by Miss Emma Davenport, still hung about me, and I used to pray to God
for letters from home. I could, in all seriousness, debate with myself
whether there was any sense in praying when I knew that the time had
passed for posting that particular letter that I hoped for. My mother
wrote constantly, but could not write often enough to keep pace with my
longings. Occasionally my father wrote in his eloquent and intellectual
way and fired me with enthusiasm, so that I walked as if I had wings to
my feet. The Sun stands for ambition and intellect and power, and the
Moon for the poetry of affection, which being insatiable, brings regret
and the consciousness of a forced resignation. In those days if my
mother was the Moon my father was the Sun, shining aloft in my sky. It
was my father who made me the artist I am, and kindled the sort of
ambition I have transmitted to my sons. My wife, once meeting an old man
who in his youth had associated much with my father, judged it a good
opportunity to ask about him, and whether he was a good preacher. The
answer came promptly: 'Yes, good--but flighty--flighty.' I do think that
romance, which is pleasant beauty, unlike the austere beauty of the
classical school, is born of sweet-tempered men. My father was
sweet-tempered, and affectionate, also he constantly read Shelley, and,
no less, Shelley's antidote, Charles Lamb. To be with him was to be
caught up into a web of delicious visionary hopefulness. Every night,
when the whole house was quiet, and the servants gone to bed, he would
sit for a while beside the kitchen fire and I would be with him. He
never smoked during the day, and not for worlds would he have smoked in
any part of the house except the kitchen; and yet he considered himself
a great smoker. He used a new clay pipe, and as he waved the smoke aside
with his hand, he would talk of the men he had known--his
fellow-students--of Archer Butler the Platonist, and of a man called
Gray who was, I think, an astronomer, and of his friend Isaac Butt, that
man of genius engulfed and lost in law and politics. And he would talk
of his youth and boyhood in the West of Ireland where he had fished and
shot and hunted, and had not a care. Of how he would, on the first day
of the grouse shooting, climb to the top of a high mountain seven miles
away, and be there in the dark with his dogs and attendants, waiting for
the dawn to break.
There are men with a social gift who must dominate their company,
expecting others to woo them. This was not my father's way. Rather would
he lure you on till you believed, not in him, about which he did not
care, but in your own self. It was he who wooed his company not they
him. Naturally I found his conversation enthralling. His country
neighbours round about and his own friends & relations, would complain
that he used strange words; and so he did, and for that reason I was the
more pleased. A new word was to him, as to me, a pearl of discovery,
fished up out of some strange book he had been reading, and we would
enjoy it together. My mind often goes back into that wide kitchen, and
again I sit with him beside the fire, a little table for his tobacco and
whiskey at his side and on it a single candle throwing a feeble light.
The kitchen is the best room in the house. To compare it with a
drawing-room is to remember the difference between a fishing lugger
built and rigged and shaped for storm and angry sea, and a spic and span
yacht which never leaves the harbour except in the summer time when the
seas are safe and the winds gentle.
If the sweet-tempered men keep romance alive, it is the cross-tempered,
contentious men without affection who grub into the secret places to
find the poison and infection of ugliness. These people desire to
destroy everywhere the vision of happiness, and to make war on its
prophets and champions. Among such people my father was silent and
helpless. I think I am more venturesome.
Everybody was happy in Shakespeare's time. When the French Revolution
had spent its force, and Napoleon was at St. Helena, unhappiness was in
Paris, and from out of its thick cloud came the realistic wave. Of
course I know that there are cheerful people who adore ugliness. Such
people have so much animal spirit that they are like many schoolboys who
want to frighten their maiden aunt, but ugliness of the intense and
passionate kind comes out of the entrails of the angry and the unhappy.
When cheerful artists revel in the ugly what they write or paint is
purely mechanical, but whether an artist has the genuine passion and
can't help himself, or is only pretending to it, such men are a
weariness to any man with any tincture of a romantic imagination. I have
seen drawings & read prose done with an appetite for the ugly that
reminded me of the dogs that licked the sores of Lazarus.
My father was as forgiving as Shakespeare in the Sonnets, and he could
forget. The artist within him incessantly arranged and rearranged life,
so that he lived in fairyland. Sometimes my father's and another man's
account of the same incident would widely differ; but I always preferred
what my father said. William Morris told my son that Kipling when a boy
would come home from a days walk with stories of the day's adventures
which were all fiction. I wonder if Shakespeare would always cleave to
the truth in the common matters of every day. At no time did I lose
respect for my father, I knew with him it was only the gentle sport of
'make believe' without which life would be intolerable to men who live
by their affections. Saints and lovers and men governed by affection,
poets and artists, all live in phantasy, its falsehood truer than any
reality. By such falsehood we got nearer to truth. His charm to me was
his veracious intellect. He would lie neither to please the
sentimentalists nor the moralists. What talent I have for honest
thinking I learned from him.
Like every Evangelical clergyman of his kind, he regarded the Catholic
Church as the Enemy, yet he never disliked it, I am convinced, as he did
the Presbyterian. On leaving the University he became Curate to a
clergyman in the North of Ireland. His Rector was a learned man who had
published translations in verse from some early Italian poet. He was
also a very bad-tempered man. I have noticed that this kind of man finds
a great attraction in men who are of sweet and placable temper, as
perhaps the evil angels love the righteous whom they incessantly torment
and tempt but cannot persuade. The first quarrel arose because my father
rode all about the parish on a spirited horse and refused to desist. The
Rector wrote to him that he had hired a Curate and not a jockey. The
next quarrel was about my father's preaching. Evangelicism was at the
time fashionable among men of intellect, & the Rector hated
Evangelicism. My father gave me an amusing account of the quarrel. He
was staying, as he often did, in the Rector's house, and it was Sunday
morning. There was a rapid interchange of letters beginning at six in
the morning, and the argument was continued at breakfast, the ladies all
on my father's side. Finally the Rector said he would preach himself
that morning. As luck would have it, choosing at random among his stock
of ready-made sermons, he took with him a sermon tainted with the
abominable doctrine. My father described the smile that went round the
Rector's pew.
The Rector did, as I have said, after his hot-tempered way, love my
father, and when my father told him that he had lost some of his income
and could no longer stay in the parish, where he was, paid but a
pittance, the Rector worked himself into a rage and refused to bid him
good bye. Yet, some years afterwards, when my father preached in some
Cathedral, he saw his old Rector coming towards him with outstretched
hands, to suggest that he have the sermon printed and published.
The letters of English women are mostly dull, they are too ceremonious
for the ease and freshness of letter writing. Irish women take life
gaily & themselves lightly, with no latent puritanism and its suggestion
of self-importance, to retard their pens. My mother's letters were a joy
to all her family, and my father wrote copiously and eloquently. I
remember every letter by either of them would end with the words 'burn
this,' and the injunction was too well carried out. I don't think that
of all these letters there is even one extant. Nothing delighted my
father more than to write speeches and letters for his friends.
Sometimes they were business letters, but more often speeches for some
family gathering--perhaps there had been a quarrel, and all the clans
were to meet at a marriage. The difficulty was to make a speech that
would offend nobody and might reconcile their differences. My father
would undertake the task with the greatest animation, and as he would
not go himself to the wedding, others would come and tell him of the
wonderful cleverness of the speaker, and how surprised they were, and of
the blessed effects, and he and my mother would keep the secret.
All my father's life he lacked companionship, and he of all men the most
companionable. There was no one with whom he could exchange ideas. He
was surrounded by good men and good women, but for a man of intellect
that is not enough. I think that, though but a boy, I was nearer being
his companion than anybody else; I at least had mental curiosity. All
the grown-up people lay fast bound in the sleep of comfortable
orthodoxy, anxious about this world, but persuaded that the less they
thought about the world to come the better. Was it not all set out in
the Bible and quite clear to those having faith?
Romantic temper and high vitality had endowed my father with a natural
intrepidity. When therefore cholera came to Ireland where it attained a
mortality higher than anywhere else in the Kingdom, he went fearlessly
among the people, consoling them with religious hope and comforting them
also in many secular ways. I have been told that again and again he
would take the sick man in his arms, and hold him up, as he prayed and
administered the Sacrament, and this at a time when cholera was supposed
to be virulently infectious. This was never forgotten to him in the
parish. The poor have long memories.
To be fond of fishing ran in the family, but my father I think preferred
grouse shooting. Arthur Corbet, my mother's brother, a big athletic man
with a short temper, had because of a very bad stammer become a clerk in
the Bank of Ireland which all his life he regarded as an insult
inflicted upon him by cruel destiny. He would walk fourteen Irish miles
to a pretty sequestered village high up among the mountains, fish all
day, and at night return walking all those miles carrying a load of
fish. I don't think my father would have endured that fatigue for a
day's fishing, and my uncle would sometimes say that he had not the true
zest. The friends of my youth used to measure a man by his taste in
shooting, fishing, or hunting, and there were noisy and dismal circles
where men were measured by their capacity for drinking. When I was asked
by the people compiling 'Who's who' what was my favourite pastime, I
replied that I had none, but would like a little fishing. It was not
inserted, being considered, I suppose, too frivolous for the solemn
emptiness of that useful book. I do not like fishing with bait because
of the nauseous handling of the worms; and in shooting the sight of the
bird alive and wounded in one's hand is painful for the nerves. But no
one minds the flapping and writhing of the fish taken out of his
element. The fish is too remote; we cannot guess its thoughts, it
inspires no curiosity. To wander along a river bank and with your utmost
dexterity cast your flics lightly here and there over the surface of a
deep pool and watch for the yellow gleam of the fish as it rises, is
there anything so fascinating as this gambling in dark waters? I knew a
man who died an enviable death. He was a distinguished Dublin barrister,
a man of imagination, and he loved salmon fishing. He had just hooked a
salmon and was playing it when he had a heart seizure. As he lay in a
friend's arms, with his dying eyes he watched that fish being played and
landed. He went to his death charioted to the next world in a
fisherman's dream.
Mr. F. B., my cousin, had a very pretty country house and demesne on the
banks of Lough Dan, County Wicklow, and was the Squire of the district,
a sort of County Wicklow Sir Roger de Coverly. He had a little flock of
children and a wife upon whom he depended a good deal. Every day she
took the children for a walk, and if she stayed away a long time, as
would occasionally happen on a fine day, and he missed her, he would
bring out the dinner-gong and beat it, sending its mellow voice rolling
among the hills. And his wife would say 'We must return, my dears, I
hear your father calling.' Everyone liked that house and its
despotically indulgent master and gentle mistress and the happy children
who are now old people. Everything about that house partook of a sort of
civility not to be found every where. The coachman, when required to
yoke the car, would come out of the stable yard to the front of the
house and give a loud halloo, and having done so would go back, and you
would hear presently from far away down in the valley of the demesne the
rapid hoof-beats of a horse, a handsome grey horse I remember, and like
rushing wind he would gallop past you into the yard behind the house,
eager to leave the solitude of his pasturage for the open road. There
were other horses, and there were dogs and cats, all pleasant and
friendly. And there were beehives that made a pleasant hum in the summer
air, and there was a pony which no one in the house, not even the
coachman, could catch. 'Herself', the mistress of the house, would have
to come out on to the lawn, and he would let himself be taken and she
would lead him to the coachman. There was also a wise old donkey, who,
when we dined, would thrust his head through the window and ask to be
fed. Dining there, I said 'Don't give him any thing and see what he will
do.' 'He will come into the hall' they said, and when we heard him
blundering about in that not particularly spacious place, I wanted them
to try him further, but they said 'No, for he will bray'.
Why did people like staying in that house? Partly because of the great
natural beauty by which it was surrounded, and partly because of the
great cordiality of your welcome from all that numerous company of men
women and children. And yet there was something else. It was that they
were a quaintly interesting people, not modern at all, just mediæval,
who stirred the historical sense and made you think of some golden age
when no one was in a hurry and so all had time to enjoy themselves, and
for the sake of enjoyment to be courteous and witty and pleasant. There
was an old butler and an old French woman who did the cooking. Indeed
everything flavoured of 'tanned antiquity' except the brood of pretty
children, who, as I remember, did on my first visit keep all together,
bright and gay, with a life of their own, and rather silent. I was at
the awkward age when a boy becomes self-conscious and is at his ease
with no one.
Certain sour-faced socialists would explain everything by the economic
situation--yet surely here was poetry pure and simple--nothing but
poetry. It was on Lough Dan I caught my first trout, just under a dark
cliff rising straight out of the water. And many a fish I've caught in
that spot. I was staying there with my father and mother when my father
was seized with rheumatic fever, further aggravated by gout, and I
helped my mother to nurse him. Some years afterwards I myself had that
fever. I know all about it. Your soul turns to blackness, wrath
overpowers you and fills you with a sort of devilry. For a few days I
was as Swift or Carlyle at their fiercest. I hated everyone. I had such
insight and gift of utterance that I knew how to wound anyone who
approached me. It is not surprising, therefore, that my father,
suffering from this fever, should for once have been unreasonable. He
asked me to move him in bed. In a great flutter of fear and anxiety I
tried to do so. If you touched him he groaned, and though I tried my
very best I could not satisfy him. Beside himself with pain and with my
awkwardness, he called out impatiently 'Place me diagonally in the bed.'
The word 'diagonal' I knew only in Euclid. Yet he would only repeat
'Place me diagonally.' Afterwards, amidst all his pain, he laughed and
apologised, and said that he got the word, not from Euclid at all but
from Tristram Shandy, where years afterwards I found it. When they had
retired behind their bed-curtains, Mrs. Shandy said to Mr. Shandy 'I
think Uncle Toby is going to be married.' Then said Mr. Shandy 'He won't
be able to lie diagonally in bed any more.'
It was always an annoyance to Mr. Shandy that he could not puzzle Mrs.
Shandy, because she never bestowed a further thought upon anything that
she did not understand at once. But my father, when he flung at me the
word 'diagonal,' knew that he was inflicting on me the pain of puzzledom
and that was a passing satisfaction to him, even though the effect was
to increase my awkwardness and prolong his own discomfort. Is it because
of the sociable instinct that when we are ourselves in pain we desire to
share it with somebody else? A man worried about his business doesn't
like his smiling wife to go on smiling, and yet if she doesn't smile, it
is a breach of all the proprieties that should control a wife's
behaviour.
People will sometimes say that religious conversion effects a change of
heart. I very much doubt it. Under religion people remain what they were
before only they are more so. The influence of Wesley reached the middle
and lower classes among the English; & commercial before, they became
more commercial. The commercial instinct of selfishness was able
henceforth to call itself a duty, and took on religious airs; and a
large part of the religion of Belfast may be stated in a single sentence
'The man who sells his cow too cheap goes to Hell.' But when Wesleyism
affected the Irish leisured class, gentlemen before, they remained
gentlemen, only with more refinement of heart and a more subtle
sympathy. The wild men, described by Charles Lever, who cared for
nothing except romance and courage and personal glory, now walked in the
footsteps of their Lord and Master. In my youth I would sometimes hear
people say with self-complacency that there was no gentleman the equal
of an Irish gentleman. The boast was not altogether foolish. We all know
the type of Christian and Saint who has no manners. These men had
manners and cultivated them as part and parcel of the Christian ideal.
Back in the misty past I can see those quiet figures of a now forgotten
civilisation, whose gentility differed from that of the English as light
from darkness, and one especially, Sir Andrew Hart, who was Vice-Provost
of Trinity College Dublin, and a learned mathematician. I painted his
portrait, and one day, as I looked at him and admired his proud and
distinguished profile, I said 'Sir Andrew, I am sure nature intended you
to have been the leader of a tribe of insurgents in the Caucasus.' His
laugh did not repudiate the suggestion. Yet he had the gentlest manners,
imposing restraint on others by the restraint he imposed on himself. My
father sometimes said that if a man is rude to you it is always your own
fault, and I remember a bumptious man from Belfast, a cousin of my own,
who would complain that he could not get men to be civil to him. Sir
Andrew was a man singularly handsome, very tall, with great strength and
endurance. He told me that on the night of the great storm of 1839 he
walked thirty miles, the weather being so dreadful that no one would
lend him a horse.
He lived to be over eighty years of age, and his daughter-in-law told me
that he died because of some inadvertence, some chance neglect. There
are men who ought to live to be as old as Methuselah. It is some
accident, some chance of a window left open or a window kept shut, that
makes inevitable the shears of Clotho.
One of my greatest friends was a son of Sir Andrew Hart, George Vaughan
Hart. I painted his eldest daughter when she was a beautiful child, and
it was my delight afterwards to paint her when she had grown a beautiful
woman. She had a fascinating precipitation of thought and action that
recalled her mother, together with the beauty derived from both father
and mother. I've painted all sorts of people, but I think Ethel Hart was
my most difficult subject. She herself was indulgent and easy to please,
and her family did not much mind, but I could never please myself. I
think that it was because she was an enigma to herself and to me that
she tantalised me, being, as she was, just between girlhood and
womanhood. I lived in that house many days, perpetually failing and
perpetually hopeful.
One day stands out very distinctly in my memory. George Hart was at
home, working over law papers which he had brought into the
drawing-room, and all the family were there, and by good luck there came
that day, to enliven us and add its background to the happy scene, a
tremendous thunder-storm. And by further good luck there was present
Hart's maiden aunt who was very much afraid of thunder-storms. The house
was on the top of Howth Hill, a wild peninsula of mountain and heather,
jutting out into Dublin Bay. All around the house the lightening played
incessantly, the flames seeming to lick the windows of the room, and the
thunder was continuous, while the maiden aunt grew more and more
alarmed. She was pious also, which I have always noticed makes people
more afraid of thunder-storms. 'Dear, Dear,' Hart would say, after a
particularly frightful crash shaking the whole house. 'Dear, Dear! I
hope those lightening rods are well oiled.' And again after another
crash 'Well, Well, I should not like a volcano on Ireland's Eye' which
was a little rocky islet just outside the harbour. Knowing that Hart was
a geologist, I foolishly asked if Ireland's Eye had ever been a volcano.
'Not in my time' came the answer in his deep voice. The storm lasted for
a long time and through it all we talked and listened and were merry and
afraid, except the maiden aunt who was only afraid, while I pursued
steadily the painting of my beautiful model. I pity anyone who is not
afraid of a thunder-storm. Terror is a delightful feeling if beauty be
added to it. The Hebraic conception of Jehovah fascinates the
imagination, because it combines terror with its beauty. If children are
frightened by a thunder-storm, take them to a window and bid them watch
the lightening play among the clouds, and their fears will change into a
kind of exultation more delightful than listening to a fairy tale.
Beauty cleanses feeling. What more distressing, what more profoundly
disturbing than the ache inspired by sex passion; yet add romance and
beauty, and while the feeling remains, the ache is gone. It has been
cleansed. A tragedy acted on the stage inspires pity and terror, but if
that play be written by Shakespeare these feelings are cleansed--they
remain, but the ache is gone. Laughter also, like beauty, cleanses the
feelings. Its special value, I think, is as a cure for anger. Yet it
does not destroy the anger. The energy is still there, but changed into
merriment. There is the sunshine of beauty and the sunshine of laughter,
and in the great writers they often mingle and become one. All through
the beauty of 'Romeo and Juliet' laughter vibrates so that we do not
know whether to laugh or to cry.
Of this mirthfulness my friend George Hart had an ample supply. He was a
barrister and often engaged in important cases. When contention ran high
and everybody was very angry. Hart would still some portion of the
troubled waters by a comment, audible only to the barristers immediately
about him. My friend was not a wit, he was something infinitely better,
he was a humorist. Your wit is an aggressively sociable fellow who makes
his thrusts at other people, getting his fun out of their confusion, or
alarm, or astonishment. He wants a social success. Your humorist is only
amusing himself and surprising himself, getting enjoyment out of the
absurdities of life, and is quite as solitary as a poet or nightingale.