Chapter IV: Part 4

From these three commanding personalities, which yield brightness to the dawn of our English school of portraiture, we advance by no inglorious progression to the masters who, though now deceased, belong of right to our own day. Hoppner, the younger contemporary of the men I have named, whose career carries us into the next century, is here superbly represented in the contributions from Mrs. Fleischmann and Lord Darnley. Raeburn also, whose masculine and sometimes rugged genius speaks to us with the accent of the north--Raeburn, who at the instigation of Sir Joshua journeyed to Italy to study the great Italian masters--is here seen at his best in the splendid portrait of “The MacNab,” lent by Mrs. Baillie-Hamilton; while near by we find characteristic examples of the art of his fellow-countrymen, Allan Ramsay and Andrew Geddes. Sir Thomas Lawrence may be said to have brought to a close the tradition established by Reynolds, and his practice may therefore be held to form a link with the more modern school. His claims here receive justice in the two portraits lent by Lord Bathurst and Lord Plymouth; nor is the collection without worthy specimens of the art of Opie, whose practice frankly confesses the example and influence of Sir Joshua himself. Among the portrait painters of the younger day, in whose ranks may be counted Frank Holl and Frederick Sandys, Brough, and Furse, two names stand pre-eminent. Watts and Millais in their different appeal register the high-water mark of portraiture during what may be called the Victorian era. The former owned in common with Sir Joshua an unswerving devotion to the great traditions of Italian painting, and may claim equally with Sir Joshua to have won for his work in this kind an imaginative quality legitimately imported from the study of ideal design. Millais stands alone. Of both I shall have to speak again in respect of other claims which their art puts forward, but the position of Millais as a painter of portrait is as independent in its appeal as that of Gainsborough himself.

The incursions into the realm of ideal and decorative art made by English painters of the eighteenth century may not be reckoned among the accepted triumphs of our school. Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, all alike inspired by high ambition and capable, as was shown by their untiring devotion and sacrifice in the cause they had espoused, lacked the means and the endowment to appear with any solid measure of success to an age that was in itself unfitted to receive the message they sought to convey. The untutored and undisciplined genius of William Blake affords an isolated example in his time of a true and deeper understanding of the secrets of the kind of art which these men vainly pursued; but even if Blake had possessed more ample resources as a painter he would none the less have spoken in a language that was strange to the temper of his time; and it was reserved for a later day to forge the means which would secure a genuine revival of the forgotten glories of imaginative design.

The movement associated with the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood stands as a landmark in the modern history of our school, nor has it been without lasting influence upon the art of Europe. In the year 1848, which gave it birth, the outlook for painting which aimed at the presentation of any imaginative ideal was not encouraging. Etty, a painter of genuine endowment, still survived, and his unquestioned gifts as a colourist are plainly asserted in the single example included in the present exhibition; but the practice of his later years, as Holman Hunt has justly observed, scarcely offered the most fitting model to a young artist of serious ambition. On the other hand, the waning accomplishment of men who had passed their prime cried aloud for the need of a new return to nature; and the accepted conventions of style, either in themselves outworn or else imperfectly revealed by hands enfeebled and grown old, left the hour ripe for the advent of that small but greatly gifted group of young men whose rebel practice was destined to leave so strong an imprint upon their own and succeeding generations. It would perhaps be difficult to find three painters of equal power whose art was so differently inspired and whose achievement was destined to take such separate and widely divergent forms as Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who stand as the acknowledged heads in this new movement; but their efforts, at the time of which I am speaking, were bound together by a common purpose which prevailed then and has since continued to keep their names linked together in the modern history of our English school. In protest against the fetters imposed upon painting by the tradition of the past--fetters that were by common consent only to be removed by a renewed return to the facts of nature--they trod, in the season of their youth, the same road, although the ultimate development of their separate personalities led them, before many years passed, into paths widely divergent from one another. To judge Rossetti’s talent justly from works collected on the present occasion we must group together the examples in oil and water-colour. The religious phase in his career is indicated by “The Annunciation of the Virgin,” lent by Mrs. Boyce; while the freedom with which his imagination afterwards roamed over those great legends already made memorable in literature is shown by the “Mariana” and the “Dante meeting Beatrice” among the paintings in oil, and perhaps even more conclusively in the exquisite water-colour drawing of “Paolo and Francesca,” lent by Mr. Davis, which may be accepted as a capital instance of his unrivalled power to render the truths of human passion without violating the laws inherent in the art he professed. In his water-colours even more decisively than in his paintings in oil Rossetti clearly announces his great claims as a colourist; and his paintings bear this distinctive mark in their invention of colour that the ordered harmonies he can command are not only beautiful in themselves but that their beauty stands in clear and direct response to the nature of the chosen subject. In this regard assuredly neither of the two men who stand associated with him in the Pre-Raphaelite movement can claim to be his superior. It is perhaps unfortunate for purposes of comparison that the range of Millais’s talent is here not completely represented. “Sir Isumbras at the Ford” is indeed a characteristic example of his earlier period, though it hardly shows the qualities he could then command in the same degree of perfection as would be rendered by the presence of “Lorenzo and Isabella” or of “Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop.” We have, on the other hand, in the “Black Brunswicker” a notable example of that transitional period in Millais’s art wherein the claims of fancy and invention and the overmastering gifts of the realist--gifts that afterwards availed to set him as the greatest portrait painter of his time--are held in momentary balance; and we may find herein expressed an element of Millais’s painting which had already received supreme embodiment in the famous picture of “The Huguenot.” No artist of his time--perhaps no artist of any time--has ever excelled him in the rendering of certain phases of human emotion that transfigure without disturbing the permanent beauty of feminine character. This power remained to him to the end of his career, and it was the perception of it which caused Watts to write to him in 1878, in regard to “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which had received deserved decoration in Paris: “Lucy Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” It is impossible to say in the presence of work of this kind how much has been contributed by the model, how much conferred by the artist; but that the artist’s share in the result is predominant is proved by the fact that nobody else has combined in the same fashion the portraiture of individual features with the most delicate suggestion of the emotion that moves them. In the art of Holman Hunt, always masculine in its character and marked by the signs of indefatigable industry, emphasis is so evenly laid upon all the confluent qualities that contribute to the result that it is hard to signalise or to describe the dominating characteristics of his personality. In his treatment of religious subjects he showed a constant reverence that nevertheless scarcely touched the confines of worship; for the same earnestness of purpose, the same reverent research of truth, asserts itself no less in whatever subject engages his brush. Rare qualities of a purely pictorial kind nearly all his work may claim, and yet it is not always possible to concede to the result, however astonishing in its power, that final seal of beauty without which Art’s victory can never be deemed absolutely complete. “The Scapegoat,” here exhibited, was fiercely disputed at the date of his first appearance, and it is even now not difficult to understand that its appeal must have seemed strange to the temper of the time; but there can be no barrier at any rate to the generous appreciation of the noble qualities displayed in the “Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” or the austere simplicity and sincerity of “Morning Prayer.”

Around these three men who bravely heralded the new movement in English art are grouped the names of others who in different degrees were equally inspired by the principles the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to enforce. For although their earlier efforts encountered bitter attack from the accredited organs of public opinion, they met at the outset with warm response from within the ranks of art itself. The company of their followers at first, indeed, was small; but the quickened spirit of the time had already been in part prepared for the reception of the message they bore. The writings of John Ruskin, in whatever degree his particular judgments upon art matters may be disputed, had already availed to stir the conscience of his generation and to restore to art its rightful place in life. Henceforth it was not possible to think of painting as a thing of mere dilettantism, serving only to minister to the trivial demands of the taste of the hour. He proved to the world that at every season when art has held a dominating place its spirit has been fast linked with the heart and life of the people; and the deep earnestness which in _Modern Painters_ he brought to the task of historical criticism found a ready reflex in the more serious and concentrated intensity of feeling which coloured the work of men of the younger school.

William Dyce, by his declared devotion to the painters of the Quattrocento, had already in part anticipated the practice of the Pre-Raphaelites; and Ford Madox Brown, here represented both as a painter of portrait and as a master of design, though never formally enrolled in the brotherhood, claims by the inherent qualities of his work a prominent place in the revolution that was then in progress. He had been Rossetti’s first master, and to the end of his life, as I can testify, Rossetti retained for him the warmest affection, and Holman Hunt’s somewhat ungracious protest that the direction of his art would have clashed with the aims the Pre-Raphaelites had then in view must be surely deemed unconvincing in the presence of his great picture entitled “Work,” wherein an unflinching reliance upon nature is the dominant characteristic. Frederick Sandys, here admirably represented by the portrait of Mrs. Clabburn and by “Medea,” showed even more conclusively in his varied work in design his right to be reckoned side by side with the leaders I have named; while Burne-Jones, who always generously acknowledged his indebtedness to Rossetti, displayed as his powers developed a kindred attachment to the kind of beauty in painting which finds its well-spring in the art of Florence. The water-colours in the present collection represent him at a time when Rossetti’s example and influence were still dominant, but “Love among the Ruins,” lent by Mrs. Michie, and “The Mirror of Venus,” from the collection of Mr. Goldman, reveal to us the painter in the plenitude of his powers, when with full mastery of resource he revelled in the interpretation of themes of imaginative significance. A great colourist in the sense in which the Florentines use colour--a great designer, gifted from the outset with the power of striking into symbol forms of beauty that might equally serve to fire the fancy of a poet, Burne-Jones holds a unique position in our school; nor are his claims to admiration likely to suffer from the fact that the principles he professed have sometimes been adopted by imitators not sufficiently endowed for so high an endeavour.

In the story of a movement that limitations of space must needs leave inadequate it would be impossible to ignore or to omit the names of two men who worthily occupied a distinguished place in the art of their time. G. F. Watts and Lord Leighton may both be said to stand apart from the particular current of artistic revolution associated with the names I have already cited. The former was already deeply imbued with the spirit of the great Venetians even before the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had come into being, but the poetic impulse, which he owned in common with his younger contemporaries, sets much of his work in clear alliance with theirs. His “Love and Death” illustrates in a form of unquestioned beauty the attempt to combine the sometimes divergent qualities of the two great schools of Italy; and the example set by both reappears in a union that is entirely satisfying when Watts turns to the task of portraiture. Nor could any better examples of his accomplishment have been procured than the figure of Lord Tennyson or the head of Mr. Walter Crane.

Lord Leighton’s finely cultivated talent, though his early sojourn at Florence had coloured the work of his youth, reveals at the hour of its maturity an undivided allegiance to classic ideals. His mediaevalism was a garb quickly discarded. “By degrees,” he once wrote to me, “my growing love for form made me intolerant of the restraints and exigencies of costume and led me more and more, and finally, to a class of subjects, or more accurately to a state of conditions, in which supreme scope is left to pure artistic qualities, in which no form is imposed upon the artist by the tailor, but in which every form is made obedient to the conception of the design he has in hand. These conditions classic subjects afford, and as vehicles therefore of abstract form, which is a thing not of one time but of all time, these subjects can never be obsolete, and though to many they are a dead letter, they can never be an anachronism.” With this confession of faith before us we may measure how far the unceasing labours of a long career availed to satisfy the noble purpose of his youth. A certain lack of virility, an imperfect sense of energy and movement which is needed to give the final sense of vitality to all art, however directed, may perhaps be alleged even against the most complete of his achievements; but the saving sense of grace, revealed in forms often finely proportioned and justly selected, remains as an abiding element in his constant pursuit of classic perfection, and is clearly enough illustrated in such works as the “Summer Moon” and the “Return of Persephone,” which the committee have secured for the present exhibition.

We must return now for a while to the earlier experiments of our school in order to trace the growth of the art of landscape, a department wherein by the consent of Europe our painters hold a place of indisputable supremacy. Gainsborough, as I have already hinted, had found in the surroundings of his Suffolk home the material he needed for the display of his deeply seated love of outward nature; and his achievements in this kind rest as the first foundation of what is most enduringly characteristic in English landscape painting. But as early as the year 1749, when Gainsborough was only a youth of twenty-two, Richard Wilson was already resident in Italy, and had begun that exquisite series of studies from Italian scenery which won so small a meed of praise from his own generation. The special direction of his art was not, indeed, destined to inspire many of those who came after him, for the new spirit of naturalism sought and captured certain qualities of dramatic expressions in the rendering of nature that were not of his seeking; nor was the ordered beauty of his compositions, or the serene charm which characterises his gift as a colourist, likely to be heeded by a race of painters who were already on the alert to seize and record those fleeting effects of changing light and tone which found such splendid embodiment in the vigorous painting of Constable. Constable’s frank reliance upon light and shade as constituting the final element of beauty in landscape could never have been accepted without reserve by Richard Wilson, but the pursuit which Constable initiated has owned an overpowering attraction for nearly all students of nature since his time; and his example, transported to France through the art of Michel, may be allowed to have powerfully inspired that distinguished group of French artists whose work was a part of the outcome of the modern romantic movement. It would be impossible here to distinguish in detail the separate work of English painters who have worthily carried forward the tradition established by Constable; nor is it needful now to vindicate the claims of men like Cotman, Cox, and Crome in an earlier time, or of Hook and Cecil Lawson, Sam Bough, Mason, and Frederick Walker, whose more recent work brings the story of this branch of art down to our own day. Of English landscapists, indeed, the name is legion, and at the head of them all, if we may judge by the extent of the fame he has won, stands the name of Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose genius, heralded to the world by the eloquent advocacy of Ruskin, is here fully illustrated in superb examples from the collections of Mr. Chapman, Lord Strathcona, Mr. Beecham, and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Turner, in his youth, while he was still under the influence of Girtin, might well have owned kinship with Richard Wilson, as both in turn might have confessed their indebtedness to the great Frenchman, Claude Lorraine; but Turner’s talent, as it passed onward in steady development, parted completely with the shackles imposed by earlier authority and left him at the close of a brilliant career in a position of complete isolation and independence. There will always be those--and I may count myself among the number--who will turn with increasing love to the more restrained beauty of his earlier work, and who will seek rather in his water-colours than in his paintings in oil for the finer expression of those more individual qualities which marked the practice of his prime. But personal preference need count for little in the acknowledgment which all alike must freely render, that his genius has conferred a lasting glory upon the English school.

With this brief survey of the work of deceased British artists the mission of the critic may here fitly end. The purpose of such an introduction as I have attempted is sufficiently served if, in sketching the growth of our school from its foundation in the middle of the eighteenth century, I have succeeded in indicating the several diverse currents which have contributed to its development, and have left so rich a heritage in achievement and example to the men of a younger day. Of the varied quality of that later work the exhibition must be left to speak for itself. That the product of our time lacks nothing of vitality is sufficiently shown in the spirit of restless and untiring experiment which marks the varied output of our younger school; and that it still preserves among many of its exponents a loyal adherence to the imperishable traditions of the past is no less clearly asserted in the work of men who are now labouring with undiminished faith in the ideals established by an earlier generation. Of Subject and Portrait, in the art that leans for its support upon qualities of decorative design and in the direct and searching questionings of nature, noticeable in every direction and manifest specially in the treatment of landscape, there is a rich and abundant harvest in the present collection.

WITH GEORGE MEREDITH ON BOX HILL

“Come down,” he wrote to me one day, “and see our Indian summer here. A dozen differently coloured torches you will find held up in our woods, for which, however, as well as for your sensitive skin, we require stillness and a smiling or sober sky.”

This was written in the autumn of 1878, and is drawn from one of many little notes of invitation which used to preface a delightful day with George Meredith on the slopes of Box Hill. Our long rambles filled the afternoon, and were preceded by a simple but thoughtfully chosen lunch, which, when the weather allowed, was set out upon a gravel walk in front of the cottage beside the tall, sheltering hedge that gave shade from the sun. Meredith attached no small importance to the details of these little feasts. He prided himself not a little on his gastronomic knowledge, and was pleased when our climate made it possible to reproduce the impression of a genuine French _déjeuner en plein air_. In another letter he writes: “The promise of weather is good. Lilac, laburnum, nightingales, and asparagus are your dishes. Hochheimer or dry, still, red Bouzy, Richebourg and your friend to wash all down.” His knowledge of these matters of the table was, perhaps, not very profound, but the appropriate vocabulary which gave the air of the expert was always at his command. And this, I think, was characteristic of the man in respect of many fields of knowledge that lay beyond the arena in which his imaginative powers were directly engaged.

In his art he was never quite content to image only the permanent facts of life, either in their larger or simpler issues, unless he was permitted at the same time to entangle the characters of his creation in the coils of some problem that was intellectual rather than purely emotional. He loved to submit his creations to the instant pressure of their time, and with this purpose it was his business, no less than his pleasure, to equip himself intellectually with garnered stores of knowledge in fields into which the ordinary writers of fiction rarely enter. It was not, of course, to be supposed that he could claim equal mastery in all, although his intellect was so active and so agile that his limitations were not easily discerned. I remember one day at an Exhibition in the New Gallery having introduced him to an old gentleman, whose long life had been spent in a study of the drawings of the old masters, to whom Meredith, with inimitable fluency, was expounding the peculiar virtues of the art of Canaletto. Meredith was eloquent, but the discourse somehow failed to impress the aged student. When they had parted his sole commentary to me was: “Your friend--Mr. Meredith, I think you said--endeavoured to persuade me that he understood Canaletto, but he did not.”

But even if, in this single instance, the criticism be accepted as just, it must be conceded by all who knew him well that Meredith was not often caught tripping in the discussion of any topic in which his intellect had been actively engaged. Sometimes--and then, perhaps, rather in a spirit of audacious adventure and for exercise of his incomparable powers of expression--he would make a bold sortie into realms of knowledge that were only half conquered. But this was, for the most part, only when he had an audience waiting on his words. When he had only a single companion to listen there was no man whose talk was more penetrating or more sincere: and he was at his best, I used to think, in those long rambles that filled our afternoons at Box Hill. The active exercise in which he delighted seemed to steady and concentrate those intellectual forces that sometimes ran riot when he felt himself called upon to dominate the mixed assembly of a dinner table.

No one, assuredly, ever possessed a more genuine or a more exalted delight in nature. His veneration for the earth and for all that sprang from the earth as an unfailing and irrefutable source of the highest sanity in thought and feeling, amounted almost to worship. He never deliberately set out to paint the landscape in set language as we passed along, but a brief word dropped here and there upon our way, telling of some aspect of beauty newly observed and newly registered, showed clearly that every fresh encounter with nature served to add another gem to the hoarded store of beauty that lay resident in his mind. And yet, even here, the research for the recondite, either in the fact observed or in the phrase that fixed it, peeped out characteristically in the most careless fashion of his talk. He loved to signalise an old and abiding love of the outward world by some new token that found expression at once in language newly coined; and he would break away on a sudden from some long-drawn legend of a half-imaginary character that was often set in the frame of burlesque, to note, with a swift change to a graver tone, some passing aspect of the scene that challenged his admiration afresh. And then, when he had quietly added this last specimen to his cabinet, he would as quickly turn again, with boisterous mirth, to complete the caricature portrait of some common friend, which he loved to embellish with every detail of imagined embroidery.

In a mixed company Meredith did not often lean to the discussion of literature. He inclined rather, if an expert on any subject was present, to press the conversation in that direction, exhibiting nearly always a surprising knowledge of the specialist’s theme, knowledge at any rate sufficient to yield in the result a full revelation of the store of information at the disposal of his interlocutor. But in those long rambles when we were alone he loved to consider and discuss the claims of the professors of his own art, rejecting scornfully enough the current standards of his own time, but approaching with entire humility the work of masters whom he acknowledged. In those days (I am speaking now of the years between 1875 and 1888) he had by no means attained even to that measure of popularity which came to him at a later time, and when the talk veered towards his own work it was easy to perceive a lurking sense of disappointment that left him, however, with an undiminished faith in the art to which his life was pledged.

During the autumn of 1878 I had written to him in warm appreciation of some of his poems, and his reply is characteristic. “There is no man,” he writes, “I would so strongly wish to please with my verse. I wish I had more time for it, but my Pactolus, a shrivelled stream at best, will not flow to piping, and as to publishing books of verse, I have paid heavily for that audacity twice in pounds sterling. I had for audience the bull, the donkey, and the barking cur. He that pays to come before them a third time, we will not give him his name.” I think in regard to all his work, whether in prose or verse, he was haunted at that time by the presence of the bull, the donkey, and the barking cur. But if this had yielded for the moment some sense of bitterness in regard to the results of his own career, his attitude towards life was even then undaunted, and left him generously disposed towards all achievement of true pretensions, either in the present or in the past. Indeed, the true greatness of the man was in nothing better displayed than in the unbroken urbanity of his outlook upon life. His was of all natures I have known the most hopeful of the world’s destiny. The starved and shrivelled pessimism of the disappointed egotist had no part in his disposition. His wider outlook upon life was undimmed by the pain of whatever measure of personal failure had befallen him, and I believe that even if his faith in humanity had not of itself been sufficing and complete, he could have drawn from the earth, and the unfading beauty of the earth, encouragement enough to keep him steadfast in his way.

How admirably has he expressed this joy of full comradeship with nature in the opening lines of the “Woods of Westermain”!

Toss your heart up with the lark;
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.

So he cries in invitation; and then a little later, in celebration of the joys that await the wood-wayfarer, he adds:

This is being bird and more,
More than glad musician this;
Granaries you will have a store
Past the world of woe and bliss;
Sharing still its bliss and woe;
Harnessed to its hungers, no.
On the throne Success usurps,
You shall seat the joy you feel
Where a race of water chirps
Twisting hues of flourished steel:
Or where light is caught in hoop
Up a clearing’s leafy rise,
Where the crossing deer-herds troop
Classic splendours, knightly dyes.
Or, where old-eyed oxen chew
Speculation with the cud,
Read their pool of vision through,
Back to hours when mind was mud.

Or yet again towards the close:

Hear that song; both wild and ruled.
Hear it: is it wail or mirth?
Ordered, bubbled, quite unschooled?
None, and all: it springs of Earth.
O but hear it! ’tis the mind;
Mind that with deep Earth unites,
Round the solid trunk to wind
Rings of clasping parasites.
Music have you there to feed
Simplest and most soaring need.

In his prose work Meredith seems often half distrustful of his own inspiration, halting now and then to test the validity of the emotions he has awakened, and at times letting a jet of irony on to the fire he has kindled, as though half suspicious that he had been lured into the ways of the sentimentalist. But in his poetry he owns a larger daring and a higher freedom; there he treads unhampered by these half-conscious fears, and yet there, no less than in his prose, we can recognise his insatiable hunger to find and discover new tokens by which to arrest the vision that he loves.

Meredith’s little cottage at the foot of Box Hill was the fittest home for the writer and for the man. Not so far removed from town as to be beyond the echo of its strife, it enabled him when his duty as reader to Chapman and Hall took him to the office to pass an hour or two at luncheon at the Garrick Club, where he loved in these brief intervals of leisure to rally some of his old friends in laughing and cheerful converse.

These occasional visits served to keep him in touch with the moving problems of his time, towards none of which he affected any kind of indifference; and yet the pungent wit and profound penetration of view with which he handled such mundane themes were won and hoarded, I think, in the long silences and the chosen loneliness of his Surrey home. Hard by Flint Cottage stands the little inn at Burford Bridge, now transformed and enlarged to meet the constant incursions of visitors from the town, but at the time when I first remember it but little changed from the days when it sheltered Keats while he was setting the finishing touches to “Endymion.” The association often led us in our rambles to speak of the work of the earlier poet, for whose faultless art Meredith owned an unbounded admiration. Of the poets I think he spoke more willingly than of the writers of prose, though he was on the alert to recognise genius in any form, and never lacked enthusiasm in appraising the work of a writer like Charlotte Brontë. For George Eliot’s achievement he never professed more than a strictly limited respect. Her more pretentious literary methods failed to impress him, and there were times when the keenness of his hostile criticism bordered upon scorn. I remember when some one in his presence ventured to remark that George Eliot, “panoplied in all the philosophies, was apt to swoop upon a commonplace,” he hailed the criticism with the keenest enjoyment, and half-laughingly declared that he would like to have forged the phrase himself.

At the close of our afternoon rambles, that in summer time were prolonged to close upon the dinner-hour, we would return at loitering pace down the winding paths to the cottage, and when I was able to stay the night our evenings would be spent in the little châlet that stood on the hill at the summit of his garden. Meredith truly loved the secluded bower that he had fashioned for himself. It was there he worked, and during the summer months it was there he constantly passed the night. It was there I used to leave him when our long talk was over, and descend the garden to the room that had been allotted to me in the cottage. But of talk he never tired, and it was often far into the night before we parted. He loved also, when he found an appreciative listener, to read aloud long passages from his poems. Once I remember he recited to me during a single evening the whole of the body of sonnets forming the poem of “Modern Love.” On occasion--but not, perhaps, quite so willingly--he might be tempted to anticipate publication by reading a chapter or two from an uncompleted story, and I can recall with what admirable effect, not at Box Hill, but at Ightham Moat where we were both the guests of a gracious hostess, whose death long preceded his own, he read aloud to us the remarkable opening chapters of the “Amazing Marriage.”

Meredith greatly enjoyed those occasional visits to his friends, and found himself, I think, especially at home in the house I have named. He did not disdain the little acts of homage there freely offered him, for the guests assembled were always to be counted among his worshippers, and yet he was finely free from the smallest pretence of consciously asserted dignity. As a rule, he spoke but little of his own work, and then only on urgent invitation, content, for the most part, to accept the passing topic, which his high spirits and unflagging humour would quickly lift to illumination. On such occasions he loved to invent and elaborate, for one or other of his more intimate friends, some fancied legend that was absolutely detached from life and reality, and sometimes he so fell in love with the fable of his creation that for weeks or months afterwards his letters would continue to elaborate and to develop a story that had only taken birth in the jesting mood of a moment.

The young people of a country-house always found a welcome from Meredith, and towards women at all times his respect was of a kind that needed no spur of social convention. It sprang of a deep faith in their high service to the world, and a quickened belief in the larger future that was in store for them. In his own home the spirit of raillery, that he could not always curb, sometimes pressed too hardly upon those nearest him; but I think he was scarcely conscious of any pain he may have inflicted--hardly aware, indeed, of the reiterated insistence with which he would sometimes expose and ridicule some harmless foible of character that did not deserve rebuke. But if this fault must be conceded in regard to those who stood in the intimate circle of his home, it certainly implied no failing reverence towards the sex they owned. After all, an artist, who has a full claim to that title, is revealed most truly in his work. If the revelation there can be suspected, the art is false, and it may, I think, be claimed without challenge for Meredith that in the created characters of his work he has done for women what has been accomplished by no other writer since Shakespeare. Over all the mystery that gives them charm, his mastery in delineation was complete, but it is his appreciation of the nobler possibilities of character that lie behind the wayward changes of temperament that sets his portraiture of women beyond the reach of rivalry. I think most women who came to know him were conscious of this in his presence, and it is small wonder that that larger circle who met themselves mirrored in his books should count him among the most fearless champions of their sex.

A few months ago I found myself treading once more the road that leads to his cottage under the hill. Once again a “dozen differently coloured torches” were held up in the woods behind the house, flaming as I saw them first in his company. But there was one torch that burned no more. It had fallen from the hand that held it, and lay extinguished upon the earth his spirit owned and loved. But those days I passed with him there are memorable still, and as I stood beside the cottage gate amid the gathering shadows of evening, his own beautiful lines came back to me from “Love in the Valley”:

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

THE LEGEND OF PARSIFAL

Some few years ago, when I was writing my play of _Tristram and Iseult_, a lady of my acquaintance, who was familiar with the music-drama by Wagner on the same theme, asked me by what means I had contrived to secure Madame Wagner’s consent to the use of the story for the English stage. Such ignorance of one of the most beautiful of the legends included in the Arthurian cycle, enshrined for English readers by Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal prose romance of _Le Morte d’Arthur_, is of course phenomenal and extreme, but it was matched by my experience a few days after the production of the play, when an enterprising newscutting agency, misled by some reference in the programme to the great chronicler, forwarded to the theatre a bundle of criticisms addressed to Sir Thomas Malory, Knight, oblivious of the fact that he had passed beyond the reach of censure in the closing years of the fifteenth century.

It is possible, however, that even among some of those to whom the source of the Tristram story is familiar, there may be here and there isolated worshippers of the great German composer who are hardly aware that the legend of Parsifal found its source in the same great body of Arthurian romance. Indeed, I have met with not a few to whom the identification of Parsifal with the British hero, Sir Perceval, comes somewhat as a surprise, and who are scarcely conscious that the whole legend of the “Holy Grail,” which forms the subject of Wagner’s opera, had its source in Britain, and was afterwards incorporated in romances that first saw the light in France. The writer who originally gave to the story its poetic form, and in whose work the purely human features of the narrative are already linked with the history of Christianity, was Crestien de Troyes, who began to write about 1150, and died before the end of the twelfth century. His poems embrace a number of the Arthurian stories, but it so happens that amongst them the “Conte del Graal” was left unfinished, and was afterwards completed by several writers, chief among whom, Wauchier, confessed that he had drawn his inspiration from the work of a Welshman, Bleheris, in whose version the “Grail” hero is not Sir Perceval but Sir Gawain.

But even before Crestien’s death the beauty of certain of these Arthurian legends had captured the imagination of Europe, and in the opening years of the thirteenth century we have the “Parzival” of Wolfram von Eschenbach, of Bavaria, who admits his knowledge of Crestien, but confesses a preference for a still older French version by Guyot, the Provençal. To Wolfram’s poem Wagner is directly indebted for that portion of the story which forms the basis of the opera. The Bavarian knight died about the year 1220, and his work forms a complete and beautiful poem, concluding with a recital of the fortunes of Lohengrin, the son of Parsifal, who, in his turn, became ruler of the Grail Kingdom. Here, as with Crestien, the link with Christianity is firmly established, and in a still later form of the story embodied by Malory the Christianising influence is further developed, and the Grail, now definitely identified with the Holy Cup, is assumed to have been brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea, who himself had filled it with the blood that flowed from the side of the Redeemer.

In all these later forms of the legend, however, certain features and incidents survive which clearly prove that the story owned an earlier, and a Pagan source. Even in Wolfram the Grail is not a cup, but a stone endowed with plenty-giving qualities, and the symbols, which in all later versions are bodily taken over for the service of the Church, we find on examination to possess a pre-Christian character and origin.

A subject upon which such a mass of criticism and scholarship has accumulated cannot here be discussed in full, but the learned work of the late Alfred Nutt, and the acute researches into the heart of the mystery made by Miss Jessie Weston, one of the most patient and diligent students of a difficult problem, establish almost beyond dispute that the Grail, in its earlier manifestations, bore no relation to the history of the Christian faith. The magic symbols that stood ready to the hand of those who gave to the legend its final religious shape had indisputably an earlier and a different significance. The dripping lance, that now becomes the weapon that pierced the Body of the Redeemer; the Cup containing the blood that flowed from His Side, had figured first as life-giving symbols before they had taken on the holier character with which they are endowed by the chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This was well established by Mr. Alfred Nutt, who referred their origin to the earlier forms of Celtic folklore; and in Miss Jessie Weston’s latest contribution to the literature of the subject, published in June of the present year, a powerful plea is put forward for the interpretation of the story in the light of the earlier forms of nature-worship, linked by far-reaching tradition with the ritual of the Adonis cult, and associated with the quest for the principle of Life itself. It is unquestionably true that this theory explains as no other can many of the features of the Grail story which have no relation to Christianity. The Fisher King, the Guardian of the precious Grail, is a title which cannot be understood unless we take account of primitive tradition, in which the fish is widely employed as a symbol of life, and the fate and character of the maimed king who guards the Grail, as well as the mystic instruments which accompany its revelation, are equally referable to Pagan ritual belonging to earlier forms of nature-worship.

This is not the place to follow in detail the many intricate and puzzling problems which beset the history of the Grail. It is, indeed, a fascinating theme, and has already attracted the learning and research of many scholars in England, Germany, and France, and is perhaps destined, in the absence of some of the earlier texts from which the legend was drawn, never to receive a final and wholly satisfying solution. Here, however, we are concerned only with those features of the story at a date when it had already received the stamp of Christian sentiment, and more especially with that particular form of it embodied by the composer, Richard Wagner, in his world-famous opera.

Apart from the hero himself, the characters engaged in the drama are not numerous. There is the aged Titurel; the wounded Amfortas whose sufferings, imposed as the penalty of unlawful love, must endure till the coming of the deliverer, Parsifal; Klingsor, the malign ruler of the enchanted castle, served by the spell-bound Kundry, an enchantress, only to be released from her thraldom by the knight who successfully resists her witch-like fascinations; and Gurnemanz, through whose aid and guidance the hero is finally enabled to accomplish his task. All appear in Wolfram’s romance, under the names retained by Wagner; and the types recur also in other versions of the legend, sometimes under different names, and with endless variations in the adventures befalling them. Parsifal is our own Sir Perceval, a knight of Arthur’s Court, the Peredur of the Mabinogion, not, however, the earliest or the latest hero of the Grail quest. Before him in historic position is Sir Gawain, who, as already noted, plays the rôle of deliverer in the poem of Bleheris; while in the later romances his place is taken by the chaste Sir Galahad, the son of Sir Lancelot, who--by reason of his sin with Guinevere--was denied the reward of achieving the quest in his own person. In like manner the Grail King, Amfortas, takes on other titles, according to the particular source of the legend, while the part played by Kundry as the Grail messenger is only a variant of the rôle assigned to the “Loathly Damsel,” with the added qualities of the sorceress, who serves the sinister purpose of Klingsor in the enchanted castle.

But a comparison of all these legends leaves undisturbed the fact that in its original shape the story and its environment are British, and, further, that it first took literary form in the work of a Welsh poet. Issuing thence, as we now know, this and other of the Arthurian romances spread like a flame over the Western world, finding their principal exponents in Germany and France, but extending even to Sicily, where there is still a tradition that in the mirage that floats between the island and the mainland can be seen the sleeping form of King Arthur embedded in the heart of Etna, and awaiting the sound of the horn that shall summon him back to his kingdom. It is not a little strange that these legends, doomed to the long sleep of King Arthur himself, should have awakened to new vitality in the work of our own modern poets, and should equally have attracted the genius of the great German composer.

To those who are interested in the dramatic side of Wagner’s genius, the study of Wolfram’s beautiful poem, to which he is directly indebted, will not be without fruitful results. As a general comment, it may be said that the dramatist misses something of the spirit of romance, something also of the atmosphere of chivalry to be found in the master whom he has followed. On the other hand, it will be clearly seen that he had handled this material with the vision of a dramatist, supported by an imagination which seizes, instinctively and surely, upon personages and incidents that enforce the ethical message he seeks to deliver. Perhaps the most beautiful part of Wolfram’s poem, of necessity excluded from the closer action of drama, concerns Parsifal’s earlier years, before he had won the right to carry arms as one of the knights of King Arthur’s Court. Gahmuret, his father, in search of adventure, had first taken service under Baruc, and had won the love of the heathen queen, Belakane, who bore him a son, Feirefiz, the father of Prester John. But before the birth of the child, Gahmuret, returning to Europe, had sought and won the love of Queen Herzeleide, the mother of the Grail hero. Gahmuret was manifestly very conscious of his restless temperament, and duly warned his newly-won bride that what had happened before might recur.

Then he looked on Queen Herzeleide, and he spake to her courteously:
“If in joy we would live, O Lady, then my warder thou shalt not be,
When loosed from the bonds of sorrow, for knighthood my heart is fain;
If thou holdest me back from Tourney I may practise such wiles again
As of old, when I fled from the lady whom I won with mine own right
hand,
When from strife she would fain have kept me, I fled from her folk and
land.”
Then she spake: “Set what bonds thou willest, by thy word I will still
abide.”
“Many spears would I break asunder and each month would to Tourney
ride,
Thou shalt murmur not, O Lady, when such knightly joust I’ld run!”
This she sware, so the tale was told me, and the maid and her lands he
won.

And yet, despite her brave front, Herzeleide was destined to endure much sorrow at the hands of her restless lord. Before Parsifal was born, he had already set out on fresh adventure, leaving his lonely lady sick with longing for his return.

As for half a year he was absent, she looked for his coming sure,
For but in the thought of that meeting might the life of the Queen
endure.
Then brake the sword of her gladness thro’ the midst of the hilt in
twain,
Ah, me, and alas! for her mourning, that goodness should bear such
pain
And faith ever waken sorrow! Yea, so doth it run alway
With the life of men, and to-morrow must they mourn who rejoice
to-day!

Here follow the bitter tidings of Gahmuret’s death. Then, when the child of sorrow came to be born, Herzeleide retreated from the Court, and took refuge in a wild woodland, where Parsifal grew to manhood, in ignorance of the world and its ways; in ignorance also of his high lineage, for the Queen held that she had suffered enough through knighthood and its adventures, and sought only to rescue her child from the dangers of his father’s fate. I am drawing again upon Miss Jessie Weston’s charming translation of Wolfram’s poem for this delightful picture of Parsifal’s boyhood:

No knightly weapon she gave him save such as in childish play
He wrought himself from the bushes that grew on his lonely way.
A bow and arrows he made him, and with these in thoughtless glee,
He shot at the birds as they carolled o’erhead in the leafy tree.
But when the feathered songster of the woods at his feet lay dead,
In wonder and dumb amazement he bowed down his golden head,
And in childish wrath and sorrow tore the locks of his sunny hair
(For I wot well of all earth’s children was never a child so fair
As this boy, who, afar in the desert, from the haunts of mankind did
dwell,
Who bathed in the mountain streamlet, and roamed o’er the rock-strewn
fell!)
Then he thought him well how the music which his hand had for ever
stilled,
Had thrilled his soul with its sweetness; and his heart was with
sorrow filled,
And the ready tears of childhood flowed forth from their fountains
free,
And he ran to his mother weeping, and bowed him beside her knee.

It may be that this passage partly inspired Wagner in his treatment of the incident of the stricken swan; but in the heart of Herzeleide, Parsifal’s love of the birds only begot a fierce jealousy, and she sent forth her servants to snare and slay the woodland choristers, so that she might have no rival in her boy’s love. But the boy’s reproaches touched the mother’s heart:

... “Now sweet, my mother, why trouble the birds so sore,
Forsooth they can ne’er have harmed thee, ah! leave them in peace once
more!”
And his mother kissed him gently, “Perchance I have wrought a wrong,
Of a truth the dear God who made them, He gave unto them their song,
And I would not that one of His creatures should sorrow because of
me.”

The turning-point in Parsifal’s career came a little later on, when on his wondering eyes fell the vision of certain of King Arthur’s knights who passed through the forest: