During the closing years of the last century certain critics contracted a rather depressing habit of numbering men of letters, especially poets, as though they were overcoats in a cloak-room, or boys competing in an examination set by themselves. ‘It requires very little discernment,’ wrote the late Churton Collins,a.d.1891, ‘to foresee that among the English poets of the present century the first place willultimatelybe assigned to Wordsworth, the second to Byron, and the third to Shelley.’ Matthew Arnold, I fear, was the first to make these unsafe Zadkielian prognostications. He, if I remember correctly, gave Byron the first place and Wordsworth the second; but Swinburne, with his usual discernment, observed that English taste in that eventuality would be in the same state as it was at the end of the seventeenth century, which firmly believedthat Fletcher and Jonson were the best of its poets.
But when is Ultimately? Obviously not the present moment. Byron does not hold the rank awarded him by the distinguished critic in 1891. The cruel test of the auctioneer’s hammer has recently shown that Keats and Shelley are regarded as far more important by those unprejudiced judges, the book-dealers. Wordsworth, of course, is still one of the poets’ poets, and theSpectator, that Mrs. Micawber of literature, will, of course, never desert him; but I doubt very much whether he has yet reached the harbour of Ultimately. His repellent personality has blinded a good many of us to his exquisite qualities; on the Greek Kalends of criticism, however, may I be there to see. I shall certainly vote for him if I am one of the examiners—or one of the cloak-room attendants.
It was against such kind of criticism that Whistler hurled his impatient epigram about pigeon-holes. And if it is absurd in regard to painting, how much more absurd is it in regard to the more various and less friable substances of literature. By the old ten-o’clockrule (I do not refer to Whistler’s lecture), once observed in Board schools, no scripture could be taught after that hour. Once a teacher asked his class who was the wisest man. ‘Solomon,’ said a little boy. ‘Right; go up top,’ said the teacher. But there was a small pedant who, while never paying much attention to the lessons, and being usually at the bottom of the form in consequence, knew the regulations by heart. He interrupted with a shrill voice (for the clock had passed the hour), ‘No, sir, please, sir; past ten o’clock, sir . . . Solon.’ Thus it is, I fear, with critics of every generation, though they try very hard to make the time pass as slowly as possible.
But if invidious distinctions between great men are inexact and tiresome, I opine that it is ungenerous and ignoble to declare that when a great man has just died, we really cannot judge of him or his work because we have been his contemporaries. The caution of obituary notices seems to me cowardly, and the reviews of books are cowardly too. We have become Laodiceans. We are even fearful of exposing imposture in currentliterature lest we get into hot water with a publisher.
During a New Year week I was invited by Lord and Lady Lyonesse to a very diverting house-party. This peer, it will be remembered, is the well-known radical philanthropist who owed his title to a lifelong interest in the submerged tenth. Their house, Ivanhoe, is an exquisite gothic structure not unjustly regarded as the masterpiece of the late Sir Gilbert Scott: it overlooks the Ouse. Including our hosts we numbered forty persons, and the personnel, including valets, chauffeurs, and ladies’-maids brought by the guests, numbered sixty. In all, we were a hundred souls, assuming immortality for the chauffeurs and the five Scotch gardeners. On January 2nd somebody produced after dinner a copy of thePetit Parisienrelating the plebiscite for the greatest Frenchman of the nineteenth century; another guest capped him with theEvening Newslist. The famousPall Mall GazetteAcademy of Forty was recalled with indifferent accuracy. Conversation was flagging; our hostess looked relieved; very soon we were all playing avariation of that most charming game,suck-pencil.
At first we decided to ignore the nineteenth century. The ten greatest living Englishmen were to be named by our votes. Bridge and billiard players were dragged to the polling-station in the green drawing-room. Lord Lyonesse and myself were the tellers. I shivered with excitement. One of the Ultimatelies of Churton Collins seemed to have arrived: it was Götterdämmerung—the Twilight of the Idols. And here is the result of the ballot, which I think every one will admit possesses extraordinary interest:
Hall Caine.
Marie Corelli.
Rudyard Kipling.
Lord Northcliffe.
Sir Thomas Lipton.
Hichens.
Chamberlain.
Barrie.
George Alexander.
Beerbohm Tree.
I ought to add, of course, that the guests were unusually intellectual. There were our host and hostess, their three sons—one is a scholar of King’s College, Cambridge, another is at Balliol, and a third is a stockbroker; there were five M.P.’s with their wives(two Liberal Imperialists, two Liberal Unionists, and one real Radical), a Scotch peer with his wife and an Irish peer without one; a publisher and his wife; three Academicians; four journalists; an Irish poet, a horse-dealer, a picture-dealer, another stockbroker, an artist, two lady novelists, a baronet and his wife, three musicians; and Myself. I think the only point on which the sincerity of the voting might be doubted, is the ominous absence of any soldier’s name on the list. Lord Lyonesse, however, is a firm upholder of the Hague Conference: like myself, he is a pro-Boer, but he will not allow any reference to military affairs, and I suspect that it was out of deference to his wishes that the guests all abstained from writing down some names of our gallant generals. Lord Kitchener, however, obtained nine votes, and I myself included Christian De Wet; but on discovery of documents he was ruled out, in spite of my pleading for him on imperialistic grounds. I thought it rather insular, too, I must confess, that Mr. Henry James and Mr. Sargent were denied to me because they are American subjects. My own final list, as pasted in theAlbum at Ivanhoe, along with others, was as follows:
H. G. Wells.
C. H. Shannon.
Bernard Shaw.
Thomas Hardy.
Lord Northcliffe.
Edmund Gosse.
Andrew Lang.
Oliver Lodge.
Dom Gasquet.
Reginald Turner.
Mine, of course, is the choice of a recluse: a scholar without scholarship, one who lives remote from politics, newspapers, society, and the merry-go-round of modern life. Its two chief interests lie in showing, first how far off I was from getting the prize (a vellum copy of poems, by our hostess), and secondly, that one name only, that of Lord Northcliffe, should have touched both the popular and the private imagination! I regret to say that none of the guests knew the names of Dom Gasquet or Sir Oliver Lodge. Every one, except the artist, thought C. H. Shannon was J. J. Shannon, and some of the voters were hardly convinced that Mr. Lang was still an ornament to contemporary literature. The prize was awarded to a lady whose list most nearly corresponded to the result of the general plebiscite. I need not say shewas the wife of the publisher. After some suitable expressions from Lord Lyonesse, it was suggested that we should poll the servants’ hall. Pencils and paper were provided and the butler was sent for. An hour was given for the election, and at half-past eleven the ballot papers were brought in on a massive silver tray discreetly covered with a red silk pocket-handkerchief, and here is the result:
Frank Richardson.
Marie Corelli.
John Roberts.
C. B. Fry.
Eustace Miles.
Robert Hichens.
T. P. O’Connor.
Lord Lyonesse.
Dr. Williams (Pink Pills for Pale People).
Hall Caine.
The prize (and this is another odd coincidence) was won by the butler himself, to whom, very generously, the publisher’s wife resigned the vellum copy of our hostess’s poems. From a literary point of view, it is interesting to note that Mr. Frank Richardson is the only master ofbelles lettreswho is appreciated in the servants’ hall! The other names we associate, rightly or wrongly, with something other than literature.
The following evening I suggested choosingthe greatest English names in the nineteenth century (twentieth-century life being strictly excluded). Every one by this time had caught thesuck-pencilfever. By general consent the suffrage was extended to the domestics: the electorate being thus one hundred. And what, you will ask, came of it all? I suggest that readers should guess. Any one interested should fill up, cut out, and send this coupon to my own publisher on April the first.
I think the Ten Greatest Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century were:
1 . . . . . . . . . .
2 . . . . . . . . . .
3 . . . . . . . . . .
4 . . . . . . . . . .
5 . . . . . . . . . .
6 . . . . . . . . . .
7 . . . . . . . . . .
8 . . . . . . . . . .
9 . . . . . . . . . .
10 . . . . . . . . . .
A prize, consisting of a copy ofBooks of To-Day and Books of To-Morrow, will be awarded for the best shot.
In no other country has mediocrity such a chance as in England. The second-rate writer, the second-rate painter meets with an almost universal and immediate recognition. When good mediocrities die, if they do not go straight to heaven (from a country where the existence of Purgatory is denied by Act of Parliament), at least they run a very fair chance of burial in Westminster Abbey. ‘De mortuis nil nisibonus,’ in the shape of royalties, is the real test by which we estimate the authors who have just passed away. A few of our great writers—Ruskin and Tennyson, for example—have enjoyed the applause accorded to senility by a people usually timid of brilliancy and strength, when it is contemporary. The ruins of mental faculties touch our imagination, owing, perhaps, to that tenderness for antiquity which has preserved for us the remains of Tintern Abbey. Seldom, however, does a great writer live tofind himself, in the prime of his literary existence, a component part of English literature. Yet there are happy exceptions, and not the least of these was Walter Pater.
His inclusion in theEnglish Men of Lettersseries, so soon after his death, somewhat dazzled the reviewers. Mr. Benson was complimented on a daring which, if grudgingly endorsed, is treated as just the sort of innovation you would expect from the brother of the author ofDodo. ‘To a small soul the age which has borne it can appear only an age of small souls,’ says Swinburne, and the presence of Pater, which rose so strangely beside our waters, seemed to many of his contemporaries only the last sob of a literature which they sincerely believed came to an end with Lord Macaulay.
It was a fortunate chance by which Mr. A. C. Benson, one of our more discerning critics, himself master of no mean style, should have been chosen as commentator of Pater. Among the plutarchracy of the present day a not very pretty habit prevails of holding a sort of inquest on deceased writers—a reaction against misplaced eulogy—tearing themand their works to pieces, and leaving nothing for reviewers or posterity to dissipate. From the author of theUpton Letterswe expect sympathy and critical acumen. It is needless to say we are never disappointed. His book is not merely about a literary man: it is a work of literature itself. So it is charming to disagree with Mr. Benson sometimes, and a triumph to find him tripping. You experience the pleasure of the University Extension lecturer pointing out the mistakes in Shakespeare’s geography, the joy of the schoolboy when the master has made a false quantity. In marking the modern discoveries which have shattered, not the value of Pater’s criticisms, but the authenticity of pictures round which he wove his aureoles of prose, Mr. Benson says: ‘In the essay on Botticelli he is on firmer ground.’ But among the first masterpieces winged by the sportsmen of the new criticism was the Hamilton Palace ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ (now proved to be by Botticini), to which Pater makes one of his elusive and delightful allusions. While the ‘School of Giorgione,’ which Mr. Benson thinks a littlepasséin the light of modernresearch is now in the movement. The latest bulletins of Giorgione, Pater would have been delighted to hear, are highly satisfactory. Pictures once torn from the altars of authenticity are being reinstated under the acolytage of Mr. Herbert Cook. A curious and perhaps wilful error, too, has escaped Mr. Benson’s notice. Referring to the tomb of Cardinal Jacopo at San Miniato, Pater says, ‘insignis forma fui—his epitaph dares to say;’ the inscription readsfuit. But perhaps thetwas added by the Italian Government out of Reference to the English residents in Florence, and the word readfuiin 1871.Troja fuitmight be written all over Florence.
Then some of the architecture at Vezelay ‘typical of Cluniac sculpture’ is pure Viollet-le-Duc, I am assured by a competent authority. A more serious error of Pater’s, for it is adjectival, not a fact, occurs inApollo in Picardy—‘rebelliousmasses of black hair.’ This is the only instance in theparfait prosateur, as Bourget called him, of a cliché worthy of the ‘Spectator.’ Then it is possible to differ from Mr. Benson in his criticism of theImaginary Portraits(the four fair ovalsin one volume), surely Pater’s most exquisite achievement after theRenaissance.Gastonis the failure Pater thought it was, andEmerald Uthwartis frankly very silly, though Mr. Benson has a curious tenderness for it. One sentence he abandons as absolute folly. The grave psychological error in the story occurs where the surgeon expresses compunction at making the autopsy on Uthwart because of his perfect anatomy. Surely this would have been a source of technical pleasure and interest to a surgeon, much as a butterfly-collector is pleased when he has murdered an unusually fine species of lepidoptera. Speaking myself as a vivisector of some experience, I can confidently affirm that a well-bred golden collie is far more interesting to operate upon than a mongrel sheep-dog. Nor can I comprehend Mr. Benson’s blame ofDenys l’Auxerroisas too extravagant and even unwholesome, when the last quality, so obvious inUthwart, he seems to condone.
Again,Marius the Epicureanis a failure by Pater’s own high standard: you would have imagined it seemed so to Mr. Benson.
Dulness is by no means its least fault. In scheme it is not unlikeJohn Inglesant; but how lifeless are the characters compared with those of Shorthouse. Both books deal with philosophic ideas and sensations; the incidents are merely illustrative and there is hardly a pretence of sequence. In the historical panorama which moves behindInglesant, there are at least ‘tactile’ values, and seventeenth-century England is conjured up in a wonderful way; how accurately I do not know. InMariusthe background is merely a backcloth for mentalposes plastiques. You wonder, not how still the performers are, but why they move at all. Marcus Aurelius, the delightful Lucian, even Flavian, and the rest, are busts from the Capitoline and Naples museums. Their bodies are make-believe, or straw from the loft at ‘White Nights.’ Cornelius, Mr. Benson sorrowfully admits, is a Christian prig, but Marius is only a pagan chip from the same block. John Inglesant is a prig too, but there is blood in his veins, and you get, at all events, a Vandyck, not a plaster cast. The magnificent passages of prose which vest this image make it resembletheex votoMadonnas of continental churches—a shrine in literature but not a lighthouse.
I sometimes wonder what Pater would have become had he been a Cambridge man, and if the more strenuous University might haveforcedhim into greater sympathy with modernity; or if he had been born in America, as he nearly was, and Harvard acted as the benign stepmother of his days. Such speculations are not beyond all conjecture, as Sir Thomas Browne said. I think he would have been exactly the same.
On the occasion of Pater’s lecture on Prosper Merimée, his friends gathered round the platform to congratulate him; he expressed a hope that the audience was able to hear what he said. ‘We overheard you,’ said Oscar Wilde. ‘Ah, you have a phrase for everything,’ replied the lecturer, the only contemporary who ever influenced himself, Wilde declared. How admirable both of the criticisms! Pater is an aside in literature, and that is why he was sometimes overlooked, and may be so again in ages to come. Though he is the greatest master of style the century produced, hecan never be regarded as part of the structure of English prose. He is, rather, one of the ornaments, which often last, long after a structure has perished. His place will be shifted, as fashions change. Like some exquisite piece of eighteenth-century furniture perchance he may be forgotten in the attics of literature awhile, only to be rediscovered. And as Fuseli said of Blake, ‘he is damned good to steal from.’ If he uses words as though they were pigments, and sentences like vestments at the Mass, it is not merely the ritualistic cadence of his harmonies which makes his works imperishable, but the ideas which they symbolise and evoke. Pater thinks beautifully always, about things which some people do not think altogether beautiful, perhaps; and sometimes he thinks aloud. We overhear him, and feel almost the shame of the eavesdropper.
Mr. Benson has approached Walter Pater, the man, with almost sacerdotal deference. He suggests ingeniously where you can find the self-revelation inGastonandThe Child in the House. This is far more illuminating than the recollections of personal friendswhose reminiscences are modelled on those of Captain Sumph. Mr. Humphry Ward remembers Pater only once being angry—it was in the Common Room—it was with X, an elderly man! The subject of the difference was ‘modern lectures.’ ‘Relations between them were afterwards strained.’ Mr. Arthur Symons remembers that he intended to bring out a new volume ofImaginary Portraits. Fancy that! Really, when friends begin to tell stories of that kind, I begin to suspect they are trying to conceal something. Perhaps we have no right to know everything or anything about the amazing personalities of literature; but Henleys and Purcells lurk and leak out even at Oxford; and that is not the way to silence them. Just when the aureole is ready to be fitted on, some horrid graduate (Litteræinhumaniores) inks the statue. Anticipating something of the kind, Mr. Benson is careful to insist on the divergence between Rossetti and Pater, and on page eighty-six says something which is ludicrously untrue. If self-revelation can be traced inGaston, it can be found elsewhere. There are sentences inHippolytus Veiled, theAge of the AthleticPrizemen, andApollo in Picardy, which not only explode Mr. Benson’s suggestions, but illustrate the objections he urges againstDenys l’Auxerrois. They are passages where Pater thinks aloud. If Rossetti wore his heart on the sleeve, Pater’s was just above the cuff, like a bangle; though it slips down occasionally in spite of the alb which drapes the hieratic writer not always discreetly.
(1906.)
A good many years ago, before the Rhodes scholars invaded Oxford, there lingered in that home of lost causes and unpopular names, the afterglow of the æsthetic sunset. It was not a very brilliant period. Professor Mackail and Mr. Bowyer Nichols had left Balliol. Nothing was expected of either the late Sir Clinton Dawkins or Canon Beeching; and the authorities of Merton could form no idea where Mr. Beerbohm would complete his education. Names are more suggestive than dates and give less pain. Then, as now, there were ‘cultured’ undergraduates, and those who were very cultured indeed, read Shelley and burned incense, would always have a few photographs after Simeon Solomon on their walls—little notes of illicit sentiment to vary the monotony of Burne-Jones and Botticelli. When uncles and aunts came up for Gaudys and Commem., while ‘Temperantia’ and the ‘Primavera’were left in their places, ‘Love dying from the breath of Lust,’ ‘Antinous,’ and other drawings by Solomon with titles from the Latin Vulgate, were taken down for the occasion. Views of the sister University, Cambridge took their places, being more appropriate to Uncle Parker’s and Aunt Jane’s tastes. More advanced undergraduates, who ‘knew what things were,’ possessed even originals. Now the unfortunate artist is dead his career can be mentioned without prejudice.
Simeon Solomon was born in 1841. He was the third son of Michael Solomon, a manufacturer of Leghorn hats, and the first Jew ever admitted to the Freedom of London. The elder brother, Abraham, became a successful painter of popular subjects (‘Waiting for the Verdict’ and ‘First and Third Class’), and died on the day of his election to the Academy! Rebecca a sister who was also a painter, copied with success some of Millais’s pictures. At the age of sixteen Simeon exhibited at the Academy, though beyond a short training at Leigh’s Art School in Newman Street he was almost self-taught.He was an early and intimate friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, with whose art he had much in common, though it is only for convenience that he is included in the school. Like Whistler, he was profoundly affected by the genius of Rossetti. Racial and other causes removed him from any real affinity to the archaistic moralatarianism of Mr. Holman Hunt. For obvious reasons the Pre-Raphaelite memoirs are silent about him, but Burne-Jones was said to have maintained, in after years, ‘that he was the greatest artist of us all.’ Throughout the sixties Solomon was one of those black-and-white draughtsmen whose contributions to the magazines have made the period famous in English art. He found ready purchasers for his pictures and drawings, not only among the well-to-do Hebrew community, such as Dr. Ernest Hart, his brother’s brother-in-law, but with well-known Christian collectors like Mr. Leathart. He was on intimate terms with Walter Pater, of whom he executed one of the only two known portraits; and in theGreek Studieswill be found a graceful reference to the ‘young Hebrew painter’ whose ‘Bacchus’ atthe Academy obviously contributed to the ‘gem-like’ flame of which we have heard so much.
In a short-lived magazine, theDark Blue, of July 1871, may be found a characteristic review by Swinburne of Solomon’s strange rhapsody,A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, his only literary work, now a great rarity. This is the longest, and with one exception the most interesting, tribute to Solomon ever published. ‘Since the first years of his early and brilliant celebrity as a young artist of high imagination, power, and promise,’ Swinburne says, ‘he has been at work long enough to enable us to define at least certain salient and dominant points of his genius . . . I have heard him likened to Heine as a kindred Hellenist of the Hebrews; Grecian form and beauty divide the allegiance of his spirit with Hebrew shadow and majesty.’ It would be difficult to add anything further, in praise of the unfortunate artist, to the poet’s eloquent eulogy of his friend’s talents. An interesting piece of autobiography is afforded in the same article, where Swinburne tells us that hisown poem of ‘Erotion,’ in the first series ofPoems and Ballads, was written for a drawing by Simeon Solomon; and in another number of the same magazine there appeared ‘The End of the Month,’ to accompany a new design of Solomon’s, the poem appearing later in the second series ofPoems and Ballads. Very few English artists—not even Millais—began life with fairer prospects. Thackeray wrote in one of the ‘Roundabout Papers’ for 1860: ‘For example, one of the pictures I admired most at the Royal Academy is by a gentleman on whom I never, to my knowledge, set eyes. The picture is (346) “Moses,” by S. Solomon. I thought it finely drawn and composed. It nobly represented to my mind the dark children of the Egyptian bondage. . . . My newspaper says: “Two ludicrously ugly women, looking at a dingy baby, do not form a pleasing object,” and so good-bye, Mr. S. S.’ This beautiful picture, painted when the artist was only nineteen, is now in the collection of Mr. W. G. Rawlinson, and was seen quite recently at the Franco-British Exhibition, where those familiar with his work considered it one of Solomon’s masterpieces.Very few students of Thackeray realised, however, that the painter thus singled out for praise formed the subject of a sordid inquest reported in theTimesof August 18th, 1905.
That Solomon’s pictures were at first better known to the public than those of his now more famous associates is shown by Robert Buchanan confessing that he had scarcely seen any of their works except those of Solomon, which he proceeded to attack in the famousThe Fleshly School of Poetry. As a sort of justification of the criticism, in the early seventies, the extraordinary artist had become a pariah. He was imprisoned for a short while, and on his release was placed in a private asylum by his friends. Scandal having subsided, since he showed no further signs of eccentricity, he was, by arrangement, sent out to post a letter in order that he might have a chance of quietly escaping and returning to the practice of his art. He returned to the asylum in half an hour!—a proceeding which was almost an evidence of insanity. He was subsequently officially dismissed, and from this time went steadily downhill, adding tohis other vices that of intemperance. Every effort was made by friends and relatives to reclaim him. Studios were taken for him, commissions were given him, clothes were bought for him. He spent his week-ends in the lock-up. Several picture-dealers tried giving him an allowance, but he turned up intoxicated to demand advances, and the police had to be called in. He was found selling matches in the Mile End Road and tried his hand at pavement decoration without much success. The companion of Walter Pater and Swinburne became the associate of thieves and blackmailers. A story is told that one afternoon he called for assistance at the house of a well-known artist, a former friend, from whom he received a generous dole. Observing that the remote neighbourhood of the place lent itself favourably to burgling operations, Solomon visited his benefactor the same evening in company with a housebreaker. They were studying the dining-room silver when they were disturbed; both were in liquor, and the noise they made roused the sleepers above. The unwilling host good-naturedly dismissed them!
Though a very delightful book might be made of his life by some one who would not shirk the difficulties of the subject, it is unnecessary here to dwell further on a career which belongs to the history of morbid psychology rather than of painting. After drifting from the stream of social existence into a Bohemian backwater, he found himself in the main sewer. This he thoroughly enjoyed in his own particular way, and rejected fiercely all attempts at rescue or reform. To his other old friends, such as Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, there must have been something very tragic in the contemplation of his wasted talents, for few young painters were more successful. Any one curious enough to study his pictures will regret that he was lost to art by allowing an ill-regulated life to prey upon his genius. He had not sufficient strength to keep the two things separate, as Shakespeare, Verlaine, and Leonardo succeeded in doing. At the same time, it is a consolation to think that he enjoyed himself in his own sordid way. When I had the pleasure of seeing him last, so lately as 1893, he was extremely cheerful and not aggressively alcoholic.Unlike most spoilt wastrels with the artistic temperament, he seemed to have no grievances, and had no bitter stories or complaints about former friends, no scandalous tales about contemporaries who had remained reputable; no indignant feeling towards those who assisted him. This was an amiable, inartistic trait in his character, though it may be a trifle negative; and for a positive virtue, as I say, he enjoyed his drink, his overpowering dirt, and his vicious life. He was full of delightful and racy stories about poets and painters, policemen and prisons, of which he had wide experience. He might have written a far more diverting book of memoirs than the average Pre-Raphaelite volume to which we look forward every year, though it is usually silent about poor Simeon Solomon. Physically he was a small, red man, with keen, laughing eyes.
By 1887 he entirely ceased to produce work of any value. He poured out a quantity of pastels at a guinea apiece. They are repulsive and ill-drawn, with the added horror of being the shadows of once splendid achievements. Long after his name could be evermentioned except in whispers, Mr. Hollyer issued a series of photographs of some of the fine early sanguine, Indian ink, and pencil drawings. The originals are unique of their kind. It is very easy to detect the unwholesome element which has inspired many of them, even the titles being indicative: ‘Sappho,’ ‘Antinous,’ ‘Amor Sacramentum.’ One of the finest, ‘Love dying from the breath of Lust,’ of which also he painted a picture, became quite popular in reproduction owing to the moral which was screwed out of it. Another, of ‘Dante meeting Beatrice at a Child’s Party,’ is particularly fascinating. To the present generation his work is perhaps too ‘literary,’ and his technique is by no means faultless; but the slightest drawing is informed by an idea, nearly always a beautiful one, however exotic. The faceless head and the headless body of shivering models dear to modern art students were absent from Solomon’s designs. His pigments, both in water-colour and oils, are always harmonious, pure in tone, and rich without being garish. We need not try to frighten ourselves by searching too curiously for hidden meanings. His whole art is, ofcourse, unwholesome and morbid, to employ two very favourite adjectives. His work has always appealed to musicians and men of letters rather than collectors—to those who ask that a drawing or a picture should suggest an idea rather than the art of the artist. Subject with him triumphs over drawing. He is sometimes hopelessly crude; but during the sixties, when, as some one said, ‘every one was a great artist,’ he showed considerable promise of draughtsmanship. His pictures are less fantastic than the drawings, and aim at probability, even when they are allegorical, or, as is too often the case,oddin sentiment. He is apparently never concerned with what are called ‘problems,’ the articulation of forms, or any fidelity to nature beyond the human frame. Unlike many of the Pre-Raphaelites, he showed a feeling for the medium of oil. His friends and contemporaries, with the exception of Millais, and Rossetti occasionally, were always more at ease with water-colour or gouache, and you feel that most of their pictures ought to have been painted intempera, the technique of which was not then understood. Since Millais was of French extraction,Rossetti of Italian, and Solomon of Hebrew, I fear this does not get us very much further away from the old French criticism that the English had forgotten or never learnt how to paint in oil. It must be remembered that Whistler, who in the sixties achieved some of his masterpieces, was an American.
It is strange that Solomon did not allow a sordid existence to alter the trend of his subjects, for these are always derived from poetry and the Bible, or from Catholic, Jewish, or Greek Orthodox ritual—a strange contrast to the respectable, impeccable painter, M. Degas, the doyen of European art, nationalist and anti-Semite, who finds beauty only in brasseries, in the vulgar circus, and in the ghastly wings of the opera. How far removed from his surroundings are the inspirations of the artist! I believe J. F. Millet would have painted peasants if he had been born and spent his days in the centre of New York. With the life-long friend of M. Degas—Gustave Moreau—Solomon had much in common, but the colour of the English Hebrew is much finer, and his themes are less monotonous. I can imagine many people being repelled bythis troubled introspective art, especially at the present day. There is hardly room for an inverted Watts. At the same time, even those who from age and training cannot take a sentimental interest in faded rose-leaves, whose perfume is a little overpowering, may care to explore an interesting byway of art. For poor Solomon there was no place in life. Casting reality aside, he stepped back into the riotous pages of Petronius. Perhaps on the Paris boulevards, with Verlaine and Bibi la Purée, he might have enjoyed a distinct artistic individuality. Expeditions conducted by Mr. Arthur Symons might have been organized in order to view him at some popular café. Mr. George Moore might have written about him. But in respectable London he was quite impossible. In the temple of Art, which is less Calvinistic than artists would have us suppose, he will always have his niche. To the future English Vasari he will be a real gold-mine.
(1905.)
Middle-aged, middle-class people, with a predilection for mediæval art, still believe that subject is an important factor in a picture or drawing. I am one of the number. The subject need not be literary or historical. After you have discussed in the latest studio jargon its carpentry, valued the tones and toned the values, motive or theme must affect your appreciation of a picture, your desire, or the contrary, to possess it. That the artist is able to endow the unattractive, and woo you to surrender, I admit. Unless, however, you are a pro-Boer in art matters, and hold that Rembrandt and the Boer school (the greatest technicians who ever lived) are finer artists than Titian, you will find yourself preferring Gainsborough to Degas, and the unskilful Whistler to the more accomplished Edouard Manet. Long ago French critics invented an æsthetic formula to conceal that poverty of imaginationwhich sometimes stares from their perfectly executed pictures, and this was eagerly accepted by certain Englishmen, both painters and writers. Yet, when an artist frankly deals with forbidden subjects, the canons regular of English art begin to thunder; the critics forget their French accent; the old Robert Adam, which is in all of us, asserts himself; we fly for the fig-leaves.
I am led to these reflections by the memory of Aubrey Beardsley, and the reception which his work received, not from the British public, but from the inner circle of advanced intellectuals. Too much occupied with the obstetrics of art, his superfluity of naughtiness has tarnished his niche in the temple of fame. ‘A wish toépater le bourgeois,’ says Mr. Arthur Symons, ‘is a natural one.’ I do not think so; at least, in an artist. Now much of Beardsley’s work shows theéblouissementof the burgess on arriving at Montmartre for the first time—a weakness he shared with some of his contemporaries. This must be conceded in praising a great artist for a line which he never drew, after you have taken the immortal Zero’s advice and divested yourself of the scruples.
‘I would rather be an Academician than an artist,’ said Aubrey Beardsley to me one day. ‘It takes thirty-nine men to make an Academician, and only one to make an artist.’ In that sneer lay all his weakness and his strength. Grave friends (in those days it was the fashion) talked to him of ‘Dame Nature.’ ‘Damn Nature!’ retorted Aubrey Beardsley, and pulled down the blinds and worked by gaslight on the finest days. But he was a real Englishman, who from his glass-house peppered the English public. No Latin could have contrived his arabesque. The grotesques of Jerome Bosch are positively pleasant company beside many of Beardsley’s inventions. Even in his odd little landscapes, with their twisted promontories sloping seaward, he suggested mocking laughter; and the flowers of ‘Under the Hill’ are cackling in the grass.
An essay, which Mr. Arthur Symons published in 1897, has always been recognised as far the most sympathetic and introspective account of this strange artist’s work. It has been reissued, with additional illustrations, by Messrs. Dent. Those who welcome it as one of the most inspiring criticisms from an alwaysinspired critic, will regret that eight of the illustrations belong to the worst period of Beardsley’s art. Kelmscott dyspepsia following on a surfeit of Burne-Jones, belongs to the pathology of style; it is a phase that should be produced by the prosecution, not by the eloquent advocate for the defence. Moreover, I do not believe Mr. Arthur Symons admires them any more than I do; he never mentions them in his text. ‘Le Débris d’un Poète,’ the ‘Coiffing,’ ‘Chopin’s Third Ballad,’ and those forSalomewould have sufficed. With these omissions the monograph might have been smaller; but it would have been more truly representative of Beardsley’s genius and Mr. Arthur Symons’s taste.
At one time or another every one has been brilliant about Beardsley. ‘Born Puck, he died Pierrot,’ said Mr. MacColl in one of the superb phrases with which he gibbets into posterity an art or an artist he rather dislikes. ‘The Fra Angelico of Satanism,’ wrote Mr. Roger Fry of an exhibition of the drawings. There seems hardly anything left even for Mr. Arthur Symons to write. Longanterior to these particular fireworks, however, his criticism is just as fresh as it was twelve years ago. I believe it will always remain the terminal essay.
The preface has been revised, and I could have wished for some further revision. Why is the name of Leonard Smithers—here simply calledapublisher—omitted, when the other Capulets and Montagus are faithfully recorded? When no one would publish Beardsley’s work, Smithers stepped into the breach. I do not know that theSavoyexactly healed the breach between Beardsley and the public, but it gave the artist another opportunity; and Mr. Arthur Symons an occasion for song. Leonard Smithers, too, was the most delightful and irresponsible publisher I ever knew. Who remembers without a kindly feeling the little shop in the Royal Arcade with its tempting shelves; its limited editions of5000copies; the shy, infrequent purchaser; the upstairs room where the roar of respectable Bond Street came faintly through the tightly-closed windows; the genial proprietor? In the closing years of the nineteenth century his silhouette reels (mymetaphor is drawn from a Terpsichorean and Caledonian exercise) across an artistic horizon of which theSavoywas the afterglow. Again, why is Mr. Arthur Symons so precise about forgetting the date of Beardsley’s expulsion from theYellow Book? It was in April 1895, April 10th. A number of poets and writers blackmailed Mr. Lane by threatening to withdraw their own publications unless the Beardsley Body was severed from the Bodley Head. I am glad to have this opportunity, not only of paying a tribute to the courage of my late friend Smithers, but of defending my other good friend, Mr. John Lane, from the absurd criticism of which he was too long the victim. He could hardly be expected to wreck a valuable business in the cause of unpopular art. Quite wrongly Beardsley’s designs had come to be regarded as the pictorial and sympathetic expression of a decadent tendency in English literature. But if there was any relation thereto, it was that of Juvenal towards Roman Society. Never was mordant satire more evident. If Beardsley is carried away in spite of himself by the superb invention ofSalome, he never forgets hishatred of its author. It is characteristic that he hammered beauty from the gold he would have battered into caricature.Salomehas survived other criticism and other caricature. And Mr. Lane once informed an American interviewer that since that April Fool’s Day poetry has ceased to sell altogether. The bards unconsciously committed suicide; and theYellow Bookperished in the odour of sanctity.
Recommending the perusal of some letters (written by Beardsley to an unnamed friend) published some years ago, Mr. Arthur Symons says: ‘Here, too, we are in the presence of the real thing.’ I venture to doubt this. I do not doubt Beardsley’s sincerity in the religion he embraced, but his expression of it in the letters. At least, I hope it was insincere. The letters left on some of us a disagreeable impression, at least of the recipient. You wonder if this pietistic friend received a copy of theLysistrataalong with the eulogy of St. Alfonso Liguori and Aphra Behn. A fescennine temperament is too often allied with religiosity. It certainly was in Beardsley’s case, but I think the otherand stronger side of his character should, in justice to his genius, be insisted upon, as Mr. Arthur Symons insisted upon it. If we knew that the ill-advised and unnamed friend was the author of certain pseudo-scientific and pornographic works issued in Paris, we should be better able to gauge the unimportance of these letters. Far more interesting would have been those written to Mr. Joseph Pennell, one of the saner influences; or those to Aubrey Beardsley’s mother and sister.
‘It was at Arques,’ says Mr. Arthur Symons . . . ‘that I had the only serious, almost solemn conversation I ever had with Beardsley.’ You can scarcely believe that any of the conversations between the two were other than serious and solemn, because he approaches Beardsley as he would John Bunyan or Aquinas. Art, literature and life, are all to this engaging writer a scholiast’s pilgrim’s progress. Beside him, Walter Pater, from whom he derives, seems almost flippant—and to have dallied too long in the streets of Vanity Fair.
(1906.)
The law reports in newspapers contain perhaps the only real history of England that has any relation to truth. Here, too, may be found indications of current thought, more pregnant than the observations of historians. They still afford material for the future short or longer history of the English people by the John Richard Greens of posterity. This was brought home to me by perusing two cases reported in theMorning Post, that of Mrs. Rita Marsh and the disputed will of Miss Browne. I yield to no one in my ignorance of English law, but I have seldom read judgments which seemed so conspicuously unfair, so characteristic of the precise minimum of æsthetic perception in the English people.
The hostelries of Great Britain are famous for their high charges, their badly-kept rooms, and loathsome cooking; let me add, their warm welcome. In the reign of Edward III. therewas legislation on the subject. The colder and cheaper hospitality of the Continent strikes a chill, I am sometimes told by those familiar with both. The hotel selected by a certain Mrs. Rita Marsh was no exception to the ordinary English caravanserai. It was ‘replete with every comfort.’ The garden contained anoubliette, down which Mrs. Marsh, while walking in the evening, inadvertently fell. On the Continent theoubliettesare inside the house, and you are ostentatiously warned of their immediate neighbourhood. These things are managed better in France, if I may say so without offending Tariff Reformers.
The accident disfigured Mrs. Marsh for life; and for the loss of unusual personal attractions an English jury awarded her only 500l. The judge made a joke about it. Mr. Gill was very playful about her photograph, and every one, except, I imagine, Mrs. Marsh, seems to have been satisfied that ample justice was done. The hotel proprietors did not press their counter-claim for a bill of 191l.! Chivalrous fellows! Still, I can safely say that in France Mrs. Marsh would have been awarded at least four times that amount; though if she hadbeen murdered the proprietors would have only been fined forty francs. But beauty to its fortunate possessors is more valuable than life itself, and the story is to me one of the most pathetic I have ever heard. To the English mind there is something irresistibly comic when any one falls, morally or physically. It is the basis of English Farce. Jokes made about those who have never fallen, ‘too great to appease, too high to appal,’ are voted bad taste. Caricaturists of the mildest order are considered irreligious and vulgar if they burlesque, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury for example; or unpatriotic if they hint that Lord Roberts did not really finish the Boer War when he professed to have done so. After Parnell came to grief I remember the Drury Lane pantomime was full of fire-escapes, and every allusion to thecause célèbreproduced roars of laughter. Mr. Justice Bigham was only a thorough Englishman when he gently rallied the jury for awarding, as he obviously thought, excessive damages. So little is beauty esteemed in England.
The case of Miss Browne was also singular. She left a trust fund ‘for the erection of anornamental structure of Gothic design, such as a market cross, tall clock, street lamp-stand, or all combined, in a central part of London, the plan whereof shall be offered for open competition, and ultimately decided upon by the Royal Institute of British Architects.’ The President of the Probate Division saidhe was satisfied that Miss Browne was not of sound mind, and pronounced against the will, with costs out of the estate. I wonder what the Royal Institute thinks of this legal testimonial. It seems almost a pity that some one did not dispute Sir Francis Chantrey’s will years ago on similar grounds. I suggest to Mr. MacColl that it might still be upset. That would settle once and for all the question whether the administration of the bequest has evinced evidence of insanity or not. A recent Royal Commission left the matter undecided. I do not, however, wish to criticise trustees, but to defend the memory of Miss Browne (who may have been eccentric in private life) from such a charge, because her testamentary dispositions were a trifle æsthetic. The will was un-English in one respect: ‘no inscription of my name shallbe placed on such erection.’ Was that the clause which proved her hopelessly mad? The erection was to be Gothic. I know Gothic is out of fashion just now. Ruskin is quite over; the Seven Lamps exploded long ago; but Miss Browne seems to have attended before her death Mr. MacColl’s lectures, knew all about ‘masses’ and ‘tones’ in architecture, and wished particular stress to be laid on ‘the general outline as seen from a good distance.’ This is greeted by some of the papers as particularly side-splitting and eccentric. Looking at the unlovely streets of London, never one of the more beautiful cities of Europe, where each new building seems contrived to go one better in sheeruglitude(especially since builders of Tube stations have ventured into the Vitruvian arena), you can easily suppose that poor Miss Browne, with her views about ‘general outlines seen from a good distance,’ must have appeared hopelessly insane. The decision of the court is not likely to encourage any further public bequests of this kind. I have cut the British Museum and the National Gallery out of my own will already. And I understand why Mr. MacColl,with his passionate pleading for a living national architecture, for official recognition of past and present English art, is thought by many good people quite odd. How he managed to attract the notice of any but the Lunacy Commissioners I cannot conceive. Valued critic, admired artist, model keeper, I only hope he will attract no further attention.
Since it is clear that the law assists in blackening reputations even in the grave, I claim that other Miss Brownes who take advantage of life, and time by the forelock to put up monuments in the sufficiently hideous thoroughfares should be pronouncednon compos mentis. The perpetrators of the erection in High Street, Kensington, hard by St. Mary Abbots, may serve as an example. Inconvenient, vulgar, inapposite, this should debar even the subscribers from obtaining probate for their wills. I invoke posthumous revenge, and claim that at least 500l. damages should be paid as compensation to the nearest hospital for theindignantblind, as my friend Mr. Vincent O’Sullivan calls them in one of his delightful stories.
(1906.)
I wish that the Rokeby Velasquez now firmly secured for the British nation could have been allowed to remain in Bond Street for a short while; not to tantalise the foreign countries who so eagerly competed for its acquisition, nor to emphasise the patriotism of its former owners, but as a contrast to ‘Some Examples of the Independent Art of To-day,’ held at Messrs. Agnew’s. Perhaps not as a contrast even, but as a complement. I do not mean to place all the examples on the same level with the ‘Venus,’ though with some I should have preferred to live; yet the juxtaposition would have asserted the tradition of the younger painters and the modernity of the older master. ‘We are all going to—Agnew’s, and Velasquez will be of the company,’ or something like Gainsborough’s dying words would have occurred sooner or later. I am persuaded that we look at the ancient pictures with frosted magnifying-glasses,and stare at the younger men from the wrong end of the binoculars. It was ever thus; it always will be so. Most of us suspect our contemporaries or juniors. And they—les jeunes féroces—are impatient of their immediate predecessors.Nos pères out toujours tort. Though grandpapa is sometimes quite picturesque; his waistcoat and old buttons suit us very well. ‘Your Raphael is not even divine,’ said Velasquez when he left Rome and that wonderfulp.p.c. card on the Doria. ‘Your Academicians are not even academic,’ some of the younger painters and their champions are saying to-day.
I found, moreover, the epithet ‘independent,’ to qualify an entertaining and significant exhibition, misleading. For many of the items could only be so classified in the sense that they were independent of Messrs. Agnew and the Royal Academy. Mr. Tonks and Professor Brown are official instructors at the Slade School in London; Mr. C. J. Holmes is Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery. Mr. Gerard Chowne was a professor at Liverpool. Mr. Fry is now an official at New York; and the majority of the painters belonged to twodistinctive anddependentgroups—the Glasgow School and the New English Art Club. Intense individualism is not incompatible with militant collectivism. The only independent artists, if you except Mr. Nicholson, were Mr. C. H. Shannon and Mr. Charles Ricketts, who have always stood apart, being neither for the Royal Academy nor its enemies; their choice is in their pictures.
I feel it difficult to write of painters for some of whom I acted showman so long at the Carfax Gallery. I confess that when I heard they were going to Bond Street my pangs were akin to those of the owner of a small country circus on learning that his troupe of performing dogs had been engaged by Mr. Imre Kiralfy or the Hippodrome. A quondam dealer in ultramontanes, I became an Othello of the trade. And in their grander quarters (I grieve to say) they looked better than ever, though I would have chosen another background, something less expensive and more severe. Yes, they all went through their hoops gracefully. With one exception, I never saw finer Wilson Steers; the ‘Sunset’ might well be hung beside the new Turners, whenthe gulf between ancient and modern art would be almost imperceptible. The ‘Aliens’ of Mr. Rothenstein in the cosmopolitan society of a public picture gallery would hardly appear foreigners, because they belong to a country where the inhabitants are racy of every one else’s soil. When time has given an added dignity (if that were possible) to this work, I can realise how our descendants will laugh at our lachrymose observations on the decadence of art. The background against which the stately Hebrew figures are silhouetted is in itself a liberal education for the aged and those who ask their friends what these modern fellows mean.
When the inhabitants of the unceltiferous portion of these islands employ the adjectiveun-Englishyou may be sure there is something serious on the carpet. It is valedictory, expressive of sorrow and contempt rather than anger. All the other old favourites of vituperative must have missed fire before this almost sacred, disqualifying Podsnappianism is applied to the objectionable person, picture, book, behaviour, or movement. And when the epithet is brought into action, in nine casesout of ten it is aimed at some characteristic essentially, often blatantly, Anglo-Saxon. Throughout the nineteenth century all exponents of art and literature not conforming to Fleet Street ideals were voted un-English; Byron, Shelley, Keats, Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelites, and, in course of good time, those artists who formed the New English Art Club. There was some ground for suspicion of foreign intrigue. They regarded Mr. Whistler, an American, who flirted with French impressionism, as a pioneer. Some of their names suggest the magic Orient or the romantic scenery of the Rhine. But it is not extravagant to assert that if Mr. Rothenstein had chosen to be born in France or Germany, instead of in Bradford, his art would have come to us in another form. In his strength and his weakness he is more English than the English. Art may have cosmopolitan relations (it is usually a hybrid), but it must take on the features of the country and people where it grows; or it may change them, or change the vision of the people of its adoption. Yet Ruth must not look too foreign in the alien corn, or her values will get wrong.When an English artist airs his foreign accent and his smattering of French pigment his work has no permanent significance. Even Professor Legros unconsciously assimilated British subjectivity: his Latin rein has been slackened; his experiments are often literary.
It is an error however to regard the exhibitions of the New English Art Club as a homogeneous movement, such as that of Barbizon and the Pre-Raphaelite—inspired by a single idea or similar group of ideas. The members have not even the cohesion of Glasgow or defunct Newlyn. The only thing they have in common, in common originally with Glasgow, was a distaste for the tenets and ideals of Burlington House. The serpent (or was it the animated rod?) of the Academy soon swallowed the sentimentalities of Newlyn, just as the International boa-constrictor made short work of Glasgow. And the forbidden fruit of an official Eden has tempted many members of the Club. Others have resigned from time to time, but with no ill result—to the Club. Now, the reason for this is that the members have no dependence on each other, except for the executive organizationof Mr. Francis Bate. It may be doubted if in their heart of hearts they admire each other’s works. They are intense individualists (personal friends, maybe, in private life) artistically speaking, on terms of cutting acquaintance at the Slade.
The mannerism of Professor Legros is still, of course, a common denominator for the older men, and the younger artists evince a familiarity with drawing unusual in England, due to the admirable training of Professor Brown and Mr. Henry Tonks. The Spartan Mr. Tonks may not be able to make geniuses, but he has the faculty of turning out efficient workmen. Whether they become members of the Club or drift into the haven of Burlington House, at all events theycanfly and wear their aureoles with propriety. A society, however, which contains such distinctive and assertive personalities as Mr. Wilson Steer, Mr. Henry Tonks, Mr. Augustus John, Mr. William Orpen, Mr. Von Glehn, Mr. MacColl, and Professor Holmes, cannot possess even such unity of purpose as inspired Mr. Holman Hunt and his associates of the ’fifties. The New English Art Club issimply an admirably administered association whose members have rather less in common than is shared by the members of an ordinary political club. The exhibitions are for this reason intensely interesting. They cannot be waved aside like mobs, and no comprehensive epigram can do them even an injustice.
I never knew any painter worthy of the name who paid the smallest attention to what a critic says, even in conversation. He will retort; but he will not change his style or regulate his motives to suit a critic’s palate. So may I now mention their faults? What painter is without fault? Their faults are shared bynearlyall of them; their virtues are their own. I see among them an absence of anydesirefor beauty—for physical beauty. If the artists have fulfilled a mission in abolishing ‘the sweetly pretty Christmas supplement kind of work,’ I think they dwell too long on the trivial and the ignoble. They put a not very interesting domesticity into their frames. Rossetti, of course, wheeled about the marriage couch, but his was itself an interesting object ofvirtu. Modern art ceased to express the better aspirations and thoughts of the daywhen modern artists refused to become the servants of the commune, but asserted themselves as a component part of an intellectual republic. That is why people only commission portraits, and prefer to buy old masters who anticipate those better aspirations. Burne-Jones, however, expressed in paint that longing to be out of the nineteenth century which was so widespread. Now we are well out of it, the rising generation does not esteem his works with the same enthusiasm as the elders. It reads Mr. Wells on the future, and looks into the convex mirror of Mr. Bernard Shaw; but it does not buy Dubedats to the extent that it ought to do. The members of the New English Art Club could, I think, preserve their æsthetic conscience and yet paint beautiful things and beautiful people. Mr. Steer has now given them a lead. I wonder what Mr. Winter’s opinion would be? He is the best salesman in London.
Among dealers, the ancient firm of Messrs. P. & D. Colnaghi, of which Thackeray writes, is thedoyen. That of Messrs. Agnew is thedouane. Here it is that the official seal must be set before modern paintings can pass onwardsto the Midlands and the middle classes. Well, I felicitate the august officials on removing a tariff of prejudice; I felicitate the young artists who, released from the bondage of the Egyptian Hall, can now enjoy the lighter air, the larger day, the pasturage and patronage of Palestine. I compliment the fearless collectors, such as Mr. C. K. Butler, Mr. Herbert Trench, Mr. Daniel, His Honour Judge Evans, the Leylands and the Leathearts of a latter day, for ignoring contemporary ridicule and anticipating the verdict, not of passing fashion but of posterity. As the servant spoke well of his master while wearing his clothes which were far too big for him, let me congratulate the Chrysostom of critics, the Origen who has scourged our heresies, Mr. D. S. MacColl; because the Greeks have entered Troy or the barbarians the senate-house.Dissolve frigus ligna super foco large reponens, and let us mix our metaphors. What was Mr. MacColl’s Waterloo was a Canossa for Messrs. Agnew.
(1906.)