HOLIDAYS
A happy chapter this: for though Joe always had so many irons in the
fire that lengthy holidays were not only very few with him but actually
avoided and disliked, he made merry so well by the wayside that many a
memory falls into a category scarcely enshrined in a longer period than
a summer afternoon, or at most, a week-end trip; he made holiday for
other folk all the time, and in so doing made it for himself.
Of week-end visits none were more joyous than those spent under
the hospitable roof of our friends Sir George and Lady Lewis at
Walton-on-Thames, where Sir Edward Burne-Jones was a constant visitor.
Neither of those friends were knighted or baroneted then, so that
perhaps we might all have been said to be--using Joe’s own
words--“of the lower middle class, to which I am proud to
belong.”
Oscar Wilde was often of the Walton party--fresh from Oxford then, and
considerably esteemed as a wit himself, though not, as Joe shows in his
Reminiscences, always above the suspicion of borrowing.
In this respect he somewhat resembled Whistler; but the latter was more
honest in his plagiarism.
One day Whistler accused Joe of making a joke at the expense of his
friend--a false accusation in reality, though sometimes lightly
true--to which Joe quickly answered: “Well, I can make a friend
most days, but I can only make a good joke now and then:”
assuredly only half a truth, too.
“Ha! ha!” laughed Whistler with his shrill cackle, “I
wish I had said that myself!”
“Never mind, Jimmy, you will,” retorted Joe.
And the cackle broke forth again whole-heartedly, whereas Wilde might
possibly have been offended.
But very few folk were ever offended at my husband’s fun.
One of the members said to him one day at the Garrick Club, in a
whimsical and deprecating manner: “These fellows tell me that I have
the reputation of a wit, my dear Carr.” To which Joe replied: “Don’t
worry! you’ll live that down in an afternoon.” And I am told that the
friend was wont to repeat this against himself. Again, the mother of a
pretty young girl, whom he was openly flattering, asked him, laughing,
whether his intentions were serious, to which he replied: “Serious, but
not honourable, madam.” But if this lady was not offended perhaps it
was because he had known her since the time when she was fourteen years
old herself.
An evening in Lady Lewis’ pretty drawing-room at the Walton
cottage comes vividly back to me. We were playing some geographical
game with the children, in the course of which Oscar Wilde--with a
view to grown-up applause--found occasion to ask: “Where is the
capital of the Rothschilds?”
The children looked blank.
“Why, in Behring Straits,” said Joe promptly, and I
remember old Sir George Lewis’ smile, for it was at the time of
the famous city crisis when, but for that capital, the great firm of
Baring might have stopped payment.
Even in that most precarious form of fun, the practical joke, Joe was
never known to hurt even the most thin-skinned.
One day he and Mr. Hallé, his co-director at the New Gallery--made
an excursion to Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ home--The Grange,
Kensington--and sent up a message to the artist asking if he would
receive two gentlemen who had called to ask whether he would take
shares in the _Great Wheel_. The maid must have been sore put to it to
keep her countenance, for the rage with which the painter viewed the
monstrosity that climbed the sky above his garden wall was well known
in his household.
He rushed downstairs, palette in hand, only to find “little
Carr,” as he affectionately called him, waiting demurely in the
hall on quite other business.
At the sweet Rottingdean home a similar joke was played: Burne-Jones’
loathing of the “interviewer” was a very open secret; so one summer
evening Joe crept up to the front door and sent in an audacious name,
purporting to be that of an American who hoped for a few words with the
distinguished artist.
From the shade of the porch he peeped into the dining-room window,
and had the satisfaction of seeing his friend creep under the
dinner-table, while the maid returned with the message that Sir Edward
Burne-Jones was not at home. I think Joe’s familiar back was
quickly recognised as he walked, in mock dignity, down the garden path,
and he was not sent empty away.
Of course, the practical jokes of which he shared the invention with
his good friend J. L. Toole--a master of the craft--were the most
cunningly devised. He has related the choicest in _Eminent Victorians_,
but I could tell of many a family laugh over them, and “One more
Tooler, father, before we go to bed,” was a common request.
One of the favourite stories was told of him when travelling down with
Joe to the beautiful old moated house at Ightham, which our American
friends, General and Mrs. Palmer, had made their English home. Stopping
at a wayside station above which a lordly mansion stood among the
trees, Toole beckoned a porter and, in the gibberish that he used so
glibly at these moments, pretended to utter the name of its owner.
“Oh, you mean Mr. So-and-So,” said the porter.
“Of course--I said so!” retorted the shameless comedian. “Well, here’s
half a crown. When the train’s off, run up to the house and say ‘we
shall be seven to dinner and the game will follow.’”
The whistle went as the porter, holding on to the door, enquired:
“Who shall I say, Sir?”
But the train moved on and Toole returned to the reading of his paper,
leaving a gaping man on the platform.
This same Ightham Mote was the scene of many of our happiest hours.
Its charming hostess was a dear friend whose rare gifts of sympathy
and true hospitality enabled her not only to attract to her house the
brightest of spirits, but also to draw from them their best. Children,
too, to whom she was a fairy godmother, were welcome as friends in
their own right. Our daughter and younger son were specially dear to
her in their different ways, and many was the grave, childish saying of
the latter that she would repeat to the proud father, though perhaps
the one he oftenest told himself was said to Alma Tadema when the
five-year-old boy remarked that he preferred a gas to a coal fire,
because the first went out when _you_ liked, and the latter when _it_
liked.
Joe was appreciated of all children and always won their favour easily;
but I remember one little lady administering a severe rebuff to him
when, after many lures, he said at last: “Well, I don’t
care whether you come or not!” to which she replied: “Oh,
yes, you do!”
But that was an exception; they were usually his slaves, and loved his
stories as much as their elders did. He treated them as his equals only
requiring that they should do the same; and when his first grandson
was born and some one alluded to him as a proud grandfather, he said:
“I like the child, but there’s to be no grandfather about
it. I’m to be Joe to him as to others.” And so he was to
the children of that dear lady in beautiful Ightham Mote.
Christmas was a real Yuletide in the fine old wainscoted hall and
library, where Joe was always ready for the revel, as he was for the
outdoor sports with his own children and those of the house. There
were games in the beautiful old quadrangle and fishing feats from the
bridges that lead across the moat to the bowling-green beyond; but the
latter must have been worse than a bad joke to an expert angler such
as my husband--consisting as they did in trying to lure the trout by
a bait tied on to a hairpin; luckily the fish swam away merrily and
perhaps enjoyed the fun too.
Frederick Jameson, that earliest friend of the days of our courtship,
led the carol and song, and played for children and grown-ups to dance;
Henry James sat in the ingle nook and told us ghost-stories of his
making wholly in keeping with the place; George Meredith watched and
made shrewd comments on the characteristics and possible careers of our
various children, and discoursed on every topic--always expecting the
homage due to him and reserving the conversation, even from Joe, by a
long-drawn “Ah--” until he was ready with his next paradox.
Yet there was a moment when Joe scored even off Meredith. I think he
tells the tale in _Coasting Bohemia_, but not of himself. Meredith
had been criticizing George Eliot, and in a brief pause, Joe put in:
“Yes! Panoplied in all the philosophies she swoops upon the
commonplace.” And Meredith, laughing, replied, “I wish I
had said that myself!”
One day we were busy amusing the children in the big Hall with
a game of Definitions; one wrote down a word for Subject, the
next man defined, and the third--the paper being turned over the
Subject--“recovered” it.
Thus: Subject, _Soap_; Definition, as made by Joe: _The Horror of the
East-end multitude_. Recovery, _Jack the Ripper_: the nickname of the
celebrated East-end murderer who was then the talk of the whole town.
Joe was leaving that day for London, and the man came to announce that
the trap was at the door.
He rose to go, but the children had begun another definition for his
“last.” _Woman_ was given as the word. _The Better Half_,
wrote the next person.
“Only just time to make the train, Sir,” said the footman.
The children wailed, and we all followed him out of the hall and saw
him off; but half an hour later a telegram was handed to our hostess.
“Recovery: _An Angel once removed_”; and nobody needed to
hear the signature.
The children were always the frame to the picture in that lovable
household, and our daughter--the apple of her father’s eye,
made in his mould, gifted with his humour and large with his urbane
and generous heart--had a very special place there. I remember his
pride when George Meredith watching her one day at his feet, said:
“Look at the bumps on that child’s head. Always let her
pursue whatever walk in life she chooses.”
His advice was followed; and she _knew_ what she would choose. I was
having her trained for a violinist (for her gifts were several) and her
master was proud of her at twelve years old. But at fourteen she came
to us one day and said: “Father, I hope you won’t mind:
I’ve sold my violin. I know now that I want to draw--and no one
can serve two masters so I’ve put away the temptation.”
Joe was generally the centre around whom the children mustered in those
good days, and many an extra ten minutes did he beg off their bedtime
in the summer twilight or by the big Christmas logs. He used to tell
them that he hated going to bed himself, and nothing was more true.
“If I didn’t know that your mother always gives me cotton sheets,” he
would say on a winter’s night, “I would never go. I’ve no fancy for a
country trip every time I turn round in bed.”
But indeed he needed no such excuse for sitting up late when he had a
congenial audience. He had a wonderful capacity for sound sleep when
the time came--a capacity equalled, as he expressed it, for “enjoying”
laziness; because, of exercise--save in the pursuit of bird or fish--he
would have none; but most of his life he sat up late and his most
welcome form of rest was always in talk.
In this relaxation he was even more than matched in argumentativeness
by the husband of another most hospitable hostess, to whom he addresses
the following letter after a long visit when she had housed us in a
homeless interval. I may add that our host was an etymologist, and
would confront Joe with a dictionary in support of his own view of
a disputed word; also that he was an eminent amateur musician and a
vehement Wagnerian.
“MY DEAR----,
It seems to me that you and your husband ought to be told that you are
excellent hosts--and yet I don’t want the thing to get about.
At first I thought that I would declare loudly to all whom I met how
pleasant a thing it was to stay in your house; and then I thought I
wouldn’t.
When one has discovered a really charming place where one can live
with exclusive regard to one’s own selfish indulgence, it is
perhaps hardly wise to noise it abroad. Some of the snuggest corners
in Europe have been ruined by such imprudent chatter; and I feel that
I should never forgive myself if I were to be the means of making it
generally known that your house is so delightful. But I think after
all that I can trust you!
You are not the sort of person to gossip about such a thing; and when
I tell you that what I am going to say is confidential, I simply mean
that I would not, for the present at any rate, mention the subject to
your daughter; young people are fanciful, and she might misinterpret
my meaning--besides why shouldn’t she find it out for herself?
No, let this be for you and your husband’s ear alone! And even
for you it must be in some sense a barren secret; you cannot stay with
yourselves! If you could I should recommend nothing so strongly as a
few weeks’ visit to your charming home. It would do your husband
all the good in the world--get him out of himself, so to speak--while
it would make you a different woman. Not that I think that in any way
desirable; I simply avail myself of a phrase that is always applied to
me when a change is recommended.
Yes! If you could only stay at----!
The family is small, but extremely intelligent, with minds well stored
with the most varied kinds of knowledge.
Your host is a type!
Waking--with him--appears to be the momentary interruption of an
animated conversation which has engaged the long hours others reserve
for sleep.
With them a new day seems to open a new volume with cover, title page
and preface. Not so with him.
The intervening night is simply a semi-colon in an uncompleted
sentence--a Wagnerian clause in a melody that repudiates a close.
This might seem to argue a too rigid adherence to a single theme with
menace of monotony. Yet nothing could be less true.
At the bidding of a single word the whole scene changes with the
shifting magic of a dream, and you are surprised to find yourself
suddenly plunged into quite another conversational sea.
I have seen visitors at your house who would turn a deaf ear to these
alert exercises of the dawn--moody men who became at once absorbed in
the mere pleasures of the table; taking refuge in bacon from arguments
to which they could find no auroral reply. They are cowards and I will
have none of them! Rather would I emulate the tact of your hostess who
finds, and welcomes, in these wide-ranging thoughts of morn, a bulwark
that keeps the host from the kitchen boiler. For he is very apt to
descend suddenly from his philosophic heights and pounce with unerring
precision on some petty domestic error.
It is here you may observe the sweet influence of the daughter of the
house, whose finesse would almost deserve the name of cunning if its
purpose were not so benign.
In her skilful hands I have seen disaster averted by a dictionary and
an impending storm transferred from a tea-cup to a disputed line of
Tennyson.
I am painting for you only the lighter moods of life at this charming
house; of what else is delightful you must some day go and see for
yourself. But I forget; of course you can’t and there is my
difficulty staring me in the face. I wonder if it is mine alone?
I find it so easy to trace a smile to its source: so difficult to
define the lasting charm that lies behind it!
And even when the definition is at hand my tongue halts at eulogy.
Odd! I love to be praised and remembrance offers no instance when
I have been in fear lest appreciation should sink to flattery. But
when I try to praise others--even as they deserve--I am overtaken by
a feeling of delicacy on their behalf which I have never felt for
myself. And so I end dumb on the very threshold of my theme.
I should like to say a great number of things of you and your husband,
but somehow it doesn’t seem possible. Some day, when I meet
a stranger in the train at one of those odd moments when by some
irresistible impulse, I am driven to confide to a chance acquaintance
secrets that through a long life I have hidden from my dearest
friends--I shall say something about you and him that you might like
to hear. But I can’t command the hour and meanwhile, you see, I
am no further than when I began. All I can say is that, if ever you
ask me to your house again, let nothing be changed from what it was,
for it could not be changed for the better.
Yours ever truly,
J. W. COMYNS CARR.”
After this epistle it may not be thought partial on my part to state
that, from the days of our youthful visits to Balcarres to the end
of his life, my husband was a welcome guest at country houses; the
following, in reply to a request from Mrs. F. D. Millet of Broadway,
that he should relieve the strain of a spell of female society upon her
husband, seems to show this.
“MY DEAR MRS. MILLET,
I ought not, but I will! And lest I should falter in my bad
resolution, I have already wired to you saying I should be down on
Saturday.
It is a strange thing about duty. I believe there is no one who sees
what is facetiously called “the path of duty” more clearly
than I do; but we are differently gifted, and I fancy I never was
intended to walk in it. Like the criminal who acquires in the end an
extensive knowledge of law by industriously incurring its penalties, I
believe that if I could recall all the moral maxims I have neglected
in practice, I might serve as a veritable storehouse of wisdom and
good conduct. And so it happens that, though I see clearly I ought to
stay in town and work, I am nevertheless determined to accept your
kind invitation and come to you on Saturday next. Tell Frank to defer
suicide till after that date.
I can indeed well understand his melancholy. No man can dwell long in
the exclusive society of women without being crushed by the sense of
his own unworthiness. We are not fit for it. I often wish there were
some bad women in the world, with whom we might associate in our baser
moments, and sometimes, in a dreary mood, I am apt to wonder what
women can have been like before the Fall, they are so perfect now.
Perhaps in another world we shall be better and you will be worse; let
us hope for the best.
And in the meantime let not Frank despair. When I see him on Saturday
I will do my best to detach his nose from the grindstone and tune his
unaccustomed lips to words that were once familiar to us both.
Yours ever truly,
J. W. COMYNS CARR.”
In those earlier days he sometimes pretended that his wardrobe was
unfitted for such places, but I think even this was but a shallow piece
of mock modesty on his part, for he was well aware that he could shine
if he liked in any environment.
A letter to my sister, which I have just found, may illustrate this:
19, BLANDFORD SQUARE,
N.W.
“MY DEAR ALMA,
Many thanks for the brushes. When my hair is gone--“which will
be short,” as Pellegrini says--I can use them for sweeping
a crossing. In the meantime they make a most excellent parting.
Seriously they are beautiful.
I have never before had brushes in a case--it seems to lift
one’s social status. Hitherto my brushes have lain in my
portmanteau cheek by jowl with my boots, or have mingled their tears
with my sponge.
Now all is changed; I feel I could stay at a country house and
meet the footman on equal terms. Of course, I don’t mean
that seriously--no man could hope to be the equal of a footman. I
am a democrat but no revolutionist, and I have always felt that so
long as liveried servants keep their supremacy the throne is safe.
Compared with this the land question is a trifle. “Dieu et
mon drawers” is the loyal but terrified sentiment with which
I always awake on a visit, and see the footman turning my tattered
underclothing inside out. But now my brushes will save me.
Yours,
JOE.”
In the later years of his life, as his friends multiplied far and wide
and his social gifts became famous, he was pressed into circles unknown
to me, and our country-house visits together became fewer; so that
personally I remember his talk oftener at some sea-side place where we
had run down for a week-end, or on the verandah of some foreign hotel
where he would be immediately surrounded by a delighted audience--in
later years not by any means always composed of his own countrymen.
Though his associations with French artists and men of letters over
pictures for the New Gallery--and, more still, over his English
editorship of _L’Art_--had taught him enough of their tongue for
his business, he was not a finished French scholar; but he was never
afraid to make a shot at expressing his thought, and consequently he
improved enormously at the end of his life. I remember the astonished
comment of two Armenian lads and a charming Finnish lady whom we met at
a Swiss mountain resort: “_Mais c’est épatant! De faire des
calembours comme cela dans une langue étrangère._”
He only needed an audience; and he had it every hour of the day in
those two Armenian boys, who would stand for hours watching him throw
his line over the lake and coax the fish out--just, they used to say,
as he would coax the children to him in the roads or the visitors in
the lounge--“sans se donner de la peine.”
I am not sure of the justice of that last remark. Perhaps he never
purposely gave himself trouble, but he amused others because his love
of his own kind was such that he must always needs be in touch with
them, be they peasant or peer, and at the end of his life he preferred
to lounge in the road and chat with the convalescent soldiers in a
quiet village than to sit comfortably in the seclusion of a lovely
garden.
It was because he was always alive that he was not dull; but I must
admit he needed plenty of human interest to keep him so.
And I think, for this reason, that the life of a good hotel, preferably
a foreign one, afforded him the best opportunities for fun; he knew
just how much or how little the applause of such kaleidoscopic society
was worth; but it tickled his appetite for the moment and was the
required sauce to his holiday rest.
The following letters to his daughter variously illustrate this aspect
of him:
EDEN HOTEL,
MONTE CARLO.
“MY DEAR DOLL,
Our little hotel at Monte Carlo is a cosy place, containing among its
visitors some odd and rather lonely females, both English and American.
I overheard a conversation the other night between four of them--two
English and two Americans--at which your mother would like to have
assisted. They evidently did not know that we were English, and let
themselves go on the subject of the male sex. The leader of the band,
an American lady, whose hips described a circle about as big as the
Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, was especially vehement in denouncing
us, though I can hardly conceive she had ever received any other cause
of resentment than neglect. To an English lady, who could not compete
with her in size but fairly distanced her in ugliness, she held forth
at great length on the superior advantages which women enjoyed in
America. “Over there,” she said, “we’ve just got men like _that_,”
and she placed an enormous thumb on a morsel of unresisting bread to
indicate where men were. “If they do anything we don’t like, why,
Madam, they hear from us pretty quick. And that’s where they ought to
be,” she added, “for they are just nothing but savages!” At which the
gruesome English woman said that that was what she had always held to;
but that, in England, she never could find any woman with the courage
to say so. Then the fat American gave her country away.
“But see now,” she said, “we’ve still got to fight the law even in our
country. I said to an American man, ‘do you love your wife?’ ‘Why, of
course,’ he said. ‘Do you love your mother?’ I said. ‘Just don’t I,’ he
replied. ‘Do you love your sister?’ ‘Why sure,’ he said. ‘Well then,’
I said to him, ‘Do you know the American constitution declares that
every living citizen should have a vote except children, criminals _and
women_.’ And then she turned to the English woman and added: “Do you
know, Madam, the thought of that American law just makes me blush all
over when I go to bed at night.”
I confess as I looked at her, I couldn’t think of the unrighteous law,
for my mind was filled with the idea of what a wild and billowy tract
of country that blush would have to traverse. Fancy the Round Pond
turned into the Red Sea with a single blush.
Yours,
J. COMYNS CARR.”
BELLAGIO,
_May, 1903_.
“MY DEAREST DOLL,
We are in the midst of a thunderstorm that is tearing and raging
round the mountains; for the moment it is like Mr. Chamberlain in the
earlier part of his campaign--very loud and very near, but I think it
is taking itself off to the Gotthard.
I don’t think I have told you of the two little bits of American
character I encountered at my hotel. One evening three ladies of
that country were set beside me at table d’hote. They were not
pre-possessing or young, but I noticed with just a momentary flush of
flattery that there was an obvious struggle going on as to which of
them should occupy the chair next to me; the struggle ended, and then
the next but one turned to the victor and said, ‘Couldn’t
you see, my dear, that I just wanted to protect you in case you might
be addressed in a manner that might offend you.’ Poor dears!
they didn’t know that God had protected them against any attack
of mine.
Later, two rather nice girls and their mother took the same places;
and one evening after dinner, when the terrace was full of people, the
mother looked up to where one of the girls was standing at the window
of the room above, and called out: ‘Don’t let him kiss you, dear.’ We
all turned to look up, and there stood the girl with a parrot on her
shoulder. There was naturally an audible smile among the spectators,
and the girl herself was in fits of laughter.
Best love from your father,
J. COMYNS CARR.”
BORDIGHERA,
_April 1909_.
“MY DEAR DOLLY,
We are very comfortable in our little hotel here, with two nice
Italian brothers to cater for us. The Italian village children please
me mightily, and I hobble about in their language with just enough
understanding to enable me to amuse myself.
We are an odd society: nearly all women, American and English. They
are mostly nice people in their way, but not exciting, and of the
place generally it may be said that whatever other attractions it may
possess it does not seem to be a health resort for beauty. The air
apparently is not recommended for pretty people. In the streets and
on the hills the German is more or less in evidence, and sometimes as
I pass them by I am inclined to side with Balfour and to demand that
four more Dreadnoughts should be laid down at once. Their admiration
of nature somehow always makes me feel shy, and I can almost see
the landscape making an ugly face after their loudly proclaimed
_Wunderschön_. However, they really don’t trouble us much--the
neighbourhood is so genuinely beautiful.
Yours,
J. COMYNS CARR.”
He often touched on the beauties of nature as related to art when
writing to his artist daughter, and I find this keen little bit of
criticism in a letter to her from Bellagio.
“This place is beautiful, and makes one wonder little that
the Italians thought of landscape as a thing of design before the
Northerners found a new beauty in the empire of cloud and sky.
Certainly these mountains have great enchantment of form, and the
Southern light defines every detail.”
And this longer letter of varying interest also rings the same note.
FROM WENGEN,
BERNESE OBERLAND.
“MY DEAR DOLL,
Here is a line from me whom I daresay you thought hopeless in that
matter. But such a little thing will sometimes provoke a sinner to
virtue. Two strangely fashioned men share the room adjoining mine,
divided from me only by a washed deal partition held together by
French nails. They spend the day in moody silence and in grey frock
coats which if they were well cut would suit the Cup Day at Ascot. But
they return at nine and chatter unceasingly till 10.30. It is now only
ten and it has occurred to me that instead of tossing about on the sea
of their incoherent conversations I would write a line to you.
This is a beautiful place which I should admire even more if nobody
else admired it. But it is made too fair to go scot free of praise,
and so I must fain clap my hands with the rest. You see we are
exclusive in our emotions as the society of a country town and do not
wish to share them with our inferiors. That is a part of it, but I
think my reluctance to hear nature applauded has a better reason too,
though it is hard to give it words. I know I always feel a better
right to enjoy its beauty when I am otherwise engaged, in killing a
bird perhaps, in fishing a stream or I suppose best of all in some
sort of labour that the needs of the world demand.
I went for an early walk the other day up to the Wengern Alp; all
the mountain in shadow and the pines blacker than their own fallen
image on the grass. I was alone and met no one on the path but the
lads laden with their washed deal milk-pails as they came singing
from every green hill. And as they passed I felt sort of shamefaced.
I was out for beauty, a kind of dilettante wandering in search of
impressions, and I knew deep down in me that they must one day and
another have won impressions I could never gain. No one can be really
intimate with a strange land, can ever really read the face of a
hillside as it is read by those however simple who were born to see
it coloured by the changing fortunes of their life from childhood to
manhood. Nature is so shy, so reluctant to speak if she thinks she is
overheard, but she will sing to herself when she thinks we are busy.
For us who are not artists I think beauty is only really captured in
that way. It is trapped unawares, stolen in the silences of night or
dawn, or burnt into the brain by the fire of some passionate moment
to which it remains as an unforgotten background. Of course the
artist, the poet or the painter, has other rights and other penalties.
‘He that would save his life must lose it,’ and the artist
is always giving up for himself what he re-fashions for the joy of
others. He is like the cuckoo that sojourns in every nest and is
itself but a homeless voice. Even the beauty that he pursues is never
really possessed; it flutters for a moment in his hand and then takes
wing for others to inherit. It is bought so dearly and then sold for a
mere song.
But this is a digression. We were talking of Switzerland, and I do
believe this is one of the choicest spots in it, but of course we
don’t discuss its merits all day. On the contrary, I think we
talk most of the food, comparing the veal of yesterday with the mutton
of to-day, wondering from what strange waters, remote or near, come
those strange fish that masquerade under the titles of the dwellers in
Northern seas. And then we pry into the lives of other lodgers, making
up imaginary relationships among families that are as normally related
as our own--taking a curious interest in characters in which we have
really no concern, and exchanging cards warmly with parting guests,
knowing that we shall see their faces again no more. And all the while
the air is so good, when the weather is not so bad, that we feel well,
which is a long way on the road to feeling happy, and we are sometimes
pointed at as distinguished, and then vanity covers the rest of the
road and we are very jolly.
Yours ever,
FATHER.”
His preference for a foreign holiday--unless one in his own country,
could be allied to fishing or shooting--did not, as will be understood
from stray remarks in his correspondence, extend to Germany. He always
disliked the race, and I can recollect a journey in our young days
during which we had made a halt at Munich with Beatty Kingston. I am
afraid Joe’s description of the place and the people included such
scathing epithets as “The Burial-place of the Peto-Baptists” and “The
Suburb of the World.” For his excuse I must note that it was the bad
season for the Opera, although we did once hear “The Flying Dutchman,”
which he particularly admired; also that the old Pinacotek, with its
riches in Paintings by Old Masters, was closed, as if to spite him;
naturally he could not be consoled by “the collection of middle-aged
articles” offered him as a salve--declaring that he saw plenty of these
in the streets of the town.
He was always just as hard on the German “frau” as on her husband, and
his description of them on the mountain paths at Gastein, with skirts
looped up like window blinds and waterproofs strapped across their
shoulders in case of a storm, could only be equalled by the whimsical
words he had for the red necks of the men bulging over their collars.
He was not a Central Europe man; the French or the Italians were always
first with him after his own people. _Romance_ for him lay in the
North; I have often heard him insist that those most deeply possess
it who dwell in the mist and dream of the sun, and he would cite
“The Wizard of the North” and the Scottish Land in proof of
his theory: yet the South stood for gaiety with him, and he sighed for
the sun even as I did who had been bred in it.
It is curious that Rome he only saw for the first time late in life,
upon being chosen to write the introduction to the British Section
of the International Exhibition there, and afterwards appointed
England’s representative on the Art Congress.
I shall quote a private appreciation of the written part of his
work from that acute and sympathetic critic, Edward Russell of the
_Liverpool Post_.
NAPLES,
_April 28th, 1911_.
“DEAR COMYNS CARR,
I cannot refrain from congratulating you on your Introduction to the
Roman Catalogue of British Paintings, etc. Not only its literary
felicity, but its fine and illuminating judgment; the choiceness of
the language; and the apt biographical illustrations; the humane
diplomacy of occasional gentle, but searching suggestions of censure;
the insight of the aperçus; and the contribution of several original
maxims to the sterling floating currency of criticism, make it one of
the most memorable of such pieces.
Yours,
EDWARD RUSSELL.”
But Rome as a city he loved not, as he loved the Tuscan and Umbrian
towns; its vast antiquities oppressed him, its medieval structures he
disliked, and the race that had left its impress there bored him; even
in the natural surroundings he found too much melancholy--definitely
contrasted in his mind with that Northern sternness which breeds
Romance; but he shall speak for himself.
“The archeological side of Rome I can only gape at as a tourist:
I have no learning that way: though, of course, there are scenes
of the old world which touch the imagination without the kind of
knowledge that must, to those who possess it, make the place deeply
interesting. The more modern Rome--the Rome of the Renaissance,
scarcely makes a single appeal and creates no such satisfying
atmosphere as Florence. The Sistine I must see again; the light was
bad to-day and the effect at so great a height did not immediately
leave the tremendous impression of Michael Angelo’s power that
comes of the more intimate knowledge given by our photographs. The
colour, however, yielded more than I had expected. Tell Fred if he is
by you that I am wholly at one with him about the Stanze of Raphael.
They gain in site, and although I knew the compositions well, I found
them better than I knew with a charm of colour unexpected and superior
to any of his easel pictures, except perhaps the Madonna at Dresden;
truly a marvellous genius, using all the resources of style with the
freedom and ease of a painter of genre--and here, which is not always
so in his later work, absolutely free from rhetoric in gesture: I must
go back to them again.
“In the general style of Roman Renaissance building I have no
delight--and never thought to have; but, of course, there are separate
things to discover that I have as yet not had time to see. But St.
Angelo makes a great barbaric pile that is mightily impressive. St.
Peter’s seems to me much less noble in general effect than St. Paul’s,
and its interior ornament, painting and sculpture, seemed, on a swift
view, to be a wilderness of that kind of art I don’t love--all except
Michael Angelo’s _Pietà_, which stood out in modest simplicity and
intensity amid the garish surroundings.
Yours,
JOE.”
“DEAREST,
I lunched with Barrère again to-day, and afterwards we went in his
motor to the lakes of Nemi and Albano. It was a very interesting
drive, and the lakes are really beautiful, though in a grave and
sombre way. Of course it was not bright sunlight, but in any case the
landscape here has a peculiar character. It has an ancient and desert
look, hardly joyous and not very fruitful, different entirely in this
respect from the landscape around Florence. But it has character, and
what one may call style: and the remains of ruined buildings, aqueduct
or tomb, which cut the sky at every turn, seem to belong to these
surroundings. The landscape is of their date, seems almost to have
remained of their date, and not to have found the renewed youth which
mocks antiquity in other kinds of scenery. A certain gravity is the
prevailing sentiment--impressive but touched with sadness.
I am seeing isolated bits of Rome little by little. If I were
settled here for long I think the sculpture would attract me as a
study--but like everything else in the way of art in Rome one has
to be constantly sifting and sorting the good from the bad. Here
as elsewhere there is a mass of indifferent achievement, a mass
of work either poorly copied from the Greek or poorly conceived
and lacking vitality. One feels more and more that the Romans
were not artists--great collectors I have no doubt, and perhaps
connoisseurs--but without the finest fire of the spirit. There are a
few great things here that are superb, and others doubtless which I
haven’t seen, but in many instances of even admired things there
is not the saving quality of life that makes Phidias seem modern as
well as great.
Yours,
JOE.”
Touching this last criticism he made us laugh when he got home by
saying that he longed to cry to the crowds who patiently paced the
Vatican galleries, guide-book in hand: “Go out into the sunshine,
dear people, and enjoy your lunch--this is all bosh.”
It was delightful to me the other day to find a perfect echo of these
sentiments in the letters of the late Mr. Stopford Brooke to his
daughters. But it is not the only instance in those enthralling volumes
where I noted a remarkable likeness in many of the views, and even in
the method of expressing them, of these two brilliant Irishmen.