SOME EMINENT VICTORIANS
[Illustration: _A Study for the picture of King Cophetua_
(_Philip Comyns Carr_)
_By Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart._]
SOME EMINENT
VICTORIANS
PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS
IN THE WORLD OF ART AND LETTERS
BY
J. COMYNS CARR
[Illustration: colophon]
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
MCMVIII
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE
Those of us who have emerged from the Victorian Era with an undiminished
reverence for the great names which have made it memorable, must be
prepared to endure with patience the pitying tolerance, or even the
indulgent rebuke, of the men who herald a younger generation.
It was only a few weeks ago that I ventured to enquire of a cultivated
young writer of the newer school if Dickens was now much read by the
generation which presumably he had a claim to represent. The question
gave him no pause. In a sentence that was dictated solely, as it seemed,
by a sincere desire to impart accurate information, he gravely informed
me that among young men of culture Dickens was now never read after the
age of fourteen. I confess that, despite the coldly judicial tone of
this utterance, I was not entirely convinced, for I happen to know even
young people who are still so far belated in their taste as to regard
Dickens as an incomparable genius. But the statement helped me at any
rate to realise how easy it is to grow old-fashioned, and suggested to
me that in addressing an age which believes that art, like science, is
always advancing, it would be prudent, on the threshold of these
reminiscences of some of the men I have known and whose work I have
worshipped, to make frank avowal of my own faith, and humbly to confess
my limitations.
Let me say, then, that in the region of Art and Literature I am still an
impenitent Victorian. I have no desire to disparage the work of those
who profess a more modern creed, and I think, although this perhaps may
be vainglorious boasting, that I am not unable to appreciate the more
instant appeal of a later day. But my talk with younger men, whose
comradeship delights me, makes it often abundantly clear to me that I am
disqualified, perhaps by age, from sharing to the full measure their
more recent enthusiasms. Our occasional divergence of feeling, which it
would be idle not to recognise, rests in some cases upon an essential
difference in the point of view. The progress of science which, to
borrow a phrase from Mr. Gladstone in regard to our revenue, is in our
day “advancing by leaps and bounds,” has, I think, set some younger men
aglow with the thought that art too is destined, with the passing of the
ages, to claim and to inherit a realm correspondingly enlarged.
This belief, perhaps only half confessed, that in the fields of
Literature and Art the later achievement must, for that reason alone, be
the greater achievement, is apt to beget in the minds of some younger
men a certain impatience with the heroes of an earlier day. As the
topmost pebble set upon the upraised cairn which represents the sum of
scientific knowledge must of necessity record the final altitude which
science has reached, so it is in some quarters held, by an analogy that
seems to me radically mistaken, that the most modern achievement in art
has the right to claim in virtue of its historical position a higher
place than that which it has succeeded.
Let me confess at once that this is not my belief. There is a little
fringe of science lying at the threshold of every art, and until the
secrets it has to yield are conquered, the illusion of progressive
advancement is inevitable. But that puny conquest counts for nothing
beside art’s constant and unchangeable conditions, conditions which
leave its earlier victories unsurpassed and unsurpassable. It is,
indeed, the glory of the artist’s spirit, in whatever field it be
exercised, that it is incapable of advancement. Each achievement, as
time attests its worth to rank at all, remains through all time
incomparable. It knows no rivalry. It defies all competition. It affects
no advance upon the triumphs of yesterday; it fears no eclipse from the
victories of to-morrow. And although history shows many barren seasons
when the spirit of the artist sinks and flags, the revival, when it
comes, is due to no added store of knowledge, but is the free gift of
men newly risen whose genius proves itself able to recapture that power
of imaging life which in the hands of genius has always been perfect
from the first.
Supported by this faith I will own I am not very gravely discouraged by
occasionally finding myself ranked as a champion of an outworn fashion.
The progress of art is the progress of the pendulum. It advances and
recedes according to a law of movement that only the fullest and
profoundest knowledge of all the factors that make up human life can
enable us to decipher.
But that art does often lie fallow after a period of rich harvest must
be indisputable to all who have carefully studied its history. It need
not, therefore, be wholly surprising if, in that little corner of time
we inhabit to-day, there should have come a momentary lull following on
a period of intense and varied vitality.
My mission here is simply to recall and to record personal reminiscences
of some of the great men who sowed and reaped a part of that great
harvest garnered during the later half of the last century. In the
history of English Literature and English Art, I believe it presents a
rich yield that will not soon be equalled as the fruit of an equal
measure of time, and I am prepared to accept lightly enough the
criticism that probably awaits me, that the heroes whom I have
worshipped are no longer the heroes of to-day.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
CHAPTER II
IDLE HOURS 15
CHAPTER III
ESSAYS IN JOURNALISM 26
CHAPTER IV
THE BAR 48
CHAPTER V
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 59
CHAPTER VI
EDWARD BURNE-JONES 71
CHAPTER VII
MILLAIS AND LEIGHTON 85
CHAPTER VIII
FREDERICK WALKER 102
CHAPTER IX
DESIGN AND ENGRAVING 111
CHAPTER X
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY AND THE NEW GALLERY 126
CHAPTER XI
WHISTLER AND CECIL LAWSON 133
CHAPTER XII
ART JOURNALISM 146
CHAPTER XIII
ORATORS 167
CHAPTER XIV
SOME VICTORIAN POETS 193
CHAPTER XV
A YOUNGER GENERATION 215
CHAPTER XVI
MEN OF THE THEATRE 225
CHAPTER XVII
SOCIAL HOURS 263
CHAPTER XVIII
SOME FOREIGN ACTORS 273
CHAPTER XIX
THE WORK OF THE THEATRE 281
ILLUSTRATIONS
Study for the picture of King Cophetua (Philip Comyns Carr).
By Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart. _Frontispiece_
FACE PAGE
G. Birkbeck Hill 7
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By Himself 59
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By G. F. Watts, R.A. 65
Letter. By Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart. (_a_) 78
The Homes of England. By Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart. (_b_) 78
The Homes of England. By Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart. (_c_) 78
Lessons in Anatomy. By Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart.--
Lesson 1 80
Lesson 2 80
Lesson 3 80
Ophelia. By Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A. 85
The Finding of Moses. By Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A. 87
The Huguenots. By Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A. 92
Lord Leighton, P.R.A. By G. F. Watts, R.A. 96
A Woman in the Snow. By F. Walker, A.R.A. 103
Lucy Gray. By Sir John Gilbert, R.A. 109
The Unjust Judge. By Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A. 111
The Leaven. By Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A. 113
“To seek the wanderer.” By F. Sandys 115
James Martineau. By G. F. Watts, R.A. 167
John Bright. By W. W. Ouless, R.A. 169
Lord Tennyson. By G. F. Watts, R.A. 193
Head of Charles Dickens. By Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A. 194
Robert Browning. By G. F. Watts, R.A. 201
William Morris. By G. F. Watts, R.A. 209
R. L. Stevenson. By Sir W. Richmond, K.C.B., R.A. 215
Sir Henry Irving. 237
Sir Arthur Sullivan. By Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A. 284
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
From my earliest boyhood I think my bent was towards a literary career,
but it was long before my ambition could be put to the test. The seventh
of a family of ten, it was scarcely to be expected that I could, in
those earlier days, make known my choice of a calling that seemed so
little likely to yield a livelihood. My father was in business in
London, and although he took the keenest interest in politics and public
affairs, and was an eager reader of the literature of his time, he had a
sufficiently hard struggle to provide for us all, and it was but natural
in his care for our future that his thoughts should turn to the choice
of some solid commercial career.
We lived, in the days that I can first recall, in the Manor House on
Barnes Common, a picturesque old-fashioned building that still remains,
though shorn of the larger grounds which were our delight as children.
The garden and fields, now partly built over, formed then a little
earthly paradise to a large family, and the open Common covered with
gorse and bracken served as a part of our wider playground. There we
roamed at will, and it was there, with each returning October, that we
used to gather the material for a great bonfire with which we annually
celebrated the fifth of November.
Sallying forth from our field-gate that abutted upon the Common, armed
with a bill-hook surreptitiously filched from the gardener’s
tool-basket, there we used to pile up our wheelbarrow with the gorse we
had no right to cut, keeping a careful eye the while, lest the sudden
approach of the policeman should set us within the grip of the law.
These raiding expeditions sometimes brought us into collision with the
boys of the village, whom we only knew under the generic title of “the
cads,” and with whom we waged unceasing warfare. Especially did we dread
their onslaught as the fifth of November approached, for we knew well it
was ever their malignant purpose to fire the pile before the appointed
night had arrived.
It was our custom, therefore, to keep watch and guard for several
preceding nights, and sometimes when we heard sounds heralding the
approach of the enemy across the fields we would send rockets whizzing
along the grass--a defensive operation we discovered to be greatly
dreaded by even the boldest of “the cads.”
The choice of an appropriate Guy was always an important point of
consideration. One year, I remember, it was Bomba, and during the days
of the Indian Mutiny a great effigy of Nana Sahib was consigned to the
flames, which gathered added intensity by the insertion into the midst
of the huge pile of gorse and dried wood of a seasoned tar-barrel
annually purchased by my father as his contribution to the revels of
this well-loved day.
The valorous deeds of our soldiers in the Crimea and the nameless
horrors of the Mutiny which followed so closely at its heels stand among
my most vivid recollections of those earlier days.
I was born in the year 1849, and I can still remember an elder cousin in
his scarlet uniform taking his way across the foot-path that leads to
Barnes station, to start for the war in the Crimea.
With the events of the Mutiny our sympathies were even more actively
engaged. We were closely allied at that time with a family, one of whom,
General Henry Marshall, but lately commanded the Artillery in South
Africa. They had lived in India, and had relatives still there at the
time of the outbreak, and the terrible news as it reached England had
therefore an enthralling interest for us all.
It was not to be supposed that my father could afford to any of us the
luxury of a public school. At first, with my brothers, I was educated at
home under a private tutor, and then at the age of thirteen I took my
way to Bruce Castle School, Tottenham, at that time under the mastership
of Arthur Hill, brother of Sir Rowland Hill of postage-stamp fame.
I remember my elder brother and I took our places on the form allotted
to new boys side by side with William Lewin, better known as William
Terriss the actor, and it was only a little while before his tragic end
that he and I were recalling those times at Bruce Castle, where, if he
gained but little learning, he at any rate acquired a perfect mastery in
the art of tree-climbing. There was no elm in the playground, or beyond
it, which he had not scaled in search of rooks’ eggs, and his constant
companion in these lawless excursions was Fred Selous, the African
hunter and explorer, with whom not long ago in his Surrey home, where we
sat surrounded by his many trophies of the chase, I was glad to renew
our memories of that earlier time.
Terriss’s name reminds me of an incident of our school-days which proves
that at that time, at any rate, his histrionic abilities were scarcely
equal to mine. Bruce Castle School boasted two masters of the French
language, both of whom were regarded as marks for the ridicule and scorn
of the English-born boy. Something of the spirit of Waterloo still
survived in our outrageous treatment of these gentlemen, whom we could
not help regarding as the luckless representatives of a beaten and
inferior race.
One of them, I remember, had a known fondness for natural history, and
under cover of sharing his enthusiasm we could nearly always lure him to
stories of different wild animals which served to fill the hour which
should have been devoted to the study of the French language.
This was our more amiable way of tormenting the unfortunate gentleman.
Occasionally, in order to frustrate his well-meant efforts to instruct
us, we resorted to more drastic measures. I remember one day it was
jointly agreed among us that we should all assume to be afflicted with
the worst kind of hacking cough, and from the very moment the class
opened the room resounded with the most distressing symptoms of our
common complaint.
Our master became at length fully conscious of the plot that had been
forged against him, and slamming the book in a rage announced his
determination of summoning Mr. Arthur Hill to restore the discipline of
the class. This show of unexpected authority on his part produced
something like consternation, and in a moment all the bronchial sounds
were silenced--all save one, for it seemed to me then that the only
policy, however desperate it might prove, was to persist in the signs of
the malady which had already been announced.
In the interval of dead silence in which we awaited the arrival of the
headmaster I therefore continued, at brief but regular intervals, with
the same persistent cough which the others had abandoned. On Mr. Arthur
Hill’s arrival, Mon. Delmas--for that was the unfortunate gentleman’s
name--explained with some volubility the cause of his complaint against
us, but at the finish, with a noble credulity that I had hardly dared to
hope for, he exempted me from the general condemnation.
“Now, Carr,” he said, “has a cough, but he suffer so much it is better
he do not attend the class for a space.”
On this intimation I was permitted to quit the room and to spend the
rest of the dreaded hour in the playground, where afterwards I incurred
the obloquy of my companions, and especially of William Terriss, because
they had failed to adopt my more ingenious policy.
It is small wonder, with these obstacles deliberately set in our own
path, that at our school, at any rate, the acquisition of any knowledge
of the French tongue was of the very slightest.
I suppose every boy has his school hero. Mine, I remember, was a South
American Spaniard named Echenique, whose father had, for a brief space,
figured as President of Peru. He was as handsome as Dickens has pictured
Steerforth; and afterwards, when I made the acquaintance of David
Copperfield, I had cause to recognise with what unerring sympathy and
fidelity the greatest of our masters of romance has mirrored the worship
of a boy.
Bruce Castle was, in its way, a remarkable school, though it made no
pretence of affording any very extended classical education. It was,
indeed, designed for boys of the middle class, of whom I was one, but it
was remarkable in this sense, that it was governed on principles of
conduct that differed materially from those accepted in other schools of
the time.
The Hills held peculiar theories upon the education of boys. Corporal
punishment was a thing altogether unknown, and the severest penalty even
upon the most hardened offender consisted in nothing worse than a course
of compulsory exercise. There was a Prefect, specially told off to take
out every day, in what in happier circumstances would have been their
play-time, those malefactors who had failed to conform to the discipline
of the school.
And yet, under this mild régime, discipline was never lax, both Mr.
Arthur Hill and his son Dr. Birkbeck Hill, who succeeded him soon after
I entered the school, possessing in a rare degree the power of evoking a
sense of responsibility in those elder pupils who controlled the
school’s conduct. I
[Illustration: G. BIRKBECK HILL
_To face page 7._
]
think only once in the period of my school-days did a case occur in
which the headmaster had need to resort to the final penalty of
expulsion.
Dr. Birkbeck Hill was, in a special sense, a man who won the affection
of his pupils. He came to us from Oxford, where he had been the friend
of Morris and Swinburne, and I remember the first time that I saw one of
those newly designed wallpapers, which were destined afterwards to play
so important a part in the movement initiated by Rossetti and Morris,
was in the dining-room of Bruce Castle School.
Dr. Birkbeck Hill was a man of considerable literary taste and literary
power. He was contributing at that time, though it was not generally
known, some brilliant light articles to the _Saturday Review_ under the
editorship of Mr. Harwood, and he very soon attached himself to that
devoted study of Dr. Johnson which finally provided the theme for some
admirable work in criticism and biography.
It is possible that he may have perceived in me some inclination towards
letters, for he often used to show me his articles in the current number
of the _Review_, and very soon by his own enthusiasm he awakened in me
an interest in his hero Johnson, which has never since abated. A copy of
Boswell’s _Life_, which he afterwards gave me on the occasion of my
marriage, still stands in its ten little volumes as one of the books
within reach of my bed. They share the honours of my book-shelf with the
novels of Charles Dickens, and for me there are no two authors to whom I
can so constantly return with ever-renewed enjoyment when sleep is not
easy to win.
But there was an older master, Mr. Braid, who exercised an even more
powerful influence in forming and directing my taste. His special
subject in the curriculum of the school was mathematics, but he was an
ardent lover of literature and a devoted student of Shakespeare. He did
not live in the school, but many times after school hours he used to
take me down to his modest rooms in the village and show me some of the
books in his small but well-loved library.
Impelled by his enthusiasm I had read, before I left school, the whole
of Shakespeare, as well as _Paradise Lost_ and the shorter poems of
Milton; and it was by his encouragement that I made my first attempt in
writing, in the sufficiently ambitious experiment of an essay on _King
Lear_. I have lost the essay, and the world has lost it, a fact not to
be deeply deplored by either. But this crude experiment set me on my
way, and when I quitted school at the age of sixteen my ambition was
already aflame to try and do something in the world of letters. But,
curiously enough, the aptitude which I had shown at school was towards
mathematics, and here my work had so far impressed the examiners, one of
whom was Charles Faulkner, afterwards so closely associated with
Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that Dr. Hill endeavoured to persuade my
father to send me to Cambridge.
I do not now know whether I regret the fact that my father’s means did
not suffice to carry out that project. It might have diverted me from
those things which I even then began to love, and have never ceased to
care for. In any case it seemed obviously necessary that, as one of a
family of ten, I should at once apply myself to a calling in which I
could earn my living. Accordingly at the age of sixteen, when I quitted
Bruce Castle School, my father articled me, at some considerable
sacrifice to himself, in a stock-broker’s office in the City.
It will be evident that the education with which I went forth into the
world could not have been very profound--a little Latin, enough to
enable me to read, in later years, Horace and Virgil with pleasure, but
not without the aid of a dictionary; no Greek--that was not considered
indispensable to a commercial career; mathematics sufficient, as my
examiners told me, to have given me more than a fair chance of a
scholarship at Cambridge; and a taste for literature mainly acquired in
the vacant hours after school.
From the first my task in the City was not congenial to me, although I
worked hard and worked early and late. But when office hours were over I
still contrived to keep alive that interest in books which had already
been deeply implanted in me, and to make some small essays in journalism
and in verse which at the first, I am bound to admit, met with scant
encouragement from the editors whom I bombarded. I can remember now
receiving from Charles Dickens, with a pain that was also blended with
pleasure, a polite little note in blue ink returning one of my many
rejected communications. Mr. Thackeray from the _Cornhill_ conferred
upon me a like distinction--a distinction, as I call it, because even
the fact that they declined to publish what I wrote seemed to me at the
time almost to form a link of association with men whom I so greatly
admired.
All this tentative work was done in the late evenings, carried sometimes
far into the night, but it did not prevent me from being at my office in
the City at a quarter past nine, and remaining there always till six and
sometimes, on account days, till nine and ten. At the same time I was
greedily reading the works of the men I worshipped most--the drama, and
the lyrical poetry of the Elizabethans; the novelists, starting with
Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett; the poets of the great revival which
ushered in the nineteenth century; and those later poets and writers,
all of whom were then living, who gave to the Victorian era its glory.
I have often thought that the youth of a later generation can hardly
realise the wealth of contemporary achievement that lay around those of
us who chanced to be born in that fortunate hour. However great, or
however greatly admired, may be the writers of a past day, they can
never speak with the quickened magic that a living master can command.
And what masters then stood there to win our worship! Tennyson in his
prime, and Browning, whose unexhausted energy had yet to give to the
world _The Ring and the Book_; Swinburne, whose new and intoxicating
music came like a voice from an undiscovered land of song; and Morris,
who in his _Defence of Guinevere_ had already found a key that was to
unlock a long-unused storehouse of legend and romance. And then, a
little later, Rossetti, mystic and passionate, whose brooding melodies
seemed to mirror in verse those “painted poems” that were wrought by his
brush; and in fiction, where Meredith had only lately arisen, there
still stood Dickens and Thackeray, George Eliot and the Brontës; and in
other fields of literature, Carlyle, Mill and Ruskin, Emerson and
Froude.
They were all our heroes then, and if Time has not left the place of all
unshaken, enough remain to form such a goodly company as no later hour
can boast. And this is so far acknowledged by the youth of a younger
generation that I find those of quickest appreciation in poetry and
fiction constantly tempted to steal my heroes and set them above their
own.
Already at school I had made acquaintance with the poems of Wordsworth,
a strange choice for a boy; and the circumstances of his life, and the
revolution which he partly headed, drew me quickly to others of the
group until all lesser admiration was finally merged in my worship of
Keats. It was only in later days that I brought myself to the study of
the poets of the intermediate time between the Elizabethans and the
close of the eighteenth century, and I will confess that even now I have
no great zest for them.
But turning aside for the moment from the things that already interested
me most, I remember being vividly impressed by some events that occurred
in the City during the period of my apprenticeship. The sudden
transition from private school to the Stock Exchange presented points of
interest that could not fail to attract a boy, even though his ambition
was otherwise engaged.
I was in the City in the year 1867, the year of the great financial
crisis which is associated with the name of Overend Gurney. The streets
and narrow lanes round about the Stock Exchange during that turbulent
time presented many picturesque sights, and within the Stock Exchange
itself were daily scenes of almost maddening excitement.
One day I waited outside a great bank, one of a seething crowd of many
hundreds, in momentary expectation that the doors would be closed, but
the minutes and the hours passed, and as four o’clock approached it
became known that the danger had been averted. Many similar scenes were
to be witnessed at that time, but, although they provided me with
excitement enough and to spare, even these vivid incidents in the career
into which I had been thrust did not induce me to swerve from the
resolution I had already secretly formed, not to remain in the City when
the days of my apprenticeship were concluded.
I think, however, that, notwithstanding the distaste I had for my work,
I performed my task zealously enough. So, indeed, it must have been, for
when I finally announced to the firm my intention to retire, one of the
partners asked me to reconsider my decision, holding out to me the
inducement that if I would remain till I was twenty-one there would be a
good prospect of my being promoted to a junior partnership.
But my choice had already been made, and I was in no mind to change it.
Still secretly nursing the thought of a literary career, it was,
nevertheless, clear to me that, for the time at any rate, I must adopt
a more definite occupation. I therefore made up my mind to study for the
Bar. My only trouble was to know how to announce this decision to my
dear father, who had spent his hardly-earned money in giving me this
first and great chance in the world, and to whom I knew the resolution
at which I had arrived would be a source of bitter disappointment and
regret.
And so, indeed, it was! But he was the widest-minded and the most
liberal-hearted of men, and, when at last I found the courage to break
it to him, he hardly allowed me to perceive the deep disappointment
which I knew he was suffering. For my own part I have never regretted
those days passed in the City, though at the time I felt them to be
barren and wasted. Perhaps I learned as much as I should have acquired
at Cambridge, though it was learning of a different sort. Some knowledge
of men I certainly gained, some knowledge also of the habit of work
which no career, however detached from business, can afford to dispense
with.
Certainly, if there had not been some such obstacle in my path, I should
not have thrown myself into the life I had chosen with the same keenness
and persistence. The opposition which these earlier years set in the way
of the calling I most wanted to pursue nerved and stiffened my
resolution. I did a prodigious amount of reading in those late nights
after the strenuous days in the City, and I think the fact that I had
broken away from the life that was laid out for me gave me a higher
courage to try and succeed in the life of my own choosing.
Already, before I had made my change of view known to my father, I had
resolved to matriculate at the London University in preparation to
becoming a student for the Bar, and, when the break came, I at once
joined the classes at University College and assisted myself further by
private tuition in several branches of knowledge which I had to take up
for examination.
Some Greek I had to learn, for I had none, a little chemistry, and then
there was my Latin, not at any time considerable, to be furbished up.
None of these things could I have done without the liberal help of my
father, for I had no resources of my own. But this liberal help was
never lacking, and I think, when his first disappointment had passed, he
became interested in furthering my new career. But the work had to be
swiftly done, for I was impatient to be upon my way, and could not have
been done in the time, in view of my meagre stock of scholastic
knowledge, if it had not been for the zealous help of those who coached
me.
By their aid I was enabled to matriculate at the London University, and
in the Honours Division, in February of the year 1870, just a month
before my twenty-first birthday. In February 1871 I obtained the First
Class in Honours in Jurisprudence and Roman Law, and in July 1871,
having already been entered as a student of the Inner Temple, I secured
the scholarship in Roman and International Law from the Council of Legal
Education. Shortly afterwards, in the year 1872, I was called to the Bar
at the Inner Temple, and with this event the period of my boyhood may be
said to have closed.