the practice of the
Pre-Raphaelites; and Ford Madox Brown, here represented both as a
painter of portrait and as a master of design, though never formally
enrolled in the brotherhood, claims by the inherent qualities of his
work a prominent place in the revolution that was then in progress. He
had been Rossetti’s first master, and to the end of his life, as I can
testify, Rossetti retained for him the warmest affection, and Holman
Hunt’s somewhat ungracious protest that the direction of his art would
have clashed with the aims the Pre-Raphaelites had then in view must
be surely deemed unconvincing in the presence of his great picture
entitled “Work,” wherein an unflinching reliance upon nature is the
dominant characteristic. Frederick Sandys, here admirably represented
by the portrait of Mrs. Clabburn and by “Medea,” showed even more
conclusively in his varied work in design his right to be reckoned side
by side with the leaders I have named; while Burne-Jones, who always
generously acknowledged his indebtedness to Rossetti, displayed as his
powers developed a kindred attachment to the kind of beauty in painting
which finds its well-spring in the art of Florence. The water-colours
in the present collection represent him at a time when Rossetti’s
example and influence were still dominant, but “Love among the Ruins,”
lent by Mrs. Michie, and “The Mirror of Venus,” from the collection of
Mr. Goldman, reveal to us the painter in the plenitude of his powers,
when with full mastery of resource he revelled in the interpretation
of themes of imaginative significance. A great colourist in the sense
in which the Florentines use colour--a great designer, gifted from the
outset with the power of striking into symbol forms of beauty that
might equally serve to fire the fancy of a poet, Burne-Jones holds a
unique position in our school; nor are his claims to admiration likely
to suffer from the fact that the principles he professed have sometimes
been adopted by imitators not sufficiently endowed for so high an
endeavour.

In the story of a movement that limitations of space must needs leave
inadequate it would be impossible to ignore or to omit the names of two
men who worthily occupied a distinguished place in the art of their
time. G. F. Watts and Lord Leighton may both be said to stand apart
from the particular current of artistic revolution associated with
the names I have already cited. The former was already deeply imbued
with the spirit of the great Venetians even before the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood had come into being, but the poetic impulse, which he owned
in common with his younger contemporaries, sets much of his work in
clear alliance with theirs. His “Love and Death” illustrates in a form
of unquestioned beauty the attempt to combine the sometimes divergent
qualities of the two great schools of Italy; and the example set by
both reappears in a union that is entirely satisfying when Watts turns
to the task of portraiture. Nor could any better examples of his
accomplishment have been procured than the figure of Lord Tennyson or
the head of Mr. Walter Crane.

Lord Leighton’s finely cultivated talent, though his early sojourn at
Florence had coloured the work of his youth, reveals at the hour of its
maturity an undivided allegiance to classic ideals. His mediaevalism
was a garb quickly discarded. “By degrees,” he once wrote to me,
“my growing love for form made me intolerant of the restraints and
exigencies of costume and led me more and more, and finally, to a
class of subjects, or more accurately to a state of conditions, in
which supreme scope is left to pure artistic qualities, in which no
form is imposed upon the artist by the tailor, but in which every
form is made obedient to the conception of the design he has in hand.
These conditions classic subjects afford, and as vehicles therefore
of abstract form, which is a thing not of one time but of all time,
these subjects can never be obsolete, and though to many they are a
dead letter, they can never be an anachronism.” With this confession
of faith before us we may measure how far the unceasing labours of
a long career availed to satisfy the noble purpose of his youth. A
certain lack of virility, an imperfect sense of energy and movement
which is needed to give the final sense of vitality to all art, however
directed, may perhaps be alleged even against the most complete of
his achievements; but the saving sense of grace, revealed in forms
often finely proportioned and justly selected, remains as an abiding
element in his constant pursuit of classic perfection, and is clearly
enough illustrated in such works as the “Summer Moon” and the “Return
of Persephone,” which the committee have secured for the present
exhibition.

We must return now for a while to the earlier experiments of our
school in order to trace the growth of the art of landscape, a
department wherein by the consent of Europe our painters hold a place
of indisputable supremacy. Gainsborough, as I have already hinted,
had found in the surroundings of his Suffolk home the material he
needed for the display of his deeply seated love of outward nature;
and his achievements in this kind rest as the first foundation of
what is most enduringly characteristic in English landscape painting.
But as early as the year 1749, when Gainsborough was only a youth of
twenty-two, Richard Wilson was already resident in Italy, and had
begun that exquisite series of studies from Italian scenery which
won so small a meed of praise from his own generation. The special
direction of his art was not, indeed, destined to inspire many of
those who came after him, for the new spirit of naturalism sought and
captured certain qualities of dramatic expressions in the rendering of
nature that were not of his seeking; nor was the ordered beauty of his
compositions, or the serene charm which characterises his gift as a
colourist, likely to be heeded by a race of painters who were already
on the alert to seize and record those fleeting effects of changing
light and tone which found such splendid embodiment in the vigorous
painting of Constable. Constable’s frank reliance upon light and
shade as constituting the final element of beauty in landscape could
never have been accepted without reserve by Richard Wilson, but the
pursuit which Constable initiated has owned an overpowering attraction
for nearly all students of nature since his time; and his example,
transported to France through the art of Michel, may be allowed to
have powerfully inspired that distinguished group of French artists
whose work was a part of the outcome of the modern romantic movement.
It would be impossible here to distinguish in detail the separate work
of English painters who have worthily carried forward the tradition
established by Constable; nor is it needful now to vindicate the
claims of men like Cotman, Cox, and Crome in an earlier time, or of
Hook and Cecil Lawson, Sam Bough, Mason, and Frederick Walker, whose
more recent work brings the story of this branch of art down to our
own day. Of English landscapists, indeed, the name is legion, and at
the head of them all, if we may judge by the extent of the fame he has
won, stands the name of Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose genius,
heralded to the world by the eloquent advocacy of Ruskin, is here fully
illustrated in superb examples from the collections of Mr. Chapman,
Lord Strathcona, Mr. Beecham, and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Turner, in his
youth, while he was still under the influence of Girtin, might well
have owned kinship with Richard Wilson, as both in turn might have
confessed their indebtedness to the great Frenchman, Claude Lorraine;
but Turner’s talent, as it passed onward in steady development, parted
completely with the shackles imposed by earlier authority and left him
at the close of a brilliant career in a position of complete isolation
and independence. There will always be those--and I may count myself
among the number--who will turn with increasing love to the more
restrained beauty of his earlier work, and who will seek rather in his
water-colours than in his paintings in oil for the finer expression of
those more individual qualities which marked the practice of his prime.
But personal preference need count for little in the acknowledgment
which all alike must freely render, that his genius has conferred a
lasting glory upon the English school.

With this brief survey of the work of deceased British artists
the mission of the critic may here fitly end. The purpose of such
an introduction as I have attempted is sufficiently served if, in
sketching the growth of our school from its foundation in the middle
of the eighteenth century, I have succeeded in indicating the several
diverse currents which have contributed to its development, and have
left so rich a heritage in achievement and example to the men of a
younger day. Of the varied quality of that later work the exhibition
must be left to speak for itself. That the product of our time lacks
nothing of vitality is sufficiently shown in the spirit of restless
and untiring experiment which marks the varied output of our younger
school; and that it still preserves among many of its exponents a loyal
adherence to the imperishable traditions of the past is no less clearly
asserted in the work of men who are now labouring with undiminished
faith in the ideals established by an earlier generation. Of Subject
and Portrait, in the art that leans for its support upon qualities
of decorative design and in the direct and searching questionings of
nature, noticeable in every direction and manifest specially in the
treatment of landscape, there is a rich and abundant harvest in the
present collection.




WITH GEORGE MEREDITH ON BOX HILL


“Come down,” he wrote to me one day, “and see our Indian summer here. A
dozen differently coloured torches you will find held up in our woods,
for which, however, as well as for your sensitive skin, we require
stillness and a smiling or sober sky.”

This was written in the autumn of 1878, and is drawn from one of many
little notes of invitation which used to preface a delightful day with
George Meredith on the slopes of Box Hill. Our long rambles filled the
afternoon, and were preceded by a simple but thoughtfully chosen lunch,
which, when the weather allowed, was set out upon a gravel walk in
front of the cottage beside the tall, sheltering hedge that gave shade
from the sun. Meredith attached no small importance to the details of
these little feasts. He prided himself not a little on his gastronomic
knowledge, and was pleased when our climate made it possible to
reproduce the impression of a genuine French _déjeuner en plein air_.
In another letter he writes: “The promise of weather is good. Lilac,
laburnum, nightingales, and asparagus are your dishes. Hochheimer or
dry, still, red Bouzy, Richebourg and your friend to wash all down.”
His knowledge of these matters of the table was, perhaps, not very
profound, but the appropriate vocabulary which gave the air of the
expert was always at his command. And this, I think, was characteristic
of the man in respect of many fields of knowledge that lay beyond the
arena in which his imaginative powers were directly engaged.

In his art he was never quite content to image only the permanent
facts of life, either in their larger or simpler issues, unless he was
permitted at the same time to entangle the characters of his creation
in the coils of some problem that was intellectual rather than purely
emotional. He loved to submit his creations to the instant pressure of
their time, and with this purpose it was his business, no less than
his pleasure, to equip himself intellectually with garnered stores of
knowledge in fields into which the ordinary writers of fiction rarely
enter. It was not, of course, to be supposed that he could claim equal
mastery in all, although his intellect was so active and so agile
that his limitations were not easily discerned. I remember one day
at an Exhibition in the New Gallery having introduced him to an old
gentleman, whose long life had been spent in a study of the drawings
of the old masters, to whom Meredith, with inimitable fluency, was
expounding the peculiar virtues of the art of Canaletto. Meredith
was eloquent, but the discourse somehow failed to impress the aged
student. When they had parted his sole commentary to me was: “Your
friend--Mr. Meredith, I think you said--endeavoured to persuade me that
he understood Canaletto, but he did not.”

But even if, in this single instance, the criticism be accepted as
just, it must be conceded by all who knew him well that Meredith was
not often caught tripping in the discussion of any topic in which his
intellect had been actively engaged. Sometimes--and then, perhaps,
rather in a spirit of audacious adventure and for exercise of his
incomparable powers of expression--he would make a bold sortie into
realms of knowledge that were only half conquered. But this was, for
the most part, only when he had an audience waiting on his words. When
he had only a single companion to listen there was no man whose talk
was more penetrating or more sincere: and he was at his best, I used
to think, in those long rambles that filled our afternoons at Box
Hill. The active exercise in which he delighted seemed to steady and
concentrate those intellectual forces that sometimes ran riot when he
felt himself called upon to dominate the mixed assembly of a dinner
table.

No one, assuredly, ever possessed a more genuine or a more exalted
delight in nature. His veneration for the earth and for all that sprang
from the earth as an unfailing and irrefutable source of the highest
sanity in thought and feeling, amounted almost to worship. He never
deliberately set out to paint the landscape in set language as we
passed along, but a brief word dropped here and there upon our way,
telling of some aspect of beauty newly observed and newly registered,
showed clearly that every fresh encounter with nature served to add
another gem to the hoarded store of beauty that lay resident in his
mind. And yet, even here, the research for the recondite, either
in the fact observed or in the phrase that fixed it, peeped out
characteristically in the most careless fashion of his talk. He loved
to signalise an old and abiding love of the outward world by some
new token that found expression at once in language newly coined;
and he would break away on a sudden from some long-drawn legend of a
half-imaginary character that was often set in the frame of burlesque,
to note, with a swift change to a graver tone, some passing aspect of
the scene that challenged his admiration afresh. And then, when he had
quietly added this last specimen to his cabinet, he would as quickly
turn again, with boisterous mirth, to complete the caricature portrait
of some common friend, which he loved to embellish with every detail of
imagined embroidery.

In a mixed company Meredith did not often lean to the discussion
of literature. He inclined rather, if an expert on any subject was
present, to press the conversation in that direction, exhibiting nearly
always a surprising knowledge of the specialist’s theme, knowledge at
any rate sufficient to yield in the result a full revelation of the
store of information at the disposal of his interlocutor. But in those
long rambles when we were alone he loved to consider and discuss the
claims of the professors of his own art, rejecting scornfully enough
the current standards of his own time, but approaching with entire
humility the work of masters whom he acknowledged. In those days (I am
speaking now of the years between 1875 and 1888) he had by no means
attained even to that measure of popularity which came to him at a
later time, and when the talk veered towards his own work it was easy
to perceive a lurking sense of disappointment that left him, however,
with an undiminished faith in the art to which his life was pledged.

During the autumn of 1878 I had written to him in warm appreciation of
some of his poems, and his reply is characteristic. “There is no man,”
he writes, “I would so strongly wish to please with my verse. I wish
I had more time for it, but my Pactolus, a shrivelled stream at best,
will not flow to piping, and as to publishing books of verse, I have
paid heavily for that audacity twice in pounds sterling. I had for
audience the bull, the donkey, and the barking cur. He that pays to
come before them a third time, we will not give him his name.” I think
in regard to all his work, whether in prose or verse, he was haunted
at that time by the presence of the bull, the donkey, and the barking
cur. But if this had yielded for the moment some sense of bitterness
in regard to the results of his own career, his attitude towards life
was even then undaunted, and left him generously disposed towards all
achievement of true pretensions, either in the present or in the past.
Indeed, the true greatness of the man was in nothing better displayed
than in the unbroken urbanity of his outlook upon life. His was of
all natures I have known the most hopeful of the world’s destiny. The
starved and shrivelled pessimism of the disappointed egotist had no
part in his disposition. His wider outlook upon life was undimmed by
the pain of whatever measure of personal failure had befallen him,
and I believe that even if his faith in humanity had not of itself
been sufficing and complete, he could have drawn from the earth, and
the unfading beauty of the earth, encouragement enough to keep him
steadfast in his way.

How admirably has he expressed this joy of full comradeship with nature
in the opening lines of the “Woods of Westermain”!

  Toss your heart up with the lark;
  Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
          Fair you fare.

So he cries in invitation; and then a little later, in celebration of
the joys that await the wood-wayfarer, he adds:

  This is being bird and more,
    More than glad musician this;
  Granaries you will have a store
    Past the world of woe and bliss;
  Sharing still its bliss and woe;
    Harnessed to its hungers, no.
  On the throne Success usurps,
    You shall seat the joy you feel
  Where a race of water chirps
    Twisting hues of flourished steel:
  Or where light is caught in hoop
    Up a clearing’s leafy rise,
  Where the crossing deer-herds troop
    Classic splendours, knightly dyes.
  Or, where old-eyed oxen chew
    Speculation with the cud,
  Read their pool of vision through,
    Back to hours when mind was mud.

Or yet again towards the close:

  Hear that song; both wild and ruled.
    Hear it: is it wail or mirth?
  Ordered, bubbled, quite unschooled?
    None, and all: it springs of Earth.
  O but hear it! ’tis the mind;
    Mind that with deep Earth unites,
  Round the solid trunk to wind
    Rings of clasping parasites.
  Music have you there to feed
  Simplest and most soaring need.

In his prose work Meredith seems often half distrustful of his own
inspiration, halting now and then to test the validity of the emotions
he has awakened, and at times letting a jet of irony on to the fire
he has kindled, as though half suspicious that he had been lured into
the ways of the sentimentalist. But in his poetry he owns a larger
daring and a higher freedom; there he treads unhampered by these
half-conscious fears, and yet there, no less than in his prose, we can
recognise his insatiable hunger to find and discover new tokens by
which to arrest the vision that he loves.

Meredith’s little cottage at the foot of Box Hill was the fittest home
for the writer and for the man. Not so far removed from town as to be
beyond the echo of its strife, it enabled him when his duty as reader
to Chapman and Hall took him to the office to pass an hour or two at
luncheon at the Garrick Club, where he loved in these brief intervals
of leisure to rally some of his old friends in laughing and cheerful
converse.

These occasional visits served to keep him in touch with the moving
problems of his time, towards none of which he affected any kind of
indifference; and yet the pungent wit and profound penetration of
view with which he handled such mundane themes were won and hoarded,
I think, in the long silences and the chosen loneliness of his Surrey
home. Hard by Flint Cottage stands the little inn at Burford Bridge,
now transformed and enlarged to meet the constant incursions of
visitors from the town, but at the time when I first remember it but
little changed from the days when it sheltered Keats while he was
setting the finishing touches to “Endymion.” The association often
led us in our rambles to speak of the work of the earlier poet, for
whose faultless art Meredith owned an unbounded admiration. Of the
poets I think he spoke more willingly than of the writers of prose,
though he was on the alert to recognise genius in any form, and never
lacked enthusiasm in appraising the work of a writer like Charlotte
Brontë. For George Eliot’s achievement he never professed more than
a strictly limited respect. Her more pretentious literary methods
failed to impress him, and there were times when the keenness of his
hostile criticism bordered upon scorn. I remember when some one in
his presence ventured to remark that George Eliot, “panoplied in all
the philosophies, was apt to swoop upon a commonplace,” he hailed the
criticism with the keenest enjoyment, and half-laughingly declared that
he would like to have forged the phrase himself.

At the close of our afternoon rambles, that in summer time were
prolonged to close upon the dinner-hour, we would return at loitering
pace down the winding paths to the cottage, and when I was able to
stay the night our evenings would be spent in the little châlet that
stood on the hill at the summit of his garden. Meredith truly loved
the secluded bower that he had fashioned for himself. It was there
he worked, and during the summer months it was there he constantly
passed the night. It was there I used to leave him when our long talk
was over, and descend the garden to the room that had been allotted
to me in the cottage. But of talk he never tired, and it was often
far into the night before we parted. He loved also, when he found an
appreciative listener, to read aloud long passages from his poems. Once
I remember he recited to me during a single evening the whole of the
body of sonnets forming the poem of “Modern Love.” On occasion--but
not, perhaps, quite so willingly--he might be tempted to anticipate
publication by reading a chapter or two from an uncompleted story,
and I can recall with what admirable effect, not at Box Hill, but at
Ightham Moat where we were both the guests of a gracious hostess, whose
death long preceded his own, he read aloud to us the remarkable opening
chapters of the “Amazing Marriage.”

Meredith greatly enjoyed those occasional visits to his friends, and
found himself, I think, especially at home in the house I have named.
He did not disdain the little acts of homage there freely offered
him, for the guests assembled were always to be counted among his
worshippers, and yet he was finely free from the smallest pretence of
consciously asserted dignity. As a rule, he spoke but little of his own
work, and then only on urgent invitation, content, for the most part,
to accept the passing topic, which his high spirits and unflagging
humour would quickly lift to illumination. On such occasions he loved
to invent and elaborate, for one or other of his more intimate friends,
some fancied legend that was absolutely detached from life and reality,
and sometimes he so fell in love with the fable of his creation that
for weeks or months afterwards his letters would continue to elaborate
and to develop a story that had only taken birth in the jesting mood
of a moment.

The young people of a country-house always found a welcome from
Meredith, and towards women at all times his respect was of a kind
that needed no spur of social convention. It sprang of a deep faith
in their high service to the world, and a quickened belief in the
larger future that was in store for them. In his own home the spirit of
raillery, that he could not always curb, sometimes pressed too hardly
upon those nearest him; but I think he was scarcely conscious of any
pain he may have inflicted--hardly aware, indeed, of the reiterated
insistence with which he would sometimes expose and ridicule some
harmless foible of character that did not deserve rebuke. But if this
fault must be conceded in regard to those who stood in the intimate
circle of his home, it certainly implied no failing reverence towards
the sex they owned. After all, an artist, who has a full claim to that
title, is revealed most truly in his work. If the revelation there can
be suspected, the art is false, and it may, I think, be claimed without
challenge for Meredith that in the created characters of his work he
has done for women what has been accomplished by no other writer since
Shakespeare. Over all the mystery that gives them charm, his mastery
in delineation was complete, but it is his appreciation of the nobler
possibilities of character that lie behind the wayward changes of
temperament that sets his portraiture of women beyond the reach of
rivalry. I think most women who came to know him were conscious of this
in his presence, and it is small wonder that that larger circle who
met themselves mirrored in his books should count him among the most
fearless champions of their sex.

A few months ago I found myself treading once more the road that leads
to his cottage under the hill. Once again a “dozen differently coloured
torches” were held up in the woods behind the house, flaming as I saw
them first in his company. But there was one torch that burned no more.
It had fallen from the hand that held it, and lay extinguished upon
the earth his spirit owned and loved. But those days I passed with him
there are memorable still, and as I stood beside the cottage gate amid
the gathering shadows of evening, his own beautiful lines came back to
me from “Love in the Valley”:

  Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
    Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
  Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
    Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
  Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
    So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
  Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
    Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.




THE LEGEND OF PARSIFAL


Some few years ago, when I was writing my play of _Tristram and
Iseult_, a lady of my acquaintance, who was familiar with the
music-drama by Wagner on the same theme, asked me by what means I had
contrived to secure Madame Wagner’s consent to the use of the story
for the English stage. Such ignorance of one of the most beautiful of
the legends included in the Arthurian cycle, enshrined for English
readers by Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal prose romance of _Le Morte
d’Arthur_, is of course phenomenal and extreme, but it was matched
by my experience a few days after the production of the play, when
an enterprising newscutting agency, misled by some reference in the
programme to the great chronicler, forwarded to the theatre a bundle
of criticisms addressed to Sir Thomas Malory, Knight, oblivious of the
fact that he had passed beyond the reach of censure in the closing
years of the fifteenth century.

It is possible, however, that even among some of those to whom the
source of the Tristram story is familiar, there may be here and there
isolated worshippers of the great German composer who are hardly aware
that the legend of Parsifal found its source in the same great body
of Arthurian romance. Indeed, I have met with not a few to whom the
identification of Parsifal with the British hero, Sir Perceval, comes
somewhat as a surprise, and who are scarcely conscious that the whole
legend of the “Holy Grail,” which forms the subject of Wagner’s opera,
had its source in Britain, and was afterwards incorporated in romances
that first saw the light in France. The writer who originally gave to
the story its poetic form, and in whose work the purely human features
of the narrative are already linked with the history of Christianity,
was Crestien de Troyes, who began to write about 1150, and died before
the end of the twelfth century. His poems embrace a number of the
Arthurian stories, but it so happens that amongst them the “Conte del
Graal” was left unfinished, and was afterwards completed by several
writers, chief among whom, Wauchier, confessed that he had drawn his
inspiration from the work of a Welshman, Bleheris, in whose version the
“Grail” hero is not Sir Perceval but Sir Gawain.

But even before Crestien’s death the beauty of certain of these
Arthurian legends had captured the imagination of Europe, and in
the opening years of the thirteenth century we have the “Parzival”
of Wolfram von Eschenbach, of Bavaria, who admits his knowledge of
Crestien, but confesses a preference for a still older French version
by Guyot, the Provençal. To Wolfram’s poem Wagner is directly indebted
for that portion of the story which forms the basis of the opera.
The Bavarian knight died about the year 1220, and his work forms a
complete and beautiful poem, concluding with a recital of the fortunes
of Lohengrin, the son of Parsifal, who, in his turn, became ruler of
the Grail Kingdom. Here, as with Crestien, the link with Christianity
is firmly established, and in a still later form of the story embodied
by Malory the Christianising influence is further developed, and the
Grail, now definitely identified with the Holy Cup, is assumed to have
been brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea, who himself had filled
it with the blood that flowed from the side of the Redeemer.

In all these later forms of the legend, however, certain features and
incidents survive which clearly prove that the story owned an earlier,
and a Pagan source. Even in Wolfram the Grail is not a cup, but a stone
endowed with plenty-giving qualities, and the symbols, which in all
later versions are bodily taken over for the service of the Church, we
find on examination to possess a pre-Christian character and origin.

A subject upon which such a mass of criticism and scholarship has
accumulated cannot here be discussed in full, but the learned work
of the late Alfred Nutt, and the acute researches into the heart of
the mystery made by Miss Jessie Weston, one of the most patient and
diligent students of a difficult problem, establish almost beyond
dispute that the Grail, in its earlier manifestations, bore no relation
to the history of the Christian faith. The magic symbols that stood
ready to the hand of those who gave to the legend its final religious
shape had indisputably an earlier and a different significance. The
dripping lance, that now becomes the weapon that pierced the Body of
the Redeemer; the Cup containing the blood that flowed from His Side,
had figured first as life-giving symbols before they had taken on the
holier character with which they are endowed by the chroniclers of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This was well established by Mr. Alfred Nutt, who referred their origin
to the earlier forms of Celtic folklore; and in Miss Jessie Weston’s
latest contribution to the literature of the subject, published in
June of the present year, a powerful plea is put forward for the
interpretation of the story in the light of the earlier forms of
nature-worship, linked by far-reaching tradition with the ritual of the
Adonis cult, and associated with the quest for the principle of Life
itself. It is unquestionably true that this theory explains as no other
can many of the features of the Grail story which have no relation to
Christianity. The Fisher King, the Guardian of the precious Grail, is
a title which cannot be understood unless we take account of primitive
tradition, in which the fish is widely employed as a symbol of life,
and the fate and character of the maimed king who guards the Grail,
as well as the mystic instruments which accompany its revelation,
are equally referable to Pagan ritual belonging to earlier forms of
nature-worship.

This is not the place to follow in detail the many intricate and
puzzling problems which beset the history of the Grail. It is,
indeed, a fascinating theme, and has already attracted the learning
and research of many scholars in England, Germany, and France, and
is perhaps destined, in the absence of some of the earlier texts
from which the legend was drawn, never to receive a final and wholly
satisfying solution. Here, however, we are concerned only with those
features of the story at a date when it had already received the stamp
of Christian sentiment, and more especially with that particular form
of it embodied by the composer, Richard Wagner, in his world-famous
opera.

Apart from the hero himself, the characters engaged in the drama are
not numerous. There is the aged Titurel; the wounded Amfortas whose
sufferings, imposed as the penalty of unlawful love, must endure till
the coming of the deliverer, Parsifal; Klingsor, the malign ruler of
the enchanted castle, served by the spell-bound Kundry, an enchantress,
only to be released from her thraldom by the knight who successfully
resists her witch-like fascinations; and Gurnemanz, through whose
aid and guidance the hero is finally enabled to accomplish his task.
All appear in Wolfram’s romance, under the names retained by Wagner;
and the types recur also in other versions of the legend, sometimes
under different names, and with endless variations in the adventures
befalling them. Parsifal is our own Sir Perceval, a knight of Arthur’s
Court, the Peredur of the Mabinogion, not, however, the earliest or
the latest hero of the Grail quest. Before him in historic position is
Sir Gawain, who, as already noted, plays the rôle of deliverer in the
poem of Bleheris; while in the later romances his place is taken by the
chaste Sir Galahad, the son of Sir Lancelot, who--by reason of his sin
with Guinevere--was denied the reward of achieving the quest in his
own person. In like manner the Grail King, Amfortas, takes on other
titles, according to the particular source of the legend, while the
part played by Kundry as the Grail messenger is only a variant of the
rôle assigned to the “Loathly Damsel,” with the added qualities of the
sorceress, who serves the sinister purpose of Klingsor in the enchanted
castle.

But a comparison of all these legends leaves undisturbed the fact
that in its original shape the story and its environment are British,
and, further, that it first took literary form in the work of a Welsh
poet. Issuing thence, as we now know, this and other of the Arthurian
romances spread like a flame over the Western world, finding their
principal exponents in Germany and France, but extending even to
Sicily, where there is still a tradition that in the mirage that floats
between the island and the mainland can be seen the sleeping form of
King Arthur embedded in the heart of Etna, and awaiting the sound of
the horn that shall summon him back to his kingdom. It is not a little
strange that these legends, doomed to the long sleep of King Arthur
himself, should have awakened to new vitality in the work of our own
modern poets, and should equally have attracted the genius of the great
German composer.

To those who are interested in the dramatic side of Wagner’s genius,
the study of Wolfram’s beautiful poem, to which he is directly
indebted, will not be without fruitful results. As a general comment,
it may be said that the dramatist misses something of the spirit of
romance, something also of the atmosphere of chivalry to be found in
the master whom he has followed. On the other hand, it will be clearly
seen that he had handled this material with the vision of a dramatist,
supported by an imagination which seizes, instinctively and surely,
upon personages and incidents that enforce the ethical message he seeks
to deliver. Perhaps the most beautiful part of Wolfram’s poem, of
necessity excluded from the closer action of drama, concerns Parsifal’s
earlier years, before he had won the right to carry arms as one of
the knights of King Arthur’s Court. Gahmuret, his father, in search
of adventure, had first taken service under Baruc, and had won the
love of the heathen queen, Belakane, who bore him a son, Feirefiz, the
father of Prester John. But before the birth of the child, Gahmuret,
returning to Europe, had sought and won the love of Queen Herzeleide,
the mother of the Grail hero. Gahmuret was manifestly very conscious of
his restless temperament, and duly warned his newly-won bride that what
had happened before might recur.

  Then he looked on Queen Herzeleide, and he spake to her courteously:
  “If in joy we would live, O Lady, then my warder thou shalt not be,
  When loosed from the bonds of sorrow, for knighthood my heart is fain;
  If thou holdest me back from Tourney I may practise such wiles again
  As of old, when I fled from the lady whom I won with mine own right
    hand,
  When from strife she would fain have kept me, I fled from her folk and
    land.”
  Then she spake: “Set what bonds thou willest, by thy word I will still
    abide.”
  “Many spears would I break asunder and each month would to Tourney
    ride,
  Thou shalt murmur not, O Lady, when such knightly joust I’ld run!”
  This she sware, so the tale was told me, and the maid and her lands he
    won.

And yet, despite her brave front, Herzeleide was destined to endure
much sorrow at the hands of her restless lord. Before Parsifal was
born, he had already set out on fresh adventure, leaving his lonely
lady sick with longing for his return.

  As for half a year he was absent, she looked for his coming sure,
  For but in the thought of that meeting might the life of the Queen
    endure.
  Then brake the sword of her gladness thro’ the midst of the hilt in
    twain,
  Ah, me, and alas! for her mourning, that goodness should bear such
    pain
  And faith ever waken sorrow! Yea, so doth it run alway
  With the life of men, and to-morrow must they mourn who rejoice
    to-day!

Here follow the bitter tidings of Gahmuret’s death. Then, when the
child of sorrow came to be born, Herzeleide retreated from the Court,
and took refuge in a wild woodland, where Parsifal grew to manhood,
in ignorance of the world and its ways; in ignorance also of his high
lineage, for the Queen held that she had suffered enough through
knighthood and its adventures, and sought only to rescue her child from
the dangers of his father’s fate. I am drawing again upon Miss Jessie
Weston’s charming translation of Wolfram’s poem for this delightful
picture of Parsifal’s boyhood:

  No knightly weapon she gave him save such as in childish play
  He wrought himself from the bushes that grew on his lonely way.
  A bow and arrows he made him, and with these in thoughtless glee,
  He shot at the birds as they carolled o’erhead in the leafy tree.
  But when the feathered songster of the woods at his feet lay dead,
  In wonder and dumb amazement he bowed down his golden head,
  And in childish wrath and sorrow tore the locks of his sunny hair
  (For I wot well of all earth’s children was never a child so fair
  As this boy, who, afar in the desert, from the haunts of mankind did
    dwell,
  Who bathed in the mountain streamlet, and roamed o’er the rock-strewn
    fell!)
  Then he thought him well how the music which his hand had for ever
    stilled,
  Had thrilled his soul with its sweetness; and his heart was with
    sorrow filled,
  And the ready tears of childhood flowed forth from their fountains
    free,
  And he ran to his mother weeping, and bowed him beside her knee.

It may be that this passage partly inspired Wagner in his treatment
of the incident of the stricken swan; but in the heart of Herzeleide,
Parsifal’s love of the birds only begot a fierce jealousy, and she sent
forth her servants to snare and slay the woodland choristers, so that
she might have no rival in her boy’s love. But the boy’s reproaches
touched the mother’s heart:

  ... “Now sweet, my mother, why trouble the birds so sore,
  Forsooth they can ne’er have harmed thee, ah! leave them in peace once
    more!”
  And his mother kissed him gently, “Perchance I have wrought a wrong,
  Of a truth the dear God who made them, He gave unto them their song,
  And I would not that one of His creatures should sorrow because of
    me.”

The turning-point in Parsifal’s career came a little later on, when on
his wondering eyes fell the vision of certain of King Arthur’s knights
who passed through the forest:

  It chanced through a woodland thicket one morn as he took his way,
  And brake from o’erhanging bushes full many a leafy spray,
  That a pathway steep and winding rose sharply his track anear,
  And the distant beat of horse-hoofs fell strange on his wondering ear.
  Then the boy grasped his javelin firmly, and thought what the sound
    might be;
  “Perchance ’tis the Devil cometh; well, I care not if it be he!
  Methinks I can still withstand him, be he never so fierce and grim,
  Of a truth my lady mother she is o’er much afraid of him!”

  As he stood there for combat ready, behold! in the morning light
  Three knights rode into the clearing in glittering armour bright.
  From head to foot were they armèd, each one on his gallant steed,
  And the lad, as he saw their glory, thought each one a god indeed!
  No longer he stood defiant, but knelt low upon his knee,
  And cried, “God who helpest all men, I pray Thee have thought for me!”

From that hour the boy’s heart, like that of his father, was fired
by the spirit of adventure. How he followed after them in their
wanderings, and how, after much happening, he arrived at King Arthur’s
Court, were too long to tell. When she saw that his mind was made up
his mother put no obstacle in his path, but robed him in the garb of a
fool, thinking, in the cunning of her mother heart, and “the cruelty
of a mother’s love,” as the poet phrases it, that when the world mocked
him he would return to the forest again.

It is at this point in the mental development of our hero that he
makes his entrance into Wagner’s opera. As already noted, full and
skilful use is made by the modern author of the dramatic material
which the legend discloses. In the associated characters of Kundry
and Klingsor he has given logical and coherent form to much that
lies scattered and disjointed in Wolfram’s poem; and he has built up
the character of Parsifal, adding to the simpler conception of the
older writer an element of conscious philosophy that makes a strong
appeal to the countrymen of Goethe. Not, be it said, that the outline
left by Wolfram was indefinite or uncertain. Already in the legend
Parsifal’s personality is clearly marked. “A brave man,” says Wolfram,
“yet slowly wise is he whom I hail my hero,” and the steady growth of
wisdom based on sympathy and suffering is clearly traced in Parsifal’s
successive visits to the Grail Castle. It is the ignorance of innocence
and egotism that on the first occasion keeps his lips dumb, when the
sympathy he was afterwards to acquire might have prompted the simple
question that would have set the sufferer free, while it was the
richer experience that came as his after inheritance which enabled
him finally to achieve the liberation of the wounded Amfortas. Of that
first visit of Parsifal to the Castle, Wolfram writes:

  Yet one, uncalled, rode thither, and evil did then befall,
  For foolish he was, and witless, and sin-laden from thence did fare,
  Since he asked not his host of his sorrow and the woe that he saw him
    bear.
  No man would I blame, yet this man I ween for his sins must pay
  Since he asked not the longed-for question which all sorrow had put
    away.

And in these lines we may find the germ of Wagner’s more conscious and
more didactic conception, wherein we miss something of the simplicity,
something also of the rich humanity of the twelfth-century poet.
This sense of loss in the modern presentment of the theme, loss in
the spirit of romance, and in the impression of free and unfettered
humanity, is perhaps an individual impression; and I may conclude with
a tribute to Wagner’s genius by the late Alfred Nutt, which certainly
does ample justice to the composer’s contribution to the story, as he
accepted it from the hands of the Bavarian knight.

“Kundry,” he writes, “is Wagner’s great contribution to the legend. She
is the Herodias whom Christ, for her laughter, doomed to wander till He
come again. Subject to the powers of evil, she must tempt and lure to
their destruction the Grail warriors. And yet she would find release
and salvation could a man resist her witch-like spell. She knows this.
The scene between the unwilling temptress, whose success would but doom
her afresh, and the virgin Parsifal thus becomes tragic in the extreme.
How does this affect Amfortas and the Grail? In this way. Parsifal is a
‘pure fool,’ knowing naught of sin or suffering. It has been foretold
of him he should become ‘wise by fellow-suffering,’ and so it proves.
The overmastering rush of desire unseals his eyes, clears his mind.
Heart-wounded by the shaft of passion, he feels Amfortas’s torture
thrill through him. The pain of the physical wound is his, but far
more the agony of the sinner who has been unworthy of his high trust,
and who, soiled by carnal sin, must yet daily come in contact with the
Grail, symbol of the highest purity and holiness. The strength which
comes of the new-born knowledge enables him to resist sensual longing,
and thereby to release both Kundry and Amfortas.”




SEX IN TRAGEDY


In the popular view of the play of _Macbeth_ the relation of the two
principal characters may be said to lie beyond the region of doubt
or discussion. According to the tradition of the stage, supported
in this instance by a respectable array of critical authority, the
motive-power of the drama is not supplied by the “vaulting ambition” of
Macbeth himself, but is to be sought rather in the sinister strength
and inhuman cruelty of his guilty partner. In virtue of her unshaken
resolution and her superior resource, Lady Macbeth is regarded as the
dominating influence in this awful record of crime, and it may indeed
be doubted whether any part of equal length--for, counted by actual
lines, it is one of the shortest in all tragic drama--has ever left
so strong a stamp on the popular imagination. Nor is the prevalent
conception of Lady Macbeth’s character lacking at all in distinctness
of definition. The outlines of the portrait are sharply and deeply
impressed: and as she is commonly represented to us, it takes the form
of a sexless creature endowed with the temper of a man and the heart of
a fiend. The embodiment of all those fiercer passions that are deemed
to be most repugnant to the ideal of womanhood, and moved by a will
that is deaf to the pleadings of humanity and inaccessible to the voice
of eternal law, she is regarded as the evil genius of her husband,
crushing by the weight of her stronger individuality the constant
promptings of his better nature, and sweeping him with irresistible
force into a bottomless abyss of crime.

To this popular view of the character Mrs. Kemble, in her notes on
Shakespeare, gives vivacious expression. Here we are told that Lady
Macbeth was not only devoid of “all the peculiar sensibilities of her
sex,” but that she was actually incapable of the feelings of remorse.
The sleepless madness of her closing hours was not, so we are assured,
the result of conscious guilt, for that was foreign to her nature: it
resembled rather the nightmare of a butcher who is haunted by the blood
in which his hands are imbrued. And as to her death, it was due in no
degree to the anguish of a stricken soul, but was in some occult way
directly traceable to the unconquerable wickedness of her heart.

“I think,” writes Mrs. Kemble, with the eager interest of a scientific
inquirer on the track of a new poison, “her life was destroyed by sin
as by a disease of which she was unconscious, and that she died of a
broken heart, while the impenetrable resolution of her will remained
unbowed. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak; the body
can sin but so much and survive; and other deadly passions besides
those of violence and sensuality can wear away its fine tissues and
undermine its wonderful fabric. The woman’s mortal frame succumbed to
the tremendous weight of sin and suffering which her immortal soul had
power to sustain; and having destroyed its temporal house of earthly
sojourn, that soul, unexhausted by its wickedness, went forth into its
new abode of eternity.”

Allowing for a certain feminine vehemence in the wording of the
indictment, this view of Lady Macbeth can scarcely be said to
exaggerate the current conception of her character. That it represents
a somewhat grotesque caricature of Shakespeare’s marvellous creation,
will plainly appear from even the most cursory examination of the
text, and has, indeed, already been pointed out on more than one
occasion. In 1867 Mr. P. W. Clayden, in the _Fortnightly Review_, made
a praiseworthy attempt to revive the finer outlines of Shakespeare’s
portrait, an attempt in which he had already been forestalled by Mr.
Fletcher in the _Westminster Review_ for 1844, and by a writer in the
_National Review_ for 1863.

The only reproach that can fairly be brought against the last-named
article, which for the rest deserves to rank as a careful and searching
piece of criticism, is that it has too much the tone of being delivered
as a brief in the lady’s favour. The advocacy of her cause, and the
consequent denunciation of the character of her husband, are both in a
style that seems rather to blur the imaginative beauty of the picture
as a whole. We are made to feel that we are sitting in a court of
law rather than at a poet’s feet, and we are sharply reminded of the
somewhat inappropriate arena into which the discussion has drifted by
the writer’s concluding assertion, that Macbeth was “one of the worst
villains” ever drawn by Shakespeare. Charges of this sort smack too
strongly of the forensic method, and have but little significance when
applied to the central figure of a great tragedy. If Macbeth stood at
the bar of the Old Bailey he would undoubtedly be convicted of murder,
and so, for that matter, would his wife; but it is the poet’s privilege
to lift the record of crime into an ideal atmosphere; and when, at
the magic bidding of genius, the closest secrets of the human heart
have been unlocked, and its inner workings laid bare, such epithets
as may be used to dismiss the record of a police case cease to be
instructive, and are scarcely even relevant to the wider issue that
has been raised. The character of Iago, with whom Macbeth is compared,
stands on different ground. It was there no part of Shakespeare’s task
to lift the impenetrable mask of malice which serves as the instrument
of Othello’s destruction. Iago is known to us only by his pitiless
delight in human torture, and by the sinister cruelty of which he
stands accused and convicted; while in the case of Macbeth, despite his
heavier record of actual crime, the evil that he wrought serves only
as the stepping-stone by which we are allowed to enter into the deeper
recesses of his soul.

But there is one point in the article to which we have referred that
has a profound interest for the student of the drama. It is the
writer’s main contention that the source of the error he seeks to
correct is to be traced to what he terms a distortion of the stage.
The figure of Lady Macbeth as now popularly accepted is represented
as the lineal descendant of the genius of Mrs. Siddons. It was her
incomparable art which first gave to the character the particular
stamp it now bears, and chased from the popular imagination the more
delicate creation of the poet’s brain. This charge carries with it, of
course, a splendid tribute to the artist’s powers, and the experience
of our own time proves that it may not be altogether unfounded. It is
not so long ago since the glamour of Salvini’s genius, with its superb
gifts of voice and bearing and its incomparable technical resource,
succeeded in effacing the Othello of Shakespeare, leaving us in its
stead a figure admirably effective for the purposes of the stage, but
sadly lacking in the higher and finer elements with which the character
had been endowed by the author. And it may be added that the witness
of contemporaries goes far to support this particular view of Mrs.
Siddons’ performance of the part. The poet Campbell testifies to the
extraordinary impression she created when he writes that “the moment
she seized the part she identified her image with it in the minds of
the living generation.” Boaden, her earlier biographer, speaking of her
first entrance on the scene, says, “The distinction of sex was only
external; ‘her spirits’ informed their tenement with the apathy of a
demon”; and evidence to the same effect is supplied by the interesting
notes of Professor Bell, first published some few years ago by
Professor Fleeming Jenkin.

“Of Lady Macbeth,” he writes, “there is not much in the play, but the
wonderful genius of Mrs. Siddons makes it the whole. She makes it tell
the whole story of the ambitious project, the disappointment, the
remorse, the sickness and despair of guilty ambition, the attainment
of whose object is no cure for the wounds of the spirit. Macbeth in
Kemble’s hand is only a co-operating part. I can conceive Garrick to
have sunk Lady Macbeth as much as Mrs. Siddons does Macbeth, yet when
you see Mrs. Siddons play the part you scarcely can believe that any
acting could make her part subordinate. Her turbulent and inhuman
strength of spirit does all. She turns Macbeth to her purpose, makes
him her mere instrument, guides, directs, and inspires the whole plot.
Like Macbeth’s evil genius, she hurries him on in the mad career of
ambition and cruelty from which his nature would have shrunk.”

If this was really the impression produced by Mrs. Siddons--and the
Professor’s notes are in close accord with Boaden’s description of
her as “an exulting savage”--it only proves how potent a factor in
the art of the stage is the unconscious and inevitable intrusion
of the actor’s personality. For this creature of “turbulent and
inhuman strength of spirit” was not at all what Mrs. Siddons in her
critical moments conceived Lady Macbeth to be. Her recorded memoranda
exhibit a widely different interpretation, and contain, indeed, much
penetrating criticism on the general scope and purpose of the play.
Even the physical image of Lady Macbeth, as it presented itself to
her imagination, was strangely unlike the threatening and commanding
figure which she actually presented on the stage. She thought of her as
embodying a type of beauty “generally allowed to be most captivating
to the other sex, fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile”--a
description which calls from her biographer the almost indignant
protest that “the public would ill have exchanged such a representation
for the dark locks and eagle eyes of Mrs. Siddons.” But the most
remarkable feature of her criticism lies in its constant insistence
upon the essentially feminine nature of Lady Macbeth. Speaking of her
entrance in the Third Act, she pictures in a few eloquent words the
sudden change which the haunting memory of crime has already wrought
in her character. “The golden round of royalty now crowns her brow
and royal robes enfold her form, but the peace which passeth all
understanding is lost to her for ever, and the worm that never dies
already gnaws her heart.” And, again, still treating of this same
scene, the most deplorably pathetic in all tragedy, “she exhibits for
the first time striking indications of sensibility, nay, tenderness and
sympathy; and I think this conduct is nobly followed up by her during
the whole of their subsequent eventful intercourse.” Not less striking
is the keen perception which these notes exhibit of the terrible
anguish of the woman herself: “Her feminine nature, her delicate
structure, it is too evident, are soon overwhelmed by the enormous
pressure of her crimes.... She knows by her own woeful experience the
torments he undergoes, and endeavours to alleviate his sufferings.”

But there is one sentence in these notes more pregnant with meaning
than all the rest. “The different physical powers of the two sexes,”
she writes, “are finely delineated in the different effects which their
mutual crimes produce.” Here in a few words is to be found the key
that will unlock the heart of the tragedy. Not merely the different
physical powers, but also, and with even a deeper truth, the different
mental and moral characteristics of the two sexes in the presence of
crime, are here illustrated by Shakespeare with unsurpassable force
and delicacy. This is the imaginative theme which his transcendent
genius has fastened upon the legend of Macbeth, and there is scarcely a
line of the play which can be rightly understood until we realise that
the two central figures are, and are deliberately intended to be, the
embodiment and expression of the contrasted characteristics of sex.
To argue that Lady Macbeth is not truly and typically a woman, is to
destroy at one blow the delicate fabric which the poet has been at
such pains to construct: to strive to vindicate the character of her
husband at her expense, is but a vain endeavour to break through the
empire of crime which sways and dominates the lives of both. There is
here, indeed, no question of moral rescue for either; and it were idle
to debate what he or she might have been under different conditions.
For, as Shakespeare has conceived the action of the story, the shadow
of guilt hangs from the first like a murky cloud in the sky, and the
invisible hands of fate have drawn the net of evil closely around them
long ere they appear upon the scene. But, accepting these conditions,
with the transformation of individual character which they imply,
_Macbeth_ stands out among the works of Shakespeare as a sublime study
of sexual contrast, a superb embodiment of the force and the weakness
of the conjugal relation.

Coleridge has aptly observed that the dominant note of the tragedy
is struck in its opening lines. The appearance of the supernatural
agents of evil serves to set the framework of the picture: their choppy
fingers have already drawn the magic circle of malignant fate around
the caged souls of Macbeth and his partner, who are henceforth to be
prisoners in a world where “fog and filthy air” exclude the purer
light of heaven, a world in which the moral order of the universe
is upturned, and where “fair is foul and foul is fair.” The whole
after-action of the story passes in this darkened and shadowed light:
the forms of the principal characters starting out from a background of
crime, illumined as by the lurid gleam of a stormy sunset whose clouds
drip blood. And as the play advances the scene seems gradually shifted
into some unknown latitude of eternal night, where the voices of nature
are made to chorus the direful music of the witches’ incantation.
Throughout the drama this dominant note of evil is kept constantly
vibrating. Even for those whose hearts are free the poisoned air seems
to carry some taint of infection, and the imagination shudders at the
uneasy forebodings that haunt the soul of Banquo, who fears to trust
his assured integrity to the attacks of the secret agents of the dark.

  Hold, take my sword.--There’s husbandry in heaven,
  Their candles are all out.--Take thee that too.
  A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
  And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers!
  Restrain in me the cursèd thoughts that nature
  Gives way to in repose!

_Macbeth_, indeed, in its imaginative setting is a play of the night;
and with unwearied imagery Shakespeare again and again appeals to the
forces of darkness as so many symbols of the black pall of crime that
weighs upon the souls of Macbeth and his wife. Nearly every page of
the drama yields some striking picture fit to conjure up such fears as
Banquo feels. Thus Macbeth himself on his way to the king’s chamber:

  Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
  The curtained sleep.

And, again, Lady Macbeth in the same scene:

  It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman
  Which gives the stern’st good-night.

And when the murder has been committed, Nature, through the lips of
Lenox, makes her own contribution to the picture:

  The night has been unruly: where we lay,
  Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
  Lamentings heard i’ the air: strange screams of death
  And, prophesying with accents terrible
  Of dire combustion and confused events,
  New hatched to the woful time, the obscure bird
  Clamour’d the live-long night: some say the earth
  Was feverous and did shake.

How superbly is the effect of this description and its symbolic
significance again enforced by the words of Rosse in a subsequent
scene:

                      By the clock ’tis day
  And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp:
  Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame,
  That darkness does the face of earth entomb,
  When living light should kiss it?

The “night’s predominance” fit emblem of the deeds of this “woful
time” prevails to the end: and as Macbeth advances in his terrible
crusade his soul becomes attuned to its surroundings, and on the eve of
Banquo’s murder he calls darkness to his aid. “The west yet glimmers
with some streaks of day” when he utters that terrible invocation:

                          Come, seeling night,
  Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;
  And, with thy bloody and invisible hand,
  Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond
  Which keeps me pale! Light thickens; and the crow
  Makes wing to the rooky wood;
  Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;
  While night’s black agents to their prey do rouse.

Lady Macbeth had already anticipated the spirit of this dread summons
when, on the eve of Duncan’s coming to her castle, she cries out in the
impatience of her passionate impulse:

                      Come, thick night,
  And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell!
  That my keen knife see not the wound it makes;
  Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
  To cry “Hold, Hold!”

Through this realm of darkness, that knows no dawn till that last
hour when by the hand of Macduff “the time is free,” Shakespeare
conducts his characters with no uncertain step. Lit as by the light of
the under-world, the fell purpose of the guilty pair stands plainly
revealed to us on the very threshold of the drama: the seeds of murder
had been sown long ere the weird sisters have shrieked their fatal
preface to the action; and before we meet with either Macbeth or his
wife, the souls of both are already deeply dyed in blood. Nothing,
indeed, could be more absurd than to suggest that the murder of Duncan
is the fruit of sudden impulse on his part or hers; nor could anything
be more destructive of the whole scheme of the poet’s work than the
assumption that Macbeth’s enfeebled virtue was overborne by the satanic
strength of her will. We cannot too often remind ourselves that there
is no question of virtue here: it could not live in the air they had
learned to breathe: it has passed beyond the ken of minds that have
long brooded over crime. And it may be pointed out that Shakespeare
himself has been at particular pains to make this clear to us; for he
doubtless felt, and felt rightly, that unless the starting-point were
clearly kept in view, the subsequent development of the action, with
the contrast of character it is designed to illustrate, would lose
all significance. Therefore at the first entrance of Macbeth, when
the eulogy of others has but just pictured him to us as a soldier of
dauntless courage fighting loyally for his sovereign, we are allowed
to see that the thought of Duncan’s death has already found a lodging
in his heart. As the weird sisters lift the veil of the future and
point the dark way to the throne, the vision that presents itself to
his eyes is but the mirrored image of the bloody picture seated in
his own brain; and in foretelling the end, they wring from his lips a
confession of the means which he has already devised for its fulfilment:

    Why do I yield to that suggestion
  Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
  And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
  Against the use of nature? Present fears
  Are less than horrible imaginings:
  My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
  Shakes so my single state of man, that function
  Is smothered in surmise; and nothing is
  But what is not.

Then, like one affrighted by the echo of his own voice, he stands for
a moment appalled at the concrete shape into which these withered hags
have thrown his own phantasy, and, seeking to ignore, what he knows but
too well, that in this dread business fate and he are one, tries to
cheat his senses with the soothing anodyne that he may yet escape the
responsibilities of action:

  If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
  Without my stir.

But this mood lasts only a little while, for in the next scene, even
while his grateful sovereign is loading him with honours, his dark
purpose is seen to have taken still more defined shape:

                    Stars, hide your fires!
  Let not light see my black and deep desires:
  The eye wink at the hand! yet let that be,
  Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

All this, be it observed, takes place before the meeting between
himself and his wife. But it needed not his coming to enable her to
divine his thoughts or to force her to confess her own. His written
message to her contains no hint of murder, and yet the words she
utters, as she holds his letter in her hands, have no meaning unless
we suppose that the violent death of Duncan had long been the subject
of conjugal debate. She has watched the working of the poison in his
breast, and has already anticipated the hesitation which he afterwards
displays. How far her generous interpretation of his halting action
accords with the real character of the man we shall presently see
for ourselves: but for the moment her speech suffices to afford the
clearest evidence that he had already imparted to her his guilty
purpose:

                      Yet do I fear thy nature;
  It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness,
  To catch the nearest way. Thou would’st be great;
  Art not without ambition; but without
  The illness should attend it. What thou would’st highly,
  That thou would’st holily; would’st not play false,
  And yet would’st wrongly win.

And that we may be in no doubt as to the original source from which
this diabolical plot proceeded, Shakespeare makes the truth doubly
plain to us in a subsequent passage. When the hesitation, which she had
feared, threatens to wreck their cherished scheme of crime, she reminds
him that in its inception the idea was his, not hers:

                      What beast was’t, then,
  That made you break this enterprise to me?

         *       *       *       *       *

                              Nor time, nor place,
  Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
  They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
  Does unmake you.

Nor, indeed, would the conduct of either be humanly explicable
unless we clearly grasp the situation as it is here plainly stated
by Shakespeare. Her superlative strength in executive resource is
only consistent with the assumption that she has accepted without
questioning a policy that was none of her own devising: his apparent
weakness, on the other hand, is the inevitable attitude of an
imaginative temperament which feels all the responsibilities and
forecasts the consequences of the crime it has conceived.

And this brings us to a consideration of the particular types of
character which have been chosen by Shakespeare for the two principal
figures of his tragedy. I have suggested that the ideal motive of the
drama lies in its contrast of the distinctive qualities of sex as
these are developed under the pressure of a combined purpose and a
common experience: and it will be found, at any rate, that the special
individuality which the author has assigned to Macbeth not less than
to his wife aptly serves the end I have supposed he had in view. Dr.
Johnson has said of the play, that “it has no nice discriminations
of character; the events are too great to admit the influence of
particular dispositions, and the course of the action necessarily
determines the conduct of the agents.” This, of course, is putting the
matter too crudely. Shakespeare was not wont to deal in abstractions,
though by the force of his imagination he could so inform his work
as to raise the exhibition of individual nature into an image of our
common humanity. Still less can he be accused of inventing mere puppets
with no other function than to carry the chosen legend to its close.
His characters always outlive the particular circumstances in which
they are employed: they are enriched by a thousand touches of reality
not absolutely needed for the requirements of the scene, which allow
us to pursue them in imagination beyond the margin of the printed
page. But there is at least this truth underlying Johnson’s criticism,
that, accepting the malign influences under which their natures are
exhibited, there is nothing abnormal in the character of either; and
that what is particularly distinctive about them has been added with
the view of giving ideal emphasis to tendencies that are common to us
all.

We shall realise this the better as we come to examine more nearly
their conduct and bearing towards the one terrible circumstance that
dominates the lives of both. For it must never be forgotten that in the
play of _Macbeth_ the murder of Duncan means all. It is the touchstone
by which temperament and disposition are tried and developed; the
instrument of evolution which the poet has found ready to his hand,
and which he has wielded with all the extraordinary force of his
genius. The first of a long list of horrors committed by Macbeth, it
nevertheless in essence contains them all; and though it hurries his
unfortunate partner by a more terrible passage to a swifter doom, it
illumines as by lightning-flashes every phase of the woman’s nature,
from the first passionate impulse of evil to the remorse that cannot
find refuge even in madness, and is only silenced by death.

On the threshold of this terrible adventure in what mood do we find
them? The project, as we have seen, is no stranger to the breast of
either, and yet with what strangely different effect has the poison
worked its spell! They have been apart, and the soul of each has been
thrown back upon itself. In the thick of action, “disdaining fortune
with his brandished steel,” Macbeth has become infirm of purpose: alone
in her castle at Inverness, Lady Macbeth has brooded over the crime
until it has completely possessed her. With the concentration of a
woman’s nature, she has driven from her brain all other thoughts save
this: and she waits now with impatient expectancy for the hour that
shall put her courage to the proof. Here, as we see, the divergence of
sex has already asserted itself, working such a transformation that
when they meet they scarcely recognise one another. The sudden coming
of the occasion so long plotted and desired by both has hastened the
development of individual character. He finds in the “dearest partner”
of his greatness a being so formidable that he regards her for the
moment with feelings of mingled admiration and dismay:

  Bring forth men-children only;
  For thy undaunted metal should compose
  Nothing but males.

And though, with the woman’s finer instinct, she has partly divined
and anticipated his mood, she is appalled at the extent of the change
it has wrought in him. Beneath the armour of the valiant soldier she
finds, as she thinks, the trembling heart of a coward, and struck with
sudden terror at his failing purpose, she tries to recall him to his
former self:

  When you durst do it, then you were a man;
  And, to be more than what you were, you would
  Be so much more the man.

From this moment they are strangers in spirit, though the old bond
still holds them together. And yet to us, who view the whole picture
with the poet’s larger vision, the process of development moves in
obedience to inevitable law. For at such a crisis it is natural in
a man to anticipate: in a woman to remember; on the eve of action
he looks forward with apprehension: on the morrow she looks back
with regret; and while his nature is stronger in restraint, hers, on
the contrary, surrenders itself more completely to the passion of
remorse. The finer moral feelings of a woman are retrospective, for
her imagination feeds and broods upon the past. She is often more
intrepid in action because the intensity of her purpose bars the view
of consequence; and whether the enterprise be heroic or malign, her
indifference to danger, which then far surpasses the courage of man,
is never so superbly illustrated as when she labours in his service,
and not for any ends of her own. And so it happens that where she only
follows she sometimes seems to lead, and the man, who has devised the
policy which her readier resource only avails to carry into execution,
appears in the guise of the reluctant victim of her stronger purpose
and more undaunted will.

In order the better to exhibit these tendencies of her sex, Shakespeare
has pictured for us in Lady Macbeth a woman of the highest nervous
organisation, whose deep devotion gives to her character a passionate
intensity of purpose that seems at times to be more than human. While
the troubled surface of Macbeth’s mind sends back but a blurred image
of the dark secret that it hides, in her transparent nature the guilty
project of his ambition is clearly and sharply mirrored. Before the
murder of Duncan she can see nothing but the crime and its reward, that
crime--

  Which shall to all our nights and days to come
  Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.

Macbeth’s message has reminded her that the time is drawing near, and
she resolves to chase from his brain--

  All that impedes thee from the golden round,

which the witches have placed upon his brow. In the next moment she
hears of the king’s expected arrival, and then she knows that the hour
so long awaited has come at last, and she nerves herself for the one
supreme effort of her life:

  The raven himself is hoarse
  That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
  Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
  That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
  And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
  Of direst cruelty!

But it is a vain cry; for throughout the terrible experiences of the
next few hours the feminine nature is ever dominant. If there are no
women save those who deal in gentle deeds, then Jael did not drive the
nail into the forehead of Sisera, and it was not Judith’s hand that
compassed the death of Holofernes. And yet, if such as they were truly
of the sex which claims them, by a still firmer title may we say of
Lady Macbeth that she is every inch a woman. It is the woman who in
this same scene greets her husband on his return:

  Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor!
  Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!
  Thy letters have transported me beyond
  This ignorant present, and I feel now
  The future in the instant.

And in “the instant” she now lives, looking neither before nor after;
for the future that she sees stretches no further than the dreaded
deed which is to bring fulfilment of all their cherished hopes. As she
has shut out the past, with whatever compassionate scruples it might
recall, so in like manner her fixed concentration on the business in
hand excludes all vision of the time to come. If she had been endowed
with Macbeth’s imagination, which could ride so swiftly on the track
of consequence, Duncan would indeed have gone forth on the morrow as
he purposed. It needed this fatal combination to effect what neither
would have accomplished alone--the man’s guilty conception poisoning
and possessing the woman’s soul, the woman’s surrender to his will so
complete and passionate that when he falters she stands before him as
the glittering image of his former self, a superb creation of his own
brain, endowed with all, and more than all, the courage he had lost.
This is Lady Macbeth on the eve of Duncan’s murder. From the moment
that she perceives his wavering resolution she takes the yoke of action
on to her own shoulders. She contrives and schemes every detail of the
crime, and with ever-increasing impetuosity urges his failing footsteps
towards the goal he now fears to reach. But the precious moments
are speeding onward, and her passionate arguments seem powerless to
lift his sickened spirit; till at the last, with all the rhetoric of
despair, she presents to his affrighted gaze a blackened image of
herself, thinking, as well she may, that such a vision will prove more
potent than curses to fan into flame the dying embers of his resolve:

                    I have given suck, and know
  How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me;
  I would, while it was smiling in my face,
  Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
  And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
  Have done to this.

It seems almost incredible, but it is nevertheless true, that this
frenzied appeal has over and again been accepted as Lady Macbeth’s
judicial report upon her own character. A speech which is conceived in
the most daring spirit of dramatic fitness, and which bears in every
word the stamp of the special purpose for which it is uttered, is
transformed into a prosaic statement of fact; and we can only wonder we
are not also invited to believe that this somewhat rigorous treatment
of the young accounts for the fact that the play contains no mention of
the lady’s surviving offspring.

When the scene in which the awful passage occurs has drawn to its
close, Lady Macbeth’s task is already more than half accomplished.
Her fiery eloquence has roused him from his stupor, and, inspired by
the dauntless spirit which he had himself inspired, he bends up “each
corporal agent to this terrible feat.” But she does not rest until all
is finished; she never falters till the goal is passed. The woman’s
quivering nerves, more potent than the iron sinews of a giant, bear her
up safely to the end; and then, with a woman’s weakness, they break,
not beneath the weight they bear, but beneath the weight they have
borne. So long as the need of action endures she remains unflinching
and undismayed. It is she who drugs the grooms in preparation for the
murder: it is she who at the supreme moment, when he can do no more,
revisits the chamber of death to complete what he has left undone:

                      Infirm of purpose!
  Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead
  Are but as pictures: ’tis the eye of childhood
  That fears a painted devil.

A speech which shows how little she knew herself; for throughout all
her brief after-life this picture of “the sleeping and the dead” is
set in flames before her haunted vision and burnt with fire into the
depths of her soul.

From this time forward Macbeth and his wife change places. In outward
seeming at least, their positions are reversed, though when we look
beneath the surface there is an inexorable consistency in the conduct
of both. He, whose imagination had foreseen all the consequences of
this initial step in crime, braces himself without hesitation to the
completion of his fatal task; she, who had foreseen nothing, is thrown
back upon the past, her dormant imagination now terribly alert, and
picturing to her broken spirit all the horrors she had previously
ignored. As the penalty of his crime is unresting action, her heavier
doom is isolated despair; and it is significant to observe that it
is she who suffers most acutely all the moral torments he had only
anticipated for himself. Macbeth indeed had “murdered sleep,” but it
was her sleep he had murdered as well as his own; and the blood that,
he feared, not “all great Neptune’s ocean” would wash away, counts
for little with one who afterwards plunged breast-high into the full
tide of blood, but remains with her a haunting memory to the end. This
change is already well marked in the scene immediately following the
murder, when he suddenly wrests the conduct of affairs from her hands,
and she sinks appalled at the dark vista of unending crime which his
readiness in resource now first opens to her view. He who before had
stood with trembling feet upon the brink of the stream now rushes
headlong into the flood; to complete the chain of suspicion, he murders
the two grooms without an instant’s hesitation; and before the next Act
opens he has already planned the death of Banquo and his son.

But from this point he proceeds alone. Her help is no longer needed,
and even if it were not so, she has none now to give. “Naught’s had,
all’s spent.” Her dream is shattered; the vision of glory is fled away
into the night, and she who had felt “the future in the instant” can
only brood over the wreck of the past. The crown for which she had
struggled presses like molten lead into her brain; the lamp which has
lighted her so far only flings its rays backward on the blood-stained
pathway she has trodden; and, bitterest of all to her woman’s soul, the
evil she had wrought for his sake now breaks their lives asunder and
parts them for ever. For his spirit has no access to the anguish of
remorse that is fast hurrying her to the tomb, and she on her side can
take no part in those darker projects with which he seeks to buttress
the tottering fabric of his ambition. In all tragedy there is nothing
so pitiful in its pathos as the passage in which she strives to grant
to her husband the support of which she herself stands so sorely in
need. She feels instinctively that he shuns her company, and surmises
that he too is suffering the lonely pangs of remorse, little guessing
that he comes to her fresh from a new scheme of murder:

  How now, my lord? why do you keep alone,
  Of sorriest fancies your companions making?
  Using those thoughts which should indeed have died
  With them they think on? Things without all remedy,
  Should be without regard: what’s done, is done.

With what a jarring note comes his answer:

  We have scotched the snake, not killed it.

And yet, despite this answer, with its clear indication of the true
drift of his thoughts, she still fails to realise the gulf that divides
them. All through the banquet scene she cannot rid herself of the
belief that he is haunted, as she is haunted, by the vision of the
murdered king, and even when he strips off the mask and bares the inner
workings of his breast--

                      For mine own good,
  All causes shall give way; I am in blood
  Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more,
  Returning were as tedious as go o’er,

she listens without understanding, and still interpreting his
sufferings by her own, answers him from the sleepless anguish of her
own soul:

  You lack the season of all natures, sleep.

In the interval, before we meet Lady Macbeth again, and for the
last time, she has learnt all; and beneath the weight of her guilty
knowledge her shattered nerves have snapped and broken. Throughout the
wandering utterances of her dying hours her imagination is unalterably
fixed upon the scene and circumstances of Duncan’s death, but across
this unchanging background flit other spectres besides that of the
murdered king. Banquo is there, and Macduff’s unhappy wife: she is
spared no item in the dreary catalogue of her husband’s crimes;
and yet, always overpowering these more recent memories, come the
thick-crowding thoughts of that one fatal hour, when her spirit shot
like a flame across the sky, and then fell headlong down the dark abyss
of night.

The character of Macbeth standing in vivid contrast to that of his
wife, has been subject to an equal amount of misconception, though
of a different sort. He is commonly represented as being pursued by
the constant warnings of conscience, which are only silenced by the
evil ascendancy of the commanding figure at his elbow. But this is
to antedate the action of the drama, and to mistake the real basis
of his nature. If the voice of conscience ever gained a hearing, it
was in some earlier hour, not pictured by Shakespeare, before this
settled scheme of murder had taken firm possession of his soul. The
opening chorus of the witches, no less than the bearing of the man
himself, warn us that he has long ceased to wrestle with the messengers
of Heaven, and that he is now under the dominion of influences that
have a different origin. The forces that sway Macbeth as we know him
are intellectual rather than moral, and in order to exhibit more
effectively that tendency to deliberation which is characteristic of
his sex, Shakespeare has endowed him with the most potent imagination,
which presents the consequences of conduct as clearly as though the
secrets of the future were mirrored in a glass. It is not conscience,
the whispered echo of eternal law, which causes him to falter on the
verge of action: it is the instinct of security, which, as Hecate sings:

  Is mortal’s chiefest enemy.

And so indeed it proved; for the initial step in crime once past, the
very forces that had been strongest in restraint now carry him with
unhalting speed through crime after crime, until his headlong course
is stayed by the hand of Macduff. And seeing that Macbeth’s keen
vision had pictured what was in store for him, it is no wonder that
he trembles with irresolute purpose while his wife’s blind impulse
moves with unbroken strength. In his case it is neither conscience nor
cowardice that cries halt, but an imagination morbidly vivid and alert,
which sees the oak in the acorn, and converts the trickling spring into
the full tide of the river that rushes to the sea. All this is plainly
imaged for us in the soliloquy that follows his first interview with
his wife:

  If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well
  It were done quickly: if the assassination
  Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
  With his surcease, success; that but this blow
  Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
  But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
  We’d jump the life to come. But, in these cases,
  We still have judgment here; that we but teach
  Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
  To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
  Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
  To our own lips.

Then in the passage that follows he realises in more particular detail
the horror and execration which such a deed will awaken. Duncan’s
virtues, he sees,

  Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
  The deep damnation of his taking-off:
  And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
  Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d
  Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
  Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
  That tears shall drown the wind.

Here we see set forth in clearest language both the scope and the limit
of Macbeth’s moral vision; and as we note his growing irresolution, it
is impossible not to be reminded of another of Shakespeare’s characters
in whom the imaginative temperament worked with equal potency. Macbeth
and Hamlet are in some points strangely allied, but when they are
placed side by side the elements of antagonism quickly overpower the
outward appearance of similarity. Both were men in whom the supremacy
of the imagination induced paralysis of action, but in the one case
its exercise is bounded by the limits of our present world, and in the
other it starts from the confines of mortal life and seeks to pierce
the veil of eternity. Macbeth takes no heed of what may lurk in those
dark recesses beyond the grave; if he can only be assured of safety
here he is ready to “jump the life to come.” To Hamlet, on the other
hand, the fortune of this world, and even death itself, are but as
shadows, for his imagination is haunted by the mysteries of that unseen
realm of which death is but the portal--

  The undiscovered country, from whose bourne
  No traveller returns.

It is this which “puzzles the will” and arrests the uplifted arm, and
though the voice that urges him to action comes to him from the grave,
the very fact that the command is borne by a supernatural messenger
suffices to ensure its neglect, and sends the imagination once more
adrift upon the limitless ocean of eternity. Macbeth too trafficks
in the supernatural, but with what different purpose and result! He
holds converse with the weird sisters only that Fate may echo the
dark project he fears to utter; and when he consults these “black and
midnight hags” again, it is to wring from their lips the knowledge
that may guide him still further in his settled career of crime. And
they answer him according to his will. He is already far advanced in
blood, but they beckon him still onward, and, speaking with the double
tongue of hope and fear, bid him beware, and yet be bold, leading him
by such sure steps to his doom that the struggle at last becomes almost
sublime, and Fate, which he had rashly challenged, enters the lists
against him.

When we have once grasped the motive-power of Macbeth’s character, it
is not difficult to reconcile the apparent inconsistency in his conduct
before and after the murder of Duncan. By this one act his trembling
hesitation is suddenly converted into an iron consistency of purpose.
The view of consequence that had held him for a while irresolute on the
threshold of crime now becomes the strongest incentive to whatever
may be needed to make his position secure. His imagination is thus
both the source of inaction and the spur that urges him to morbid
activity: it is at once the friend of conscience and its bitterest
foe: at one moment the lamp that reveals to him his hideous design and
all its attendant train of evil, in the next a lurid flame that lights
up a thousand avenues of danger, only to be guarded by the exercise
of a relentless cruelty and an unflinching courage. In nearly every
utterance of Macbeth after the murder we are allowed to see how clearly
he himself apprehends the danger of his position, and the sinister
policy which it demands. “Things bad begun make strong themselves by
ill”; and accordingly, with no more compunction than an executioner
might feel, he proceeds in the course of action which he had foreseen
from the first to be inevitable. Even his superstitious fears do not
shake him in his resolve, and he has no sooner recovered from the
vision of Banquo’s ghost than he determines to visit again the weird
sisters, that he may know “by the worst means the worst.”

  Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
  Which must be acted ere they may be scanned.

This is the first intimation that we have of any menace to the safety
of Macduff, and when, in a following scene, Macbeth hears of his flight
to England, he is full of self-reproaches for his procrastination in
crime:

  The flighty purpose never is o’ertook
  Unless the deed go with it: from this moment,
  The very firstlings of my heart shall be
  The firstlings of my hand.

And then, baulked in his guilty designs upon the husband, he
straightway resolves to wreak his vengeance upon his family:

  The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
  Seize upon Fife; and give to the edge o’ the sword
  His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
  That trace him in his line.

Truly indeed and with prophetic vision had he said to his wife that he
was “but young in deed,” and that his terror at Banquo’s ghost was only
“the initiate fear that wants hard use.”

And yet, despite this full revelation of the man’s nature, who can fail
to be moved by the splendid despair of his closing hours, when, with
all the forces of heaven and earth arrayed against him, he struggles
with dauntless courage to the end? His imagination, still informing his
shattered spirit, lights up the ruin of his life, and presents to his
wearied gaze the hated object that he has become in the sight of all
men:

                My way of life
  Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf:
  And that which should accompany old age,
  As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
  I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
  Curses not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
  Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

There is no refuge of madness for him. He has seen the end from the
beginning, and even when the end has come it has no terror which he had
not known long ago. This only is added to his earlier knowledge, though
the truth, alas! comes too late, that this present life, which he had
held so dear, and for which he had sacrificed all, this life, which had
been the tomb of his virtue, and of his honour, is

      ... but a walking shadow; a poor player,
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
  And then is heard no more: it is a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.

And so, with the “sound and fury” of this present world still ringing
in his ears, he passes out into that “life to come” of which he had
never dreamed at all.




HENRY IRVING


The value of personality on the stage has rarely been exhibited with
greater force than in the case of Sir Henry Irving. Nature had not
specially equipped him for his calling; in several respects, indeed,
she had weighted him with disabilities which were destined to prove a
serious hindrance in the progress of his career. But she had dowered
him, as if by way of compensation, with a force and persistence of
character that finally shaped for themselves a mode of expression which
satisfied the demands of his ambition. And this sense of resident power
was mirrored in the man himself, even in the earlier days when those
physical peculiarities, which he never wholly lost, were, for the time,
gravely imperilling his success upon the stage.

I met him first at the Old Albion Tavern in Drury Lane--a favourite
haunt of actors that has long passed away--and I remember then
that the man himself impressed me more deeply than any of the few
impersonations in which I had seen him. Already in his face and in his
bearing he contrived to convey a curious sense of power and authority
that he had not yet found the means to incorporate completely in his
work upon the stage. I found myself vaguely wondering why he should
have chosen the actor’s calling as a means of impressing himself upon
his generation, and yet at the time I felt a full assurance that in
that or in some other walk of life he was bound to leave a mark upon
his time. Johnson once said of Burke that if a stranger should take
shelter beside him from the rain, he would part from him with the
feeling that chance had brought him in contact with a remarkable man.
Something of that same feeling was left in me as the impression drawn
from my first meeting with Irving; and it is perhaps characteristic
of that unnameable kind of force his personality suggested, that even
at the zenith of his career, when he had won complete authority over
a public that at first only reluctantly rallied to his banner, there
was still room left for a measure of doubt as to whether his powers
might not have found a fuller exercise in a different realm. It is, I
think, however, an attribute of all the very highest achievement in
any art that its authors, even when their special aptitude for the
chosen medium of expression is full and complete, possess, by right
of their genius, something more and something different in kind from
that particular endowment which the art they have adopted calls into
exercise. In Irving’s case, this thought marked itself more deeply,
because, as I have already hinted, his command of the special resources
of his art was by no means complete, and his whole career may be said
to have been a struggle, fiercer and more obstinate than most men
have to wage, to secure, through the medium of the theatre, a full
recognition of the latent forces he undoubtedly possessed.

He was conscious of that himself, and would often openly avow it; very
conscious, I mean, that, in a calling in which there is no escape from
the physical presence of the artist, he had much to contend with.
It made him quickly appreciative of the kind of perfection achieved
by others in whom the motive and the means of expression were more
finely attuned; and he never wearied in later days of appraising this
quality in the acting of Ellen Terry, whose varied gifts in the moment
of perfection were combined in a fashion so easy and so absolute as
sometimes almost to rob her of the praise due to conscious art.

Such appreciation would sometimes, though not so often, be extended to
the comrades of his own sex; and I recollect, during the time when
William Terriss was a member of his company, he would comment, with a
sense of half-humorous envy, upon the ease and grace with which the
younger actor could at once establish himself in the favour of his
audience. But this recognition of the qualities he knew himself not to
possess never, I think, for a moment shook his deeper conviction that,
when he could subdue to the service of his art the more refractory
elements of his own physical personality, he had a message to convey
which would carry a deeper and more lasting impression.

And he proved by his career that he had a true title to that
conviction. Force was always there, force that showed itself almost
to the point of terror in his early impersonation of “The Bells.” But
sweetness and grace came not till later, and was only won as the reward
of patient and unceasing effort: it was the case of the honeycomb
bedded in the carcase of the lion, and it took all a lion’s strength to
reveal it to the world. In the man himself, however, as distinguished
from his art, it was present from the first; and I recall, in those
earlier days of our friendship, that a certain grave courtliness of
bearing was among the first things that struck me. A certain sense
of loneliness and isolation always belonged to him--the index, as it
seemed to me, of a mind that was conscious that in his case the road
towards fame must be trodden alone; that such perfection as he could
ultimately achieve could borrow little from example, but must be due to
his own unaided subjugation of whatever in his individuality impeded
his progress.

But this suggestion was never so far obtruded as to burden the freedom
of personal intercourse, and my long association with him, in work or
at play, is rich in the remembrance of many varied moods of a sweet and
affectionate character. In common with all men who remain permanently
attractive in companionship, he had a quick and delicate sense of
humour, sometimes half-mischievous in its exercise, and touched now and
then with a slightly saturnine quality, but always ready at call--even
in his most serious moods.

One evening during a brief holiday with him in Paris it was somewhat
roughly put to the test. We stood in a group of spectators watching
the agile performances of some dancers who were exhibiting the wayward
figures of the Can-Can, when one of the more adventurous of the troupe,
greatly daring, suddenly lifted her foot and neatly removed the hat
that Irving was wearing. The other spectators, some of whom, I think,
had recognised the actor, and all of whom, as I had remarked, were
attracted by his personality, stood in momentary wonder as to how this
audacious act of familiarity might be received, and I thought that
I myself detected in Irving’s face a momentary struggle between the
dignity that was natural to him and the genial acceptance of the spirit
of the place in which we found ourselves. But it was only momentary,
and when he acknowledged with hearty laughter the adroitness of the
performer, the Parisians around us found themselves free to indulge in
the merriment which the look upon his grave, pale face had for the time
held in check.

Upon such lighter phases of the life of the French capital Irving
looked with a half-sinister tolerance.

That aspect of the character of the French people made no sympathetic
appeal to him, but he watched their antics with unceasing interest
rather as he might have watched the uncouth gambols of animals in a
menagerie. But there was one of the shows of Paris which positively
fascinated him, and that was the Morgue. Irving’s mind was always
attracted to the study of crime; he loved to trace its motives, to
examine and to probe the various modes of the criminal character; and
so it happened that, on one pretext or another, our morning wanderings
nearly always led us back to this gruesome exhibition. One day the
fancy seized him that a man who passed before one of the corpses and
then returned to gaze upon it again was possibly the murderer himself;
and afterwards, while we were breakfasting at Bignons, he occupied
himself with a sense of keen enjoyment in tracing in imagination the
motive of the crime and the means by which it had been carried out.

At that time his thoughts were greatly occupied with the proposed
revival of _Macbeth_, and on several evenings at the Hotel Bristol we
sat long into the night discussing every phase of that greatest of all
poetic tragedies. I think Irving felt--partly, perhaps, as the result
of our many discussions--that in his earlier presentation of the play
he had dwelt too insistently upon the purely criminal side of Macbeth’s
character to the neglect of its larger and more imaginative issues. I
know, at any rate, that he was so far impressed with my view of the
play, that he asked me to write an essay upon the subject which was
to appear simultaneously with the revival; and he did this in part,
I believe, because the view I entertained of the interplay of motive
between Macbeth and his guilty partner went far to supplant that
masculine conception of Lady Macbeth’s character which had hitherto
been imposed upon the world mainly through the genius of Mrs. Siddons.
The essay, no less than the performance, proved, as we had expected,
the mark for much hostile criticism; but the revival--interesting
to me in many respects--illustrated with surprising force the
extraordinary advance in his art which had been made by Irving since
the earlier production of the play--an advance not merely of technical
resource, but even more as showing the larger and profounder spirit in
which he could now approach the poetic drama.

Nearly all our excursions abroad were in some way associated with
work projected or already in hand, and it was while he was preparing
Mr. W. G. Wills’s version of _Faust_ that we made together a long
and delightful excursion to Nuremberg. Irving was very anxious to
find something that was both quaint and characteristic for the scene
of Margaret’s Garden, and although he was not very fond of physical
exercise, he never wearied of our constant tramps among the narrower
streets of the old German city in inquisitive search for something
that should fit with the ideal that he had in his mind. We trespassed
freely wherever we found an open gateway; and at last, having failed to
discover what was exactly suited to the purpose, we set out one day for
Rothenburg on the Tauber--one of the most perfect and complete examples
of a mediaeval city, and where, as we were assured, we should find
richer material than was provided in Nuremberg itself.

At that time the journey between Nuremberg and Rothenburg had to be
made mainly by road; the railway carried us only half-way, and then we
had a drive of several hours before reaching our destination. I think
it was this that mainly attracted Irving in undertaking the excursion.
All through his life he clearly loved the pleasure of a drive; and
during a week I spent with him at Lucerne, our every day, for six or
seven hours at a stretch, was employed in exploring the shores of the
lake. Rothenburg, as it chanced, furnished us with little new material
towards the object of which we were in quest, and on our return to
Albert Durer’s city, feeling that he had exhausted all the available
means of inquiry, he at once, with characteristic promptitude, summoned
the scenic artist, Mr. Hawes Craven, from London in order that he might
make notes on the spot of the several scenes of the drama.

At home or abroad, Irving was always at his best as a host, and,
whether in the larger entertainments which he sometimes gave on
the stage of the Lyceum, or in the more intimate gatherings in the
Beefsteak Room, he presided with admirable grace over a company that
was often strangely varied in its composition--the most distinguished
statesmen, soldiers, and men of letters, meeting in happy association
with chosen members of his own profession. Two little incidents recur
to me which illustrate in their different ways that sense of humour,
sometimes innocently mischievous, and sometimes again employed for a
long settled purpose of deliberate attack. The first of these occasions
was a dinner given in honour of the members of the Saxe-Meiningen
company on the stage of the theatre. I had been driving with him during
the day, and happened to mention, to his manifest surprise, that I had
not seen their great performance of the play of _Julius Caesar_ which
was making a considerable stir in London. He said nothing more at the
time, but at the end of the evening’s feast, after having himself in a
few words gracefully welcomed his distinguished guests, he announced
that he would now call upon Mr. Comyns Carr, who he felt sure would
do ample justice to the exquisite art of these German players. I can
see now the smile upon his face as he sat down, and left me to my
task, of which I acquitted myself with at least so much skill, that he
was the only one among those present who was aware that I was wholly
unacquainted with the subject I had been summoned to discuss.

The other incident to which I have referred had a more serious import.
During his first visit to America his feelings had been gravely
outraged, and not on his own account alone, by a series of scandalous
articles which had appeared in one of the most popular of New York
journals. Our party that evening at supper in the Beefsteak Room
included a popular American Colonel, a great friend of Irving’s, and,
as Irving well knew, a great friend also of the wealthy proprietor of
this offending journal. The scene was wholly characteristic of Irving,
who rarely forgot an injury, although he was content sometimes to lie
long in wait for the fitting occasion to strike a counter-blow. In a
genial prelude he led our American friend on in a growing crescendo of
praise of the amiable qualities of the wealthy newspaper proprietor.
“You know so-and-so,” he innocently remarked to his guest, as he
settled himself down in his chair, in an attitude that not uncommonly
conveyed to those who knew him that danger might be impending. “Know
him!” replied the innocent Colonel, “I have known him all my life.”
“Quite so,” said Irving; “good fellow, isn’t he?” “Good! He’s one of
the very best fellows that was ever born.” “The kind of man,” pursued
Irving, “who would never do an ungenerous or an unkind thing?” And at
this, lured on to his doom, the unsuspecting Colonel burst forth in
such unrestrained eulogy of his friend, as to depict for the admiration
of those present a character of almost unchallenged perfection. “No
doubt; no doubt,” responded Irving; “no doubt he is all that you say”;
and then, in words all the deadlier for the perfect quietude of tone in
which they were uttered, he added: “But he is also one of the damned’st
scoundrels that ever stepped the earth.” The genial Colonel was not
unnaturally taken aback; but before he could make any show of defence,
Irving had whipped from his breast-pocket the series of offending
articles, and, handing them across the table, made the simple comment,
“I thought, old friend, you might be interested to see them.”

It was, I think, in the beginning of the year 1892 that Irving invited
me to write for him a play on the subject of King Arthur. The theme had
long been in his mind, and before his death Mr. Wills had completed a
version, which proved, however, unacceptable to the actor. At first
Irving thought that I might find it possible to recast and remodel
Wills’s work; but it was afterwards agreed between us that I should
be free to work out my own design. When my task was completed, Irving
and Miss Terry came one night to dine with us in Blandford Square. He
brought with him also his little dog Fussy, the constant companion of
many years. And when dinner was over, he settled himself down in an
arm-chair, with the dog upon his knees, prepared for an ordeal that
is never wholly agreeable either to the author or his auditor. I know
that I was nervous enough, as I always am on such occasions; and when
I was about half-way through, the audible sounds of snoring which
reached my ears made me fancy in my morbid state of sensitiveness that
I had failed to grip or to hold the attention of the man I so strongly
desired to please. Still I plodded on, not daring to lift my eyes
from the book, and still the stertorous sounds continued, until at
last, exasperated beyond endurance, I closed the book, with the abrupt
announcement that I felt it useless to go on. “What do you mean?”
inquired Irving, in blank amazement. “Why, you were asleep,” I replied;
but even as I spoke, I perceived the ridiculous blunder into which I
had fallen, for the snoring still continued without interruption, and,
lifting my eyes, I saw Miss Terry, with laughing gesture, pointing to
the sleeping terrier still resting upon Irving’s knees. I had “tried it
on the dog,” and it was the dog I had failed to please.

My association with Irving during the preparation of _King Arthur_
was wholly interesting and delightful. I had been warned by those who
had long worked with him in the theatre that Irving was intolerant of
interference, and that I would do well not to assume any position
of authority in the direction of the rehearsals. My own experience,
however, completely belied this warning; from the first he treated me
with the utmost consideration, and invited, rather than repressed,
the suggestions I had to make. His own work at rehearsal was always
deeply interesting to watch, though it often revealed little more than
the mechanical part of his own performance. This, however, he fixed
with absolute exactitude, and the minute invention of detail which he
displayed sufficed to suggest that in his own private study of the
part this fabric of mechanism was already wedded to the emotional
message he intended to convey. As a rule, he was word-perfect before
the rehearsals of any play began, and this left him free to bestow
infinite patience and pains upon the work of others. He would go
through the whole of any one of the minor parts, instructing the actor
in every detail of gesture and movement; and when it came to scenes in
which he himself was concerned, he knew precisely--and could precisely
realise--the pace and the tone that were needed to achieve the effect
he desired.




A SENSE OF HUMOUR


I suppose no man at this time of day would have the temerity to
hazard a definition of humour. It has been often attempted, never,
however, with any convincing success; and sometimes with such cumbrous
elaboration of thought as to leave upon the reader only the desolating
impression that the philosopher was wholly lacking in the quality which
he sought to define. Nor is its presence so common even in those who
most loudly deplore its absence in others. I have heard the dullest of
men lament the fact that God has denied it to women, and the fleeting
smile with which such an announcement is sometimes received by their
wives goes far to prove that even the intimate association of marriage
has not sufficed for the full appreciation of character.

In its larger and more elemental forms humour is certainly one of the
rarest of human attributes; and even the appreciation of humour in
that broader and deeper sense is not quite so common as is generally
supposed. There is quite a considerable body of seemingly educated
opinion which would concede to Shakespeare every gift except the gift
of humour; persons who would regard Falstaff as a quite inconsiderable
creation, and who would dismiss Dogberry and the nurse in _Romeo and
Juliet_ as negligible portraits in the great Shakespearean gallery.
Once I remember hearing this view put forward very confidently in the
presence of a brilliant essayist, whose grave demeanour gave the critic
some ground for the belief that his unfavourable opinion would meet
with ready acceptance. After holding forth at some length upon what he
deemed to be this rather puerile aspect of Shakespeare’s genius, he
ventured at the finish upon the direct inquiry: “Now what, sir, do you
think of Shakespeare’s humour?” To which the reply came in very quiet
tones: “Well, the trouble is, there is no other.”

The proposition need not be taken too literally, but it contains a
truth that cannot be ignored. Shakespeare’s humour is as directly and
as legitimately the fruit of his wide and deep love of life as the
most sublime of his tragic creations. The mind that drew the portrait
of Falstaff owns and claims the same large handwriting as that which
revealed the character of Macbeth; in both there is an equal measure
of mastery. And that, naturally, suggests an element in humour
which, without risking the imprudence of definition, may be said to
separate it from mere wit. The man of wit may distinguish and reveal
the incongruities of life but the humorist, not only perceives them,
but loves the characters in which they reside. Among the humorists I
have met, this essential gift of sympathy has always, as it seems to
me, been a constant and dominating force. It was not my fortune to
know Charles Dickens, but his transcendent humour may be said to have
dominated all who came within the reach and range of his genius; and it
may surely be said of him, as it may be said of Shakespeare, that he
not only saw where the sources of laughter lay, but that he loved the
thing he made laughable.

This was equally true of Bret Harte, who in our talks together would
always willingly own his obligations to the great master; and there
is certainly no more touching tribute to Dickens’s genius than is
contained in the little poem with which Bret Harte greeted the news
of his death. As is not uncommon with men of creative humour, Bret
Harte, in ordinary converse, gave little hint of its possession. A
man of grave and reticent bearing, he made no attempt to shine as a
talker; and as far as my experience went, rarely sought to draw the
conversation into literary channels. He deliberately, as it would
seem, kept all that concerned his work as an artist in a world apart;
and his charm in companionship--which was not inconsiderable--suggested
rather the tenderness and sympathy in his outlook on life than his
equal gift of humorous appreciation. Those earlier meetings of the
Kinsmen Club, of which Bret Harte was a member, brought together many
humorous spirits, and amongst them George du Maurier and poor Randolph
Caldecott, who, although he too owned a grave exterior, partly due to
frailty of health, could on occasion break out into a frolic mood that
was irresistible in its sense of fun.

But the draughtsmen for _Punch_ in those days, even when, as in the
case of du Maurier and Charles Keene, they could boast a higher measure
of purely artistic accomplishment, were hardly comparable in their
grasp of what is essentially comic in character with their predecessor,
John Leech; and if we turn from the work they produced to the men
themselves, it was not the possession of a sense of humour which formed
the main element in the social charm they exercised. Du Maurier, in his
conversation, never sought to exhibit or to exploit this particular
side of his talent; and in our many talks upon the subject of art it
was evident that he was rather on the alert to recognise what was
seriously beautiful in the work of his contemporaries. He never tired
in praise of Millais whom, I think, he ranked as the supreme master of
his time; and, on the other hand, he never quite settled in his mind,
even up to the end of his life, what measure of welcome to accord to
the widely different gifts of Rossetti and Burne-Jones.

But although his talk was, for the most part, serious in tone, he could
show himself on occasion to be possessed of the wildest high spirits,
and it was then he most clearly revealed the qualities that were
distinctively his in virtue of his partly foreign extraction.

Indeed among the men who practised this branch of art, I have known
only two who in personal intercourse gave any complete indication of
the humorous powers they possessed. Perhaps neither Phil May nor Fred
Barnard have yet received their full meed of praise, and yet in them,
rather than in their better known contemporaries, the tradition of
the earlier humorists survives. In one sense they may be said to have
shared between them the mantle of John Leech, and they possessed this
quality in common, that their perception of the sources of laughter
in life was as clearly betrayed in personal association as in the
work that came from their hand. Phil May’s face was in itself a
highly-coloured print that made an instant appeal to any one endowed
even with a most rudimentary sense of humour, and his talk, though it
affected no brilliancy, very clearly revealed the fact that the little
pageant of life which came within the range of his vision struck itself
at once into humorous outline. He hardly saw life, indeed, in any other
frame, and the few finely selected lines with which he registered
the images that presented themselves to his imagination seemed by
instinctive preference to exclude and to dismiss those graver realities
that were not his especial concern. And yet so keen and so sure was his
touch of life that now and again his hand would outrun his purpose, and
leave, even upon the slightest drawing, a suggestion of almost tragic
import underlying its laughing message. Fred Barnard was a humorist
through and through--at work or at play his eye lighted unerringly on
whatever might enrich his humorous experience, and he was quick to
detect, though never with any lack of urbanity, the little foibles of
those with whom he was brought into contact.

But I suppose it is to the stage that one’s thoughts must naturally
turn for the most telling exposition of this particular quality. Nearly
all the comedians I have known have seemed to accept it as a part of
the duty which their profession imposes on them, that they should be
as amusing in the world as in the theatre. It cannot be said, according
to my own experience, that they have always been successful, and I may
even go so far as to say that the laboured efforts of the wilfully
comic man mark off in remembrance some of the dullest hours I have
passed. The penalty of the perpetual jester very often, as one would
think, a grievous burden to himself, falls sometimes with even heavier
incidence upon those he has doomed to be amused.

I know it is a prevalent belief among Americans that we English are
wholly devoid of that sense of humour in which many of their own
countrymen undoubtedly excel; and it may perhaps, therefore, shock them
to learn that, to a taste differently educated, the unremitting efforts
of some of their professional jesters are apt on occasion to appear a
little overstrained. But in some natures the appetite for the ceaseless
flow of comic anecdote is swiftly satisfied, and the man who will
insist upon unpacking his wallet of well-worn stories for the intended
delight of his fellows may, if he is not watchful of the effect he
is producing, induce in the mind of his audience a mood of settled
sadness, that not even the genius of a Dickens could lift or lighten.

This haunting fear lest conversation should at any point take a
serious note--which I cannot help thinking characteristic of many
Americans--is often to be found in our own country in the person of
the comedian by profession. It existed perhaps in a lesser degree in
J. L. Toole than any other representative of his calling whom I have
intimately known. What rendered Toole delightful in companionship was
rarely anything memorable that he said, for he made no effort to pose
as a wit, and his reminiscent humour, which he could always summon at
need, was for the most part introduced in illustration of some point
of character humorously perceived and presented. There are critics who
have questioned his appeal as a comedian in the theatre, but no one
brought into personal contact with him could be left in any doubt as
to the swiftness and sureness of his vision in detecting and enjoying
the little foibles of those around him. In any company, whatever its
composition, his mind got quickly to work upon each individuality in
the group; and, although he might not join largely in the conversation,
he loved to impart to the companion by his side his keen sense of
enjoyment of the conflict and interplay of character as it presented
itself at the table.

Toole was a constant guest at those pleasant little suppers in the
Beefsteak Room of the Lyceum Theatre over which Irving so gracefully
presided; and if one had the good fortune to be his neighbour it was
always delightful to watch the expression of his swiftly-glancing,
laughing eyes and mobile mouth, as they mirrored, in hardly-restrained
amusement, his inward enjoyment of the changing humours of the
scene. Nothing characteristic escaped him, however widely divergent
the personalities that came within the range of his vision; but his
quickness of perception, ever ready to register and record the little
foibles of each member of the company, bred in him no feeling of
resentment, but seemed rather to add to the rich store of enjoyment
which, in his happier moods, life always afforded him. I say in his
happier moods, because even in the earlier days of our friendship, when
his vitality was unimpaired, his exuberant high spirits were subject to
sudden clouds of deep depression that seemed for the time to banish all
laughter from his life.

Like Irving, he was an inveterately late sitter, and the many
occasions that found them together--either at the theatre or at the
Garrick Club--rarely witnessed their parting till the morning hours
were far spent. In Toole’s case, I know, this reluctance to break in
upon the long duration of these social hours sprang in part out of a
haunting terror of the sadder thoughts that might overtake him when
he was driven back upon himself. He would often confess to me, as
we drove home, his constant dread of these night fears, that were
chiefly dominated at that time by the recurring image of his only son,
whose early death remained with him to the end as an ineffaceable
source of sorrow. And yet, while we talked of these sadder things, it
was sometimes irresistibly comic to notice, as we drew towards his
house, how this deeper grief would then be exchanged for a terror
of a nearer kind, for he was always at these moments very conscious
that his persistently late habits--so often repented of, but never
reformed--would surely draw down upon him severe domestic rebuke. And
even when the cab had reached his door, he would hold me prisoner in
whispered converse in order to postpone, as long as he could, the dread
moment when he would have to face the salutary lecture that was in
store for him.

But for the most part he was the gayest and most light-hearted of
companions, forcing out of the most unhopeful material a rich yield of
fun and frolic. At home or abroad he was never at a loss for the means
of filling an empty day. Sometimes, in his ceaseless tendency towards
practical joking, he would place himself in positions that other
men might have found embarrassing and even dangerous. But there was
something so infectious in his humour, and in his good humour, that
even on the Continent, where he could speak no language but his own,
he was always able to extricate himself with success from difficulties
that would have left many graver men without resource.

He dearly loved the excitement of the gaming table, whether at Monte
Carlo or elsewhere; and I remember, during a holiday that we passed
together at Aix-les-Bains, that he did his best to imperil the good
effects of his cure by his constant attendance at the Cercle and the
Villa des Fleurs. It was difficult to drag him from the table, however
late the hour, for his pathetic reply to every remonstrance took the
form of a solemn promise that he would absolutely go to bed as soon as
the little pile before him was exhausted; a reply, the humour of which
he was himself only half-conscious, for it pointed to the inevitable
loss that was the final result of all his gambling transactions. After
a night wherein he had been more than usually successful in exhausting
the ready cash he carried about him, we made our way in the morning to
the little bank in the main street of Aix-les-Bains, in order that he
might make a fresh draft upon his letter of credit.

But he did not at once reveal to the clerk in charge his serious
intent. Tapping lightly at the closed window of the _guichet_, he
inquired, in broken English, which he appeared strangely to believe
would be somehow comprehensible to his foreign interlocutor, whether
the bank would be prepared to make him a small advance upon a
gold-headed cane which he carried in his hand. The request, as might
be supposed, was somewhat briskly dismissed, and the little window was
abruptly closed in his face. Toole retired apparently deeply dejected
by the refusal of his prayer; but in a few minutes he returned to the
attack, having in the meantime provided himself with fresh material for
a new financial proposition. Hastening out into the little market that
lay near the bank, he hurriedly purchased from one of the fish-stalls
a small pike that had been caught in the lake, and, having added to
this a bunch of carrots, he returned to the bank, where he carefully
arranged these proffered securities on the counter, enforced by the
addition of his watch and chain, a three-penny bit, and a penknife.
When all was ready he again tapped softly at the window, and, in a
voice that was broken by sobs, implored the clerk, in view of his
unfortunate position, to accept these ill-assorted articles in pledge
for the small sum which was needed to save him from starvation. The
clerk, by this time grown indignant, requested him to leave the
establishment, explaining to him in emphatic terms, and in such
English as he could command, that they only made advances upon circular
notes or letters of credit. At the last-named word Toole’s saddened
face suddenly broke into smiles, and, producing his letter of credit,
he handed it to the astonished clerk, with the added explanation that
he would have offered that at first if he had thought the bank cared
about it, but that the porter at the hotel had told him the bankers of
Aix liked fish better.

This is only a sample of the kind of adventure that Toole loved to
create for himself and which he carried through with the keenest
zest and enjoyment. His invention in such matters never flagged, and
I have often been his companion through the whole of an idle day,
during which he would keep us both fully employed in the prosecution
of these boyish frolics, that may seem foolish enough in narration,
but were irresistible in their appeal, owing to the unalloyed pleasure
they brought him in their progress. I have known many men who deem
themselves adepts at this kind of sport, but none who were so
convincing in their methods--none, certainly, who took such an honest
pleasure in their work, or who used such infinite pains in carrying the
projected little plot to a successful issue.

Once at Ramsgate he contrived to relieve the tedium of a Sunday
afternoon by calling at nearly every house in a long and respectable
terrace, charged with a mission that was foredoomed to failure. As each
door was opened Toole stood on the step, his face distorted by signs
of emotion, that for the moment deprived him of all powers of speech,
and when at last, in response to the angry inquiry of a maid-servant,
he contrived to regain a measure of self-control, it was only to
beg, in tearful accents, for the loan of “a small piece of groundsel
for a sick bird.” As door after door was slammed in his face, his
high spirits correspondingly increased, his only fear being, as he
afterwards explained to me, lest some one of the peaceful inhabitants
whose Sabbath repose he had so ruthlessly disturbed should, by an evil
chance, have possessed the remedy he so persistently sought.




SITTING AT A PLAY


The child’s love of the drama begins long before there is any thought
of a playhouse. To escape from life in order to rediscover it in mimic
form, would seem to rank among the earliest of human impulses. We are
all born actors, though some of us--and this is true even of those
who adopt the stage as a profession--would seem occasionally to part
with this primitive instinct in later life. But an average child has
no sooner entered this world than he finds himself pursued by the
longing to create another: he has scarcely had time to recognise his
own identity before he seeks to hide it beneath the mask of an alien
personality. How far the youthful histrion believes himself to be a
lion when he crawls across the drawing-room carpet on all fours, and
roars from behind the sofa, is perhaps open to argument. My own belief
is that he is already so much of an artist as to be in no way deceived,
but of his desire to impose upon the credulity of others there can, I
think, be no question. But the limits of histrionic enjoyment are even
here sometimes overstepped, as, for example, when a maturer rival in
the art, boasting a louder roar, approaches too closely to the confines
of absolute illusion. The enjoyment of the art as an art is then rudely
disturbed, and, shaken with sudden terror, the infant Roscius is once
more driven back upon that actual world from which it had been his
pride and desire to escape.

This may be cited as an early instance of the intemperate employment of
the resources of realism, which in later life, when sitting at a play,
we have so often just reason to deplore. Again, the sudden assumption
by a too eager elder of a woolly hearth-rug may ruin at a stroke the
child’s purely imaginative vision that he is in the society of a bear.
Natural terror expels in an instant that higher emotion which the
drama is designed to create. The child recognises that the irrefutable
laws of the art have been rudely broken, to his own discomfort; and
it is always interesting to note on such occasions with what quick
and easy resource he will suddenly change the whole subject and scope
of the mimic performance, imperiously demanding that the bear shall
be exchanged for a horse, or some other domestic animal, whose milder
tendencies may be the more readily endured, even when the actor is
forgetful of the proper restraints of his art.

It is what survives of the child in us that makes us all playgoers,
although in the early days of our playgoing the unsuspected resources
of illusion which the theatre can command are often hard to endure.
It is, I suppose, the experience of most children--it certainly was
mine--that certain critical moments in drama, clearly foreseen and
eagerly anticipated, nevertheless prove in realisation too thrilling
and too intense for pure delight; and I can recall occasions, such
desired moments being clearly in view, when I would address a whispered
request to one of my elders that I might be permitted to watch the
ensuing scene from the safe vantage ground of the corridor at the back
of the dress circle. The small glass window in the red baize door
provided just that added veil of distance which rendered the sufferings
of the persons on the stage artistically tolerable. But the crisis once
past--a crisis generally signalised by the explosion of a pistol--I
was eager to return to my seat in order to appreciate with unabated
enjoyment the consequences of an act of violence I had not had the
courage to witness.

It is remarkable how little, in those very early days of playgoing,
we are at all concerned with the personality of the actor. The story
is all-absorbing, and in the poignant interest in the persons of the
story, all memory of the performer as a separate entity is submerged
and effaced. I had no thought at that time whether the actor was good
or bad. His performance appeared to me to be inevitable and inevitably
perfect. The day when he takes separate existence, apart from the
character he is presenting, marks a revolution in the life of the
playgoer, a revolution that is destined henceforward to complicate his
emotions, with never again any possible return to that earlier and
more confiding attitude when the illusion of the scene is absolute and
complete. It is difficult even to recall the names of the actors who
first greatly stirred me. They hardly stain my memory, for in my mind
they had no separate existence. But with this revolution is born a new
kind of enjoyment, that carries richer recollections. The limitless
world of illusion shrinks to a narrower kingdom, but its triumphs are
more vivid and more enduring: the sense of assumption and disguise is
no longer so complete or so convincing, but the message of revelation,
when it comes, brings with it a higher pleasure.

Nothing lives longer in remembrance, or pictures itself more vividly,
than the first impression of the performance of a great actor. Phelps
was the earliest of my heroes of this more sophisticated time, and
the first of his performances I can recall was that of Falstaff in
_King Henry IV._ produced at Drury Lane. Walter Montgomery was the
Hotspur of the occasion, and young Edmund Phelps figured as Prince Hal.
First impressions are hard to supplant, and the visual presentment
of Falstaff even now always takes the form and shape assigned to him
by the elder Phelps on that memorable evening. I saw him many times
afterwards--in _Othello_ and _King John_, in Mephistopheles, in
Bayle Bernard’s version of Goethe’s play, in Wolsey, in Sir Pertinax
M‘Sycophant, and in John Bull; and, although the more critical spirit
of a later hour left him shorn of some part of that perfection I
thought was his when I first saw him upon the stage, he ranks even
now in my recollection as a great and gifted exponent of a great
tradition. In his personality there was little to allure. It was rugged
and bereft of many of the lighter graces that are calculated to win
an audience; but his voice was incomparable, and the earnestness of
the artist beyond reproach. Nor could variety of resource be denied
him: he seemed equally equipped for his task as King John, Wolsey, or
Falstaff, or as Bottom in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. He fought his
way to a front rank in the profession at a time when older playgoers
were full of memories of men who were perhaps his superiors--of Kemble,
Kean, and, more recently, of Macready. But whatever he owed to any of
them--and I do not suppose he was ever tempted to deny his debt--it is
impossible not to concede to him a rare measure of individual power
that must always leave him his due rank among the English interpreters
of Shakespeare.

It must have been my first vision of Charles Fechter which enabled me
to realise as by a flash how much Phelps suffered by lack of personal
charm and grace. In those days I had not seen Fechter in Shakespeare.
I knew him only as the victorious lover and the conquering hero of
romantic drama. But, however conventional the material upon which
his talent was employed, the glamour of his personality exercised an
overpowering fascination.

To the youth of both sexes Fechter’s foreign accent constituted a charm
in itself. The rising cadence of his voice struck heroically on the
ear, and the swifter and freer gesture which came of his Gallic origin
added something of extra fascination to the unquestionably great gifts
with which he was endowed. In those days of the old Lyceum, when he was
acting in melodramas like _The Duke’s Motto_ and _Bel Demonio_, Miss
Kate Terry was constantly his partner and the two together seemed to
embody for the time the whole spirit of romance. But the moment of
Fechter’s acting which is stamped most firmly in my recollection was
in the last act of _Ruy Blas_. It was not till long afterwards when
growing stoutness had robbed him of that grace of form which belonged
to his earlier days, that I saw him in the part of _Hamlet_, and it is
perhaps hardly fair to test his fitness as a Shakespearean actor by
such later impressions. To me, however, that foreign cadence, which
linked itself so well with the impersonation of romantic heroism,
left a jarring note when it was yoked with the statelier measure of
English verse; and it was not till long afterwards, when I saw Irving’s
_Hamlet_, that I realised for the first time how much of the subtlety
of the character and beauty of the play could be realised within the
walls of a theatre.

The playgoer’s memories refuse to obey any strict chronological order.
They are rather governed by vividness of impression, which summons with
equal distinctness things seen long ago and triumphs of a more recent
date. My first vision of Sarah Bernhardt retains always a foremost
place in my playgoing experience. It was in Paris in the spring of
1876, and the play was _L’Étrangère_. She was surrounded by a company
of rare distinction--Coquelin, Croisette, and Mounet-Sully amongst
them. But I remember, as she came upon the stage, that a creature
almost of another race seemed suddenly to have invaded, and, at a
single stroke, to be dominating, the scene. Her personality appeared
at once to announce a new dialect in the language of Art. Her mode of
speech and her method of acting left almost unregarded and unremembered
the particular language in which the play was written. In virtue of
her genius she became at once an international possession, leaving,
by comparison, the artists around her almost provincial in style
and method. I had previously seen Ristori, and had marvelled at the
wonders of her art in Lucrezia Borgia and in Mary Stuart, an art that
was struck in a larger mould than Sarah Bernhardt could claim; and I
afterwards had to acknowledge the superb force and matchless physical
resource which Salvini brought to the theatre. But in neither case does
the first impression stand out so vividly in recollection as that first
impression of Sarah Bernhardt in Dumas’ play. And yet I remember Sir
Frederick Leighton, whose recollections of the theatre went back to an
earlier day, telling me that the effect produced by Rachel left Sarah
Bernhardt’s art by comparison almost in the region of the commonplace.

I have mentioned the name of Coquelin, whose talent in the region
of comedy was consummate, and even in this very performance of
_L’Étrangère_ his impersonation of the Duc de Septmonts leaves an
ineffaceable recollection. But I had already seen him in Molière, and
it was the endless resource with which he furnished the creations
of the master dramatist of France that gives him, I think, his
unapproachable place in the modern theatre. His own rich enjoyment of
every discovered detail of the carefully constructed portrait carried
with it the magic of infection, and, as the work grew under his hand,
the spectator was left with a pitiful consciousness of his own dulness
in having gathered from the written page so small a part of the
author’s manifest intention. In so far as the actor’s art seeks for the
triumphs of assumption and disguise, Coquelin was, indeed, beyond the
reach of rivalry, and it was perhaps pardonable, in view of his own
splendid achievement, that he should have been disposed to question the
claims of those whose mastery in this particular direction was not so
complete as his own. Coquelin to the last was intolerant of all acting
which allowed the personality of the performer to override the identity
of the particular character to be presented. He could be admiring, and
even enthusiastic, over the art of Irving, but always with an implied
reservation--the English actor never, to his thinking, sufficiently
effaced himself in his part; the performance, however brilliant in
intellectual force, was marred, in Coquelin’s judgment, by an imperfect
surrender of personality, and by a corresponding incompleteness of
assumption. And that was an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the French
artist.

It was agreeable to discuss these matters with Coquelin, for he was
a brilliant talker, quick in insight, and ever ready with the terse
and fit phrase to illustrate his meaning. And it was peculiarly
interesting to me, because the argument touched upon problems in the
actor’s art that I have always thought to be profoundly significant.
How far may the personality of the performer intrude itself in the
presentation of the chosen character, and to what extent are assumption
and disguise part of the indispensable equipment of the artist? These
are questions which every generation is apt to raise in regard to its
popular favourites upon the stage. And the answer is not easy to find.
To very many it will seem indisputable that versatility carries with
it the hall-mark of perfection, and that no actor can claim absolute
victory in any individual achievement unless we are allowed completely
to forget the person in the impersonation. Such critics are the avowed
champions of the art of disguise, and yet, to me at least, they leave
out of account the most profound and most memorable impressions which
the theatre is able to yield. The scenes which have most deeply
moved me, the performers whose art has stirred me to the strongest
emotion, are hardly associated in memory with any particular triumph
of characterisation. It is, in short, not disguise, but revelation,
which evokes and demands the highest histrionic gifts. The ingenuity
and resource that can distinguish and exhibit the markings of varying
personality must, of course, always count for much, but the imaginative
power which can recreate upon the scene the simpler and deeper emotions
that are common to us all must surely count for more; and in the
exercise of this higher power the lighter accessories employed to
achieve completeness of disguise must often be discarded and forgotten,
as the actor’s personality, impatient of all lesser fetters that impede
its utterance, becomes wholly engaged in the task of communicating
to his audience the deeper and more enduring passions of our common
humanity.

Of course, some may dream that these opposite qualities may be
combined. I have never seen them combined in any measure of
completeness. I remember thinking, when I first saw Sarah Bernhardt
in _Frou-Frou_, that her portraiture fell far short of that of
Desclée, the original creator of the rôle. And so, in fact, it did.
The countless subtleties, by means of which the earlier performer
had established the identity of the frivolous heroine of one of the
most masterly of modern French plays, were all lacking in the work
of her successor; but in the great scene in the third act, where
the tensity of the situation sounds a deeper note of drama, I felt
disposed to forget that any other _Frou-Frou_ had ever existed. Another
illustration pointing in the same direction may be found in the
exquisite art of the Italian actress, Eleanora Duse. When I saw her in
the _Dame aux camélias_ it was impossible to believe even for a moment
that this perfect embodiment of all that is beautiful in feminine
nature owned even the remotest relationship to the courtesan whom Dumas
had set himself to present upon the stage. The unconquerable purity
of her artistic personality left her helpless in the presence of her
chosen task. As mere assumption the performance counted for next to
nothing, and yet in its exquisite power to reveal the ever-deepening
emotions of a suffering human soul it was incomparable and superb.
It chanced that only three nights afterwards I saw Sarah Bernhardt
in this same play, and the contrast was striking and instructive. It
might have been another story; it certainly was another and a widely
different character. Possibly neither artist rendered faithfully the
author’s intention, and yet both had produced an impression of intense
enjoyment, such as the theatre is rarely able to confer.

On both of these evenings I had the good fortune to sit beside Miss
Ellen Terry, whose presence in the theatre I think contributed in
no small degree to the almost inspired performances of her comrades
upon the stage. I am not indiscreet enough to reveal her comparative
judgment of their competing claims, but I remember considering at the
time how far her own presentation of Marguerite Gauthier, if she had
ever undertaken the part, would have compared with the conception
of either. Here, again, is an instance of an artist who has never
sought, or who has sought in vain, to hide her own identity; and
yet of those who have felt the magic of her influence in the ideal
figure of Ophelia, in the exquisite raillery of Beatrice, or in the
tender sentiment of Olivia, who is there who would deny her right to
the foremost place in her profession? With her most surely the final
effect and impression rest upon powers of revelation--upon the ability
to realise and to interpret the simplest and the subtlest phases of
emotion, far more than upon those artifices of deception that make for
the more obvious triumphs of disguise.

It may, of course, be conceded that in his critical and discriminating
judgment of Irving’s acting Coquelin had before him an extreme
example of marked personal idiosyncrasy. The English actor, and no
one was better aware of the fact than himself, was partly hampered
in the exercise of his art by physical peculiarities that for many
years proved a serious hindrance in his career. But, even if he could
have shaken himself wholly free of them, he could never have effaced
the personality that lay behind them. It is, indeed, impossible to
conceive a more striking contrast than was presented by the two men as
I used often to see them in those intimate little supper-parties at the
Lyceum. Coquelin, despite his alert and agile intelligence, remained in
outward appearance almost defiantly bourgeois, and this indelible stamp
of his origin, which art had done nothing to refashion or refine, never
showed so clearly as when he stood beside the English actor, who, with
no better social title than his own, nevertheless carried about him a
nameless sense of race and breeding. I remember one night when they
stood up side by side towards the close of a long evening, Coquelin’s
silhouette bulging in somewhat rotund line as it traversed his ample
waistcoat, the comedian was enlarging in earnest and eager tones as to
his plans for the future. “I have the intention,” he said to Irving,
in his halting English, “I have the intention next year to assume the
rôle of _Richard III._” Irving seemed thoughtful for a moment, and then
his long, slender fingers lightly tapping that protuberant outline, he
murmured, as though half to himself, “Would you? I wonder!”




SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN


Arthur Sullivan’s final claims as a composer can only be settled by
time. It is not allowed, even to the expert, to hasten the judgment
of posterity, for, as we know from experience, that judgment does not
always accord with the verdict even of the most learned of the living.
But there is one fact which in Sullivan’s case time cannot dispute,
and that is the extraordinary influence which he exercised over his
generation. There is possibly no Englishman in any realm of art who,
during the same period, won the admiration of so many of his fellows:
none assuredly whose genius entered with so sweet a welcome into so
many English homes.

The art of the musician where it is destined to win any form of
popular response has indeed this peculiar prerogative. The processes
of its production are hedged around with special technicalities that
can be comprehended only by the few, but its completed message owns a
universal language that no other art can command. And those of us who
know of music no more than the pleasure it confers ought not on that
account to withhold our tribute of praise from a master who has charmed
us all. It is not only the super-subtle or the obscure which merits
respect, and we need not, therefore, be too timorous in confessing our
love of that which we are permitted to understand, resting assured that
there will remain critics enough to deliver the sterner judgment of
the higher courts. And amongst such critics there is a certain section
in music, as in literature, or in painting, whose ears are so finely
tuned to catch the first whisper of the moderating voice of the time
to come, that they are apt to lose their nerve for praise of their
contemporaries: others again so beset with the cant of categories that
they must needs deplore in the case of every gifted artist who chances
also to be popular that his gifts are not engaged in other and loftier
employment. We need not, however, be too greatly concerned with censure
of this sort; for the accepted formulas of criticism are after all but
the reflex of past achievement, and are liable to be recast or enlarged
in accordance with the needs and resources of those who have the power
to remodel them. Genius, indeed, takes little account of the accepted
classifications of the schools, and forms of art that were deemed
capable of holding only so much as they have hitherto contained are
suddenly transformed at the touch of new invention, which, in its turn,
forges new fetters doomed again to be shattered by the advent of some
later individuality.

But it is the personality of the artist rather than the quality of his
work that now chiefly concerns us. Of the latter, indeed, the present
writer has no title to speak save in terms of grateful admiration, and
although it is true of every man of genius that the finest attributes
of his nature lie surely enshrined in the fruit of his life’s labour,
yet those who enjoyed the privilege of Arthur Sullivan’s friendship
may be pardoned for thinking that the art with which he charmed the
world still left unrevealed a deeper fascination in the man himself.
So much at least is certain, that only those who knew him well were
able to realise the perfect accord that existed between the artist
and his work. This, as we know, is not always easy to discover. Life
sometimes refuses to surrender any hint of the subtler graces that
stand confessed in the artistic record given to the world for its
enjoyment; and, on the other hand, it will as often happen that the
product of hand or brain seems sternly to exclude some more intimate
charm that friendship alone can claim to have discovered. It was not so
in Sullivan’s case. The man and the artist were woven of one fabric
throughout, and those who have enjoyed the varied phases of his music,
from its graver to its lighter strains, may be said to have possessed a
faithful index to the purely personal qualities that won the affection
of his friends. In the unstudied converse of daily life he exhibited
in himself that same swift grace of alternating mood that is so
characteristic of his art. He was never afraid of the sudden entry of
humour into a discussion of the most serious theme, or of sounding a
deeper and graver note, however closely it may have followed upon the
heels of recent laughter. It was this that made him the most delightful
of companions. His instinct was so sure, his sympathy so finely tuned,
that he never missed his footing: his sense of harmony in friendship,
as in art, so absolutely irreproachable, that he never struck a jarring
note.

A great simplicity and generosity of nature lay, I think, at the root
of the rare social charm he possessed. In all my recollections of
our companionship I cannot recall a single ill-natured word towards
friend or acquaintance, or any bitter criticism of a comrade in art. In
another man such restraint might have seemed insipid: in his case it
was instinctive and obviously sincere. He was naturally endowed with
the genius of friendship, and what he had to say in the way of serious
criticism was delivered with such generous understanding of the claims
of other arts with which he was brought into association, that it could
never give offence. It was my good fortune more than once to be closely
allied with him in the execution of a common task, and those who have
written for music will know how constant are the opportunities for
friction between the author and the composer. The conflicting claims of
music and drama must needs breed keen discussion, and sometimes even
marked divergence of view, but with Arthur Sullivan the sense of what
was essential in the requirements he had to meet was so quick and so
true that it was rarely possible to withhold any concession he might
finally see fit to demand.

We met first in the seventies when we were fellow-guests in a
country-house in Scotland. The house party was a large one, and Sir
Arthur Sullivan, laying aside all claim to the kind of consideration
to which his reputation entitled him, became at once the life and soul
of the varied entertainments that were organised during the evenings
of our visit. If there were private theatricals or tableaux vivants he
would cheerfully supply the incidental music required for the occasion,
and was so little preoccupied with the dignity of his position as
composer that he would willingly accompany the songs of every amateur,
and when the need arose would seat himself patiently at the piano to
provide the music for an improvised dance. We met often in the years
that followed, and our acquaintance quickly ripened into a close and
lasting friendship. In the riverside houses, which he used then to
take during the summer months of the year, he was the most delightful
of hosts, and when I was able to accompany him on some of his trips
abroad, I found in his companionship a charm that never failed.

In 1894 he was invited by Sir Henry Irving to compose the music for
my play of King Arthur, and he became so deeply interested in the
subject that he afterwards planned the execution of an opera dealing
with the fortunes of Launcelot and Guinevere, for which I was to supply
the libretto. Owing to failing health, however, the scheme was never
carried to completion, and it is perhaps open to question whether the
sustained effort needed for the interpretation of a serious and tragic
theme would have so nicely fitted the natural bent of his genius as the
lighter framework provided for him by Sir William Gilbert.

Certainly the alliance of these two men proved of rare value to their
generation. It is impossible to conceive of talents so differently
moulded or so sharply contrasted, a contrast that found an apt
reflection in their strikingly divergent personalities. At the first
glance their partnership would hardly seem to promise a fruitful
result, and yet it was perhaps out of their very unlikeness that
they were enabled to derive something of constant inspiration from
one another. Gilbert’s humour, perhaps the most individual in his
generation, was cloaked beneath a somewhat sullen exterior. The settled
gravity of his expression, sometimes almost menacing in the sense of
slumbering hostility which it conveyed, gave hardly a hint of those
sudden flashes of wit which came like quick lightning from a lowering
sky, and was as far removed as possible from the sunny radiance of
Sullivan’s face, wherein the look of resident geniality stood ready
on the smallest provocation to reflect every passing mood of quickly
responsive appreciation. Many of the pungent epigrams of Gilbert are
well known, and if they were not in every case invented on the spur of
the moment, they were uttered with such apparent reluctance to disturb
the settled gravity of his demeanour as to produce in the listener
the conviction that he himself was the last person to suspect their
existence. Very often indeed they were obviously born of the moment of
their utterance. I remember our both being present in the stalls of
a theatre listening to an actor who was wont to mask his occasional
departure from strict sobriety by the adoption of a confidential tone
in delivery that sank sometimes to the confines of a whisper, when
Gilbert, leaning over my shoulder, remarked, “No one admires the art
of Mr. K---- more than I do, but I always feel I am taking a liberty
in overhearing what he says.” At another time, when he had been
invited to attend a concert in aid of the Soldiers’ Daughters’ Home,
he replied with polite gravity that he feared he would not be able
to be present at the concert, but that he would be delighted to see
one of the soldiers’ daughters home after the entertainment. These
are only two samples drawn at random from an inexhaustible store of
such sayings as must survive in the memory of all who knew him, and
the special flavour that is impressed upon them all is equally to be
noted in his work for the theatre, more particularly in those lyrical
portions of the operas composed in association with Sullivan. In the
art of stating a purely prosaic proposition in terms of verse he was
indeed without rival. His metrical skill only served to emphasise more
deeply the essential unfitness of the poetic form for the message he
had to convey; and this unconcealed discordance between the essence of
the thought to be expressed and the vehicle chosen for its expression,
became irresistible in its humorous appeal even before it had received
its musical setting. And yet that setting, as supplied by Sullivan,
gave to the whole a unique value. The sardonic spirit of the writer not
only called forth in Sullivan a corresponding humour in the adaptation
of serious musical form, but it enabled him to super-add qualities of
grace and beauty which deserved to rank as an independent contribution
of his own. In this way the combined result possessed a measure of
poetic charm and glamour which Gilbert’s verse in itself, despite
its rare technical qualities, could not pretend to claim, although
without the impulse supplied by his more prosaic partner, it may be
doubted whether even the finer graces of Sullivan’s genius would have
found such apt and fortunate expression. Certain it is that where the
task imposed upon him lacked the support of this satiric spirit, he
often laboured with a reward less entirely satisfying, and, on the
other hand, I think Gilbert himself was impelled by the exigencies
of their comradeship to indulge a more fanciful invention than was
characteristic of his isolated efforts as a writer of verse.

My final association with Sir Arthur Sullivan arose out of my joint
authorship with Sir Arthur Pinero in the libretto of _The Beauty
Stone_. I think the composer was conscious that the scheme of our work
constituted a somewhat violent departure from the lines upon which
his success in the theatre had hitherto been achieved. At an earlier
time this fact in itself would not, I believe, have proved unwelcome
to him, for he had confessed to me that he was sometimes weary of the
fetters which Gilbert’s particular satiric vein imposed upon him,
and his ambition rather impelled him to make trial in a field where,
without encountering all the demands incident to Grand Opera, he might
be able to give freer rein to the more serious side of his genius.
But the adventure, even had our share in the task proved entirely
satisfactory to the public, came too late. Poor Sullivan was already a
sick man. Sufferings long and patiently endured had sapped his power of
sustained energy, and my recollection of the days I passed with him in
his villa at Beaulieu, when he was engaged in setting the lyrics I had
written, are shadowed and saddened by the impression then left upon me
that he was working under difficulties of a physical kind almost too
great to be borne. The old genial spirit was still there, the quick
humour in appreciation and the ready sympathy in all that concerned
our common task, but the sunny optimism of earlier days shone only
fitfully through the physical depression that lay heavily upon him, and
when a little later we came to the strenuous times of rehearsal in the
theatre, one was forced to observe the strain he seemed constantly in
need of putting upon himself in order to get through the irksome labour
of the day. There were indeed brighter intervals when he seemed in
nothing changed from the man as I first knew him, but on such happier
moments would quickly follow long seasons of depression, showing itself
sometimes in an irritability of temper so foreign to his real nature as
to raise in the minds of his friends feelings of deep disquietude and
anxiety. But the Sullivan of those moods of dejection is not the man
whose portrait lives in the memory of those who knew him. It is easier
to think of him in those earlier days when the constant urbanity of his
outlook upon the world was lightened by a laughing humour constantly
inspired by sympathy and affection.




THE JUNIOR OF THE CIRCUIT


When I first joined the Northern circuit in the year 1872, it
covered a wider area than is now allotted to it. We used at that
time to begin operations at Appleby, journeying thence from Durham
to Newcastle, Carlisle, Lancaster, Manchester, and Liverpool. The
members of the Local Bar in the two last-named cities were already
strong and powerful, but they had not yet absorbed so large a share
of the business of the assizes as they now enjoy. It was Charles
Crompton--with whom I had read in chambers--who secured for me the
coveted position of Junior of the circuit, and the first occasion on
which I set out to discharge the somewhat anomalous duties of my office
I shared rooms at Durham with the present Mr. Justice Kennedy, who, I
think, had himself been a candidate for the post.

I have referred to the duties of the Junior of the circuit as being
somewhat anomalous, because although, as his title would imply, he
is always chosen from the newest of its recruits, tradition dowers
him with a figment of authority which is altogether out of proportion
to any personal qualifications he may chance to possess. He disputes
the leadership of the circuit with the leader himself, and is assumed
to hold specially in his keeping the interests of the Junior Bar as
opposed to whatever arrogant claims may be put forward by the more
fortunate wearers of the silken gown. To this defiant attitude,
where the opportunity for defiance was in any sense possible, I was
constantly urged by the members of the Junior Bar, whose cause I was
supposed to champion; and it was deemed a duty, which no Junior of
spirit could safely ignore, that on any public occasion when he had
to stand up as spokesman of the circuit, he should depreciate, with
all the resources at his disposal, both the intellectual prowess and
the professional bearing of the eminent Queen’s counsel who were
assembled at assize. The dignity thus assigned to him was, of course,
only half-humorously entertained by his comrades of both ranks, but
so much of reality still attached to the office that the holder of
it, if he chose to take advantage of the situation, found ample
opportunity for the trial and exercise of such gifts of oratory as he
might be fortunate enough to possess. Wherever and whenever the members
of the circuit were entertained, the Junior had to brace himself
to his allotted task; and although at the time I had been assigned
no opportunity of airing my powers of speech in open court, these
festive gatherings, which occurred in nearly every separate county we
visited, left me free for the crude practice of an art that had always
profoundly attracted me.

The leaders of the Northern circuit, whose virtues I was called upon
to assail, numbered at that time some of the most distinguished
representatives at the Bar. Herschell, Russell, Holker, and Sam Pope
had all either attained or were nearing the zenith of their fame; while
among the Junior Bar it may suffice to cite the names of the late
Lord Selby (then Mr. Gully), Mr. Henn Collins (the late Master of the
Rolls), Lord Mersey, and Mr. Justice Kennedy. It was a privilege to
watch the work in court in which the powers of some of these giants
of the profession were daily called into exercise. I used to hear
some of my contemporaries sigh over the weary ordeal of having to
sit and listen to cases in which they were not concerned; a little
later, in the courts at Westminster, I sometimes shared that feeling
of fatigue; but my experience of two years of circuit life yields few
dull memories. The proceedings on circuit are perhaps more concentrated
in their interest than can, in the nature of things, be claimed for
the more scattered and diversified arena of the metropolis; one is
brought more nearly into touch with the chief actors in the drama, and
the incidents of the day are renewed and discussed at the Bar mess in
the evening. It is possible there to gauge and to measure the social
qualities of the men whose public performances in court are still under
consideration, and to link the more human side of this or that great
advocate, as it was frankly and freely exhibited in those hours when we
sat at wine after dinner, with the purely intellectual gifts that had
been set in action during the day. No one, for instance, who knew Mr.
Russell (afterwards Lord Russell of Killowen) only by his conduct of
a case in court, where the qualities of an imperious temper joined to
an unrelenting gravity of manner coloured and dominated the impression
which even his most eloquent speeches produced, could have readily
divined that he possessed at the same time a vein of genuine sentiment
that, in his more sympathetic moods, showed itself as being no less
clearly an integral part of his nature. And yet this softer side of
his character was often shown at the circuit mess, and I have more
than once seen his eyes moistened with tears as he would sing, without
any great pretence of art, one or more of Moore’s sentimental Irish
melodies.

Nor could it have been readily guessed that, beneath the look of
slumbering power which marked Holker’s personality, there lurked a
quickened sense of humour of which he could make agile display when
the needs of the social occasion called it into being. The almost
daily contest between these two men, so differently equipped, and yet
often so equally matched, formed one of the most interesting subjects
of study to the youngster whose idle days were passed in court; for
down the length of the circuit, from Durham to Liverpool, there were
few causes of any magnitude or importance in which they were not both
engaged, and their divergent personalities and varying methods remain
to me now as an unfading recollection. It was sometimes difficult
to realise that Holker owned any real claims to eloquence until the
cumulative effect of his untiring insistence found its reflex in the
favourable verdict of the jury. That, at any rate, was the first
impression.

It was only afterwards that the student was able to realise what a
wealth of intellectual resource and unsleeping vigilance lay masked
beneath the somewhat uncouth exterior in which the immobile and
unresponsive features gave scarcely a hint of the quick insight
into human nature, and the swift grasp of what was essential either
in the strength or the weakness of his cause. Grace of oratory he
certainly could never boast, but his very disability in this respect
seemed sometimes to serve him as a source of power. His humble and
deprecating manner, as though he were struggling with a task too
great for him, made an irresistible appeal to the sympathies of a
Northern jury, who would seem silently bidden to come to the aid of
this giant in distress, and who were never, I think, aware that in
leaning towards what they deemed the weaker side, they were, in fact,
the victims of the most consummate art which cloaked itself in almost
blundering simplicity of phrase. Russell’s more brilliant gifts as
an orator often beat in vain against what seemed at first sight to
be the ill-adjusted and cumbrous methods of his adversary; while at
other times the superior grace and vehemence of his style carried him
safely to victory. Even at that date it seemed to me clear that he was
destined to take his place as the most distinguished advocate at the
Bar, and those who had the privilege of watching his career at that
time had not long to wait to witness the fulfilment of their prophecy.
I think of him always as an advocate, for although his natural gift of
speech might have fitted him to win renown in almost any arena, it may
nevertheless be justly said of him that it was the office of advocacy
alone which furnished the needed impulse for the display of his highest
gifts as an orator. It is possibly for that reason that his career
in Parliament never quite justified his commanding reputation at the
Bar, and it is certainly true--as I myself have witnessed more than
once--that in the discharge of those lighter duties that fall to a
speaker on festal occasions he moved with little ease of style and with
far inferior effect.

It was the concrete issue, carrying with it a full sense of
responsibility, that was needed to set in motion the great forces of
character and intellect that were his by right. It was the sense of
the duel that pricked him forward to the display of his powers at
their best; and it is, I think, this same sense of the duel that forms
the supreme element of interest to those who are called upon to watch
the conduct of a great trial in which grave issues are at stake. To
the trained mind of the lawyer an intricate case, in which only civil
interests are involved, provides perhaps the fullest opportunity for
watching the expert sword-play between two leaders who are fitly armed
for their task; but from the more human and dramatic point of view
it is the criminal court in an assize town that more often attracts
the presence of the younger student. A murder trial, where the man
whose life is in the balance stands before you in the dock during the
long hours of a protracted hearing, becomes, as the case advances,
absorbing, and even oppressive, in its interest. The very air of
the crowded court seems charged with the message of this one human
story; it is difficult, as the sordid and pitiable facts are gradually
revealed, to conceive that there is any other drama than that which
is being enacted within those four walls. And as the trial drags its
course, with each new link in the evidence seeming to forge a chain
that is gradually drawing closer around the wretched being who stands
before you in the dock, the intensity of the situation becomes so great
and so strained that one is almost tempted to believe that the whole
world is awaiting that one word from the lips of the jury which shall
set him free once more or send him to his doom.

I can recall many such trials during my brief service on the Northern
circuit, and sometimes when the hearing outran the hours commonly
allotted for the sittings of the court, and when judge and jury, by
mutual consent, had agreed that the end should be reached before the
end of the day, the inherent solemnity of the scene would receive an
added sense of awe and terror as the fading daylight gradually deserted
the building, and the creeping shadows half-shrouded the faces of the
spectators eagerly and silently intent upon every word that fell from
the judge in his summing-up--whose grave countenance, only partly
illumined by the candles that had been set upon his desk, stood in
dreadful contrast with that of the prisoner who confronted him with
ashen face like that of a spectre in the darkness. And once I remember,
when the fatal verdict had been given, and the judge had passed to
the dread task of pronouncing sentence--a task never in my experience
discharged without the signs of visible emotion--the terror of the
scene was still further heightened as the prisoner, shrieking for
mercy, held fast to the bar of the dock, and was only at last removed
by force to the cells below.

Such memories count among the sadder experiences of circuit life, and
were relieved by much else in the ordinary work of the day that leaves
a happier recollection. I believe the circuit mess has now greatly
fallen from its former estate; in my time it flourished exceedingly.
At each of the great towns we kept a well-stocked cellar of our own,
and it was the business of the junior to see that the members dining
were kept well supplied with the wine of their choice. The increase of
the Local Bar in many of the great centres has no doubt considerably
changed all this--with some loss, as it must be, of the sense of
good-fellowship which then bound us together. But at that time those
nightly gatherings, at which nearly every member of the circuit dined,
kept alive a kind of schoolboy feeling that infected the graver
leaders no less than the Junior Bar. The dinner-hour brought with it
always something of a festal spirit, and there were special occasions,
such as grand nights, that were wholly given over to a frolic mood. We
had our accredited Poet Laureate, poor Hugh Shield, who has now joined
the majority, and whose duty it was to provide the fitting doggerel
to be recited at the mess. Nor were these effusions too strictly
judged, from a purely literary point of view, if they were sufficiently
besprinkled with pungent personal references to such members as were
deemed to afford fitting material for the exercise of the poet’s
humour. Another of those who was a prodigal contributor to the humours
of the evening was M‘Connell, who afterwards became judge of the
Middlesex Sessions. And even the leader was not allowed to escape his
contribution, although it was sometimes hinted that his lighter essays
in prose and verse were supplied to him by some one of his friends
whose professional services were not so fully employed.

Though the barrister’s calling did not long hold me in its service,
I have always retained the keenest interest in the triumphs of its
distinguished representatives. Perhaps of no other profession can it be
so truly said that it is fitted to claim the undivided allegiance of
the strongest character and the keenest intellect; possibly, for that
reason it leaves the most indelible mark upon its followers. A great
lawyer, in whatever arena he may be encountered, never quite divests
himself of the habit of the law; just as there are some men who, by a
natural academic inclination, remain always and obviously members of
their University, no matter how far removed may be the ultimate field
of their activity. But if a lawyer is always a lawyer, it is perhaps
for that very reason that he is often such excellent company, and this,
I think, applies especially to members of the Common Law Bar, who do
not incur the same danger of becoming enmeshed in the enclosing net
of legal subtleties. With them the study and knowledge of character
becomes often a greater element of strength, than a profound knowledge
of legal principles.




BY THE SIDE OF A STREAM


If a writer happens to be an angler, he will often find himself when in
holiday mood on the banks of a trout stream. There is long warrant for
the association of these two callings. Since the day of Izaak Walton,
whom we still follow with such delight in his rambles beside the Dove
or the Lea, the hand whose chief office it is to hold the pen has
again and again, in hours of leisure, been found wielding the rod. We
have modern examples in Charles Kingsley, whose “Chalk Stream Studies”
may perhaps outlast many of his more ambitious essays in literature;
and Mr. Froude has left among his miscellaneous writings a delightful
record of a day’s fishing on a Hertfordshire stream. William Black,
the novelist, never tired of recounting to me his various adventures
in northern waters; and among modern writers, Mr. Andrew Lang may
also be cited as an unwearying follower of the gentle art. I think,
indeed, the alliance I have noted has in it something more than the
accident of individual taste. There is no need for the long leisure
of a set holiday to enable the man of letters to turn to his favourite
recreation. The more violent forms of sport, which exact the devotion
of a day, or of a series of days, require the enforced cessation of all
forms of literary toil; but if the angler is fortunately located, work
and play are by no means inconsistent and--granted that he is strong
enough to resist during the earlier hours of the day the alluring call
of the gentle south-west breeze with its alternating changes of sun
and cloud--the morning may still hold him chained to his desk, sure of
the reward of his industry in the evening ramble by the stream. And
if his success as an angler be not too complete--and how often it is
not!--the subject of his morning task will often renew itself in the
happy solitude that counts among the many joys which angling can boast.

My own apprenticeship as a fisherman was passed among the Cumberland
hills. Earlier experience had taken me no further than an occasional
day on the upper reaches of the Thames, but even this cockney form of
the sport in its annual recurrence was looked forward to with delight;
and though the reward was no more than a few gudgeon, with a rare
and occasional perch, such puny triumphs already whetted my appetite
for the day when I should be admitted to the deeper mysteries of
the fly-fisher’s art. My first master in this higher branch of the
profession was no hero save to me. He was a gentleman of unsettled
occupation, who dwelt in a cottage close beside Grasmere Churchyard,
where Wordsworth lies buried; and by the more orderly characters of
the village his wayward habits of life, involving constantly recurring
lapses into inebriety, were regarded with stern reprobation. But for
me, at the time, any doubt of the moral integrity of his character
was silenced by the indisputable fact that he was an unrivalled
professor of his art. I accepted him without misgiving as my comrade
and my master, and this at least may be urged in mitigation of the
harsher judgment of the village, that the night’s debauch, of which I
was myself too often the reluctant witness, never hindered him from
appearing under our cottage window as soon after dawn as I was prepared
to set out on our daily expedition. His stock-in-trade as a fisherman
was of the homeliest and scantiest description. His rod, consisting
of two parts rudely spliced together, had been fashioned by himself;
and by the side of the beck or the mountain tarn, with fingers that
alcohol still left incomparably steady for their task, he would forge,
with such rough process of imitation as he could command, the fly that
he thought best suited for the conditions of the water or the day. In
his company my brother and I rambled far afield. There was no upland
stream or lonely pool within a circuit of five miles where our untried
skill was not assiduously exercised. At that time the lakes and rivers
of Cumberland were not so unceasingly flogged by the summer visitor,
and there were sequestered haunts well known to him that were scarcely
visited by the tourist at all.

One specially favoured spot was a tiny lake called Harrop Tarn,
surrounded by a quaking bog, that lay in the hills above Thirlmere.
My revered master, though a genuine sportsman, was not wholly
irreproachable in regard to some delicate questions that lay on the
border-land of poaching, and it was at Harrop, where the bank was
in most places unapproachable, that he initiated us in the subtle
mysteries of cross-lining. Be it counted to his honour, however, that
these occasional departures from the stricter etiquette of his calling
were never undertaken without enjoining on us the most solemn pledge of
secrecy, a fact that at the time gave to the delights of almost certain
success the added excitement of some unknown personal risk and danger.

But the Lake district, it must be confessed, was even then no paradise
for the trout-fisher. It satisfied well enough the moderate ambition of
a boy, who was still a bungler in the art, and it served, at any rate,
as fitting ground for that patient apprenticeship which is necessary
to all who desire to become proficient in the science and practice of
casting a fly. Scotland, a few years later, offered a wider field, with
the occasional chance of larger triumphs; and it was there that I first
became conscious of my ability to meet my desired prey upon more equal
terms. The upper reaches of the Tay, as it runs between Crianlarich and
Killin, became for many years my favourite hunting-ground. The little
inn at Luib was our resting-place, and Loch Dochart, which lay five
miles up the stream, our favourite resort when wind and weather served.
I can recall no sense of fatigue from the ten miles of mountain road
that we had to trudge by the time our day’s work was done, though we
were often drenched to the skin before we reached the inn at night. Nor
did the inn itself, at that time, offer absolute protection against the
weather, and sometimes when the storm beat heavily upon the uncertain
roof we had to make our way upstairs to our rooms under the shelter of
an umbrella.

Some years later I found my way to the Western Highlands as the invited
guest of a dear friend who was almost as keen a fisherman as myself.
I had often heard of the _Salmo ferox_, whose identity as a separate
species is, I believe, still in dispute, but it was not until one
memorable day upon Loch Awe that I encountered the monster in person.
A fair morning had changed suddenly to a wild storm of wind and rain,
and the surface of the lake was lashed into the semblance of a mimic
sea. Fly-fishing was out of the question, and our gillie in despair
suggested that we might put out the trolling rod with a large phantom
minnow for bait, while we tried to make our way against the wind back
to the landing-place. I do not think there was any expectation even on
his part that the endeavour would yield any result, and I, who held the
rod in hands that were nearly frozen by the beating rain, was entirely
unprepared for the violent and sudden tug that nearly wrenched it from
my grasp. But when that tug came, no one thought any more about the
storm, and for nearly half an hour of throbbing excitement we were
engaged in a fierce struggle that seemed at any moment likely to end
in our ignominious defeat. Again and again the great trout rose to the
surface and sprang high into the air, and then, with sudden change of
tactics, it would dive, as it would seem, to the floor of the lake,
and lie in sullen resistance to such pressure as we dared put upon the
line. But the victory long delayed was ours at last, not, however, I
will admit, without some element of disappointment in the appearance
and quality of our captive. A long, lank fish, that scaled something
between 8 lb. and 9 lb., but which, if it had been in condition, ought
to have mounted to as much as half its weight again: an ugly fish, with
the mouth and jaws of a pike, it still left us in wonder where it had
found the force to offer so stubborn a resistance.

An occasional monster during a day which seems to offer the prospect of
only smaller fry is one of the pleasurable excitements of loch-fishing
in Scotland. Only a few years ago I set out in pleasant company from
a cottage beside the shores of Mull, to make a picnic near one of the
little lochs that lay about five miles up the hill. Two or three of us
had taken our rods, but with no thought of a larger capture than the
small brown trout and Fontinalis with which we knew these hill lochs
were well stocked. The day was busily spent, and most of the party had
already started homeward on the downward path, when the gillie who was
with us said that he knew of another little loch about a mile over the
hill, where rumour had it that there were certain larger trout which
had never been induced to rise to the fly. My host and I, with one
other companion, determined to make trial of this unconquered pool,
and set out across the heather just as the sun was beginning to dip
behind the shelter of the hill. It had been a scorching day, and was a
lovely evening. As we came in sight of the little loch it seemed to us
both that if these reluctant fish were ever to be lured to the net, the
present was the most propitious occasion for the adventure.

It chanced that my friend had in his case a fine cast of drawn gut
with a small floating fly, which a month or two before he had used on
a southern stream; I myself had chosen an Alder of a pattern I had
found efficient two or three years before on some of the little lochs
above Glenmuich. Our gillie knew nothing of the mysteries of the dry
fly, though he had heard tell of its wonders, and it was indeed mainly
at his instigation that we were tempted to present this lure on the
present occasion. We threw our lines almost simultaneously far out into
the tranquil surface of the pool, but the luck was with my rival, for
his fly had scarcely reached the water when there came a sudden flop
and a splash, and it was evident by the mighty rush, that took out
nearly the whole of the line from his reel, that the legend related
to us by the keeper had a solid foundation in fact. It is astonishing
what strength and persistence these larger lake trout display. A fish
of equal weight in the Test or the Itchen would most assuredly have
been brought to bank within half an hour or less, but on this occasion
it was nearer three hours before our capture was complete. A part of
our difficulty was due to the fact that the tackle was of the finest,
so that it was impossible to put any strain upon the line; and even, at
the last, when the struggle was practically at an end, there came the
added difficulty that the long gloaming had fallen into darkness, and
the application of the landing-net became a hazardous operation. Twice
the line nearly parted when the fish was within less than a yard of the
bank; but when it was safely netted it proved to be a splendid trout of
something over 4-1/2 lb., in perfection of colour and condition. It was
under a moonless sky and in pitch darkness that we picked our way amid
the rough boulders down to the valley below, where we were met within
a mile of home by the rest of our party, who had already set out with
lanterns to come to our rescue.

There is not often occasion for the use of the dry fly in the
Highlands, though I remember employing it with some success one evening
at Kinloch-Rannoch, where the waters of the river run with tranquil
flow from the lake. But it is a delightful branch of the fly-fisher’s
craft, of unending fascination to those who have once gained a mastery
over its secrets. For some years I was in happy possession of a little
cottage on the upper reaches of the Lea, where the narrow stream, in
places no more than a few yards across, gave no hint, save to the
initiated, of the heavy fish which found a home and haunt under its
banks. It was, indeed, only during the annual rise of the May-fly
that this little river made anything like a full announcement of its
thriving population. During the weeks before and after this recurrent
season of debauch, there was little chance of a heavy basket, and for
that reason it made a delightful home for any one occupied in writing,
to whom at those seasons the banks of the stream offered no compelling
temptation. Two or three hours in the evening after work was done
sufficed to test the chances of sport, and I was amply satisfied if
I returned to the cottage at nightfall with a brace or a brace and a
half of handsome trout. But with the advent of the May-fly my desk, I
confess, was deserted. From my windows, as I tried to write, I could
hear and see the constant splashing in the stream which proclaimed
that the fish were already on the feed. The cottage and the stretch
of river that belonged to it are, alas! no longer mine, and I am told
that there, as in so many other southern streams, the rise of the fly
is no more what it was ten years ago. In those days, on a favourable
morning, the meadows that bordered the water were all alight with
myriads of these beautiful ephemorae, and the stream itself, as far
as the eye could trace its course, literally alive with the boil and
splash of the feeding fish. For every fly that touched the water there
seemed to be an attendant and expectant trout. Larger fish, that kept
to their deeper haunts at other seasons, now took up their stations
in mid-stream, and the veriest tiro in these favouring circumstances
could scarcely go home with an empty basket. But there are days of luck
and days of disaster at all seasons: days even during the May-fly time
when the most skilful fisherman has sometimes to confess a series of
mishaps, while a companion not a hundred yards away is crowned with
good fortune. When the weed is heavy--and for my part I have a liking
for the presence of the weed, and deprecate the close shearing of the
stream which is too often the modern habit--it is inevitable that
some of the heavier fish should make their escape. The most fortunate
morning that I can recall was a basket of twelve fish, weighing in all
28-1/2 lb.; and the largest trout that has ever fallen to my rod there,
though by no means the largest known to the river, was within an ounce
of 4 lb.

In days of early spring or late summer, when there is no rise of fly to
tempt the angler, the keeper and I used to find congenial occupation
in ridding the stream of some of the heavy jack that were apt in those
days to come from Luton Hoo. It was he who first initiated me in the
art, of which he himself was a past master, of securing these marauding
cannibals by the aid of a running wire. Like many a good keeper, he
had been in his boyhood something of a poacher, and even in those
later days, when his morality was beyond reproach, be retained certain
stealthy and secret ways that dated from the lawless times of his
youth. At any likely bend of the stream, where a deeper pool rendered
probable the presence of a jack, and when I might perhaps be deploring
the fact that we had left our wires at the cottage, he would suddenly
to my surprise produce an ash sappling that lay hidden in the long
grass, not three yards away, with the running noose already attached
to its point. Nothing could exceed the quickness of his vision in
detecting the neighbourhood of his prey, and nothing could equal the
incomparable steadiness of his hand as he reached far out across the
stream and deftly passed the wire over the head of the jack as it lay
half asleep in the sun. And then, before I was aware that the operation
was complete, with a sudden wrench that almost cut the fish in twain
he would lift a jack of 4 lb. or 5 lb. high into the air, and fling it
over his head on to the bank. It was perhaps the recollection of his
earlier poaching days that made him so zealous and watchful during the
spawning season, which offers to the poacher his favourite opportunity.
At these times he would spend long hours of the night beside the
stream, never seeming to grudge any demand that was made upon his rest,
and it was while he was so employed that he made capture of a large
otter, whose marauding expeditions he had long reason to suspect.
Otters, I think, are not common on that part of the Lea; certainly this
was the only specimen brought to my knowledge during my long tenancy
of the cottage. But even a single otter can work ruinous havoc among
the trout, as we had then reason to know, and it was therefore with
pardonable pride that, when I came down to breakfast one morning, he
laid his dead victim out to view on the little lawn in front of the
door.

I sometimes think that those who haunt the country, without conscious
sense of its many beauties, are apt to learn and love its beauties
best. How often the memory of a day’s shooting is indissolubly linked
with the pattern of a fading autumn sky, when we have stood at the edge
of a stubble field wondering whether the growing twilight will suffice
for the last drive. And if this is true of other forms of sport, it
is everlastingly true of fishing. There is hardly a remembered day
on a Scotch loch, or beside a southern stream, which has not stamped
upon it some unfading image of landscape beauty. It was not for that
we set forth in the morning, for then the changing lights in a dappled
sky counted for no more than a promise of good sport; during those
earlier hours there is no feeling but a feeling of impatience to be
at work; and the splash of a rising trout, before the rod is joined
and ready and the line run through its rings, is heard with a sense of
half-resentment lest we should have missed the favourable moment of the
day. But as the hours pass, the mind becomes more tranquilly attuned
to its surroundings. The keenness of the pursuit is still there, but
little by little the still spirit of the scene invades our thoughts,
and as we tramp home at nightfall the landscape that was unregarded
when we set forth upon our adventure now seems to wrap itself like a
cloak around us with a spell that it is impossible to resist. A hundred
such visions, born of an angler’s wanderings, come back to me across
the space of many years. I can see the reeds etched against a sunset
sky, as they spring out of a little loch in the hills above the inn at
Tummel. And then, with a changing flash of memory, the broad waters of
Rannoch are outspread, fringed by its purple hills. And then, again,
in a homelier frame, I can see the willows that border the Lea, their
yellow leaves turned to gold under the level rays of the evening sun;
and I can hear the nightingale in the first notes of its song as I
cross the plank bridge that leads me homeward to the cottage by the
stream.




INDEX


  Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 26-41


  Barnard, Fred, 217, 218

  Barry, James, 119

  _Beauty Stone_, the, 251

  Bell, Professor: Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth, 167

  Bernhardt, Sarah, 233, 237, 238

  Black, William, 264

  Blake, William, 120

  Bleheris: story of the Holy Grail, 148

  Boaden, James: Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth, 167

  Bohemia Past and Present, 1-11

  Bough, Sam, 131

  Bret Harte, 215

  Brough, Robert Barnabas, 119

  Brown, Ford Madox, 126

  Brown, Oliver Madox, 52

  Browning, Robert, 12

  Burne-Jones, Edward, 56-88;
    friendship with Alma-Tadema, 31;
    appreciation of Rossetti, 49, 56, 86;
    paintings referred to, 60;
    friendship with William Morris, 86;
    paintings at Roman Exhibition, 127;
    Du Maurier’s opinion of, 217


  Caldecott, Randolph, 216

  Clayden, P. W., 164

  Clint, George, 109

  Collins, Henn, 255

  Constable, John, 130

  Coquelin, B. C., 233, 234, 240

  Cotman, John Sell, 131

  Cox, David, 131

  Craven, Hawes, 207

  Crestien de Troyes--story of the Holy Grail, 148

  Crome, John, 131

  Crompton, Charles, 253


  De Hoogh, 33

  Desclée, Mme., 237

  Dickens, Charles, 215

  Du Maurier, George, 216

  Duse, Eleanora, 238

  Dyce, William, 125


  English School of Painting at the Roman Exhibition, 101-133

  Etty, William, 120


  Faulkner, Charles, 86

  _Faust_, Irving’s preparations for, 206

  Fletcher, Charles, 232

  Fletcher, Mr., 164

  Frith, William Powell, 107

  Froude, James Anthony, 264

  Furse, 119

  Fuseli, Johann Caspar, 119


  Gainsborough, Thomas, 113, 114, 115, 129

  Geddes, Andrew, 118

  George Eliot, 142

  Gilbert, Sir William, 247-250

  Gregory, E. J., 109


  Haydon, B. R., 119

  Herschel, Sir F., 255

  Hogarth, William, 104-106

  Holker, Sir John, 255-257

  Holl, Frank, 119

  Hook, 131

  Hoppner, John, 113, 118

  Humour, A Sense of, 213-226

  Hunt, Holman, 44, 124;
    pre-Raphaelite movement, 43, 50, 121


  Irving, Sir Henry, 199-212, 233, 235, 240


  Junior of the Circuit, the, 253-263


  Keene, Charles, 216

  Kemble, Mrs., 163

  Kennedy, Mr. Justice, 253, 255

  _King Arthur_, Mr. Carr’s version of, for Henry Irving, 210;
    music for, written by Sir Arthur Sullivan, 247

  Kingsley, Charles, 264


  Lang, Andrew, 264

  Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 118

  Lawson, Cecil, 131

  Leech, John, 216, 217

  Leighton, Sir Frederick, 19, 35, 128, 234;
    paintings at Roman Exhibition, 129

  Lewis, John Frederick, 109

  Leyland, Fred, referred to, 52

  Lorraine, Claude, 131


  _Macbeth_, 162-198;
    Irving’s reading of, 205

  Maclise, Daniel, 108

  M‘Connell, W. R., 262

  Malory, Sir Thomas, 147

  Mason, 131

  May, Phil, 217

  Meredith, George, 134-146

  Mersey, Lord, 255

  Millais, Sir John Everett, 13-25, 65;
    pre-Raphaelite movement, 43, 50, 121;
    paintings referred to, 23, 44, 123;
    Rossetti’s praise of, 51;
    portrait painting, 119;
    paintings at Roman Exhibition, 123;
    Du Maurier’s praise of, 217

  Montgomery, Walter, 231

  Morris, William, 86


  Nutt, Alfred: story of the Holy Grail, 150, 160


  Opie, John, 119

  Orchardson, Sir William, 106


  “Parsifal”: origin of legend, etc., 147-161

  Pettie, John, 110

  Phelps, Edmund (jun.), 231

  Phelps, Samuel, 230

  Pope, Sam, 255

  Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood--aims and achievements of, etc., 5, 42,
    50, 55, 120, 125


  Rae, Mr., 45

  Raeburn, Sir Henry, 113, 118

  Ramsay, Allan, 118

  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 110, 114, 116

  Ristori, Mme., 234

  Roman Exhibition, English school of painting at, 101-133

  Romney, George, 113, 117

  Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 42-55;
    paintings referred to, 46, 122;
    praise of Millais, 51;
    encouragement and appreciation of Burne-Jones, 56, 57;
    pre-Raphaelite movement, 43, 50, 55, 121;
    paintings at Roman Exhibition, 122;
    Du Maurier’s opinion of, 217

  Ruskin, John, 125

  Russell of Killowen, Lord, 255, 256, 258


  Salvini, Tomaso, 234

  Sandys, Frederick, 119, 126

  Selby, Lord (Mr. Gully), 255

  Sex in Tragedy--_Macbeth_, 162-198, 205

  Shield, Hugh, 262

  Siddons, Mrs.: personation of Lady Macbeth, 166-170, 205

  Sitting at a Play, 227-241

  Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 242-252


  Terriss, William, 202

  Terry, Ellen, 201, 210, 239

  Terry, Kate, 232

  Tissot, Amédée Angelot, referred to, 31

  Toole, J. L., 220-226

  _Tristram and Iseult_, 147

  Trout-fishing, 264-277

  Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 131-132;
    paintings at Roman Exhibition, 131


  Walker, Frederick, 131

  Watts, G. F., 119, 128

  Wauchier: story of the Holy Grail, 148

  Weston, Miss Jessie: story of the Holy Grail, 150, 156

  Whistler, James McNeill, 89-100

  Wilkie, Sir David, 106

  Wills, W. G., 206, 210

  Wilson, Richard, 130, 131

  Wolfram von Eschenbach: story of the Holy Grail, 149


  Zoffany, Johann, 109


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