1874
THE BLACK OPAL
“Ibam forte viâ sacrâ, sicut meus est mos,
Nescio quid meditans nugarum, totus in illis,
Accurrit quidam.”
Horace, Sat. I. 9.
One fine day at the end of April I was walking down the “sacred
street” of St. James, as usual thinking of I know not what trifles,
utterly absorbed in them, when I felt a tap upon my shoulder. I turned
round—Gloster, by all that was unexpected! Colonel Gloster, to whom I
had bidden farewell at Point de Galle nine years before! It was a happy
meeting, and we stopped to chat for a moment, but he had a business
appointment, so we agreed that he should come to dinner with me in my
rooms in Victoria Street that evening. As we parted I said: “What a pity
that Overbeck should not be in England! We could have such a delightful
talk over the days of the Lion’s Den on board the _Simla_!” I hailed a
hansom and trotted off to order dinner: on my table was Overbeck’s card!
“Only in London for two days—when and where can I see you?” I lost no
time in going to look him up; found him by great good luck, and so it
happened that we three came together again on that April day after nine
long and strenuous years, during which neither of us had met, though we
had corresponded fitfully.
Overbeck came to dinner in morning clothes, as he had parted somehow with
his heavy luggage, and I noticed that he had a curious stone, unknown to
me, mounted as a pin in his cravat. I asked what it was. “A black opal,”
was the answer. I had lately been hearing all sorts of tales about the
bad luck which opals are supposed to bring. White opals he admitted
were known to be unlucky, but the black opal, on the contrary, was the
luckiest of stones. He insisted that I must buy one, and promised to call
the next morning and go with me to hunt for one.
We spent a merry evening; in the discussion of the happenings of nine
years there was much to ask and much to tell, for we had all three led
pretty busy lives in the interval, and it was late when we separated,
wondering over the chance that had so strangely brought us together again.
The following morning Overbeck turned up, quite determined that I must
go and buy a black opal, as to which my enthusiasm had had time to wane
during the night; however, he would take no denial, and so off we went to
my old friend, Mr. Phillips, in Cockspur Street, the man who was really
the first to introduce the artistic feeling of the sixteenth century
into the modern jewellers’ craft. He was a man of the most consummate
taste and culture, qualities repeated with additional intensity in his
distinguished son, Sir Claude, the great critic, the accuracy of whose
judgment and historical knowledge in all that concerns the fine arts is
undisputed.
I knew that the best chance of finding anything a little out of the way
would be in Mr. Phillips’ hands, and so it proved to be, for he at once
showed me the gem that I wanted, mounted as a pin with tiny sparks of
diamonds round it. He told me that he had shown it to the Prince of Wales
and the Duke of Edinburgh; both admired its beauty, but neither of them
would buy it, on account of the evil reputation of the white opal.
It was a strange, weird stone, with a mysterious spark of fire in the
centre, which seemed to gleam fitfully, almost capriciously. Overbeck
looked at it for a moment, trembling with excitement, and then hissed in
my ear: “Buy it! Buy it! It surely brings you luck.” I laughed at his
eagerness, but I bought the pin for its beauty’s sake. As we left the
shop Overbeck, who was greatly excited, stopped on the threshold, and
said: “In ten days you’ll get a letter, mark my words; in ten days, more
or less.” We parted in Cockspur Street and he went abroad that evening.
I went home, delighted with my pretty new toy, and thought nothing more
about the famous letter which I was to receive, when on the evening
of the 9th of May, exactly ten days from the visit to Mr. Phillips, I
received the following note:
“10, Downing Street, Whitehall. May 9th, —74.
“DEAR MR. MITFORD,
“If you like to become Secretary to the Board of Works I shall
have pleasure in appointing you.
“Faithfully yours,
B. DISRAELI.
“Bertram Mitford, Esq.”
That letter changed the whole course of my life.
I wrote and congratulated Overbeck on his prophetic powers. His answer
was, “You will get anything you wish.”
One night at a party I told my future wife, Lady Clementine Ogilvy, the
story, and when three months later we were betrothed, I sought all over
London for a black opal for her, but there was not one to be had; the
fame of my stone had somehow or other been spread abroad and everybody
was mad to buy its fellow. When she went to Paris with her mother,
trousseau buying, I commissioned her to hunt for a black opal, which she
did, and brought home a beautiful specimen which she still has—and on the
day that she bought it I concluded the purchase of the house in Chelsea,
where we were to spend so many happy years.
We are old folk now, the ink of Dizzy’s note, which I treasure, has faded
almost into nothingness, and my poor black opal was stolen some seven
years ago by burglars—but not before it had well and truly done its
appointed work.
We were married on the 31st of December, 1874, in the little chapel of
Cortachy Castle. Had the wedding been fixed for a day later there would
have been no bridegroom, for all the trains in Scotland were held up by
a terrific blizzard, and the New Year’s hampers were looted to feed the
passengers, who were starved with cold and hunger.
At the wedding breakfast I told the story of the black opal to the
late Lord Southesk, a famous collector of gnostic gems, perhaps sharing
Bartolommeo Scala’s belief in the mystic virtues of precious stones. “Ah!
wonderful!” he said. “How little we know about the influence of gems!
Perhaps——” Someone interrupted, and to my regret he was prevented from
finishing the sentence. People said it was a very pretty wedding—and so
it must have been, in that glorious old castle with the richly-wooded
river Esk running under its walls, as it had done for seven centuries—but
a bridegroom, I take it, does not see much on his wedding-day.
There was a goodly company—chiefly neighbours from such places as Glamis,
Kinnaird, Kinnordy, Kinblethmont, Balnaboth. Many Ogilvys and Stanleys,
and an army of tenants and retainers. The host looked every inch a scion
of the old Mormaers of Scotland, and the stately châtelaine, at whose
hands the venerable home had received such loving care, proudly did the
honours, a queen among her guests. The sun shone out gaily after the
storm, the wild skirl of many bagpipes screamed in the courtyard, pibroch
followed by pibroch, as we made ready to drive through the bright, crisp
air to Airlie Castle. That was indeed a romantic setting for a honeymoon,
and never looked more beautiful than during those sharp winter days. The
river was almost entirely frozen over, and on one great ice-block was
a dead salmon, half eaten by the otter which had dragged it there; the
trees were heavily laden, snow-icicles sparkling with all the colours
of the rainbow; the red sandstone walls of the bonnie House of Airlie
glowing in the sun—winter in all its glory.
1875
The honeymoon was cut very short, for at the end of five days I was
summoned south. There was trouble at the Office of Works, and I must
perforce get back into harness with all speed. And so we bade good-bye to
Airlie Castle and the year 1874. It had been for me a bright and a joyous
year, in which there had not been an hour that was not full of hope, and
of happiness which is the child of hope.
For a few months, while our house in Chelsea was getting ready for us, we
camped in my old quarters in Victoria Street. We had a bright welcome
there, for my dear old friend, Sir Joseph Hooker, had made the rooms gay
with flowers, and the dinginess of London was left outside.
On the 3rd of July we migrated into our new home at Chelsea, a delightful
house looking over the river, carrying up and down with the tide the
brown-sailed barges and all its picturesque movement, with the famous
green copper spire of Battersea Church across the water, and the
delightful old wooden bridge, now vanished, which has been immortalized
in Whistler’s etchings and nocturnes and harmonies. At the time when
Chelsea was “a village of palaces” Lindsey House had seen better days.
It was built on part of the site occupied by Sir Thomas More’s country
place, a site full of memories of the great Chancellor and Erasmus and
Anne Roper. Here Holbein, introduced by Erasmus, lived until he had
painted the portraits of his host and hostess and the whole family, down
to Patenson the jester and the little dog.
Then came a day when Sir Thomas, prudent man, seeing that there was
nothing left to paint, began to think that a tame artist was an expensive
luxury. How to get rid of him decently? The Chancellor was a man of
resource. He gave a great garden-party which the King announced his
intention of honouring. Up the river came the royal barge, with banners
flying and trumpets braying, a brave pageant. At Chelsea the King
alighted, and was received with all due honour just outside my house that
was to be. Old Sir John Tyrrell—a famous character at the Carlton Club
some fifty years ago, used to say: “Yes! I’ll go and stay with you on two
conditions; first, that I breakfast at my own time, and secondly that I
am not taken round to see the improvements.” Sir Thomas More spared King
Henry VIII. none of the “improvements.” When with royal courtesy he had
admired the outside, His Majesty was taken within, and there, like the
great judge that he was, he was smitten by the beauty of the glorious
canvases and panels which hung everywhere. “Is such a painter yet alive,
and to be had for money?” he exclaimed, and Holbein was produced out of
a closet in which he lay hidden. The King was overjoyed. The painter’s
fortune was made and the Chancellor’s weekly bills were reduced.
Next, in Charles II.’s time, all the way from St. Martin’s Lane came Sir
Theodore Mayerne, the confidential doctor of three kings, and he too
was a patron of art, for he set up a furnace and worked at enamelling
with Petitot the Swiss miniaturist, the excellence of whose flesh tints
are said to have been due to the discoveries of the great medicine-man.
When Sir Theodore died his house was pulled down and Lord Lindsey bought
the property and built himself a home with the river in front and a
garden at the back. There is some reason, based upon internal evidence,
for supposing that Sir Christopher Wren may have been the architect.
There are still remaining some of those ogival chimney-pieces such as
he introduced into Hampton Court; and what more likely than that the
famous Court architect should have built for the hereditary Lord Great
Chamberlain? Here dwelt his descendant, the Duke of Ancaster, with his
beautiful duchess, whose portrait was painted both by Hudson and by a
famous pupil of his, one Sir Joshua Reynolds. The beautiful portrait by
Hudson, with shipping in the distance, was painted to record the mission
of the Duchess when she went to Germany to bring back Queen Charlotte.
To the Ancasters succeeded Count Zinzendorf, chief of the Herrenhuters,
whose burial-ground was at the back where the Moravian preacher’s pulpit
was not so very long ago still to be seen—indeed perhaps it may be there
yet. After that the glory of the great house departed. It was divided
into five and was known as Lindsey Row. In the first of these in 1874
lived Whistler, in the next, which had once been owned by Martin the
painter, the illustrator of Milton, dwelt a Mr. Boggett, a great grower
of chrysanthemums; then came Mr. Nassau Senior, who married the beautiful
and charming sister of Tom Hughes (“Tom Brown’s School-days”), and the
last two were empty. Those two I bought and threw into one with the help
of Mr. Devey the architect. And here we lived for many happy years.
If in London the last person with whom you are likely to make
acquaintance is the man who is living next door to you, in Chelsea it was
quite different; we were very neighbourly; the Nassau Seniors were most
friendly—she, unfortunately a great invalid, hardly leaving her sofa, but
always a ray of sunshine, brightening all the lives with which she came
in contact; as for Whistler, he was perpetually in and out of our house,
and always welcome for the spirit of fun and devilry which he brought
with him. He would come in of a morning with a whole budget of papers,
letters, of which many were afterwards published in “The Gentle Art of
Making Enemies,” which he would read out to us, exploding with laughter
over his own witticisms. It was generally at some “art patron” that he
loved to gird—the owner of the famous blue room being a favourite victim.
There was one batch of correspondence, however, which was never made
public—with eating appetite had come, and in these letters Whistler
had fed himself to bursting-point. The law of libel stopped even his
mouth, and only a very small number of friends was allowed to listen to
those masterpieces of demoniacal satire. It was an unfortunate thing
for art that during his life-time—except so far as his etchings were
concerned—Whistler’s genius was not recognized. The result was that many
of his finest paintings were destroyed. His financial difficulties were
no secret.
On one occasion, I went to see him and found him boiling over with anger
surrounded by masterpieces which he had just cut to ribbons in a storm
of mad fury lest they should fall into the hands of the bailiffs; and
all for a miserable debt of thirty pounds, which, for the moment, he was
unable to pay. There they lay in strips—portraits, nocturnes, harmonies,
symphonies, gems which now, after a lapse of from thirty to forty years,
would be worth many thousand pounds. Any one of his friends would have
lent him the money over and over again, but he was as proud as Lucifer,
the devil entered his soul, and the art tragedy was consummated. The blow
hit me cruelly, for he had just finished a beautiful portrait of my wife;
what it must have meant for Whistler himself nobody ever knew; but when
he cooled down among the ruins it must have been misery, for he was as
confident as Thucydides himself of the value of his own work. But how
lucky it was that neither the Mother nor the Carlyle were included in
that massacre of the innocents—surely two of the most reverent portraits
that genius ever produced.
Whistler’s hospitality was great—his Sunday luncheons (breakfasts he
called them) were perfect; he had an excellent cook, who, with her
husband, made up the household, and there were constant little surprise
dishes over which he would chuckle and linger till late in the afternoon;
as Amphitryon, he was the embodiment of human happiness—sitting at
the head of his table dispensing quaint cates and still quainter
sayings—barbed arrows sometimes—he was a sight for gods and men; the
talk was always good, for he had the knack of surrounding himself with
all manner of clever people—but, as was once told of Kinglake, no matter
how many good things might be said, his were sure to be the best. The
lightning flashes of his wit—his epigrams—were matchless. They were like
the sting in the tail of his emblematic butterfly, an insect unknown to
mere vulgar entomologists.
I once or twice met Oscar Wilde there, and a set-to between that big
fat man and the little gnome-like Whistler was certainly good to listen
to—but the lightweight always carried off the belt. Charles Keene, whose
black and white sketches for _Punch_ were Whistler’s admiration, was a
frequent guest. He was a tall, solemn-looking Don Quixote who used to
wander through the suburbs dressed as a _rapin_ should be in a loose
jacket and slouch hat, with a black cutty pipe always in his mouth, and a
satchel hanging from his shoulders. He had a dry, racy humour of his own,
which worked in well with the salad of wit at the table.
One day the conversation turned on health and nostrums; “Well,” said Don
Quixote, “I think that if a man is ill there is only one thing for him
to do; he must give up smoking for a fortnight.” “Yes! but supposing
he don’t smoke?” asked I. “Then I don’t know what he is to do.” Having
uttered these words with pious gravity Charles Keene retired behind his
pipe and once more became a listener.
There was another very agreeable scoundrel, the sort of man who has done
everything and been everywhere, a capital foil to the others. But one
fine day he disappeared. Whistler had found him out. There are not a
few men of that sort who contrive to make a living in some way out of
art and artists. But they seldom last long. I shall never forget that
man’s account of the recovery of Rossetti’s poems. When his wife died
the great artist in his misery had laid the MS. in her coffin as a last
loving gift—they were hers, he said, and she should keep them. Always
being urged to regain them, he in the end yielded. The needful authority
was obtained, and in the dead of night Rossetti with a friend went to the
cemetery. The coffin was exhumed and opened, the lovely hair which his
paintings had made famous rippled out in waves. The MS. all stained with
the horrors of death, lying on her bosom, was reverently secured and the
coffin fastened down again. A weird story, but the poems were saved.
There came a day when, to my great regret, Whistler made up his mind to
leave the old house in which he had lived for eleven years and to build
the “White House” in Tite Street, mainly prompted, as he told me, by
the wish to show what he could achieve in decoration. E. W. Godwin was
the architect and it was not long before they quarrelled over the work,
in commemoration of which Whistler caused a stone to be inserted in the
front of the house, engraved with the words, “Except the Lord build the
house, they labour in vain that build it—E. W. Godwin F.S.A. built this
house.” The stone has long since disappeared. Godwin died in 1886 and in
1888 Whistler married his widow. A quaint ending to an artistic feud.
Unlike the great plagiarist Oscar Wilde, Whistler was always original.
He was himself, he imitated nobody. The other man, brilliantly clever
as he undoubtedly was, never hesitated to copy. Both were startling and
audacious in their dress; but Whistler in his long coat, playing with a
slender Wanghai cane as tall as himself, his little white plume standing
up in the midst of his black, or blackened, hair, was unlike anything or
anybody else. He was delicate, playful, whimsical, a creature of fancy.
Wilde, the last time I saw him, was got up like a low-comedy caricature
of a Tom and Jerry “Corinthian.” That day he was minded to be Georgian,
and was swaggering in the King’s Road dressed in a brown frogged coat,
trimmed with cheap fur; on his head was an extravagant hat with a brim as
much curled as the roof of a Chinese pagoda; the size and flatness of his
huge splay feet were accentuated by being forced out of a pair of tight
trousers carefully strapped over a pair of aggressively varnished boots;
Whistler might be vain, but it was the vanity of Puck. The other man was
Caliban.
When Whistler made his famous answer, “Why drag in Velasquez?” he was in
his sly way laughing at himself, just as he was full of malicious fun
when on somebody praising Leighton’s versatility as musician, linguist,
orator and what not, he said, “Paints a little too sometimes, don’t he?”
How came so bright an elf, so gay, so mischievous, into the world? He
must have been a changeling brought by some wanton sprite straight from
the realm of King Oberon.
Lindsey Row, with all its traditions, soon became absorbed into Cheyne
Walk, and the very name would have been forgotten and lost had I not had
the audacity to call my two-fifths of the old building Lindsey House.
A little further to the east, past the quaint old church so full of
ancient monuments and thoughts that were sermons in themselves, was the
home of Thomas Carlyle. He and his wife had been friends of my family
and of my wife’s for many years, and when I went to live in Chelsea he
sent to bid me go and see him. Having known him from childhood I was not
afraid of him as most people were, though of Mrs. Carlyle I used to stand
in considerable awe; but she had now been dead eight years, and the old
wise man was always kind and gentle to me. So I often used to go and see
him on Sunday afternoon when he sat in his dressing-gown in the little
room at the back, smoking his long churchwarden, and he even allowed me
to light a cigar—a rare privilege, I was told—for, as a rule, in that
sanctum nobody might smoke but himself.
Sometimes he would put away his pipe, don his long brown coat and
soft wide-awake hat, grasp his cudgel and come out for a walk on the
Embankment or in Battersea Park. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a great
friend of Carlyle’s and afterwards his executor, was a pretty frequent
companion on these Sunday walks. During these outings Carlyle used to
cross-examine me about Japan, which greatly excited his curiosity. He
made me very proud once by saying that he had “read my ‘Tales of Old
Japan’ from Alpha to Omega.” He did not like the stories; there was too
much blood and murder in them—but that was not my fault—at any rate, I
felt that to have been read “from Alpha to Omega” by Carlyle was a bright
feather in my cap. Occasionally, if the weather was bad, Carlyle would go
for what he called his drive. This meant taking the omnibus in the King’s
Road as far as the Bank and coming back in a return bus. I only once bore
him company on one of these expeditions, but it was a memorable occasion.
It was at the time of the Bulgarian atrocities when Mr. Gladstone was
goading the country into fury with his eloquence, till Delane once said
to me, “Upon my word I verily believe that Gladstone thinks that Dizzy
himself had a hand in those outrages upon women and children.” Carlyle
was as hot upon the subject as Gladstone himself. When we got into the
omnibus the old man began lashing out. “Hoo! Sir!” he said, “there’s
that Disraeli or Beaconsfield, or whatever he chooses to call himself;
he thinks himself the wisest man on earth, and he’s just the foolishest
thing that crawls upon the face of it”—and so he went off at score,
rattling out the most fantastic invective against the Tory Government
and “the unspeakable Turk”; accusations to make one’s hair stand on end,
for he was as great an artist in adjectives as Dizzy himself—witness the
“sea-green incorruptible” and the “French Revolution” _passim_—and when
he had spent himself in his indignation, real or feigned, then would
come a loud guffaw of laughter as much as to say, “See what a sad dog I
am!” There were a few people in the omnibus who listened in open-mouthed
amazement—but the conductors all knew him, and were used to his wonderful
ways.
I call attention to those bursts of laughter. They were very
characteristic and very significant. Those who from Froude downwards have
recorded much of Carlyle’s conversation have given the impression of an
ill-natured, discontented man carping with no little spite at the rest of
mankind. That was not Carlyle. That he held violent opinions expressed in
violent language is a fact. But much of his so-called cynicism was, I am
convinced, misunderstood.
Where he suspected fraud of any kind he was pitiless—but half his
utterances were redeemed by a loud laugh, a laugh which impressed me as
being quite as much directed against himself as against his victim—and
that laugh took the sting of cruelty out of his speech. He did not suffer
fools gladly, and he could not brook being lionized, but during all
the years that I knew him—from before the year 1850 to the time of his
death—he was always kind to everybody with whom I saw him—kind and, in
his rough way, considerate.
The downright nature of the man was well shown by what he said of the
Duke of Wellington’s speeches in the House of Lords: “He was no orator,
but he was the best man there, for he had something to say and he said
it.” To the gewgaws and tinsel of oratory he paid no respect; so the
cloth were good he cared not for the embroidery. His great admiration of
the old warrior was fully shared by Mrs. Carlyle. Is it not recorded in
one of her letters or writings that on one occasion, happening to meet
the Duke at some party, she contrived to brush up against him in order
just to be able to say that she had once touched him?
Like everybody else who held Carlyle in reverent affection I was shocked
by Froude’s publications. No falser portrait of a great man was ever
handed down to posterity than that which he has painted. Would Carlyle’s
friends have loved him as they did had he been the snarling, spiteful,
inhuman monster that he represents, without one scintilla of the rare
geniality and of the power of friendship which he possessed?
That he was a good hater—such a hater as Dr. Johnson would have loved—no
man will deny; much of his hatred was political; in regard to social
life—the life of man with his kind—I have known him to melt into a
tenderness that was all the more touching coming as it did from the
rugged Scottish peasant nature. I have walked with him and sat with him
by the hour, without hearing him say an ill-natured word of man or woman.
Above all it is a pity that the veil of sanctity which should mask the
wedded life of even the humblest individual should have been lifted in
the case of two such remarkable personalities as the Carlyles. Froude has
done it, greatly to the prejudice of the friend who trusted him, but who
was careful to express the feeling that the papers which he confided to
him would need judicious editing, and that at a time when the one person
fitted to edit them would be no more. In spite of my great admiration for
Froude as a writer of English prose, I am bound to say that his treatment
of Carlyle must always remain a blot upon his reputation not only as a
man of letters but as a friend.
It is certain that the Carlyles were an ill-assorted couple. She
considered from the beginning that to marry him was an act of
condescension on her part. The daughter of a country doctor at Haddington
had descended from the skies like Diana to Endymion to marry the son of
a stone-mason! I feel inclined to say “Poor Endymion!” But he loved her
and was happy in his love. Not so she! Jealous of him she was—furiously
jealous—not as a lover, for there she knew she was safe. But she could
not bear to think that if she was famous it was as his wife, whereas she,
knowing herself to be brilliant, would fain have had him to be known as
the husband of that wonderful Mrs. Carlyle. It was his success, social
and literary, that she resented; it irked her to be in the second place,
and she could not forgive it.
That she entertained any sentimental feeling about Carlyle’s intimacy
with Lady Ashburton is an absurd supposition hardly worthy of
contradiction. Harriet Lady Ashburton was an ideal _grande dame_,
accomplished, well read, with a strong spice of Irish wit inherited from
her mother Lady Sandwich, who was a Corry, a daughter of Lord Belmore;
I knew her from my childhood up, indeed it was at the Grange that my
father and aunt made the acquaintance of the Carlyles, who met there
a whole galaxy of famous people, Thackeray, Charles Buller, Fleming,
Monckton Milnes, Dickie Doyle, Titania’s favourite painter, and a host
of others, all of whom were like the Ashburtons, hearty admirers of
Carlyle’s genius. Mrs. Carlyle was always welcome either at the Grange or
at Addiscombe, but he was the sun, she the moon—the satellite.
There was something else of which the lady was jealous, and that was the
agony of concentration which her husband’s work meant for him. At moments
her _sæva indignatio_ against “that Carlyle,” as she would somewhat
contemptuously call him, passed all bounds.
One day my aunt went to call upon her and found her in one of her
tantrums—what was the matter, she asked: “Oh! my dear, it’s just that
Carlyle! Would you believe it, I have had a headache for three days, and
he’s only just found it out. ‘I’m afraid you’re not quite well, my dear,’
he said—and all the time he has been working, working! I just threw a
tea-cup at his head.” Petruchio had a bad time of it that day.
Another time “that” Carlyle was in great disgrace and Mrs. Carlyle in
tears because the poor man had resented the presence of a dead mouse
embalmed in his porridge at breakfast.
Poor Mrs. Carlyle was much to be pitied, not for any wrong that he did
her, but because she was one of those people who make themselves wretched
and pass on their misery to those near them. My aunt was one of those
sympathetic people to whom others carry their troubles, and Mrs. Carlyle
spared her not a moan. Carlyle’s self-reproaches after her death were a
delusion, born of her own shrewish complaints, which in his sorrow he
schooled himself into believing to be well founded. That she was not
an easy woman to live with is shown by the fact that she had been just
as cantankerous with her mother at home as she was afterwards with her
husband. Her letters to him are the witnesses of that.
In society Mrs. Carlyle certainly shone. Her conversation was bright,
witty and stimulating, but when she went home to the privacy of her
journal, thanks to Froude’s indiscretion, we see another woman. She was
ready enough to accept favours and hospitality from great people; then
she would hie back to Cheyne Row and write down little petty unkindnesses
about them.
To a house where she had been received with much cordiality she was
invited with other friends to go and see the bridal trousseau of one of
the daughters; out comes the journal, and with fluent pen she gives her
friends full measure of spiteful satire because the linen is marked with
a coronet. Perhaps she would have found equal fault had the coronet been
omitted. She was in her inmost heart a discontented woman in whom the
milk of human kindness had been turned sour by praise that was not always
destined for her alone, and she had been much encouraged by her friend
Miss Jewsbury, the novelist, a very clever woman whom I sometimes met and
did not like.
Much is said in Froude’s volumes about Mrs. Carlyle’s beauty. When I knew
her she was an elderly, even an old woman, but I could see no trace of
good looks—and people who had known her when she was young laughed at
the idea. However, love is blind, and in Carlyle’s eyes she was all that
is beautiful. If it be true that in her youth she had so many suitors,
it must have been her wit, and perhaps the _beauté du diable_, that
attracted them.
When the end came in 1881 and the lovable wise old man died full of
honour, Chelsea, and yet not Chelsea alone, mourned his loss. It was sad
to think that we should never again see the lonely, pathetic figure in
his long brown coat and soft hat slouching along swiftly, stick in hand,
with his peculiar shuffling gait. His face was a picture of hale old
age with its ruddy cheeks streaked like a russet apple, and his strong
white hair and crisp beard. It was a figure that might have stepped out
of a painting by Raeburn, a thing of the past with a nobility which was
all its own—the sturdy, rugged independence of the northern peasant.
Everybody in the Village of Palaces knew him, and everybody was proud of
him.
Among the notables in Chelsea at that time was old William Bell Scott,
poet and painter—not one of the giants in either capacity, but yet a
man of some merit, for after all, to have achieved the honour of being
a crony of such men as Rossetti and Swinburne—who wrote a sonnet on his
death—means something. He was a delightful, kindly old gentleman, who was
always welcome in a society the entrance to which was difficult indeed.
Rossetti, who had a way of chastening his friends, chaffed him in one of
those sets of nonsense verses in which he delighted.
There is an old person called Scott
Who thinks he can paint and can NOT.
Shall I call him a poet?
Oh! not if I know it!
This curious person called Scott.
Rossetti himself lived at Tudor House further east, a remnant, as it is
said, of the old house where Catherine Parr was visited by the Lord High
Admiral Seymour before their marriage was made public; for some time
George Meredith and Swinburne shared the house with him. It is a matter
of regret to me that I never knew Rossetti. He was much interested in
Japan and in Japanese art, and when I published my “Tales of Old Japan”
in 1871 he took a fancy to the book, and it was arranged that I should go
and see him with Lord Wharncliffe, who was a friend of his; but for one
reason or another the visit never came off, and when I went to live near
him chloral had done its work, and his health was no longer such as to
enable him to make new acquaintances.
Whistler’s excellently told stories of his wild eccentricities were
amazing. The tale of the pet bull kept in the little back garden and
the alarming vagaries of the beast and its master was inimitable; but
funniest of all was that of the five-barred gate. It seems that Rossetti
walking in some by-street saw a little model of a five-barred gate fixed
in the window of a humble dwelling. This for some reason caught his
fancy, and he was fired with the desire to have all the windows of his
house decorated with miniature five-barred gates. With him to have a wish
was to gratify it. In a few days the windows were fitted with their new
ornament, and Rossetti was enchanted. Life was now worth living. After a
day or two the house began to be besieged by carts bringing baskets of
dirty linen. The poet was at his wits’ end and gradually became furious.
Was he a laundryman? At last the mystery was revealed. The five-barred
gates were in the poorer suburban localities a washerwoman’s sign,
meaning, “Washing is taken in here and linen carefully attended to.”
Those were the palmy days of the Monday Popular Concerts. They were a
great weekly pleasure. Every Monday evening my wife and I found ourselves
among the crowd of real lovers of music listening to the masterpieces
of the great composers, given out by such artists as Joachim, Madame
Norman Neruda, Piatti, Lazarus, Hallé, Clara Schumann. The audiences were
always the same and in the same groups; there were even familiar figures
amongst the unreserved shilling seats that regularly occupied their own
particular places—did they come hours beforehand to secure them or was
there some such law of courtesy as governs the reservation of certain
seats in the House of Commons?
Close to us sat Mrs. Sartoris, Leighton and Robert Browning and scores
of other devotees of lesser note. It was the perfection of Chamber
Music, but it was even better heard at those delightful concerts which
Sir Frederic Leighton used to give in his studio in Holland Park. There
we had the same artists and met the pick of their admirers; but the
space was just what the music was suited to, and not the most delicate
shade, not the tenderest phrasing was lost, as it sometimes was in the
huge concert hall. And then Leighton himself was such an admirable
host, so instinct with that finest of all courtesy which springs from
kindliness of heart and the honest delight in giving pleasure. I first
made Leighton’s acquaintance in 1855, the year in which the picture which
made him famous, the procession of Cimabue’s Madonna, was exhibited. He
was then a young man of twenty-five—handsome, accomplished, a musician,
speaking French, German and Italian in great perfection, with what
probably was a unique mastery of the different Italian patois from
Venetian to Neapolitan.
One great charm that he possessed and retained to the end, save only
under the paroxysms by which his heart was being tortured, was the look
of happiness—a rare gift; whether he were painting a picture, listening
to music, or presiding in his royal way, lounging in the great armchair
at an Academy dinner, he seemed to radiate happiness. To his friends he
always gave a glad and genial welcome, to young artists a helpful hand
and sound advice. His charity was boundless, and it may rightly be said
of him that he obeyed the precept of the sermon on the mount, “When thou
doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”
There was one side of Leighton’s character which perhaps few people
suspected. Underneath the soft, willowy, rather effeminate manner which
he affected in general society there lay a foundation of chivalry worthy
of a Bayard. For his beloved Academy, as its chosen champion, he was
ready to do battle in the most literal sense of the word. The removal of
the Duke of Wellington’s statue from the top of Decimus Burton’s arch at
Hyde Park Corner, to which I shall refer later, led to a debate in the
House of Commons, when Sir Robert Peel the Second took the opportunity
to deliver an attack on the Royal Academy whose members he declared to
be “people of no very good taste.” He then singled out the President as
a target to be shot at in the most vicious manner, quoting Leighton’s
evidence in the famous case of Belt v. Lawes, and arguing therefrom that
the Royal Academy “was not worthy of consideration in this House;” and he
wound up with a rather risky pun, not in the best of taste, which, roared
out with a voice which was perhaps the finest—certainly the loudest—that
ever electrified the House, convulsed the faithful Commons with laughter.
The next morning Leighton came to my office in a fury—his rage at white
heat. The affront to himself was nothing, but the Academy had been
insulted and as President he must take up the glove, and he was there to
consult me as to the propriety of calling out Sir Robert, at the same
time suggesting that I, as an old friend and largely concerned in the
Hyde Park Corner scheme, should be the bearer of the message.
I succeeded in calming him, arguing that after all abuse of the kind was
nothing more than a wasteful expenditure of carbonic acid gas, which
according to the law of the diffusion of gases would be absorbed and
forgotten—nobody being the worse. Nothing came of it, and Leighton went
away only half convinced; the argument that duelling was out of fashion
carried no weight with it; on that morning he was full of fight and as
eager to go and buy a case of pistols as any fire-eating Sir Lucius
O’Trigger of the eighteenth century. I did not tell this to Sir Robert
Peel, who was a friend of mine, and he died unaware of the terrors from
which I had saved him.
The honours list of New Year’s Day, 1896, contained Leighton’s name as
a peer. His patent was signed on the 24th of January and on the 25th he
died, having been a peer for one day, without taking his seat in the
House of Lords, and without signing the roll. His funeral at St. Paul’s
Cathedral was attended by all sorts and conditions of men from the great
Lord Salisbury downwards. A notable feature in the service was the
chorale of trombones which was written by Beethoven for his own funeral
and had never been heard since. The pealing of that solemn dirge, the
great sound-waves rolling through the aisles, was soul-stirring. A nobler
requiem could not have been chosen.
Leighton did not marry. With his good looks, which had something that
belonged to an archaic type, his varied talents and the success which
always appeals to women, he might have been irresistible, yet no one ever
saw him pay more attention to any woman, however beautiful, than was
justified by the most chivalrous courtesy. He was in love, but it was
with his Art—she was his mistress and to her he was faithful to the end.
In these days when rough sketches and mere hints are extolled as works
of genius it is the fashion to decry Leighton’s work. The new men shirk
all that makes the painting of a picture difficult. Leighton boldly faced
all the great obstacles that stand in the way of the man who would fain
be the exponent of the highest art. Sometimes—indeed, often—he failed.
His flesh tints were apt to be waxy and his drawing in parts weak, though
no man ever painted flowing drapery more beautifully. Still, there are
paintings of his which will live. To name only two, the Daphnephoria
seems to me to be a most nobly imagined picture, full of dignity,
movement and life, and the portrait of Richard Burton in the National
Portrait Gallery is not only a speaking likeness but a masculine and
vigorous work. Those are not the only ones. But whatever he did showed
distinction and grace and a loftiness of aim of which he never lost sight.
When Leighton was elected to the Dilettante Club, of which I was then
a member, he whimsically enrolled himself as their sculptor, “with
permission occasionally to relapse into painting.” This was a playful
allusion to the fine piece of classical sculpture which he had produced
in 1877—the “Athlete wrestling with a Python” in the Tate Gallery—of the
first sketch of which he gave me a replica.
A constant guest at Leighton’s parties was Robert Browning who, unlike
not a few poets—Swinburne and Tennyson to wit, who had not the gift of
tune—was a fanatic lover of music and never failed to seek it where
it was at its best. So it happened that we often met him, and once he
honoured us by dining with us.
He was very pleasant and agreeable, handsome in a rather leonine way,
but his conversation lost some of its charm owing to his rasping, grating
voice. I once heard him read one of his poems, “The Ride to Ghent,” at
the house of Lady Stanley of Alderley. There were only about a dozen
people present; it was not a pleasing performance; the effect of the
poetry was marred by that hoarse croak, like that of Edgar Allan Poe’s
raven, and though he read with intense emotion he failed to touch. Had he
possessed the attraction of a musical speaking voice he would have been
irresistible.
The friendship between Leighton and Joachim was close and real, and no
wonder; the two personalities so artistic, so refined, were eminently
suited to one another. Both were above all, quite apart from their art,
charming companions. They were of about the same age; Joachim, who
survived Leighton by nine years, was one year younger. At dinner at our
house one day Joachim told us how it was that he became an artist. When
he was a tiny boy of about four years his father, who lived at Kittsee
near Pressburg, went one day into the town to attend a fair and brought
home as a fairing for the child a little sixpenny toy fiddle. Little
Joseph seized upon it eagerly, it became his constant companion, he
contrived to coax a tune out of it, and his destiny was fixed.
There can be no doubt that as an exponent of the highest masterpieces
of classical music he was the greatest violinist that ever lived. There
have been other artists full of technical accomplishments, fired by the
most intense musical passion—but for the power of throwing himself, as
it were, into the very inmost soul of the great masters and reverently
realizing their intentions he never had an equal. That he had all the
fire of his rivals, all their passion, he could show upon occasion, as,
for instance, in his wild, corybantic rendering of the Hungarian dances
which he and Brahms adapted; but when he was dealing with the more
serious school of music he proved that he had something more. There,
tender and true as a lover should be, he exercised the most supreme
self-effacement, and became the very voice of the tone poet at whose
shrine he was at the time officiating as high priest. So great was his
sympathy for his composer that when he played it was not Joachim who was
speaking to you but Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms.
He was one of the most amiable of men, and would often carry his violin
with him to the house of a friend, never weary of giving pleasure.
In that he was unlike some artists who resent, as I must say I think
they are justified in doing, any attempt at making use of them. Arthur
Sullivan once told me how at an evening party the hostess went up to him
and said: “Oh! Sir Arthur, it would be so sweet of you if you would play
us something.” The answer was characteristic. “My dear lady, there is
John Millais. If he will sit down and make a sketch for you, I will play.
He has been painting all day, I have been working at music all day, so we
are both in the same boat.”
The highly-strung nature of artists is accountable for many
misunderstandings, few more unintelligible than that which arose between
the large-hearted Joachim and Brahms, the friend whom he admired and
to whose fame he did so much to contribute. It all arose out of the
performance or non-performance of a work of Brahms in 1873. It was a
trifling matter which might probably have been set right with ease. It
must have embittered the long years of life which remained to both, each
conscious of the worth of the other. Brahms died in 1897; Joachim ten
years later. The separation from his wife, whom he adored, and the loss
of his friend, were cruel blows. There are other men besides Job who
might well say, “I have lived too long!”