COASTING BOHEMIA
[Illustration]
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
COASTING BOHEMIA
BY
J. COMYNS CARR
AUTHOR OF ‘KING ARTHUR,’ ‘TRISTRAM AND ISEULT,’ ‘PAPERS ON ART,’
‘SOME EMINENT VICTORIANS,’ ETC. ETC.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1914
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Many of the papers which give to the present volume its title first
appeared in the columns of the _Daily Telegraph_, and are here
reprinted by the courteous permission of the proprietors of that
journal.
A portion of the essay on Burne-Jones was originally designed as an
introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his collected works
held, shortly after his death, at the New Gallery. The essay on Sex in
Tragedy was written on the occasion of Sir Henry Irving’s last revival
of the play of _Macbeth_ at the Lyceum Theatre.
CONTENTS
PAGE
BOHEMIA PAST AND PRESENT 1
SOME MEMORIES OF MILLAIS 12
AT HOME WITH ALMA-TADEMA 26
WITH ROSSETTI IN CHEYNE WALK 42
EDWARD BURNE-JONES 56
JAMES M‘NEIL WHISTLER 89
THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING AT THE ROMAN EXHIBITION 101
WITH GEORGE MEREDITH ON BOX HILL 134
THE LEGEND OF PARSIFAL 147
SEX IN TRAGEDY 162
HENRY IRVING 199
A SENSE OF HUMOUR 213
SITTING AT A PLAY 227
SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN 242
THE JUNIOR OF THE CIRCUIT 253
BY THE SIDE OF A STREAM 264
INDEX 279
BOHEMIA PAST AND PRESENT
The papers which compose this volume make no claim to any sort of
ordered plan in their composition. They reflect in some measure the
varied activities of a life that has been passed in close association
with more than one of the arts, and therein lies their sole title to so
much of coherence as they may be found to possess.
Lord Beaconsfield once defined critics as men who had failed in art.
The reproach, however, is not always deserved, for youth is often
confident in its judgment of others at a time when it is still too
timorous to make any adventure of its own. For myself I may confess
that I had adopted the calling of a critic long before I had found
the courage to make even the most modest incursion into the field of
authorship. My first essays in journalism, made at a time when I was
still a student at the bar, were chiefly concerned with the art of
painting, and I look back now with feelings almost of dismay at the
spirit of reckless assurance in which I then assumed to measure and
appraise the achievement of contemporary masters. A little later in
my career I was brought into still closer contact with the art of the
theatre, and in both these worlds, as well as in that of literature
itself, I was fortunate in the formation of many valued and enduring
friendships which have enabled me, in such of the following chapters
as bear a distinctively biographical character, to record my personal
impressions of some of the notable figures in the literature and art of
the later Victorian era.
The reader who accompanies me in my voyage along the shores of the
Bohemia of that time will quickly realise that it is not quite the
Bohemia of to-day. Indeed since Shakespeare first boldly conceded
to the kingdom a seaboard, each succeeding age, and almost every
generation, has claimed the liberty to refashion this enchanted country
in accordance with its own ideals. The coast-line has been recharted
by every voyager who has newly cruised upon its encompassing seas, and
in recent days its boundaries have been enlarged by the occasional
incursions of Society which has lately condescended to include the
concerns of art within the sphere of its patronage. But although no
longer retaining its old outlines upon the map, there is enough of
continuity in the character of the inhabitants and in the subjects of
their preoccupation to render a brief survey of earlier conditions of
something more than merely archaeological interest. If much has been
gained, something also has been lost, and the traveller who survives to
set down the experiences of that earlier time may perhaps be pardoned
if he cannot always accept the changes which have transformed the face
of the country, or modified the mental attitude of its citizens, as
improvements upon the prospect that first dawned upon his vision forty
years ago.
I read the other day a confident pronouncement made by one of the
apostles of the more modern spirit which gave me the measure of the
revolution that has been effected in all that concerns our judgment
upon matters of art. “Art,” declared this authority, “cannot stop: the
moment it rests and repeats itself, or imitates the past, it dies.”
There is here no faltering or uncertainty in the assertion of those
principles of faith and criticism which are embodied in the newer
gospel, and it took me a little time to steady myself in the face of
a declaration which seemed to overturn the settled convictions of a
lifetime. But after much pondering my courage returned. I perceived
that apart from the underlying truism that life implies movement, and
that art as its image must share its vitality, there is nothing here
that is not highly disputable or wholly false. Art indeed never stops
but it does not always go forward: the movement perceptible at every
stage of its history has been as often retrograde as progressive, and
although it can never repeat itself, there have been again and again
long seasons of rest when after a period of great productivity the land
which has yielded so rich a harvest lies fallow.
But the final clause of the proposition, that imitation of the past
heralds approaching dissolution, is demonstrably untrue of every great
epoch of artistic activity. A fearless spirit of imitation, born of the
worship yielded to the achievements of an earlier time, may, on the
contrary, be claimed as the hall-mark of genius, and is indeed most
frankly confessed in the work of men of unchallenged supremacy. Raphael
exhibited neither shame nor fear in the frank reliance of his youth
upon the example of Perugino: the painting of Titian, with an equal
candour, confesses the extent of his debt to Giovanni Bellini, and
Tintoret, who certainly could not be cited as a man deficient in the
spirit of independence, made it his boast that he combined the design
of Michelangelo with the colouring of Titian: while of Michelangelo
himself we have it on record that in one of his earlier efforts as a
sculptor a deliberate imitation of the antique carried him near to
the confines of forgery. And when we pass from individuals to the
epoch which produced them, was not the main impulse which governed
the movement of the Renaissance inspired by a renewed sense of the
beauty that was left resident in the surviving examples of the Art of
the antique world? And all later time yields a similar experience.
That newly born spirit in modern painting associated with what is
known as the pre-Raphaelite movement rested upon the untiring effort
of its professors to recapture the forgotten or neglected qualities
of the painting of an earlier time, not indeed of the time which
was its immediate forerunner, but of that still younger day when by
simple means and with technical resources not yet assured, the earlier
painters of Italy sought to interpret the beauty they found in nature.
The spirit of imitation, conscious and unabashed, was of the very life
blood of the movement, and it was in their devotion to that period in
Italian painting which preceded the crowning glory of the Renaissance
that the artists whose work constitutes the most important contribution
to the painting of modern Europe were led to a stricter veracity in the
rendering of the facts in nature which they sought to interpret.
But the men who laboured in that day were not greatly affected by
the declared ambitions of the present generation. Originality had
not yet been accepted as the cardinal virtue in any of the fields
of imaginative production, and the illusion of progress, which may
be said to rank as the special vice of the moment, found no place in
the teaching of the time. Thinking over this widely desired and much
vaunted quality of Originality in art, I was minded to turn to old
Samuel Johnson to discover what particular meaning was then attached to
a term that is now in such constant use. But my curiosity was baffled,
for I discovered to my disappointment that this much treasured word
finds no place at all in the pages of his _Dictionary_. The world is
therefore free to conjecture in what way, if he were living in this
hour, that sane and virile intelligence might have sought to describe
it. As applied to matters of art, whether literary or pictorial, he
would perhaps have been tempted to define it as “a word in vulgar use
employed to indicate a vulgar ambition.” But without burdening the
great lexicographer with views which the exigencies of the time did not
provoke him to express, this at least may be confidently affirmed, that
the pursuit of whatever virtue the word implies can have no place in
the conscious equipment of any great artist. Certainly it was unknown
or unregarded in every great epoch of the past. It is impossible to
think of even the least of the mighty race of Florentine painters,
from Giotto to Michelangelo, sparing one foolish moment from the
eager intentness of their labour to ponder whether the judgment of
aftertime should hail their work as original. That work, in common
with all else that is produced in obedience to the impulse which is
constantly shaping the beauties of the outer world till they are tuned
into harmony with the spirit resident in the breast of the artist, had
no need of any spur to production beyond that which is provided by a
reverent love and an unceasing devotion, and it survives to prove, if
proof were needed, that this boasted attribute of Originality, though
it may fitly find a place in the epitaph upon an artist’s tomb, never
since the world began formed any part in the impulse that governed the
work of his hand.
The undue importance now assigned to this coveted quality of
Originality is partly the outcome of the illusion to which I have
already referred,--that art is in its nature progressive and is in
fact constantly and steadily progressing. It must be obvious, however,
to any one who has followed the fortunes of the imaginative spirit in
the past, that history affords no warrant for any such pretension.
In whatever field of artistic industry we choose to enter, in the
world of letters no less than the world of art, strictly so called,
the testimony of the ages bears witness to the fact that the sense
of restless and unceasing movement is not always accompanied by any
real advancement. Fate has scattered over the centuries with impartial
indifference to the onward march of time those signal examples of
individual genius which mark for us the summit of human invention.
No one supposes that Dryden was a greater dramatist than Shakespeare
because he came later: no one would be so foolish as to suggest that a
comparison between Lycidas and Adonais can be decided by reference to
the historical position of their authors.
And yet it is not difficult to understand how in our more modern day
this illusion of progress has fastened itself upon the judgment and
consideration of the things of art. The rapid strides made by science
during the last fifty or sixty years, yielding at every step some
new discovery to arrest the admiration of a wondering world, has not
unnaturally bred an inappropriate spirit of rivalry in the minds of
men whose mission it was to deal with the widely divergent problems of
the imagination. Indeed it is easy to discern in the literature of the
Victorian era that some of its professors were apt to be haunted by the
fear that their different appeal might be partly overborne or wholly
silenced unless they too could prove to their generation that what
they had to offer for its acceptance registered something of a like
superiority to the product of earlier times.
The sense of inexhaustible variety, characteristic of all art
that truly images the spirit of man, has by a false analogy been
confused with the onward march of science where every addition to
the accumulated harvest garnered in the past uplifts each succeeding
generation upon the shoulders of its forerunner. Art cannot compete on
such terms, and any comparison so conducted must relegate its claims
to an inferior place; yet though so much may be freely confessed, it
does not therefore follow that its unchanging appeal is to be counted
as an unequal factor in shaping the destinies of humanity. The work of
the man of science, however pre-eminent the place assigned to him in
his generation, must of necessity yield place to the larger discoveries
made by even the humblest of his followers; while the work of the
artist, the outcome of individual vision engaged upon the unchanging
passions of man and the unfading beauty of the world he inhabits,
stands secure against any assault from the future; in its nature
distinct from all that has preceded it as from all that may follow in
the time to come. It knows neither rivalry nor competition, for in the
temple wherein the artist worships, each worshipper has his separate
and appointed place. In the matchless words of Shelley,
Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
and although the light beyond to which the artist lifts his eyes is
of unchanging purity, the myriad hues through which it is transmitted
yields to each separate vision the impress of an individuality which no
after achievement can challenge or destroy.
But there are recurring seasons in the history of every art when the
worker becomes unduly conscious of the medium in which he labours,
and correspondingly forgetful of the truth he seeks to interpret.
It was this that Wordsworth had in his mind when he urged upon the
poet the necessity of keeping his eye upon the object, and it is not
difficult to perceive how easily in the present hour the reiterated
demand for Originality, enforced by the vulgar illusion that art to be
a living force must be a progressive force, invites the invasion of
the charlatan. It would perhaps not be too much to say that the little
corner of time we now inhabit constitutes a veritable paradise for the
antics of every form of conscious imposture.
But this fact, even if it be conceded, need not greatly disturb us.
The patient labour of men more worthily inspired still survives. The
more aggressive spirits in every department of art, who in their
haste to secure the verdict of the future are eager to cast overboard
the hoarded treasure of the past, may find when time’s award comes
to be recorded that they have won nothing but the gaping wonder of
the fleeting moment. The judgment of posterity refuses to be hustled
however loud or shrill the voices that call upon it, and we may take
comfort in the thought that the whispered message, perhaps only half
audible in its generation, has often been the first to win the ear of
the future.
SOME MEMORIES OF MILLAIS
There are men in every walk of life who would seem deliberately to
shun the outward trappings of their calling. During his later years,
when I knew Robert Browning well, it always appeared to me that he was
at particular pains not to make any social appeal which could be held
to rest on his claims as a poet. The homage that fell to him on that
score he accepted as his due, but always, as I thought, on the implied
understanding that in the daily traffic of social life the subject
should not be rashly intruded. In the many and varied circles in which
he moved he made no demand of any formal tribute to the distinguished
place he held in the world of letters; and it was sometimes matter for
wonder to those who met him constantly to note with what apparently
eager and sincere interest he entered into the discussion of any
trivial topic in which it was not to be supposed that he could have
been very deeply concerned. Like Lord Byron, whose gifts as a poet
he held in no great esteem, he was rather anxious--at any rate, in
the earlier stages of acquaintanceship--that his position as a poet
should be regarded as a thing apart; and he was apt, I think, to be
embarrassed by any persistent endeavour to penetrate the outward shard
of the man of the world, wherein he preferred to render himself easily
accessible to a wide circle of friends, few of whom would have deemed
themselves competent to enter into any sustained discussion of literary
topics.
Among the painters of his time Millais would, I think, have owned to
a like inclination. Neither in his personality nor in his bearing was
he at any pains to announce himself to the world as an artist; and
if not in his earlier days, at any rate at the time I first began
to know him, he seemed to seek by preference the comradeship of men
whose distinction had been won in another field. In self-esteem he was
certainly at no time lacking; he could accept in full measure praise
of his own work from whatever quarter it came; and in that respect he
differed from Browning, whose nature seemed to stand in less need of
flattery, or even of expressed appreciation. On occasion, indeed, and
with only moderate encouragement, Millais could be beguiled into a
confession of confident faith in his own powers that might sometimes
seem to border on arrogance, but at the worst it was no more than
the arrogance of an overgrown boy, put forward with such genuine
conviction as to rob it of all offence. At these times he would give
you the impression that, having won the top place in his class, he
intended to hold it. He could not readily endure the thought, or even
the suspicion, that there was anybody qualified to supplant him, and
he was apt to be impatient, and even restive, when other claims were
advanced, as though he felt the world was wasting time till it reached
the consideration of what he was genuinely convinced was a higher
manifestation of artistic power. And yet thee judgments upon himself,
even when they were delivered in the most buoyant and conquering
spirit, never left the savour of pretentious vanity. There was an air
of impartiality that I think was genuine, even when his self-esteem was
most emphatically expressed, as though he were recording the award of
a higher tribunal, in whose verdict his own personality was in no way
involved.
And then there was so much that was immediately lovable in the man
himself as distinguished from the artist! I have heard it said by an
older friend who knew him in the season of his youth that when, as a
mere boy, he quitted the schools of the Academy to begin the practice
of his art, he had the face and form of an Adonis, and his handsome
and commanding presence when I first met him, toward the close of the
seventies, a man then nearing fifty years of age, made it easy to
believe that this record of the charm of his youthful appearance was
in no way exaggerated. And yet the frank outlook of the face, with its
clear blue eyes, and firm, yet finely-modelled mouth, though it spoke
clearly of power and resource, and betrayed in every changing mood of
expression the unconquerable optimism of a nature that retained its
full vitality to the last, did not, I think, then, or at any time,
yield any decisive indication of the direction in which his gifts
were employed. Afterwards I learned to find in his features the true
index of the finer qualities of his genius, but at our first encounter
it seemed to me rather that I stood in the presence of a robust
personality that had been bred and nurtured in the free air of the
country.
It was always, indeed, easier to think of him as one of a happy and
careless company during those annual fishing and shooting holidays in
which he so greatly delighted, than to picture him a prisoner in a
London studio, arduously applying himself to the problems of his art.
And, in point of fact, he always brought something of that sense of
breezy, outdoor life into the spacious studio at Palace Gate. Perhaps,
if he could have followed his own inclination, he would have passed
a greater part of his life on the banks of the northern river that
he loved so well. Quite in the later years of his life, when he was
rebuking his old friend and comrade, Holman Hunt, upon a too obstinate
indifference to the taste of his time, he said to him: “Why, if I were
to go on like that, I should never be able to go away in the autumn to
fish and shoot. You take my advice, old boy, and just take the world
as it is, and don’t make it your business to rub up people the wrong
way.” Millais’s ready acquiescence in the demands of his generation
was to some extent an element of weakness in his artistic character,
leading him occasionally, as he more than once confessed to me himself,
into errors of taste that he was afterwards shrewd enough to detect
and candid enough to deplore; but however far he may on occasion have
been led astray towards a certain triviality in choice of subject, this
tendency never impugned or injured his integrity as a painter in the
chosen task he had set himself to accomplish. The presence of nature,
either in human face or form, or in the facts of the external world,
proved a tonic that sufficed to restore his artistic conscience, and
I do not think he was ever satisfied by the exercise of any acquired
facility, for it was both the strength and the weakness of his art that
his ultimate success in any particular adventure largely depended upon
the inspiration supplied by his model.
One day we were talking of technique, and I remember Millais, who was
at the time in some trouble with a portrait that he could not get to
his satisfaction, roundly declared that, for an artist worth the name,
there was no such thing as technique. “Look at me now,” he said; “I
can’t get this face right, and it has been the same with me all through
my life--with every fresh subject I have to learn my art all over
again.” Such a confession came well from a man who, from the earliest
time of his precocious and marvellous boyhood, had in the native gifts
of a painter clearly outpaced and outdistanced the most accomplished of
his contemporaries, and yet it was made in no spirit of mock modesty,
but out of a clear conviction that an artist’s conflict with nature is
ceaseless and unending, no matter what degree of mastery the world may
choose to accord him.
We first met at the Old Arts Club, in Hanover Square. He was not a very
constant visitor there, for his inclination, as I have already hinted,
did not often carry him into a mixed company of his fellow-workers; but
he occasionally looked in of an evening after dinner, and sometimes
I used to walk away with him towards his home in Kensington. In his
talk at the club he was apt to exhibit a genuine impatience of any
desponding view of the present condition or the future prospects of
English art, and the unbroken success of his own career--for at that
time he had long outlived, and perhaps almost forgotten, the struggles
of his youth--made it, I think, really difficult for him to comprehend
that the arena in which he had won his undisputed place was not the
best of all possible worlds. But this overbearing optimism of view was
not always entirely sympathetic in its appeal; he was apt to brush
aside with imperfect consideration the comparative failure of his less
fortunate contemporaries, and it was not until long afterwards that
I grew to realise that this apparent indifference to the fortunes of
others sprang less from any natural lack of sympathy than from an
intellectual incapacity to understand the possibility of real merit
failing to secure recognition. Something of an egotism that was at
times almost aggressive must indeed be allowed to him--an egotism which
I believe left him with a genuine belief that nearly all other ideals
than those he followed were misguided, and that lesser achievements
than his own scarcely merited prolonged consideration.
But when we had left the club and were alone together in the street
the more human and sympathetic side of his character often came into
play. Not that he was, even then, apt to lavish extravagant praise
upon his immediate contemporaries, but he could speak often and
lovingly of the men with whom he had been brought into association in
his earlier days, both in literature and in art, always reverting, in
terms of special affection, to his friendship for John Leech, of whom
he was wont to say that he was “the greatest gentleman of them all.”
Dickens, too, he genuinely admired, though the great novelist had
failed to recognise the earlier efforts of his genius; and he had many
interesting anecdotes of Thackeray, with whom he had been brought into
close contact during the time when he was engaged in the practice of
illustration, telling me how, during periods of illness, he would be
summoned to the distinguished editor’s bedside to receive instructions
for the drawings he was commissioned to execute for the _Cornhill
Magazine_.
It was during one of those talks about Thackeray that he related how he
came to make his first acquaintance with the name of Frederic Leighton,
in an anecdote which he afterwards told with telling effect, as part
of a speech at the Arts Club, on the occasion of Leighton’s election
to the post of President of the Academy. He recounted how Thackeray
had warmly praised the talents of the young painter, whom he had met
in Rome, prophesying for him the final distinction he afterwards
achieved; and Millais confessed how, even then, he had felt a certain
measure of jealousy in the novelist’s warmth of appreciation, conscious
that he already cherished the idea that he himself would one day
occupy the presidential chair. And so, indeed, he did, but the honour
fell upon him almost too late, when he was already in the grip of the
malady that was destined to carry him to the grave. But his reference
to the work of other painters, however distinguished, was, as I have
already hinted, comparatively rare, and the dominant impression left
from all our talks of that time was of a man whose own ever-increasing
prosperity had left him partially blind to qualities in others that had
missed an equal measure of recognition. He could perceive little or no
flaw in a world which had accorded to him his unchallenged position.
The finer and gentler side of Millais, half hidden from me then under
an overpowering and impenetrable armour of optimism, I learned to
know better when, as one of the directors of the Grosvenor Gallery,
I assisted in the arrangement of the collected display of his life’s
work. That was in the year 1886, and I can vividly recall with what
easy self-complacency he anticipated the pleasure which he would derive
from this long-looked-for opportunity of seeing the product of many
years of labour displayed in a single exhibition. Before the arrival
of the paintings themselves, many of which he had not seen from the
time they had left his easel, he was afflicted by no trace of the
nervous apprehension which I have found not uncommonly betrayed by
other artists in similar circumstances. But the triumphant buoyancy
of this earlier mood was replaced by many an hour of deep dejection
when the works themselves appeared in their place; and that dejection
again was sometimes as swiftly replaced by a spirit of almost unlimited
self-esteem as he discovered in some particular example qualities
greater than his recollection had accorded it.
The essential charm of the man’s nature shone out very clearly
during that fortnight of preparation, and the invulnerable armour of
self-esteem in which he was wont to appear before the world would
sometimes fall from him in an instant, leaving in its place a spirit
of humility that belonged to the deeper part of his nature. It was
sometimes almost touching to note the mood of obvious dejection in
which he would quit the gallery at the close of the day’s work, and
no less interesting to observe with what alacrity the next morning he
would recapture the confident outlook that was a part of the necessity
of his being. He would sometimes be in the gallery half an hour or
more before the usual time for the work of hanging to begin, and we
would find him on our arrival with his short cherrywood pipe in his
mouth surveying with evident satisfaction the pictures already placed
upon the walls. And on those occasions he would often run his arm
through mine and draw me away to compel my admiration of some forgotten
excellence in this picture or in that, the renewed vision of which had
sufficed completely to restore his self-complacency.
But these moments of exultation were not long-enduring, and it was
an integral part of the fascinating _naïveté_ of his character that
he could with equal emphasis in the presence of some less desirable
performance accuse himself roundly of having slipped into vulgarity and
bad taste. There was one thing, however, he never could endure, and
that was the suggestion that his latest achievement was not also his
best, and this conviction so entirely possessed him that he set himself
in very vigorous fashion to the task of correcting what he conceived
to be the faults of some of his earlier works. I confess I looked upon
this adventure with something approaching dismay, for it was evident
enough, though he was in no way conscious of it, that the Millais of
1886 was not the Millais of thirty years before, who had laboured under
the influence of earlier and different ideals. Happily the emphatic
protests of one or two of the owners from whom the pictures had been
borrowed cut short this crusade of fancied improvement upon which he
had embarked, and in one instance, although sorely against his will, he
was forced to remove the fresh painting from the surface of the canvas.
Some of the essays of that earlier time of youthful impulse and more
poetic design had grown unfamiliar to him. Many of them he had not
seen from the date when they first left his studio, and I recall in
particular with what eager and yet nervous expectation he awaited the
arrival of “The Huguenot,” a picture that had served as the foundation
of his fame as a young man. I think as he saw it unpacked, with its
delicate beauty untarnished by time, that for the moment his faith in
the uninterrupted progress of his career was partly shaken. I know at
least that his voice trembled with emotion as he muttered some blunt
words of praise for a picture which, as he said, was “not so bad for
a youngster,” and I remember that as it took its place upon the wall,
after gazing at it intently for some time in silence, he relit his pipe
and took his way thoughtfully down the stairs into the street.
Millais used to contend that, until the advent of Watteau, the beauty
of women had found no fit interpreters in art, and he would cite the
example of Rembrandt as showing how poorly the feminine features which
he portrayed compared with the lovely faces imaged by Reynolds and
Gainsborough. Perhaps he was hardly equipped to deliver final judgment
on such a subject, for I do not think he leaned with any enthusiasm
towards those finer examples of Italian painting wherein the subtleties
of feminine beauty have certainly not suffered by neglect. But these
dogmatic assertions of men of genius, if they are not irrefutable in
themselves, are often instructive in illuminating the finer tendencies
of their own achievement; and it will remain as one of Millais’s
indestructible claims to recognition that both in his earlier and
in his later time he was able to interpret with matchless power the
finer shades of emotional expression in the faces of beautiful women.
When the chosen model rightly inspired him--and without that model
his invention was often vapid and inert--he could succeed in a degree
which no other artist has matched or surpassed in registering not only
the permanent facts of beauty in form and feature, but in arresting
with equal felicity the most fleeting moments of tender or passionate
expression.
In the later days of his life it was at the Garrick Club that I saw
most of Millais, for there, in the card-room, he was to be found
nearly every afternoon, and as we both then dwelt in Kensington we
often wandered homeward together. The buoyancy of his youth and early
manhood never quite deserted him, even at that sadder season, when
he was already in conflict with that dread opponent against whom his
all-conquering spirit was powerless, and I never heard from him,
however great the dejection of spirit he must have suffered, a single
sour word concerning life or nature. His outlook on the world was
never tainted by self-compassion, never clouded by any bitterness of
personal experience, and one came to recognise then, as his life and
strength gradually waned and failed, that the spirit of optimism which
seemed sometimes unsympathetic in the season of his opulent vigour and
virility was indeed a beauty deeply resident in his character, which
even the shadow of coming death was powerless to cloud or darken.
AT HOME WITH ALMA-TADEMA
The death of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, following only too closely upon
the loss of his gracious and gifted wife, finally closed the doors
of one of the most delightful houses that overlooked the shores of
Bohemia. They both possessed in rare measure the genius of friendship,
and to both belonged the fine and generous sympathy of nature which is
the abiding secret of true hospitality. And in their case a friendship
once formed was steadfastly held. There are men and women not a few,
who, as they advance along the path that leads to fame and distinction,
contrive to shed the friends and comrades of an earlier day in haste to
make room for guests more important or influential. This was never true
of Tadema at any period of his career, and those who can recall the
earlier Tuesday evenings at Townshend House, which looked across the
waters of the canal to the green shade of the Regent’s Park, can bear
witness that the simplest and most modest of his associates of that
time found as cordial a welcome in the more spacious premises which he
afterwards built for himself in the Grove End Road.
It was in the year 1877 that I first became an intimate guest at the
pleasant weekly receptions at Townshend House, and I remember that
what first struck me about them was the delightful sense of ease and
informality that the host and hostess contrived to infuse into every
gathering. Sometimes the friends assembled might number only a few;
sometimes the rooms would be thronged with all that was most notable
in the world of literature and art; but the party, whether large or
small, knew no constraint of dulness, nor were we ever oppressed by
that overpowering sense of social decorum which is apt to benumb the
best-intentioned efforts of ordinary English hospitality. And, this I
think, was due in great measure to an element in Tadema’s character
that was almost unique.
Shakespeare has told us of the “boy eternal,” and many men of
distinction have owned and kept that quality to the end of their days.
But Tadema went one better, for he retained throughout his life some
of the simple impulses and attributes of a veritable child. He had
the wondering delight of a child in each new experience as it came
within the range of his vision, and there were times when some passing
ebullition of temper would betray something also of a child’s wayward
petulance. It was characteristic of this side of his nature, which
for the rest ranked among the most masculine and virile I have known,
that he preserved to the last a child’s abiding delight in all forms
of mechanical toys. This was a weakness well known to his intimate
friends, who, on the annual occasion of his birthday, would vie with
one another in presenting him with the most admired achievements of the
toy-maker’s art. I remember, in particular, a certain ferocious tiger,
which moved by clock-work across the polished floor of the studio.
Tadema was absolutely fascinated by the antics of this mimic beast,
remaining under the spell of its enchantment during the whole of the
evening; and whenever a pause in the music permitted it, I could hear
the whirr of the wheels of the clock as the delighted owner of this new
plaything prepared to start it again upon an excursion round the room.
These birthday parties were occasions fondly cherished by our host. He
loved every detail in the little ceremonial that might be arranged for
their celebration, and would reckon up with the earnest intentness of
a schoolboy over his first sum in arithmetic, the candles set around
his birthday cake, that counted the sum of his years. And then followed
the inevitable speech proposing his health--a task which usually fell
to my lot; whereupon Tadema, who always thought that whatever was done
in his honour exceeded in excellence any tribute accorded to another,
would stoutly maintain that, as an effort in oratory, it far surpassed
any speech he had ever heard made. This naïve delight of his in little
things, that remained as a constant element of his character, was
linked with a large generosity of nature in all that concerned the
greater issues of life. And if he exacted from all who came within
the range of his influence the little acts of homage and respect that
he thought were his due, there was no one who would so freely place
himself at the disposal of those whom he believed he could serve. He
loved to gather round him the young students of his craft, ever on
the alert to note and welcome new talent as it appeared, and when his
counsel or advice was needed, he would spare neither time nor pains to
afford the aid and encouragement which his superb technical resources
so well fitted him to bestow. I have heard artists of position declare
that if they had reached some crux in a picture that proved difficult
of solution, there was no one so helpful as Tadema; and this, I
think, was due mainly to the fact that his quick sympathy and swift
apprehension enabled him at once to appreciate the point of view of the
comrade who had sought his advice.
The last of those pleasant Tuesday evenings at Townshend House, which
occurred in the spring of 1885, brought with it a certain feeling of
sadness that found constant expression as the evening wore on. We had
all become deeply attached to the quaintly-adorned dwelling where so
many joyous evenings had been passed, and some there were who may have
been conscious of a lurking fear lest the more spacious premises that
were then in course of reconstruction in the Grove End Road should rob
these festive gatherings of some part of the ease and intimacy that had
hitherto been their most delightful characteristic. Certain it was that
for his friends during many months to come, the week would contain no
Tuesday worth the name, and as we parted that night I think there was a
wide-spread feeling that the new order of things could never rival the
old. But such fears, so often justified by experience, proved in this
case wholly without foundation, and when, in the autumn of 1887, we
were bidden to the richly-decorated new studio, in the construction of
which Tadema had taken such infinite delight, it was found that the old
spirit of hospitality, unchanged and unimpaired, was able quickly to
accommodate itself to its more imposing surroundings.
I had known the house in Grove End Road before it took on the stamp
of Tadema’s quaint invention and fanciful ingenuity. It had been
inhabited by the French painter Tissot during a great part of his
residence in England, and I recall a dinner party given by him on an
occasion shortly after the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, at which
he announced to me his serious and solemn intention of making a radical
revolution in the purpose and direction of his art. Up to that time
the pictures of this most adroit of craftsmen had been wholly mundane,
it might even be said demi-mundane, in character; but he had been
profoundly impressed by the recent display of the works of Burne-Jones,
to which the public for the first time had accorded a larger welcome;
and it immediately struck the shrewd spirit of Tissot that there were
commercial possibilities in the region of ideal art of which he was
bound as a practical man to take account and advantage. As he himself
naïvely expressed it on that evening: “Vraiment, mon ami, je vois qu’il
y a quelque chose à faire”; and he forthwith led the way to his studio,
where he had already commenced a group of allegorical subjects, to the
infinite amusement of his friend Heilbuth, who at that time, I think,
knew him better than he knew himself.
In those days, Tadema and Burne-Jones were scarcely acquainted.
Their real friendship came a little later, but when it came it was
very genuine and sincere, resting on a certain quality of simplicity
which they owned in common and a strong feeling of mutual respect and
esteem. Their ways in art lay far asunder, but each knew how to value
at their true worth the gifts of the other. From time to time they
would both join me in little Bohemian feasts at Previtali’s Restaurant
in Coventry Street, where we would sit till the closing hours in
pleasant converse that was never permitted to be protractedly serious.
Tadema generally prefaced the evening with an anecdote which he always
believed to be entirely new, and even when its hoary antiquity was not
in doubt, Burne-Jones never failed to supply a full measure of the
laughing appreciation that was due to novelty. In his more serious
moods, however, Tadema’s talk was marked by deep conviction and entire
sincerity. He never acquired complete mastery over our language, but he
could always find the word or phrase that reached the heart of what he
wanted to say. In his art, no less than in his views on art and life,
he was desperately in earnest, and there was something even in the
quality of his voice that aptly mirrored the mind and character of the
man. Indeed, to be quite correct, it was not one voice, but two, for
sometimes even within the compass of a single sentence the tone would
swiftly change from the guttural notes that betrayed his northern
origin to those softer cadences that seemed to echo from some southern
belfry.
I have often thought that this contrast of intonation in his speech
reflected in a measure the dual influences that dominated his painting.
By his heart’s desire, he belonged to a land that was not the land of
his birth and to an epoch far removed from the present. The call of
the spirit led him backward and southward--to the streets of ancient
Rome and the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean; but, for all his
journeyings, his genius as a painter remained securely domiciled under
northern skies. The saving grace of his art, whatever the material
upon which it was employed, differed little, indeed, from that which
gives its surviving charm to the art of his countryman De Hoogh. Both
will live in virtue of their unfailing love of light. It is that,
or, at least, that above all else, that will make their achievements
delightful and indestructible. “No man has ever lived,” Burne-Jones
once said to me, “who has interpreted with Tadema’s power the incidence
of sunlight on metal and marble.” And although Tadema left the simple
interiors of De Hoogh far behind him in his learned reconstruction of
the buildings of antiquity, it was with a temper and purpose closely
allied to that of De Hoogh that he loved to revel in quaintly-chosen
effects of light and shade, admitting sometimes only the tiniest corner
of the full sunshine from the outer world, just to illumine as with the
dazzling brilliance of a jewel the imprisoned half-tones that flood the
foregrounds of his pictures.
To those who can look below the surface, this central quality of his
genius, which he inherited as part of his birthright, will be found
reappearing in unbroken continuity throughout the splendid series of
his work that lately adorned the walls of Burlington House. Their
fertile invention, and the strong and vivid sense of drama that often
moves that invention; the patient industry and wide learning which
have served to recreate the classic environment wherein his chosen
characters live and have their being--these things would count for
little in the final impression left by his art, if he had not carried
with him in all his wanderings into the past and towards the south,
that vitalising principle of light, which, in hands fitly inspired,
is able to bestow even upon inanimate things a pulsing and sentient
existence. “There is nothing either beautiful or ugly,” as Constable
once said, “but light and shade makes it so.” Alma-Tadema had learnt
this secret long ago, when he was little more than a boy, and before he
had quitted his native land, and he retained it to the very end of his
career.
This is not the occasion to appraise at its full value the worth
of Tadema’s artistic achievement, nor would even those who are his
warmest admirers seek to deny that in many of its aspects it is open
to criticism. But at a time when the antics of the charlatan are
invading almost every realm of art, his patient and unswerving loyalty
to a chosen ideal stands forth as a shining example to all who may
come after him. That his powers in the region of design confessed
some inherent limitations he himself was entirely conscious. I
remember one day when we were discussing the claims of several of his
contemporaries, he said to me suddenly, “You know, my dear fellow,
there are some painters who are colour-blind, and some painters who are
form-blind. Now, Leighton, for instance, is colour-blind, and I--well,
I, you know, am form-blind.” The criticism was perhaps unduly severe in
both directions, but it announced a pregnant truth and proved that he
was not unaware of those particular qualities in which his weakness was
apt to betray itself.
This was said during the time when Hallé and I were arranging the
collected exhibition of his works at the Grosvenor Gallery, and when
he had had a full opportunity of passing in review the gathered
achievement of many years’ labour. Those days we passed together
superintending the process of hanging were wholly delightful, and
served to bring out many interesting characteristics of Tadema’s
nature. When the exhibition was first projected Tadema had laid
down a rule for our guidance, which he emphatically declared must
not be departed from. “The arrangement,” he said, “must be strictly
chronological”; for the whole interest of such a collection, as he
held, lay in the image it presented of an artist’s gradual development.
We offered no objection at the time, though we knew well by previous
experience that adherence to so rigid a principle was inconsistent with
decorative effect; and we were, therefore, not unduly surprised when
Tadema appeared one morning with the revolutionary announcement that
the chronological arrangement must go by the board; insisting, with
the air of a man who had hitherto unwillingly yielded to our pedantic
tradition, that the only fit way to hang an exhibition was to make the
pictures look well upon the walls.
The last time I met Alma-Tadema was at a little supper party given by
Sir Herbert Tree on the occasion of the first performance of _Macbeth_.
It was impossible for those who had known him in the days of his full
vigour not to be conscious even then that his health was failing. From
the time of his wife’s death, he had never, indeed, shown the same
elasticity of spirit, though with valiant courage he had set himself to
take up the broken thread of his life, retaining even to the last that
loving and humorous welcome of his friends that had been his unfailing
characteristic in happier days. But although admittedly no longer
robust, his unflagging interest in the theatre and his friendship for
Tree had brought him from home on that evening, and availed to hold him
a prisoner for the little impromptu feast that followed the play.