Chapter I: Part 1

COASTING BOHEMIA

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

COASTING BOHEMIA

BY
J. COMYNS CARR
AUTHOR OF ‘KING ARTHUR,’ ‘TRISTRAM AND ISEULT,’ ‘PAPERS ON ART,’
‘SOME EMINENT VICTORIANS,’ ETC. ETC.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1914

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Many of the papers which give to the present volume its title first appeared in the columns of the _Daily Telegraph_, and are here reprinted by the courteous permission of the proprietors of that journal.

A portion of the essay on Burne-Jones was originally designed as an introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his collected works held, shortly after his death, at the New Gallery. The essay on Sex in Tragedy was written on the occasion of Sir Henry Irving’s last revival of the play of _Macbeth_ at the Lyceum Theatre.

CONTENTS

PAGE

BOHEMIA PAST AND PRESENT 1

SOME MEMORIES OF MILLAIS 12

AT HOME WITH ALMA-TADEMA 26

WITH ROSSETTI IN CHEYNE WALK 42

EDWARD BURNE-JONES 56

JAMES M‘NEIL WHISTLER 89

THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING AT THE ROMAN EXHIBITION 101

WITH GEORGE MEREDITH ON BOX HILL 134

THE LEGEND OF PARSIFAL 147

SEX IN TRAGEDY 162

HENRY IRVING 199

A SENSE OF HUMOUR 213

SITTING AT A PLAY 227

SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN 242

THE JUNIOR OF THE CIRCUIT 253

BY THE SIDE OF A STREAM 264

INDEX 279

BOHEMIA PAST AND PRESENT

The papers which compose this volume make no claim to any sort of ordered plan in their composition. They reflect in some measure the varied activities of a life that has been passed in close association with more than one of the arts, and therein lies their sole title to so much of coherence as they may be found to possess.

Lord Beaconsfield once defined critics as men who had failed in art. The reproach, however, is not always deserved, for youth is often confident in its judgment of others at a time when it is still too timorous to make any adventure of its own. For myself I may confess that I had adopted the calling of a critic long before I had found the courage to make even the most modest incursion into the field of authorship. My first essays in journalism, made at a time when I was still a student at the bar, were chiefly concerned with the art of painting, and I look back now with feelings almost of dismay at the spirit of reckless assurance in which I then assumed to measure and appraise the achievement of contemporary masters. A little later in my career I was brought into still closer contact with the art of the theatre, and in both these worlds, as well as in that of literature itself, I was fortunate in the formation of many valued and enduring friendships which have enabled me, in such of the following chapters as bear a distinctively biographical character, to record my personal impressions of some of the notable figures in the literature and art of the later Victorian era.

The reader who accompanies me in my voyage along the shores of the Bohemia of that time will quickly realise that it is not quite the Bohemia of to-day. Indeed since Shakespeare first boldly conceded to the kingdom a seaboard, each succeeding age, and almost every generation, has claimed the liberty to refashion this enchanted country in accordance with its own ideals. The coast-line has been recharted by every voyager who has newly cruised upon its encompassing seas, and in recent days its boundaries have been enlarged by the occasional incursions of Society which has lately condescended to include the concerns of art within the sphere of its patronage. But although no longer retaining its old outlines upon the map, there is enough of continuity in the character of the inhabitants and in the subjects of their preoccupation to render a brief survey of earlier conditions of something more than merely archaeological interest. If much has been gained, something also has been lost, and the traveller who survives to set down the experiences of that earlier time may perhaps be pardoned if he cannot always accept the changes which have transformed the face of the country, or modified the mental attitude of its citizens, as improvements upon the prospect that first dawned upon his vision forty years ago.

I read the other day a confident pronouncement made by one of the apostles of the more modern spirit which gave me the measure of the revolution that has been effected in all that concerns our judgment upon matters of art. “Art,” declared this authority, “cannot stop: the moment it rests and repeats itself, or imitates the past, it dies.” There is here no faltering or uncertainty in the assertion of those principles of faith and criticism which are embodied in the newer gospel, and it took me a little time to steady myself in the face of a declaration which seemed to overturn the settled convictions of a lifetime. But after much pondering my courage returned. I perceived that apart from the underlying truism that life implies movement, and that art as its image must share its vitality, there is nothing here that is not highly disputable or wholly false. Art indeed never stops but it does not always go forward: the movement perceptible at every stage of its history has been as often retrograde as progressive, and although it can never repeat itself, there have been again and again long seasons of rest when after a period of great productivity the land which has yielded so rich a harvest lies fallow.

But the final clause of the proposition, that imitation of the past heralds approaching dissolution, is demonstrably untrue of every great epoch of artistic activity. A fearless spirit of imitation, born of the worship yielded to the achievements of an earlier time, may, on the contrary, be claimed as the hall-mark of genius, and is indeed most frankly confessed in the work of men of unchallenged supremacy. Raphael exhibited neither shame nor fear in the frank reliance of his youth upon the example of Perugino: the painting of Titian, with an equal candour, confesses the extent of his debt to Giovanni Bellini, and Tintoret, who certainly could not be cited as a man deficient in the spirit of independence, made it his boast that he combined the design of Michelangelo with the colouring of Titian: while of Michelangelo himself we have it on record that in one of his earlier efforts as a sculptor a deliberate imitation of the antique carried him near to the confines of forgery. And when we pass from individuals to the epoch which produced them, was not the main impulse which governed the movement of the Renaissance inspired by a renewed sense of the beauty that was left resident in the surviving examples of the Art of the antique world? And all later time yields a similar experience. That newly born spirit in modern painting associated with what is known as the pre-Raphaelite movement rested upon the untiring effort of its professors to recapture the forgotten or neglected qualities of the painting of an earlier time, not indeed of the time which was its immediate forerunner, but of that still younger day when by simple means and with technical resources not yet assured, the earlier painters of Italy sought to interpret the beauty they found in nature. The spirit of imitation, conscious and unabashed, was of the very life blood of the movement, and it was in their devotion to that period in Italian painting which preceded the crowning glory of the Renaissance that the artists whose work constitutes the most important contribution to the painting of modern Europe were led to a stricter veracity in the rendering of the facts in nature which they sought to interpret.

But the men who laboured in that day were not greatly affected by the declared ambitions of the present generation. Originality had not yet been accepted as the cardinal virtue in any of the fields of imaginative production, and the illusion of progress, which may be said to rank as the special vice of the moment, found no place in the teaching of the time. Thinking over this widely desired and much vaunted quality of Originality in art, I was minded to turn to old Samuel Johnson to discover what particular meaning was then attached to a term that is now in such constant use. But my curiosity was baffled, for I discovered to my disappointment that this much treasured word finds no place at all in the pages of his _Dictionary_. The world is therefore free to conjecture in what way, if he were living in this hour, that sane and virile intelligence might have sought to describe it. As applied to matters of art, whether literary or pictorial, he would perhaps have been tempted to define it as “a word in vulgar use employed to indicate a vulgar ambition.” But without burdening the great lexicographer with views which the exigencies of the time did not provoke him to express, this at least may be confidently affirmed, that the pursuit of whatever virtue the word implies can have no place in the conscious equipment of any great artist. Certainly it was unknown or unregarded in every great epoch of the past. It is impossible to think of even the least of the mighty race of Florentine painters, from Giotto to Michelangelo, sparing one foolish moment from the eager intentness of their labour to ponder whether the judgment of aftertime should hail their work as original. That work, in common with all else that is produced in obedience to the impulse which is constantly shaping the beauties of the outer world till they are tuned into harmony with the spirit resident in the breast of the artist, had no need of any spur to production beyond that which is provided by a reverent love and an unceasing devotion, and it survives to prove, if proof were needed, that this boasted attribute of Originality, though it may fitly find a place in the epitaph upon an artist’s tomb, never since the world began formed any part in the impulse that governed the work of his hand.

The undue importance now assigned to this coveted quality of Originality is partly the outcome of the illusion to which I have already referred,--that art is in its nature progressive and is in fact constantly and steadily progressing. It must be obvious, however, to any one who has followed the fortunes of the imaginative spirit in the past, that history affords no warrant for any such pretension. In whatever field of artistic industry we choose to enter, in the world of letters no less than the world of art, strictly so called, the testimony of the ages bears witness to the fact that the sense of restless and unceasing movement is not always accompanied by any real advancement. Fate has scattered over the centuries with impartial indifference to the onward march of time those signal examples of individual genius which mark for us the summit of human invention. No one supposes that Dryden was a greater dramatist than Shakespeare because he came later: no one would be so foolish as to suggest that a comparison between Lycidas and Adonais can be decided by reference to the historical position of their authors.

And yet it is not difficult to understand how in our more modern day this illusion of progress has fastened itself upon the judgment and consideration of the things of art. The rapid strides made by science during the last fifty or sixty years, yielding at every step some new discovery to arrest the admiration of a wondering world, has not unnaturally bred an inappropriate spirit of rivalry in the minds of men whose mission it was to deal with the widely divergent problems of the imagination. Indeed it is easy to discern in the literature of the Victorian era that some of its professors were apt to be haunted by the fear that their different appeal might be partly overborne or wholly silenced unless they too could prove to their generation that what they had to offer for its acceptance registered something of a like superiority to the product of earlier times.

The sense of inexhaustible variety, characteristic of all art that truly images the spirit of man, has by a false analogy been confused with the onward march of science where every addition to the accumulated harvest garnered in the past uplifts each succeeding generation upon the shoulders of its forerunner. Art cannot compete on such terms, and any comparison so conducted must relegate its claims to an inferior place; yet though so much may be freely confessed, it does not therefore follow that its unchanging appeal is to be counted as an unequal factor in shaping the destinies of humanity. The work of the man of science, however pre-eminent the place assigned to him in his generation, must of necessity yield place to the larger discoveries made by even the humblest of his followers; while the work of the artist, the outcome of individual vision engaged upon the unchanging passions of man and the unfading beauty of the world he inhabits, stands secure against any assault from the future; in its nature distinct from all that has preceded it as from all that may follow in the time to come. It knows neither rivalry nor competition, for in the temple wherein the artist worships, each worshipper has his separate and appointed place. In the matchless words of Shelley,

Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,

and although the light beyond to which the artist lifts his eyes is of unchanging purity, the myriad hues through which it is transmitted yields to each separate vision the impress of an individuality which no after achievement can challenge or destroy.

But there are recurring seasons in the history of every art when the worker becomes unduly conscious of the medium in which he labours, and correspondingly forgetful of the truth he seeks to interpret. It was this that Wordsworth had in his mind when he urged upon the poet the necessity of keeping his eye upon the object, and it is not difficult to perceive how easily in the present hour the reiterated demand for Originality, enforced by the vulgar illusion that art to be a living force must be a progressive force, invites the invasion of the charlatan. It would perhaps not be too much to say that the little corner of time we now inhabit constitutes a veritable paradise for the antics of every form of conscious imposture.

But this fact, even if it be conceded, need not greatly disturb us. The patient labour of men more worthily inspired still survives. The more aggressive spirits in every department of art, who in their haste to secure the verdict of the future are eager to cast overboard the hoarded treasure of the past, may find when time’s award comes to be recorded that they have won nothing but the gaping wonder of the fleeting moment. The judgment of posterity refuses to be hustled however loud or shrill the voices that call upon it, and we may take comfort in the thought that the whispered message, perhaps only half audible in its generation, has often been the first to win the ear of the future.

SOME MEMORIES OF MILLAIS

There are men in every walk of life who would seem deliberately to shun the outward trappings of their calling. During his later years, when I knew Robert Browning well, it always appeared to me that he was at particular pains not to make any social appeal which could be held to rest on his claims as a poet. The homage that fell to him on that score he accepted as his due, but always, as I thought, on the implied understanding that in the daily traffic of social life the subject should not be rashly intruded. In the many and varied circles in which he moved he made no demand of any formal tribute to the distinguished place he held in the world of letters; and it was sometimes matter for wonder to those who met him constantly to note with what apparently eager and sincere interest he entered into the discussion of any trivial topic in which it was not to be supposed that he could have been very deeply concerned. Like Lord Byron, whose gifts as a poet he held in no great esteem, he was rather anxious--at any rate, in the earlier stages of acquaintanceship--that his position as a poet should be regarded as a thing apart; and he was apt, I think, to be embarrassed by any persistent endeavour to penetrate the outward shard of the man of the world, wherein he preferred to render himself easily accessible to a wide circle of friends, few of whom would have deemed themselves competent to enter into any sustained discussion of literary topics.

Among the painters of his time Millais would, I think, have owned to a like inclination. Neither in his personality nor in his bearing was he at any pains to announce himself to the world as an artist; and if not in his earlier days, at any rate at the time I first began to know him, he seemed to seek by preference the comradeship of men whose distinction had been won in another field. In self-esteem he was certainly at no time lacking; he could accept in full measure praise of his own work from whatever quarter it came; and in that respect he differed from Browning, whose nature seemed to stand in less need of flattery, or even of expressed appreciation. On occasion, indeed, and with only moderate encouragement, Millais could be beguiled into a confession of confident faith in his own powers that might sometimes seem to border on arrogance, but at the worst it was no more than the arrogance of an overgrown boy, put forward with such genuine conviction as to rob it of all offence. At these times he would give you the impression that, having won the top place in his class, he intended to hold it. He could not readily endure the thought, or even the suspicion, that there was anybody qualified to supplant him, and he was apt to be impatient, and even restive, when other claims were advanced, as though he felt the world was wasting time till it reached the consideration of what he was genuinely convinced was a higher manifestation of artistic power. And yet thee judgments upon himself, even when they were delivered in the most buoyant and conquering spirit, never left the savour of pretentious vanity. There was an air of impartiality that I think was genuine, even when his self-esteem was most emphatically expressed, as though he were recording the award of a higher tribunal, in whose verdict his own personality was in no way involved.

And then there was so much that was immediately lovable in the man himself as distinguished from the artist! I have heard it said by an older friend who knew him in the season of his youth that when, as a mere boy, he quitted the schools of the Academy to begin the practice of his art, he had the face and form of an Adonis, and his handsome and commanding presence when I first met him, toward the close of the seventies, a man then nearing fifty years of age, made it easy to believe that this record of the charm of his youthful appearance was in no way exaggerated. And yet the frank outlook of the face, with its clear blue eyes, and firm, yet finely-modelled mouth, though it spoke clearly of power and resource, and betrayed in every changing mood of expression the unconquerable optimism of a nature that retained its full vitality to the last, did not, I think, then, or at any time, yield any decisive indication of the direction in which his gifts were employed. Afterwards I learned to find in his features the true index of the finer qualities of his genius, but at our first encounter it seemed to me rather that I stood in the presence of a robust personality that had been bred and nurtured in the free air of the country.

It was always, indeed, easier to think of him as one of a happy and careless company during those annual fishing and shooting holidays in which he so greatly delighted, than to picture him a prisoner in a London studio, arduously applying himself to the problems of his art. And, in point of fact, he always brought something of that sense of breezy, outdoor life into the spacious studio at Palace Gate. Perhaps, if he could have followed his own inclination, he would have passed a greater part of his life on the banks of the northern river that he loved so well. Quite in the later years of his life, when he was rebuking his old friend and comrade, Holman Hunt, upon a too obstinate indifference to the taste of his time, he said to him: “Why, if I were to go on like that, I should never be able to go away in the autumn to fish and shoot. You take my advice, old boy, and just take the world as it is, and don’t make it your business to rub up people the wrong way.” Millais’s ready acquiescence in the demands of his generation was to some extent an element of weakness in his artistic character, leading him occasionally, as he more than once confessed to me himself, into errors of taste that he was afterwards shrewd enough to detect and candid enough to deplore; but however far he may on occasion have been led astray towards a certain triviality in choice of subject, this tendency never impugned or injured his integrity as a painter in the chosen task he had set himself to accomplish. The presence of nature, either in human face or form, or in the facts of the external world, proved a tonic that sufficed to restore his artistic conscience, and I do not think he was ever satisfied by the exercise of any acquired facility, for it was both the strength and the weakness of his art that his ultimate success in any particular adventure largely depended upon the inspiration supplied by his model.

One day we were talking of technique, and I remember Millais, who was at the time in some trouble with a portrait that he could not get to his satisfaction, roundly declared that, for an artist worth the name, there was no such thing as technique. “Look at me now,” he said; “I can’t get this face right, and it has been the same with me all through my life--with every fresh subject I have to learn my art all over again.” Such a confession came well from a man who, from the earliest time of his precocious and marvellous boyhood, had in the native gifts of a painter clearly outpaced and outdistanced the most accomplished of his contemporaries, and yet it was made in no spirit of mock modesty, but out of a clear conviction that an artist’s conflict with nature is ceaseless and unending, no matter what degree of mastery the world may choose to accord him.

We first met at the Old Arts Club, in Hanover Square. He was not a very constant visitor there, for his inclination, as I have already hinted, did not often carry him into a mixed company of his fellow-workers; but he occasionally looked in of an evening after dinner, and sometimes I used to walk away with him towards his home in Kensington. In his talk at the club he was apt to exhibit a genuine impatience of any desponding view of the present condition or the future prospects of English art, and the unbroken success of his own career--for at that time he had long outlived, and perhaps almost forgotten, the struggles of his youth--made it, I think, really difficult for him to comprehend that the arena in which he had won his undisputed place was not the best of all possible worlds. But this overbearing optimism of view was not always entirely sympathetic in its appeal; he was apt to brush aside with imperfect consideration the comparative failure of his less fortunate contemporaries, and it was not until long afterwards that I grew to realise that this apparent indifference to the fortunes of others sprang less from any natural lack of sympathy than from an intellectual incapacity to understand the possibility of real merit failing to secure recognition. Something of an egotism that was at times almost aggressive must indeed be allowed to him--an egotism which I believe left him with a genuine belief that nearly all other ideals than those he followed were misguided, and that lesser achievements than his own scarcely merited prolonged consideration.

But when we had left the club and were alone together in the street the more human and sympathetic side of his character often came into play. Not that he was, even then, apt to lavish extravagant praise upon his immediate contemporaries, but he could speak often and lovingly of the men with whom he had been brought into association in his earlier days, both in literature and in art, always reverting, in terms of special affection, to his friendship for John Leech, of whom he was wont to say that he was “the greatest gentleman of them all.” Dickens, too, he genuinely admired, though the great novelist had failed to recognise the earlier efforts of his genius; and he had many interesting anecdotes of Thackeray, with whom he had been brought into close contact during the time when he was engaged in the practice of illustration, telling me how, during periods of illness, he would be summoned to the distinguished editor’s bedside to receive instructions for the drawings he was commissioned to execute for the _Cornhill Magazine_.

It was during one of those talks about Thackeray that he related how he came to make his first acquaintance with the name of Frederic Leighton, in an anecdote which he afterwards told with telling effect, as part of a speech at the Arts Club, on the occasion of Leighton’s election to the post of President of the Academy. He recounted how Thackeray had warmly praised the talents of the young painter, whom he had met in Rome, prophesying for him the final distinction he afterwards achieved; and Millais confessed how, even then, he had felt a certain measure of jealousy in the novelist’s warmth of appreciation, conscious that he already cherished the idea that he himself would one day occupy the presidential chair. And so, indeed, he did, but the honour fell upon him almost too late, when he was already in the grip of the malady that was destined to carry him to the grave. But his reference to the work of other painters, however distinguished, was, as I have already hinted, comparatively rare, and the dominant impression left from all our talks of that time was of a man whose own ever-increasing prosperity had left him partially blind to qualities in others that had missed an equal measure of recognition. He could perceive little or no flaw in a world which had accorded to him his unchallenged position.

The finer and gentler side of Millais, half hidden from me then under an overpowering and impenetrable armour of optimism, I learned to know better when, as one of the directors of the Grosvenor Gallery, I assisted in the arrangement of the collected display of his life’s work. That was in the year 1886, and I can vividly recall with what easy self-complacency he anticipated the pleasure which he would derive from this long-looked-for opportunity of seeing the product of many years of labour displayed in a single exhibition. Before the arrival of the paintings themselves, many of which he had not seen from the time they had left his easel, he was afflicted by no trace of the nervous apprehension which I have found not uncommonly betrayed by other artists in similar circumstances. But the triumphant buoyancy of this earlier mood was replaced by many an hour of deep dejection when the works themselves appeared in their place; and that dejection again was sometimes as swiftly replaced by a spirit of almost unlimited self-esteem as he discovered in some particular example qualities greater than his recollection had accorded it.

The essential charm of the man’s nature shone out very clearly during that fortnight of preparation, and the invulnerable armour of self-esteem in which he was wont to appear before the world would sometimes fall from him in an instant, leaving in its place a spirit of humility that belonged to the deeper part of his nature. It was sometimes almost touching to note the mood of obvious dejection in which he would quit the gallery at the close of the day’s work, and no less interesting to observe with what alacrity the next morning he would recapture the confident outlook that was a part of the necessity of his being. He would sometimes be in the gallery half an hour or more before the usual time for the work of hanging to begin, and we would find him on our arrival with his short cherrywood pipe in his mouth surveying with evident satisfaction the pictures already placed upon the walls. And on those occasions he would often run his arm through mine and draw me away to compel my admiration of some forgotten excellence in this picture or in that, the renewed vision of which had sufficed completely to restore his self-complacency.

But these moments of exultation were not long-enduring, and it was an integral part of the fascinating _naïveté_ of his character that he could with equal emphasis in the presence of some less desirable performance accuse himself roundly of having slipped into vulgarity and bad taste. There was one thing, however, he never could endure, and that was the suggestion that his latest achievement was not also his best, and this conviction so entirely possessed him that he set himself in very vigorous fashion to the task of correcting what he conceived to be the faults of some of his earlier works. I confess I looked upon this adventure with something approaching dismay, for it was evident enough, though he was in no way conscious of it, that the Millais of 1886 was not the Millais of thirty years before, who had laboured under the influence of earlier and different ideals. Happily the emphatic protests of one or two of the owners from whom the pictures had been borrowed cut short this crusade of fancied improvement upon which he had embarked, and in one instance, although sorely against his will, he was forced to remove the fresh painting from the surface of the canvas.

Some of the essays of that earlier time of youthful impulse and more poetic design had grown unfamiliar to him. Many of them he had not seen from the date when they first left his studio, and I recall in particular with what eager and yet nervous expectation he awaited the arrival of “The Huguenot,” a picture that had served as the foundation of his fame as a young man. I think as he saw it unpacked, with its delicate beauty untarnished by time, that for the moment his faith in the uninterrupted progress of his career was partly shaken. I know at least that his voice trembled with emotion as he muttered some blunt words of praise for a picture which, as he said, was “not so bad for a youngster,” and I remember that as it took its place upon the wall, after gazing at it intently for some time in silence, he relit his pipe and took his way thoughtfully down the stairs into the street.

Millais used to contend that, until the advent of Watteau, the beauty of women had found no fit interpreters in art, and he would cite the example of Rembrandt as showing how poorly the feminine features which he portrayed compared with the lovely faces imaged by Reynolds and Gainsborough. Perhaps he was hardly equipped to deliver final judgment on such a subject, for I do not think he leaned with any enthusiasm towards those finer examples of Italian painting wherein the subtleties of feminine beauty have certainly not suffered by neglect. But these dogmatic assertions of men of genius, if they are not irrefutable in themselves, are often instructive in illuminating the finer tendencies of their own achievement; and it will remain as one of Millais’s indestructible claims to recognition that both in his earlier and in his later time he was able to interpret with matchless power the finer shades of emotional expression in the faces of beautiful women. When the chosen model rightly inspired him--and without that model his invention was often vapid and inert--he could succeed in a degree which no other artist has matched or surpassed in registering not only the permanent facts of beauty in form and feature, but in arresting with equal felicity the most fleeting moments of tender or passionate expression.

In the later days of his life it was at the Garrick Club that I saw most of Millais, for there, in the card-room, he was to be found nearly every afternoon, and as we both then dwelt in Kensington we often wandered homeward together. The buoyancy of his youth and early manhood never quite deserted him, even at that sadder season, when he was already in conflict with that dread opponent against whom his all-conquering spirit was powerless, and I never heard from him, however great the dejection of spirit he must have suffered, a single sour word concerning life or nature. His outlook on the world was never tainted by self-compassion, never clouded by any bitterness of personal experience, and one came to recognise then, as his life and strength gradually waned and failed, that the spirit of optimism which seemed sometimes unsympathetic in the season of his opulent vigour and virility was indeed a beauty deeply resident in his character, which even the shadow of coming death was powerless to cloud or darken.

AT HOME WITH ALMA-TADEMA

The death of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, following only too closely upon the loss of his gracious and gifted wife, finally closed the doors of one of the most delightful houses that overlooked the shores of Bohemia. They both possessed in rare measure the genius of friendship, and to both belonged the fine and generous sympathy of nature which is the abiding secret of true hospitality. And in their case a friendship once formed was steadfastly held. There are men and women not a few, who, as they advance along the path that leads to fame and distinction, contrive to shed the friends and comrades of an earlier day in haste to make room for guests more important or influential. This was never true of Tadema at any period of his career, and those who can recall the earlier Tuesday evenings at Townshend House, which looked across the waters of the canal to the green shade of the Regent’s Park, can bear witness that the simplest and most modest of his associates of that time found as cordial a welcome in the more spacious premises which he afterwards built for himself in the Grove End Road.

It was in the year 1877 that I first became an intimate guest at the pleasant weekly receptions at Townshend House, and I remember that what first struck me about them was the delightful sense of ease and informality that the host and hostess contrived to infuse into every gathering. Sometimes the friends assembled might number only a few; sometimes the rooms would be thronged with all that was most notable in the world of literature and art; but the party, whether large or small, knew no constraint of dulness, nor were we ever oppressed by that overpowering sense of social decorum which is apt to benumb the best-intentioned efforts of ordinary English hospitality. And, this I think, was due in great measure to an element in Tadema’s character that was almost unique.

Shakespeare has told us of the “boy eternal,” and many men of distinction have owned and kept that quality to the end of their days. But Tadema went one better, for he retained throughout his life some of the simple impulses and attributes of a veritable child. He had the wondering delight of a child in each new experience as it came within the range of his vision, and there were times when some passing ebullition of temper would betray something also of a child’s wayward petulance. It was characteristic of this side of his nature, which for the rest ranked among the most masculine and virile I have known, that he preserved to the last a child’s abiding delight in all forms of mechanical toys. This was a weakness well known to his intimate friends, who, on the annual occasion of his birthday, would vie with one another in presenting him with the most admired achievements of the toy-maker’s art. I remember, in particular, a certain ferocious tiger, which moved by clock-work across the polished floor of the studio. Tadema was absolutely fascinated by the antics of this mimic beast, remaining under the spell of its enchantment during the whole of the evening; and whenever a pause in the music permitted it, I could hear the whirr of the wheels of the clock as the delighted owner of this new plaything prepared to start it again upon an excursion round the room.

These birthday parties were occasions fondly cherished by our host. He loved every detail in the little ceremonial that might be arranged for their celebration, and would reckon up with the earnest intentness of a schoolboy over his first sum in arithmetic, the candles set around his birthday cake, that counted the sum of his years. And then followed the inevitable speech proposing his health--a task which usually fell to my lot; whereupon Tadema, who always thought that whatever was done in his honour exceeded in excellence any tribute accorded to another, would stoutly maintain that, as an effort in oratory, it far surpassed any speech he had ever heard made. This naïve delight of his in little things, that remained as a constant element of his character, was linked with a large generosity of nature in all that concerned the greater issues of life. And if he exacted from all who came within the range of his influence the little acts of homage and respect that he thought were his due, there was no one who would so freely place himself at the disposal of those whom he believed he could serve. He loved to gather round him the young students of his craft, ever on the alert to note and welcome new talent as it appeared, and when his counsel or advice was needed, he would spare neither time nor pains to afford the aid and encouragement which his superb technical resources so well fitted him to bestow. I have heard artists of position declare that if they had reached some crux in a picture that proved difficult of solution, there was no one so helpful as Tadema; and this, I think, was due mainly to the fact that his quick sympathy and swift apprehension enabled him at once to appreciate the point of view of the comrade who had sought his advice.

The last of those pleasant Tuesday evenings at Townshend House, which occurred in the spring of 1885, brought with it a certain feeling of sadness that found constant expression as the evening wore on. We had all become deeply attached to the quaintly-adorned dwelling where so many joyous evenings had been passed, and some there were who may have been conscious of a lurking fear lest the more spacious premises that were then in course of reconstruction in the Grove End Road should rob these festive gatherings of some part of the ease and intimacy that had hitherto been their most delightful characteristic. Certain it was that for his friends during many months to come, the week would contain no Tuesday worth the name, and as we parted that night I think there was a wide-spread feeling that the new order of things could never rival the old. But such fears, so often justified by experience, proved in this case wholly without foundation, and when, in the autumn of 1887, we were bidden to the richly-decorated new studio, in the construction of which Tadema had taken such infinite delight, it was found that the old spirit of hospitality, unchanged and unimpaired, was able quickly to accommodate itself to its more imposing surroundings.

I had known the house in Grove End Road before it took on the stamp of Tadema’s quaint invention and fanciful ingenuity. It had been inhabited by the French painter Tissot during a great part of his residence in England, and I recall a dinner party given by him on an occasion shortly after the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, at which he announced to me his serious and solemn intention of making a radical revolution in the purpose and direction of his art. Up to that time the pictures of this most adroit of craftsmen had been wholly mundane, it might even be said demi-mundane, in character; but he had been profoundly impressed by the recent display of the works of Burne-Jones, to which the public for the first time had accorded a larger welcome; and it immediately struck the shrewd spirit of Tissot that there were commercial possibilities in the region of ideal art of which he was bound as a practical man to take account and advantage. As he himself naïvely expressed it on that evening: “Vraiment, mon ami, je vois qu’il y a quelque chose à faire”; and he forthwith led the way to his studio, where he had already commenced a group of allegorical subjects, to the infinite amusement of his friend Heilbuth, who at that time, I think, knew him better than he knew himself.

In those days, Tadema and Burne-Jones were scarcely acquainted. Their real friendship came a little later, but when it came it was very genuine and sincere, resting on a certain quality of simplicity which they owned in common and a strong feeling of mutual respect and esteem. Their ways in art lay far asunder, but each knew how to value at their true worth the gifts of the other. From time to time they would both join me in little Bohemian feasts at Previtali’s Restaurant in Coventry Street, where we would sit till the closing hours in pleasant converse that was never permitted to be protractedly serious. Tadema generally prefaced the evening with an anecdote which he always believed to be entirely new, and even when its hoary antiquity was not in doubt, Burne-Jones never failed to supply a full measure of the laughing appreciation that was due to novelty. In his more serious moods, however, Tadema’s talk was marked by deep conviction and entire sincerity. He never acquired complete mastery over our language, but he could always find the word or phrase that reached the heart of what he wanted to say. In his art, no less than in his views on art and life, he was desperately in earnest, and there was something even in the quality of his voice that aptly mirrored the mind and character of the man. Indeed, to be quite correct, it was not one voice, but two, for sometimes even within the compass of a single sentence the tone would swiftly change from the guttural notes that betrayed his northern origin to those softer cadences that seemed to echo from some southern belfry.

I have often thought that this contrast of intonation in his speech reflected in a measure the dual influences that dominated his painting. By his heart’s desire, he belonged to a land that was not the land of his birth and to an epoch far removed from the present. The call of the spirit led him backward and southward--to the streets of ancient Rome and the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean; but, for all his journeyings, his genius as a painter remained securely domiciled under northern skies. The saving grace of his art, whatever the material upon which it was employed, differed little, indeed, from that which gives its surviving charm to the art of his countryman De Hoogh. Both will live in virtue of their unfailing love of light. It is that, or, at least, that above all else, that will make their achievements delightful and indestructible. “No man has ever lived,” Burne-Jones once said to me, “who has interpreted with Tadema’s power the incidence of sunlight on metal and marble.” And although Tadema left the simple interiors of De Hoogh far behind him in his learned reconstruction of the buildings of antiquity, it was with a temper and purpose closely allied to that of De Hoogh that he loved to revel in quaintly-chosen effects of light and shade, admitting sometimes only the tiniest corner of the full sunshine from the outer world, just to illumine as with the dazzling brilliance of a jewel the imprisoned half-tones that flood the foregrounds of his pictures.

To those who can look below the surface, this central quality of his genius, which he inherited as part of his birthright, will be found reappearing in unbroken continuity throughout the splendid series of his work that lately adorned the walls of Burlington House. Their fertile invention, and the strong and vivid sense of drama that often moves that invention; the patient industry and wide learning which have served to recreate the classic environment wherein his chosen characters live and have their being--these things would count for little in the final impression left by his art, if he had not carried with him in all his wanderings into the past and towards the south, that vitalising principle of light, which, in hands fitly inspired, is able to bestow even upon inanimate things a pulsing and sentient existence. “There is nothing either beautiful or ugly,” as Constable once said, “but light and shade makes it so.” Alma-Tadema had learnt this secret long ago, when he was little more than a boy, and before he had quitted his native land, and he retained it to the very end of his career.

This is not the occasion to appraise at its full value the worth of Tadema’s artistic achievement, nor would even those who are his warmest admirers seek to deny that in many of its aspects it is open to criticism. But at a time when the antics of the charlatan are invading almost every realm of art, his patient and unswerving loyalty to a chosen ideal stands forth as a shining example to all who may come after him. That his powers in the region of design confessed some inherent limitations he himself was entirely conscious. I remember one day when we were discussing the claims of several of his contemporaries, he said to me suddenly, “You know, my dear fellow, there are some painters who are colour-blind, and some painters who are form-blind. Now, Leighton, for instance, is colour-blind, and I--well, I, you know, am form-blind.” The criticism was perhaps unduly severe in both directions, but it announced a pregnant truth and proved that he was not unaware of those particular qualities in which his weakness was apt to betray itself.

This was said during the time when Hallé and I were arranging the collected exhibition of his works at the Grosvenor Gallery, and when he had had a full opportunity of passing in review the gathered achievement of many years’ labour. Those days we passed together superintending the process of hanging were wholly delightful, and served to bring out many interesting characteristics of Tadema’s nature. When the exhibition was first projected Tadema had laid down a rule for our guidance, which he emphatically declared must not be departed from. “The arrangement,” he said, “must be strictly chronological”; for the whole interest of such a collection, as he held, lay in the image it presented of an artist’s gradual development. We offered no objection at the time, though we knew well by previous experience that adherence to so rigid a principle was inconsistent with decorative effect; and we were, therefore, not unduly surprised when Tadema appeared one morning with the revolutionary announcement that the chronological arrangement must go by the board; insisting, with the air of a man who had hitherto unwillingly yielded to our pedantic tradition, that the only fit way to hang an exhibition was to make the pictures look well upon the walls.

The last time I met Alma-Tadema was at a little supper party given by Sir Herbert Tree on the occasion of the first performance of _Macbeth_. It was impossible for those who had known him in the days of his full vigour not to be conscious even then that his health was failing. From the time of his wife’s death, he had never, indeed, shown the same elasticity of spirit, though with valiant courage he had set himself to take up the broken thread of his life, retaining even to the last that loving and humorous welcome of his friends that had been his unfailing characteristic in happier days. But although admittedly no longer robust, his unflagging interest in the theatre and his friendship for Tree had brought him from home on that evening, and availed to hold him a prisoner for the little impromptu feast that followed the play.

My first experience of Tadema’s work for the theatre was on the occasion of the production of Mr. Ogilvie’s play of _Hypatia_, when I had persuaded him, at Tree’s invitation, to undertake the designs for the scenery and costumes. This is a kind of work to which many gifted painters cannot readily adapt themselves. But Tadema’s constructive talent, his rare ingenuity in dealing with architectural problems, and, above all, his unrivalled gifts in contriving diversified effects of light and shade, amply fitted him for such a task; and the difficulty which some painters experience of yoking their intended design with the interpretative resources of the scenic artists, proved no difficulty to him. He loved their art with all its infinite devices for the production of illusion, and he knew how to treat them in a spirit of true and loyal comradeship. At the first I had been a little nervous on this score, but, one day, when I asked him how he and the principal scene-painter were progressing, he relieved me of all anxiety upon the matter by the emphatic announcement that he and his associate were in such complete agreement that, as he quaintly phrased it from a peasant formula recalled from the land of his birth, “we are like two hands on one stomach.” As the production neared completion, I remember one evening, we were waiting for Tadema, who had been detained by a council meeting at the Royal Academy. The most important scene was ready set, and, as it seemed to us, with really admirable effect; but when Tadema arrived everything was wrong. He scattered objection and criticism in every direction, sometimes, as I thought, with so little reason that I cast about to discover what could be the source of his discontent. Suddenly I remembered that the hour was late, and that, as he had come straight from Burlington House to keep the appointment, the probability was that he had not dined. I put the question to him, and his answer was immediate, “Of course I have not dined.” “Then,” I said, “let us dine, and leave the men to put these matters right.” The cure acted like magic, for when we returned to the theatre an hour later, Tadema readily found a way by which every defect might be set right.

I was associated with him at a later time with several other productions which he made for the stage, notably the _Coriolanus_, in the later days of the Lyceum, and, in a lesser degree as far as my work was concerned, in the _Julius Caesar_ presented by Sir Herbert Tree. I think such work was always a pleasure to him, because it brought into play qualities that are not directly involved in the work of a painter. His talent had always a strongly practical side, and it was that which made the construction and perfecting of his own house so keen a pleasure to him. His labours there would, I believe, have remained incomplete even if he had lived for another twenty years. He was always discovering new possibilities that opened the door for fresh improvements, and his knowledge of the details of every craft employed in his service was so exacting and complete that the skilled artificers who laboured for him knew well that they were under the trained eye of a master as well as of an employer.