History. In August 1889, Sir Joseph (then Mr.) Barnby, came down to
Longford to play the organ at Lady Skelmersdale’s marriage. One day at
this time Miss Wingfield’s hand wrote a communication in strange
old-fashioned characters, which purported to come from one ‘John
Longland.’ When asked why he came, he said that he had been brought ‘by
the influence of Mr. Barnby, whose music he had heard in Eton College
Chapel, where he was buried.’ Later in the day, the party went to
Salisbury Cathedral, and while Lady Radnor and Miss Wingfield were
sitting in the Hungerford Chapel (the freehold family pew of the Radnor
family), Mr. Barnby played. Whilst he was playing, Miss Wingfield saw,
as in a vision, various scenes enacted, culminating in a procession of
monks and other ecclesiastics with banners and canopies: one of these, a
grave-faced man, came up to the chapel and looked in at her through the
bars. At the same time he announced (by loud raps on the wainscot, which
is the ordinary means of communication) that he was John Longland, that
it was he who had written in the morning, and that he had come to the
cathedral because he had been Dean there in 1514, and that he had more
to tell. Another vision in the cathedral showed the gorgeous ceremonial
of a consecration, which was announced to be that of one Brian Duppa,
Bishop of Salisbury: in a third vision, Brian Duppa was again seen,
lying dead in his coffin.
“On reaching Longford, Miss Wingfield received more writing from John
Longland, who described himself as anxious to confess how faithless he
had been to his intimate friendship with Thomas Bullen (Anne’s father);
that he had been instrumental in persuading Henry VIII. to divorce
Catherine and to marry Anne, thus advancing his friend’s daughter, and
that afterwards--entirely from motives of personal pique against his
former friend--he had influenced Henry against Anne, and fostered
suspicions which led to her execution. He again said that he was buried
in Eton College Chapel.
“Anxious to verify these statements, Mr. Wingfield (Coldstream Guards)
purposely went to Eton to search for the tomb of John Longland, and
nowhere could it be found. The Radnors and Miss Wingfield then thought
that John Longland must be a ‘lying spirit,’ and not finding any record
of his being Dean of Salisbury either, they tore up his writings.
“After Mr. Barnby had left Longford, John Longland came again, but no
one would listen to him. He was, however, so persistent, that the
Radnors decided to have a hunt for a list of officers of the cathedral.
In a lobby cupboard they discovered some old volumes of county history,
uncut and covered with dust. In one of these they found that John
Longland had been Dean of Salisbury at the date mentioned, and that he
was translated to Lincoln in 1521. Turning to ‘Britton’s Lincolnshire,’
equally covered with dust, showing it had not been moved for months (so
that there was no possibility of Miss Wingfield having seen the
statement), it was found that Bishop John Longland was a person of great
learning and piety, &c., that he was confessor to Henry VIII., and
suspected of having unduly influenced the King with regard to Catherine
and Anne, &c. He died at Woburn, and was privately buried in Eton
College Chapel, of which he was ‘visitor,’ his heart being sent to
Lincoln.[511] The Radnors afterwards learnt that the tombstone of
Longland was removed from Eton College Chapel during a ‘restoration.’
“Some time after, when Miss Wingfield went for the first time to the
Palace at Salisbury with Lady Radnor, she exclaimed, ‘There is my Bishop
that I saw!’ and went straight up to a portrait on which the name of
Brian Duppa was found to be inscribed in very small characters.
“The day after I came was Sunday--thick snow without, with bright
sunshine, which together threw a glorious light on the pictures. Lady
Radnor showed them all delightfully. Amongst those which remain in one’s
mind are a delightful full-length of his boy by Rubens in the Long
Parlour, which the family chiefly inhabit, and the ‘Child Feeding
Chickens,’ and Mrs. Edward Bouverie and her child, by Reynolds, in the
great saloon. In the Long Gallery are two grand Claudes and a steel
chair of enormous value, the delicate work of one Thomas Ruker, given
by the city of Augsburg to Rudolph II. in 1577. This gallery opens on
one side toward the chapel, with the font in which little Lucius Hare,
son of Lord Coleraine, who once lived here, was baptized; and on the
other to a sort of ‘Tribune’ with the choicest pictures--the Egidius of
Quentin Matsys, the Erasmus of Holbein, a fine Sebastian del Piombo, and
a glorious Paris Bordone of a scornful beauty--‘Violante’--in a red
velvet dress. In a passage is the curious portrait of Mrs. Honeywood,
aged ninety-three, who had 367 descendants at the time of her death. She
is represented with a glass goblet. In her great age she was sure she
was doomed to eternal damnation. ‘I am as certain to be lost,’ she said,
‘as that goblet is to be broken to pieces,’ and she dashed it to the
ground, and it rolled away quite unhurt. So after that she remained
perfectly satisfied that all would be well with her. But the pictures
which interested me most personally were the noble Vandyke of my
great-great-great-great-grandmother, Margaret Carey, Countess of
Monmouth, and the Holbein of Mary Boleyn, who married William Carey, and
was also my grandmother by just ten removes.
“The house is built in a triangle, with three round towers at the
angles, known as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Lord Radnor told me
how, when he walked out with his father every summer evening, as they
neared the house he always saw his father take off his hat, look up at
the windows, and bow three times. When his father died he often
regretted that he had never liked to ask him why he did this. But now
he _had_ asked his father’s spirit through a medium, and the spirit
answered that he had always repented not having told him the cause, in
an old distich, which he wrote:--
‘Owner of Longford, whoe’er you be,
Turn and bow with bends full three,
And call on the name of the Trinitie,
Or castle and lands will pass from thee.’
And since that he had always done the same.
“In one of the round towers is a pleasant room with ancient panelling of
white and gold. This is now Lady Radnor’s boudoir, and here she has
often sung to us delightfully. The grounds, with their two rivers, and
the garden with its terraces and vases and yew-hedges, are enchanting.
The younger son, Stuart Bouverie, called ‘Toby’ in the family, is, at
fourteen, a clever mechanician.”
* * * * *
On the 17th of February 1893, my dear old cousin Charlotte Leycester
died peacefully at her house in London. For months past she had been
failing in her great age (ninety-five) as to physical powers, but her
mind was as much alive as ever, and her affection and sympathy as warm
and ready. “She seemed,” as I have read in the novel “Diana Tempest,” to
“have reached a quiet backwater in the river of life, where the pressure
of the current could no longer reach her, would never reach her again.”
In the last days of her own life, my dearest mother begged me always to
be all I possibly could to this dear cousin and friend of her whole
life, and I believe that I have been able to fulfil her wishes. She has
had a home at Holmhurst every summer, and I have never allowed a week,
generally not three days, to pass without writing to her. She carries
away with her my closest link with the past, but no one could wish to
keep her here. Better that she should go in her great age before the
suffering of age came.
Just when her gentle life flickered out in sleep, I read in Grinnell’s
“Pawnee Hero Stories”--“The sun was glad. He gave them great age. They
were never sick. When they were very old, one morning their children
said, ‘Awake, rise and eat.’ They did not move. In the night, in sleep,
without pain, their shadows had departed for the sandhills.”
* * * * *
_To_ HUGH BRYANS.
“_June 20, 1893._--I was in London a long time, but saw and heard little
of interest. At Mr. Knowles’s one day I met the honest sturdy Miss
Octavia Hill, and another day Bret Harte, a young-old man, with white
hair and an unwrinkled rosy face. It was odd to hear him called ‘Mr.
Harte.’ After luncheon Mr. Knowles read Tennyson’s ‘Boadicea’ in a
weird monotonous kind of chaunt, imitating him exactly, I should think.
He said that was the way Tennyson always wished his poems to be
read--straight on, without emphasis or any change of voice. One day I
went with the Lowthers to draw at Fulham, and we had tea delightfully in
the open air with the Bishop and Mrs. Temple, he helping his boy
meanwhile to do Latin verses. George Lefevre had a great pleasant party
at the old palace at Kew, to which we went by the river, and where we
saw the Tecks with their daughter and the Duke of York a very little
while before their marriage. For this I saw the picturesque procession
capitally.”
* * * * *
_To_ VISCOUNT HALIFAX.
“_October 20, 1893._--I have been little away from home all summer,
being so busy with my Waterford Memorial, at which I have certainly
worked _con amore_.
“One little frisk I have had to Montacute, whence Mrs. Phelips took me
to see two fine old houses, Barrington, and Wolferton near Dorchester.
Then I was three pleasant days with Lord Arthur Hervey, the delightful
old Bishop of Bath and Wells, in his moated fortified palace, as
picturesque and as beautiful as it could possibly be. How attractive is
all the apple-filled neighbourhood of Avalon--‘the Apple Island’--and
how delightful its legends of Arthur if one seeks them.
“‘As Arthur ever still in British memory lives,’ says the inscription at
Cardeña on the tomb of the Cid, but I fear few think of him where he
lived. The Bishop took me to Cheddar. How very grand it is! We mounted
by a coombe into the hills, and so descended upon the gorge. ‘Imagine
yourself a river working its way down,’ said the Bishop, as the narrow
ravine opened beneath us with its great purple rocks in labyrinthine
windings of inexpressible beauty. Very lovely, too, I thought the little
lake at the bottom, covered with a kind of ranunculus unknown elsewhere.
“The Bishop talks freely on all subjects with perfect ease and
simplicity, in the repose of a mind at rest and the humility of real
knowledge. He was much occupied with the question as to whether the
children of Israel were 200 or 400 years in the wilderness, all
depending upon where a stop ought to be placed. He was also full of
derivations of names, and mentioned several interesting ones--Bevan, ap
Evan; Bethel, ap Ithil; Coblentz, confluence; and Snowdon and Ben Nevis,
meaning the same thing. He talked of having known Madame de Gontaut long
ago, and how, when Louis XVIII. did something she could not approve, she
always turned his portrait to the wall. The last time he went to see
her, the servant said, ‘Depuis qu’elle est en enfance, Madame la
Duchesse ne reçoit pas.’ He told of having been in his childhood at the
ball which George IV. gave to children, and how a little girl being
asked there what she would like to have, said, ‘I should like to have
too much.’ In his room hung a beautiful engraving from Millet’s
‘Angelus,’ which he aptly called ‘the picture of the good lout’[512]
[Illustration: BROADHURST.][513]
“Later, for my little ‘Sussex’ book, I was four days wandering about the
deep sandy lanes and semi-forest tracts in the central part of the
county. One of the prettiest places was Broadhurst, near Horsted Keynes,
where the saintly Archbishop Leighton passed the last years of his life,
and taught his sister’s children and grandchildren under the old oaks. I
slept two nights at Groombridge Place, a delightful house, little
altered since it was built in James I.’s time, and with three terraced
gardens, and peacocks innumerable sunning themselves on the grey
parapet of the wall above the moat.
[Illustration: GROOMBRIDGE PLACE.][514]
“At Holmhurst I have been much alone, and I feel, with Carlyle, that
‘the memory of many things which it is not at all good to forget rises
with strange clearness on me in these solitudes, very touching, very
sad, out of the depths of old dead years.’”
* * * * *
The only incidents of my autumn were visits to Sir Raymond and Lady
Burrell at Knepp Castle, containing one of the finest collections of
portraits to be found at any small place in England; and to the Palace
at Chichester, where the noble old Bishop Durnford seemed at ninety-one
more full of tireless energy than ever, and whence I was taken to visit
the site of the original bishopric, Selsey, with its lichen-covered
walls and storm-beaten gravestones.
In December, whilst staying at ever-pleasant Thorncombe with my cousin
Victoria Rowe, I sat for my portrait to Mr. Eddis.
* * * * *
JOURNAL.
“_Dec. 5, 1893._--I had a delightful morning with Mr. Eddis, now
eighty-three, but full of vigour and vivacity, and still more of
reminiscence. He said, ‘You would not have been here now having your
portrait painted if it had not been for the Athenaeum. When I was a very
young man, one Magrath, who was secretary there, told me he wanted a
sketch made of himself, and that he would give me £5 for one. So I did
it, and it was such a success, that no fewer than sixty members of the
club put their names down to be drawn by me. I was doubtful if I should
do them, for I wanted to study, and I had not studied enough, but I
asked Hilton, who was a very good artist then, and he told me it would
be folly to refuse what came so easily; and so I did the portraits, and
from that time orders have poured in all through my long life, and so I
have never had time for real study since: I have only learnt through my
work.’
“‘What one learns most by experience is the value of reflected light. I
once had a discussion with Gladstone about what was the brightest colour
in Nature. He maintained red was: he was perfectly certain, and very
determined in his opinion. I said blue was. I told him how, in the
evening, when all was mysterious, the red flowers in the garden
disappeared, but the blue remained visible. But he was unconvinced. Then
I showed him how, in a photograph of a flower-bed, the red flowers
remained dead, undetached from the leaves, but the blue flowers were
light and visible in all their forms. Then--“Good night, Mr. Eddis,” he
said.’
“‘Did you know D’Israeli?’ said Mr. Eddis. ‘No, he must have been before
your time, but I used to meet him often. He always struck me as _lying
in wait for points_: to make a point was what he cared for most.
“‘James Croker had much to do with the building of the Athenaeum. They
wanted him--the members did--to make an icehouse for them, but he
wouldn’t. Afterwards some one found in a waste-paper basket a couplet he
had written--
‘My name is James Croker, I’ll do as I please;
You wish for an ice-house, I’ll give you a frieze.’
“‘Sydney Smith did not make at the time all the jokes which were
attributed to him: he thought of them afterwards, and circulated them.
He told me once, for instance, that Landseer had asked him to sit for
his portrait, and that he had answered, “How could I possibly refuse a
chance of immortality,” which was perhaps a very natural thing to say.
But it was reported afterwards in London, and reported with at least his
consent, that he had answered, “Is thy servant a dog, that I should do
this thing?”
“‘One of his best real sayings was of Dr. Whewell--“Science is his
forte, omniscience his passion.”
“‘Macaulay, it is true, talked incessantly--talked like a machine, but
he had his attractive points. I found this out especially when he
brought the present Lady Knutsford, as a very little girl, to me to be
painted, and talked nonsense to her the whole time, but it was always
nonsense which had a lesson in it.
“‘Lady Waterford was the most glorious specimen of womanhood I ever saw.
She came in with Lady Canning when I was drawing the Archbishop of
Armagh[515]--“the Beauty of Holiness,” as he was called. Lady Canning
had the lovelier face and the more beautiful eyes, but Lady Waterford
was always the more striking from the grand pose of her head and her
majestic mien. In seeing her, one felt as if one looked upon a goddess.’
“This afternoon Victoria took me to see Mr. Watts.[516] A drive through
wooded lanes and water-meadows; then the carriage stopped at the foot of
a wooded knoll, and we walked up little winding paths through the
bracken and Scotch firs to the house--a rustic hermitage. You enter
directly upon the principal dwelling apartment--two low rooms, with old
carved furniture and deep windows, and much colour and many pictures.
The ceiling is in panels, decorated in stucco by Mrs. Watts (_née_
Fraser Tytler). At least she has finished one room, and is going to do
the other with an epitome of the religion of all the nations of the
earth--‘A work,’ she said, ‘which gives me much study.’
“Soon Mr. Watts came in, like a pilgrim, like a mediaeval hermit-saint,
in a brown blouse and slippers, with a skull-cap above his white hair
and beard, and his sharp eager features, in which there is also
boundless tenderness and refinement. He sat by me on the window-sill,
and began at once to talk of Lady Waterford--of her wonderful
inspirations, her unrivalled colouring, her utter unconsciousness of
self, and her majestic beauty--how, when he first saw her out walking at
Blickling, with her grand mien, he could not but exclaim--‘It is Pallas
Athene herself!’
“He regretted that she should never have been painted in later life.
‘When she came into a studio, it was like a glorious vision.’ His wife
said how often he spoke of Lady Waterford, and that to herself it was a
lifelong regret that she should never have looked upon one who so
occupied his thoughts and admiration.
“Mr. Watts took us into his studio, an immense and beautiful room added
to the cottage. Here were many of his pictures, the work of years, on
which, from time to time, he adds a few touches. He likes to have many
of his works around him, and to add to them thus.
“At the end of the room hangs his vast ‘Court of Death,’ which can be
lowered by pulleys whenever he wishes to add to it. He was greatly
pleased with a photograph of it, which has the effect of a Tintoretto,
and which, while preserving the grand masses, blots out the detail.
‘Death’ is throned in the upper part of the picture. ‘I have given her
wings,” said Mr. Watts, ‘that she may not seem like a Madonna. In her
arms nestles a child--a child unborn, perhaps, who has taken refuge
there. By her side the angels of silence guard the portals of the
unseen. Beneath is the altar of Death, to which many worshippers are
hastening: the old mendicant comes to beg; the noble offers his coronet;
the warrior does not offer--but surrenders--his sword; the sick girl
clings for refuge to the feet of Death. I have wished to paint Death
entirely without terrors.
“‘You wonder what that is, that other picture of a figure of a rich man
in Eastern dress whose face is half-hidden, buried away in the folds of
his garment. I meant that for the man who was “very sorry, for he had
great possessions.” He cannot give them up. He has tried, but he
_cannot_. He is going out into the world again, and yet--and yet he is
very sorry. I have only got to give him a number of rings and to put a
gold chain round him, and I think his story will be told.’
“‘And that great picture?’ we asked. ‘Oh, that is the Angel of Rest. He
has come to that old man, by whom all the instruments of music and
science are lying, that weary old man, and he is touching his hand and
bidding him come with him and rest.’
“Besides these, Mr. Watts produced from a corner a grand chalk portrait
of Lady De Vesci--a most noble picture, giving all the dignity and all
the sympathy and pity of her expression. Mr. Watts said he was going to
give it to her little girl.
“He said, ‘I am within two years of eighty, and I have worked all my
life, but I do not feel old or feeble. I do not even use a maul-stick,
and I intend to do my best work yet.’
“On the walls were photographs from Lady Waterford’s drawings, placed
beside Titians, and in their ideas as fine.
“Mr. Watts took me to the window of the other room to look out into ‘the
half-clothed trees of the winter world.’ In the foreground, a number of
cocoa-nuts, open at the ends, were hung up, and wrens and other tiny
birds were fluttering in and out of them. ‘They like cocoa-nut,’ he
said, ‘and I like to see them enjoy it.’
“He said he had no wish to go into the world again. Living was
outliving. Holland House, the second home of many years, was swept away
for him, and all its intimates were passing away, and its memories
perishing. Nothing else in London could attract him.
“He had wished to make large pictures of Hope, Charity, and Faith. With
the two first he had no difficulty, but he lingered long over the third.
He showed us the picture he had done--of a woman seated, looking
upwards, an Amazonian woman, sheathing her sword, and bathing her
blood-stained feet in a brook of clear water. ‘She had found out that
all that was no use--no use at all.’ His words, his thoughts, his works,
all seemed imbued with the truest spirit of religion. ‘With theology,’
he said, ‘I have nothing to do.’
“He said he had no models. ‘Models are well as studies to draw from, but
they check inspiration.’ He rejoiced in Lady Waterford’s using no models
for her smaller pictures, and said she would not have been so truly
great had she done so.”
* * * * *
“_Dec. 7._--Another delightful sitting with Mr. Eddis. I told him of our
visit to Watts, and he said how he felt, on seeing his pictures and
those of Alma Tadema, that Watts was the head, while Tadema was only the
hand.
“He talked of his own early life as a student. At that time, Fuseli[517]
had recently been the head of the Academy--the very fierce head. He used
to say to his pupils, ‘You may be very good buttermen, you may be very
good cheesemen, but students of Art you will never be; and now, give me
my umbrella, and I’ll go and look at Constable’s pictures.’
“‘Turner[518] often used to come in and look at us and our work. There
was a student amongst us who had painted in a red background, and he
painted it the crudest, brightest red he could manage. Turner came in
and said, “Come now, this will never do; give me your palette and
brush,” and in a few minutes he had toned and mellowed it down with a
hundred delicate gradations of tint. “Well now, don’t you think it’s
improved?” said Turner. “No, I don’t,” answered the man; “I think it
was much better before,” which annoyed Turner rather.
“‘I remember that he came to me that day. I was copying a Vandyke, and
he looked at my work. “Part of that is very good,” he said; “why isn’t
all the rest as good?”--“Because,” I said, “all the rest is me, and that
part is an accident.”--“Well, let that accident to-day become principle
to-morrow,” said Turner, and we were always rather friends afterwards.
“‘Turner was proud of his picture of Carthage. He had received many
mortifications about his pictures, and people had haggled about the
prices--very small prices too--that he asked for them. When Lord Francis
Egerton came and told him that a subscription was on foot to buy that
picture from him and present it to the National Gallery, he burst into
tears, he was so moved. But he said, “No, I will not sell it, but I will
leave it to the National Gallery.”
“‘Afterwards, however, he changed his mind, and wished to be buried in
that picture. He spoke of it to Chantrey, who was his executor, and
begged that he would see that it was done, urging him to promise that it
should be done. “Yes, since you wish it, I’ll see you buried in that
picture,” said Chantrey, “but, as sure as you’re alive now, I’ll see you
dug up again.”
“‘Eventually the picture was left to the National Gallery.
“‘I was very near becoming an Academician,’ said Mr. Eddis, ‘but I never
did. I had painted a picture of the “Raising of Jairus’s Daughter,”
which was considered a good thing, and my election was thought certain.
I was advised to call upon some of the principal members, not to ask
them to vote for me, but to conciliate them by the attention. It went
rather against the grain with me, and I asked Stanfield about it. “Your
election is as certain,” said Stanfield, “as that I am sitting upon this
sofa, but you may perhaps hasten it a little if you call as you’ve been
advised.” I never did, however; I let it slip, and I was never elected.
Then younger men cropped up, and I was forgotten: it was all as well,
perhaps.’