Part 8

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.