Chapter VII: Millais and Leighton

Millais was not one of those to whom I had written after the publication of my article upon his work, and it was not till later at the Arts Club that I learned to know him personally.

Perhaps I refrained from addressing him at the time because I was conscious that my criticism could not be altogether agreeable to him, and I felt that I could hardly demand any assistance in the prosecution of my labours from one whose talent I had so severely handled.

Looking back now upon that youthful essay it seems to me, in the light of later knowledge and appreciation, to be disfigured to an extraordinary degree by arrogance of statement and intolerance of judgment. My mind had been so completely captured by the innate poetical feeling that marked the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that I was then scarcely ready to rank at their true value the splendid powers which Millais possessed. I could only think at the time, with something approaching resentment, of Millais’s apparent desertion of the ideal that inspired his earlier efforts, and I was not able to perceive that, in the line of development which he had followed, he was only conforming with absolute loyalty to the natural bent of his genius.

It was the accident of youth which set him for a while under the influence of men of a deeper spiritual tendency, and it was not his fault, nor indeed our misfortune, that when the period of youth had passed he should have applied himself with ever-increasing earnestness to the development of those gifts in portraiture and in landscape which have left him pre-eminent among the painters of our school.

At the time I was not able to judge fairly of the causes which led to his ultimate desertion of those earlier ideals, and I could only remember with a regret, too harshly expressed, that we were no longer to expect of him another “Huguenot” or “Ophelia,” or to welcome again from his hand such achievements as the “Carpenter’s Shop” or the “Feast of Lorenzo.”

But a knowledge of the man himself very speedily enabled me to take a juster view of his place as a painter. There are artists in every line, in literature as well as in painting, whose personality does not willingly associate itself with their work. This was certainly true of Browning, who would seem in social intercourse to be almost perversely desirous of enabling you to forget that he was a poet, and it was true no less of Millais, who rather sought by preference in his leisure hours the companionship of men who were not concerned with the art he professed.

Millais had about him, as I first recall him, and retained to the end of his life, even in the days that

From _Lays of the Holy Land_.

By Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.

Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.

(Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.)

_By permission of Messrs. James Nisbet and Co., Ltd._

_To face page 87._ ]

were passed under the shadow of a mortal sickness, a delightful buoyancy of character that was enchaining and infectious. In his view of his own art there was occasionally something of the victorious arrogance of a school-boy who has lately carried off the first prize, an arrogance that was nevertheless consistent with a deep modesty of character that showed itself in his reverent attitude towards nature, where he was ever ready to admit that he had found his rival and his master.

As far as my own experience of him went, he was never very eager to discuss the work of his contemporaries, although he could be amply generous on occasion towards the earlier experiments of younger men. When he referred to the works of the older masters it seemed to me that there was something of defiant challenge in his tone, as though he were ready to do battle with any one of them in his own person and in his own painting.

Of the men with whom his career had been so closely linked in the earlier days of his studentship he spoke but little, but even in the little that he said I always felt there was an underlying conviction on his part that, as a painter, he had easily outstripped them all. And perhaps he was right. That, at least, was Rossetti’s opinion, as I have already stated, nor is it possible, I think, in fairly reviewing the art of his time, not to set Millais, in virtue of his powers as a mere craftsman, in a place beyond the reach of rivalry.

It was difficult at the period when I first made Millais’s acquaintance to realise that the earlier stages of his career had sometimes yielded periods of deep depression, and yet it is only necessary to turn to his own letters, written in the earlier part of the year 1859, to realise how, for a while at least, discouragement sat heavily upon him. And it is no less characteristic to note how swiftly that darker mood passed, for in the letter dated May 16 of that same year he says, “I have now enough commissions to last me all next year, so I am quite happy.” And then a little later, though he had received no vote at the Academy election, he adds in his characteristically confident temper, “It’s really a matter of entire indifference to me, as my position is as good as any except Landseer’s, and this they too well know.”

The charm of Millais’s nature, with its swift alternation between absolute confidence in his own powers--in the form of its expression sometimes verging upon harmless arrogance--and those rarer moods of discouragement and self-abasement, was aptly imaged in his person and bearing. I have been told by one who knew him in his youth that he had the beauty of an Adonis, and even in the year 1875, when I first met him, his appearance was singularly handsome and attractive.

The frankness of his outlook upon the world was aptly mirrored in his face--eyes that were keen yet kindly, and a mouth delicately sensitive for all its firmness, forming the essential features in a countenance that could not fail to win both sympathy and regard.

Occasionally in walking home with him from the Club he would tell me something of the men he had known well in an earlier period of his life, but for the most part it was not especially of painters that he spoke. Talking in this way of Thackeray and Dickens, and other notabilities of their time, he remarked to me that “the greatest gentleman of them all was John Leech”; and then, for a quarter of an hour or more, he ran on in affectionate appreciation of the great caricaturist, enlarging upon the extraordinary fascination and charm of his manner and the delicate refinement of his nature.

When the time came for the gathered exhibition of his work in the Grosvenor Gallery, I saw Millais more often and more intimately. Day by day, as Hallé and I were engaged in arranging the pictures upon the walls, Millais would come in with his short wooden pipe in his mouth and wander round examining the rich record of his own career; sometimes elated to the verge of enthusiasm, and sometimes as frankly confessing his own dissatisfaction with this work or that. Taking me by the arm one day he drew me round the room, and pausing before the “Knight Errant” he said:

“You know, Carr, as I look at these things there are some of them which seem to say to me, ‘Millais, you’re a fine painter,’ and this is one”--pointing as he spoke to the beautiful picture before us--“and there are others,” he added, his tones suddenly changing from triumph to dejection, “that tell me just as plainly, ‘Millais, you’re a damned vulgar fellow!’ Oh, but there are!” he cried, as though anticipating my polite protest. “If you don’t believe me, look at that,” and he pointed to a picture I need not now name, but which he looked at with unfeigned resentment and disgust.

There was one little incident connected with that exhibition which I shall not readily forget. After many efforts, at first unsuccessful, we had at last persuaded the owner of “The Huguenot” to lend it for the occasion; but this favourable answer to our request only reached us when the rest of the exhibition was already arranged. It so chanced that Millais had not seen the picture since the year 1852 when it was painted, and he was therefore particularly anxious that it should be included in the exhibition.

It was late in the evening when the picture arrived in its case from Preston; but Millais had waited, evidently in some trepidation as to how this first triumph of his youth would impress him when he saw it again. Its place had been reserved on the wall, and the carpenters, quickly unscrewing the case, held up the picture for the painter to see.

Millais was standing beside me as they hurried forward in their work, and I felt his arm tremble on my shoulder during the few moments that prefaced its appearance; and then, when at last it was raised to its place, he said in a voice that was half broken by emotion, “Well, well, not so damned bad for a youngster.” And lighting his little wooden pipe hurried out of the Gallery and took his way downstairs into the street.

In later days we met constantly in the card-room at the Garrick, and as we both lived in Kensington it happened often that we used to walk homeward together. Sometimes I would come across him in the daytime strolling in Kensington Gardens, and I remember one snowy Sunday in winter when I had carelessly said to him, “How ugly snow is!” Millais turned to me with sudden vehemence and said, “Carr, how can you say that? Nothing in nature is ugly.” And I think to him it was as he said.

I know at the time I was forcibly reminded of a phrase used by Constable which betrays the same unfailing faith in nature. “There is nothing,” said the earlier painter, “either beautiful or ugly but light and shade makes it so.”

The power of selection in the facts he chose to render was never among the strongest of Millais’s artistic gifts; perhaps to him the need of it seemed not so great as to others. His mastery in the rendering of every aspect of reality, a mastery exercised with impartial regard upon the facts of human form or the complex growth of outward nature, was so complete, and so completely enjoyed, that he had scarcely the inclination to reject any one part of the subject presented to him in favour of another.

His art knew little preference, and for that reason it often lacked the higher sense of composition that painters, differently though perhaps not so greatly gifted, can command for their work. And so it was that the spiritual appeal of his painting varied extraordinarily according to the degree in which the theme had inspired him, and even more according to the measure of support which he received from the chosen model before his eyes.

And yet, to the last, that inspiration, when it came, could summon, almost undimmed, all that concentrated power in the rendering of life, animate and inanimate, that had set so clear a stamp upon those beautiful paintings of the period of his youth.

Lovable I think he was in an extraordinary degree to all who were brought in contact with him, and I know for my own part that as I knew him more, I was the more attracted by his personality. At the last, as he lay dying in Palace Gate, he sent a message to say he would like to see me, but when I reached the house his son greeted me at the door with the sad verdict that it was too late. Already the hand of Death was upon him: within a few hours he had passed away.

There is one element of Millais’s painting which, I think, has never received a full measure of appreciation. Apart from his superb gifts as a painter, he possessed a distinctive mastery in the rendering of certain phases of human emotion that has left him without a rival among the living or the dead. His fine powers as a draughtsman enabled him to press into a single face a quality of sentiment that, by reason of its exquisite delicacy of expression, was saved from the reproach of any sentimentalism.

The desire to capture this deeper beauty in character lay always resident in his nature, but it needed the inspiration of some rarer type of feminine loveliness to quicken it into life. In this sense Millais was to some extent, as I have said, at the mercy of his model, but when that model served him well--as in the case of “The Huguenots” and “Ophelia”--the result yields an image of some indefinable beauty in human character that adds to his innate gifts as a realist a deeper and more passionate truth.

From the picture by Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.

_By permission of Messrs. Methuen and Messrs. Henry Graves and Co._

_To face page 92._ ]

It would be difficult to cite any other master of our school, or indeed of any school, who possessed this special power in quite the same degree. Reynolds and Gainsborough have left examples in the region of female portraiture that render in almost matchless perfection the permanent facts of gentle character; and the different kinds of beauty which they have saved for us bear the unmistakable stamp of a type that is national as well as individual.

But with Millais, whose art no less than theirs rests finally upon this power of interpreting individual features, there was sometimes added, when the model and the subject combined to inspire him, this finer grace of delicate and tender feeling which no one of his predecessors could command. Though not a constant quality of his art, it reappeared from time to time during the whole of his career. He never parted with it as he had parted with that earlier quality of design, which he had only shared for a while with men to whom it was all in all. Though intermittent in its manifestation, it remained with him to the end, and constituted a rare attribute of his art which belonged to him by right of nature and belonged to him alone. It was the appreciation of this quality which caused Watts to write to him in 1878 in regard to “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which had received a decoration in Paris: “Lucy Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” And what is true here is true in a supreme degree of the face of the lady in “The Huguenots” and the face of “Ophelia.”

The contrast between Millais and Leighton, both as regards individual character and the character of their art, was as striking as could be presented by two men of the same generation.

Millais’s manner was spontaneous, careless, and buoyant; Leighton was ever graceful and courteous, but never quite without the sense of conscious and deliberate effort. I remember an Italian painter who had been his friend for many years saying to me one day, “Leighton wills to be a good fellow,” and I think the criticism that is here conveyed very aptly describes, or suggests, a certain feeling of constraint that was always to be felt in Leighton’s companionship.

Despite all his accomplishments and grace he left the impression that he was never quite at ease, and as though he felt that that must be the plight of others as well as himself he seemed to be constantly striving to rid his companion of an embarrassment which was often only his own.

The essential difference between the two men was made very manifest by an incident that occurred at a dinner given by the Arts Club to celebrate Leighton’s election as President of the Royal Academy.

Leighton’s speech, of course, was expected to be the speech of the evening, and so in a sense it was. But Leighton never spoke without the polished preparation of every word, and though his gifts as an orator were conspicuous, there was always, even upon the happiest occasion, a sense of something artificial in his aptly chosen phrases; and on the evening of which I am thinking, the fact of his being fast bound and fettered by a string of carefully forged and graceful sentences proved disastrous to the speaker.

Before Leighton rose to make his acknowledgment of the compliment that had been paid to him, Millais had his part in the programme to discharge, and although he could never boast any considerable gifts as a speaker, there was a directness and simplicity in his utterances that placed his audience in quick sympathy with the man.

When I complimented him afterwards he replied, “Yes, my boy, but you see I had a story to tell.”

And so he had; but that was not the whole secret of the great impression he made upon his hearers that evening, for though the story was simple enough in itself, it was told with such genuine feeling and with such frank revelation of his own character that it moved his audience not a little.

He recalled a day of his youth when he had been summoned by Mr. Thackeray, who lay ill in bed, to receive some instructions for designs that Millais was making for the _Cornhill Magazine_. The business ended, Mr. Thackeray turned to him and said:

“Millais, my boy, you must look to your laurels. There’s a young fellow in Rome called Leighton who is making prodigious strides in his art. He speaks every European language, and is an accomplished musician as well. If I’m not mistaken that young man will one day be President of the Royal Academy.”

And then Millais turned to us, and in words of the simplest candour confessed that Mr. Thackeray’s prophecy had somewhat hurt him--“For I will own,” he said, “that at that time, with the ambition of a boy, I cherished the hope that _I_ might some day be President of the Royal Academy.” And then after a pause he added, “But now, looking back, I can say, ‘Mr. Thackeray, you were right, and the right man has been chosen.’”

It is not easy to convey the effect which that speech made upon the crowded audience, most of whom were artists, but the depth of the impression was shortly realised when Leighton rose to respond.

It would have been impossible for any speaker born to his task to have followed Millais without betraying in response a sensibility to those deeper chords of feeling which his simple words had touched. But Leighton was incapable of resuming the unfinished melody Millais had so finely tuned; incapable by his habit and temperament of discarding what he had prepared; and so it happened that the discourse he delivered, though no less perfect and polished than was his wont, left his audience gravely disappointed and wholly unmoved.

Of Leighton I had also written in those earlier articles in a manner perhaps that showed too little consideration for his great gifts and great accomplishments, but he was characteristically courteous in his reply to my request for some particulars of the days of his studentship, and the pains he had evidently taken to assist me as far as he could in the project I had in hand bears strong witness to that ungrudging demand he always made upon himself when any duty came before him. He wrote:

_Hollyer_

LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A.

From the painting by G. F. WATTS, in the National Portrait Gallery.

_To face page 96._ ]

_Thursday, Nov. 27, 1873._

DEAR SIR--I should have answered your letter sooner had I been more
master of my time. I am divided between my readiness to serve you
and my embarrassment as to how to satisfy your request concerning
my past life of which you already possess the outline. I find on
looking at _Men of the Time_ that the facts there given under my
name are copied from the _Illustrated London News_, to which I
furnished some such skeleton to accompany the customary portrait on
my election to membership in the Royal Academy. They are accurate,
barring misprints, such as calling my old friend Robert Fleury,
Robert Henry. I hardly know what I can add without egotistic
display to this account of a life in which, whilst there has been,
and, as I hope, still is, steady growth and development, there had
been no peripateia.

I scarcely have any earlier recollection than a passionate wish and
a firm purpose to be an artist, and having become one, I have never
failed or swerved from my deep desire to leave behind me something
in Art which should be not ignoble in its aim, and in which Form
and Style, the highest attributes of Form, should be chiefly
sought, and I may own to a hope, which has not been much fed by
experience, that I might in some degree disseminate my artistic
faith in this country where the seed is little and the soil rocky,
and where what is to me vital and essential in Art is generally
either repudiated or held a matter of obsolete dilettantism.

The only apparent change in my work, the change from mediævalism to
classicism, is in reality no change but only a development.

The love of mediævalism, the youth of Art, which is almost
invariably found in youths, was strengthened and nourished in me
partly by an early love for Florence and Tuscan art in which all
grace is embodied, and partly by the example of my master Steinle,
for whom I had, and have retained, a great reverence, and who was
fervently mediæval. For a long time I treated none but subjects
from the Italian Middle Ages--going to history, Dante, Boccaccio,
and preferring in Shakespeare the Italian plays. (I have sometimes
wondered, by the bye, that the atmosphere of Faust and the
Niebelungen Lied and the worship of Cornelius, in which, as a
German student, I lived for many years, should really have left so
little mark on my work.)

By degrees, however, my growing love for Form made me intolerant of
the restraint and exigencies of costume, and led me more and more,
and finally, to a class of subjects, or, more accurately, to a set
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.

But you did not ask me for a profession of faith. You see,
meanwhile, that though shifted to another channel the stream of my
artistic life has remained the same.

The dominant personal influence of my early development is that of
my dear master Steinle, under whom I worked at Frankfort for
several years. His stamp is still upon me, and I owe him a debt of
gratitude for guidance, restraint, and upholding in the search of
whatever is elevated, and for example of steadfastness and
singleness of heart which I cannot ever repay.

One word more in candour. I have written these few lines because,
unless my memory deceives me, you have written about Art with a
sense at least of its place and dignity--a grace too rare amongst
English critics; but I do not therefore accept entire solidarity
with your standpoint, with which in some respects I am much at
variance.

If there is any special point concerning which you care to inquire
I shall be happy to answer.--I am, dear sir, faithfully yours,

FRED LEIGHTON.

_P.S._--Having lived much abroad during my young years, the years
when one is wax, I have been in turn, thoroughly and sincerely, an
Italian artist, a German artist, and a French artist. I need not
say that, though every man is of a nation (and I am most
emphatically an Englishman), all Art _intentionally_ national is an
error to my thinking. But I think I have gained in balance and
insight by my varied experience.

It is not possible to question the justice of this brief record of his aims in Art with which Leighton so courteously supplied me, and that he never swerved from his fidelity to those aims may be generously acknowledged even by those who were never deeply moved by his painting.

If he failed to reach the goal towards which he was ever striving, it was from no lack of persistent purpose or earnest faith; and the courage and devotion which he exhibited in his life as an artist were no less manifest in the discharge of every duty which his high official position called upon him to perform.

I was an occasional visitor to his studio for many years after this first introduction to him in 1873, but I cannot boast of ever having been, in any true sense of the word, his friend. To my temperament he was a man easy to know, but difficult to know well; of unfailing kindness in any service demanded of him, but with no quick link of sympathy to encourage a closer intimacy.

Gifted with an appearance at once imposing and picturesque, it was impossible not to agree with Millais that the choice of the Academy when they elected him as their President was rightly made. For all the official duties that are attached to that office he was admirably equipped, but it was difficult in ordinary converse to feel that he had ever quite thrown off his official garb.

Even in those earlier days, before he became President, he was apt in his hearing to convey the feeling that he was playing a part. His mind seemed always to move in some carefully chosen raiment which it was impossible for his nature ever wholly to discard.

As he said in the postscript of his letter, “I have been in turn thoroughly and sincerely an Italian artist, a German artist, and a French artist”; and so in his life he was in turn thoroughly and sincerely either a polished member of society or the careless Bohemian.

I remember once noticing him in the stalls of the Palais-Royal Theatre in Paris habited in a brown velveteen jacket, and suggesting to me that he was in this way resuming the days of his studentship in the Quartier Latin. His appearance on that evening seemed to me a little characteristic of the man. But among the many phases of his varied life, the sense of his personality as an artist was always uppermost; and however distinguished might be the throng of fashionable visitors who filled his studio, the entry of any one who had any call upon him as an artist would at once claim his attention.

To his older friends I know he was untiring in his devotion, and one of them once told me that at a little Christmas party in a remote quarter of London to which he had been bidden, nearly all the other guests kept away by reason of a severe snowstorm, but that Leighton turned up faithful to his appointment, having walked all the way from Kensington to keep his engagement.