CHAPTER I

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[Illustration]

The Life, Letters and Work of

Frederic Baron Leighton

Of Stretton

VOL. I

"_If any man should be constantly penetrated with a gift

bestowed on him, it is the artist who has realised as his

share a genuine love for nature; for his enjoyment, if he

puts his gift to usury, increases with the days of his life._"

"_Every man who has received a gift, ought to feel and act as

if he was a field in which a seed was planted that others

might gather the harvest._"

_FREDERIC LEIGHTON._

_August 1852._

The Life, Letters and

Work of

Frederic Leighton

BY

MRS. RUSSELL BARRINGTON

AUTHOR OF "REMINISCENCES OF G.F. WATTS," ETC. ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I

LONDON

GEORGE ALLEN, RUSKIN HOUSE

1906

[All rights reserved]

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.

At the Ballantyne Press

[Illustration: EARLY PORTRAIT OF LORD LEIGHTON

From the Painting by G.F. Watts (Photogravure)

By permission of the Hon. Lady Leighton-Warren and Sir Bryan

Leighton, Bart.]

TO ALL WHO HOLD DEAR THE

MEMORY OF FREDERIC LEIGHTON

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED WITH

THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGIES FOR

ITS VERY MANY SHORTCOMINGS

PREFACE

Ten years and more have passed since Leighton died, yet it is still

difficult to get sufficiently far away, to take in the whole of his

life and being in their just proportion to the world in which he

lived.

When we are in Rome, hemmed in by narrow streets, St. Peter's is

invisible; once across that wonderful Campagna and mounting the slopes

of Frascati, there, like a huge pearl gleaming in the light, rises the

dome of the Mother Church. As distance gives the true relation between

a lofty building and its suburbs, so time alone can decide the height

of the pedestal on which to place the great.

The day after Leighton's death Watts wrote to me:--

"...The loss to the world is so great that I almost feel ashamed to

let my personal grief have so large a place.

"I am glad you knew him so well. I am glad for any one who knew him.

No one will ever know such another, alas! alas! alas!

"I am glad you have enjoyed the friendship of one of the greatest men

of any time."

This is the estimate of a great artist who knew Leighton for forty

years, and for many of those years enjoyed daily intercourse with him.

A few like Watts required no length of time before forming a right

estimate of Leighton. They not only knew him to be great, but knew why

he was great. Undoubtedly as a draughtsman Leighton was unrivalled;

but bearing in mind his English contemporaries--Watts, Millais, Holman

Hunt, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones--it is not as a painter that even his

truest friends would claim for him his right to the exceptional

position he undoubtedly occupied.

What was it that gave Leighton this position? He himself was the very

last to claim it as a right. His creed and his practice were ever to

fight against the weaknesses of his nature rather than to rejoice in

its strength. For assuredly, however strong the intellect, beautiful

the character, brilliant the vitality, and fine the intuitive

instincts, a man may yet have within his nature foibles in common with

the herd. The difference is, that in the truly great the unworthier

side of nature is viewed as unworthy--is fought against and banished

like the plague.

"A good man is wise, not because all his desires are wise, but because

his reasonable soul masters unwise desires and is itself wise.

"He is courageous, because he knows when to fight, and does so under

control of reason.

"He is temperate, because his pluck and his desires unite in giving

the first place to the reasonable soul; and finally, he is just,

because each principle is in its place and stops there."

In a letter to his mother when he was twenty-three Leighton wrote: "I

feel I have of my nature a very fair share of the hateful worldly

weakness of my country people;" adding, "Still, I have found no

sufficiently great advantage or compensation for the tedium of going

out." Again, three years later, after describing to his sister the

delight he felt in the beauty he found in Algiers, he wrote: "And yet

what I have said of my feelings, though _literally true_, does not

give you an exactly true notion; for, together with, and as it were

behind, so much pleasurable emotion, there is always that other

strange second man in me, calm, observant, critical, unmoved,

blase--odious!

"He is a shadow that walks with me, a sort of nineteenth-century

canker of doubt and discretion; it's very, very seldom that I forget

his loathsome presence. What cheering things I find to say!"

Doubtless Leighton had within him the possibilities of becoming a

worldling, and also of becoming a cynic. He overrode and banished the

first as despicable, the second as hideous.

But it is not in the wisdom that--Socrates-like--steered his life by

reason, that we find the adequate answer to the question, "Why was

Leighton the prominent entity he was?" Diverse as were his natural

gifts and his power of achievement on various lines, he differed

radically from that modern development--the all-round man, who has no

concentrated fire as a centre to illumine his life, but develops all

his capacities so that they shall shine forth equally on certain high

levels. From childhood Leighton had one overriding passion, and from

this sprang the will-force and vitality which throughout his life

succeeded in bringing his intentions to fruition. Whatsoever his hand

found worthy to do at all, he did with the whole might of his great

nature. Still even that would not adequately answer the question. His

greatness truly lay in the fact that the choice he made of what was

worth doing was never limited by personal interests. He impelled the

force of his powers for the welfare of others, and for the causes

beneficial to others, as much or more than to those matters which

concerned himself alone. Hence his true greatness and his great

fame--for AEschylus is right: "The good will prevail."

A sense of duty--"the keenest possible sense of it," to use Mr.

Briton Riviere's words--which was the keynote of all Leighton's

actions, was impelled in the first instance by a feeling of gratitude

for the joy with which beauty in nature and art had steeped his being

from a child; a deep well of happiness, a constant companion, ever

springing up in his heart, which he craved that others should share

with him. This happiness gave sweetness to his life, lovableness to

his character, irresistible power to his control. Leighton's was truly

a life of praise and gratitude for the joys nature had bestowed on

him. He had a pleasant way of making the truth prevail. The

description by Marcus Aurelius of his "third man" applies well to the

character of Leighton.

"One man, when he has done a service to another, is ready to set it

down to his account as a favour conferred. Another is not ready to do

this, but still in his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor,

and he knows what he has done. A third in a manner does not even know

what he has done, but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, and

seeks for nothing more after it has once produced its proper fruit. As

a horse when he has run, a dog when he has tracked the game, a bee

when it has made the honey, so a man, when he has done a good act,

does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to

another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season."

Leighton's work in every direction was complete work, because his mind

grasped completely the proportion and aspect of everything he

undertook. His inborn affection for, and sympathy with, his

fellow-creatures impelled him to feel that the area of self-interest,

however gifted that self might be, was too restricted for him to find

full completeness therein. This could only be attained by working with

and for others. Such feelings and doctrines are common in religious

and philanthropic men; but in the ego of the modern artist there is

generally something which seems to demand a concentration of attention

on his own ego in order to develop his gifts as an artist. The

attitude of Leighton towards his own work, and towards that of others,

was essentially contrary to this concentration.

In his letters to his mother, and to his master, Eduard von Steinle,

are found the bases on which the superstructure of his after career

rested, the underpinning of that monumental feature of the Victorian

era--namely, in unflagging industry, in ever striving to make his life

worthy of the beauty and dignity of his vocation as an artist, and in

ever endeavouring to make his work an adequate exponent of "the

mysterious treasure that was laid up in his heart": his passion for

beauty.

In my attempt to write Leighton's life I have purposely devoted more

space to the earlier than to the later years of his career as an

artist. With an artist more than with others is it specially true that

the boy is father to the man; and if Leighton's example is in any way

to benefit students of art, the early struggles, the failures, more

even than the successes, will teach the lesson that there is no short

cut on the road which has to be travelled even by the most gifted.

From the family letters and those to his master, which are, with a few

exceptions, given in full, it will also be seen that, however high was

the pedestal on which Leighton placed his mistress Art, he felt keenly

likewise the beauty of his family relationships, and a deep, grateful

affection for the master who had given him his start on the road to

fame.

If this endeavour to present a true picture of Leighton the man has

any value, it is owing mainly to the fact that Mrs. Matthews has

placed at my disposal the family and other letters in her

possession,--an act which demands the thanks of all those who are

interested in the fame of her brother.

I also wish to acknowledge with gratitude the considerate kindness of

several of Leighton's friends in contributing "notes" and letters,

which are of true value in bringing before the public a right view of

the man and of the artist. First and foremost among these contributors

must be placed Dr. von Steinle, son of Professor Eduard von Steinle of

Frankfort-on-Main, the beloved master to whom Leighton in 1879

referred as "_the indelible seal_," when writing of those who had

influenced him most for good. The first letter of the correspondence

which was carried on between the master and pupil, and preserved

preciously by each, is dated August 31, 1852, the last 1883. Only

second in interest to this correspondence, which discloses Leighton's

intimate feelings and aspirations as an artist, are the notes supplied

by Mr. Briton Riviere, R.A.--notes which could only have been written

by one whose own nature in many ways was closely attuned to that of

Leighton's, and which give the intimate aspect of Leighton as an

official. "It would be difficult for any one," writes Mr. Briton

Riviere, "to give in a short space any adequate account of a character

so full and complex as Leighton's." And indeed it would require a

great deal more than two volumes even to touch on all the events of

this eventful life, which might further illustrate Leighton's

character; but Mr. Briton Riviere has noted certain salient

characteristics of his friend with a sympathy, and a fine touch, which

I think will prove of very rare interest in this record. The tribute

to Leighton of Mr. Hamo Thornycroft, R.A. (from a sculptor's point of

view), carries great weight, and gives also, as does that of another

old comrade in the Artists' Volunteer Corps, an appreciative account of

Leighton as the soldier. To these, to Lady Loch, the Hon. Mrs. Alfred

Sartoris, Sir William Richmond, R.A., Mr. Walter Crane, Mr. Alfred

East, P.R.B.A., I offer my thanks for so kindly contributing notes

which help to solve the problems presented by "a character so full and

so complex." For courteous permission to publish letters I wish to

express my thanks to Alice, Countess of Strafford, the executor of Mr.

Henry Greville, who was one of, if not the most intimate of the

friends who loved Leighton; the Hon. Mrs. Leigh, Mrs. Fanny Kemble's

daughter and executor; the Right Hon. Sir Charles Dilke, executor of

Mrs. Mark Pattison (afterwards Lady Dilke); the Right Hon. John

Morley, Dr. von Steinle, Mr. John Hanson Walker, Mr. Cartwright, Mr.

Robert Barrett Browning, Professor Church, Mr. T.C. Horsfall, and Mrs.

Street, daughter of the late Mr. Henry Wells, R.A.; the executor of

George Eliot, Mrs. Charles Lewes; and the executors of John Ruskin.

There are many other letters and notes of interest which have been

preserved by Mrs. Matthews, but which cannot be inserted for want of

space. Among these are affectionate notes from Joachim, Burne-Jones,

Hebert, Robert Fleury, Meissonier, Gerome, Tullio Massarani; also

friendly letters from Cardinal Manning, Viscount Wolseley, Sarah

Bernhardt, John Tyndall, Froude, Anthony Trollope, Sir John Gilbert,

Lady Waterford, and Lord Strangford. A number of letters exist from

members of the Royal Family to Leighton, all evincing alike admiration

for the artist and an affectionate appreciation of the man.

In these pages there will be found a repetition of several sentences.

This is intentional. Watts would often remark, "A really wise and true

saying can't be repeated too often"; and in Leighton's letters are

several tallying with this description, which it would be a pity to

detach from their own context, and yet which are also required

elsewhere to enforce the argument.

As regards the kindness shown in allowing reproductions of pictures,

I have to tender my loyal gratitude to the Queen for the gracious loan

of the picture presented to her Majesty by Leighton; also to the

Prince of Wales for allowing the "Head of a Girl," given to his Royal

Highness as a wedding present by the artist, to be reproduced in these

pages.

Other owners of pictures to whom I proffer also my warm thanks are

Lord Armstrong, Lord Pirrie, the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, the Hon.

Lady Leighton-Warren, Sir Bryan Leighton, the Hon. Mrs. Sartoris, Sir

Elliot Lees, Sir Alexander Henderson, Mr. E. and Miss I'Anson, Mr. S.

Pepys Cockerell, Mr. T. Blake Wirgman, Mrs. Stewart Hodgson, Mr.

Hanson Walker, Mrs. Henry Joachim, Mrs. Stephenson Clarke, Mrs. C.E.

Lees, Mrs. James Watney, Mr. Hodges, Mrs. Charles Lewes, Mr. H.S.

Mendelssohn, Mr. Phillipson, and Dr. von Steinle.

Also to the Fine Art Society, the Berlin Photographic Co., Messrs.

Agnew & Son, Messrs. P. & D. Colnaghi, Messrs. Henry Graves, Messrs.

Lefevre, Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Co., and the directors of the

Leicester Galleries.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER I

ANTECEDENTS AND SCHOOL DAYS, 1830-1852 34

CHAPTER II

ROME, 1852-1855 91

CHAPTER III

PENCIL DRAWINGS OF PLANTS AND FLOWERS, 1850-1860 197

CHAPTER IV

WATTS--SUCCESS--FAILURE, 1855-1856 222

CHAPTER V

FRIENDS 250

CHAPTER VI

STEINLE AND ITALY AGAIN--FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE EAST,

1856-1858 278

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME I

1. DESIGN FOR REVERSE OF THE JUBILEE MEDALLION Cover

Executed for Her Majesty Queen Victoria's Government,

1887.

2. CROWN OF BAY LEAVES "

From Drawing made by Lord Leighton at the Bagni de Lucca,

1854.

3. PORTRAIT OF LORD LEIGHTON BY G.F. WATTS, ABOUT 1863

By kind permission of the Hon. Lady LEIGHTON-WARREN To face

and Sir BRYAN LEIGHTON, Bart. (_Photogravure_) Dedication

4. HEAD OF YOUNG GIRL To face page 1

By the gracious permission of HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN.

5. PORTRAITS OF LORD LEIGHTON'S FATHER AND MOTHER WHEN YOUNG 17

From Miniatures.

6. EARLY PAINTING OF BOY SAVING A BABY FROM THE CLUTCHES OF AN

EAGLE (_Colour_) 19

7. PORTRAIT OF PROFESSOR EDUARD VON STEINLE 27

By kind permission of his Son, DOCTOR VON STEINLE.

8. PORTRAIT OF MRS. SARTORIS, 1856 28

9. CRYPT UNDER ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL WHERE BARRY, SIR JOSHUA

REYNOLDS, TURNER, AND LORD LEIGHTON WERE BURIED 33

10. PORTRAITS OF LORD LEIGHTON AND HIS YOUNGER SISTER, MRS.

MATTHEWS 37

Drawn by him when a boy.

11. EARLY COMIC DRAWING MADE IN FRANKFURT 43

By kind permission of Mr. JOHN HANSON WALKER.

12. PORTRAIT OF MR. I'ANSON, LORD LEIGHTON'S GREAT-UNCLE, 1850 48

By kind permission of Mr. E. and Miss I'ANSON.

13. THE DEATH OF BRUNELLESCHI, 1851 55

By kind permission of Doctor VON STEINLE.

14. THE PLAGUE IN FLORENCE, 1851 56

15. STUDIES OF BRANCHES OF FIG AND BRAMBLE 69

Leighton House Collection.

16. STUDY OF BYZANTINE WELL HEAD, VENICE, 1852 81

By kind permission of Mr. S. PEPYS COCKERELL.

17. FROM PENCIL DRAWING OF MODEL, ROME, 1853. "COSTUME DI

PROCIDA" 98

Leighton House Collection.

18. HEAD OF MODEL USED FOR FIGURE IN CIMABUE'S MADONNA,

ERRONEOUSLY STATED TO HAVE BEEN THE PORTRAIT OF LORD

LEIGHTON, 1853 112

Leighton House Collection.

19. SKETCH OF SUBIACO, 1853 116

Leighton House Collection.

20. HEAD OF VINCENZO, 1854 152

Leighton House Collection.

21. COPY IN PENCIL OF THE PORTRAITS OF GIOTTO, CIMABUE, MEMMI,

AND TADDEO GADDI 138

From the Capella Spagnola, Sta. Maria Novella, Florence,

1853. Leighton House Collection.

22. STUDY OF WOMAN'S HEAD FOR FIGURE AT THE WINDOW--CIMABUE'S

MADONNA, 1854 (_Photogravure_) 145

Leighton House Collection.

23. ORIGINAL SKETCH IN PENCIL AND CHINESE WHITE FOR CIMABUE'S

MADONNA, 1853 149

Leighton House Collection.

24. CIMABUE'S MADONNA, 1855 193

By kind permission of the FINE ART SOCIETY.

25. FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM SIR CHARLES EASTLAKE, ANNOUNCING

THAT QUEEN VICTORIA HAD PURCHASED CIMABUE'S MADONNA, MAY

3, 1855 194

26. STUDY OF CYCLAMEN, 1856 200

Leighton House Collection.

27. WREATH OF BAY LEAVES, 1854 201

Leighton House Collection.

28. STUDY OF A LEMON TREE--CAPRI, 1859 202

By kind permission of Mr. S. PEPYS COCKERELL.

29. STUDY OF BRANCHES OF A DECIDUOUS TREE 202

Leighton House Collection.

30. EARLY STUDIES OF KALMIA LATIFOLIA, OLEANDER, AND

RHODODENDRON FLOWERS 205

Leighton House Collection.

31. STUDIES OF PUMPKIN FLOWERS 206

Leighton House Collection.

32. STUDY OF VINE, 1854--BAGNI DI LUCCA 206

Leighton House Collection.

33. STUDIES OF VINE LEAVES, "BELLOSGUARDO," SEPT. 1856 207

Leighton House Collection.

34. "ARIADNE ABANDONED BY THESEUS--DEATH RELEASES HER." 1868

(_Photogravure_) 211

By kind permission of LORD PIRRIE.

35. "ELISHA RAISING THE SON OF THE SHUNAMMITE," 1881 211

(_Photogravure_)

36. "DAEDALUS AND ICARUS," 1869 (_Photogravure_) 211

By kind permission of Sir ALEXANDER HENDERSON, Bart.

37. "CAPTIVE ANDROMACHE," 1888 (_Photogravure_) 213

By kind permission of the BERLIN PHOTOGRAPHIC CO.

38. STUDY IN OILS FOR "CAPTIVE ANDROMACHE" (_Colour_) 213

By kind permission of Mrs. STEWART HODGSON

39. "WEAVING THE WREATH," 1873 214

40. "WINDING THE SKEIN" 214

By kind permission of the FINE ART SOCIETY.

41. "THE MUSIC LESSON," 1877 214

By kind permission of the FINE ART SOCIETY.

42. STUDIES OF SEA THISTLE, MALINMORE 218

From Sketch Book, 1895.

43. STUDIES OF SEA THISTLE, MALINMORE 218

From Sketch Book, 1895.

44. "RETURN OF PERSEPHONE" (_Photogravure_) 221

Corporation of Leeds.

45. STUDY IN OILS FOR "RETURN OF PERSEPHONE" (_Colour_) 221

By kind permission of Mrs. STEWART HODGSON.

46. FROM DECORATIVE PAINTING ON GOLD BACKGROUND OF CUPID WITH

DOVES 223

47. "IDYLL," 1881 (_Photogravure_) 229

48. PORTRAIT OF MISS MABEL MILLS, 1877 229

49. "VENUS DISROBING FOR THE BATH," 1867 230

By kind permission of Sir A. HENDERSON, Bart.

50. PHRYNE AT ELEUSIS, 1882 230

51. PORTRAIT OF MRS. ADELAIDE SARTORIS, DRAWN FOR HER FRIEND,

LADY BLOOMFIELD, 1867 233

By kind permission of the Hon. Mrs. SARTORIS.

52. STUDY FOR PORTION OF FRIEZE, "MUSIC" (NOT CARRIED OUT IN

FINAL DESIGN). 1883 234

Leighton House Collection.

53. FROM SKETCH IN WATER COLOUR FOR TABLEAUX VIVANTS,

"THE ECHOES OF HELLAS" (_Colour_) 241

Leighton House Collection.

54. STUDY FROM MR. JOHN HANSON WALKER, WHEN A BOY, FOR

"LIEDER OHNE WORTE," 1860 251

Leighton House Collection.

55. PORTRAIT OF MRS. JOHN HANSON WALKER, PAINTED AS A WEDDING

PRESENT TO HER HUSBAND, 1867 (_Colour_) 273

By kind permission of Mr. WALKER.

56. FIGURES FOR CEILING FOR MUSIC ROOM, PREVIOUS TO THE DRAPERY

BEING ADDED, 1886 276

57. ORIGINAL SKETCH IN CHARCOAL OF DANCING FIGURES FOR THE SAME,

1886 276

Leighton House Collection.

58. WATER COLOUR DRAWING OF THE CA' D'ORO, VENICE 285

(_Colour_)

59. VIEW IN ALGIERS (_Colour_) 299

60. VIEW IN ALGIERS (_Colour_) 301

61. SKETCH FOR "SALOME, THE DAUGHTER OF HERODIAS," 1857 308

Leighton House Collection.

62. SIXTEEN SCENES IN FLORENCE--ILLUSTRATIONS TO "ROMOLA" Beginning

By kind permission of Mrs. CHARLES LEWES. page 310

1. BLIND SCHOLAR AND DAUGHTER.

2. "SUPPOSE YOU LET ME LOOK AT MYSELF;" NELLO'S SHOP.

5. "THE FIRST KEY."

6. PEASANTS' FAIR.

7. THE DYING MESSAGE.

8. FLORENTINE JOKE.

9. THE ESCAPED PRISONER.

10. NICCOLO AT WORK.

11. "YOU DIDN'T THINK."

13. "FATHER, I WILL BE GUIDED."

15. THE VISIBLE MADONNA.

16. DANGEROUS COLLEAGUES.

17. "MONNA BRIGIDA."

18. "BUT YOU WILL HELP."

20. "DRIFTING."

21. "WILL HIS EYES OPEN?"

[Illustration: HEAD PRESENTED TO THE QUEEN BY LORD LEIGHTON

By permission of Her Majesty the Queen]

ERRATA

Motto facing Title-page, line 3, _for_ "from," _read_ "for."

Page xx, No. 49, _for_ "Figures for Ceiling, &c.," _read_

"By kind permission of Sir A. Henderson, Bart."

Page 31, line 7, _for_ "at all," _read_ "to all."

Page 60, omit note.

Page 67, line 31, _for_ "unscorched," _read_ "sunscorched."

Page 103, line 31, _for_ "worse that," _read_ "worse than."

Page 127, line 16, _for_ "Wasash," _read_ "Warsash."

Page 169, line 8, _for_ "Pantaleoni," _read_ "Pantaleone."

Page 197, note, _for_ "Vol. I.," _read_ "Vol. II."

Page 213, lines 6, 7, _for_ "owing ... from," _read_ "owing ... to."

Page 265, note. The reference number should be to "Edward," instead

of to "Adelaide."

Page 296, line 17, _for_ "Couture," _read_ "Conture."

THE LIFE OF LORD LEIGHTON

INTRODUCTION

In 1860, when Leighton, at the age of thirty, definitely settled in

England, art was alive in two distinctly new directions. Ruskin was

writing, the Pre-Raphaelites were painting, and Prince Albert, besides

encouraging individual painters and sculptors, had, through his fine

taste and the exercise of his patronage in every branch of art,

developed an interest in good design as it can be carried out in

manufactures and various crafts. Leighton followed the Prince

Consort's initiatory lead; and, by showing the same cultured and

catholic zeal in her welfare, was enabled to continue and develop

Prince Albert's important work, thereby widening and elevating the

whole outlook of art in England.

It has at times been asserted that Leighton was greater as a President

of the Royal Academy than he was as a painter. It would be truer, I

think, to say that it was because he was so great as an artist in the

highest, widest meaning of the word, so sincere a workman, that he

stands unrivalled as a President. In a letter to a friend, dated May

1888, ten years after he had been elected President, he wrote, "I am a

workman first and an official afterwards," and it was, I believe,

because he carried into his official duties the true artist's warmth,

sincerity, and zeal for his special vocation, that his influence as an

official was never deadened by theoretic red-tapeism, nor by secondary

or side issues. Leighton ever flew straight to the mark, and the mark

he aimed at in his presidential work was ever the highest essential

point from the view he also took as an artist. His official duties,

carried out with so great an amount of scrupulous conscientiousness,

would have gone far to fill the entire life of an ordinary human

being; yet these duties were, to the last, subordinated in his

personal existence to his self-imposed duties as a painter and a

sculptor.

The words, "I am a workman first and an official afterwards,"

epitomise the creed of his life. From earliest childhood art had cast

over Leighton's nature a glamour which made his heart-service to her

the great passion of his life. His "great nature" had in it many

sources of stirring interest and of pure delights, which he enjoyed

keenly; but nothing came in sight, so to speak, which ever for a

moment seriously challenged a rivalry with the salient ruling passion.

His character, as it developed, wound itself round it; his strongest

sense of duty focalised itself in its service; his ambition ever was

more inspired and stimulated by a devotion to the best interests of

art than by any purely personal incentive. Leighton was an artist of

that true type in whom no influence whatsoever can deter or slacken

incessant zeal for work. In the deepest recesses of his nature burnt

the unquenchable fire, the paramount longing to follow in Nature's

footsteps, and to create things of beauty. Among the many loyal

servants who have dutifully worshipped at the shrine of art, never was

there one who more completely devoted the best that was in him to her

service.

"Va! your human talk and doings are a tame jest; the only passionate

life is in form and colour."[1]

Leighton's nature may be viewed from three aspects. Though each aspect

is apparently detached from the others, it would be impossible to

record a true portrait were the three not kept in view while

attempting to draw the picture.

First, there was Leighton, the great man, the public servant, gifted

with exceptional powers of intellect and character, who attained the

highest social position ever reached by an English artist; the

Leighton the world knew, whose sway was paramount in the many councils

and assemblies to which he belonged no less than when fulfilling his

duties as President of the Royal Academy, and whose helpfulness and

zeal in promoting the extension of a knowledge and appreciation of

English art in foreign countries and in the colonies became

proverbial. Lady Loch tells of his invaluable help in the efforts she

and her husband made to encourage art, while the late Lord Loch was

Governor of the Isle of Man, of Victoria, and of Cape Colony. "I feel

it would be impossible," she writes, "to convey in a few words what a

wonderful friend Frederic Leighton was to my husband from the time he

first knew him,[2] forty years before Leighton's death, and to myself

from the time we married. He was always ready to help us at every

turn. Any deserving artist whom we sent to him would be certain to

find in him a friend. When we arranged the very small Art Exhibition

in the Isle of Man, you could hardly imagine with what energy and

thoughtfulness he entered into the matter, impressing upon us all the

steps that we ought to take in order to secure its success, even to

the details, such as packing and insuring the pictures. He himself

sent us pictures for the Exhibition, and guided our judgment in

admiring and caring for those which were best and most to be valued,

with a paternal care and zeal not describable. Again, when we were in

Australia, and the great International Centennial Exhibition in

Melbourne took place in 1888, Frederic Leighton selected such a good

collection of pictures that they simply were the saving of the

Exhibition financially--they attracted such continuous crowds of

visitors. Subsequently, when an exhibition of ceramic work was asked

for in Melbourne, and Henry Loch wrote to consult his friend, amidst

all Frederic Leighton's important work and duties, he rushed about and

secured a most interesting collection of all kinds of china and

pottery, which was greatly appreciated by the Australians. Again, in

1892, he formed a Fine Art Committee, consisting of himself, who was

appointed Chairman, Sir Charles Mills, Sir Donald Currie, M.P., Mr.

W.W. Ouless, R.A., Mr. Colin Hunter, A.R.A., Mr. Frank Walton, and Mr.

Prange, to select pictures to send for exhibition at Kimberley.

Besides a picture lent by Queen Victoria, at Leighton's request, of

the portraits of herself and the royal family by Winterhalter, and

four by Leighton, which he lent, the Committee secured 181 pictures,

though not without great difficulty, Leighton told us, because the

artists were afraid their works would be injured by the burning sun,

the sandstorms, and the rough journey up from the Cape. Owing,

however, to Leighton's untiring exertions, a very interesting and

successful exhibition took place in this then little known town of our

English colony in Africa."

On the day Leighton died, Watts, his near neighbour and

fellow-workman, in a letter to a friend, wrote that he had enjoyed "an

uninterrupted and affectionate friendship of five-and-forty years"

with Leighton. He continues: "No one will ever know such another. A

magnificent intellectual capacity, an unerring and instantaneous

spring upon the point to unravel, a generosity, a sympathy, a tact, a

lovable and sweet reasonableness, yet no weakness. For my own

part--and I tell you, life can never be the same to me again--my own

grief is merged in the sense I have of the appalling loss to the

nation; it seems to me to be no less."[3] Later, Watts wished it

recorded that Leighton's character was the most beautiful he had ever

known. This tribute from the great veteran artist, thirteen years

Leighton's senior, but who outlived him more than eight years, was

echoed far and wide by many at the time of Leighton's death. To his

powers and influence, exercised in the Royal Academy as a body and to

the members individually, Mr. Briton Riviere, the painter, and Mr.

Hamo Thornycroft, the sculptor, give the following appreciative

tributes.

Mr. Briton Riviere writes:--

"To begin with, I never really knew him--though we had met several

times before--until I began to serve upon the Council with him very

soon after his election as President. This at once brought us into

very intimate relations, and a very few meetings convinced me that his

opinions and actions on that body were invariably regulated by a true

spirit of absolute justice and fairness to all, and that if he had his

own particular art beliefs--which he certainly had, for art was to him

almost a religion, and his own particular belief almost a creed--he

never allowed it to bias him in the least. Indeed, I have never worked

with any one who exhibited a broader or more catholic spirit of

tolerance, even sympathy with all schools, however diverse from his

own, only demanding honesty and sincerity should be the basis of each

kind of work.

"I have always felt that no one, who had heard only his elaborately

prepared speeches, knew his real power as a speaker.

"He was a master of time. I do not think he ever failed to keep an

appointment almost to the minute. He was seldom much too early, but

never too late.

"He was an ideal president for any institution, and after serving

under him for many years, I cannot think of any one faculty which a

president should possess, which Leighton wanted."

Mr. Hamo Thornycroft writes:--

"My earliest recollection of Leighton was in 1869, when, with several

other young art students, I went to his studio. He had promised to

criticise the designs we had made from Morris' 'Life and Death of

Jason.' This he did most admirably, it seemed to me, and most

sympathetically, devoting considerable time to each; and I came away

encouraged and a sworn devotee of the great man.

"For the next few years, I had the benefit of his teaching at the

Academy Schools, where he was most energetic as a visitor, and took

the greatest pains to help the students. He was, moreover, an

_inspiring_ master. Besides doing much for the school of sculpture,

till then much neglected, he started a custom of giving a certain time

to the study of drapery on the living model. His knowledge in this

department and his excellent method were a new element in the training

in the schools, and soon had a salutary effect upon the work done by

the students. His influence, through the Academy Schools, upon the

younger generation of sculptors was very great. There can be no doubt

whatever that the rapid advance made in the art of sculpture during

the last thirty years was to a considerable extent due to the sympathy

and the interest which Leighton gave to it.

"Leighton, as is well known, carefully prepared his important

speeches, like many great speakers; but I never saw him fail, or even

hesitate, when called upon to speak unexpectedly. At meetings of the

Academy Council or at the general assemblies, his summing up and his

weighing of the arguments brought forward by members in course of

discussion was always masterly, just and eloquent. He had such a great

sense of proportion, and detected what was the essence and the

essential part of a speaker's argument."

At a meeting held in Leighton's studio, after his death in May 1896,

for the purpose of furthering the scheme of preserving the house for

the nation as a memorial to the great artist, the sculptor, Mr.

Alfred Gilbert, R.A., on rising to speak, said he felt too much on the

occasion to be able to make a speech, adding, "I can only say that all

I know, and all the little I have been able to do as a sculptor, I owe

to Leighton."

In a letter, dated February 9, 1896, Watts again writes: "I delighted

in shaping a splendid career of incalculable benefit to his

(Leighton's) epoch. His abilities, his persuasiveness, the peculiar

range of his cultivation, would have fitted him to accompany a

delicate embassy, where his efficiency would have been made evident,

establishing a right to be entrusted with the like as its head; I

believe something of this and more, if there could be more, was for

him in the future. You know, I always looked forward to his seat in

the House of Lords. That came about, and I believe the rest was but a

question of time. Feeling this, you can understand that my own grief

seems to me to be selfish. I am glad you enjoyed the friendship of one

of the greatest men of any time."

In the speech which the King, then Prince of Wales, made at the first

banquet held after Leighton's death, on May 1, 1897, His Majesty

referred to the late President in the following words:--

"All of us in the room, and I especially, must miss one whose eloquent

voice was so often heard at this banquet--a voice, alas! now hushed

for ever. It is unnecessary, as it would be almost impertinent in me,

to hold forth in praise of the merits and virtues of Lord Leighton.

They are known to you all. He has left a great name behind him, and he

himself will be regretted not only by the great artistic world, but by

the whole nation. I myself had the advantage of knowing him for a

great number of years--ever since I was a boy--and I need hardly say

how deeply I deplore the fact that he can be no more in our midst. But

his name will be cherished and honoured throughout the country."

It is not necessary to dwell more lengthily on this salient aspect of

Leighton. During his lifetime it was public property, the great name

he has left is evidence sufficient to coming generations.

Secondly, as portrayed chiefly by his human qualities, there was the

aspect of Leighton as his family and his friends knew him; the beloved

Leighton, the delightful companion, the charming personality, the

being whose brilliant vitality brought a mental stimulus into all

intercourse with him. The Leighton _qui savait vivre_ perhaps better

than did ever any other conspicuous, overworked servant of the public;

an active, positive influence, radiating strength and sunshine by his

presence; and playing the game--whatever game it was--better than even

the experts in special games. In that which perhaps he played best,

lay his remarkable social power. Leighton had a deep-rooted and

ingenuous sincerity of nature, and never for a moment lost his

self-centre; yet he had the rare gift of unlocking the side most

worthy to be unlocked in the nature of his companion of the moment. He

had the power of evolving out of most people he met something that was

real and of interest. Never giving himself away, he yet managed to

meet other individualities on any ground that existed which could by

any possibility be made a mutual ground. Though generosity itself in

believing the best of every one, and at times entrapped by the wily,

anything like flattery was a vice in his eyes. He neither gave himself

away, nor induced others to give themselves away while in his company,

and would always abstain from obtruding his opinions, modestly

withholding judgment where he saw neither a duty nor a distinct reason

to pronounce.

Perhaps the strongest mark of Leighton's true distinction lay in the

fact that, notwithstanding his reserve on all matters of deep feeling,

notwithstanding his love of form in the living of life as in the

creating of art, notwithstanding the perpetually shifting and urgent

claims which, as a public man and a prominent social entity, were

being continually forced upon him, the inner entity, the real

Leighton, remained to the end a child of nature. No need was there for

him to gauge the proportionate merit of the various conflicting

influences that played on his complicated life; his own instinctive

preferences clenched the matter indubitably, asserting that the

noblest grace and the finest taste lay in the spontaneous and the

natural. When Watts wished it recorded that Leighton's nature was the

most beautiful he had ever known, he referred, I think, more specially

to that lovable, kind-hearted ingenuousness and noble simplicity which

were its deepest roots, notwithstanding a life of conflicts,

ambitions, and unparalleled success. There are among those who most

honour and love Leighton's memory, and who felt most keenly his loss,

poor and unsuccessful artists and students, of whom the world has

never heard, but to whom the great President gave of his very best in

advice and sympathy.[4] He never posed, though he was an adept in

catching the atmosphere of a situation, however new and foreign to

his usual beat such a situation might be. Scrupulous in his attitude

of reverence towards his vocation as an artist, _ever_ most scrupulous

to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, the inner core of

the nature remained simple and unstained by worldliness.

Then there was the third aspect of Leighton, the Leighton at times

half-hidden from himself; the yearning, unsatisfied spirit, which,

though subject at times to great elevations of delight, at others was

also the victim of profound depressions and a sense of loneliness--a

state of being born out of that strange, only half-explained region

whence proceed all intuitive faculties. Such states are referred to

occasionally in his letters to his mother, and we find their influence

recorded at intervals in his art. In 1849, on a sketch of Giotto when

a boy, are written in the corner the words "Sehnsucht"; in 1865, there

is the David, "Oh, that I had wings like a dove; for then would I fly

away and be at rest"; in 1894, the "Spirit of the Summit"--these are

all alike expressions of the home-sickness that yearned for an abiding

resting-place not found in the conditions of this world. "Oh, what a

disappointing world it is!" were words he uttered shortly before his

death. In 1894, when at Bayreuth, a friend was congratulating him on

his ever fortunate star having even there easily overcome the

difficulties of the crowd. Leighton, passing over the immediate

question, answered with a striking serious sadness, "I have not _ever_

got what I most wanted in this world."

No mind was ever more explicit to itself in its mental working, than

was his with regard to matters which the intellect can investigate and

solve. His judgment could never be warped by reason of an insufficient

brain apparatus with which to judge himself and others impartially.

But Leighton was a great man, beyond being the one who owned "a

magnificent intellectual capacity." The qualities he possessed, which

made him a prominent entity who influenced the interests of the world

at large, secured for him a footing on that higher level where human

nature breathes a finer, more rarefied atmosphere than that in which

the intellect alone disports itself; a level from which can be viewed

the just proportion existing between the truly great and the truly

little. Selfishness disappears in a nature such as Leighton possessed,

when that level is reached. The necessity for self-sacrifice forces

itself so peremptorily, that there is no struggle to be gone through

in exercising it. For instance--notwithstanding the absorbing nature

of his occupations and the intense devotion he felt towards his

vocation as an artist, when it was a question of the country needing a

reserve force for her army to draw on in case of war--a need which is

at this present moment insisted on by Lord Roberts with such zealous

earnestness--Leighton at once seized the importance of the question,

and, at whatever sacrifice to his own more personal interests,

enlisted as a volunteer, and mastered the art and duties of soldiering

so completely that many officers in the regular army envied his

knowledge and efficiency.

The following is an appreciation by an old comrade in the Artists'

Volunteer Corps:--

"The names of those who first enrolled themselves to form the Artists'

Volunteer Corps in 1860 is a record of considerable interest in

itself, and calls back many reminiscences connected with art. Leighton

joined May 10, 1860, and was in a few days given his commission as

ensign.

"Probably the very character of the first recruits tended to prevent

that expansion and accession of numbers without which no military body

can flourish. Lord Bury, the first commandant, became the Colonel of

the Civil Service Rifles; and whatever attention may have been given

to firing and detailed training, the early appearances of the

'Artists' in public at reviews was, as a rule, as a company or two

attached to the Civil Service Rifle Corps.

"Events, however, brought a change in the command, and Leighton

having, not without hesitation, accepted it, set himself at once to

introduce reforms. The Captains, he announced, were to be responsible

each for the command and drill of his company. He, to carry out before

promotion as Major Commanding a duty which the previous laxity had

never required of him, learned the company drill by heart and went

through the whole complicated system then existing, on a single

evening under trying circumstances in very insufficient space.

Reorganisation did not rapidly fill the ranks, and there was much hard

work to be done before the Artists' Corps appeared as a completed

eight-company battalion, and took its place among the best of the

Volunteer Corps of the Metropolis. The personality of the Commander

did very much to achieve this result, and Leighton became

Lieutenant-Colonel Commandant in 1876.

"Next to his duty to his Art and to the Royal Academy, as he was ever

careful to say, he esteemed his duty in the Corps. Busy man, with his

time mapped out more than most, he was always accessible and ready to

give the necessary time to those who had access to him on the Corps

business. He never appeared on parade without previous study of the

drill to be gone through, while his tact, energy, and personal charm

were brought out and used at those social meetings with officers and

with men which do so much to build up the tone of a volunteer body.

"Of camps and duties in the tented field he took his part cheerfully.

He shared the hardship of the early experience of the detachment at

the Dartmoor Manoeuvres, where, camping on the barren hills above the

lower level of the mist, the extemporised commissariat followed with

difficulty, and the officers consoled themselves for the roughness of

their fare by the consumption of marmalade, which happened to be

supplied in bulk, and had to clean their knives in the sand to make

some show for the entertainment of the Brigadier at such dinner as

could be had.

"Regarding volunteering so earnestly as he did, the reports of the

Inspecting Officers would appear of great importance in Leighton's

eyes. On one occasion paragraphs had appeared in the papers about the

Corps which probably gave some umbrage to the authorities. The

Inspecting Officer kept the battalion an unconscionable time at drill,

changed the command, fell out the Staff Sergeants, yet all went well.

At length, with Leighton again in command, and a word imperfectly

heard, the square walked outwards in four directions. The confusion

was put to rights, and the well-prepared speech from the Inspecting

Officer as to the importance of battalion drills, &c., followed. It

was quite a pleasure to point out to the distressed Leighton that the

whole was manifestly a 'put up thing.'

"The answer he received on another occasion admitted of no

misinterpretation. Riding with the Officer after the inspection, and

anxious to know whether in his opinion he was really doing any good

work by his volunteering, Leighton asked whether the Officer would be

willing to take the battalion he had just inspected under fire, and

received the laconic reply, 'Yes, sir, hell fire.'

"On Leighton's election as President of the Academy, his twenty-five

years active service in the Corps ceased in 1883. All the time that

the history of the volunteering of the nineteenth century is known,

his name will be associated with the Artists' Corps to the honour of

both."

Mr. Hamo Thornycroft, R.A., also adds his tribute in the following

lines:--

"I should think that few Commanding Officers of Volunteer Regiments

could surpass Colonel Leighton in efficiency. His wonderful knowledge

of infantry drill, and the decision with which he gave the word of

command, made it very easy for the men in the ranks to obey him; and

the quickness of eye with which he detected an error in any movement

frequently saved confusion in the ranks on a field day. The Artists'

Corps soon became one of the smartest in London. I well remember how

efficiently he commanded the Volunteer Battalion in the Army

Manoeuvres on Dartmoor in 1876, when for a fortnight of almost

continuous rain on that wild moorland he kept us all happy and full of

respect for him by his fine soldierly example. His thoroughness and

kindness were constant. After a soaking wet night he would come down

the line of tents in the early morning distributing some unheard-of

luxury, such as a couple of new-laid eggs to each man, which he had

managed to have sent from some outlying village."

Besides the obvious results of a complex and astonishingly

comprehensive nature, there were also phases in Leighton's life which

were the outcome on that side of his being half hidden to himself.

Most of us have dual natures, not only in the sense that good and bad

reside within us simultaneously, but we have also a less definable

duality of nature; nature's original creature being one thing, and the

creature developed by the conditions it meets with in its journey

through life, another. Each acts and reacts on the other. We meet the

conditions forced upon us in life from the point of our own

individualities. On the other hand, the original creature gets twisted

by circumstances and the influence of other personalities, and becomes

partially altered into a different person. This backwards and forwards

swaying of the influence of nature and circumstances helps to make

life the intricate business it is. In the case of highly gifted human

beings there seem to be further complications, arising chiefly,

perhaps, from the fact that these form so small a minority. Very

subtle and undefinable is the effect of such gifts on the character

and nature of those possessing them, for nature herself maintains a

kind of secrecy and endows her favoured ones with but a half

consciousness in respect of them. She gives to the artist and to the

poet the something, unshared with the ordinary mortal, which controls

the inner core of his being, and which is another quantity to be

allowed for in his contact with his fellows. It initiates his most

passionate, peremptory conditions of temperament, yet it remains

partially veiled to himself, in so far that he cannot explain it, nor

give it its right place, any more than the lover can explain the

glamour which is spread over life by an overpowering first love. When

Plato classes the souls of the philosopher, the artist, the musician,

and the lover together[5] as having been born to see most of truth, he

recognises the same inspired instinctive quality in the artist as in

the lover. In the artist is linked, as part of its separateness from

the rest of the community, the inseparable shyness of the lover.

Anything is better than to expose the sacred, indescribable treasure

to the indifferent stare of the uninitiated. We find every sort of

ruse adopted by lovers and artists to avoid being forced into

explicitness on so tender, so intimate a passion; so convincing to its

possessor, so impossible of full explanation to those who possess it

not. The necessity to give it a clear outline is only forced when a

danger arises of the lover being robbed of his mistress, the artist of

his vocation; then the will, propelled by the all-conquering love,

asserts itself, and difficulties have to succumb before it.

Such was the result of opposition in Leighton's case. From early

childhood he was known to care for nothing so much as for drawing, and

his talent attracted notice and pleased his family, every

encouragement being given him by his parents in his studies. It was

only when, as a boy of twelve, he viewed art as the serious work of

his future life, and when this view was met by the authorities as one

not to be encouraged, that the strong passion of his nature asserted

its rights. Clearly in opposition are planted the firmest roots of

those inevitable developments which make the great of the world great.

In Leighton was nurtured that sense of responsibility towards his

vocation, so salient a characteristic throughout his career, partly by

his father's attitude towards the worship of his nature for beauty and

for her exponent art. To prove that his self-chosen labour was no mere

play work, no mere avoiding the hard work of life and the duller paths

of service generally recognised only as of serious use to mankind, for

a game which was a mere pleasure, was a strong additional incentive to

Leighton's own high aspirations, inspiring him yet more to treat the

development of his gifts as a moral responsibility. He considered it

almost in the light of a debt owing to those to whom he was attached

by strong family affection, that he should prove good his cause.

Though he fought and overcame, having once won his point, he did his

utmost to satisfy his father's ambition for him, and to be "eminent."

On August 5, 1879, he wrote to Mrs. Mark Pattison, who was compiling

notes for an article on his life: "My father, of his own impulse, sat

down to write a few jottings, which I cannot resist sending you,

because I was touched at the thought in this kind old man of eighty.

_He_, by the way, _is_ a fine scholar, and was, at his best, a man of

exceptional intellectual powers. My desire to be an artist dates as

far back as my memory, and was wholly spontaneous, or rather

unprompted. My parents surrounded me with every facility to learn

drawing, but, as I have told you, _strongly_ discountenanced the idea

of my being an artist unless I could be eminent in art."

[Illustration: LORD LEIGHTON'S FATHER

LORD LEIGHTON'S MOTHER

From Miniatures, by permission of Mr. H.S. Mendelssohn]

Still--though to excel was Leighton's aim, in order to satisfy his

father's and also his own ambition--within the hidden recesses of that

aim lay the reverent, more single-hearted worship for his mistress

Art--seldom unveiled, it would seem, when with his father, to whose

purely intellectual and philosophical attitude of mind it would not

have appealed. Those alone possessed the key to that inner sanctuary

who did not need the key; who wanted no introduction, and were not

merely sympathisers, but native inhabitants. There is a freemasonry

between the inmates of these places remote from the world's usual

habitations, and these, naturally, have a horror of vaunting the

possession of a sacred ground to the outsider, the uninitiated. Many

of Leighton's most intimate acquaintances gathered no clue, through

their knowledge of him, of the existence of the secluded spot. Dr.

Leighton's influence, however, non-artistic as was his nature,

stimulated his son's natural mental elasticity, encouraging a

comprehensive and unprejudiced view of life and people, a view which

marked Leighton's undertakings with a stamp of nobility and

distinction throughout his career. Yet further--the intellectual

training he received in youth probably enlarged, in some respects, the

areas of the sacred sanctuary itself, enabling Leighton, when he was

the servant of the public and possessing wide influence and patronage,

not only to exercise power with the qualities which spring from a high

intellectual development, but to mellow with wisdom the guidance of

the yet higher sympathies of the heart, when helping those staggering

along the road which he himself had travelled over with such success.

To many, however, especially to those possessing the artistic

temperament, it must always remain, to say the least, a questionable

advantage to a student of art that his intellectual faculties should

be forced forward at the expense of the development of his more

emotional and ingenuous instincts, at the age when sensitiveness to

receive impressions is keenest, and when such impressions have the

most lasting power in moulding the future tendencies of his nature.

Certainly the effects of a development of critical and analytical

faculties is apt to prove a damper to those ecstasies of enthusiasm

which inspire the most convincing conceptions in art. When first

starting and facing seriously his independent career alone, Leighton

writes to his mother: "I wish that I had a mind, simple and

unconscious as a child." Again, writing to his elder sister from

Algiers in 1857, after describing the delightful impression produced

by a first visit to an Eastern country, he adds: "And yet what I have

said of my feelings, though _literally true_, does not give you an

exactly true notion, for together with, and as it were behind, so much

pleasurable emotion, there is always that other strange second man in

me, calm, observant, critical, unmoved, blase--odious! He is a shadow

that walks with me, a sort of nineteenth-century canker of doubt and

dissection; it's very, very seldom that I forget his loathsome

presence. What cheering things I find to say!"

Allied to the third, more intimate aspect of his nature were phases in

Leighton's feelings when heart would seem to conquer head. He would at

times indulge in what might almost be designated as a self-imposed

blindness, when he would allow of no criticism by himself or others of

the cause or person in question. An enthusiastic, unselfish devotion,

a sense of chivalry or pity, would override his normally

clear-sighted, intellectual acumen. Having set his belief and

admiration to one tune, faithful loyalty--and maybe a certain amount

of obstinacy--would bind him fast in an adherence to the same.

[Illustration: EARLY PICTURE OF BOY RESCUING SLEEPING BABY

FROM EAGLE

Leighton House Collection]

Belonging also to the intuitive, more emotional side of his nature,

was the curiously strong influence places exercised over him, certain

localities affecting him and exciting his sympathies with a strong

power.

In 1857 he wrote to his elder sister: "If I am as faithful to my wife

as I am to the places I love, I shall do very well!"

In order to seize fully Leighton's complete individuality, an

understanding of Italy, his "second home," is perhaps necessary--a

conception of the nature of the unsophisticated Italian life which

fascinated him so greatly when as yet no invasion had been made of

cosmopolitan, so-called civilisation. As a magnet, Italy drew Leighton

to her.[6] Under the influence of her radiant beauty, breathing such a

life of charm and colour beneath sunlit skies, he felt the sources of

happiness in his own nature expand and his powers ripen. In the

fertility of her soil, the vitality of her people, the superb quality

of her art--fine and gracious in its perfection, and distributed

generously throughout the length and breadth of her land--he

experienced influences which intensified his emotions and vivified his

imagination. The child-like charm of her people, so spontaneously

happy, enjoying the ease and assurance of nature's own aristocracy,

because enjoying nature's generous gifts with unabashed fulness of

sensation, in whom are non-existent those sensibilities which create

self-consciousness, restraint, and an absence of self-confidence,

aroused in Leighton an interest deeper than mere pleasure. It was to

him like the joy of a yearning satisfied, as of those who, having had

their lot cast for years with aliens and foreigners, find themselves

again with their own kith and kin, surrounded by the native atmosphere

which had lent such enchantment to childhood. Again and again he

returned to Italy to be made happy, to be revived, to be strengthened

by her. Her influence became kneaded into his very being, not only

nourishing his sense of beauty and rendering more complete the artist

nature within him, but touching the sources from which his artist

temperament sprang, inspiring his very personality and changing it

into one which was certainly not typically English. His rapid

utterance, his picturesque gesture, his very appearance, were not

emphatically English.[7]

Certain Englishmen who knew Leighton but slightly felt out of sympathy

with him for this reason, experiencing a difficulty in recognising him

as one of themselves. It was, however, only on the surface that a

difference existed. Once intimate with Leighton, he was ever found to

be _au fond_ English of the English. After the age of thirty it was in

England Leighton fought the serious battle of life--Italy was but the

playground, though a playground of such fascination to him that the

glamour of it was spread over the working hours no less than over the

holidays. In these days we have to go into the smaller towns and

villages to discover the typical Italian characteristics; but when

Leighton, as a child, was taken from the gloom of Bloomsbury to this,

to him a magic world,--syndicates, building-companies, tramways, and

modern things generally, had not as yet invaded either Rome or

Florence. When grown up and master of his own actions, he wandered

into unsophisticated haunts--villages and towns off the beaten tracks,

where with abnormal facility he learned the distinctive _patois_ of

every district, listening with delight to local folk-songs, and

watching the peasants and the aborigines of the soil. In early

sketch-books we find records of visits to Albano, Tivoli, Cervaro,

Subiaco, San Giuminiano, and to even smaller and less known villages

in Tuscany and Veneziano, where he enjoyed the unalloyed flavour of

Italy and her people. Those who pay only flying visits to the country

after they are grown up would find a difficulty perhaps in realising

what Italy was to Leighton; but any one visiting for a few weeks even

such a well-known place as Albano, without other preoccupation than to

watch the natives and wander in the beautiful scenery to the sound of

the many flowing fountains, could still catch something of the true

national spirit which fascinated him so greatly. The typical Britisher

might regard the ways of these natives of the _Provincia di Roma_ as

irrational, idle, semi-savage. Doubtless the streets and piazzas

abound in noisy inhabitants, gesticulating with wild dramatic fervour,

who appear to have otherwise little to do in life but to loiter and

"look on"; sociable groups of women sit round the doorways knitting;

but it is the talk, accompanied by excited action, which is engrossing

them. Charmingly pretty children are playing everywhere--idle,

troublesome, but so happy! To the accompanying sound of running

waters,--night and day,--cries, yells, and songs ring out through the

ancient little town.[8] High up on the side of the mountains it

overlooks the Roman Campagna, the tragic strangeness of those

land-waves rolling away, flattened and stretched out, for miles and

miles, under the dome of light and shadowing cloud, a network of

bright gleams and violet lakelets, to the far-off brilliant shine on

the sea limit.[9] This noise, dramatic action, gesticulation, all

ending apparently in nothing in particular, but filling the little

town with such amazing vitality--what is it all about? The typical

Englishman does not know--does not care to know, despising the whole

thing as beneath his notice. But Leighton knew well what it meant.

From experiences in his own nature he realised that it was but an

innocent outlet, through voice and gesture, of an excitement resulting

from an imperative dramatic instinct, a vital force in the emotional

nature of the Italian. He recognised the necessity for such an outlet

in such temperaments through his sympathy with the glad exuberance of

physical vitality enjoyed in this sunlit land; anti-puritan though it

may be, this exuberance is none the less pure and innocent.

The holy Saint Francis in his ecstasies of spiritual illumination

would, it is said, break out into song from the natural impulse to

find an outlet and to throw off the excess of excitement, that

thrilled through his being.[10]

Leighton knew that to suppress the vitality which needs such an outlet

was to minimise the forces necessary for life's best work. He himself,

in the working of his mind, was possessed of a magnificent facility--a

facility which left the strength of his emotions fresh and free, to

enjoy the ecstasies of admiration and delight which the choice gifts

of nature and art had given him; but there are many among modern men

and women, taught by much reading, who overweight their physical

vitality in the effort to develop intellect and to forward

self-interest, till all simple physical enjoyment is lost, and the

natural man becomes repressed into a mental machine incapable of any

spontaneous emotions of joy, and blunt to the fine aroma of life's

keen and pure pleasures--

"My nature is subdued to what it works in."

To Leighton the simple joyous child of nature, in the form of the

unsophisticated Italian, was a preferable being. To the end of his

life he retained much of the child in his own nature, and had ever an

inborn sympathy with the love for children so evident everywhere in

unspoilt Italy; for the gracious caressing of them by the poorest of

the poor--old men in the veriest tatters and rags showing a complete

and beautiful submission to the dominating charms of babyhood.

The memory of the hideous, gruesome stories of baby-farming in England

strikes indeed a contrast with the scenes that abound at every turn

in any old, dirty, picturesque Italian village, and assuredly settles

the question, Is our English development of civilisation an unalloyed

benefit?

As a contrast to the definite, explicit German development of his

intellectual machinery, Leighton had special sympathy with the

emotional spontaneity of the Italian race; also as a contrast to the

selective and finely poised conclusions to be worked out in theories

of composition learnt from his beloved master Steinle, arose a special

admiration for the casual, unpremeditated, inevitable grace and charm

in the manners and gestures of this southern people. What laboured

theories so often failed to achieve, nature here was always doing in

her most careless moods.

In considering the intimate aspect of Leighton's nature, and the

interweaving of the original fabric with the forces developed by the

circumstances he encountered, the influence of Italy must assuredly be

given a very distinct prominence. From her and her people he acquired

courage in the exercise of his intuitive preferences, also a

development of that rapid and direct insight so inborn in her

children. Like the lizards that dart with such lightning speed across

her sun-scorched walls and over the gnarled bark of the weird olive

tree, the perceptions of the typical Italian are swift, and fly

straight to the mark. In the Italian, however, this vividness of

perception is mostly expended in ejaculation and dramatic gesture,

which,--subsiding,--leaves a state of indolence and nonchalance,

untroubled by any mental exertion. In Leighton the rapidity with which

his perceptions seized the core of truth was backed by an intellectual

activity of extraordinary power, by which he worked his intuitive

sensibilities into the interests which guided the solid aims of his

life.

Probably no Englishman ever approached the Greek of the Periclean

period so nearly as did Leighton, for the reason that he possessed

that combination of intellectual and emotional power in a like rare

degree. The human beings who achieve most as active workers in the

world, are doubtless those in whom can be traced a capacity for making

apparently incompatible forces pull together towards a desired end.

Leighton succeeded in allying two distinct developments in his nature;

and by, so to say, putting these into double harness and driving them

together, acquired an advantage which few other artists, if any, have

possessed since the time of the Greeks.

But, being essentially English as well as Greek-like, Leighton pushed

this combination of powers to a moral issue. He held as his creed of

creeds that the mission of Art was to act as a lever in the uplifting

of the human race, not by going beyond her own domain, but by

directing the sense of beauty with which her true priesthood must ever

be endowed, in order to eliminate from man his more brutal tendencies,

to refine and perfect his insight into nature, and to develop his

delight in her perfection. He held that, the stronger the emotional

force in an artist, the stronger the sense of responsibility should

be; the more he should seek to express it in a manner which would

elevate rather than deprave. In his picture of "Cymon and Iphigenia,"

Leighton expressed the main dogma of his belief. In sentences towards

the end of his second address to the Royal Academy students in the

year 1881, he eloquently describes the complex and deep nature of

those aesthetic emotions whence spring the Arts:--

"It is not, it cannot be, the foremost duty of Art to seek to embody

that which it cannot adequately present, and to enter into a

competition in which it is doomed to inevitable defeat.

"On the other hand, there is a field in which she has no rival. We

have within us the faculty for a range of emotions of vast compass, of

exquisite subtlety, and of irresistible force, to which Art and Art

alone amongst human forms of expression has a key; these then, and no

others, are the chords which it is her appointed duty to strike; and

Form, Colour, and the contrasts of Light and Shade are the agents

through which it is given to her to set them in motion. Her duty is,

therefore, to awaken those sensations directly emotional and

indirectly intellectual, which can be communicated only through the

sense of sight, to the delight of which she has primarily to minister.

And the dignity of these sensations lies in this, that they are

inseparably connected by association of ideas, with a range of

perceptions and feelings of infinite variety and scope. They come

fraught with dim complex memories of all the ever-shifting spectacle

of inanimate creation, and of the more deeply stirring phenomena of

life; of the storm and the lull, the splendour and the darkness of the

outer world; of the storm and the lull, the splendour and the darkness

of the changeful and transitory lives of men. Nay, so closely overlaid

is the simple aesthetic sensation with elements of ethic or

intellectual emotion by these constant and manifold accretions of

associated ideas, that it is difficult to conceive of it independently

of this precious overgrowth.... The most sensitively religious mind

may indeed rest satisfied in the consciousness that it is not on the

wings of abstract thought alone that we rise to the highest moods of

contemplation, or to the most chastened moral temper; and assuredly

Arts which have for their chief task to reveal the inmost springs of

Beauty in the created world, to display all the pomp of the teeming

earth, and all the pageant of those heavens of which we are told that

they declare the Glory of God, are not the least eloquent witnesses to

the might and to the majesty of the mysterious and eternal Fountain of

all good things."

Not only could no attempt be approximately made at giving a real and

vivid picture of Leighton's remarkable personality were not the three

aspects of his nature taken into account, but also if the influences

which affected him strongly during those years when his genius and

character were being developed were not also considered. His

conscious nature and feelings, during the first thirty years of his

life, can be best traced in his letters, notably in those to his

mother. It is easy to recognise, in reading his mother's letters to

him, from whom he inherits the warm tender generosity which made his

nature so lovable.

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF PROFESSOR EDOUARD STEINLE

Drawn by Himself]

When at Frankfort, in 1845, he first became acquainted with the most

"indelible" influence of his life in that inner sanctuary in which he

had hitherto been a lonely inmate. Seven years later, in the Diary he

calls "Pebbles," written for his mother, when, fully fledged, he

leaves the nest to battle alone on the field of life, he pays a

tribute of unqualified affection and gratitude to his master, Steinle,

who first unlocked the door to Leighton's full consciousness of the

depth of his devotion for his calling (see pp. 61 and 62).

In 1879, the year after Leighton was elected President of the Royal

Academy, in the same letter to Mrs. Mark Pattison already quoted from,

he writes, respecting the influences which affected his art

development: "For _bad_ by Florentine Academy, for good, far beyond

all others, by Steinle, a noble-minded, single-hearted artist, _s'il

en fut_. Technically, I learnt (later) much from Robert Fleury, but

being very receptive and prone to admire, I have learnt, and still do,

from innumerable artists, big and small. Steinle's is, however, the

_indelible seal_. The _thoroughness_ of all the great old masters is

so pervading a quality that I look upon them all as forming one

aristocracy."

During the first year when he settled in Rome, in the beginning of

1853, he made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Sartoris. Leighton's

friendship with Mrs. Sartoris (Adelaide Kemble), many years his

senior, and one who had ever viewed her art as a singer from the

purest and highest aspect, became a strong and elevating influence in

his life. Professor Giovanni Costa (the "Nino" of the letters), one

of Leighton's most intimate friends from the year 1853 to the end in

1896, wrote of Mrs. Sartoris, referring to the early days in Rome from

1853 to 1856:[11] "The greatest influence on the life of Frederic

Leighton was exerted by Mr. and Mrs. Sartoris (Miss Adelaide Kemble),

who had the mind of a great artist. Mr. Sartoris was one of the

greatest critics of art, and Mrs. Sartoris had a most elevated and

serene nature."

This great friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Sartoris brought with it many

others, notably those of Robert Browning and of Mr. Henry Greville.

Some years later, Leighton writes of Mr. Henry Greville, in a letter

to his pupil and friend, Mr. John Walker: "He is indeed one of the

kindest and best men possible, I look on him myself as a second

father"; and Henry Greville in a letter to Leighton writes: "I wish

you were my son, Fay"--Fay being the name given to Leighton by his

inner circle of intimates, and certainly a stroke of genius in the one

who invented it. Writing from Frankfort to his mother, where he

returned to show his works to Steinle after his family had finally

migrated to Bath and he to Rome, he says: "I have had such a letter

from Henry (Henry Greville); there never was anything like the

tenderness of it. You would have been just enchanted."

The friendship with Mrs. Sartoris only ended with her death in 1879,

the year after Leighton was elected President of the Royal Academy.

Being then close upon fifty, deeply sensible of the grave

responsibilities involved by his new position, Leighton entered on a

fresh phase in his career. As president of the centre of national

living art, this phase involved a serious view being taken of the

interests of art such as could be encouraged by a public body. Also as

one who had been helped and encouraged by personal friendship and

influence to work out the best in him, with his ever eager and

generous nature he felt anxious to hand on the help he had received by

devoting a like sympathy to the individual interests of other workers.

His field of action had become enlarged, and he rose with consummate

ability to the fulfilment of the duties this larger area entailed on

him. Not only by his biennial addresses to the students of the Royal

Academy, but by the speeches delivered spontaneously at the councils

and elsewhere, when no preparation would have been possible, his fame

as an orator was established. Many there are who have heard the

impromptu speeches he made, who can vouch, as do Mr. Briton Riviere

and Mr. Hamo Thornycroft, that these were just as fine in language and

excellent in the concise form in which the words were made to convey

the intended meaning, as those which Leighton had carefully prepared

beforehand, and possessed, moreover, the charm of an unlaboured

effort.

[Illustration: FROM DRAWING OF ADELAIDE SARTORIS

Paris, 1856]

The seventeen years, during which Leighton was President of the Royal

Academy, and prominent in every direction as the leader of the art of

his country, were not without saddening influences. His duties

necessitated contact with many varieties of human nature, some far

from sympathetic to him. The contrast between his own disinterested

reverence for beauty, moral and physical, with the indifference

displayed by many of his brother artists towards his own high aims and

aspirations, forced itself more and more on Leighton as the optimistic

fervour and enthusiasm of youth waned with years and failing health.

He had to face the depressing fact that selfish motives are the ruling

factors with most men, even with those who ostensibly follow the

calling of beauty. Much of the joyousness of his spirit was lessened

accordingly, though his "sweet reasonableness," to quote Watts' truly

suggestive words, never deserted him. This prevented any bitterness or

resentment from finding permanent location in his nature. Another

source of distress arose from the fact that his great position

aroused the jealousy of the envious. However exceptional his tact,

however truly heartfelt his consideration for others, no virtues could

stand against the vice of being so pre-eminently successful in the

eyes of the envious, whose vanity alone placed them in their own

estimation on a level with the great.

Nothing perhaps excites so rampant a jealousy in unappreciative and

envious natures, as does the unexplainable charm of a delightful

personality. It aggravates the dull and envious beyond measure to see

a being thus endowed galloping over the ground in all directions with

ease, there being in their eyes no sufficient explanation for the

pace. Such success is viewed by the envious as a kind of trick, some

witchery of fascination, which deludes the world into bestowing

unmerited advantages on the conjuror. Those, on the contrary, who can

appreciate a transcendent and delightful personality, recognise it as

the convincing grace of the power of uncommon gifts flashing their

radiance into the intercourse of every-day life, modestly ignored as

conscious possessions but inevitably sparkling out in any human

intercourse, and from a social point of view making the greatest among

us the servants of all.

Jealousy fights with hidden weapons. What man or woman ever

acknowledged being jealous? The passion is disguised. Hence the

hideous sins that follow in its wake: ingratitude, treachery,

calumnies, are called into the service to blacken the offending

object. Bacon says of envy: "It is also the vilest affection, and the

most depraved; for which cause it is the proper attribute of the

devil, who is called _the envious man, that soweth tares amongst the

wheat by night_, as it always cometh to pass that envy worketh

subtilly, and in the dark; and to the prejudice of good things, such

as is the wheat."

Leighton suffered from the jealousy of the envious, though in most

cases the open expression of it was smothered during his life by

reason of his power and position. Besides being tender-hearted and

easily hurt at any feeling of hostility shown against him, he

cordially hated any phase of the ugly.

In the spring of 1895 Leighton said to a friend: "My one constant

prayer is that I should not live beyond seventy." His great dread was

to be a burden to any one--to cease to be useful to all. His wish was

more than fulfilled. He passed onward five years before the allotted

three score and ten.

Many there were who felt with Watts that life was indeed darkened; "a

great light was extinguished," a beloved friend was no longer amongst

them to help, encourage, and brighten the days. To a wide social

circle, a personality, rare in its charm and endowments, differing

from all others, had passed off the stage. It was as if, amid the

sober brown and grey plumage of our quiet-coloured English birds,

through the mists and fogs of our northern clime, there had sped

across the page of our nineteenth century history the flight of some

brilliant-hued flamingo, emitting flashes of light and colour on his

way.

To the wide public a power and a control, noble and distinguished in

its quality, had ceased to rule over the art interests of the country.

Last, but not least, to his "brothers and sisters," as Leighton called

all earnest students and artists, it was as if a strong support, a

centre of impelling force, an inspiration towards the best and highest

in art, had been suddenly swept away.

On the day of his funeral, a friend, whose husband had known him from

the commencement to the end of the brilliant career, wrote the

following notes:--[12]

"Lord Leighton's funeral to-day was as brilliant as his life, and we

came home from the majestic ceremony at St. Paul's Cathedral feeling

that his kind and gracious spirit would have rejoiced--for all he

loved and honoured in life were there mourning for the loss of their

gifted and genial friend. As the procession moved slowly into the

Cathedral the crimson and golden pall was Venetian in its brilliancy,

and the long branch of palm spoke touchingly of pain over and the

conquest won. Music, the sister Art he so devoutly worshipped, lifted

up her voice in pathetic accents to the dome of the vast Cathedral,

striving to re-echo the solemnity and grief around.

"Dear gracious Leighton, how vividly my husband recalled his earliest

impressions of him, the handsome young artist at Rome. Visions arise

in the mind of joyous days in his second home there, the cultured and

hospitable house of Adelaide Sartoris, which formed the happy

background of Leighton's life. He remembered the departure of his

picture 'The Triumph of Cimabue,' sent with diffidence, and so,

proportionate was the joy when news came of its success, and that the

Queen had bought it. It was the month of May. Rome was at its

loveliest, and Leighton's friends and brother artists gave him a

festal dinner to celebrate his honours. On receiving the news,

Leighton's first act was to fly to three less successful artists and

buy a picture from each of them (George Mason, then still unknown, was

one), and so Leighton reflected his own happiness at once on others.

To-day as we viewed the distinguished (in the best sense of the term)

mourners, it seemed an epitome of all his social and artistic life. He

never forgot an old friend, and not one was absent to-day. The men

around his coffin all looked heartily sad. It was only when those

peaceful words came, 'We give Thee hearty thanks, for that it hath

pleased Thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this

sinful world,' that we remembered the agony of his last three days on

earth, and we could be glad for our dear friend that it was past. We

could give hearty thanks, but it was for him and him alone, for we

turn with heavy hearts to our homes, feeling that with Frederic

Leighton ever so much kindness, love, and colour has gone out of the

world."

[Illustration: CRYPT UNDER ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, WHERE BARRY,

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, TURNER, AND LORD LEIGHTON WERE BURIED

From a photo, by permission of Messrs. S.B. Bolas & Co.]

Attached to the wreath which lay on his coffin were the lines written

by our Queen:--

"Life's race well run,

Life's work well done,

Life's crown well won,

Now comes rest."

In Leighton's own letters, more than is possible in any other written

words, will be traced those qualities of character and feeling which

guided the rare gifts nature had bestowed. These, used with unstinting

generosity for the benefit of others, established for our national art

a position, cosmopolitan in its influence, never previously attained

by English painting and sculpture, and of which it may be fairly

hoped, future generations, no less than the present, may reap the

benefit.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] George Eliot--"Romola."

[2] Lord Loch's cousin, Colonel Sutherland Orr, married Leighton's

elder sister in the year 1857.

[3] Quoted in G.F. Watts' "Reminiscences."

[4] An incident, one out of many that tell of Leighton's hearty, eager

helpfulness, happened on one of the evenings at the Academy, after the

prizes had been given away. A student was passing through the first

room, on his way to the entrance. He looked the picture of dejection

and disappointed wretchedness, poorly and shabbily dressed, and

slinking away as if he wished to pass out of the place unnoticed.

Millais and Leighton, walking arm in arm, came along, pictures of

prosperity. Leighton caught sight of the poor, downcast student.

Leaving Millais, he darted across the vestibule to him, and, taking the

student's arm, drew him back into the first room, and made him sit down

on the ottoman beside him. Putting his arm on the top of the ottoman,

and resting his head on his hand, Leighton began to talk as he alone

could talk; pouring forth volumes of earnest, rapid utterances, as if

everything in the world depended on his words conveying what he wanted

them to convey. He went on and on. The shabby figure gradually seemed

to pull itself together, and, at last, when they both rose, he seemed

to have become another creature. Leighton shook hands with him, and the

youth went on his way rejoicing. It is certain that if other help than

advice were needed, it was given. But it was the extraordinary zest and

vitality which Leighton put into his help which made it unlike any

other. He fought every one's cause even better than others fight their

own.

[5] In Plato's "Phaedrus," Socrates says: "The soul, which has seen

most of trouble, shall come to the birth as a philosopher, or artist,

or musician, or lover; that which has seen truth in the second degree,

shall be a righteous king, or warrior, or lord; the soul which is of

the third class, shall be a politician, or economist, or trader; the

fourth, shall be a lover of gymnastic toils, or a physician; the fifth,

a prophet, or hierophant; to the sixth, a poet or imitator will be

'appropriate'; to the seventh, the life of an artisan, or husbandman;

to the eighth, that of a sophist, or demagogue; to the ninth, that of a

tyrant; all these are states of probation, in which he who lives

righteously, improves, and he who lives unrighteously, deteriorates his

lot."

[6] He wrote to his sister in 1857 from Algiers: "I shall spend my next

winter in my dear, dear old Rome, to which I am attached beyond

measure; indeed, Italy altogether has a hold on my heart that no other

country ever can have (except, of course, my own), and although, as I

just now said, I was most delighted with Africa, and have not a moment

to look back to that was not agreeable, yet there is an intimate little

corner in my affections into which it could never penetrate." And later

he wrote in a letter to his mother: "I have so often been to Italy, and

so often written to you from thence, that it seems quite a platitude to

tell you how much I enjoy it, and what a keen delight I felt again this

time when I once more trod the soil of this wonderful country; indeed,

by the time you get this you will already yourself be in full enjoyment

of its pleasures, and though naturally you cannot feel one tittle of my

attachment and yearning affection for it, yet you will have all the

physical delights of sun and serene skies and a good share of the

wonder and admiration at the inexhaustible natural beauties of this

garden of the world. I came through Switzerland this time, but as quick

as a shot, as I was in a hurry to get _home_ to Italy."

[7] Du Maurier, who took much interest in tracing indications of

various racial distinctions in the remarkable people of his time, was

troubled on this point. He was convinced that in Leighton existed

indications of foreign or Jewish blood, but was quite unable to

discover any facts in support of this theory.

[8] Leighton wrote in a letter to his sister from Algiers of the

strange sounds which the Moors emit, adding: "Much the same sort of

thing is noticeable in the peasants near Rome, whose songs consist

(within a definite shape) of long-sustained chest notes that are

peculiar in the extreme, and though often harsh, seem to be wonderfully

in harmony with the long unbroken lines of the Campagna."

[9] On December 1, 1856, Leighton writes to Steinle: "My Italian

journey afforded me in every way the greatest pleasure and edification,

and I seem now for the first time to have grasped the greatness of the

Campagna and the giant loftiness of Michael Angelo."

[10] "Apres de pareilles emotions, il avait besoin d'etre seul, de

savourer sa joie, de chanter sa liberte definitivement conquise, sur

tous les sentiers le long desquels il avait tant gemi, tant lutte.

"Il ne voulut donc pas retourner immediatement a Saint-Damien. Sortant

de la cite par la porte la plus voisine, il s'enfonca dans les sentiers

deserts qui grimpent sur les flancs du Mont Subasio. On etait aux tout

premiers jours du printemps. Il y avait encore ca et la de grandes

fondrieres de neige, mais sous les ardeurs du soleil de mars l'hiver

semblait s'avouer vaincu. Au sein de cette harmonie, mysterieuse et

troublante, le coeur de Francois vibrait delicieusement, tout son etre

se calmait et s'exaltait; l'ame des choses le caressait doucement et

lui versait l'apaisement. Un bonheur inconnu l'envahissait; pour

celebrer sa victoire et sa liberte, il remplit bientot toute la foret

du bruit de ses chants.

"Les emotions trop douces ou trop profondes pour pouvoir etre exprimees

dans la langue ordinaire, l'homme les chante."--_Vie de S. Francois

d'Assise, par Paul Sabatier._

[11] "Notes on Lord Leighton," _Cornhill Magazine_, March 1897.

[12] The _Morning Post_ of February 4, 1896.

CHAPTER I

ANTECEDENTS AND SCHOOL DAYS

1830-1852

Some light is thrown on Leighton's ancestry by the following letter,

written by Sir Baldwyn Leighton to Sir Albert Woods, Garter, at the

time when a peerage was bestowed on Frederic Leighton. It deals with

the question of associating the name of Stretton with the Barony.

"TABLEY HOUSE, KNUTSFORD,

_January 10, 1896._

"DEAR SIR,--In answer to yours of January 9, I beg to say that

there are two places called Stretton in the County of Salop;

one, now known as Church Stretton, having become a small town,

was formerly in the possession of my family through the

marriage of John de Leighton, my lineal ancestor, with the

daughter and heiress of William Cambray of Stretton in the

fourteenth century, whose arms we still quarter (see Herald's

Visitation for Shropshire). This no longer belongs to me,

having been mortgaged and sold by Sir Thomas Leighton, Kt.

Banneret, temp. Hen. VIII. But there is another Stretton in

the parish of Alderbury with Cardeston which does still belong

to me, and has always belonged to the family from time

immemorial. I have been in communication with Sir Frederic

Leighton on the subject, and it _is_ my wish that he should

adopt the supplemental title of Stretton. According to a

pedigree made out by a Shropshire antiquarian some thirty

years ago, Sir Frederic's branch descends from the younger son

of the John de Leighton who married the Cambray heiress, and

who was admitted burgess of Shrewsbury in 1465. Therefore I

am of opinion that it _is_ a very proper supplemental title

for Sir Frederic to assume.--I remain, yours, &c.,

"BALDWYN LEIGHTON.

"To Sir ALBERT WOODS, Garter."

In 1862, Leighton writes to his mother:--

"You must know that I received some time back a letter from the _Rev.

Wm. Leighton_ (address, _Luciefelde, Shrewsbury_) asking me very

politely to give him whatever information I could about our family, as

he was making a pedigree of the Leighton family, and was anxious to

find out something about a branch that had settled and been lost sight

of in London. I answered that I regretted I could give him no definite

information on the subject, beyond our belief that we were of a

younger branch of the Shropshire Leightons, whose arms and crest we

bore, that I knew personally nothing of my family further back than my

grandfather, telling him who and what he was. I ended by referring him

_to Papa_, to whom I immediately wrote, telling him the nature of Mr.

Leighton's request, and begging him to write to him at once in case he

could give him any clue that might facilitate his researches. I then

received a second, and very interesting, letter from Mr. L. telling me

that he had found in Yorkshire some Leightons (I forget the Christian

names, but not Robert) who claimed to descend from the Shropshire

stock, and whose crest differed from the Leighton crest exactly as

ours does, _i.e._ in the _forward_ expansion of the right wing of the

Wyvern; a peculiarity, by the by, which did not appear to be of weight

with him. There was more in this letter which I don't clearly

remember, but nothing establishing our claim; this letter I

immediately forwarded to you, and since then both myself and Mr.

Leighton have been waiting to hear from Papa."

The conclusion arrived at from these inquiries was--that, three or

four hundred years ago, the descendants of John de Leighton and the

Cambray heiress migrated from Shropshire to Yorkshire, and that

Leighton's grandfather, Sir James Leighton, court physician to the

Emperor Nicholas of Russia, was a descendant of this branch. Dr.

Leighton, the artist's father, married the daughter of George Augustus

Nash of Edmonton. He and his wife, early in their married life, went

to St. Petersburg, and it was supposed that he would probably succeed

his father as court physician to the Czar, who favoured Sir James

Leighton with his intimacy; but the climate of St. Petersburg not

suiting Mrs. Leighton's health, they remained there but a few years.

It was at St. Petersburg that the two eldest children were born,

Fanny, who died young, and Alexandra, the god-child of the Empress

Alexandra, who became Mrs. Sutherland Orr. From St. Petersburg, the

family moved to Scarborough, and it was at Scarborough, on December 3,

1830, that the most famous member of the Leighton family was born. The

question as to which was the actual house in which the event took

place was satisfactorily settled at the time when Leighton was raised

to the peerage, in letters which appeared in the press,--one

containing the testimony of Mrs. Anne Thorley, who was in Dr.

Leighton's service for three years with the family at Scarborough, and

for two years after they moved to London. She affirms that Leighton

was born in the house in Brunswick Terrace, now numbered 13, but which

at that time consisted only of three houses. Mrs. Thorley adds,

"Fred's mother was a splendid lady--such a good one with her children,

and most affectionate."

A second son named James, who died in his infancy, was also born at

Scarborough, and five years after the birth of Leighton his younger

sister Augusta, now Mrs. Matthews, was born in London.

[Illustration: Lord Leighton when a Boy

From a Portrait by Himself

By permission of Mr. H.S. Mendelssohn]

[Illustration: Lord Leighton's younger Sister when a Child

From a Drawing by Lord Leighton

By permission of Mr. H.S. Mendelssohn]

Dr. Leighton had every prospect of excelling among those most

distinguished in his profession. Deafness, however, by which he was

unfortunately attacked about that time, made it impossible for him to

practise any longer as a physician. Deprived of his active work, he

turned his attention to more abstract lines of study, and to

philosophy.

In 1840, Mrs. Leighton, after a severe illness, required a drier

climate than that of England, and the family travelled on the

Continent, visiting Germany, Switzerland, and Italy.

Family annals record the delight with which Leighton, the boy of ten,

enjoyed the beauty of nature in Switzerland, the flowers and

everything he saw in the land of mountains. When he reached Rome, the

buildings, the fountains, the ruins, the models awaiting hire on the

Piazza di Spagna, fascinated him, and he filled many sketch-books with

records of all the picturesque scenes that struck him as so new and

wonderful. From earliest days, drawing was Leighton's greatest

amusement, and he had it always in his own mind that he would be an

artist and nothing else. When in Rome, he was allowed to study drawing

under Signor Meli, but his father insisted on other lessons being

carried on with regularity and industry. We hear of his elder sister

and Leighton learning Latin together from a young priest. Dr. Leighton

had a commanding intelligence, and made his will felt. As with many

fond fathers who centre their chief interest on an only son, and

foster thoughts of a notable future for him, Dr. Leighton seems to

have felt that the greater his interest and affection, the greater

must be the exercise of strict discipline over his boy. Leighton

received, to say the least, a stern upbringing from his father,

mitigated, however, by the greatest tenderness from his mother. The

boy's will respecting his future career proved sufficient for the

occasion, and he had reason to be thankful that the general knowledge,

which Dr. Leighton insisted on his acquiring, was instilled at so

early an age. From the time he was ten years old he was made to study

the classics, and at twelve he spoke French and Italian as fluently as

English. Dr. Leighton had himself taught the boy anatomy, ever

cherishing the hope that he would, when he came to years of

discretion, renounce the idea of being an artist, and follow in the

footsteps of his father and grandfather by becoming a doctor. In

either case a knowledge of anatomy was thought necessary, and, in

after years, Leighton declared he knew much more anatomy when he was

fourteen than he did when he was President of the Royal Academy. "I

owe," he said, "my knowledge to my father. He would teach me the names

of the bones and the muscles. He would show them to me in action and

in repose; then I would have to draw them from memory; until my memory

drawing was perfect, he would not let it pass."

The family returned to England for the summer of 1841, spending it at

the paternal grandfather's country house at Greenford; and during the

following winter Leighton studied at the University College School in

London. Mrs. Leighton's health again declined in England, and the

family migrated to Germany, the country chosen by Dr. Leighton as that

in which the education of the children could be best carried forward.

Leighton studied under tutors at Berlin, it being only in his spare

moments that he found time to sketch, or to visit the galleries. Then

followed a move to Frankfort, and thence to Florence. There he was

allowed to enter the studio of Bezzuoli and Servolini, celebrated

artists in Florence, but of whose real greatness Leighton, even at

that early age, entertained his doubts. It was in Florence that the

father's will had finally to submit to the son's passion for his

vocation. Dr. Leighton was too wise to allow prejudice to affect his

serious actions. He could no longer blind himself to the fact, that

this desire to be an artist was a vital matter with his son. He felt

it would be wrong to try and override the boy's desires without

seeking the opinion of an expert on art matters as to whether there

was any probability of Leighton excelling. He therefore took him and

his drawings to Hiram Powers, the sculptor, for the verdict to be

given. The well-known conversation took place after Powers had

examined the work.

"Shall I make him a painter?" asked Dr. Leighton.

"Sir, you cannot help yourself; nature has made him one already,"

answered the sculptor.

"What can he hope for, if I let him prepare for this career?"

"Let him aim at the highest," answered Powers; "he will be certain to

get there."

Leighton had won: he had now to prove good his cause. Even though

theoretically his father had given in, he yet hoped that, as years

went on, a change in his boy's views might come about; but he was

allowed to work at the Accademia delle belle Arti, under Bezzuoli and

Servolini, and besides continuing his study of anatomy with his

father, Leighton attended classes in the hospital under Zanetti. Of

this time in Florence, one of his life-long friends, Professor Costa,

writes: "I knew, both from himself and from his fellow-students, that

at the age of fourteen Leighton studied at the Academy of Florence

under Bezzuoli and Servolini, who at this time (1842) had a great

reputation. They were celebrated Florentines, excellent good men, but

they could give but little light to this star, which was to become one

of the first magnitude. Leighton, from his innate kindness, loved and

esteemed his old masters much, though not agreeing in the judgment of

his fellow-students that they should be considered on the same level

as the ancient Florentines. 'And who have you,' said Leighton one day

to a certain Bettino (who is still living), 'who resembles your

ancient masters?' And Bettino answered, 'We have still to-day our

great Michael Angelos, and Raffaels, in Bezzuoli, in Servolini, in

Ciseri.' But this boy of twelve years old could not believe this, and

one fine day got into the diligence, and left the Academy of Florence

to return to England. Although the diligence went at a great pace, his

fellow-students followed it on foot, running behind it, crying, 'Come

back, Inglesino! come back, Inglesino! come back,' so much was he

loved and respected. He did come back, in fact, many times to Italy,

which he considered as his second fatherland."

It was, however, at Frankfort, where the family settled in 1843, that

Leighton fell under the real, living art influence of his life, in the

person of Steinle. Leighton described this artist later as "an

intensely fervent Catholic, a man of most striking personality, and of

most courtly manners." In the temperament of this religious Catholic

was united a fervour of feeling with a pure severity in the style of

his art which belonged to the school of the Nazarenes, of which

Steinle was a follower, Overbeck and Pfuehler having led the way. A

spiritual ardour and spontaneity placed Steinle on a higher level as

an artist than that on which the rest of the brotherhood stood.

Leighton, boy as he was, at once realised in his master the existence

of that "sincerity of emotion,"--to use his own words when preaching,

nearly forty years later, to the Royal Academy students; a quality

ever considered by him as an essential attribute of the true

artist-nature--of that inner vision of the religious poet, of that

finer fibre of temperament which endowed art in Leighton's eyes with

higher qualities than science or philosophy alone could ever include.

Steinle viewed art with the reverence and nobility of feeling which

accorded with those aspirations that had been hinted to the boy's

nature in his best moments, but which had had no sufficiently clear,

decisive outline to inspire hitherto his actual performances. In

Steinle's work he found the positive expression of those aspirations;

there, in such art, was an absolute confutation of the creed that art

was but a pleasant recreation, having no backbone in it to influence

the serious work of the world; the creed which meant that, if taken up

as a profession, it led but to the making of money by amusing the

aesthetic sense of the public in a superficial manner. The view taken

by the magnates--the "Barbarians" of the time--was, that unless a

painter were a Raphael, a Titian, or a Reynolds, his position was

little removed from that of the second-rate actor or the dancer. It

was not the profession, but the individual prominence in it which

alone saved the situation. In Steinle, Leighton found an exponent of

art, who reverenced the vocation of art itself as one which should be

sanctified by the purest aims and the highest aspirations.

In the nature of one who exercises a strong influence over another is

often found the real clue to the nature influenced. Circumstances had

led Leighton to be reserved with regard to his deepest feelings

respecting art, but with Steinle that reserve vanished. Under the

influence of this master he realised an adequate cause for this

deep-rooted, peremptory passion. Steinle's nature explains that of his

pupil; for Leighton was, in an intimate sense, introduced to a full

knowledge of his own self by Steinle. This influence, to use his own

words, written more than thirty years later, was the "indelible seal,"

because it made Leighton one with himself. The impress was given which

steadied the whole nature. There was no vagueness of aim, no swaying

to and fro, after he had once made Steinle his master. The religious

nature also of the German artist had thrown a certain spell over him.

Leighton possessed ever the most beautiful of all qualities--the power

of feeling enthusiasm, of loving unselfishly, and generously _adoring_

what he admired most. Fortunate, it may possibly have been, that his

father's strict training developed his splendid intellectual powers at

an early age; fortunate it certainly was, that, when emancipated from

other trammels, he entered the service of art under an influence so

pure, so vital in spiritual passion as was that of Steinle.

However, it was not till Leighton reached the age of seventeen that he

was allowed to give his time uninterruptedly to the study of art. At

that age he had acquired sufficient knowledge of the classics and of

the general lines of knowledge even to satisfy his father. He had also

completely mastered the German, French, and Italian languages. The

vitality of his brain was almost abnormal, otherwise his constitution

was not strong. Constantly such phrases as "I am not ill, but I am

never well" occur in his letters, and he suffered from weakness and

heat, also from "blots" in his eyes, perhaps the result of scarlet

fever, which he had as a child. His school days seem to have had their

_mauvais moments_. When he was fifteen, his parents and elder sister

went to England, leaving him and his little sister at school during

their holidays. The love for his mother, and his longing to be with

her, is told in the following pathetic appeal:--

"FRANKFORT A/M.,

_Friday, June 26, 1845._

"[DEAR MAMMA],--Your letter, which I have just received,

caused me the greatest pleasure, for I have been anxiously

expecting it for three long days. I am very pleased to hear

that Lina is getting stronger, though slowly, and hope that

Hampstead will agree with her and you better than London. I am

very sorry to hear that you are not very well. I hope that the

country will refresh Papa after all his fatigues. I need not

tell you that I was very unhappy when I heard what you said

about my going to England; ever since I have been here, from

the time I wake to the time I go to bed, I think of London;

the other night, indeed, I went in my dream to see the new

British Museum. However, if there is nothing to be done....

From Hampstead you can see London, and there is the dear old

common where I and the Coodes used to play, and the pretty

little lake where I went to slide, and it's such a pleasant

walk to London and the galleries, and ... is there _no_ little

hole left for poor Punch?[13] On the 16th July all the

schoolboys go on a three weeks' journey, whose wing but yours

can take care of me for so long a time? I will ask for money

to buy a clothes-brush, I have none; 2 fl. I spent on

water-colours for the painting lesson, 5 fl. a splendid book,

'Percy's Relics of Old English Poetry,' 1 fl. sundries, my

last florin I lent to Bob, but he was fetched away in a hurry

before his money was given to him, however he said he would

send it me from Mayence, but I have not seen it since. It is a

great bore to have no money; that 1 fl. would have lasted the

second month very well as I only want it for sundries. I have

dismissed Mottes, my _new_ boots have already been _re_soled,

and he made me wait three weeks for a pair of boots, which of

course I did not take. I wish I had had turning clothes, my

jacket is very shabby, and I cannot afford to put on my best

whilst it goes to the tailor; my black trowsers are ruined,

but I must wear them whilst my blue ones go to be lengthened.

Little Gussy looks very well, she is very well, and has sundry

'zufrieden's' and 'tres content's.' On the advice of _Pappe_,

the master of mathematics and nat. phil., I have got a

'Meierhirsch's Algebraische Aufgaben.' I want a Euclid, mine

is in England, how shall I get at it? I am quite well, but

_long_ to see you all, and to have some _wing_; pray write

very soon. Give my best love to Papa and Lina, and believe me,

dear Mamma, your affectionate and _speckfle_ son,

F. LEIGHTON."

[Illustration: EARLY COMIC DRAWING, About 1850

By permission of Mr. Hanson Walker]

History does not record whether the "little hole for poor Punch" had

been found or not. Together with other studies, Leighton was allowed

to attend the model class at the famous Staedelsches Institut, and, in

1848, when the family went to Brussels, he painted his first picture,

Othello and Desdemona, his elder sister sitting as model for the

Desdemona, and also a portrait of himself. From Brussels he went to

Paris, studying in an _atelier_ in the Rue Richer, among a set of

Bohemian students, and then to Frankfort, to work seriously under his

beloved master Steinle. The following letter to his father shows how

unsatisfactory he considers his studies had been in both Brussels and

Paris, and that now, as he expressed it, he is girding his "loins for

a new race."

"CRONBERG, _Friday evening_.

"[DEAR PAPA],--As I have reason to believe that you are not

indifferent to the fate of the studies which met with

Dielmann's censure, and at the same time opened my eyes to the

fact that I have not yet (to use a German phrase) 'die Natur

mit dem Loeffel gefressen,'[14] I now write to tell you that I

have retouched better parts of them, and _that_ to Burger's

satisfaction as well as to mine. Of course some are better

than others. Independently of the intense irritation which bad

sitting (as well you know) occasions to my nerves, they give

me great trouble, and I take it; but this can hardly astonish

me, when I consider that, in point of fact, during the whole

time that has elapsed between my leaving the model class in

the Staedelsches Institut up to my return to Frankfurt, I have

_never_ studied from nature; that I did not in Brussels, I

need not remind you, and you must also remember that

everything I painted in Paris, in the way of portraits, was

done _before_ nature, I grant, but with a certain _ideal_

colour or tone, the consistency of which might be illustrated

by putting Rubens, Reynolds, Titian, Tom Lawrence, Vandyke,

Velasquez, Correggio, Carracci, Rembrandt, and Rafael into a

kaleidoscope, and setting them in a rotatory motion, in a

word--

When taken

Well shaken.

(What's his name--Hem!)

I am therefore girding my loins for a new race, far from

discouraged, but rather with the persuasion that one with my

innate love for colouring, and, I think I may add, sharp

perception of the merits and demerits of the colouring of

others, has a fair chance of success; nor am I dissatisfied

with my beginning."

In the year 1849, he went to London to paint the portrait of his

great-uncle, Mr. I'Anson, Lady Leighton's brother, and wrote to his

father and mother the following:--

"Fleeced at Malines--very fine passage--slept well, why the

deuce had not I a carpet bag? horrid inconvenience! my chest

of drawers twenty feet below the surface of the deck, obliged

to get on friendly terms with a sailor to borrow a comb (which

had got blue with usage)--lovely brown tints about my shirt,

cuffs more picturesque than tidy; two hours stifling in that

confounded hole of a waiting-room in the custom house; arrive

at last at Mr. I'Anson's at about three o'clock; as he was not

at home I dressed and ran half round London before dinner;

crossed Kensington Gardens, saw the outside of the Exhibition,

went down Hyde Park, along Green Park, stared at Buckingham

Palace, rushed down St. James' Park, flew up Waterloo Place,

made a dive at Trafalgar Square, and a lunge at Pall Mall,

gasped all along Regent Street, turned up Oxford Street, bent

round to the Edgware Road, and from there the whole length of

Oxford Terrace, I brought home a very fine appetite!"

"[MY DEAREST MOTHER],--I have resumed my Uncle's likeness, and

as far as it goes (the head is done) very successfully. Will

you tell Papa from me that it is more 'aufgefasst' (as I

expected) than 'durchgefuehrt,' but that I have seized the

_twinkle_ of his mouth to a T.

"Mr. I'Anson treats me with the utmost kindness, it is of

course superfluous to tell you that I enjoy myself beyond

measure.

"I am a very slow writer--I am without readiness either of

thought or speech owing to the picturesque confusion which

possesses my brain, and not, God knows, from a phlegmatic

habit of mind."

Letter to his mother from Norfolk Terrace, Hyde Park:--

"[DEAREST MOTHER],--I have received your kind letter, and

conclude from your silence on that point that Lina is now

getting on well. In order to avoid losing time on fluency of

style, I shall follow, strictly as I find them, the heads of

your epistle, and answer them in the same succession. First, I

hasten to thank you and Papa for your kind permission to

prolong my stay, a permission which I value the more that I

know that Papa was desirous I should return as soon as

possible. You tell me, dear Mamma, that I am not to lose time

in seeing the _lions_ of London, and Papa, in his displeasure

at my having done so little as yet towards the real object of

my visit, seems to imply an idea that I _have_ been so doing;

I regret very much that you should entertain that notion, and

assure you that I have neither hitherto dreamt, nor have

ultimate intention, of seeing that long list of wonders, the

Colosseum, the polytechnic, the cosmorama, the diorama, the

panorama, the polyorama, the overland mail, Catlin's

exhibition, the Chinese exhibition, nor even Wild's great

globe, for that, I am told, costs five shillings; this is a

decided case of 'Frappe, mais ecoute.' And if Papa did not

think that I had so wasted my time, is it not very certain

that, if I had not thought it a matter of duty, I would not

have tired myself making what I most hate, calls, instead of

seeing works of art?

"Lady Leighton looked in some respects worse, and in some much

better, than I expected; I was surprised to see her walk with

her back bent, and leaning on a stick; but I was more

surprised still to see a face so free, comparatively, from

wrinkles, and bearing such evident traces of former beauty.

Her reception was of the warmest; in her anxiety lest I should

be lonely and uncomfortable in an inn, she insisted on my

sleeping in her house. She talked much, long, and _well_,

though slowly and in a suppressed tone; she dwelt tenderly on

Papa's name, and advocated warmly our return to England. I saw

two letters which she wrote to her brother, my uncle, and

which were both most elegantly written; both contained a

paragraph in allusion to me; in the first, written before my

visit (in answer to one in which my uncle had prepared her for

seeing me), she expresses herself most _eager to receive and

to love the grandson, of whom all speak so highly_; in the

second, written after my return to London, she says that her

_dear and fascinating grandson amply realises all her

expectations_, and that seeing him has increased that pain

which she feels at being separated from us all.

"Now, I will give you a _catalogue raisonne_ of whom I have

seen: Cowpers, this you know; Smyths, ditto; Laings, very

kind, though Mr. Laing, like the Cowpers, did not know me till

I mentioned my name; Wests, exceedingly kind, invitation to

dinner; Richardsons, motherly reception, party, given for me;

Moffatt, very _prevenant_, asked me twice to dinner, both of

which invitations I was unfortunately obliged to refuse, but

wrote a very civil note, and went next morning in person to

apologise; Hall, dreadfully busy, but gave me cards to

Maclise, Goodall, Frith, Ward, Frost; Maclise was not at home,

but I found Goodall, Ward, and Frith, and was pleased with my

visits. There is a new school in England, and a very promising

one; correctly drawn historical _genre_ seems to me the best

definition of it. They tell me there is a fine opening for an

historical painter of merit, and that talent never fails to

succeed in London. Goodall, a young man about thirty, who

painted 'The Village Festival,' in the Vernon Gallery, and of

which you have an engraving in one of your Art Journal

numbers, sells his pictures direct from the easel; and he does

not stand alone. Sir Ch. Eastlake received me very politely,

but looks a great invalid; Lance, very jolly, and Fripp,

ditto. Bovills and E. I'Ansons, very kind, invitations, of

course; Mackens, you know; I have found no time to call on Dr.

Holland, Mr. Shedden, or Tusons.

"Having told you _whom_, I will now tell you rapidly _what_, I

have seen: Vernon Gallery, very much gratified; Dulwich

Gallery, very much disappointed; British Institution, ditto;

National Gallery, pictures magnificent, locality disgraceful,

I must make another visit there; Royal Academy, on the whole,

satisfactory; British Museum, very fine; Mogford's Collection,

very indifferent; Marquis of Westminster (Mr. Laing), very

fine indeed; private collection (through interest of Mr.

Moffatt), delightful; Windsor, _Vandyke_, superb; _Lawrence_,

a wretched quack. Time presses--_la suite au prochain

numero_."

[Illustration: MR. I'ANSON, LORD LEIGHTON'S GREAT-UNCLE. 1850

By permission of Mr. E. I'Anson]

The portrait of his great-uncle, Mr. I'Anson, here reproduced, proves

that the visit to London effected the desired result. On his return to

Frankfort he painted the portraits of Lady Cowley and her three

children. Lady Cowley writes: "I am delighted with the pictures of my

dear little girls, and again return you my most sincere thanks for

having painted them." And in another letter: "I should have called on

Mrs. Leighton all these days, had I not been very unwell with the

grippe, as I wished to express to her, as well as to yourself, how

very grateful I am for the beautiful portrait you have made of my

little Frederick. I am quite delighted with it, as well as every one

else who has seen it. Besides being extremely like, it is such a good

painting that it must always be appreciated. Ever yours sincerely,

Olive Cecilia Cowley." In the spring of 1852, Leighton, being then

twenty-one, went to Bergheim, to paint the portraits of Count

Bentinck's family. He writes from there:--

"[DEAREST MAMMA],--Having naturally a reflecting turn of mind,

I am struck with the truth of the following aphorism: 'It's

all very well to say I'll be blowed, but where's the wind?'

Circumstances induce me to deliver a sentiment of a parallel

tendency; it's all very well to say 'mind you write'; but

where's the post? A deficiency in that latter commodity is a

leading feature in the economy of the principality of Waldeck;

so much so, that any individual residing in Bergheim, and

desiring to carry on a correspondence 'ins Ausland,' is

obliged to take advantage of the privilege freely granted him

by the liberal constitution of the country of carrying his own

letters to the first frontier town of the next state, and

having posted them, waiting for an answer. I, however,

_knowing my privileges_, and not being desirous of availing

myself of them in _that line_, humbly and modestly send these

lines by my hostess's flunkey, who is going to Fritzlar

to-morrow on an errand of a similar description. _N.B._--If

you want a person to receive an epistle within a fortnight

(that is allowing you to be a neighbour), you must chalk up

_per express_ on the back of it, in consideration of which he

or she will receive it through the medium of a hot messenger,

much, and naturally, fatigued and excited by a journey

performed at the rate of half a mile an hour, not including

the pauses in which the _inner man_ is refreshed and

invigorated by a cordial gulp of 'branny un worrer.'

"Fancy a man getting to a place, by appointment, expecting a

carriage and trimmings to take him to a lovely retirement in

the country, and finding--devil a bit of it! Well that's

precisely what did not happen to me when I got to Waldeck,

because although the carriage was not there, there was a

letter to say it could not come. The road to Bergheim, which

crosses a river of no mean pretensions without the assistance

of a bridge (other advantageous peculiarity of the state of

Waldeck), was, it appeared, rendered impracticable by an

inundation of the torrent alluded to; it was therefore

proposed to me (without an option) to perform the journey on

the top of an _oss_ provided for the purpose and accompanied

by a groom mounted on another; I willingly accept an offer so

much to my taste, and for the first time after a lapse of

nearly three years put a leg on each side of a steed. The

first part of the road was executed at a round trot on a very

nice level _chaussee_, but I cannot say that I felt altogether

at home on my saddle. An eye to effect is nevertheless kept

open, which is manifested by my catching up two drowsy,

drawling, jingling 'po shays' and sweeping past them with

supreme contempt, but at a great expense of my lumbar muscles.

Presently, however, my continuation-clad members began to thaw

a little, and to adapt themselves to the saddle, which also

lost some of its rigid severity; I began to feel very

comfortable, and, by Jove! it was a good job I did, for on

getting out of Fritzlar, we left the high road (for reasons

above given) and plunged into a rugged, donkey-shay sort of

by-path in which the ruts were without exaggeration a foot

deep. Nothing daunted, however, I make light of this 'terrain

legerement accidente,' cross stream and ride along tattered

banks with the nonchalance of the Chinese Mandarin in the

Exhibition of '51; in fact, such is my confidence in myself,

that I at last begin to feel above my stirrups, I scorn them,

fling them over my saddle, and perform without their

assistance the rest of the journey to within half a mile of

Bergheim, and that on a road the profile of which was about

this:

(Here was drawn a line representing a hill-side almost

perpendicular.)

"On my arrival I am of course kindly received by the Countess

(her husband is still at Oldenburg), got my tea, and go to bed

rather stiff after an equestrian performance of about two

hours and a half. The house is large and rambling, fifteen

windows in a row, and yet I cannot get a satisfactory light,

the only available north room looking on a lane, the

white-washed houses of which reflect disagreeably on the

picture, whenever the sun shines. However I must make up my

mind to it and do my best; I am at present painting the

Countess."

"BERGHEIM, _Sunday_.

"[DEAR MAMMA],--In the midst of my anxious expectations of a

letter from you, it suddenly occurred to me that I had

forgotten to give you my direction; in the full confidence

that _late is far preferable to never_, I now hasten to make

up for my omission--

Mons. F. Leighton

bei

Ihrer Erlauchten der Graefin von

Waldeck und Pyrmont

zu Bergheim

bei Fritzlar

Fuerstenthum Waldeck.

"_N.B._--You will not forget to write _per express_ on the top

of the envelope; for reasons, see my letter of last Sunday.

"Being sorely pressed for time, I now huddle on to the rest of

the paper a few loose remarks, for the incoherency of which I

crave your indulgence.

"The aspect of affairs is much changed since my last epistle;

then, I was looking forward with anxious though sanguine

expectation to the labour before me; now, I look back on one

portrait (that of the Countess), achieved to the great

satisfaction of those for whom it is intended, and contemplate

with satisfaction the progress which the other is making in

the same direction. I must, however, add that, owing to the

necessary absence of the Countess for two days next week, my

return home will be delayed in proportion, as I have a few

more touches to give to the portrait of my eldest patient,

whose husband is desirous of taking it over to England with

him. (I shall probably be with you Saturday afternoon--at all

events I shall let you know beforehand.)

"What I said a few lines back will have suggested to you what

I am now going to add; Colonel B. is now returned from

Oldenburg, and will probably be in London in the early part or

middle of June; he is _much_ pleased with the pictures, and in

his kindness has promised me an introduction to his brother in

town, and also to another relation, whose name I have

forgotten; the result of which is to be: access to the

collections of Lord Ellesmere, Duke of Sutherland, and Sir

Robert Peel. I told Colonel B. that if on his road to or from

Toeplitz in the autumn he should pass through Frankfurt, I

should be very glad if he could bring the pictures with him,

as they would both want a varnish, and the children probably a

few glazes and touches; he said that he would make a point of

so doing, that indeed after all the trouble and pains I had

taken for him, it was the least he _could_ do; for these and

other reasons (not unimportant) which I shall communicate when

I see you, you need not regret my having made two journeys to

paint his wife and children.

"That I spend one of the days of the Countess' absence in

seeing _Wilhelmshoehe_, a sight reputed unique of its kind,

will, I hope, not seem unreasonable.

"I have noted down, as they occurred to me, during the last

few days one or two little arrangements, relative to my

approaching journey, which I would ask you to make during my

absence, trusting at the same time that if in the meanwhile

anything else should occur to your provident mind, and be

transmitted to your _many-knotted_ pocket-handkerchief, you

will kindly carry it into execution, in order to avoid delay

when I return from the country, as _my_ time will be almost

entirely taken up by Lady P.'s [Pollington's] sitting and the

_business calls_ I have to make.

"Will Papa kindly order a tin case for my compositions; it

should be a plain cylinder, about an inch and a half in

diameter, with a lid at one end; let its length be that of my

'Four Seasons.'

"To my amazement I have just received a letter from you, dear

Mamma--_did_ I give you my direction? You forgot the _per

express_ on the back of the letter. Pray write soon. Much love

and many kisses to all.--Your dutiful and affectionate son,

F. LEIGHTON."

Soon after Leighton's return to Frankfort Lord Cowley was appointed

British Ambassador in Paris, and writes the following letters. The

invitation he gives to Leighton to make his home at the Embassy while

pursuing his studies was not accepted, Steinle's teaching being only

given up later for the charms of Italy.

"MY DEAR MR. LEIGHTON,--I am more obliged than I can say by

the kindness you have shown in painting portraits of my

children. I never saw anything so like, or in general so

pleasing, as the portrait of Frederic, and I only regret that

it is not in England to be seen and appreciated. Once more

accept my thanks, and believe me to be very truly yours,

COWLEY."

"_Sunday Afternoon._

"MY DEAR MR. LEIGHTON,--It has been quite out of my power to

get to your house, as I had intended, to take leave of you,

and to thank you again for the valuable reminiscence which

through your talent and kindness I carry away with me. It will

give Lady Cowley and myself great pleasure if you will visit

us at Paris. You cannot find a better school of study than the

Louvre, and we shall be most happy to lodge and take care of

you.

"Pray present my best compliments to the members of your

family.

"I regret very much not being able to do it in person.--Very

faithfully,

COWLEY."

On his return from Waldeck, Leighton painted the portrait of Lady

Pollington, one of his Frankfort acquaintances.

During these years, when Leighton studied under Steinle, his family

lived also at Frankfort, and therefore few other letters written at

that time exist. There was a journey to Holland, made during the early

summer of 1852, from England, where he and his family had returned for

a visit. The journey back to Frankfort, _via_ Holland, is the subject

of a long letter to his mother.

"There I am at the Hague. Pretty place, the Hague, clean,

quaint, cheerful, _and_ ain't the Dutch just fond of smoking

out of long clay pipes! _And_ the pictures, _Oh_ the pictures,

_Ah_ the pictures! That magnificent Rembrandt! glowing,

flooded with light, clear as amber, and do you twig the _grey_

canvas? _What_ Vandykes! what dignity, calm, gently breathing,

and a searching thoughtfulness in the gaze, amounting almost

to fascination; and only look at that Velasquez, sparkling,

clear, dashing; Paul Potter, too, only twenty-two years old

when he painted that bull, and just look at it; Jan Steen,

Terburg, Teniers, _Giov. Bellini_ (splendid), &c. &c. There I

catch myself bearing something in mind: 'And yet, after all'

(with an argumentative hitch of the cravat), 'all that those

fellows had in advance of us was a palette and brushes, and

_that_ we've got too!' I walk down to Scheveningen, and

sentimentalise on the seashore; I find the briny deep in a

very good humour, and offer _you_ mental congratulations.

"About the Rembrandt at Amsterdam, I say nothing, for it is a

picture not to be described. I can only say that, in it, the

great master surpasses himself; with the exception, however,

of this and the Vanderhelst opposite to it, which is full of

spirit and individuality, the _Ryko Museum_ is tolerably flat.

After a dull afternoon, I hurry off to Arnheim, and to

Mayence, and to Frankfurt, where I arrive on Wednesday

evening. From Cologne to Frankfurt, Janauschek[15] was on the

same conveyance as myself; I made her acquaintance, which was

a great blessing to me on that tedious, cockney-hackneyed

journey. She is lady-like, interesting, amiable, and

_severely_ proper, almost cold; she observed the strictest

incognito. Towards evening, however, when she had ascertained

that I was a resident at Frankfurt, and therefore probably

knew her perfectly well, and that I was an artist, which

excited her sympathy, and that my name was Leighton, a name

with which she was acquainted (through Schroedter and others)

as that of one of the most talented young artists of Frankfurt

(hem!), she relaxed considerably. She has a melancholy and

most interesting look, and talks very despondently of the

state of dramatic art nowadays. I made myself useful to her at

the station, and she was warmly grateful. About my picture[16]

(which I have entrusted to Steinle's care) I have nothing to

communicate, except that I am confirmed in thinking that it

has been universally well received; even Becker seems to like

it in many respects--of course you know that the leading fault

is that it was painted under his rival; Oppenheim said (when I

talked of it as a daub) that he wished he could daub so, and

that he promised me a great future; Prince Gortschakoff (who,

by the by, preferred the portraits, and judges with all the

_aplomb_ of a Count Briez) introduced himself to me in the

gallery, and told me in the course of conversation that he

regretted very much having no work of mine, adding that he

only bought masters of the first order; _that_ was a

compliment, at all events; Dr. Schlemmer has been very kind to

me, and has given me a letter for Venice; I dined with him on

Sunday, and made the acquaintance of Felix Mendelssohn's

widow, a charming woman."

[Illustration: "THE DEATH OF BRUNELLESCHI." 1851

By permission of Dr. Von Steinle]

[Illustration: "THE PLAGUE IN FLORENCE." 1851]

Between the years 1849 and 1852 Leighton painted, besides the

portraits mentioned, three finished pictures, "Cimabue finding Giotto

in the Fields of Florence," "The Duel between Romeo and Tybalt," and

"The Death of Brunelleschi"; and also made the notable drawing, now in

the Victoria and Albert Museum, of a scene during the plague in

Florence. His master, Steinle, easily discerned that Leighton was

truly enamoured of Italy; the subjects he chose were Italian, and his

memory was full of the charm and fascination of the country which he

ever referred to, to the end of his life, as his second home. It was

decided that he should go to Rome, his father having determined to

leave Frankfort and to reside at Bath, where his mother, Lady

Leighton, was then living. Steinle gave Leighton an introduction to

his friend and fellow "Nazarene," Cornelius, and on the eve of his

departure his mother wrote a farewell letter of "injunctions,"

flavoured happily by hints of humour. There is something very quaint

to those who knew Leighton after he was thirty in the admonitions

with regard to manners and politeness, which occur in several of his

mother's letters.

"MY DEAREST CHILD,--As we are about to part, you may perhaps

think you will be rid of my lectures, but no, I leave you some

injunctions in writing, so that you will not be able to urge

the plea of forgetfulness if you continue your negligent

habits, though you certainly may _forget_ to read what I

write--but I trust to your love and respect for me, though the

latter needs cultivation nearly as much as habits of

refinement in you. I have no new advice to give you, I can but

repeat what I have urged on you many times from your childhood

upwards; I do implore you, let your conscience be your guide

amidst all temptations, they will be such as they have never

yet been to you, as you will henceforward have no other

restraint on your actions than what is self-imposed. I beseech

you, do not suffer your disbelief in the dogmas of the

Protestant Church to weaken the belief I hope you entertain of

the existence of a Supreme Being. Strive to obey the law He

has implanted in us, which approves good and condemns evil,

though the struggle for the mastery between these principles

is sometimes fearful, as every one knows, especially in youth.

My precious child, if one sinful mortal's prayer for another

could avail, how carefully would you be preserved from moral

evil (the greatest of all evil); but I need not tell you there

is no royal road to Heaven any more than to excellence in

inferior objects, every advantage must be obtained by energy

and perseverance. May God help you to keep free of the

greatest of all miseries, an upbraiding conscience; for though

this can be deadened for a time in the hurry of life while

youth lasts, there comes an hour when life loses its

attractions, and _then_ issues the troubled consequence of

merry deeds. I am aware you have heard all this a hundred

times, and better expressed, but it will bear repetition; and

now that it is your mother who is counselling you, you will

not, I trust, turn a deaf ear.

"I can but repeat what I have continually told you--to refine

your feelings you must neither utter nor encourage a coarse

thought. It would be an inexpressible pleasure to me to leave

you confirmed in good habits; but wishes are idle. I trust to

your desire to improve in all ways and to please me. The next

sheet I wrote some time ago, intending to rewrite it, but the

trouble is too great for my shaking hands, and I add what I

have written to-day on separate pieces of paper. I have

written enough; I have only now to add an entreaty that you

will not throw these admonitions away, but sometimes read

them, remembering they come warm from your mother's heart.

"My child, your manners are very faulty, and I am consequently

much disappointed. You take so much after me, and my nearest

relations had such refined manners, that I made sure you must

resemble my father and brothers. There is, however, nothing on

earth to prevent your becoming the gentleman I wish to see

you, and remember to write ineffaceably on the tablets of your

memory, 'Too much familiarity breeds contempt.' You remember

how seriously young ----'s forwardness has been commented on.

Well, it is true, you have never, as far as I know, spoken as

he has done; but as I have seldom seen you in company, nor

your father either, without observing some want of politeness,

is it not probable that other people have their eyes open

also?"

These admonitions received, Leighton started on his journey to Rome.

At Innsbruck, on August 18, 1852, he began to write a Diary, in order

that his mother should hear the details of his travels, and to serve

"as a clue" by which he might one day recall the "impressions and

emotions of the years of his artistic noviciate."

Leighton's utterances on paper in these early days display the same

intense exuberance of vitality which, during the whole of his notable

career, served to spur on his mental and emotional powers to perform

with great completeness all the various kinds of work which he

undertook; a vitality which conquered triumphantly the effects of

indifferent health and troubled eyesight. In the diaries and letters

is also to be traced the existence of that Greek-like combination of

qualities so characteristic of Leighton--namely, explicit precision in

his thought and expression, and a subtle power of analysis, united

with great emotional sensitiveness and enthusiastic warmth of

temperament. His feeling for beauty was an intoxicating joy to him.

Heartfelt and genuine joy engendered by beauty in nature and art is

not a very common feeling among the moderns, though so much fuss is

made by many in our day in their endeavours to become "_artistic_";

but, as a ruling guide, beauty has gone out of fashion. The accounts

that Leighton gives of his ecstasies in the presence of beautiful

scenes, enforce the belief entertained by those who knew him best,

that it was the power which beauty exercised over him that developed

his exceptional strength in all artistic directions. What force in the

over-riding of difficulties does not passion give to the lover! No

less a force was engendered in Leighton by the inspiration of the

beauty of nature.

In the letter to his mother, which accompanies the Diary, referring to

the joy he has been experiencing, Leighton adds: "I feel almost a kind

of shame that so much should have been poured down on me. I will put

my talent to usury, and be no slothful steward of what has been

entrusted to me. Every man who has received a gift ought to feel and

act as if he was a field in which a seed was planted, that others

might gather the harvest." The purity of purpose which guided

Leighton's life to the end, generated first by the precepts of his

mother in the fertile soil of his own beautiful nature, subsequently

developed by the teaching of the high-minded Steinle, and finally

established later by other elevating influences, chastened the

emotional side of Leighton's passion for beauty, and disentangled it

even in the earliest days from lower and purely sensuous

contamination. The puritanical attitude of mind towards beauty

appeared to Leighton absolutely impure and desecrating, in that it

associated influences and feelings which are of the lowest with the

appreciation of God's most beautiful creations, and some of man's

highest aspirations with sensations entirely degraded and unworthy.

Fun and humour abound in the family letters, and in the Diary.

Leighton was never guilty of being sentimental, and when referring to

the word _ideal_ in one of his letters, he writes he "hates such

stuff." After he died, it was written of him: "He was no idealist;

needless to say, he was no materialist, no one less so; nor does the

term realist seem to recall his nature. He was--if such a word can be

used--an actualist, the actual was to him of primary importance. But

the actual meant a great deal more to Leighton than it does to most of

us. Life and its vivid interests was spread over a much wider area; so

many more of its various ingredients were such very actual entities to

him."[17]

And when Leighton started, at the age of twenty-one, to begin his

independent life, we feel that it is with the _actual_ that he

grappled--the actual in his sensations, his feelings, his impressions,

his conditions. An unmistakable note of reality rings through his

description of all these. He has no tendency, even unconsciously, when

under the glamour of the most entrancing impressions, to colour the

picture other than he _actually_ saw it. In the strength of his own

real nature he goes forth on the journey of life.

DIARY

INNSBRUCK, _August 18, 1852_.

[Sidenote: I contemplate the life and

adventures of Mr. Thumb.]

"When Hop o' my Thumb, a nursery hero of European note, first sallied

out into the world with an eye to making a fortune, his first step was

(justly foreseeing what the world would expect of the hero of a future

romance) to lose himself in a large and horrid forest, in which it was

pitch dark all day long, and nothing was heard but ... &c. &c. (Here

see biog. of H.O'M. Thumb, Esq., vol. i.)

"Now, in those days mile-posts were not yet come in, and maps were

excessively expensive; how, then, was H.O'M.T., after he should have

realised a large independence, to find his way back through this

intricate waste? Here admire the man of parts and sagacity! '_He

determined_,' says the historian, '_to drop pebbles in a row all along

the path_'!

[Sidenote: and adopt one of his

measures,]

"Admirable Thumb! I, too, purpose, as I stroll along, to drop every

now and then mental pebbles, which shall serve as a connecting link

between the past and the future, and as a clue by which I may one day

recall the emotions and impressions of the years of my artistic

noviciate.

"Be with me, oh Thumb!

[Sidenote: but make a reservation.]

"_N.B._--Quality of pebbles not warranted.

PEBBLES

[Sidenote: Pebble I.]

"Kind, affectionate, earnest Steinle!

[Sidenote: A tribute of affection and

respect for my dear Steinle.]

"In a record of whatever concerns me as an artist, _his_ name should

be at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end. _Now_, at the

beginning, for our parting is still painfully present to my mind; our

parting, and the last few days we spent together: the sad face and

moistened eye with which he watched the diligence in which I rolled

off from Bregenz; his fitful way, when we travelled together--one

moment jovial and facetious, another laying his hand affectionately on

my shoulder and remaining silent; his saying to me before I started,

'I shall be all alone to-morrow, here, and yet I shall be with you all

the day.'...

"_In the middle_, all through, and to the end--because if ever,

hereafter, my works wear the mark of a pure taste, if ever I succeed

in raising some portion of the public to the level of high art, rather

than obsequiously acquiesce in the judgments of the tasteless and the

ignorant, and if I keep alive, to the end, the active conviction that

an artist, who deserves the name, never ceases to learn, the key of

such success will be in one name: Steinle; in having constantly borne

in mind his precept, and his example.

[Sidenote: I find on reflection that

though I started a week ago, I am only

just gone!]

[Sidenote: I look forward,]

"Although a week has already elapsed since I left Frankfurt, so long

my home, it is only now that I have parted from Steinle that I really

feel that I have taken the great step, that I have opened the

introductory chapter of the second volume of my life, a volume on the

title-page of which is written "Artist." It seems to me that my

wanderings began at _Bregenz_, and that in retracing, as I presently

shall, my route until I got there, I am tearing open again leaves that

were closed--to remain so. I seize the opportunity offered by this

first day of repose to take breath, and, as I stand within the

threshold, to look before me and reconnoitre. Italy rises before my

mind. Sunny Italy! the land that I have so long yearned after with

ardent longing, and that has dwelt in my memory since last I saw it as

a never-fading, gentle-beckoning image of loveliness; I am about again

to tread the soil of that beloved country, the day-dream of long years

is to become a reality. I am enraptured!

[Sidenote: but don't feel quite _it_.]

"And yet--how is it that my pleasure is not unalloyed? that I

involuntarily shrink from grasping the height of my wishes? It is

because I feel a kind of sacred awe at breaking through the charm

that has been so long gathering around the image that I have carried

in my inward heart, as one who loves, at touching with cold _reality_

that which has so long been the far removed object of dreamy, sweetly

melancholy longings!

"I cannot help thinking that an imaginative man must feel something

similar when on the point of changing courtship for marriage.

[Sidenote: Get better.]

"Other thoughts, too, assail me, and sometimes make me uneasy. 'Do I

fully feel....' No, 'Shall I _continue_ fully to feel the immense

importance to me of the three or four years now before me? feel that

they will be the corner-stone of my career, for good or for evil?

Shall I have the energy to carry out all my resolutions? Shall I

fulfil what I have promised?'... Then I think of Steinle, and I feel

reassured.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pebble II.]

"Let me come to the point, to the description of my journey; but

before I begin, let me remember that, whilst of all my friends and

companions only _three_ were present at my departure,--one of them was

there in order to give me a commission, and another to acknowledge a

service,--old General Bentinck did not think it too great an exertion

to see off, at eight in the morning, one, three times younger than

himself.

[Sidenote: Middelburgh, August 11.]

"My first day's journey took me to Middelburgh, along the Bergstrasse,

which we all know, and of which I therefore say nothing, and yet I

enjoyed it more than I ever had done before; it was one of those cool,

clear, _opalescent_ mornings, in which all nature looks as if it was

teeming with health and freshness; there was something exhilarating,

too, in the atmosphere, which very much increased my enjoyment; I

looked upon familiar scenes, but I saw them in a new light; it seemed

to me as if I was reading nature in a new book.

[Sidenote: Stift Neuburg.]

"On arriving at Heidelberg, I hurried at once, by appointment with

Steinle, to a place in the neighbourhood called 'Stift Neuburg,' the

property and residence of Frau Rath Schlosser, the widow of his old

and intimate friend, Rath Schlosser.

[Sidenote: I enjoy myself.]

[Sidenote: Heilbronn, August 12.]

"Picture to yourself, just where the Neckar makes a graceful curve,

about a mile above Heidelberg, half-way up a rich and sunny slope,

chequered with clustering vineyards and luxuriant meadows, an old,

picturesque convent, with its adjoining chapel and appurtenant dairies

and farmhouses, the whole group raised up on a lofty, timeworn,

weather-beaten terrace--and you will form some idea of _the Stift_.

There I spent the afternoon in the most charming possible manner,

whether in wandering with Steinle along the solitary, shady walks of

the convent garden, or in snuffing about in the vaulted, mildew old

library (which, by the by, contains six or seven thousand valuable and

curious books), or the silent chapel, with its stained-glass windows,

or in looking through Frau Rath's magnificent collection of drawings

by German artists, or, finally, in enjoying the conversation of the

Frau Rath herself, who is a most clever and amiable old lady. The next

morning (for I spent the night there) after all breakfasting together,

we went down by a postern gate to the river-side, and awaited the

arrival of the Heilbronn steamer; general leave-taking, shaking of

hands, gratitude and thanks on the one side, on the other reiterated

invitations for the future, which I sincerely hope I may one day be

able to meet. The valley of the Neckar as far as Heilbronn, where we

arrived on the evening of the same day, is dull enough in all

conscience; indeed, had it not been for the company and always

interesting conversation of Steinle, I really do not know what I

should have done with myself; such a contrast with the preceding day!

"Between Heilbronn and the Lake of Constance, however, a new scene

opens out; I see Germany under a totally new aspect, I understand at

last what German poets mean when they rave about the lovely

'Schwabenland' and call it the 'Perle deutscher Gauen'; I can now

imagine the existence of _landed patriotism_ (if I may be allowed the

expression) among the Germans coming from that part of the country. It

is, indeed, an enchanting panorama; a never-ceasing variety of rich,

profusely fertile valleys, studded with cheerful, bright-looking,

home-inviting villages, and enclosed by chains of gently undulating

hills. The corn was ripe, and waved in golden stripes across the

variegated plains; the peasants, a picturesque, good-humoured set,

were scattered over the fields, some mowing down the heavy laden

wheat, others binding it into graceful sheaves; in one respect the

scene reminded me of my own dear country: it looked as if a blessing

were on it.

[Sidenote: Ulm: its cathedral]

"On our road we passed through Ulm,[18] and visited the cathedral,

some parts of which (especially the portico) are very beautiful and

elegant; the interior contains a magnificent and highly elaborate

tabernacle, and some wood-carving by Syrlin of exquisite workmanship;

the whole, however, left a melancholy impression on both of us,

especially on Steinle, who is an ardent Catholic. It stands neglected

and half-finished, in the midst of a miserable, rambling town-village,

a thing of olden times, for whose presence one can hardly account. It

was built, or rather, begun, as a monument of Catholicism; the country

round it has become Protestant; itself has been protestantized; it has

been disfigured by an incongruous heap of business-like pews; it is no

longer accessible at every hour of the day, from Sunday to Sunday its

walls re-echo no sound but the occasional tread of the pew-opener, as

he dusts the seats of those who pay him for it; the soul has left the

grey old pile; it is a stately corpse. What artist, however uncatholic

in his belief, can contemplate those old Gothic churches, with their

glorious tabernacles and other ornaments equally beautiful and equally

disused, without painfully feeling what an almost deadly blow the

Reformation was to High Art, what a powerful incentive it removed,

irrecoverably? Who, in his heart of hearts, can but dwell with

melancholy regret on the times when art was coupled with belief, and

so many divine works were virtually expressions of faith? What a

purifying and ennobling influence was thus exercised over the taste of

the artist! an influence which nothing can replace. This influence was

incalculably great; no dwelling was so humble but it owned a crucifix;

no artist so poor in capacity but endeavoured to produce something not

unworthy of his subject; the general _tone_ of taste thus produced

reacted on everything; witness the most insignificant doorlatch or

ornament that remains to us from the Middle Ages. Is it not remarkable

that the first artists of the modern day, in the higher walk of art, I

mean, are _Catholics_? Cornelius and Steinle were born in the Church

of Rome; Veit and Overbeck went over to it; Pugin, too, our great

architect, was converted by his art to the Catholic faith.

[Sidenote: August 15, Sunday.]

"From Friedrichshafen a delightful sail took us across the emerald

coloured Lake of Constance to Bregenz, where I parted from Steinle.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pebble III.]

[Sidenote: August 21, Saturday.]

[Sidenote: I make a reflection,]

[Sidenote: and feel grateful.]

"I am sitting at my window in the inn (hotel, I'll trouble you!) at

Meran. For the first time since I left Innsbruck I have leisure again

to take up my pen. As I look back on my journey through the Tyrol, so

far as it goes, I am forcibly struck with the reflection that my

enjoyment of it has been much keener this time than ever it was

before; this increased enjoyment has not, I feel, arisen from any

external or adventitious circumstances; last time that I was in this

lovely country, I contemplated it with ease and comfort from the

rumble of our own carriage; this time I have jolted through it under

all the disadvantages attendant on an _Eilwagen_ and indifferent

weather; it has arisen in the greater development of my artistic

sensibilities, in my sharpened perception of the charms of nature,

which discloses to me now a thousand beauties that found no echo in me

when I saw them last. I congratulate myself on this reflection. If any

man should be constantly penetrated with gratitude for a gift bestowed

on him, it is the artist who has realised as his share a genuine love

for nature; for his enjoyment, if he puts his gift to usury, increases

with the days of his life.

[Sidenote: I get drunk with the

anticipation of Italy,]

[Sidenote: and spout a parable.]

"Another circumstance, which has greatly augmented my relish of the

Tyrol, is that, at every step, it assumes more and more the character

of my darling Italy; I have watched with fond anxiety every little

token that whispered of the south; the gently purpling tints that

steal gradually over the distant hills, as one advances towards the

land of the amaranthine Apennines, the slow but steadily progressive

change of vegetation, the gaunt and ragged fir giving way by degrees

to the encroachment of a richer and more gently rustling shade, the

anxiously watched gradations, the climax at last; the walnut, first,

'few and far between,' but warmly welcome, with its clustering leaves

of juicy green; the chestnut, with its long, graceful, dark-hued

foliage; the vine, again, no longer, as in the north, tied stiffly to

a row of sticks (like a regiment of gooseberry bushes), but luxurious,

wildly spreading, gracefully trained along rows of outward-slanting,

basket-like trellis-work, and wreathed here and there by a pious hand

up a roadside image of the Crucifixion in illustration of the words of

Christ: '_I_ am the true vine.' Now, too, the dark striped, portly

pumpkins, with their gorgeous flame-like flowers, begin to appear,

sometimes drowsily lolling under the tremulous shade of the mantling

vines, sometimes basking with half-closed eyes down the sunscorched

lizard-haunted walls, sometimes trained across from house to house,

hanging like Chinese lamps over the heads of the passers by.

Presently, a _fig-tree_--two--three--more--plenty! A cypress--and, by

Jove! look at that terrace of stately, heavy-laden citron and orange

trees! Nothing is wanting now but the olive. How could I pass by such

dear old friends without loitering a little among them? A faithful

lover, I return, after six years of longing absence, to the home of

her of my inward heart; I hurry along, I have already crossed the

garden gate. I breathe the air she breathes, I see from afar the bower

where she dwells; but as I hasten along the well-known path, a

thousand reminiscences of her arise from every object around me, and

cling to me, and throw a gentle net across my faltering step, and

whisper softly to my dream-wrapt brain--I am spellbound--I linger,

even in my impatience.

"I must not forget the excessively picturesque appearance of all the

towns and villages south of Innsbruck; long, narrow, tortuous streets,

lined on each side with never-ceasing vistas of arcades, and enclosed

by houses of most fancifully artistic irregularity; as one passes

along the vaulted galleries the eye is constantly caught by some

picturesque object; either the peasants, as they stroll along in their

divers costumes, or the many-coloured, richly piled fruit stalls that

every now and then fill the arches, or, through an open door, the

endless depth of vaulted passages and fantastic staircases and

irregular inward courts and yards, offering to the artist's eye a play

of lights and shades and mysterious, dreamy half-tints that might

shame even a Rembrandt or an Ostade. As the exterior of all the houses

is (with the exception, of course, of the ornaments) scrupulously

white, the streets, narrow as they are, reflecting, by the luminous

nature of their local tint, the light of day into the remotest corner,

have a most cheerful aspect.

"Of the Tyrolese themselves, three qualities seem to me to

characterise them, qualities which go well hand in hand with, and, I

think it is not fanciful to say, are in great measure a key to, their

well-known frankness and open-hearted honesty. I mean Piety, which

shines out amongst them in many little things, a love for the art,

which with them is, in fact, an outward manifestation of piety, and

which is sufficiently displayed by the numberless scriptural subjects,

painted or in relief, which adorn the cottages of the poorest

peasants, and, last not least, a love for flowers (in other words, for

nature), which is written in the lovely clusters of flowers which

stand in many-hued array on the window-sills of every dwelling. The

works of all the really great artists display that love for flowers.

Raphael did not consider it 'niggling,' as some of our broad-handling

moderns would call it, to group humble daisies round the feet of his

divine representation of the Mother of Christ. I notice that _two

plants_, especially, produce a beautiful effect, both of form and

colour, against the cool grey walls: the spreading, dropping, graceful

_carnation_, with its bluish leaves and crimson flowers, and the

slender, anthered, thousand-blossomed _oleander_.

[Illustration: STUDY OF A BRANCH OF FIG TREE, 1856

Leighton House Collection]

[Illustration: STUDY OF BRAMBLE, 1856

Leighton House Collection]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pebble IV.]

[Sidenote: Statues in Innsbruck.]

[Sidenote: I take on,]

[Sidenote: and lay on,]

[Sidenote: but bottle it up again.]

"One of the sights in Innsbruck has left on me a deep and, I hope, a

lasting impression: the bronze statues in the Franciscan church; they

are the finest specimens of German mediaeval sculpture that I ever saw,

and grew on me as I gazed at them in a manner which I hardly ever felt

before; their great merit consists in combining in the most astounding

manner the most consummate knowledge of the art with all the

simplicity of nature and the most striking individuality (that first

of artistic qualities), and exhibiting at the same time the most

elaborate finish in the details, with greatest possible breadth and

grandeur of general masses; this quality is particularly conspicuous

amongst the women, three, especially, standing side by side, show, by

three perfect examples, the whole secret of ornamental economy; the

one, whose dress is ornamented with all the richness of which a

luxurious imagination and an unparalleled power of execution were

capable, recovers its simplicity of outline and mass by having a

tightly fitting body and sleeve and a skirt of moderate amplitude;

the second, whose ornaments, though richly, are more broadly disposed,

retains its balance by a slightly increased amplitude of drapery;

while the third, whose dress is altogether without embroidery,

acquires a corresponding effect by large, loose sleeves and richly

folded skirt, and two large plaits hanging down her back. What an

opportunity this would be, backed by these giants of breathing bronze,

to make an indignant descent on some paltry and muddle-headed moderns,

who don't know how to discriminate between that kind of finish which

proceeds from the love of a smooth surface, and makes the artist

equally careful of his pumps and of his pictures, and that other kind

of minuteness which is the beautiful fruit of a refined love for

nature, and proceeds from a feeling of piety towards the mother of

art, and who complacently call 'niggling,' a quality above the

appreciation of their _breadth-mad_ brains; who, in their

art-made-easy system of 'idealising' (forsooth), look for artistic

'beauty' in a facial angle of so and so much. What with the _Greeks_

was an _abstract of_ MAN, and very appropriately applicable in the

cases of demi-gods (that the ancients _could_, and _did_, 'en tems et

lieu,' individualise, may be sufficiently seen in their admirable

portraits), becomes with _them_ an absurdly misapplied _average of

mankind_, not _a_ man, or _men_. _The leading feature in Nature is a_

MANIFOLD INDIVIDUALITY, AN ENDLESS VARIETY; _she is like a diamond,

that glances with a thousand hues_. 'Indeed!' I hear them

contemptuously sneering, 'you don't seem to be aware, sir, that ideal

beauty is the great _centre_ of all these _extreme_ varieties, and the

only thing worthy of a great artist's attention.' 'Well, gentlemen,'

say _I_, 'without inconsistency, you can't get out of the way of the

following mouthful: there are (perhaps you will allow) three

elementary colours, which in different combinations produce every

variety of hue; _but_, the great _centre_ of these three _extremely_

various colours is _grey, non-colour ... the ideal of a bit of

colouring, "the only thing worthy of the attention of a great

colourist" is a picture with no colour in it at all_.' However,

Messrs. the Generalisists and _Apollinisists_ 'have every reason to

congratulate themselves on the extensive circulation of their views,

for their _ideal_' is visible in every haircutter's window. Never

mind, I must contain myself--but the rod is in pickle!

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pebble V.]

[Sidenote: Meran.]

"A glorious amphitheatre of lofty mountains! On one side rugged,

sternly rising, crenelated, grey, snow-strewn; on the other, dreamy,

far outspreading, gently vanishing, southward luring, softly glowing,

wrapt in tints of loveliest azure, gradually blending with the

silver-fretted sky. A spreading, fertile gushing valley. Down the

sunny, swelling slopes, across the embosomed plain, an endless,

curling, wreathing flood of gold-green vines, foaming and eddying with

purple grapes. Through the verdant waves, like rushes in a stream, the

Indian corn raises its slender form and feathered head in long array.

Beneath, outstretched at ease, the pumpkin winks and yawns. At the

foot of a steep-fronted, purpling rock, skirting the glowing

vineyards, a foaming mountain stream, emerald and silver. Along the

heights, nestling in verdure, rise thickly scattered, castellated

villas, looking, with their bright, white walls, like smiles on the

face of the earth. An epitome of what is rich and joyous and

unfettered in landscape. The Alpha and Omega of all that is charming

in the Tyrol. MERAN!

"I can say no more for it.

"To my mind, it is inferior to Italy only in one respect: it is

wanting in that glowing, strongly marked individuality, that earnest

beauty, that 'charm that is in melancholy,' which fascinates so

powerfully in the land of wine and oil.

[Sidenote: Pebble VI.]

[Sidenote: Italy!]

[Sidenote: I "realise," as the Americans say,]

[Sidenote: and find reason to think that

I am a queer party.]

"To be able to say that, on returning after long years to a country

whose image memory has, during the whole of that time, fondled with

all the partiality of ardent attachment, one has found one's best

expectations realised, is, in this world of disappointments and

frustrated expectations, indeed a rare thing; but to find imagination

_surpassed_ by reality is rarer still; yet it is my case now that I

once more breathe the air and tread the soil of Italy. For this, I

feel more grateful than I can say; for to have been disappointed in

_these_ hopes would have been to me the greatest of miseries; as it

is, my enjoyment is a double one: that which is occasioned by the

positive, intrinsic beauty of what I see, and that, not less great, of

recalling at the same time a happy, long-dwelt-on past. This I have

more particularly experienced since my arrival in Verona; and here a

queer feature in my queer idiosyncrasy obtrudes itself to notice,

_i.e._ the extraordinary dominion exercised over me by the senses of

smell and hearing! That I do labour under these peculiarities I always

knew, but to what a ludicrous extent, I did not find out till, on

arriving here (Verona), I was suddenly seized by a gust of a thousand

smells and a din of a thousand sounds, some always remembered, others

long-forgotten, suddenly rising up again to my memory. I was

spellbound, the veil of the past was torn up, I was fairly carried

back against the stream of time. Ridiculous as it may sound, my

enjoyment of Italy, independently, of course, of the art (which is an

extraordinary tissue of reality and illusion), would be very imperfect

without this combination of trifles. One thing, I think, must affect

every one agreeably; I mean the exquisitely humorous cries of the

vendors in the thoroughfares and market-places; who could hear and not

remember the loud, expostulatory shriek with which the one dwells on

the excellencies of his handkerchiefs, the argumentative and facetious

tone in which another infers that comfort is not possible without a

supply of his matches, that urgent wail with which a third deplores

that man should have so little appreciation of his baked apples, the

muddy, half-suffocated tenor with which a fourth proclaims his

water-melons, or the rabid, piercing soprano which seems to warn the

public that 'if those violets are not bought pretty quick, there will

soon be none to buy'?"

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pebble VII.]

[Sidenote: Verona.]

"I do not think there exists anywhere a more powerfully and

fantastically individual town than Verona; it is to Italy what

Nuremburg is to Germany; but it is a transfiguration of Nuremburg; in

point of wildly picturesque variety it defies description and

surpasses expectation; it is saturated with art; wherever one turns,

the eye is struck by some beautiful remnant of the taste--that was; of

that glowing, sterling feeling for art, which spread itself over

everything, and ennobled whatever it touched. Hardly a house that

cannot boast of a sculptured archway, or some such token of ancient

splendour; not a church, even the most insignificant, but is crowded

with old paintings in oil and fresco, few of which are bad, some very

good, a few excellent, but _all_ in a far higher _tone of feeling_

than nine-tenths of the shallow, papery daubs with which the

nineteenth century covers its carcase of steam engines. No

wonder--they are all scriptural or apocryphal subjects, and were all

painted with an ardent belief in the faith to which they all owe their

existence; from thence arose, amongst other excellencies, a certain

naif, ingenuously childlike treatment of the miraculous, which,

combined with the manly dignity of consummate art, gives them an

indescribable charm, which nothing can replace. Now--with us, at

least, of the cold belief--men throw really eminent talents--_to the

dogs_. But, for us Protestant artists, things are made much worse than

they in any way need be, by the total rejection of pictures and

statuary in our churches. Now, three centuries back, in the first

ebullition of reformatory fanaticism, such a practice was not only

comprehensible, but even a natural and necessary consequence and token

of their total disavowal of everything approaching to the Romish form

of worship; but its continuance at present amongst us is, not only

contrary to the spirit of the Anglican Church, which after all, when

compared to Lutheranism and Calvinism, is a _conservative_ one, but is

founded on arguments altogether untenable with any degree of

consistency; for if, as we are told, pictures and statues distract the

attention and produce a worldly frame of mind, if it be true indeed

that works of _high art_ (for, of course, no others are here taken

into consideration), than which surely nothing is more calculated to

raise the tone of the mind and prepare it for the reception of

elevated impressions, have indeed so pernicious an effect, then, it is

evident, by the same argument, the beauties of architecture, the

eldest of the sister arts, must be equally rejected; at the sight of a

Gothic church, that offspring of Christianity, we must shrug our

shoulders and say with pious aversion: 'Vanitas vanitatum!' But the

Church of England has not gone as far as that; indeed, great attention

is paid to our Church's architecture; is there no inconsistency here?

Or does the Church, terrified by the example of Romish image-worship,

fear a similar evil amongst us, whose belief is so infinitely more

circumscribed than that of Rome? Or is she so tender of admitting

symbols into her bosom, she, whose corner-stone is a symbol: the Last

Supper?

"To return to Verona.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pebble VIII.]

[Sidenote: The Veronese love flowers,]

[Sidenote: and have good legs.]

"As Gamba, owing to the time which my letter took in reaching him, was

not able to meet me at the time appointed, I remained two days at

Verona, days to which I shall always look back with unmixed pleasure.

I indulged, this time (the more that I knew the town already), in the

luxury of _not_ 'sight-seeing,' but strolled about the whole town in

every direction, dropping into churches, staring at tombs and palaces

and piazzas and pictures, just as if rolled past me in the

ever-varying panorama. I was struck, in the Tyrol, with the profusion

of flowers everywhere displayed; but here I see far more, and those,

too, more artistically distributed; they rise in double and treble

tiers on, in, and about the gracefully curved balconies, and assert

their sway wherever human ingenuity makes it possible to place a

flower-pot, and in a great many other places besides; creepers wreathe

from window to window, and vines actually springing from holes in the

walls, with no visible root or origin at all, spread their graceful

mantle over the walls of crumbling palaces. Of the Veronese

themselves, I cannot say that they are a handsome race; the women

especially, though they have a great deal of character in their

features, are generally far from good-looking. Amongst the peasants I

saw some very fine men; they have, some of them, very good legs,

slender and well shaped as a Donatello or a Ghiberti.

[Sidenote: Thursday, August 26.]

[Sidenote: Gamba.]

"On Thursday Gamba came, just as I was giving him up in a high state

of despair and mystification. We hurried at once by Padua to Venice,

where I found your letter.

[Sidenote: I look back and feel ashamed,]

[Sidenote: and make a clumsy excuse.]

"As I look through what I have written, before sending it off to you,

I feel, painfully, that my style is clumsy, stuttering, incoherent;

that I am wordy, without saying enough; that I am overfree in my use

of fanciful epithets, without giving an adequate idea of the

suggestive beauty of what I see; that I am sometimes almost mawkish,

without saying half I feel; that I am incorrigibly slovenly and

forgetful; that I can't write, that I can't spell. In answer to all

this, I can only answer by referring to a little premonitory

observation at the foot of my first page, _i.e. Quality of Pebbles not

warranted_.

* * * * *

BATCH No. 2.

(This blank represents three weeks.)

[Sidenote: Sept. 16.]

"_September 16._--Many happy returns of the day, dear Gussy! The other

day I took a pair of scales, and put into the one vessel the price you

would have to pay for the postage of a congratulatory letter to be

received by you on your birthday, and into the other a pleasure which

a surprise might afford you; the postage outweighed its rival; so I

wrote no letter. If my directions have been attended to, you will, no

doubt, have received a far more satisfactory outward and visible sign

of my good wishes.

[Sidenote: Sept. 18.]

"_September 18._--The same to you, Papa!... _Can the river offer its

fountain a drink?_

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pebble I.]

[Sidenote: Sept. 19.]

[Sidenote: I lucubrate,]

[Sidenote: when I consider, &c. &c.,]

[Sidenote: whereas, &c. &c.,]

[Sidenote: and even then, &c. &c.,]

"Three weeks (apparently months) have elapsed since I last soared on

the descriptive pinion; now, and only now, on the eve of my departure

from Venice, I find time and leisure again to pour on the past a

libation of pen and ink. I resume the quill with a feeling of

disheartenment. With what intentions did I begin to write this

(journal)? Had I not hoped to note down, at once and in all their

freshness, my emotions and impressions just as I should receive them?

and to speak also sometimes of the thousand little incidents that fall

in one's path, and which form the arabesque round the chapter of life?

And how are my hopes fulfilled? Behold me, on the morning of the last

day, the day of parting, packing, paying, and passports, forced to

throw in a hurried and disconnected heap a few general remarks

concerning what I have seen and heard and felt and found, and not

found, during my stay in the home of Titian. And even that, how

difficult! For in this short stay, sight has succeeded sight, emotion

has followed emotion, in one continued merry-go-round; I have been

alternately grave and gay, melancholy and jocose, dejected and

enraptured; add to this that in my mind, as in the dissolving views,

one picture always effaces its predecessor, and you will at once

perceive that I am in the position of a man trying to see the pebbles

at the bottom of a muddy brook, or his natural face in a basin of

gruel.

[Sidenote: but you know, &c.]

"Now, I again repeat what I made a preliminary condition: that I send

you the pebbles, loose and disjointed, and that I don't undertake to

make a necklace of them.

"'But whose fault is all this?' (I hear you ask).

[Sidenote: besides, it's not my fault]

"During my stay here (I continue, without attending to your question)

I have been up nearly every day _before the sun_ (about five o'clock),

and after working and tearing about the town all day, towards evening

I was not sorry to....

"Do you guess how it was I wrote so little?

[Sidenote: A little digression]

"Here a little observation obtrudes itself to my notice. Man (for

there is nothing like throwing your own frailties on mankind in

general) is born with an irresistible tendency to talk _at something

or somebody_; eighteen pages back I was talking to nobody; or, if I

did address anything, it was that very vague personage, the future;

now I find myself getting more and more personal; _you's_, I expect,

will soon get up to fifty per cent.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pebble II.]

[Sidenote: A picture.]

[Sidenote: (Parenthetic Pebble about Gondolas.)]

"Venice! Mighty word, city of endless associations, image that fills

the mind! What impressions has it left on me? I shrink from answering

a question so difficult to answer _fairly_, and from dissecting a

point of such intricate anatomy. Whilst I think it over, I will give

you a picture or two to look at; you shall have a peep out of the

window where I sit writing. It is early morning, everything is cool

and calm, in silent, almost breathless expectation of the not yet

risen sun. Before your eyes rises one of the most splendid views in

Europe, that of the Grand Canal from the steps of the Academy; the

stately, dark green street of waters reflects on its wide-spreading

mirror the grey and crumbling palaces, and the lovely form of Sta.

Maria della Salute, with her domes of dazzling white. Not a ripple

mars its glossy surface, except where, at rare intervals, some silent

gondola glides swiftly along, scattering the sparkling drops from its

graceful oar, or where, here and there, the playful 'aura mattutina'

has left too rough a kiss upon its slumbering cheek. No sound is

heard, but the distant, even, measured chimes, that seem to be rocking

on the silence of the morning. Along its marge, singly, or clustering

in close array beneath roofs of vine-covered trellis, lie the

far-famed, ebon-coloured, swiftly gliding gondolas of Venice.

'Gondolas!' Whilst the sun is rising, let me say a word or two on

gondolas. It has always excited my great surprise that these barks,

which are graceful almost beyond imagination, are, in point of fact,

in their present shape the offspring of a period, next to our own, the

most execrable in point of taste which the world has produced. I mean

the end of the seventeenth, or rather the beginning of the eighteenth

century. Yet, so it is. In the time of Carpaccio and the Bellinis they

were queer, tolerably uncouth contrivances, about two-thirds of their

present length, pointed and equally curved at both ends, so as to

resemble as nearly as possible a slice of melon, dead of the cholera.

In Titian's day the shape began to taper out a little, and the iron

points or knobs, _at both ends_, rose to a greater height, and were

enriched with a serrated ornament; but they did not assume their

present slender proportions and graceful ornament, _at the prow only_,

till the eighteenth century; as also the mysterious and exquisitely

comfortable little cabins or coffins, which now surmount them, and

which formerly were open _behind and before_, forcing the passenger to

sit upright! They contained then the rudiment of an idea of grace,

which took its natural growth and development in spite of man.

Meanwhile, for I have been watching him, the sun has appeared above

the horizon; not that I see his own, real, glorious face, for he is

hidden behind an ancient palace, but I see his reflection glowing in

the eye of nature. First a gentle, tremulous, golden light began to

steal along the dappled morning sky, warning all the little, distant,

fleecy clouds to shake their plumes, for that it was going to begin;

then, of course, the water took up the tune; and then (it was fit the

biggest building should set the example) the 'Salute' assumed a

saffron hue, and gradually one by one all the palaces on one side of

the Canal, right up to our windows, and, did not you notice? your own

face took quite a shine. For a while you yourself and everything round

you seems wrapped in a trance; presently you begin to write. How is

this? The whole picture begins to dance and quiver. Our Lady della

Salute glows with a deeper blush, and trembles. Then, suddenly, her

redness vanishes, her glorious countenance sparkles, and she raises

her stately form in a garment of burnished silver; the gondolas that

nestle round her feet, and hem in the whole length of the Canal, seem

like a fillet of sparkling gems around a web of emerald and gold; the

sky is a sea of light; the sun is in the wide heavens--it's time for

breakfast. Waiter, coffee and rolls!

[Sidenote: I am reminded,]

"'Do you mean,' I hear you urge, 'to come to the point, and tell us

how you like Venice?'

[Sidenote: but take no notice.]

[Sidenote: Pebble IV.]

"Another picture! (pretending not to hear). The same scene, but under

a different aspect. How different! Just now it was a scene of dawning

life, a burst of gladness--now it is a mild, a gentle dream, an

Italian moonlight night, a _Venetian_ moonlight night--calm, clear,

soft, fancy stirring. You lean idly out of the window; there are two

of you, or ought to be, but you don't say anything to one another; you

are rocked in silence; you feel the sweet, warm breath of night pass

over your cheek; you think of Shakespeare's exquisite verses on what

he never saw but with the eye of his boundless fancy; you are sitting

with Jessica and Lorenzo (that is his name, I think) on a bank of

violets; you are anxiously waiting for Portia and her company; your

ear is attentive to every sound; presently a sweet, half-heard strain,

like a distant echo, dawns on your ear; then it is lost again; again

it swells, and seems to glide gently along the shadowy waters towards

you, nearer, still nearer. You see a track of gleaming light along the

water, and at intervals a shower of tiny stars; it's no illusion; they

glide along towards you, the voices that rose from the distant waters;

they are almost beneath your window. Quick, quick, a gondola; a dozen

or more musicians, with every kind of instrument, sit together in a

bark, and alternately play and sing lovely melodies by the musicians

of Italy. As long as the strain lasts the oar is suspended, and the

floating orchestra drifts slowly along with the slowly ebbing tide;

round it, a cluster of gondolas, full of breathless listeners whose

very soul seems to melt with the delicious sounds, and combine with

them--at least, you can answer for yourself, for you are one of them.

Those are moments which you, I am sure, will never forget.

[Sidenote: You interrupt me, but I take no notice.]

"'You are beating about the bush, we want an ans....'

[Sidenote: Pebble V.]

"Another picture! (taking no notice of you)--a bit of Giorgione,

coloured by Veronese. You are in an _atelier_; pictures and sketches

in different stages of advancement lie about the tables and cover the

easels; at one end of the room you see a large cupboard; its open

doors betray within layers of rich old silks and damasks, some made

up, some in pieces, as they were found at the antiquary's; further, an

old mandoline, that perhaps could tell of the days of Titian. Through

the large, gaping window you look upon a group of the most picturesque

Venetian houses, with their fanciful basket-shaped chimneys and

irregular windows and thousand-fold tints; the foreground is

gracefully supplied by a screen of slender, net-like trees, amongst

which heavy-laden vines wreathe in fanciful festoons. But where is

Werner? the amiable inmate of this charming snuggery; where his

pupils? Ah, I hear them! Hark! in the garden, a merry laugh, a

clattering of cups, a sound of several voices, a suggestion of

enjoyment; you rush to the scene of action; on your road you nearly

break your neck over a table covered with the remains of a hearty

dinner. A few yards further, you see half-a-dozen young men (of course

artists) stretched, in every variety of ingeniously comfortable

attitude, on a temporary floor of Turkey carpets, in a cool, clear,

shady spot beneath arches of roof-weaving vines; in the middle, at

comfortable arm's length, coffee, and heaps of purple grapes, whilst

the intervals of conversation are filled by affectionate and earnest

appeals to long Turkish pipes. You approach; you are recognised;

seized by the hand, thrown down on the carpet; and presently you

perceive that an entire afternoon is gone by! But that afternoon

becomes a landmark to you. May not such reminiscences well endear a

place to one's memory?

[Illustration: STUDY OF BYZANTINE WELL HEAD. Venice, 1852

By permission of Mr. S. Pepys Cockerell]

"'Well, then, I suppose....' (say you).

"Never mind, let me continue.

[Sidenote: More where the rest came from.]

"Another impression. You are sitting, early in the morning, in a

spacious, picturesque court; you have got your sketch-book, and you

are busily poring over a drawing of a beautiful old Saracenic well;

you are intent on doing it well, on cutting out that friend you have

got with you. Presently you are seized with a peculiar sensation; you

have heard, all of a sudden, the voice of an old, old friend, who

speaks to you of things you don't see round you; a veil falls from

your eyes; you feel that you have missed something for some time past;

a vision rises before your eyes--a sweet vision of wooded hills and

grassy fields, teeming with a thousand wild flowers and sending forth

a sweet smell, and of flowing streams, of _fresh_ waters, of birds

singing merrily as they fly from tree to tree, and swing on the

slender branches; and then you remember that you dwell in a

mysterious city, closed in by the salty sea. Who was the friend that

called up these lively images in your mind? It was a poor, solitary,

wandering _Bee_. But he suggested something else to you, the roaming

honey-gatherer--he reminded you of _freedom_; reminded you that

Freedom had no home _there_; and he made you _feel_ how much you had

felt it, how much you had been unconsciously haunted by the breath of

oppression that hovers over poor, browbeaten Venice, and whose

pestilence clings to its rocky shore, as the rankling seaweed to the

skirts of its palaces. Poor Venice! once resounding with joyous

voices, now its walls seem, as you pass them, to mutter mournfully of

arrests, condemnations, executions! Its narrow streets re-echo with

the heavy tread of exulting soldiers, with the watchword of a foreign

tongue. Palaces and convents are become barracks and infirmaries, and

Slavonian troopers loll and spit where the proudest lords and

loveliest ladies of Venice used to assemble to the banquet or the

ball. But I turn away from such sad reflections, lest they may seem to

outweigh all the delight that I have spoken of before.

[Sidenote: Pebble VI.]

[Sidenote: What I think about it.]

"I have rehearsed to you a few of my impressions for good and for

evil, and I think that was the only way of answering your (imaginary)

questions. I need make no apologies for not _describing_ Venice to

you, as you have all seen it, and it is a place the image of which

does not easily fade. I might say a word or two about the Venetians.

Whatever some people may say (and, if I am not mistaken, Byron amongst

them), the female Venetian type, such as it is transmitted to us by

Titian, Giorgione, Pordenone, &c. (_i.e._ stout, tall, round-faced,

small-mouthed, _Roxolane-nosed_) has either totally disappeared, or

only manifests itself to a chosen few; one feature only I recognise,

and that is a profusion of fine hair, which they plait in the most

elaborate manner. A thing that rather puzzles those who go to Venice

with the idea of seeing _Titians_ and _Veroneses_ at the windows and

in the streets, is that the women have altogether left off dyeing

their hair auburn as they used in former times. To show you that

vanity made the fair sex go through the greatest personal discomfort

as far back as the sixteenth century, I will tell you what the process

of dyeing was. On the top of nearly every house in Venice is a kind of

terrace-like scaffold, or scaffold-like terrace ('you pays your money

and takes your choice'), which has the noble vocation of drying linen;

in former days, however, they were built for a different purpose. In

the middle of the day, during the greatest heat of the sun, the party

anxious to impart to her hair a tint between sugar-candy and radishes

repaired to these _lofty_ spots, and there regularly bleached her hair

in the following manner: she put on her head the _brim_ of a large

straw hat, so that the top of the head was exposed to all the power of

the sun, whilst the face and neck were kept in the shade. Through the

hole thus left in the middle of this extraordinary headgear the whole

of the hair was drawn, and spread out as much as possible; which done,

different kinds of waters, made for the express purpose, were passed

over it by means of a little sponge fastened to the top of a reed.

History does not give the exact number of _coups-de-soleil_ caught in

this manner; a few, I should imagine. However, I can warrant the

accuracy of my statement, which is borrowed from a contemporary author

of the highest standing. The men of Venice are neither handsome in the

face nor well made in the body. The Venetian dialect is amusing; in

the mouth of a woman, if well spoken, it is pretty, musical,

childlike, lisping; but in the mouth of a man, for the most part,

muddy, stammering, unintelligible.

* * * * *

"There, much as still remains to say, and willingly as I dwell on

its memory, I must discard Venice, and turn to your kind letter,

for it is now, I am afraid, more than a month since I last wrote.

This delay has, however, been unavoidable, for when one is

travelling, or staying a short time in a place, one is always

hurried and flurried in the day-time, and in the evening tired or

excited--or both. Next time you hear from me (which will be when

I reach Rome) my communication will openly take the shape that

this has imperceptibly been attaining, that of a letter; when I

am once settled for the winter I shall, I hope, be better able to

write _au jour le jour_. Before entering into your letter, which

will be a longish job, I must acknowledge the receipt of one from

Papa, containing part of my remittance; it was written in most

kind terms (I tell you this because you can't have seen it, since

he wrote in London), and was, I think, the longest I ever got

from him, at all events it was the first in which he said

anything beyond what was necessary to business. It gave me

sincere pleasure. I was touched, it seemed to me that distance

had brought me nearer to him; pray thank him both for that and

for the consideration with which he has provided for an emergency

which will in fact arise--that of my not reaching Rome in

October; I do not expect to get there until the first week in

November. Of one thing I must remind Papa; he talks of sending to

Rome the _remaining eighty_ pounds of my second quarter; he has,

I am afraid, forgotten that he gave me sixty for my first; my

remittance this time is only _forty_ pounds, he therefore has

only twenty to send to Rome.

"I now turn to your letter, dear Mamma; I lay it by my side, and

as I read it slowly through, answer it systematically, head for

head, for in my present hurry I have indeed no time to pick and

choose, or to arrange my topics according to their importance and

interest, or even to consult as much as I wish the little

amusement that my letters give you. However, I console myself a

little with the reflection that it certainly is not the

composition of my letters which gratifies you much, for I am

painfully aware that my ideas are brought to paper with about as

much order as the footprints of a cock-sparrow show on a

gravel-walk.

"You say, dear Mamma, that you have a fear of not telling me all

that I wish to hear; and there, indeed, you are right, for if you

were to tell me _all_ that I wish to know about your doings, you

might write for a week; but you are equally right in supposing

that _whatever_ you write concerning yourself (and selves) is

full of interest to your distant Punch. About my health? Well, I

plead guilty, steaks _do_ still continue to be to me _physical

consciences_; this admonitory part they took more especially at

Venice, where the climate, I must confess, did not agree with me

particularly well. This is perhaps attributable to the water,

which was particularly bad there, for my diet was of the simplest

description. Judge for yourself: in the morning early, coffee and

dry bread (I have discarded butter to keep company with Gamba,

who is not in the habit of eating any); at eleven or so, fruit

and bread; at four or five, a simple dinner; and in the evening,

an ice or a cup of coffee. Here I live much in the same way.

"I am truly delighted to hear that you are accommodating yourself

a little to an English climate; if you once get over that one

great obstacle, nothing else need prevent your establishing

yourself in the country which, after all, is still the dearest to

you; with the prospect of pleasant and desirable society for

yourself and the girls, and of other resources for Papa, there is

every reason to hope that you will find in Bath what you have so

long wished for, a home in _England_."

Speaking of his elder sister's suffering, he continues:--

"I feel, almost, a kind of shame that so much should have been

poured down on me, who have deserved it less. To become

deserving of it, must be my great, never-wavering endeavour;

I will put my talent to usury, and be no slothful steward of

what has been entrusted to me. Every man who has received a

gift, ought to feel and act as if he was a field in which a

seed was planted that others might gather the harvest.

"I am delighted to hear that Lady Leighton is getting on well,

and as much gratified at having made on her a favourable

impression; pray tell her that her presence and conversation

inspired me with a desire to please her, and that her

affectionate reception has still a lively hold on my memory.

"You tell me that you were touched at Steinle's kindness to

me, and indeed it was such as might well touch any one; this

time you will be touched at his affliction, poor man, he has

just had a heavy misfortune--the most affectionate of fathers

has lost another child, the second, in a year and a half; I

heard this from Andre, who has just arrived from Frankfurt,

and who called on the unfortunate man before he started and

found him much dejected. He said in his melancholy but calm

tone of voice: 'Ich habe eine Tochter begraben.' You think it

improbable that I shall find a _second_ Steinle; I delight in

the belief that there _is none_.

"I am not surprised at your finding it impossible to imagine

an artist without a genuine love for nature. In any but an age

of perverted taste such a thing could not exist; but it is

only too true that that most essential of qualities has become

obsolete, and is hardly to be found at all. Artists now are

full of _breadth_ and _depth_; and, between us and the

doorpost, _flatness_. On this subject I mean to tell you more

in my next letter, when I speak more particularly of my

_artistic_ impressions and opinions, which I have not yet

done.

"I am glad to hear what you tell me about the comfort you

enjoy in Bath, from the superior cleanliness and decency of

behaviour of English servants over foreign ones; it is a

thing to which I am particularly alive, and which struck me

very much last time I was in England; Gussy too, I am sure,

appreciated it very much. I am sorry that I cannot participate

in your enthusiasm about the beauties of Bath (barring, of

course, the situation, which is charming), but I will say

nothing against it, as I am only too glad that you should be

pleased with it. I quite follow you in your admiration of the

edifices in Westminster; I think that, taking them altogether,

they form one of the finest groups of architecture that I ever

saw; but what particularly pleases me in the Houses of

Parliament is the example they set of building in that style

of architecture which is our own, the growth, as it were, of

our soil, and which therefore best befits our country. Such

feelings, I have reason to believe, are becoming prevalent in

England, and they may have great results; but I reserve all

this for another letter. I am glad to hear of the institution

you tell me of for the cultivation of good principles; I

believe that the greatness of England will not be as ephemeral

as that of the other nations that have had the lead in

succession, because so much is done to consolidate and

increase in strength the basis on which it stands, and which

is the best prop to the enduring prosperity of a nation,

uprightness and morality.

"I have now followed and answered your letter, from beginning

to end, from point to point, it is time I should close; next

time I write, I shall be in Rome, settled for the

winter.--Believe me, dear Mamma, with very best love to all,

your most affectionate and dutiful son,

"FRED LEIGHTON."

_Translation._]

VENICE, _31st August_.

"HONOURED AND VERY DEAR HERR STEINLE,--If I did not, according

to our agreement, write to you directly Rico[19] arrived, it

was because I could not make up my mind to put you off with

two words, whereas I had neither time nor leisure to write you

anything detailed. Now, however, arrived and established in

Venice, I take up my pen to repair the neglect. It is a

lovely, cool, clear summer morning; I sit at my window on the

Grand Canal, and before my eyes rises in glorious beauty the

incomparable outline of Sta. Maria della Salute with the

adjoining Dogano. The newly risen sun (it is five o'clock in

the morning) throws a golden, enchanted light along one side

of the Canal; the gondolas and barges, which nestle in a

numerous array at the steps of the _Salute_, glitter in the

dusky distance like gleaming jewels on the borders of the

silver mirror of the water, whose clear bosom is gently

ruffled by the soft breath of dawn. All is still, except the

distant church bells. What words can give an idea of such a

sight? I gaze about me in a day-dream and think of you, the

dear friend, the honoured master; all that I owe you for

heartfelt sympathy and wise guidance, and cannot pay, rises

before my grateful soul, and reminds me that I have lost one

whom I shall miss many a time. I hope with all my heart that

your stay in the mountains of Appenzell will have given you

fresh strength, and that in all respects you are

re-established and invigorated according to your expectations.

"Now, however, as I am to speak of myself, and to give some

account of my impressions on my journey, I note that for me

the potent picture of Italy, of Venice, has pushed all that

went before into the background, almost blotted it out, so

that now it floats before me like a dim remembrance; but with

two exceptions: two pictures have impressed themselves deeply

on my memory, and will certainly not be easily erased--I mean

the _Franciscan church at Innsbruck_ and lovely _Meran_. You

were indeed right when you said that the cast giants in that

church are the grandest achievement of German sculpture; they

are colossal, a truly imposing spectacle, brilliant monuments

of an age of noble taste. What eternal truth! What an amazing

impress of individuality! Of marvellous execution that never

borders on the little, full of breadth and strength, and yet

nobly slender, they are the most perfect example of _economy

of detail_; what a sharp contrast to the superficial

stone-hammering (I might say) of to-day; what an everlasting

shaming to the nineteenth century! I could name many sculptors

who could not look at these things without profit.

"Meran! What an indelible, fascinating picture floats before

one's eyes at the name; this Alpha and Omega of all that is

lovely in Tyrol; this lovely amphitheatre of mountains, rugged

on one side, and steep and covered with snow on the other,

glowing in the purple gleam of the south--widely extended,

melting away, alluring; this fertile plain; this gold-green

flood of climbing vines, hanging down like waterfalls from the

espaliers on the mountain slopes, with the purple foam of the

vines; these thousand pleasure-houses and castles; the

picturesque costume!

"But why so many words? You have seen this beauty yourself,

and have no doubt a clearer picture of it than I can paint for

you.

"In Botzen, to my very great regret, I was unable to see Herr

von Hempel, since he was staying, not in his town house, but

in a castle at a distance of two hours; but I visited Becker's

brother. He received me in a most friendly manner, asked much

after his brother, of whom he had heard _nothing_ for more

than a _year_, and told me that his mother, who had recently

visited him in Feldkirch, had wept bitterly about it. I must

also inform you that he has recently _taken unto himself a

wife_--a fact of which our good Jacob (that is his name, is it

not?) also knew nothing.

"I could still, dear Herr Steinle, write much to you about

Tyrol and Italy (especially about _Verona_), for I know no one

with whom I so gladly share my artistic sensations as with

you, but lack of time obliges me to close quickly for the

present; I will only add that after I had been two days in

Verona the worthy Rico arrived, and we are now having a _feast

of art_ in Venice together.

"Should you be still at the Stift when you receive these

lines, I beg you to kiss the Frau Rath's hand for me, and to

tell her that I remember vividly the day I spent in her house.

Remember me most kindly to your wife--I congratulate her upon

her deliverance from the Cronberg martyrdom; kiss the little

children for me, and remember me to the elder ones; remember

me also to Frau Schoeff & Co. and to all my other good friends;

this is perhaps rather a large request, but whom could I omit?

I rely upon your kindness. I close with a plea for forbearance

towards my incorrigible writing and my lame, headlong

style.--Heartfelt greetings from your devoted and grateful

pupil,

"FRED LEIGHTON.

"_P.S._--Should you have anything to say to me, or any

commission to give me, the address, Poste Restante, Florence,

will find me till the end of September.

"Gamba wishes to be cordially remembered to you, and promises

himself to be under your wing again in eighteen months.

"In my next letter I will tell you about Italy."

FOOTNOTES:

[13] In the winter of 1845 Leighton went to a children's costume ball

in Florence as Punch, and for some time after the name clung to him in

his family.

[14] Literally, "devoured nature with a spoon."

[15] A distinguished actress.

[16] Probably "The Death of Brunelleschi."

[17] See Appendix, In Memoriam.

[18] See sketch, "A Monk Dividing Enemies," Leighton House Collection,

"Ulm, 1852."

[19] Count Gamba.