WHEN THE LATE MR. W. P. FRITH WAS AT the height of his fame, and
engravings of his “Derby Day” and “The Railway Station” contested for
prominence on the flowery flock-papered walls of many drawing-rooms with
Landseers “Monarch of the Glen,” he went to pay a visit to his daughter
in a southern county, and she has placed it on record that when she
mentioned his name to the leaders of Society in various localities it
conveyed nothing to them.
Why should it convey anything to them? He did nothing but paint all his
life. Fame in painting, in music, in writing, means nothing--in many
cases rather less than nothing--to the society of any English county. If
the man had brought down a couple of hunters and gone out three times a
week to hounds, the people in his division of the county would talk
to you of him and look on you with astonishment if his name conveyed
nothing to you; and the wife of a retired country doctor who takes
up what is known as Church work--organising village teas and village
concerts and Sunday “Unions”--is at once accorded a position that counts
as fame in such communities in England.
But if it were not for observing these features in country life nothing
of its lighter side would be apparent. There is nothing so comical as a
picture in which all the laws of perspective are ignored; and living in
a country town in England is like placing oneself in the position of the
man in Edgar Allan Poe's story who, looking out of his window, saw
an immense and hideous monster--a thing with splay feet and a huge
proboscis--stalking with mighty steps across a distant lawn, and was
greatly perturbed until he discovered that the creature was only an
ordinary sort of spider walking across one of the strands of its web,
which was drawn across the window pane.
Every day one may have experience of people living in the midst of such
distorted perspective--fancying that the commonplace insects that move
before them are creatures of enormous proportions and importance, and
quite as frequently assuming that because an object appears small to
them, being far away from them, it is quite insignificant. If one
cannot find humour in observing the attitude of people who ignore the
conditions of perspective in this way, one must be stolid indeed.
A typical inhabitant complained to me very bitterly some time ago of
having just discharged a very thankless duty in respect of a stranger
who, at the instigation of his brother--a London barrister of some
repute--had called upon him in motoring through the county. He admitted
that the stranger was a nice enough sort of man, but wholly devoid of
appreciation of the relative importance of the persons whose houses were
pointed out to him from the summit of the old castle which the stranger
had been anxious to visit.
“I showed him Lord Riverland's place--as much of it as we could see
through the trees--but all he said was, 'Who is Lord Riverland?'”
continued the man, pouring his complaint into my ear. “And then I told
him that just beyond Eglam Church was the Shillingdales' place. 'Funny
name, Shillingdale!' was all that he remarked; but when we were leaving
the castle he saw the gable of Maxfield's house sticking out, and he
took a fancy to that tumbledown place and asked who lived there. I told
him. 'Maxfield,' he said. 'Not Laurence Maxfield, I suppose?' I said
that I believed his name was Laurence. 'What! Laurence Max-field, the
painter?' Yes, I said, I heard he was something in that line. Well,
you should have seen his face at that. 'How can I ever thank you
sufficiently for pointing out that house to me?' he cried. And when
we got down to the road he kept hovering about that place, and once he
said, 'What kind fate led me here to-day? And yet I might have gone away
without so much as glancing at the house of Laurence Max-field!' Now,
is it any wonder that I almost lost my temper? I had pointed out to the
fellow Riverland Park and Shillingdale Hall, and yet I don't believe he
ever heard of Lord Riverland, or knew that Captain Shillingdale had been
made a D.L. for the county! But he almost became maudlin over the two
old cottages that Maxfield knocked into one! A painter! The idea of
making a fuss over a painter!”
“You forget that the man was a total stranger to our neighbourhood,”
said I. “You must make allowances: he knew no better.”
He said he supposed the fellow really did know no better; and I am
convinced that in his own way he abused his visitor to his wife for
the man's deplorable lack of all sense of proportion, to ignore the
privilege of having a distant view of the mansion of a deputy-lieutenant
of an English county and feasting his eyes on the cottage of a painter!