school in order to trace the growth of the art of landscape, a
department wherein by the consent of Europe our painters hold a place
of indisputable supremacy. Gainsborough, as I have already hinted,
had found in the surroundings of his Suffolk home the material he
needed for the display of his deeply seated love of outward nature;
and his achievements in this kind rest as the first foundation of
what is most enduringly characteristic in English landscape painting.
But as early as the year 1749, when Gainsborough was only a youth of
twenty-two, Richard Wilson was already resident in Italy, and had
begun that exquisite series of studies from Italian scenery which
won so small a meed of praise from his own generation. The special
direction of his art was not, indeed, destined to inspire many of
those who came after him, for the new spirit of naturalism sought and
captured certain qualities of dramatic expressions in the rendering of
nature that were not of his seeking; nor was the ordered beauty of his
compositions, or the serene charm which characterises his gift as a
colourist, likely to be heeded by a race of painters who were already
on the alert to seize and record those fleeting effects of changing
light and tone which found such splendid embodiment in the vigorous
painting of Constable. Constable’s frank reliance upon light and
shade as constituting the final element of beauty in landscape could
never have been accepted without reserve by Richard Wilson, but the
pursuit which Constable initiated has owned an overpowering attraction
for nearly all students of nature since his time; and his example,
transported to France through the art of Michel, may be allowed to
have powerfully inspired that distinguished group of French artists
whose work was a part of the outcome of the modern romantic movement.
It would be impossible here to distinguish in detail the separate work
of English painters who have worthily carried forward the tradition
established by Constable; nor is it needful now to vindicate the
claims of men like Cotman, Cox, and Crome in an earlier time, or of
Hook and Cecil Lawson, Sam Bough, Mason, and Frederick Walker, whose
more recent work brings the story of this branch of art down to our
own day. Of English landscapists, indeed, the name is legion, and at
the head of them all, if we may judge by the extent of the fame he has
won, stands the name of Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose genius,
heralded to the world by the eloquent advocacy of Ruskin, is here fully
illustrated in superb examples from the collections of Mr. Chapman,
Lord Strathcona, Mr. Beecham, and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Turner, in his
youth, while he was still under the influence of Girtin, might well
have owned kinship with Richard Wilson, as both in turn might have
confessed their indebtedness to the great Frenchman, Claude Lorraine;
but Turner’s talent, as it passed onward in steady development, parted
completely with the shackles imposed by earlier authority and left him
at the close of a brilliant career in a position of complete isolation
and independence. There will always be those--and I may count myself
among the number--who will turn with increasing love to the more
restrained beauty of his earlier work, and who will seek rather in his
water-colours than in his paintings in oil for the finer expression of
those more individual qualities which marked the practice of his prime.
But personal preference need count for little in the acknowledgment
which all alike must freely render, that his genius has conferred a
lasting glory upon the English school.
With this brief survey of the work of deceased British artists
the mission of the critic may here fitly end. The purpose of such
an introduction as I have attempted is sufficiently served if, in
sketching the growth of our school from its foundation in the middle
of the eighteenth century, I have succeeded in indicating the several
diverse currents which have contributed to its development, and have
left so rich a heritage in achievement and example to the men of a
younger day. Of the varied quality of that later work the exhibition
must be left to speak for itself. That the product of our time lacks
nothing of vitality is sufficiently shown in the spirit of restless
and untiring experiment which marks the varied output of our younger
school; and that it still preserves among many of its exponents a loyal
adherence to the imperishable traditions of the past is no less clearly
asserted in the work of men who are now labouring with undiminished
faith in the ideals established by an earlier generation. Of Subject
and Portrait, in the art that leans for its support upon qualities
of decorative design and in the direct and searching questionings of
nature, noticeable in every direction and manifest specially in the
treatment of landscape, there is a rich and abundant harvest in the
present collection.
WITH GEORGE MEREDITH ON BOX HILL
“Come down,” he wrote to me one day, “and see our Indian summer here. A
dozen differently coloured torches you will find held up in our woods,
for which, however, as well as for your sensitive skin, we require
stillness and a smiling or sober sky.”
This was written in the autumn of 1878, and is drawn from one of many
little notes of invitation which used to preface a delightful day with
George Meredith on the slopes of Box Hill. Our long rambles filled the
afternoon, and were preceded by a simple but thoughtfully chosen lunch,
which, when the weather allowed, was set out upon a gravel walk in
front of the cottage beside the tall, sheltering hedge that gave shade
from the sun. Meredith attached no small importance to the details of
these little feasts. He prided himself not a little on his gastronomic
knowledge, and was pleased when our climate made it possible to
reproduce the impression of a genuine French _déjeuner en plein air_.
In another letter he writes: “The promise of weather is good. Lilac,
laburnum, nightingales, and asparagus are your dishes. Hochheimer or
dry, still, red Bouzy, Richebourg and your friend to wash all down.”
His knowledge of these matters of the table was, perhaps, not very
profound, but the appropriate vocabulary which gave the air of the
expert was always at his command. And this, I think, was characteristic
of the man in respect of many fields of knowledge that lay beyond the
arena in which his imaginative powers were directly engaged.
In his art he was never quite content to image only the permanent
facts of life, either in their larger or simpler issues, unless he was
permitted at the same time to entangle the characters of his creation
in the coils of some problem that was intellectual rather than purely
emotional. He loved to submit his creations to the instant pressure of
their time, and with this purpose it was his business, no less than
his pleasure, to equip himself intellectually with garnered stores of
knowledge in fields into which the ordinary writers of fiction rarely
enter. It was not, of course, to be supposed that he could claim equal
mastery in all, although his intellect was so active and so agile
that his limitations were not easily discerned. I remember one day
at an Exhibition in the New Gallery having introduced him to an old
gentleman, whose long life had been spent in a study of the drawings
of the old masters, to whom Meredith, with inimitable fluency, was
expounding the peculiar virtues of the art of Canaletto. Meredith
was eloquent, but the discourse somehow failed to impress the aged
student. When they had parted his sole commentary to me was: “Your
friend--Mr. Meredith, I think you said--endeavoured to persuade me that
he understood Canaletto, but he did not.”
But even if, in this single instance, the criticism be accepted as
just, it must be conceded by all who knew him well that Meredith was
not often caught tripping in the discussion of any topic in which his
intellect had been actively engaged. Sometimes--and then, perhaps,
rather in a spirit of audacious adventure and for exercise of his
incomparable powers of expression--he would make a bold sortie into
realms of knowledge that were only half conquered. But this was, for
the most part, only when he had an audience waiting on his words. When
he had only a single companion to listen there was no man whose talk
was more penetrating or more sincere: and he was at his best, I used
to think, in those long rambles that filled our afternoons at Box
Hill. The active exercise in which he delighted seemed to steady and
concentrate those intellectual forces that sometimes ran riot when he
felt himself called upon to dominate the mixed assembly of a dinner
table.
No one, assuredly, ever possessed a more genuine or a more exalted
delight in nature. His veneration for the earth and for all that sprang
from the earth as an unfailing and irrefutable source of the highest
sanity in thought and feeling, amounted almost to worship. He never
deliberately set out to paint the landscape in set language as we
passed along, but a brief word dropped here and there upon our way,
telling of some aspect of beauty newly observed and newly registered,
showed clearly that every fresh encounter with nature served to add
another gem to the hoarded store of beauty that lay resident in his
mind. And yet, even here, the research for the recondite, either
in the fact observed or in the phrase that fixed it, peeped out
characteristically in the most careless fashion of his talk. He loved
to signalise an old and abiding love of the outward world by some
new token that found expression at once in language newly coined;
and he would break away on a sudden from some long-drawn legend of a
half-imaginary character that was often set in the frame of burlesque,
to note, with a swift change to a graver tone, some passing aspect of
the scene that challenged his admiration afresh. And then, when he had
quietly added this last specimen to his cabinet, he would as quickly
turn again, with boisterous mirth, to complete the caricature portrait
of some common friend, which he loved to embellish with every detail of
imagined embroidery.
In a mixed company Meredith did not often lean to the discussion
of literature. He inclined rather, if an expert on any subject was
present, to press the conversation in that direction, exhibiting nearly
always a surprising knowledge of the specialist’s theme, knowledge at
any rate sufficient to yield in the result a full revelation of the
store of information at the disposal of his interlocutor. But in those
long rambles when we were alone he loved to consider and discuss the
claims of the professors of his own art, rejecting scornfully enough
the current standards of his own time, but approaching with entire
humility the work of masters whom he acknowledged. In those days (I am
speaking now of the years between 1875 and 1888) he had by no means
attained even to that measure of popularity which came to him at a
later time, and when the talk veered towards his own work it was easy
to perceive a lurking sense of disappointment that left him, however,
with an undiminished faith in the art to which his life was pledged.
During the autumn of 1878 I had written to him in warm appreciation of
some of his poems, and his reply is characteristic. “There is no man,”
he writes, “I would so strongly wish to please with my verse. I wish
I had more time for it, but my Pactolus, a shrivelled stream at best,
will not flow to piping, and as to publishing books of verse, I have
paid heavily for that audacity twice in pounds sterling. I had for
audience the bull, the donkey, and the barking cur. He that pays to
come before them a third time, we will not give him his name.” I think
in regard to all his work, whether in prose or verse, he was haunted
at that time by the presence of the bull, the donkey, and the barking
cur. But if this had yielded for the moment some sense of bitterness
in regard to the results of his own career, his attitude towards life
was even then undaunted, and left him generously disposed towards all
achievement of true pretensions, either in the present or in the past.
Indeed, the true greatness of the man was in nothing better displayed
than in the unbroken urbanity of his outlook upon life. His was of
all natures I have known the most hopeful of the world’s destiny. The
starved and shrivelled pessimism of the disappointed egotist had no
part in his disposition. His wider outlook upon life was undimmed by
the pain of whatever measure of personal failure had befallen him,
and I believe that even if his faith in humanity had not of itself
been sufficing and complete, he could have drawn from the earth, and
the unfading beauty of the earth, encouragement enough to keep him
steadfast in his way.
How admirably has he expressed this joy of full comradeship with nature
in the opening lines of the “Woods of Westermain”!
Toss your heart up with the lark;
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
So he cries in invitation; and then a little later, in celebration of
the joys that await the wood-wayfarer, he adds:
This is being bird and more,
More than glad musician this;
Granaries you will have a store
Past the world of woe and bliss;
Sharing still its bliss and woe;
Harnessed to its hungers, no.
On the throne Success usurps,
You shall seat the joy you feel
Where a race of water chirps
Twisting hues of flourished steel:
Or where light is caught in hoop
Up a clearing’s leafy rise,
Where the crossing deer-herds troop
Classic splendours, knightly dyes.
Or, where old-eyed oxen chew
Speculation with the cud,
Read their pool of vision through,
Back to hours when mind was mud.
Or yet again towards the close:
Hear that song; both wild and ruled.
Hear it: is it wail or mirth?
Ordered, bubbled, quite unschooled?
None, and all: it springs of Earth.
O but hear it! ’tis the mind;
Mind that with deep Earth unites,
Round the solid trunk to wind
Rings of clasping parasites.
Music have you there to feed
Simplest and most soaring need.
In his prose work Meredith seems often half distrustful of his own
inspiration, halting now and then to test the validity of the emotions
he has awakened, and at times letting a jet of irony on to the fire
he has kindled, as though half suspicious that he had been lured into
the ways of the sentimentalist. But in his poetry he owns a larger
daring and a higher freedom; there he treads unhampered by these
half-conscious fears, and yet there, no less than in his prose, we can
recognise his insatiable hunger to find and discover new tokens by
which to arrest the vision that he loves.
Meredith’s little cottage at the foot of Box Hill was the fittest home
for the writer and for the man. Not so far removed from town as to be
beyond the echo of its strife, it enabled him when his duty as reader
to Chapman and Hall took him to the office to pass an hour or two at
luncheon at the Garrick Club, where he loved in these brief intervals
of leisure to rally some of his old friends in laughing and cheerful
converse.
These occasional visits served to keep him in touch with the moving
problems of his time, towards none of which he affected any kind of
indifference; and yet the pungent wit and profound penetration of
view with which he handled such mundane themes were won and hoarded,
I think, in the long silences and the chosen loneliness of his Surrey
home. Hard by Flint Cottage stands the little inn at Burford Bridge,
now transformed and enlarged to meet the constant incursions of
visitors from the town, but at the time when I first remember it but
little changed from the days when it sheltered Keats while he was
setting the finishing touches to “Endymion.” The association often
led us in our rambles to speak of the work of the earlier poet, for
whose faultless art Meredith owned an unbounded admiration. Of the
poets I think he spoke more willingly than of the writers of prose,
though he was on the alert to recognise genius in any form, and never
lacked enthusiasm in appraising the work of a writer like Charlotte
Brontë. For George Eliot’s achievement he never professed more than
a strictly limited respect. Her more pretentious literary methods
failed to impress him, and there were times when the keenness of his
hostile criticism bordered upon scorn. I remember when some one in
his presence ventured to remark that George Eliot, “panoplied in all
the philosophies, was apt to swoop upon a commonplace,” he hailed the
criticism with the keenest enjoyment, and half-laughingly declared that
he would like to have forged the phrase himself.
At the close of our afternoon rambles, that in summer time were
prolonged to close upon the dinner-hour, we would return at loitering
pace down the winding paths to the cottage, and when I was able to
stay the night our evenings would be spent in the little châlet that
stood on the hill at the summit of his garden. Meredith truly loved
the secluded bower that he had fashioned for himself. It was there
he worked, and during the summer months it was there he constantly
passed the night. It was there I used to leave him when our long talk
was over, and descend the garden to the room that had been allotted
to me in the cottage. But of talk he never tired, and it was often
far into the night before we parted. He loved also, when he found an
appreciative listener, to read aloud long passages from his poems. Once
I remember he recited to me during a single evening the whole of the
body of sonnets forming the poem of “Modern Love.” On occasion--but
not, perhaps, quite so willingly--he might be tempted to anticipate
publication by reading a chapter or two from an uncompleted story,
and I can recall with what admirable effect, not at Box Hill, but at
Ightham Moat where we were both the guests of a gracious hostess, whose
death long preceded his own, he read aloud to us the remarkable opening
chapters of the “Amazing Marriage.”
Meredith greatly enjoyed those occasional visits to his friends, and
found himself, I think, especially at home in the house I have named.
He did not disdain the little acts of homage there freely offered
him, for the guests assembled were always to be counted among his
worshippers, and yet he was finely free from the smallest pretence of
consciously asserted dignity. As a rule, he spoke but little of his own
work, and then only on urgent invitation, content, for the most part,
to accept the passing topic, which his high spirits and unflagging
humour would quickly lift to illumination. On such occasions he loved
to invent and elaborate, for one or other of his more intimate friends,
some fancied legend that was absolutely detached from life and reality,
and sometimes he so fell in love with the fable of his creation that
for weeks or months afterwards his letters would continue to elaborate
and to develop a story that had only taken birth in the jesting mood
of a moment.
The young people of a country-house always found a welcome from
Meredith, and towards women at all times his respect was of a kind
that needed no spur of social convention. It sprang of a deep faith
in their high service to the world, and a quickened belief in the
larger future that was in store for them. In his own home the spirit of
raillery, that he could not always curb, sometimes pressed too hardly
upon those nearest him; but I think he was scarcely conscious of any
pain he may have inflicted--hardly aware, indeed, of the reiterated
insistence with which he would sometimes expose and ridicule some
harmless foible of character that did not deserve rebuke. But if this
fault must be conceded in regard to those who stood in the intimate
circle of his home, it certainly implied no failing reverence towards
the sex they owned. After all, an artist, who has a full claim to that
title, is revealed most truly in his work. If the revelation there can
be suspected, the art is false, and it may, I think, be claimed without
challenge for Meredith that in the created characters of his work he
has done for women what has been accomplished by no other writer since
Shakespeare. Over all the mystery that gives them charm, his mastery
in delineation was complete, but it is his appreciation of the nobler
possibilities of character that lie behind the wayward changes of
temperament that sets his portraiture of women beyond the reach of
rivalry. I think most women who came to know him were conscious of this
in his presence, and it is small wonder that that larger circle who
met themselves mirrored in his books should count him among the most
fearless champions of their sex.
A few months ago I found myself treading once more the road that leads
to his cottage under the hill. Once again a “dozen differently coloured
torches” were held up in the woods behind the house, flaming as I saw
them first in his company. But there was one torch that burned no more.
It had fallen from the hand that held it, and lay extinguished upon
the earth his spirit owned and loved. But those days I passed with him
there are memorable still, and as I stood beside the cottage gate amid
the gathering shadows of evening, his own beautiful lines came back to
me from “Love in the Valley”:
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.
THE LEGEND OF PARSIFAL
Some few years ago, when I was writing my play of _Tristram and
Iseult_, a lady of my acquaintance, who was familiar with the
music-drama by Wagner on the same theme, asked me by what means I had
contrived to secure Madame Wagner’s consent to the use of the story
for the English stage. Such ignorance of one of the most beautiful of
the legends included in the Arthurian cycle, enshrined for English
readers by Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal prose romance of _Le Morte
d’Arthur_, is of course phenomenal and extreme, but it was matched
by my experience a few days after the production of the play, when
an enterprising newscutting agency, misled by some reference in the
programme to the great chronicler, forwarded to the theatre a bundle
of criticisms addressed to Sir Thomas Malory, Knight, oblivious of the
fact that he had passed beyond the reach of censure in the closing
years of the fifteenth century.
It is possible, however, that even among some of those to whom the
source of the Tristram story is familiar, there may be here and there
isolated worshippers of the great German composer who are hardly aware
that the legend of Parsifal found its source in the same great body
of Arthurian romance. Indeed, I have met with not a few to whom the
identification of Parsifal with the British hero, Sir Perceval, comes
somewhat as a surprise, and who are scarcely conscious that the whole
legend of the “Holy Grail,” which forms the subject of Wagner’s opera,
had its source in Britain, and was afterwards incorporated in romances
that first saw the light in France. The writer who originally gave to
the story its poetic form, and in whose work the purely human features
of the narrative are already linked with the history of Christianity,
was Crestien de Troyes, who began to write about 1150, and died before
the end of the twelfth century. His poems embrace a number of the
Arthurian stories, but it so happens that amongst them the “Conte del
Graal” was left unfinished, and was afterwards completed by several
writers, chief among whom, Wauchier, confessed that he had drawn his
inspiration from the work of a Welshman, Bleheris, in whose version the
“Grail” hero is not Sir Perceval but Sir Gawain.
But even before Crestien’s death the beauty of certain of these
Arthurian legends had captured the imagination of Europe, and in
the opening years of the thirteenth century we have the “Parzival”
of Wolfram von Eschenbach, of Bavaria, who admits his knowledge of
Crestien, but confesses a preference for a still older French version
by Guyot, the Provençal. To Wolfram’s poem Wagner is directly indebted
for that portion of the story which forms the basis of the opera.
The Bavarian knight died about the year 1220, and his work forms a
complete and beautiful poem, concluding with a recital of the fortunes
of Lohengrin, the son of Parsifal, who, in his turn, became ruler of
the Grail Kingdom. Here, as with Crestien, the link with Christianity
is firmly established, and in a still later form of the story embodied
by Malory the Christianising influence is further developed, and the
Grail, now definitely identified with the Holy Cup, is assumed to have
been brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea, who himself had filled
it with the blood that flowed from the side of the Redeemer.
In all these later forms of the legend, however, certain features and
incidents survive which clearly prove that the story owned an earlier,
and a Pagan source. Even in Wolfram the Grail is not a cup, but a stone
endowed with plenty-giving qualities, and the symbols, which in all
later versions are bodily taken over for the service of the Church, we
find on examination to possess a pre-Christian character and origin.
A subject upon which such a mass of criticism and scholarship has
accumulated cannot here be discussed in full, but the learned work
of the late Alfred Nutt, and the acute researches into the heart of
the mystery made by Miss Jessie Weston, one of the most patient and
diligent students of a difficult problem, establish almost beyond
dispute that the Grail, in its earlier manifestations, bore no relation
to the history of the Christian faith. The magic symbols that stood
ready to the hand of those who gave to the legend its final religious
shape had indisputably an earlier and a different significance. The
dripping lance, that now becomes the weapon that pierced the Body of
the Redeemer; the Cup containing the blood that flowed from His Side,
had figured first as life-giving symbols before they had taken on the
holier character with which they are endowed by the chroniclers of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.