Part 10

On hearing people talk of the Pre-Raphaelite movement now, one wonders if they realize how thoroughly Post-Raphaelite the world was, when that movement started (1848) and for long years afterwards. Here is an extract from my diary, 22 August 1874, on my first visit to Dresden. I was only sixteen then, and have never been a judge of pictures, though they have always interested me; but I think it gives the point of view from which most people saw things at that time. “To the picture-gallery in the Zwinger, and at once went to the _Sistine Madonna_, which has a room to itself at one end of the building. After seeing many bad or indifferent copies of a picture, it is difficult to appreciate the original at once: it is certainly a most wonderful production, and, as a painting, far surpasses anything I have yet seen, but, as a composition, I do not like it so much as Titian’s _Assumption_ or Murillo’s _Immaculate Conception_.” [I never understood the composition till I did what very few people take the trouble to do--went to Piacenza, 7 August 1898, and looked at the church of San Sisto, for which the Madonna was painted. On seeing the rectangular windows and their curtains, I understood the composition at once.] “Then went to Holbein’s _Madonna_, a Dutch lady in black velvet and frills: not very impressive after Raphael’s. The other principal pictures are Correggio’s _La Notte_, a wonderful composition of light and shade, Titian’s _Tribute Money_, Carlo _Dolce’s Christ blessing the bread_, and Battoni’s _Magdalene_.”

People care no more for Pompeo Battoni now than they cared for Botticelli then. The fashion is all the other way; and concessions must be made to fashion, even in a picture-gallery. And in most collections now the later works have been displaced by early works, almost always inferior in execution, and very often inferior in conception also. At the Uffizi the works of Botticelli now have a room apart; but for many years after I first went to Florence the _Birth of Venus_ was hanging in the outside corridor, and did not even get a star in Baedeker.

In his essay on Botticelli, written in 1870, Walter Pater termed him “a secondary painter,” yet found so much in him to praise, that people hardly noticed this. And that was the beginning of the craze, at any rate in England. I knew Walter Pater, and always found him much more level-headed than people might imagine from his style of writing. And he had no illusions here. It is just the old story:--Wilkes never was a Wilkite.

All my earlier views of art were dislocated by the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, 1 May 1877. By that time I had seen all the great galleries of Europe, except the Hermitage, and thus had material for forming an opinion, though the opinion may have been quite wrong. Anyway, I recognized there a style of art that certainly was great, and yet could not be classed with the Old Masters or the Modern Painters, or even as Eclectic. The style is hackneyed now; but in 1877 the _Days of Creation_ was as great a surprise as _Sartor Resartus_ in 1833 or _Pickwick_ in 1836. Carlyle and Dickens were established long before my time, and were suffering then from imitation; and I could not see the reason why those books were praised so lavishly by the people who read them when they first came out. And now the younger generation cannot understand such praising of that picture and the others that were with it. This generation has grown up in a sort of “greenery-yallery” Grosvenor Gallery, and has never had to face the pea-greens and vermilions of the past.

Art has made strange moves since then. Personally, I am always glad of the impressions of a mind that is brighter than my own, but I do not want the impressions of a mind that is still duller; and I get impatient, when the dull mind goes with a clumsy hand, so that the artist cannot even give me such impressions as he has. When honest critics praise such work, I fear their minds are very dull indeed.

As an executor I was concerned in putting a memorial window into a country church. A relative wished for copies of the figures by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the west window of New College chapel at Oxford. There are only seven there, and this window needed nine. I thought the objection fatal; but the purveyor of stained glass replied “Oh no, not at all: we can design you two to match.” He did design them, and they matched his copies of the other seven, the copies being quite unlike the originals.

At the eastern end of Rochester cathedral there is a memorial to Dean Scott, with a gigantic Alpha and Omega on each side of the altar. As he was Dean Liddell’s partner in the great Greek lexicon, the double entendre is rather neat.

One sees trophies everywhere of captured flags and guns and other instruments of war; but the neatest trophies that I ever saw, were both at Petersburg. In the Preobrajensky cathedral there was a row of keys of captured cities, hanging up on pegs with little brass labels for the names. These came from conquests in the East; and in the Kazan cathedral there was a similar row of keys of captured cities in the West--Utrecht and Rheims amongst them.

The first time that I went over Rheims cathedral I noted in my diary:--“The exterior roof is a considerable height above the interior vaulting, and is supported by wood-work enough to burn down half-a-dozen cathedrals.” That was written on 30 March 1875, and it disturbed me in September 1914, when I heard that the Germans were bombarding Rheims, and the cathedral was on fire. The exterior roof was burnt and all this wood-work with it, but the vaulting stood the strain.

Writers on architecture do not always go to see the buildings they describe. Fergusson gives a plan, section and elevation of the church at Lodi on pages 50 to 52 of his _History of Modern Architecture_; and he describes the church as the earliest and best type of its class, and the only remarkable church now extant which was wholly by Bramante. On the strength of this I took the trouble to go to Lodi, 28 September 1899, in order to see the church. But it did not correspond to the designs in Fergusson. I found out afterwards that Bramante’s designs were never carried out, and the church was by Battagio.

I just missed seeing the celebrated crane upon Cologne cathedral. I went there first on 28 August 1868; and it was taken down about three months before that, after standing there on the stump of the spires for about 400 years, waiting for work to be resumed. I looked with admiration on the design for the spires, a fine old Fifteenth Century drawing--the architect sold his soul, and the Devil drew this in his blood. But the Devil had the best of it, as the spires have ruined the cathedral, being out of scale with all the rest.

Before the present Law Courts were begun, the rival designs were exhibited in sheds in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I went to see them several times; and, speaking from memory, I should say that every one of the designs was better than what was built. But that was not the architect’s fault: he had to accept suggestions from all manner of people, each thinking only of one thing, and not considering the building as a whole. When the old Law Courts were pulled down, and the exposed side of Westminster Hall received its present screen and buttresses, a committee ruined the whole thing by forbidding the architect to carry up the little towers at the Palace Yard end--an integral part of his design. Once only, so far as I know, has such interference ended in success. Scott designed the Foreign Office block of buildings in the Gothic style; and his design may be seen in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy. Palmerston could not stand Gothic, and Scott converted his Gothic to Palladian. Looking down Downing Street from the further side of Whitehall, one sees that he achieved what Linton and Turner only dreamt, when they painted their ideals of ancient Rome and Carthage.

The present Law Courts were not opened until 4 December 1882. That was six months after I was called to the Bar; and I have spoken in the old Chancery courts that have now been pulled down and forgotten--the two courts for the Vice Chancellors, that stood where there is now a lawn just inside the gateway leading into Lincoln’s Inn from Chancery Lane, and the court of the Master of the Rolls, on the other side of Chancery Lane on the site of the north-west corner of the present Record Office. I never spoke in the old Common Law courts at Westminster, but remember trials there long before I was a barrister.

I once spent a whole day there listening to the Tichborne case, and found it rather dull. But the Claimant was a sight: he was so corpulent that they cut a large semicircle out of the table to enable him to sit at it, and even then his waistcoat bulged out above the edge.

The trial in _Pickwick_ seemed more possible then than now. I once heard Dickens read that chapter out. I am not certain of the date, but fully thirty years after he had written it; and he was no longer the same man. It fell rather flat. As a rule, authors should be read, not seen. I used to read Browning with interest and respect, if not with pleasure, until one afternoon I saw him running after an omnibus at the end of Piccadilly; and I could not stand his loftier poetry after seeing that.

Many years ago, during a Salisbury administration, I was in a train on the Great Northern, sitting with my back to the engine in one corner of a carriage, and at Hatfield a bishop got in, and sat with his back to the engine in the other corner. There was nobody else in the carriage, and he must have forgotten that I was there, as he started talking to himself. Apparently, he had been recommending some one for preferment, and now had qualms of conscience as to what he had been saying. “I said his preaching was admired by competent judges.” Pause. “Well, so it is. **** admires it, so does ****, and they’re competent judges. I didn’t say that I admired it.” Long pause. “I said he was a convinced Christian.” Pause. “Well, he _is_ convinced. I didn’t say he wasn’t quarrelsome.” I thought it time to make my presence known.

Amongst the letters here I found one to my father from myself, Trinity College, Cambridge, 17 November 1877:--“I saw Darwin made a Doctor in the Senate House to-day. Huxley and Tyndall and the rest of them were there; and there were two stuffed monkeys--one with a musical-box inside it--suspended from the galleries by cords and dangled over Darwin’s head.”

The present Master of Trinity was headmaster at Harrow, while I was there. In his study one afternoon he was adjusting the accents on some of my Greek verses; and at last, pointing to a misplaced circumflex, he asked me how that could possibly go there. I answered him quite honestly that I didn’t know and didn’t care. It was rather a risky thing to say to a headmaster; but in the evening I received a parcel, and found it was Dean Stanley’s _Life of Arnold_--“C.T. from H.M.B. Harrow. Novʳ. 4. 1875.” I suppose my candour pleased him. I know he was quite snappish at my telling him that I put enclitics in for emphasis, when obviously I put them in to make my verses scan.

It was in my time at Harrow that _Forty Years On_ was written and composed; and I helped to sing it at the concert on Founder’s Day, 10 October 1872, which was the first time it was sung in public. Forty years seemed a very long while then, and does not seem much now; and I see more meaning in “Shorter in wind, though in memory long, What shall it profit you that once you were strong.”

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For many years I wasted time in trying to play the piano, until at last I saw that I should never play effectively, and then I gave it up. Curiously, my grandfather went through this process with the flute, though I never knew it till I found a letter of his just now:--2 April 1843, “I once had a great wish to learn the flute, and attended to it, and learnt all that was necessary, but could not make any advancement for want of an ear for it. I could play a tune by notes, but not give it that pleasing air that others could, for want of an ear. Therefore I considered it was time badly spent, and dropt it.” I think the fault was with the fingers more than with the ear. Had the ear been altogether bad, our bad playing might have pleased us.

My father had no ear at all for music, yet went to Oratorios, and slept comfortably through them all, except Haydn’s _Creation_ with its disturbing bursts of sound. At the Opera he kept awake, as that was something more than music; and for some years he went pretty regularly--five-and-twenty times in the season of 1853, and so on. But he cared less for such things as the première of Berlioz’s _Benvenuto Cellini_ on 25 June 1853, than for the spectacle on 19 April 1855, when Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie came there with Queen Victoria. The best spectacle I ever saw, for opera and audience combined, was Glinka’s _Life for the Czar_ at Moscow on the Czar’s name-day, 11 September 1889.

I went to the Opera for the first time on 25 May 1863. It was Meyerbeer’s _Prophête_; and I can still recall the scenery and dresses and acting, and make comparisons with later performances, though I cannot recall the singing at any performance vividly enough to compare it with the singing at another. I suppose my taste in operas has varied with the fashion, and also with my time of life. I was told some years ago, by one of our few living poets, that there was only one opera in the world, and that was Gluck’s _Orfeo_. I should say that others have also run, but otherwise I now agree with him.

A letter from my brother to my father--Wreyland, 30 June 1853--comes strangely from a boy of six. “My Dear Papa, I am very much displeased at your not answering my letter. there is a great fault in you about those things. and I hope you will answer this. two letters would be the sum but I would not trouble you to write two for one long one would be enough.... I know that you are quite an oprea [Opera] man. but you must not expect me to go to that Theatre for I do not like always to see things showy but I want something full of frolic such as the Merry Wives Of Windsor. that is what I want to see.” He knew Shakespeare too well. My grandfather writes to my father, 12 September 1854:--“He is always reading Shakespeare, and gets hold of all improper words: he made use of some to-day.”

The antics of some of the conductors used to amuse me as a boy. They waved their heads and arms, and swayed their bodies, as if they were intoxicated with the music. And then Maud Allan arose upon the stage, and did everything they would have done, were they not compelled to keep their seats. I was at one of her first performances in London; and there was no crowding or applause, such as was usual afterwards--in fact the audience did not quite know what to make of it.

She was not the earliest of these dancers--Isidora Duncan was before her--but she had the advantage of being highly trained as a musician before she took to dancing; and certainly her dancing made me understand much music that I never understood before. I had some correspondence with Dr Raymond Duncan--the brother of Isidora--about the music of the ancient Greeks. He claimed to speak with knowledge; but his logic was too easy for me--the Greeks did everything that was beautiful: this is beautiful: therefore the Greeks did it. I could not see how this would solve such problems as the structure of the tetrachords.

Some years before that time I wrote a little treatise _On the Interpretation of Greek Music_, and prepared to build an instrument of seventy strings. The ancients had seventy notes, having twenty-one notes to the octave, and a compass of three octaves and a third; but they never had so many strings. They tuned their strings to suit the mode or scale that they were going to use; but my object was to have the notes all there without this tuning.

I am a Pythagorean myself, and regard the Aristoxenians as silly folk who misinterpret Aristoxenus--and he merely walked slipshod in the footsteps of Pythagoras. Accordingly, I increased the mean tones (_ab_, _cd_, _de_, _fg_, _ga_) to major tones, and decreased the mean semitones (_bc_, _ef_) proportionately; and then I put _a_¹ and _a_² at about a quarter and a half of a mean tone above _a_, and _b_¹ and _b_² at rather less than an eighth and a quarter of a minor tone above _b_, and so on with the other notes. I worked out the vibrations for one complete tetrachord; and (omitting decimals) they were 243, 246, 249 for _b_, _b_¹, _b_², 256, 263, 271 for _c_, _c_¹, _c_², 288, 296, 304 for _d_, _d_¹, _d_², and 324 for _e_. And then I got Messrs Broadwood to make me a set of tuning-forks to test it--a troublesome piece of work, to which their Mr Hipkins gave a great deal of his valuable time and skill and knowledge. The error in the forks was negligible. The intervals were very curious, and unpleasant at first hearing; but, on getting used to them, I got impatient with the piano for having nothing but mean semitones.

As the piano and all keyed instruments have equal temperament now, they ought to have black keys and white alternately all through, and the music could be rewritten in a simpler form. It is ridiculous to keep to five black keys and seven white, instead of six of each, now we have dropped the system on which the seven and five were based.

I did not build my instrument of seventy strings, as I did not see how it could be kept in tune--a tuner would never get these subtle notes quite true, when his daily work was with the tempered scale. And there were practical difficulties about an instrument of seventy tuning-forks.

Somebody asked me what I meant to call the instrument, and I said Cacophone. That was before I grew accustomed to the intervals, and came to like them. But my answer reached some people’s ears in Paris; and I read in the _Revue Critique_, 27 July 1896, that I had invented a series of sounds “inexécutables par aucune voix humaine ou même féline,” in fact a “miaulement,” which “mérite complètement le nom de Cacophone, sous laquelle, dit-on, il l’a désignée.” Anyway, my cat-squall was antique, and their tempered scale was not; and I retorted with some vigour in that journal, 12 October 1896.

Various people had published transcripts of bits of ancient music, and had been applauded at the concerts where their transcripts were performed; and they did not like my saying that twenty notes in twenty-one were wrong, and the twenty-first was doubtful. Anyone can calculate the intervals between the notes by means of logarithms and the ratios given by Ptolemy and other ancient authors. These people told me volubly that this was only mathematics--“lascia le muse, e studia le matematiche.” They said that Aristoxenus must have used the tempered scale, as he assumes that six tones make an octave. Euclid, _Sectio Canonis_, prop. 9, proves with his usual precision that six tones are greater than an octave. Ptolemy, _Harmonica_, i. 9, says that the Aristoxenians should either have accepted what was proved, or set up something else to take its place; and he would hardly have said that, had they set up the tempered scale.

I have always felt that, if an opinion was worth publishing, it was worth defending; and that was why I defended my views about Greek music in the _Revue Critique_ and elsewhere, and have also defended my views on many other things. Critics often change their tone, when put on their defence. There was a professor of theology at Jena, who was displeased with something that I wrote, and he pitched into me, _Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift_, 18 June 1898. I wrote an Entgegnung, which appeared there, 27 August 1898, with an Erwiderung from him. I remarked that “was er ein Wasserstrahl nennt, ist nicht anderes als der Heilige Geist,” corrected him on other points, and finished off with “in der That scheint er von der Litteratur der Sache ebensowenig zu wissen als von altchristlicher Kunst.” In his reply he was an injured innocent, although he had come down on me as if he were a Pope and Œcumenical Council all rolled up into one.

I had been writing about some portraits of Christ that can probably be dated at 258 A.D., or shortly after that; and I had used them in support of my opinion that Christ was only a little over twenty years of age at the date of the Crucifixion. I did not expect people to acquiesce in this without demur; but the theologians treated dates as dogmas. I cannot see the merit of believing that something happened in one way, if it happened in another way, or did not happen at all.

One evening, when some friends were staying with me, one of them was speaking of something he had seen in Egypt; and he said that he thought Brugsch’s system was the best, as a rough and ready way of getting at dates. You reckon three generations to a century; and, though this may not be true for a century or two, it comes pretty near the truth on an average of several centuries. Another man looked dubious; so I asked him what was wrong, and he explained. He was descended from William the Conqueror both on his father’s side and on his mother’s, but on one side it was twenty-seven generations, and on the other it was twenty-four; and he was just wondering whether he was a century older or younger than himself.

I wrote a book on Egyptian chronology and its application to the early history of Greece. The evidence required more careful sifting than it had received; and my point of view was that of Ovid, _Amores_, ii. 2. 57, 58--“viderit ipse licet, credet tamen ipse neganti, | damnabitque oculos, et sibi verba dabit.” I thought of quoting this upon the title-page, but found it rather long, and only gave a part. And then the _Guardian_ reviewed the book, 9 September 1896, and said:--“The motto on the title-page, _damnabitque oculos_, is, perhaps, the oddest motto that ever graced a scientific treatise issued by a University Press.” Which made it plain that the _Guardian_ had a reviewer who was less familiar with the Latin language than with modern swear-words.

* * * * *

In reviewing books myself, I have often been amazed at their inaccuracy. Youthful writers have to make mistakes for want of knowledge and experience, but I have found older writers making just as bad mistakes from indolence or carelessness.

There is a brilliant volume by Mahaffy on _The Greek World under Roman Sway_. It came out in 1890, and I reviewed it then. At page 391 I came on something quite incredible about the Proconsul of Asia reserving an exceptional privilege for the Christians. The author cited an inscription in support; so I looked this up, and found it was about the citizens of Chios. Of course, the Greek _X_ is _Ch_; and I presume he made his note of this inscription in that form, and then took his Xians for Christians on the analogy of Xmas for Christmas.

One day Maspero was speaking to me rather strongly of a blunder that a friend of mine had made. I turned to a great work of his own, that was lying on the table, _Les momies royales de Deir el-Bahari_, and pointed to the hieroglyphic _ka_ in one of the hieratic texts he had transcribed there. He looked at it for a minute, and then wrote down the hieroglyphic _cha_. He said that he pronounced _cha_ as _ka_, and this must have led him into writing the wrong sign.