HollyerDANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTIFrom the painting byG. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.To face page 65.
HollyerDANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTIFrom the painting byG. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.To face page 65.
Hollyer
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
From the painting byG. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.
To face page 65.
Vanna,” and “Lady Lilith,” and in the earlier part of the period to which these works belonged he had given to the world that exquisite series of watercolour paintings in which “Paolo and Francesca” and “Heart of the Night” stand pre-eminent.
It was “The Beloved” and “Mona Vanna” that I particularly remember as forming part of the collection of Mr. Rae, and it was mainly upon these two paintings, and a knowledge of some of the drawings inBlack and White, that I had founded my first enthusiastic appreciation of the painter’s genius.
The common impression of the time, which I indeed partly shared, was that Rossetti’s individuality, however finely it might be endowed with poetic imagination, was not of the most virile order. For this he himself was in a great degree responsible. He had deliberately withdrawn from all public exhibition of his work, and even later, when I became connected with the establishment of the Grosvenor Gallery, he still held fast to his earlier resolution.
The man, as I came to know him in the flesh, was therefore something of a surprise to me, and I quickly perceived, as I learned to know him better, that, whatever may have been the source of his reluctance to expose himself to the fire of criticism, it certainly was not due to any lack of masculine strength.
On the occasion of my first visit to Cheyne Walk, it was indeed the breadth of his sympathy both in literature and art, no less than the fineness and delicacy of his taste, that most impressed me. Those never-to-be-forgotten evenings that I passedin his company became at the time a sort of enchantment. His talk was assuredly more inspiring than that of any man I have ever known; most inspiring certainly to a youth who had ambitions of his own, for, although intolerant of any utterance that was merely conventional, and quick to detect the smallest lack of sincerity, he was ever patient with the expression of any enthusiasm however crude, and was as ready to listen as to reply.
I can see him now as he used to lie coiled up on the sofa in his studio after dinner, and can hear the deep tones of his rich voice as he ranged widely over the fields of literature and art, always trenchant, always earnest, yet now and again slipping with sudden wit and humour into a lighter vein.
I remember that one afternoon as I sat beside him while he worked, the late Mr. Virtue Tebbs came in fresh from an exhibition of the old masters at Burlington House, and full of enthusiasm for a picture by Turner which he insisted that Rossetti must speedily go and see.
“What is it called?” asked Rossetti.
“‘Girls Surprised while Bathing,’”replied Tebbs.
“Umph!” returned Rossetti. “Yes, I should think devilish surprised to see what Turner had made of them.”
On one point he was always absolutely emphatic.
“A picture,” he used to say to me, “is a painted poem, and those who deny it have simply no poetry in their nature.” It was, I think, the absence of this quality that made him intolerant of the work of artists like Albert Moore.
“Often pretty,” he said, “pretty enough, but sublimated café-painting and nothing more.”
But he could be unstintedly generous in his praise, as he was searching and even scathing in his criticism. Of Millais he once said to me:
“I don’t believe since painting began there has ever been a man more greatly endowed with the mere painter’s power.”
And of Burne-Jones, not once, but often, he spoke in terms of the warmest and highest praise.
“He has oceans of imagination,” he used to say, “and in this respect there has been nobody like him since Botticelli.” And then, reverting to his favourite maxim, he added in those round and ringing tones that seemed at once to invite and to defy contradiction: “If, as I hold, 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 with poetic invention.”
Of Leighton he was wont to speak with genuine respect and sincere appreciation. There was only one point, and that concerned not the character but the manners of the graceful and accomplished President, on which he was not quite tolerant.
“Leighton,” he said one night, “is undoubtedly one of the most gifted and accomplished creatures of his time. There’s scarcely anything which he can’t do, and can’t do well. He has, besides, a very high sense of duty which I know to be sincere, and even as a painter he undoubtedly deserves to some extent the position he occupies, but as to manners——”
And then in a few trenchant sentences he wouldgive his own, not very flattering, impression of what he considered to be Leighton’s imperfections on this score.
At the simple dinners to which I was at that time hospitably bidden, Rossetti, as he sat at the head of his table, was always amusing to watch. His inability to serve any dish set before him was pathetic in its helplessness. He would lunge at a joint as though it were a hostile foe, driving it from one end of the dish to the other till he got it securely cornered in its well of gravy, and then plunge his knife into it with something of deadly ferocity.
It is related of Rossetti, though I myself was not a witness to the incident, that on one occasion he was so entirely oblivious of the contents of the dish before him, that, wishing to prove its value as a specimen of oriental porcelain, he turned it over to examine the marks on its back, and all unconsciously deposited the turbot on the table-cloth.
I remember he very greatly admired some literary review which I had published in the columns of theGlobe, the subject of which I now forget; and in the talk that followed he spoke with rare eloquence of the poets of the dawn of the last century, dwelling especially upon Keats, whom he knew I loved deeply, and coming at last to Landor, whose work, however beautiful, has never warmly appealed to me.
“What do you think of Landor?” he inquired.
I answered, “It seems to me through all his poetry that his genius is impersonal without being dramatic,” and Rossetti, who was always generousin his appreciation of youth, answered with a phrase that sent me home that night happy and contented.
“By Jove,” he said, “that’s the finest criticism ever made on Landor!”
I make no pretence that it was: it was enough for me then that he thought so, or that he said so.
But this friendship with Rossetti, so dearly prized by me and so indelible in its lasting impression, was not destined to endure for long. During the later days of our association he was already to some extent a sick man. Little by little the invitations, once so freely extended to me, slackened in their warmth of hospitality, until the day came when I realised the fact that my visits to Cheyne Walk were no longer welcome. It was not until years afterwards that I learned the cause, and if I give it here, it is only because it curiously illustrates that almost morbid sensitiveness of character which lay side by side in his nature with the most masculine grasp of the problems of life and art.
He had, it seems, as I had learned from the lips of a friend whose devotion to the poet endured till his death, a very high opinion of my judgment as an art critic, and he had conceived the belief, perhaps true at the time, that I thought more highly of the work of Burne-Jones than of his own. And although he himself had often said to me things of Burne-Jones’s genius which no word of mine could out-measure in generous praise, it fretted him, in the supersensitive condition in which suffering and ill-health had consigned him, to be reminded by my presence of a judgment that in his own person he would not have resented.
It may, as I have said, have been true then—though I was unaware that I had ever betrayed the feeling to Rossetti—that Burne-Jones stood foremost in my appreciation of the painters of the time. It is certainly not true now in any sense that would consign Rossetti to an inferior place; for I have come to think, in the light of later study of the two men’s work, that, in some undefinable and yet indisputable quality of genius, especially as exemplified in his earlier work not then so well known to me, he stands pre-eminent among those who influenced his generation.
As a colourist in that supreme sense in which colour is inspired by the purpose of the design, he had in his earlier period no equal among them all. In later life, under the shadow of suffering and sickness, the tones he employed had lost the first glowing radiance of the dawn. But an artist lives only by his best; and if the best of Rossetti be fairly measured and appraised, it will, I think, be hardly possible to dispute his right and claim to have been the foremost leader in the movement with which his name is associated.
My intimacy with Burne-Jones struck deeper and lasted without interruption from those earlier days of the “Ignotus” articles in theGlobeto the time of his death in 1898. We were friends for more than twenty-five years, and during the greater part of that period the closest and most affectionate friends.
To him also I had written when I thought of enlarging that first crude criticism of his work. I was a stranger to him then, although my elder sister had already made his acquaintance, but his letter in reply to my application is delightful in its considerate tolerance towards the somewhat audacious challenge of a boy to be supplied with the particulars of his early career.
Referring to the pictures which I had specially selected for notice he writes:
“I need not say that such a flattering review of them gave me pleasure, for, whatever cause I have to see them with disappointment, such sympathy as you express cannot be anything but most welcome. But there is so little to say of the kind of information you ask for, and I should like to saynothing, for a sudden feeling of being ridiculous overwhelms me. At Oxford till twenty-three, therefore no right to begin art at all, never having learnt one bit about it practically, nor till that time having seen any ancient picture at all to my remembrance. Provincial life at home, at Oxford prints of Chalons and Landseer—you know them all. I think Morris’s friendship began everything for me, everything that I afterwards cared for. When I left Oxford I got to know Rossetti, whose friendship I sought and obtained. He is, as you know, the most generous of men to the young. I could not bear with the young man’s dreadful sensitiveness and intolerable conceit as he did with mine. He taught me practically all I ever learned; 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 good and bad 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 backward, I think my heart’s desire would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli. I do feel out of time and place, and think you should let me go crumbling and mouldering on, for I am not fit for much else but a museum. You see I am writing in front of my work and ought to know, and I do know.”
The letter ends with a courteous invitation to visit his studio, where he promised to show me the work he had completed during the year. Needless to say with what delight I accepted, though Iscarcely realised then that that visit was destined to date the beginning of a friendship that endured without halt or flaw till the time of his death in the summer of 1898.
When I first knew him in 1873, his appearance corresponded almost exactly with that which is imaged in Watts’s beautiful portrait. His eyes then, as always, were the dominant feature of his face—pale blue eyes, that revealed in their changing expression the sympathy, the gentleness, and no less the strength, of his nature.
From the time I am speaking of, I became a constant and always welcome visitor to his studio at the Grange, and at those simple Sunday luncheons to which his intimate friends were bidden Burne-Jones very soon made known to me a side of his character scarcely to be suspected by those who knew him only from his work.
Playful and humorous, boylike, and even child-like in his quick surrender to the laughing mood of the moment, he could nevertheless become swiftly serious at the summons of some deeper thought, and without the need of any prepared process of transition could shift with ready and earnest eloquence to the discussion of those deeper problems which touched the centre of his art.
From the outset we were in close agreement as to the dominating tendencies which governed the great schools of European painting, and no less in our common preference for the great tradition of Florentine design, established by the genius of Giotto and culminating in the splendid achievement of Michael Angelo. Years afterwards, when I hadsent him a little volume of my gathered essays on Art, he wrote me: “I found your book when I got home last night, and it was a real pleasure for me to have another proof of your love and sympathy. And there will be this additional pleasure about it, that I know how heartily I shall be at one with you while I read it.” And then, with a sudden turn to a lighter mood, he adds: “We shall meet on Sunday at lunch. Georgie is away, but Margaret dispenses lower middle-class hospitality with a finish and calm which would not disgrace a higher social position.”
I suppose no man ever held with such unswerving fidelity to the ideal with which he set out upon his career, an ideal as plainly manifest in those earlier contributions to the old Water-Colour Society as in his last great picture of “Arthur in Avalon.” In him the sense of design was all in all, but mere abstract design that missed the impulse of some legend of passion or romance never quite contented his genius.
It was his delight, as it was the delight of Botticelli, to be always exercising his invention upon some theme of legendary beauty; and it was his special gift, as indeed it was also Botticelli’s, to be able to translate such themes into the appropriate language of Art.
Though he could appreciate at its true value excellence in almost every school of painting, his temper turned as by instinct even from the greatest masters who sought only for a faithful rendering of nature. Blake once said that in his highest moments of inspiration he was often haunted by those “Flemish Demons,” as he termed them, whocame and blurred his imagination and stole away the thought he desired to present. I think Burne-Jones was sometimes haunted by them too.
It is not needful now to revive the memories of that fierce hostility of criticism which greeted his earlier efforts. Rossetti’s determined reticence in regard to the exhibition of his work left Burne-Jones in those earlier days to bear the whole brunt of the attack, for the art of Millais and Holman Hunt made a somewhat different appeal and claimed a separate victory. Nor was it wonderful that what lay in the mind of both to do should at first have seemed tinged by something of determined archaic affectation. The temper of their work was strange to the world to whom it was offered at first in a form so tentative, and also confessedly so incomplete.
The history of English Painting, even in its greatest achievement, has left no tradition to which they could appeal, and, indeed, if we take a wider range of view, it may be said with equal truth that, since the downfall of the great school of Florence, Art throughout Europe had taken a direction which made the efforts of these younger men seem like a wilful neglect of the accepted models of style.
Such English masters of an earlier time as had attempted to enter into this higher realm of imaginative painting—Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, to name only the leaders—had wrecked their lives in the vain endeavour suddenly to renew the splendours of the great masters of the sixteenth century.
With the advent of the pre-Raphaelite movement, marked by a determined research of greater reality in the rendering of actual fact, the failure of theseearlier experiments became only the more manifest; and it was left for that little group in which Rossetti and Burne-Jones stand pre-eminent to realise the truth that, if imagination could ever again resume its place in pictorial art, the result must be achieved, not by an endeavour to repeat the triumphs of the past at the epoch of its culminating glory, but by retracing the stream to its source and beginning again, where Florence had begun in the earlier period of her history.
It was, I think, the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery that gave Burne-Jones’s critics reason to pause in their pitiless onslaught of ridicule and rebuke. But even then the fight was not ended, and among the many members of the Academy itself the hostility continued almost without check.
I remember going round that exhibition with Mr. Gladstone, and recalling a phrase of his which he used in reference to this very feeling that was even then sufficiently openly expressed.
Standing before one of Burne-Jones’s pictures which he was warmly admiring, he turned to me and said, “Dislike of such a painter I can understand, but such intolerance of dislike as I find on every hand I do not comprehend.”
It was, perhaps, difficult, even for those to whom such work made a sympathetic appeal, to realise what a broad and liberal outlook in Literature, as well as in Art, belonged to the painter whose deliberate selection of a chosen type of beauty might plausibly seem to argue a narrow intelligence; and it was, indeed, only by close and intimate knowledgeof the man himself that one was enabled to escape altogether from this initial prejudice.
As a talker he was wholly delightful. There were few subjects in literature upon which those who might have thought to convict him of a narrow intensity of feeling could have dared to challenge him with success. It was natural, perhaps, that, with his preoccupation as a painter, his love should have turned most often and most readily to legend and romance. But in romance his task took a wide range, and it will surprise many, who see how rigorously all suggestion of humour is excluded from his paintings, to learn that his knowledge of Dickens was almost encyclopædic, and his love of him, like that of Mr. Swinburne, without limit of praise.
As our friendship advanced it came to be our custom to meet periodically at a little restaurant in Soho, over a quiet dinner which we boasted was to be a mere preliminary to “seeing Life”; but these evenings nearly always ended as they began, in talk over the table—light and laughing to commence, and then drifting finally into deep and earnest discussion of the things we loved the best in Poetry and Art; until, the lights gradually extinguished, we were reminded that the closing hour had come, and that the projected visit to the music-hall, which was to constitute our vision of Life, must needs be postponed until another occasion.
And so these meetings went on from time to time, but never without a word of mock indignant protest on his part that he had been cheated of a promised debauch. Once he fired my imagination by telling me that he had made a solitary visit tothe Aquarium, where he had seen “The Last Supper” tattooed on a man’s back, and this taste of blood had whetted his appetite for more salient examples of monstrosity which were at that time being exhibited in Barnum’s Show.
An appointment made for the purpose I was compelled to abandon by reason of a social engagement with my wife, a circumstance which drew from him a little note of pitying sympathy:
“Carr Mio, so you have thrown me over! Well, perhaps you are right; at any rate I am wrong to have trusted. I confess I marvelled at your bravery in so openly defying woman, but knew that you must be justified in some consciousness of strength. But lo! you are even as I, who boasted not. Still, we will have Barnum another night. Imustsee the fat lady, andwill.”
And then on the facing page he adds a monstrous portrait of that lady herself, a thing of unimagined wealth of flesh, seated on a velvet cushion before the upturned eyes of a crowded theatre.
Burne-Jones was wont to be lavish of these humorous sketches in letters to his intimate friends, and I have one or two supposed to illustrate a projected fresh departure in his Art, wherein, under the impulse of a new resolve, he was to abandon finally all future effort after ideal design, and, conforming to that taste of the public which he had hitherto failed to satisfy, to embark upon a series of pictures to represent, as he told me, the homes of England.
“I enclose a sketch,” he writes, “for my next picture. It is a new departure, but the public
FACSIMILE OF A LETTERBy SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart. (a).To face page 78.
FACSIMILE OF A LETTERBy SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart. (a).To face page 78.
FACSIMILE OF A LETTER
By SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart. (a).
To face page 78.
THE HOMES OF ENGLANDFrom an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart. (b).To face page 78.
THE HOMES OF ENGLANDFrom an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart. (b).To face page 78.
THE HOMES OF ENGLAND
From an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart. (b).
To face page 78.
THE HOMES OF ENGLAND.From an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart. (c).To face page 78.
THE HOMES OF ENGLAND.From an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart. (c).To face page 78.
THE HOMES OF ENGLAND.
From an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart. (c).
To face page 78.
must be humoured. I have fought the fight of unpopularity long enough. Tell me what you think,” and accompanying this startling announcement of the fresh direction his art was to take, he enclosed, not a mere sketch, but an elaborately finished black and white drawing of the first of the great series he had projected, wherein he had evidently intended to present a typical representative of our great commercial nation—a hideous being stretched in stertorous sleep upon a Victorian sofa of abominable design, every deformed curve and moulding of which he had rendered with searching veracity.
I must have sent him in reply some burlesque welcome of the revolution in his style indicated by the design, for in a day or two I received a second drawing more monstrous and grotesque than the first, and with the drawing he wrote: “You divine my purpose. It was the first of a series to be called the Homes of England.”
But even in these essays in the grotesque, and in the lighter and sometimes very graceful fancies which he would illustrate so easily and so rapidly for our amusement, or for the delight of our children, there was always an unfailing sense of composition and design.
One afternoon on the lawn of Lady Lewis’s cottage at Walton, where we often met, and where so many happy hours of my life have been spent, he was discussing in a bantering mood the reproach so often levelled against him, that his female forms were lean and meagre and lacked the sense of flesh and blood.
“I think,” he said, “I must make a more determined study of the manner of Rubens,” and thereupon, taking a sheet of paper from the table where Lady Lewis was writing, he began at once to compose a picture of “Susannah and the Elders,” after the manner of the great Flemish master. It took him only a few minutes to accomplish, and yet, as it lies before me now, admirable as it is in its sense of caricature, it is no less striking for a certain beauty in the ordered arrangement of line which could not desert him even when he was proposing to lampoon himself.
It was, I think, about the same time that he laughingly proposed to instruct my eldest boy in the principles of anatomy, and there and then made for him on the spur of the moment two beautiful drawings representing the anatomy of the good man and the good woman, to which he added, by special request, a third drawing illustrating the anatomy of the bad man. On being met with the reproach that the drawing showed nothing of the details of internal structure, he replied that there were none, as “the bad man was quite hollow”; and on being further challenged to illustrate the anatomy of the bad woman, he gravely replied, “My dear Phil, she doesn’t exist.”
In later days the little Bohemian meetings to which I have referred, at first restricted to our two selves, took occasionally the form of larger hospitality. Sometimes Sir George and Lady Lewis, and sometimes Sir Lawrence Tadema and his wife, would join our party.
On such evenings, to mark the added dignity to
LESSONS IN ANATOMYFrom an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart.To face page 80.
LESSONS IN ANATOMYFrom an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart.To face page 80.
LESSONS IN ANATOMY
From an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart.
To face page 80.
LESSONS IN ANATOMYFrom an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart.To face page 80.
LESSONS IN ANATOMYFrom an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart.To face page 80.
LESSONS IN ANATOMY
From an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart.
To face page 80.
LESSONS IN ANATOMYFrom an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart.To face page 80.
LESSONS IN ANATOMYFrom an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart.To face page 80.
LESSONS IN ANATOMY
From an original drawing by SirEdward Burne-Jones, Bart.
To face page 80.
the occasion, we shifted our quarters to Previtale’s, and I have known no merrier hours before or since than those we passed together.
Burne-Jones always made a grave pretence of being quite ignorant as to what should be ordered for these little feasts. Of one of them, where he was to be the host, he wrote to me some few days before imploring me in a spirit of mock despair to come to his rescue and arrange themenu.
“I no more know,” he cries, “what dinner to order than the cat on the hearth as I write—less, for it would promptly order mice. Oh, Carr, save my honour and order for me a nice dinner so that I may not be quoted as a warning of meanness! I am not mean. Order apples of gold on plates of silver, and let the wine be scented and brought from Lebanon; but not a mean dinner, nor yet ostentatious or presuming, or such a one as could possibly compete with the banquets of the affluent. My honour is in your hands. Oh, Carr, come to the rescue!”
It is extraordinary, in view of the concentrated energy he bestowed upon his work, how readily and how generously he always responded to the appeal of his friends. There was no demand they could make upon him which he seemed unable to satisfy, no help which the youngest or the most modest student could ask of him which he was not always ready and willing to give; and yet all these gifts of friendship so lavishly bestowed were never allowed to interfere with the absolute devotion that he owed and that he paid to his art.
Behind the affectionate gentleness of his nature, that was susceptible to every influence, there lay afaith that nothing could shake or weaken. 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 it. 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, and there were many who could claim perhaps a closer alliance than I, who could cause him to swerve for a moment from the labour that was his life.
One of the last letters I received from him must have concerned another of these little feasts which he had projected and which for some reason I was compelled to postpone. I cannot now recall what I then wrote to him, but I suppose my letter must have contained some reference to our long and close friendship, for I received from him in reply an affectionate little note that it is a pleasure to me to preserve.
“Dear Carr,” he writes, “I too feel just the same. I want years and years of us together, and much work and a little play. We will put it off for a week, then, and I will try and rearrange, and perhaps Tadema will join.—Yours affectionately,E. B. J.”
“Dear Carr,” he writes, “I too feel just the same. I want years and years of us together, and much work and a little play. We will put it off for a week, then, and I will try and rearrange, and perhaps Tadema will join.—Yours affectionately,
E. B. J.”
Those “years and years” that would have been so dear to us were unhappily denied. He was often ailing in the later days of his life, and it was easy to perceive that he was sometimes apprehensive as to the condition of his health. And yet he never allowed his own anxieties to burden others. On one occasion I remember, and it must have beenabout this time, he told me he had been to see his doctor, who had questioned him closely as to his habits as a smoker.
“How many cigars do you smoke in a day?” he had inquired of his patient, to which Burne-Jones had carelessly replied:
“Oh, I think about six.”
“Well,” replied his adviser, “for the present you had better limit yourself to three.”
And in detailing the incident to me afterwards Burne-Jones added with a chuckle:
“You know, my dear Carr, I never did smoke more than three.”
When the end came, and came so swiftly, he left a gap in my life I well knew could never be filled again. I had not seen quite so much of him during the last three or four years of his life, but immediately preceding that period we had been closely associated in a task that lay very near my heart. I had asked him, with Irving’s concurrence, to undertake the designing of the scenery and costumes for my play ofKing Arthur, produced in 1894. At his request I went down to read him the play while he was at work in the garden studio of the Grange, and at its conclusion he announced, to my great delight, that he would willingly undertake the work. The subject was congenial to him; he was deeply versed in all Arthurian lore, and in his paintings he returned again and again to that great cycle of romance enshrined for English readers in the exquisite prose poem of Sir Thomas Malory.
We met often and intimately during the progress of preparation, and I remember his almost child-likedelight when we mounted to the painting-room at the Lyceum—where Hawes Craven was transferring to a wider canvas his beautiful design for the scene of the Queen’s Maying—as he insisted in taking from the scenic artist a brush of giant dimensions, and executing a passage in one corner of the backcloth so that he might be able to boast, as he laughingly declared to Craven, that he had partly painted the scene himself.
OPHELIAFrom the picture by SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.
OPHELIAFrom the picture by SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.
OPHELIA
From the picture by SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.
Millais was not one of those to whom I had written after the publication of my article upon his work, and it was not till later at the Arts Club that I learned to know him personally.
Perhaps I refrained from addressing him at the time because I was conscious that my criticism could not be altogether agreeable to him, and I felt that I could hardly demand any assistance in the prosecution of my labours from one whose talent I had so severely handled.
Looking back now upon that youthful essay it seems to me, in the light of later knowledge and appreciation, to be disfigured to an extraordinary degree by arrogance of statement and intolerance of judgment. My mind had been so completely captured by the innate poetical feeling that marked the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that I was then scarcely ready to rank at their true value the splendid powers which Millais possessed. I could only think at the time, with something approaching resentment, of Millais’s apparent desertion of the ideal that inspired his earlier efforts, and I was not able to perceive that, in the line of developmentwhich he had followed, he was only conforming with absolute loyalty to the natural bent of his genius.
It was the accident of youth which set him for a while under the influence of men of a deeper spiritual tendency, and it was not his fault, nor indeed our misfortune, that when the period of youth had passed he should have applied himself with ever-increasing earnestness to the development of those gifts in portraiture and in landscape which have left him pre-eminent among the painters of our school.
At the time I was not able to judge fairly of the causes which led to his ultimate desertion of those earlier ideals, and I could only remember with a regret, too harshly expressed, that we were no longer to expect of him another “Huguenot” or “Ophelia,” or to welcome again from his hand such achievements as the “Carpenter’s Shop” or the “Feast of Lorenzo.”
But a knowledge of the man himself very speedily enabled me to take a juster view of his place as a painter. There are artists in every line, in literature as well as in painting, whose personality does not willingly associate itself with their work. This was certainly true of Browning, who would seem in social intercourse to be almost perversely desirous of enabling you to forget that he was a poet, and it was true no less of Millais, who rather sought by preference in his leisure hours the companionship of men who were not concerned with the art he professed.
Millais had about him, as I first recall him, and retained to the end of his life, even in the days that
THE FINDING OF MOSES BY PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER.FromLays of the Holy Land.By SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)By permission ofMessrs. James Nisbet and Co., Ltd.To face page 87.
THE FINDING OF MOSES BY PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER.FromLays of the Holy Land.By SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)By permission ofMessrs. James Nisbet and Co., Ltd.To face page 87.
THE FINDING OF MOSES BY PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER.
FromLays of the Holy Land.
By SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.
Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.
(Reproduced from theirFifty Years’ Work.)
By permission ofMessrs. James Nisbet and Co., Ltd.
To face page 87.
were passed under the shadow of a mortal sickness, a delightful buoyancy of character that was enchaining and infectious. In his view of his own art there was occasionally something of the victorious arrogance of a school-boy who has lately carried off the first prize, an arrogance that was nevertheless consistent with a deep modesty of character that showed itself in his reverent attitude towards nature, where he was ever ready to admit that he had found his rival and his master.
As far as my own experience of him went, he was never very eager to discuss the work of his contemporaries, although he could be amply generous on occasion towards the earlier experiments of younger men. When he referred to the works of the older masters it seemed to me that there was something of defiant challenge in his tone, as though he were ready to do battle with any one of them in his own person and in his own painting.
Of the men with whom his career had been so closely linked in the earlier days of his studentship he spoke but little, but even in the little that he said I always felt there was an underlying conviction on his part that, as a painter, he had easily outstripped them all. And perhaps he was right. That, at least, was Rossetti’s opinion, as I have already stated, nor is it possible, I think, in fairly reviewing the art of his time, not to set Millais, in virtue of his powers as a mere craftsman, in a place beyond the reach of rivalry.
It was difficult at the period when I first made Millais’s acquaintance to realise that the earlier stages of his career had sometimes yielded periodsof deep depression, and yet it is only necessary to turn to his own letters, written in the earlier part of the year 1859, to realise how, for a while at least, discouragement sat heavily upon him. And it is no less characteristic to note how swiftly that darker mood passed, for in the letter dated May 16 of that same year he says, “I have now enough commissions to last me all next year, so I am quite happy.” And then a little later, though he had received no vote at the Academy election, he adds in his characteristically confident temper, “It’s really a matter of entire indifference to me, as my position is as good as any except Landseer’s, and this they too well know.”
The charm of Millais’s nature, with its swift alternation between absolute confidence in his own powers—in the form of its expression sometimes verging upon harmless arrogance—and those rarer moods of discouragement and self-abasement, was aptly imaged in his person and bearing. I have been told by one who knew him in his youth that he had the beauty of an Adonis, and even in the year 1875, when I first met him, his appearance was singularly handsome and attractive.
The frankness of his outlook upon the world was aptly mirrored in his face—eyes that were keen yet kindly, and a mouth delicately sensitive for all its firmness, forming the essential features in a countenance that could not fail to win both sympathy and regard.
Occasionally in walking home with him from the Club he would tell me something of the men he had known well in an earlier period of his life, but forthe most part it was not especially of painters that he spoke. Talking in this way of Thackeray and Dickens, and other notabilities of their time, he remarked to me that “the greatest gentleman of them all was John Leech”; and then, for a quarter of an hour or more, he ran on in affectionate appreciation of the great caricaturist, enlarging upon the extraordinary fascination and charm of his manner and the delicate refinement of his nature.
When the time came for the gathered exhibition of his work in the Grosvenor Gallery, I saw Millais more often and more intimately. Day by day, as Hallé and I were engaged in arranging the pictures upon the walls, Millais would come in with his short wooden pipe in his mouth and wander round examining the rich record of his own career; sometimes elated to the verge of enthusiasm, and sometimes as frankly confessing his own dissatisfaction with this work or that. Taking me by the arm one day he drew me round the room, and pausing before the “Knight Errant” he said:
“You know, Carr, as I look at these things there are some of them which seem to say to me, ‘Millais, you’re a fine painter,’ and this is one”—pointing as he spoke to the beautiful picture before us—“and there are others,” he added, his tones suddenly changing from triumph to dejection, “that tell me just as plainly, ‘Millais, you’re a damned vulgar fellow!’ Oh, but there are!” he cried, as though anticipating my polite protest. “If you don’t believe me, look at that,” and he pointed to a picture I need not now name, but which he looked at with unfeigned resentment and disgust.
There was one little incident connected with that exhibition which I shall not readily forget. After many efforts, at first unsuccessful, we had at last persuaded the owner of “The Huguenot” to lend it for the occasion; but this favourable answer to our request only reached us when the rest of the exhibition was already arranged. It so chanced that Millais had not seen the picture since the year 1852 when it was painted, and he was therefore particularly anxious that it should be included in the exhibition.
It was late in the evening when the picture arrived in its case from Preston; but Millais had waited, evidently in some trepidation as to how this first triumph of his youth would impress him when he saw it again. Its place had been reserved on the wall, and the carpenters, quickly unscrewing the case, held up the picture for the painter to see.
Millais was standing beside me as they hurried forward in their work, and I felt his arm tremble on my shoulder during the few moments that prefaced its appearance; and then, when at last it was raised to its place, he said in a voice that was half broken by emotion, “Well, well, not so damned bad for a youngster.” And lighting his little wooden pipe hurried out of the Gallery and took his way downstairs into the street.
In later days we met constantly in the card-room at the Garrick, and as we both lived in Kensington it happened often that we used to walk homeward together. Sometimes I would come across him in the daytime strolling in Kensington Gardens, and I remember one snowy Sunday in winter when Ihad carelessly said to him, “How ugly snow is!” Millais turned to me with sudden vehemence and said, “Carr, how can you say that? Nothing in nature is ugly.” And I think to him it was as he said.
I know at the time I was forcibly reminded of a phrase used by Constable which betrays the same unfailing faith in nature. “There is nothing,” said the earlier painter, “either beautiful or ugly but light and shade makes it so.”
The power of selection in the facts he chose to render was never among the strongest of Millais’s artistic gifts; perhaps to him the need of it seemed not so great as to others. His mastery in the rendering of every aspect of reality, a mastery exercised with impartial regard upon the facts of human form or the complex growth of outward nature, was so complete, and so completely enjoyed, that he had scarcely the inclination to reject any one part of the subject presented to him in favour of another.
His art knew little preference, and for that reason it often lacked the higher sense of composition that painters, differently though perhaps not so greatly gifted, can command for their work. And so it was that the spiritual appeal of his painting varied extraordinarily according to the degree in which the theme had inspired him, and even more according to the measure of support which he received from the chosen model before his eyes.
And yet, to the last, that inspiration, when it came, could summon, almost undimmed, all that concentrated power in the rendering of life, animate andinanimate, that had set so clear a stamp upon those beautiful paintings of the period of his youth.
Lovable I think he was in an extraordinary degree to all who were brought in contact with him, and I know for my own part that as I knew him more, I was the more attracted by his personality. At the last, as he lay dying in Palace Gate, he sent a message to say he would like to see me, but when I reached the house his son greeted me at the door with the sad verdict that it was too late. Already the hand of Death was upon him: within a few hours he had passed away.
There is one element of Millais’s painting which, I think, has never received a full measure of appreciation. Apart from his superb gifts as a painter, he possessed a distinctive mastery in the rendering of certain phases of human emotion that has left him without a rival among the living or the dead. His fine powers as a draughtsman enabled him to press into a single face a quality of sentiment that, by reason of its exquisite delicacy of expression, was saved from the reproach of any sentimentalism.
The desire to capture this deeper beauty in character lay always resident in his nature, but it needed the inspiration of some rarer type of feminine loveliness to quicken it into life. In this sense Millais was to some extent, as I have said, at the mercy of his model, but when that model served him well—as in the case of “The Huguenots” and “Ophelia”—the result yields an image of some indefinable beauty in human character that adds to his innate gifts as a realist a deeper and more passionate truth.