MILLAIS AND LEIGHTON
Millais was not one of those to whom I had written after the publication
of my article upon his work, and it was not till later at the Arts Club
that I learned to know him personally.
Perhaps I refrained from addressing him at the time because I was
conscious that my criticism could not be altogether agreeable to him,
and I felt that I could hardly demand any assistance in the prosecution
of my labours from one whose talent I had so severely handled.
Looking back now upon that youthful essay it seems to me, in the light
of later knowledge and appreciation, to be disfigured to an
extraordinary degree by arrogance of statement and intolerance of
judgment. My mind had been so completely captured by the innate poetical
feeling that marked the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that I was
then scarcely ready to rank at their true value the splendid powers
which Millais possessed. I could only think at the time, with something
approaching resentment, of Millais’s apparent desertion of the ideal
that inspired his earlier efforts, and I was not able to perceive that,
in the line of development which he had followed, he was only
conforming with absolute loyalty to the natural bent of his genius.
It was the accident of youth which set him for a while under the
influence of men of a deeper spiritual tendency, and it was not his
fault, nor indeed our misfortune, that when the period of youth had
passed he should have applied himself with ever-increasing earnestness
to the development of those gifts in portraiture and in landscape which
have left him pre-eminent among the painters of our school.
At the time I was not able to judge fairly of the causes which led to
his ultimate desertion of those earlier ideals, and I could only
remember with a regret, too harshly expressed, that we were no longer to
expect of him another “Huguenot” or “Ophelia,” or to welcome again from
his hand such achievements as the “Carpenter’s Shop” or the “Feast of
Lorenzo.”
But a knowledge of the man himself very speedily enabled me to take a
juster view of his place as a painter. There are artists in every line,
in literature as well as in painting, whose personality does not
willingly associate itself with their work. This was certainly true of
Browning, who would seem in social intercourse to be almost perversely
desirous of enabling you to forget that he was a poet, and it was true
no less of Millais, who rather sought by preference in his leisure hours
the companionship of men who were not concerned with the art he
professed.
Millais had about him, as I first recall him, and retained to the end of
his life, even in the days that
[Illustration: THE FINDING OF MOSES BY PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER.
From _Lays of the Holy Land_.
By Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.
Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.
(Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.)
_By permission of Messrs. James Nisbet and Co., Ltd._
_To face page 87._
]
were passed under the shadow of a mortal sickness, a delightful buoyancy
of character that was enchaining and infectious. In his view of his own
art there was occasionally something of the victorious arrogance of a
school-boy who has lately carried off the first prize, an arrogance that
was nevertheless consistent with a deep modesty of character that showed
itself in his reverent attitude towards nature, where he was ever ready
to admit that he had found his rival and his master.
As far as my own experience of him went, he was never very eager to
discuss the work of his contemporaries, although he could be amply
generous on occasion towards the earlier experiments of younger men.
When he referred to the works of the older masters it seemed to me that
there was something of defiant challenge in his tone, as though he were
ready to do battle with any one of them in his own person and in his own
painting.
Of the men with whom his career had been so closely linked in the
earlier days of his studentship he spoke but little, but even in the
little that he said I always felt there was an underlying conviction on
his part that, as a painter, he had easily outstripped them all. And
perhaps he was right. That, at least, was Rossetti’s opinion, as I have
already stated, nor is it possible, I think, in fairly reviewing the art
of his time, not to set Millais, in virtue of his powers as a mere
craftsman, in a place beyond the reach of rivalry.
It was difficult at the period when I first made Millais’s acquaintance
to realise that the earlier stages of his career had sometimes yielded
periods of deep depression, and yet it is only necessary to turn to his
own letters, written in the earlier part of the year 1859, to realise
how, for a while at least, discouragement sat heavily upon him. And it
is no less characteristic to note how swiftly that darker mood passed,
for in the letter dated May 16 of that same year he says, “I have now
enough commissions to last me all next year, so I am quite happy.” And
then a little later, though he had received no vote at the Academy
election, he adds in his characteristically confident temper, “It’s
really a matter of entire indifference to me, as my position is as good
as any except Landseer’s, and this they too well know.”
The charm of Millais’s nature, with its swift alternation between
absolute confidence in his own powers--in the form of its expression
sometimes verging upon harmless arrogance--and those rarer moods of
discouragement and self-abasement, was aptly imaged in his person and
bearing. I have been told by one who knew him in his youth that he had
the beauty of an Adonis, and even in the year 1875, when I first met
him, his appearance was singularly handsome and attractive.
The frankness of his outlook upon the world was aptly mirrored in his
face--eyes that were keen yet kindly, and a mouth delicately sensitive
for all its firmness, forming the essential features in a countenance
that could not fail to win both sympathy and regard.
Occasionally in walking home with him from the Club he would tell me
something of the men he had known well in an earlier period of his life,
but for the most part it was not especially of painters that he spoke.
Talking in this way of Thackeray and Dickens, and other notabilities of
their time, he remarked to me that “the greatest gentleman of them all
was John Leech”; and then, for a quarter of an hour or more, he ran on
in affectionate appreciation of the great caricaturist, enlarging upon
the extraordinary fascination and charm of his manner and the delicate
refinement of his nature.
When the time came for the gathered exhibition of his work in the
Grosvenor Gallery, I saw Millais more often and more intimately. Day by
day, as Hallé and I were engaged in arranging the pictures upon the
walls, Millais would come in with his short wooden pipe in his mouth and
wander round examining the rich record of his own career; sometimes
elated to the verge of enthusiasm, and sometimes as frankly confessing
his own dissatisfaction with this work or that. Taking me by the arm one
day he drew me round the room, and pausing before the “Knight Errant” he
said:
“You know, Carr, as I look at these things there are some of them which
seem to say to me, ‘Millais, you’re a fine painter,’ and this is
one”--pointing as he spoke to the beautiful picture before us--“and
there are others,” he added, his tones suddenly changing from triumph to
dejection, “that tell me just as plainly, ‘Millais, you’re a damned
vulgar fellow!’ Oh, but there are!” he cried, as though anticipating my
polite protest. “If you don’t believe me, look at that,” and he pointed
to a picture I need not now name, but which he looked at with unfeigned
resentment and disgust.
There was one little incident connected with that exhibition which I
shall not readily forget. After many efforts, at first unsuccessful, we
had at last persuaded the owner of “The Huguenot” to lend it for the
occasion; but this favourable answer to our request only reached us when
the rest of the exhibition was already arranged. It so chanced that
Millais had not seen the picture since the year 1852 when it was
painted, and he was therefore particularly anxious that it should be
included in the exhibition.
It was late in the evening when the picture arrived in its case from
Preston; but Millais had waited, evidently in some trepidation as to how
this first triumph of his youth would impress him when he saw it again.
Its place had been reserved on the wall, and the carpenters, quickly
unscrewing the case, held up the picture for the painter to see.
Millais was standing beside me as they hurried forward in their work,
and I felt his arm tremble on my shoulder during the few moments that
prefaced its appearance; and then, when at last it was raised to its
place, he said in a voice that was half broken by emotion, “Well, well,
not so damned bad for a youngster.” And lighting his little wooden pipe
hurried out of the Gallery and took his way downstairs into the street.
In later days we met constantly in the card-room at the Garrick, and as
we both lived in Kensington it happened often that we used to walk
homeward together. Sometimes I would come across him in the daytime
strolling in Kensington Gardens, and I remember one snowy Sunday in
winter when I had carelessly said to him, “How ugly snow is!” Millais
turned to me with sudden vehemence and said, “Carr, how can you say
that? Nothing in nature is ugly.” And I think to him it was as he said.
I know at the time I was forcibly reminded of a phrase used by Constable
which betrays the same unfailing faith in nature. “There is nothing,”
said the earlier painter, “either beautiful or ugly but light and shade
makes it so.”
The power of selection in the facts he chose to render was never among
the strongest of Millais’s artistic gifts; perhaps to him the need of it
seemed not so great as to others. His mastery in the rendering of every
aspect of reality, a mastery exercised with impartial regard upon the
facts of human form or the complex growth of outward nature, was so
complete, and so completely enjoyed, that he had scarcely the
inclination to reject any one part of the subject presented to him in
favour of another.
His art knew little preference, and for that reason it often lacked the
higher sense of composition that painters, differently though perhaps
not so greatly gifted, can command for their work. And so it was that
the spiritual appeal of his painting varied extraordinarily according to
the degree in which the theme had inspired him, and even more according
to the measure of support which he received from the chosen model before
his eyes.
And yet, to the last, that inspiration, when it came, could summon,
almost undimmed, all that concentrated power in the rendering of life,
animate and inanimate, that had set so clear a stamp upon those
beautiful paintings of the period of his youth.
Lovable I think he was in an extraordinary degree to all who were
brought in contact with him, and I know for my own part that as I knew
him more, I was the more attracted by his personality. At the last, as
he lay dying in Palace Gate, he sent a message to say he would like to
see me, but when I reached the house his son greeted me at the door with
the sad verdict that it was too late. Already the hand of Death was upon
him: within a few hours he had passed away.
There is one element of Millais’s painting which, I think, has never
received a full measure of appreciation. Apart from his superb gifts as
a painter, he possessed a distinctive mastery in the rendering of
certain phases of human emotion that has left him without a rival among
the living or the dead. His fine powers as a draughtsman enabled him to
press into a single face a quality of sentiment that, by reason of its
exquisite delicacy of expression, was saved from the reproach of any
sentimentalism.
The desire to capture this deeper beauty in character lay always
resident in his nature, but it needed the inspiration of some rarer type
of feminine loveliness to quicken it into life. In this sense Millais
was to some extent, as I have said, at the mercy of his model, but when
that model served him well--as in the case of “The Huguenots” and
“Ophelia”--the result yields an image of some indefinable beauty in
human character that adds to his innate gifts as a realist a deeper and
more passionate truth.
[Illustration: THE HUGUENOT
From the picture by Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.
_By permission of Messrs. Methuen and
Messrs. Henry Graves and Co._
_To face page 92._
]
It would be difficult to cite any other master of our school, or indeed
of any school, who possessed this special power in quite the same
degree. Reynolds and Gainsborough have left examples in the region of
female portraiture that render in almost matchless perfection the
permanent facts of gentle character; and the different kinds of beauty
which they have saved for us bear the unmistakable stamp of a type that
is national as well as individual.
But with Millais, whose art no less than theirs rests finally upon this
power of interpreting individual features, there was sometimes added,
when the model and the subject combined to inspire him, this finer grace
of delicate and tender feeling which no one of his predecessors could
command. Though not a constant quality of his art, it reappeared from
time to time during the whole of his career. He never parted with it as
he had parted with that earlier quality of design, which he had only
shared for a while with men to whom it was all in all. Though
intermittent in its manifestation, it remained with him to the end, and
constituted a rare attribute of his art which belonged to him by right
of nature and belonged to him alone. It was the appreciation of this
quality which caused Watts to write to him in 1878 in regard to “The
Bride of Lammermoor,” which had received a decoration in Paris: “Lucy
Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” And what is true here
is true in a supreme degree of the face of the lady in “The Huguenots”
and the face of “Ophelia.”
The contrast between Millais and Leighton, both as regards individual
character and the character of their art, was as striking as could be
presented by two men of the same generation.
Millais’s manner was spontaneous, careless, and buoyant; Leighton was
ever graceful and courteous, but never quite without the sense of
conscious and deliberate effort. I remember an Italian painter who had
been his friend for many years saying to me one day, “Leighton wills to
be a good fellow,” and I think the criticism that is here conveyed very
aptly describes, or suggests, a certain feeling of constraint that was
always to be felt in Leighton’s companionship.
Despite all his accomplishments and grace he left the impression that he
was never quite at ease, and as though he felt that that must be the
plight of others as well as himself he seemed to be constantly striving
to rid his companion of an embarrassment which was often only his own.
The essential difference between the two men was made very manifest by
an incident that occurred at a dinner given by the Arts Club to
celebrate Leighton’s election as President of the Royal Academy.
Leighton’s speech, of course, was expected to be the speech of the
evening, and so in a sense it was. But Leighton never spoke without the
polished preparation of every word, and though his gifts as an orator
were conspicuous, there was always, even upon the happiest occasion, a
sense of something artificial in his aptly chosen phrases; and on the
evening of which I am thinking, the fact of his being fast bound and
fettered by a string of carefully forged and graceful sentences proved
disastrous to the speaker.
Before Leighton rose to make his acknowledgment of the compliment that
had been paid to him, Millais had his part in the programme to
discharge, and although he could never boast any considerable gifts as a
speaker, there was a directness and simplicity in his utterances that
placed his audience in quick sympathy with the man.
When I complimented him afterwards he replied, “Yes, my boy, but you see
I had a story to tell.”
And so he had; but that was not the whole secret of the great impression
he made upon his hearers that evening, for though the story was simple
enough in itself, it was told with such genuine feeling and with such
frank revelation of his own character that it moved his audience not a
little.
He recalled a day of his youth when he had been summoned by Mr.
Thackeray, who lay ill in bed, to receive some instructions for designs
that Millais was making for the _Cornhill Magazine_. The business ended,
Mr. Thackeray turned to him and said:
“Millais, my boy, you must look to your laurels. There’s a young fellow
in Rome called Leighton who is making prodigious strides in his art. He
speaks every European language, and is an accomplished musician as well.
If I’m not mistaken that young man will one day be President of the
Royal Academy.”
And then Millais turned to us, and in words of the simplest candour
confessed that Mr. Thackeray’s prophecy had somewhat hurt him--“For I
will own,” he said, “that at that time, with the ambition of a boy, I
cherished the hope that _I_ might some day be President of the Royal
Academy.” And then after a pause he added, “But now, looking back, I can
say, ‘Mr. Thackeray, you were right, and the right man has been
chosen.’”
It is not easy to convey the effect which that speech made upon the
crowded audience, most of whom were artists, but the depth of the
impression was shortly realised when Leighton rose to respond.
It would have been impossible for any speaker born to his task to have
followed Millais without betraying in response a sensibility to those
deeper chords of feeling which his simple words had touched. But
Leighton was incapable of resuming the unfinished melody Millais had so
finely tuned; incapable by his habit and temperament of discarding what
he had prepared; and so it happened that the discourse he delivered,
though no less perfect and polished than was his wont, left his audience
gravely disappointed and wholly unmoved.
Of Leighton I had also written in those earlier articles in a manner
perhaps that showed too little consideration for his great gifts and
great accomplishments, but he was characteristically courteous in his
reply to my request for some particulars of the days of his studentship,
and the pains he had evidently taken to assist me as far as he could in
the project I had in hand bears strong witness to that ungrudging demand
he always made upon himself when any duty came before him. He wrote:
[Illustration:
_Hollyer_
LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A.
From the painting by G. F. WATTS, in the National Portrait Gallery.
_To face page 96._
]
_Thursday, Nov. 27, 1873._
DEAR SIR--I should have answered your letter sooner had I been more
master of my time. I am divided between my readiness to serve you
and my embarrassment as to how to satisfy your request concerning
my past life of which you already possess the outline. I find on
looking at _Men of the Time_ that the facts there given under my
name are copied from the _Illustrated London News_, to which I
furnished some such skeleton to accompany the customary portrait on
my election to membership in the Royal Academy. They are accurate,
barring misprints, such as calling my old friend Robert Fleury,
Robert Henry. I hardly know what I can add without egotistic
display to this account of a life in which, whilst there has been,
and, as I hope, still is, steady growth and development, there had
been no peripateia.
I scarcely have any earlier recollection than a passionate wish and
a firm purpose to be an artist, and having become one, I have never
failed or swerved from my deep desire to leave behind me something
in Art which should be not ignoble in its aim, and in which Form
and Style, the highest attributes of Form, should be chiefly
sought, and I may own to a hope, which has not been much fed by
experience, that I might in some degree disseminate my artistic
faith in this country where the seed is little and the soil rocky,
and where what is to me vital and essential in Art is generally
either repudiated or held a matter of obsolete dilettantism.
The only apparent change in my work, the change from mediævalism to
classicism, is in reality no change but only a development.
The love of mediævalism, the youth of Art, which is almost
invariably found in youths, was strengthened and nourished in me
partly by an early love for Florence and Tuscan art in which all
grace is embodied, and partly by the example of my master Steinle,
for whom I had, and have retained, a great reverence, and who was
fervently mediæval. For a long time I treated none but subjects
from the Italian Middle Ages--going to history, Dante, Boccaccio,
and preferring in Shakespeare the Italian plays. (I have sometimes
wondered, by the bye, that the atmosphere of Faust and the
Niebelungen Lied and the worship of Cornelius, in which, as a
German student, I lived for many years, should really have left so
little mark on my work.)
By degrees, however, my growing love for Form made me intolerant of
the restraint and exigencies of costume, and led me more and more,
and finally, to a class of subjects, or, more accurately, to a set
of conditions, in which supreme scope is left to pure artistic
qualities, in which no form is imposed upon the artist by the
tailor, but in which every form is made obedient to the conception
of the design he has in hand. These conditions classic subjects
afford, and as vehicles, therefore, of abstract form, which is a
thing not of one time but of all time, these subjects can never be
obsolete, and though to many they are a dead letter, they can never
be an anachronism.
But you did not ask me for a profession of faith. You see,
meanwhile, that though shifted to another channel the stream of my
artistic life has remained the same.
The dominant personal influence of my early development is that of
my dear master Steinle, under whom I worked at Frankfort for
several years. His stamp is still upon me, and I owe him a debt of
gratitude for guidance, restraint, and upholding in the search of
whatever is elevated, and for example of steadfastness and
singleness of heart which I cannot ever repay.
One word more in candour. I have written these few lines because,
unless my memory deceives me, you have written about Art with a
sense at least of its place and dignity--a grace too rare amongst
English critics; but I do not therefore accept entire solidarity
with your standpoint, with which in some respects I am much at
variance.
If there is any special point concerning which you care to inquire
I shall be happy to answer.--I am, dear sir, faithfully yours,
FRED LEIGHTON.
_P.S._--Having lived much abroad during my young years, the years
when one is wax, I have been in turn, thoroughly and sincerely, an
Italian artist, a German artist, and a French artist. I need not
say that, though every man is of a nation (and I am most
emphatically an Englishman), all Art _intentionally_ national is an
error to my thinking. But I think I have gained in balance and
insight by my varied experience.
It is not possible to question the justice of this brief record of his
aims in Art with which Leighton so courteously supplied me, and that he
never swerved from his fidelity to those aims may be generously
acknowledged even by those who were never deeply moved by his painting.
If he failed to reach the goal towards which he was ever striving, it
was from no lack of persistent purpose or earnest faith; and the courage
and devotion which he exhibited in his life as an artist were no less
manifest in the discharge of every duty which his high official position
called upon him to perform.
I was an occasional visitor to his studio for many years after this
first introduction to him in 1873, but I cannot boast of ever having
been, in any true sense of the word, his friend. To my temperament he
was a man easy to know, but difficult to know well; of unfailing
kindness in any service demanded of him, but with no quick link of
sympathy to encourage a closer intimacy.
Gifted with an appearance at once imposing and picturesque, it was
impossible not to agree with Millais that the choice of the Academy when
they elected him as their President was rightly made. For all the
official duties that are attached to that office he was admirably
equipped, but it was difficult in ordinary converse to feel that he had
ever quite thrown off his official garb.
Even in those earlier days, before he became President, he was apt in
his hearing to convey the feeling that he was playing a part. His mind
seemed always to move in some carefully chosen raiment which it was
impossible for his nature ever wholly to discard.
As he said in the postscript of his letter, “I have been in turn
thoroughly and sincerely an Italian artist, a German artist, and a
French artist”; and so in his life he was in turn thoroughly and
sincerely either a polished member of society or the careless Bohemian.
I remember once noticing him in the stalls of the Palais-Royal Theatre
in Paris habited in a brown velveteen jacket, and suggesting to me that
he was in this way resuming the days of his studentship in the Quartier
Latin. His appearance on that evening seemed to me a little
characteristic of the man. But among the many phases of his varied life,
the sense of his personality as an artist was always uppermost; and
however distinguished might be the throng of fashionable visitors who
filled his studio, the entry of any one who had any call upon him as an
artist would at once claim his attention.
To his older friends I know he was untiring in his devotion, and one of
them once told me that at a little Christmas party in a remote quarter
of London to which he had been bidden, nearly all the other guests kept
away by reason of a severe snowstorm, but that Leighton turned up
faithful to his appointment, having walked all the way from Kensington
to keep his engagement.