(At the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)
Though this canvas is scarcely typical of Leighton's usual achievement,
it has a particular value as an illustration of his adaptability as a
painter. The contrast between the figure of the Prophet and that of
the Angel, between the rugged vigour of the man and the grace of the
celestial being, is curiously effective.
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--ELIJAH IN THE WILDERNESS]
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Indeed, it was during this last ten years that some of the most
memorable additions were made to the list of his successes. "The Last
Watch of Hero" (1887), as charming in sentiment as in execution; the
large composition, "Captive Andromache" (1888); "The Bath of Psyche"
(1890), a delicate piece of fancy in his happiest manner; "Perseus and
Andromeda" and "The Return of Persephone," in 1891; "The Garden of the
Hesperides" (1892); "Hit" (1893); "Summer Slumber" (1894); "'Twixt Hope
and Fear," and that wonderful study of glowing colour, "Flaming June,"
in 1895; and the "Clytie," which was at Burlington House after his
death, are worthy of praise as generous and unhesitating as can be
given to anything he showed before. "The Bath of Psyche" and the
"Clytie" are, in fact, pictures which have few rivals among his other
works, the first because of its inimitable purity of feeling and
classic refinement, the other because of its convincing force and
dramatic passion. In this last effort of a dying man it is easy to
find a kind of symbolical meaning: there is a pathetic significance in
the attitude of the nymph who loved the light, as she kneels with arms
outstretched towards the setting sun. Such a conception, and such a
treatment of the subject, typify so exactly the sadness of an artist
who was working actually under the shadow of death, and with full
consciousness that his days were nearly numbered, that it is difficult
not to look upon the "Clytie" as Leighton's farewell to the world in
which he had found so much beauty and so much brightness. The sun was
setting for him, and though he was too brave a man to despair or rail
at fate, his yearning for a little longer spell of sunshine was not to
be repressed.
His death, which released him from sufferings that had towards the end
become scarcely endurable, was the more pathetic because an honour had
just been bestowed upon him which showed in a most significant fashion
how highly his claims to special recognition were approved. In 1886 he
had been created a baronet, and a bare month before he died he was
advanced by Queen Victoria to be a peer of the United Kingdom, with the
title of Baron Leighton of Stretton. It is sad, indeed, that he should
not have lived to enjoy a distinction which he had so amply earned, and
to use his splendid mental gifts in the wider sphere of activity which
was opened up to him by accession to the peerage. There was so much he
might have done, so much he would have wished to do, to help on those
artistic movements which were always first in his thoughts, that to
have lost him then, just as greater opportunities of usefulness were
promised than had ever before been offered to him, was an irreparable
disaster for British art. As he died his last words were, "Give my
love to the Academy," that institution with which he had been
associated for more than thirty years, and in the service of which
nearly half his life had been spent.
To most people it would seem incredible that such a career could be
spoken of as anything but a success, or that an artist so respected and
so honoured should not be counted among the very few to whom fate has
been consistently kind. And yet to say that Leighton died a
disappointed man would not be untrue. He had been a great figure
socially, he had played his part in public as an official with
brilliancy and distinction, he had enjoyed the friendship of the
greatest of his contemporaries, but no one knew better than he did that
the popular homage was offered to his personality rather than to his
art. He was conscious that he had failed to convey to the people among
whom he lived that aesthetic message which was to him so vital and so
urgent, and that the purpose and principle for which he always laboured
remained to the end unintelligible to the world. He felt that the
public attitude towards him was exactly summed up in that cynical
saying with which Whistler has been credited: "Oh yes, a marvellous
man! He is a great speaker, a master of many languages, a fine
musician, a leader of society; and they tell me he paints too." That
which was to him the one thing worth living for seemed to every one
else the last and least of his accomplishments! It is small wonder
that he can be spoken of as disappointed; he had given so much for art,
and in return he was recognised as nothing more than an amazingly
clever man of the world, who painted pictures in his spare moments.
Yet it can be freely admitted that his work was not of the kind which
was likely to appeal as a matter of course to ordinary men. It was, as
has been already said, the outcome of his own temperament, and had from
the first a specific character which was too personal to be wholly
intelligible to people accustomed to look only at the surface of
things. It must be remembered that he had naturally a very remarkable
mind, and that he received an education which was quite unlike that
usually given to men who adopt the artist's profession. He had a sound
basis of book-knowledge, and was taught especially to study and
understand the classics, but to this was added, by his prolonged
residence abroad, an intimate insight into many things which never come
within the view of the majority of men, or at best are only dealt with
in later life when the receptivity of youth has become dulled. He was
encouraged partly by his father's precepts, partly by circumstances, to
analyse and investigate, to compare this and that phase of thought and
form of expression, to seek for the reasons why there should be such
marked differences between the methods of workers who all professed to
be advocating the same principles. Superficial information could not,
and did not, satisfy him; he had to get down to the foundation and to
find out the causes for the results which were presented to him.
But of course when he came to build a system of art practice upon his
early experiences, and to shape it by the aid of his analytical habit,
he evolved something which most men could scarcely appraise at its full
value. Therefore, his artistic purpose was persistently misunderstood
and, it may be added, habitually misrepresented. His art was over the
heads of his contemporaries because their tastes and sympathies had
never been cultivated to his level, because their grosser preferences
failed to find satisfaction in the purity of his idealism. He was
absorbed always in the pursuit of beauty, which he had sought and found
in many lands, and it was his earnest desire to give to his
representations of this beauty a kind of unhuman perfection,
passionless, perhaps, and cold, but exquisite always in its studied
refinement. No hint of coarseness or sensuality ever crept into his
pictures; it would be a strangely constituted mind indeed that could
find in his work any suggestiveness, or anything to gratify the baser
instincts of humanity. He kept aloof from the common things of
existence, and lived in a self-created paradise to which the rest of
mankind could hardly hope to gain admission.
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