EARLY YOUTH
In December we migrated back to London, and shortly before Christmas our
dear, faithful nurse died. That was Alice’s and my first sense of
sorrow, and, even now, I can’t bear to go over those dreadful days. Our
father told us we would never forgive ourselves if we did not take our
last look at her. He said we were very young for looking on death, but
“go, my children,” he said, “it is right.” I cannot read those
heartbroken words with which I fill page after page of my Diary even now
without tears. She had at first intended to remain at home at Lausanne
when my parents were leaving for England, shortly after my birth, but as
she was going I smiled at her from my cradle. “_Ah! Mademoiselle Mimi,
ce sourire!_” brought her back irresistibly, and with us she remained to
the end.
As we girls grew apace we had a Parisian mistress to try and parisianise
our Swiss French and an Italian master to try and tuscanise our Genoese
Italian, and every Saturday a certain Mr. Standish gave me two hours’
drill in oil painting. How grand I felt! He gave me his own copies of
Landseer’s horses’ heads and dogs as models. This wasn’t very much, but
it was a beginning. My lessons in the elementary class at the S.
Kensington School of Art are not worth mentioning. The masters gave me
hateful scrolls and patterns to copy, and I relieved my feelings by
ornamenting the margins of my drawing paper with angry scribblings of
horses and soldiers in every variety of fury. That did not last long.
This entry in the Diary speaks for itself:--
“_Sunday, March 16th, 1862._--We went to Mr. Lane’s house preparatory to
going to see Millais in his studio. Mr. Richard Lane is an old friend of
papa’s. The middle Miss Lane is a favourite model of Millais’ and very
pretty. We entered his studio, which is hung with rich pre-Raphaelite
tapestry and pre-Raphaelite everything. The smell of cigar smoke
prepared me for what was to come. Millais, a tall, strapping, careless,
blunt, frank, young Englishman, was smoking with two villainous friends,
both with beards--red, of course. Instead of coming to be introduced
they sat looking at Millais’ graceful drawings calling them ‘jolly’ and
‘stunning,’ the creatures! Millais would be handsome but for his eyes,
which are too small, and his hair is colourless and stands up in curls
over his large head but not encroaching upon his splendid forehead. He
seems to know what a universal favourite he is.” I naturally did not
record in this precious piece of writing a rather humiliating little
detail. I wanted the company to see that I was a bit of a judge of
painting, ahem! In fact, a painter myself, and, approaching very near to
the wet picture of “The Ransom” (I think), I began to scrutinise. Mr.
Lane took me gently, but firmly, by the shoulders and placed me in a
distant chair. Had I been told by a seer that in 1875--the year I
painted “Quatre Bras”--this same Millais, after entertaining me at
dinner in that very house, would escort me down those very steps, and,
in shaking hands, was to say, “Good night, Miss Thompson, I shall soon
have the pleasure of congratulating you on your election to the
Academy, an honour which you will _t’oroughly_ deserve”--had I been told
this!
Our next halt was in the Isle of Wight, at Ventnor, and then at
Bonchurch, and our house was “The Dell.” Bonchurch was a beautiful
dwelling-place. But, alas! for what I may call the Oxford primness of
the society! It took long to get ourselves attuned to it. However, we
got to be fond of this society when the ice thawed. The Miss Sewells
were especially charming, sisters of the then Warden of New College.
Each family took a pride in the beauty of its house and gardens, the
result being a rivalry in loveliness, enriching Bonchurch with flowers,
woods and ornamental waters that filled us with delight. Mamma had “The
Dell” further beautified to come up to the high level of the others. She
made a little garden herself at the highest point of the grounds, with
grass steps, bordered with tall white lilies, and called it “the
Celestial Garden.” The cherry trees she planted up there for the use of
the blackbirds came to nothing. The water-colours she painted at “The
Dell” are amongst her loveliest.
[Illustration: A LEAF FROM A VERY EARLY SKETCH-BOOK.]
Ventnor was fond of dances, At Homes, and diversions generally, but I
shall never forget my poor mother’s initial trials at the musical
parties where the conversation raged during her playing, rising and
sinking with the _crescendos_ and _diminuendos_ (and this after the
worship of her playing in Italy!), and once she actually stopped dead in
the middle of a Mozart and silence reigned. She then tried the catching
“Saltarello,” with the same result exactly. “The English appreciate
painting with their ears and music with their eyes,” said Benjamin West
(if I am not mistaken), the American painter, who became President of
our Royal Academy. This hard saying had much truth in it, at least in
his day. Even in ours they had to be _told_ of the merits of a picture,
and the _sight_ of a pianist crossing his hands when performing was the
signal for exchanges of knowing smiles and nods amongst the audience,
who, talking, hadn’t heard a note. For vocal music, however, silence was
the convention. How we used inwardly to laugh when, after a song piped
by some timid damsel, the music was handed round so that the words and
music might be seen in black and white by the guests assembled. I
thankfully record the fact that as time went on my mother’s playing
seemed at last to command attention, and it being whispered that silence
was better suited to such music, it became quite the thing to stop
talking.
Though Bonchurch was inclined to a moderate High Church tone, its rector
was of a pungent Low-Churchism, and he wrote us and the other girls who
sang in his choir a very severe letter one day ordering us to
discontinue turning to the east in the Creed. We all liked the much more
genial and very beautiful services at Holy Trinity Church, midway to
Ventnor, where we used to go for evensong. The Rev. Mr. G., of
Bonchurch, gave us very long sermons in the mornings, prophesying dismal
and alarming things to come, and we took refuge finally in the Rev. A.
L. B. Peile’s more heartening discourses.
The Ventnor dances were thoroughly enjoyable, and the croquet parties
and the rides with friends, and all the rest of it. Yes, it was a nice
life, but the morning lessons never broke off. No doubt we were
precocious, but we like to dwell on the fact of the shortness of our
childhood and the consequent length of our youth. I now and then come
upon funny juvenile sketch books where I find my Ventnor partners at
these dances clashing with charges of Garibaldian cavalry. There they
are, the desirable ones and the undesirable; the drawling “heavy swell”
and the raw stripling; the handsome and the ugly. The girls, too, are
there; the flirt and the wallflower. They all went in.
These festive Ventnor doings were all very well, but it became more and
more borne in upon me that, if I intended to be a “great artist” (oh!
seductive words), my young ’teens were the right time for study. “Very
well, then--attention!--miss!” No sooner did my father perceive that I
meant business than he got me books on anatomy, architecture, costume,
arms and armour, Ruskin’s inspiring writings, and everything he thought
the most appropriate for my training. But I longed for regular training
in some academy. I chafed, as my Diaries show. For some time yet I was
to learn in this irregular way, petitioning for real severe study till
my dear parents satisfied me at last. “You will be entering into a
tremendous ruck of painters, though, my child,” my father said one day,
with a shake of his head. I answered, “I will single myself out of it.”
So, then, the lovely “Dell” was given up, and soon there began the
happiest period of my girlhood--my life as an art student at South
Kensington; _not_ in the elementary class of unpleasant memory, but in
the “antique” and the “life.”
But our father wanted first to show us Bruges and the Rhine, so we were
off again on our travels in the summer. Two new countries for us girls,
hurrah! and a little glimpse of a part of our own by the way. I find an
entry made at Henley.
“_Henley, May 31st._--Before to-day I could not boast with justice of
knowing more than a fraction of England! This afternoon I saw her in one
of her loveliest phases on a row to Medmenham Abbey. Skies of the most
telling effects, ever changing as we rowed on, every reach we came to
revealing fresh beauties of a kind so new to me. The banks of long grass
full of flowers, the farmsteads gliding by, the willows allowed to grow
according to Nature’s intention into exquisitely graceful trees, the
garden lawns sloping to the water’s edge as a delicious contrast to the
predominating rural loveliness, and then that unruffled river! I have
seen the Thames! At Medmenham Abbey we had tea, and one of the most
beautiful parts of the river and meadowland, flowery to overflowing, was
seen before us through the arcades, the sky just there being of the most
delicious dappled warm greys, and further on the storm clouds towered,
red in the low sun. What pictures wherever you turn; and turn and turn
and turn we did, until my eyes ached, on our smooth row back. The
evening effects put the afternoon ones out of my head. I imagined a
score of pictures, peopling the rich, sweet banks with men and women of
the olden time. The skies received double glory and poetry from the
perfectly motionless water, which reflected all things as in a
mirror--as if it wasn’t enough to see that overwhelming beauty without
seeing it doubled! At last I could look no more at the effects nor hear
the blackbirds and thrushes that sang all the way, and, to Mamma’s
sympathetic amusement, I covered my eyes and ears with a shawl. Alas!
for the artist, there is no peace for him. He cannot gaze and
peacefully admire; he frets because he cannot ‘get the thing down’ in
paint. Having finished my row in that Paradise, let me also descend from
the poetic heights, and record the victory of the Frenchman. Yes,
‘Gladiateur’ has carried off the blue ribbon of the turf. Upon my word,
these Frenchmen!” It was the first time a French horse had won the
Derby.
Bruges was after my own heart. Mediæval without being mouldy, kept
bright and clean by loving restorations done with care and knowledge. No
beautiful old building allowed to crumble away or be demolished to make
room for some dreary hideosity, but kept whole and wholesome for modern
use in all its own beauty. Would that the Italians possessed that same
spirit. My Diary records our daily walks through the beautiful, bright
streets with their curious signs named in Flemish and French, and the
charm of a certain _place_ planted with trees and surrounded by gabled
houses. Above every building or tree, go where you would, you always saw
rising up either the wondrous tower of the Halle (the _Beffroi_), dark
against the bright sky, or the beautiful red spire on the top of the
enormous grey brick tower of Notre Dame, a spire, I should say,
unequalled in the world not only for its lovely shape and proportions,
but for its exquisite style and colour: a delicious red for its upper
part, most refined and delicate, with white lines across, and as
delicate a yellow lower down. Or else you had the grey tower of the
cathedral, plain and imposing, made of small bricks like that of Notre
Dame, having a massive effect one would not expect from the material.
Over the little river, which runs nearly round the town, are
oft-recurring draw-bridges with ponderous grey gates, flanked by two
strong, round, tower-like wings. Most effective. On this river glided
barges pulled painfully by men, who trudged along like animals. I record
with horror that one barge was pulled by a woman! “It was quite painful
to see her bent forward doing an English horse’s work, with the band
across her chest, casting sullen upward glances at us as we passed, and
the perspiration running down her face. From the river diverge canals
into the town, and nothing can describe the beauty of those water
streets reflecting the picturesque houses whose bases those waters wash,
as at Venice. When it comes to seeing two towers of the Halle, two
spires of Notre Dame, two towers of the cathedral, etc., etc., the
duplicate slightly quivering downwards in the calm water! Here and
there, as we crossed some canal or other, one special bit would come
upon us and startle us with its beauty. Such combinations of gables and
corner turrets and figures of saints and little water-side gardens with
trees, and always two or more of the towers and spires rising up, hazy
in the golden flood of the evening sun!”
In our month at Bruges I made the most of every hour. It is one of the
few towns one loves with a personal love. I don’t know what it looks
like to-day, after the blight of war that passed over Belgium, but I
trust not much harm was done there. How one trembled for the old
_beffroi_, which one heard was mined by the Huns when they were in
possession.
“_August 24th._--Dear, exquisite, lovely, sunny, smiling Bruges,
good-bye! Good-bye, fair city of happy, ever happy, recollections.
Bright, gabled Bruges, we shall not look upon thy like again.”
I will make extracts from my German Diary, as Germany in those days was
still a land of kindly people whom we liked much before they became
spoilt by the Prussianism only then beginning to assert itself over the
civil population. The Rhine, too, was still unspoilt. That part of
Germany was agricultural; not yet industrialised out of its charm. I
also think these extracts, though so crude and “green,” may show young
readers how we can enjoy travel by being interested in all we see. I may
become tiresome to older ones who have passed the Golden Gates, and for
some of whom Rhine or Nile or Seine or Loire has run somewhat dry.
[Illustration: FLYING SHOTS IN BELGIUM AND RHINELAND IN /65.]