[Contents]
[Illustrations]
[Index]

SOME EMINENT VICTORIANS

A Study for the picture of King Cophetua

(Philip Comyns Carr)

By Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart.

SOME EMINENT
VICTORIANS

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS
IN THE WORLD OF ART AND LETTERS
BY
J. COMYNS CARR

LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
MCMVIII

All rights reserved

PREFACE

Those of us who have emerged from the Victorian Era with an undiminished reverence for the great names which have made it memorable, must be prepared to endure with patience the pitying tolerance, or even the indulgent rebuke, of the men who herald a younger generation.

It was only a few weeks ago that I ventured to enquire of a cultivated young writer of the newer school if Dickens was now much read by the generation which presumably he had a claim to represent. The question gave him no pause. In a sentence that was dictated solely, as it seemed, by a sincere desire to impart accurate information, he gravely informed me that among young men of culture Dickens was now never read after the age of fourteen. I confess that, despite the coldly judicial tone of this utterance, I was not entirely convinced, for I happen to know even young people who are still so far belated in their taste as to regard Dickens as an incomparable genius. But the statement helped me at any rate to realise how easy it is to grow old-fashioned, and suggested to me that in addressing an age which believes that art, like science, is always advancing, it would be prudent, on the threshold of these reminiscences of some of the men I have known and whose work I have worshipped, to make frank avowal of my own faith, and humbly to confess my limitations.

Let me say, then, that in the region of Art and Literature I am still an impenitent Victorian. I have no desire to disparage the work of those who profess a more modern creed, and I think, although this perhaps may be vainglorious boasting, that I am not unable to appreciate the more instant appeal of a later day. But my talk with younger men, whose comradeship delights me, makes it often abundantly clear to me that I am disqualified, perhaps by age, from sharing to the full measure their more recent enthusiasms. Our occasional divergence of feeling, which it would be idle not to recognise, rests in some cases upon an essential difference in the point of view. The progress of science which, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Gladstone in regard to our revenue, is in our day “advancing by leaps and bounds,” has, I think, set some younger men aglow with the thought that art too is destined, with the passing of the ages, to claim and to inherit a realm correspondingly enlarged.

This belief, perhaps only half confessed, that in the fields of Literature and Art the later achievement must, for that reason alone, be the greater achievement, is apt to beget in the minds of some younger men a certain impatience with the heroes of an earlier day. As the topmost pebble set upon the upraised cairn which represents the sum of scientific knowledge must of necessity record the final altitude which science has reached, so it is in some quarters held, by an analogy that seems to me radically mistaken, that the most modern achievement in art has the right to claim in virtue of its historical position a higher place than that which it has succeeded.

Let me confess at once that this is not my belief. There is a little fringe of science lying at the threshold of every art, and until the secrets it has to yield are conquered, the illusion of progressive advancement is inevitable. But that puny conquest counts for nothing beside art’s constant and unchangeable conditions, conditions which leave its earlier victories unsurpassed and unsurpassable. It is, indeed, the glory of the artist’s spirit, in whatever field it be exercised, that it is incapable of advancement. Each achievement, as time attests its worth to rank at all, remains through all time incomparable. It knows no rivalry. It defies all competition. It affects no advance upon the triumphs of yesterday; it fears no eclipse from the victories of to-morrow. And although history shows many barren seasons when the spirit of the artist sinks and flags, the revival, when it comes, is due to no added store of knowledge, but is the free gift of men newly risen whose genius proves itself able to recapture that power of imaging life which in the hands of genius has always been perfect from the first.

Supported by this faith I will own I am not very gravely discouraged by occasionally finding myself ranked as a champion of an outworn fashion. The progress of art is the progress of the pendulum. It advances and recedes according to a law of movement that only the fullest and profoundest knowledge of all the factors that make up human life can enable us to decipher.

But that art does often lie fallow after a period of rich harvest must be indisputable to all who have carefully studied its history. It need not, therefore, be wholly surprising if, in that little corner of time we inhabit to-day, there should have come a momentary lull following on a period of intense and varied vitality.

My mission here is simply to recall and to record personal reminiscences of some of the great men who sowed and reaped a part of that great harvest garnered during the later half of the last century. In the history of English Literature and English Art, I believe it presents a rich yield that will not soon be equalled as the fruit of an equal measure of time, and I am prepared to accept lightly enough the criticism that probably awaits me, that the heroes whom I have worshipped are no longer the heroes of to-day.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

From my earliest boyhood I think my bent was towards a literary career, but it was long before my ambition could be put to the test. The seventh of a family of ten, it was scarcely to be expected that I could, in those earlier days, make known my choice of a calling that seemed so little likely to yield a livelihood. My father was in business in London, and although he took the keenest interest in politics and public affairs, and was an eager reader of the literature of his time, he had a sufficiently hard struggle to provide for us all, and it was but natural in his care for our future that his thoughts should turn to the choice of some solid commercial career.

We lived, in the days that I can first recall, in the Manor House on Barnes Common, a picturesque old-fashioned building that still remains, though shorn of the larger grounds which were our delight as children.

The garden and fields, now partly built over, formed then a little earthly paradise to a large family, and the open Common covered with gorse and bracken served as a part of our wider playground. There we roamed at will, and it was there, with each returning October, that we used to gather the material for a great bonfire with which we annually celebrated the fifth of November.

Sallying forth from our field-gate that abutted upon the Common, armed with a bill-hook surreptitiously filched from the gardener’s tool-basket, there we used to pile up our wheelbarrow with the gorse we had no right to cut, keeping a careful eye the while, lest the sudden approach of the policeman should set us within the grip of the law.

These raiding expeditions sometimes brought us into collision with the boys of the village, whom we only knew under the generic title of “the cads,” and with whom we waged unceasing warfare. Especially did we dread their onslaught as the fifth of November approached, for we knew well it was ever their malignant purpose to fire the pile before the appointed night had arrived.

It was our custom, therefore, to keep watch and guard for several preceding nights, and sometimes when we heard sounds heralding the approach of the enemy across the fields we would send rockets whizzing along the grass—a defensive operation we discovered to be greatly dreaded by even the boldest of “the cads.”

The choice of an appropriate Guy was always an important point of consideration. One year, I remember, it was Bomba, and during the days of the Indian Mutiny a great effigy of Nana Sahib was consigned to the flames, which gathered added intensity by the insertion into the midst of the huge pile of gorse and dried wood of a seasoned tar-barrel annually purchased by my father as his contribution to the revels of this well-loved day.

The valorous deeds of our soldiers in the Crimea and the nameless horrors of the Mutiny which followed so closely at its heels stand among my most vivid recollections of those earlier days.

I was born in the year 1849, and I can still remember an elder cousin in his scarlet uniform taking his way across the foot-path that leads to Barnes station, to start for the war in the Crimea.

With the events of the Mutiny our sympathies were even more actively engaged. We were closely allied at that time with a family, one of whom, General Henry Marshall, but lately commanded the Artillery in South Africa. They had lived in India, and had relatives still there at the time of the outbreak, and the terrible news as it reached England had therefore an enthralling interest for us all.

It was not to be supposed that my father could afford to any of us the luxury of a public school. At first, with my brothers, I was educated at home under a private tutor, and then at the age of thirteen I took my way to Bruce Castle School, Tottenham, at that time under the mastership of Arthur Hill, brother of Sir Rowland Hill of postage-stamp fame.

I remember my elder brother and I took our places on the form allotted to new boys side by side with William Lewin, better known as William Terriss the actor, and it was only a little while before his tragic end that he and I were recalling those times at Bruce Castle, where, if he gained but little learning, he at any rate acquired a perfect mastery in the art of tree-climbing. There was no elm in the playground, or beyond it, which he had not scaled in search of rooks’ eggs, and his constant companion in these lawless excursions was Fred Selous, the African hunter and explorer, with whom not long ago in his Surrey home, where we sat surrounded by his many trophies of the chase, I was glad to renew our memories of that earlier time.

Terriss’s name reminds me of an incident of our school-days which proves that at that time, at any rate, his histrionic abilities were scarcely equal to mine. Bruce Castle School boasted two masters of the French language, both of whom were regarded as marks for the ridicule and scorn of the English-born boy. Something of the spirit of Waterloo still survived in our outrageous treatment of these gentlemen, whom we could not help regarding as the luckless representatives of a beaten and inferior race.

One of them, I remember, had a known fondness for natural history, and under cover of sharing his enthusiasm we could nearly always lure him to stories of different wild animals which served to fill the hour which should have been devoted to the study of the French language.

This was our more amiable way of tormenting the unfortunate gentleman. Occasionally, in order to frustrate his well-meant efforts to instruct us, we resorted to more drastic measures. I remember one day it was jointly agreed among us that we should all assume to be afflicted with the worst kind of hacking cough, and from the very moment the class opened the room resounded with the most distressing symptoms of our common complaint.

Our master became at length fully conscious of the plot that had been forged against him, and slamming the book in a rage announced his determination of summoning Mr. Arthur Hill to restore the discipline of the class. This show of unexpected authority on his part produced something like consternation, and in a moment all the bronchial sounds were silenced—all save one, for it seemed to me then that the only policy, however desperate it might prove, was to persist in the signs of the malady which had already been announced.

In the interval of dead silence in which we awaited the arrival of the headmaster I therefore continued, at brief but regular intervals, with the same persistent cough which the others had abandoned. On Mr. Arthur Hill’s arrival, Mon. Delmas—for that was the unfortunate gentleman’s name—explained with some volubility the cause of his complaint against us, but at the finish, with a noble credulity that I had hardly dared to hope for, he exempted me from the general condemnation.

“Now, Carr,” he said, “has a cough, but he suffer so much it is better he do not attend the class for a space.”

On this intimation I was permitted to quit the room and to spend the rest of the dreaded hour in the playground, where afterwards I incurred the obloquy of my companions, and especially of William Terriss, because they had failed to adopt my more ingenious policy.

It is small wonder, with these obstacles deliberately set in our own path, that at our school, at any rate, the acquisition of any knowledge of the French tongue was of the very slightest.

I suppose every boy has his school hero. Mine, I remember, was a South American Spaniard named Echenique, whose father had, for a brief space, figured as President of Peru. He was as handsome as Dickens has pictured Steerforth; and afterwards, when I made the acquaintance of David Copperfield, I had cause to recognise with what unerring sympathy and fidelity the greatest of our masters of romance has mirrored the worship of a boy.

Bruce Castle was, in its way, a remarkable school, though it made no pretence of affording any very extended classical education. It was, indeed, designed for boys of the middle class, of whom I was one, but it was remarkable in this sense, that it was governed on principles of conduct that differed materially from those accepted in other schools of the time.

The Hills held peculiar theories upon the education of boys. Corporal punishment was a thing altogether unknown, and the severest penalty even upon the most hardened offender consisted in nothing worse than a course of compulsory exercise. There was a Prefect, specially told off to take out every day, in what in happier circumstances would have been their play-time, those malefactors who had failed to conform to the discipline of the school.

And yet, under this mild régime, discipline was never lax, both Mr. Arthur Hill and his son Dr. Birkbeck Hill, who succeeded him soon after I entered the school, possessing in a rare degree the power of evoking a sense of responsibility in those elder pupils who controlled the school’s conduct. I

G. BIRKBECK HILL

To face page 7.

think only once in the period of my school-days did a case occur in which the headmaster had need to resort to the final penalty of expulsion.

Dr. Birkbeck Hill was, in a special sense, a man who won the affection of his pupils. He came to us from Oxford, where he had been the friend of Morris and Swinburne, and I remember the first time that I saw one of those newly designed wallpapers, which were destined afterwards to play so important a part in the movement initiated by Rossetti and Morris, was in the dining-room of Bruce Castle School.

Dr. Birkbeck Hill was a man of considerable literary taste and literary power. He was contributing at that time, though it was not generally known, some brilliant light articles to the Saturday Review under the editorship of Mr. Harwood, and he very soon attached himself to that devoted study of Dr. Johnson which finally provided the theme for some admirable work in criticism and biography.

It is possible that he may have perceived in me some inclination towards letters, for he often used to show me his articles in the current number of the Review, and very soon by his own enthusiasm he awakened in me an interest in his hero Johnson, which has never since abated. A copy of Boswell’s Life, which he afterwards gave me on the occasion of my marriage, still stands in its ten little volumes as one of the books within reach of my bed. They share the honours of my book-shelf with the novels of Charles Dickens, and for me there are no two authors to whom I can so constantly return with ever-renewed enjoyment when sleep is not easy to win.

But there was an older master, Mr. Braid, who exercised an even more powerful influence in forming and directing my taste. His special subject in the curriculum of the school was mathematics, but he was an ardent lover of literature and a devoted student of Shakespeare. He did not live in the school, but many times after school hours he used to take me down to his modest rooms in the village and show me some of the books in his small but well-loved library.

Impelled by his enthusiasm I had read, before I left school, the whole of Shakespeare, as well as Paradise Lost and the shorter poems of Milton; and it was by his encouragement that I made my first attempt in writing, in the sufficiently ambitious experiment of an essay on King Lear. I have lost the essay, and the world has lost it, a fact not to be deeply deplored by either. But this crude experiment set me on my way, and when I quitted school at the age of sixteen my ambition was already aflame to try and do something in the world of letters. But, curiously enough, the aptitude which I had shown at school was towards mathematics, and here my work had so far impressed the examiners, one of whom was Charles Faulkner, afterwards so closely associated with Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that Dr. Hill endeavoured to persuade my father to send me to Cambridge.

I do not now know whether I regret the fact that my father’s means did not suffice to carry out that project. It might have diverted me from those things which I even then began to love, and have never ceased to care for. In any case it seemed obviously necessary that, as one of a family of ten, I should at once apply myself to a calling in which I could earn my living. Accordingly at the age of sixteen, when I quitted Bruce Castle School, my father articled me, at some considerable sacrifice to himself, in a stock-broker’s office in the City.

It will be evident that the education with which I went forth into the world could not have been very profound—a little Latin, enough to enable me to read, in later years, Horace and Virgil with pleasure, but not without the aid of a dictionary; no Greek—that was not considered indispensable to a commercial career; mathematics sufficient, as my examiners told me, to have given me more than a fair chance of a scholarship at Cambridge; and a taste for literature mainly acquired in the vacant hours after school.

From the first my task in the City was not congenial to me, although I worked hard and worked early and late. But when office hours were over I still contrived to keep alive that interest in books which had already been deeply implanted in me, and to make some small essays in journalism and in verse which at the first, I am bound to admit, met with scant encouragement from the editors whom I bombarded. I can remember now receiving from Charles Dickens, with a pain that was also blended with pleasure, a polite little note in blue ink returning one of my many rejected communications. Mr. Thackeray from the Cornhill conferred upon me a like distinction—a distinction, as I call it, because even the fact that they declined to publish what I wrote seemed to me at the time almost to form a link of association with men whom I so greatly admired.

All this tentative work was done in the late evenings, carried sometimes far into the night, but it did not prevent me from being at my office in the City at a quarter past nine, and remaining there always till six and sometimes, on account days, till nine and ten. At the same time I was greedily reading the works of the men I worshipped most—the drama, and the lyrical poetry of the Elizabethans; the novelists, starting with Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett; the poets of the great revival which ushered in the nineteenth century; and those later poets and writers, all of whom were then living, who gave to the Victorian era its glory.

I have often thought that the youth of a later generation can hardly realise the wealth of contemporary achievement that lay around those of us who chanced to be born in that fortunate hour. However great, or however greatly admired, may be the writers of a past day, they can never speak with the quickened magic that a living master can command. And what masters then stood there to win our worship! Tennyson in his prime, and Browning, whose unexhausted energy had yet to give to the world The Ring and the Book; Swinburne, whose new and intoxicating music came like a voice from an undiscovered land of song; and Morris, who in his Defence of Guinevere had already found a key that was to unlock a long-unused storehouse of legend and romance. And then, a little later, Rossetti, mystic and passionate, whose brooding melodies seemed to mirror in verse those “painted poems” that were wrought by his brush; and in fiction, where Meredith had only lately arisen, there still stood Dickens and Thackeray, George Eliot and the Brontës; and in other fields of literature, Carlyle, Mill and Ruskin, Emerson and Froude.

They were all our heroes then, and if Time has not left the place of all unshaken, enough remain to form such a goodly company as no later hour can boast. And this is so far acknowledged by the youth of a younger generation that I find those of quickest appreciation in poetry and fiction constantly tempted to steal my heroes and set them above their own.

Already at school I had made acquaintance with the poems of Wordsworth, a strange choice for a boy; and the circumstances of his life, and the revolution which he partly headed, drew me quickly to others of the group until all lesser admiration was finally merged in my worship of Keats. It was only in later days that I brought myself to the study of the poets of the intermediate time between the Elizabethans and the close of the eighteenth century, and I will confess that even now I have no great zest for them.

But turning aside for the moment from the things that already interested me most, I remember being vividly impressed by some events that occurred in the City during the period of my apprenticeship. The sudden transition from private school to the Stock Exchange presented points of interest that could not fail to attract a boy, even though his ambition was otherwise engaged.

I was in the City in the year 1867, the year of the great financial crisis which is associated with the name of Overend Gurney. The streets and narrow lanes round about the Stock Exchange during that turbulent time presented many picturesque sights, and within the Stock Exchange itself were daily scenes of almost maddening excitement.

One day I waited outside a great bank, one of a seething crowd of many hundreds, in momentary expectation that the doors would be closed, but the minutes and the hours passed, and as four o’clock approached it became known that the danger had been averted. Many similar scenes were to be witnessed at that time, but, although they provided me with excitement enough and to spare, even these vivid incidents in the career into which I had been thrust did not induce me to swerve from the resolution I had already secretly formed, not to remain in the City when the days of my apprenticeship were concluded.

I think, however, that, notwithstanding the distaste I had for my work, I performed my task zealously enough. So, indeed, it must have been, for when I finally announced to the firm my intention to retire, one of the partners asked me to reconsider my decision, holding out to me the inducement that if I would remain till I was twenty-one there would be a good prospect of my being promoted to a junior partnership.

But my choice had already been made, and I was in no mind to change it. Still secretly nursing the thought of a literary career, it was, nevertheless, clear to me that, for the time at any rate, I must adopt a more definite occupation. I therefore made up my mind to study for the Bar. My only trouble was to know how to announce this decision to my dear father, who had spent his hardly-earned money in giving me this first and great chance in the world, and to whom I knew the resolution at which I had arrived would be a source of bitter disappointment and regret.

And so, indeed, it was! But he was the widest-minded and the most liberal-hearted of men, and, when at last I found the courage to break it to him, he hardly allowed me to perceive the deep disappointment which I knew he was suffering. For my own part I have never regretted those days passed in the City, though at the time I felt them to be barren and wasted. Perhaps I learned as much as I should have acquired at Cambridge, though it was learning of a different sort. Some knowledge of men I certainly gained, some knowledge also of the habit of work which no career, however detached from business, can afford to dispense with.

Certainly, if there had not been some such obstacle in my path, I should not have thrown myself into the life I had chosen with the same keenness and persistence. The opposition which these earlier years set in the way of the calling I most wanted to pursue nerved and stiffened my resolution. I did a prodigious amount of reading in those late nights after the strenuous days in the City, and I think the fact that I had broken away from the life that was laid out for me gave me a higher courage to try and succeed in the life of my own choosing.

Already, before I had made my change of view known to my father, I had resolved to matriculate at the London University in preparation to becoming a student for the Bar, and, when the break came, I at once joined the classes at University College and assisted myself further by private tuition in several branches of knowledge which I had to take up for examination.

Some Greek I had to learn, for I had none, a little chemistry, and then there was my Latin, not at any time considerable, to be furbished up. None of these things could I have done without the liberal help of my father, for I had no resources of my own. But this liberal help was never lacking, and I think, when his first disappointment had passed, he became interested in furthering my new career. But the work had to be swiftly done, for I was impatient to be upon my way, and could not have been done in the time, in view of my meagre stock of scholastic knowledge, if it had not been for the zealous help of those who coached me.

By their aid I was enabled to matriculate at the London University, and in the Honours Division, in February of the year 1870, just a month before my twenty-first birthday. In February 1871 I obtained the First Class in Honours in Jurisprudence and Roman Law, and in July 1871, having already been entered as a student of the Inner Temple, I secured the scholarship in Roman and International Law from the Council of Legal Education. Shortly afterwards, in the year 1872, I was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, and with this event the period of my boyhood may be said to have closed.

CHAPTER II
IDLE HOURS

It might perhaps be supposed, from the brief account I have given of myself, that these earlier days were wholly devoted to study and hard work. This, however, was very far from being the case. At school I had been an ardent cricketer and a lover of football, and in the holidays with my second brother, who was as keenly devoted to fishing as I was, I passed many a happy hour among the hills of Cumberland and in the Scottish Highlands.

It was in Cumberland that we were first initiated into the mysteries of the craft by a genial drunkard named Atkinson, who dwelt in a small cottage close by Wordsworth’s grave in Grasmere churchyard.

My father had been a native of the hills, and his forebears came of that race of Dalesmen, or small free-holders, owning farms of a hundred acres or more, whose independence of character Wordsworth so strongly extols, but whose little properties have been long since absorbed in the great estates of the Lake District.

My grandfather’s farm was situated at Jonby, midway between Penrith and the shores of Ullswater, and it was natural, when my father’s resources sufficed, that our summer outing should be made in the land of his birth.

I think we all of us inherited his love of the hills, and it was in those fishing days, while we were staying in a house that stood close beside Grasmere churchyard, that I renewed and completed my study of Wordsworth, whom I had first learned to love while I was at school.

How simple must have been my father’s life in those boyish days before he set forth on his business career is shown in the fact that he was fond of relating to us that he and his brothers used always to go barefoot to school, and only put on their shoes and stockings when they neared the village.

To Scotland my brother and I journeyed mostly alone, combining the pleasures of a walking tour with the exercise of our favourite sport. Our means were not very ample for these rambling excursions, and we not unseldom found ourselves in a tight place before the end of our journey was reached.

I remember in particular that on one occasion at the close of a delightful holiday we arrived at Callander with little more than our third-class return tickets in our pockets. That afternoon we were to take train for London, but we had walked for many miles and were desperately hungry. Outside what seemed to us to be the most modest inn in the town we held a council of war, and at last determined to venture upon ordering a cold lunch.

The resources of the establishment were meagre, and were fairly outstripped by our ravenous appetites. Long before the latter were satisfied, the one cold joint of lamb which the establishment possessed was exhausted. We called for more, but there was no more, so there was nothing left for us but to call for the bill, when, to our horror and dismay, we found that the amount surpassed by two or three shillings the little hoard that was still left to us.

The situation was critical and called for a Napoleonic remedy. After a whispered consultation with my brother I boldly summoned the waiter and demanded to know if the fixed price charged for a cold lunch did not allow us to have as many helpings as we pleased. The waiter, brought to bay, had to confess that this was the case, and thereupon, with sudden audacity, I urged the point that, as he had been unable to satisfy our just demands, the bill must be proportionately reduced. After considerable parley, with an occasional reference to a landlady who sat behind a screen, and who may have been moved by a feeling of pity for our obvious embarrassment, our plea was allowed, and we walked from the inn with a sense of triumphant victory in our hearts, and with just threepence-ha’penny in our pockets to start on our journey to town.

As we were waiting on the platform of Callander station, with no baggage but our knapsacks and our fishing-rods, I overheard a conversation which has always seemed to me to throw a lurid light upon certain aspects of the Scottish character.

Two pawky tradesmen of the district were pacing up and down the platform in earnest talk, and as they passed me I caught this one sentence, torn from its context:

“Should I outlive my wife, as I hope to do——” said the elder to the younger, and then they passed out of hearing.

What was to follow on the realisation of this fond dream I have often longed to know, but even as the statement stands I have always thought it forms a notable monument to the caution and foresight of the race.

There are several picturesque sayings of the Highlanders that come back to me as connected with these annual excursions. We had been staying for a few days at the little inn at Luib, situated about five miles from Loch Dochart, where we went daily to fish, and the gillie who used to row us on the loch had many a pleasant story to tell of his working days in the years when he had followed the calling of a shepherd.

I remember one evening, as we walked home with our faces turned to one of those beautiful sunsets that I think are only to be seen in the Highlands, he was telling us of a favourite sheep-dog that had been for years his companion on the hills. But the time came when age unfitted the poor animal for his work, and when the only kindness in the shepherd’s eyes was to put an end to its life. And then he described how he had tied it to an apple-tree and got his gun to shoot it.

“An’ I could scarce look at the beast,” he said, “as I fired, for I loved him well and he had been sae wise.”

The tears rolled down his cheeks as he told the story, and we paused in our talk as we trudged along the sun-lit road. Then out of the silence came this further utterance:

“I buried him,” he faltered, “at the foot of the apple-tree”—and then another pause, and then the final words—“an’ there would be a rare crop of apples on the tree the year, for there’s naething for an apple-tree like a dead dog.”

This anecdote has always seemed to me characteristic of the Highland nature where poetry and prose lie closely side by side, and where the simple mind that holds them both is quite unconscious of any shock of feeling in the rapid transition from one to the other.

In this respect I think they show a close resemblance to the peasants of Northern Italy, in whom there is this same frank avowal of swiftly changing feeling; and neither in the one nor in the other does there seem to occur the need, always felt by the Englishman, of forming a bridge of sentiment from the world of fact to the world of passion.

A great race are these Highland gillies, claiming and according equality even in a calling in which they are very conscious of their superiority; never lacking in courtesy, and yet yielding with a certain proud independence all deference that is rightly due to the temporary relation of master and servant. In their speech they are sometimes curiously felicitous, and, using our English language as in a sense a strange tongue, they sometimes exhibit, for that reason, a purity and delicacy in the selection of words that a native can hardly command.

There was a very pretty phrase used by an old peasant at Killin with whom I was chatting one evening outside his cottage door. A pretty girl passed along on the other side of the road, and, wishing to be as Scotch as I could in order to ingratiate myself with the old man, who was vastly entertaining in his stories of the village, I said, “That’s a bonny lassie!” to which he replied, “Ay, sir, she is, but I’m thinking maybe she’s just bonnier than she’s better.” How much more delicate in its inference, how much milder in its condemnation, than our crude statement, “She’s no better than she should be!”

In those earlier times the “dry fly” as a lure for trout was scarcely known, and even to this day it is regarded with undisguised scepticism by the majority of Scotch gillies. It is not many years ago that I astonished an expert in the older fashion by its successful application on a little loch on the hills above Glenmuick, where I was staying with Lord Glenesk. We had ridden for five or six miles to reach our fishing-ground, and when we arrived it seemed as though we had come upon a fruitless errand—there was not a ripple upon the water and not a rise to be seen. The gillie who was with me scanned the surface of the lake with a melancholy eye. Towards evening, however, the fish began to move, and as sunset approached they were feeding eagerly. But the absence of any breeze rendered casting with the wet fly a barren toil. It was then that I drew from my case a large alder dressed as a floating fly. When I showed it to the gillie his contempt was unconcealed. “What sort of an animal might that be?” he inquired, and when I explained its uses to him, he turned his face towards the sunset with a look of patient and pitying toleration, merely remarking for my comfort that I “might just as well throw my bonnet into the loch.” But his scorn quickly changed to wonder as fish after fish was drawn to the bank, and when we parted at the close of the day he somewhat sheepishly entreated me to leave him as a legacy one or two specimens of those same “animals.”

I had a somewhat similar experience in Switzerland a few years later. The little crater lakes on the summit of the Gothard Pass are well stocked with trout, and the landlord of the hotel where we lunched advised me to accept the services of the chef, who was reckoned locally a very mighty exponent of the piscatorial art. But when my comrade observed my methods and noted the results, he very speedily returned to his kitchen: “Oh! là, là ça, vous savez, je ne comprends pas du tout. Bon jour, monsieur,” and so we parted.

I think every sportsman-born has in him something of the poacher. Certainly one of the keenest and most skilful fishermen of my acquaintance has made confession to me of occasional lapses into the most illicit practices when fairer means had failed. In our earlier essays among the hills of Westmoreland and Cumberland my brother and I were frankly unscrupulous, in so far at least as our limited skill permitted. There was a little pool in the hills above Thirlemere called Harrop Tarn which was so completely surrounded by a quaking morass that fishing from the bank was almost impossible. And yet we contrived to extract many a good trout from that same tarn by the poachers’ device of cross-lining. Joining our casts together, we were able, by letting out the line from either rod, to reach the very centre of the sheet of water, and when a fish was hooked we reeled in and drew him to the one little bit of firm land on one side or the other where he could be safely brought to the basket.

I knew nothing of the literature of the art when I first learned to fish at the age of twelve, and it has often amazed me since to note what wondrous feats of skill can be performed—in books. How to cast in the teeth of a facing wind, how to avoid the sagging of the line in a swift stream, how to clear a spreading bush immediately behind you—there are exact and precise receipts for all these accomplishments, but they do not always serve you by the water-side. There was a time when the written record of such triumphs of skill made me feel that I scarcely deserved to rank as a fisherman at all, but it has been my fortune occasionally to see some of these bookmade anglers at their work, and the result in nearly every case has been to restore to me a measure of self-esteem.

The truth is that the art of fishing can only be acquired on the banks of a stream, and is rarely acquired at all unless it has been practised in boyhood. And even so it lies not within the reach of all, even of those who ardently desire to succeed. I remember a comrade in one of my earlier fishing excursions in Scotland who laboured zealously but fruitlessly to obtain even the most modest degree of proficiency, and as he stood up in the boat, his line hopelessly entangled for the hundredth time, the gillie who was rowing us, moved by a spirit of prophecy that broke down all social reserve, suddenly turned to him and addressing him by his Christian name: “Frank, Frank,” said he, “you’re a good fellow, but you’ll never be a fisherman!” And in truth he never was.

And yet, once a measure of mastery is won, fishing remains for those who love it an abiding passion. Time leaves undisturbed the keen excitement of the first adventure, and with each return of spring the longing to be out beside a stream sets the pulses newly beating. One day when we were trudging through a field of turnips in Fifeshire, the late Sir William Harcourt, as though pierced by sudden conviction, turned to me with the remark, “Carr, what a bore sport is!” And of some forms of sport that, I think, may sometimes be truly said. But your true fisherman is never bored. He counts no day blank till it is ended, for the last hours, as he well knows, may restore his broken fortunes and set a goodly brace or two in the empty basket.

And there is no sport, I think, that sorts so well with the occupations of a writer. Shooting and stalking need the surrender of the entire day, and are too exhausting to leave any appetite for intellectual labour. But with fishing it is not so. The angler who has the good fortune to dwell beside a stream can divide his energies between work and sport without neglect of either, and in my own case I have found them go happily hand in hand. Much of my play of King Arthur was written by the shores of Rannoch, which I had first known and loved as a boy, and there is a little cottage in Hertfordshire, unhappily no longer mine, that enshrines many happy memories wherein work and sport are linked in close association.

Walking tours have gone out of fashion nowadays; the bicycle and motor-car have engendered another taste, and have partly ruined the quiet ways that were once the exclusive property of the pedestrian. But they were a favourite pastime in the sixties and seventies, and, apart from the longer sojourn we used to make in the Lake District or in Scotland, there was scarcely an Easter or a Whitsuntide holiday which did not find me among the hills of Westmoreland and Cumberland. There, with a friend of my early years and still a friend to-day, we explored every hill and dale of the Lake District.

On one of those spring excursions I remember we had made rather a long day of it, starting from Patterdale in the morning, lunching at Grasmere, and then making our way by Easedale Tarn to the summit of High White Stones. It was our intention to descend from that point and to reach the hotel in Dungeon Ghyll in time for dinner. But on High White Stones an eerie and impenetrable white mist descended upon us and we missed our way. For several hours we wandered in the mist until we lost all count of where we were, but at last, by some strange good fortune, we found ourselves on the top of Langdale Pikes, a spot which I knew well from many an earlier excursion.

We both knew that below us lay Stickle Tarn, and that from Stickle Tarn ran the brook which would finally lead us to our now much-desired inn. And so in the drenching rain we cautiously descended the hillside till we got to the shores of the Tarn. Then, by some unexpected error, instead of turning on our right, which in a few moments would have led us to the issue of the brook, we took the other direction and were forced to make the whole circuit of the Tarn, reaching at last, almost exhausted, the rushing torrent that descends to the valley. In such fear were we of losing our way again that we determined not to desert the bed of the stream, and, crawling catlike from boulder to boulder, we found the village at last, and saw, with a delight that may be easily imagined, the far-off glimmer in the windows of the Dungeon Ghyll Hotel.

It was half-past ten before we arrived at the door, wet through, and with our slight stock of change contained in our knapsacks sodden with rain. But the landlord kindly lent us some strange garments of his own, and I do not think two men ever enjoyed a meal more than we two as we fell upon that staple dish of the Lake District, “ham and eggs.”

CHAPTER III
ESSAYS IN JOURNALISM

Even before I left the City I had already made some tentative excursions into the realm of journalism. My first experiment, I remember, had something of a grotesque conclusion.

An early friend of mine, Arthur O’Neil, the younger half-brother of Henry O’Neil, the painter of Eastward Ho, had somehow persuaded a modest capitalist to venture a small sum of money in the establishment of a weekly journal called the Dramatic and Musical Review. We were both keenly interested in the drama, and I had assisted at O’Neil’s first venture in the shape of a pantomime at the old Sadler’s Wells Theatre.

To judge by the scene that occurred during the later stages of the entertainment, it could not have been deemed wholly successful. I remember that the members of the orchestra had to divide their attention between the music of the harlequinade and the shower of stone ginger-beer bottles that were hurled like hail from a hypercritical gallery.

O’Neil, who was older than I, and who had already had some slight experiences as a journalist, with a desire to encourage my budding ambition, asked me to do a criticism on a recently published volume of Longfellow’s Poems for this same Dramatic and Musical Review, of which he was the proud editor. I duly received and duly corrected the printed proof of my article with feelings of exaltation only to be realised by those who, for the first time, see their ideas in printed type, and then waited with eager expectation for the day of publication.

The office was situated in that older part of the Strand near St. Clement Danes which is now no more, and the publisher owned the two-fold responsibility of also issuing another weekly journal entitled the Labour News. Twopence was, I think, the price of our artistic organ, and as early as I could on the Saturday morning I presented myself at the office and tendered the sum required. Almost overwhelmed with excitement I rapidly scanned the columns of this slender journal to find the first-fruits of my pen. But my search yielded nothing but disappointment. The article was not there. I stood in the tiny office crushed by a sense of failure and misfortune, and was just going out into the grey street when the enterprising boy behind the counter, actuated by the simple desire to do business, asked me if I wanted a copy of the Labour News.

As a fact I wanted nothing but some place to hide the sense of humiliation which overpowered me, but as he added, “It’s only a penny,” I took the journal and went out into the street, and, as I listlessly scanned its pages through, I found, to my astonishment, my lost article on Longfellow’s Poems.

It turned out afterwards that the Dramatic and Musical Review in that particular week had more than its needed supply of “copy,” and the Labour News, on the other hand, finding itself short of material, a bright idea had come into the printer’s mind that the review of Longfellow’s Poems might be appropriately set beside advertisements as to the advantages of Canadian Emigration.

Little by little, from this first ludicrous start, I gained a modest footing in the world of journalism, at first as dramatic critic to the Echo, then edited by Arthur Arnold, brother of Sir Edwin Arnold, so long connected with the Daily Telegraph.

My services upon the Echo were not particularly lucrative, the payment for an article being rarely more than six or seven shillings; and my fare to and from Clapham Junction, where we lived at the time, and the necessary modest meal before the theatre began, almost entirely absorbed the sum that I earned.

From the Echo I drifted to the Globe, which was then under the editorship of Dr. Mortimer Granville, and here my work began in something like earnest. During my services as dramatic critic I had become acquainted with Thomas Purnell, and it was he who secured for me a regular position upon the staff of the Globe.

Our work there was sufficiently strenuous. There were three of us stationed in a room above the editorial sanctum, and here, between the hours of nine o’clock in the morning and twelve, we were engaged upon three columns of notes which formed the first page of the paper. The three of us were Purnell, Francillon the novelist, and myself; and the life, wholly new to me, was at the time strangely fascinating and attractive.

Purnell was himself one of the quaintest and most characteristic figures I have ever encountered. A regular Bohemian in a Bohemia that has long lost its sea-board, he had the Bohemian frank detestation of work and utter disregard of all social conventions, and yet with these peculiarities were linked a fine taste and a personality of real distinction.

When I first met him he had just completed a series of papers in the Athenæum upon the drama under the signature of “Q,” winning some little renown in a sharp controversy with Charles Reade, in which he was certainly not worsted.

My other stable companion, Francillon, was of an exactly opposite temperament. Endowed with considerable imagination, which was happily exhibited in Pearl and Emerald, a novel which had been published in the Cornhill Magazine, he was by habit plodding and industrious, qualities which aroused in Purnell a degree of disapproval that sometimes almost verged on resentment.

“Now, Francillon,” he used to say, “loves work. I don’t. I hate it; I loathe it! People will tell you, my dear Carribus”—for so he often addressed me—“that to work is to pray. Well, of the two, I find it easier to pray. Why should I work?” he used to add, with an air of deep and earnest conviction. “I want nothing, only my twopence. All I need is a herring and a glass of ale, and when I have earned that I like to be idle. Some men, so they say, like work. I don’t!” And he did not.

One fixed appointment which he held was to contribute a weekly article on Conservative Policy to the pages of an important provincial paper. Long before the day came when this article had to be despatched by the evening post he used to look upon the impending task with something like horror, and yet nothing could ever induce him to anticipate by an hour the execution of his labours.

Indeed, as a rule, he never wrote it at all. When the day came and we had finished our morning’s work on the Globe, he would generally invite Francillon and myself to a frugal lunch at the old Gaiety Restaurant, and when the invitation was issued we always knew what was in store for us. As the lunch neared its end he would breach the subject by imploring us to supply him with a topic.

“It’s the topic, my dear boy, there’s the devil of it. If I only had a topic I could do it in an hour”—a purely fallacious statement, seeing that no amount of topics would ever have induced him to do it single-handed at all.

Francillon would sometimes heave a sigh, and then with newly-lit cigars we would wend our way back to the old Globe office, where our working-room overlooked the chapel of the Savoy. By that time either Francillon or I had found a topic, for although I was then, and have since remained, a Liberal in politics, I found it not difficult, and sometimes even diverting, to engage in the advocacy of Conservative Policy in the service of our indolent friend.

Perhaps it was I who generally found the subject for the article, and when I announced it Purnell would reply, “Then begin, my dear boy; begin it, Carribus; the thing’s done.”

In those days a leading article always consisted of three paragraphs, and the three paragraphs of this authoritative statement on Conservative ideas were on these happy occasions divided between the three of us, Purnell always reserving to himself the conclusion, not because I think he had any special aptitude in bringing the argument to an end, but because it gave him a longer time to smoke his pipe before his turn came to set upon his task.

And so it came about that I having opened the debate, Francillon at the same time would be busily engaged in the discussion necessary for the central paragraph, while Purnell, looking over our shoulders with chuckling glee, and passing contentedly from chair to chair as he saw his task nearing its end, would finally be persuaded to sit down at his own desk and scribble about eight sentences which were supposed, by their invincible logic, to confirm and strengthen the Tory convictions of the city to which the article was to be despatched.

But hurry and scurry as we would, this terrible task was scarcely ever finished till within a few minutes of the time for post, and even then it often happened that one of us had to come to Purnell’s rescue and try as best we could to adjust the scattered arguments which he had been vainly endeavouring to set in logical sequence.

His delight on these occasions was unbounded. The weekly price for these essays was three guineas, and I think he received it with all the greater zest from the consciousness that he had not rightly earned it.

Purnell’s social ambitions were few, and all social obligations he boldly repudiated. It was one of his most deeply seated convictions that no man was compelled to reply to any letter of invitation, whatever the source from which it might have come, and he defended this position with great show of legal force.

“If,” he said, “a lady had asked me whether in the event of her writing me an invitation I would reply to it, and I had answered in the affirmative, then, my dear Carribus, the agreement would be complete. But I never said anything of the kind, never would; and therefore, my dear boy, there’s no privity of contract.”

But there was one invitation he took care to answer, an invitation to pass a week-end with a certain noble lord in the country. I do not think that he was in any grave sense a “snob,” but he was deeply impressed with the sense of his powers of fascination over women, and his handsome picturesque face, I think, entitled him to the belief that it was not mere idle boasting.

At this particular party he happened to know that several charming ladies of the family would be present, and it was this fact, I think, which made him very eager, if he could, to accept the invitation. But the question of a fitting wardrobe raised a difficulty, and here again he threw himself in all candour upon Francillon and myself.

The rare letter of acceptance had been sent, and the day for his departure had arrived, but in this question of dress he was still lamentably unprepared. We met in hasty consultation in a little eating-house called the Coal Hole, which lay down a narrow court at the south side of the Strand.

It was Saturday. The shops would soon be closing, and there was no time to lose. He had money enough for his railway ticket, but none for such idle luxuries as clothes. His only proffered contribution to the necessities of the occasion was a tarnished disreputable bag which he had brought down empty to the office in view of the projected excursion. He had no great faith in it himself, and it was discarded with scorn by those whom he had pressed into his service. And so in the end Francillon and I had to provide a modest valise and stock it with a wardrobe that would suffice for the three days’ stay, and I can recall now the air of triumph with which he started upon his journey, robed in a new pilot-jacket which we had added as the final feature of his outfit.

Our little circle on the staff of the Globe was later joined by Churton Collins, now the Professor of English Literature at the University at Birmingham, then only a boy fresh from Oxford, but a boy whose mind was already stored with a knowledge of English literature such as I suppose few men of his generation can boast. His prodigious memory both in prose and poetry I certainly have never encountered in another; and through many an evening, when he dined quietly with us in our rooms in Great Russell Street, did we wonder and delight to listen to him as he passed from author to author, not always reciting things of his own choice, but responding with equal readiness to any call that might be made upon him when the choice was made by others.

But this wondrous memory sometimes played him tricks in his first essays as a journalist. For as there was no time and no opportunity in the Globe office to verify any quotation, his literary articles, which were always packed with quotations from the poets, were generally subject to correction in some small particular, and for this reason evoked a shower of correspondence which irritated and annoyed our worthy editor.

This same editor, on the other hand, was often a source of annoyance to us. Our time was short for the work we had to do during the morning, and we resented the constant pencil-notes which he used to send up from the room below, or the repeated calls up the speaking-tube, the whistle of which stood next to Purnell’s desk.

One day we determined to mark our disapproval of this vexatious and harassing policy. We were accustomed sometimes, when money was short, to be content with a lunch of cocoa and biscuits prepared by ourselves. A kettle on this occasion stood puffing on the fire, and when the whistle of the speaking-tube had gone for about the thirtieth time, a demoniacal idea of vengeance entered into the mind of Purnell. The call this time was for me, and Purnell having answered that I was coming to speak in answer, went with stealthy steps towards the fireplace and seizing the kettle poured the whole of its contents down the tube.

It is not perhaps wonderful that this resulted in something like a crisis in the internal arrangements of the office, and very nearly ended in the dismissal of the entire literary staff.

Another comrade of those days, though he rarely wrote in the Globe, was Camille Barrère, now the distinguished Ambassador of the French Republic at Rome. Barrère and I were for many years close allies. I had assisted him in his first essay in English journalism when he contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette a series of articles on the Commune, with which he had been in some sense associated. He was always a brilliant and gifted creature, and his rapid advancement from the hour when he was first befriended by Gambetta could never have been any surprise to those who knew him well.

At that time, like the rest of us, he was having a hard struggle for life. We were together on the Echo, and together on the Pall Mall Gazette, and I can remember in the old days of the Arts Club how often we sat and planned vague, large schemes for the reorganisation of journalism, which should yield us more complacent editors and a rate of higher remuneration, which we fancied our merits deserved.

Barrère had passed some of his earlier years in England, and his knowledge and power over our tongue were remarkable, but now and then some small idiomatic fault would slip out unawares, and one day, when he had just received what he considered an inadequate cheque from the Echo, he cried out indignantly that he “would like to wring the throat of Arnold.”

Unlike poor Purnell, the choice of a topic never presented any difficulty to him. Almost any subject served him for a light and graceful essay, and the fertility of his invention in this regard was more than remarkable. Happily for his own sake, and for the sake of the nation which he has served with so much distinction, he need no longer rack his brains, as in the old days, for the material that would fill a column in the Echo; and though it is many years since we met, I know, through many messages that I have received from him, that he looks back with kindly remembrances to those times when we struggled side by side.

It is a strange thing about a journalist’s career, when it is successful, that at the first it seems so hard to get the work to do, and then later so hard to do the work that comes. In those early days every new opening was only won after a struggle, yet within a very few years I found myself almost overwhelmed by the tasks that were laid upon me.

From the Globe I passed to the Pall Mall Gazette, where I succeeded Professor Colvin as its Art Critic; from the Pall Mall to the Saturday Review and the Examiner; and then a little later I joined the staff of the World, which had recently been founded by Edmund Yates.

These different changes of occupation brought many new friends and many new editors, but of all those under whom I have served I think I should signalise Mr. Frederic Greenwood as by far the most inspiring to his contributors. Not that to be numbered among Mr. Greenwood’s contributors always implied a peaceful career; he was an autocratic commander, whose powerful personality loved to assert itself in every department of his paper, and he and I in those days had sharp encounters with regard to that particular arena of art criticism over which I thought I was entitled to exercise independent control.

But those differences are long forgotten, and the remembrance that survives is of a keen and ardent intelligence that communicated its own warmth of purpose to all who served under his banner.

Very different in type was Mr. Harwood, the editor of the Saturday Review. On the quiet evenings that I sometimes passed at his house in Regent’s Park, when he would spend most of the time after dinner in playing on his violoncello, it seemed hardly possible to realise that he was the capable conductor of what was even then a mighty organ of public opinion.

I suppose that hardly any British journal has ever boasted among its contributors so many eminent men in so many varied ways of life as one could see gathered at the great annual dinner of the Review in the “Trafalgar” at Greenwich, presided over by Mr. Beresford Hope.

Mr. Harwood had succeeded Mr. Cook, and had inherited many of the traditions of the great founder of the Review. His editorial office at the time I joined him was situated in The Albany, where he was assisted as sub-editor by my old friend, Mr. Walter Herries Pollock, who afterwards succeeded to the editorial chair.

I did little of the more serious work upon the paper, my duties, as a rule, being confined to those middle articles, as they were called, which formed at that time one of its salient features. I suppose the aptitude for finding and treating such lighter subjects was not too common; at any rate, I know that my contributions of that sort always met with a generous welcome, and Mr. Harwood himself, despite his grave exterior, was sometimes singularly happy in the choice of subjects for fit treatment in this lighter vein.

A young man who has gained an entry into the journalistic world can sometimes get through a prodigious amount of work, and at the time I am speaking of it often happened that within the week, besides my morning duties upon the Globe, I would furnish one, and sometimes two, articles to the Saturday Review, an article to the Examiner, another to the World, and, in addition, three or four columns of art criticism to the Pall Mall Gazette, apart from regular work in the same department for the Manchester Guardian, and occasional articles in other daily or weekly journals.

Mr. Edmund Yates, the founder and editor of the World, had given me a generous welcome from the first, and I recall an incident in connection with a series of articles I had done for him which at the time filled me with no little pride. In this series I had dealt week by week with the more important organs of the British press, and I was fortunate enough to win for these papers a considerable amount of attention. But, for the time, Edmund Yates had carefully withheld the secret of their authorship, and one day when I was visiting my old master at Bruce Castle School the subject came into our conversation, and he told me that the report was about that they were written by a prominent leader-writer of the Times.

At this my pride could no longer contain itself, and his incredulity and astonishment when I announced myself as the author gave me a moment of the keenest pleasure.

Yates had many enemies in those days, and the new features which he had introduced into English journalism were in many quarters profoundly resented. But he was generous and warm-hearted to his friends, and beneath those lighter gifts which made for immediate success he possessed a deep, sincere love of literature. It was at his house that I first met the late Mr. Archibald Forbes, a man of rare force and grit, and possessed, as a writer, of a style of trenchant sincerity and power that in my opinion placed him easily at the head of that great race of special war-correspondents which may be said to have been founded by the late Sir William Russell. None of them all, however, could equal Sir William in social grace and readiness of wit. His store of anecdotes garnered from a rich experience of many men and many lands seemed ever inexhaustible and ever new.

Forbes was of a widely different type. His experience had been won in a harder school, but his rapid and vivid powers of expression, his ability to set forth in picturesque presentment events which had only just happened, were, I think, altogether unrivalled. When it is remembered that many of these descriptions were sent rushing over the wires at the close of a day when other men of less energy would have been exhausted after many hours spent in the saddle, and when it is observed with what potent directness of narrative, often rising to real greatness of style, the story he had to tell was presented to his readers, it will be conceded, I think, that he had no equal in the particular branch of journalistic literature to which he had devoted himself.

We became close friends almost from our first meeting, which, as I remember, was on the occasion of a dinner given by Edmund Yates to the contributors to the World, and later, when I became editor to the English Illustrated Magazine, he rekindled some of the earlier memories of his fighting days in a series of articles that included a delightful account of the struggles which preceded his appointment as a special correspondent to the Daily News.

It was during the Franco-German War that the Daily News leapt into sudden prominence, in virtue of its splendid correspondence yielding a vivid picture of the conflict from both sides of the campaign, and it was incontestably to the energy and judgment of the late Sir John Robinson that this immediate success was due.

The quiet, kindly personality of Sir John would scarcely have suggested the sure and rapid power of organisation he undoubtedly possessed, and his quickness of insight in the selection of the fit man for the work to be done was vividly illustrated in the account which Mr. Forbes wrote for the English Illustrated Magazine of his first meeting with the genial manager of the Daily News.

It is possible that Forbes had somewhat embroidered the sober facts of the situation in order to heighten its picturesque effect, for I remember that on my next meeting with Sir John, after the publication of the article, he was somewhat whimsically annoyed to find that his own share in this historical transaction had been slightly disfigured to suit the exigencies of Mr. Forbes’s narrative.

Forbes had asserted that at a point in the negotiations he conceived the idea that his services were not desired, and was leaving the office in disgust when Robinson ran after him and brought him back. It was this little piece of added embroidery that Sir John declared to be not absolutely historical, but I feel sure, at least, that Forbes never intended to do injustice to the manager of the Daily News, for in our many talks concerning his struggles at this time he always acknowledged how deeply he had been indebted to his great employer.

Another of the staff of the Daily News war-correspondents was Hilary Skinner, whose younger brother had been the dearest friend of my youth, from the time when we were schoolmates at Bruce Castle School.

Alan Skinner afterwards rose to a distinguished official position in the Straits Settlements, but at the time I am thinking of he had just been called to the Bar; and when I, at a later date, left school to begin my life in London, he and I passed many a long evening in the little set of chambers he occupied in Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. In those days he was a versifier like myself, and, failing a wider audience, we used to delight to read to one another our first essays in poetry.

The friendship between us was of the closest, and when he finally went abroad to take up his official duties, the separation, I think, was felt keenly by both. His elder brother, Mr. Hilary Skinner, was of a lighter temperament, though he must have possessed strong force of character to have endured the strenuous labours of a war-correspondent. A voluble and insatiable talker, his conversation never needed the provocation of a reply. In an endless stream of anecdote he would wander over a wide world of men and things, never halting for a word, and rarely halting at all. And yet the trials of the life he had adopted must have been a severe strain upon a constitution that was by no means robust, and I think the wear and tear of that life, though it was not long continued, set a permanent mark upon his health.

Certainly this was so in the case of Archibald Forbes, who suffered much during the later years of his life, suffering that had its origin, as he told me, in a terrible two days’ ride in South Africa when he was racing against time to reach the telegraph-office to cable his news home.

Among others of this special race of correspondents who came into my life at this time were George Augustus Sala and William Beatty-Kingston. With both, however, the record of war was only a passing incident in their journalistic career.

Sala, I think, possessed a larger assortment of odd scraps of knowledge than any man I have ever met, and although his chequered career presented many vicissitudes, he had cultivated, as he told me, from boyhood the habit of keeping a series of most carefully compiled commonplace books, in which were recorded, under headings sometimes quaintly chosen, every bit of information or historical allusion which even remotely bore upon the subject in hand.

He told me that in the wildest and most disordered periods in his career this habit had never deserted him, and one evening, when I was dining with him in Mecklenburg Square, he showed me one entire shelf packed with these little volumes, all written in the neatest of monkish hands, and almost without a blot or scar.

I have often wondered what has become of those note-books from which he drew such varied allusions for his characteristic articles in the Daily Telegraph. They would be a treasure-store to many a budding journalist, and as far as I could gather, from a rapid review of them during that one evening at his house, a delight even to the casual reader.

Sala, like his friend Yates, was an accomplished speaker, and a keen critic on all presumptuous pretenders in that department.

I remember one evening, coming away from a public banquet at which he had admirably distinguished himself, I ventured to ask him what he thought of the performance of a gentleman who had followed him, and who I knew rather prided himself upon his achievements in this particular direction.

“Oh!” said Sala in reply, “you mean so-and-so. Ah yes! Damned fluent, damned fool!” The comment sounds harsh, but I do not think it was unjust. He used to tell me that in the preparation and delivery of his speeches there was always present to his mind the image of a furnished house, and that he kept his material in order and sequence by suggesting to himself, as he spoke, that he was inspecting the various apartments, from the dining-room to the attic, and that in this way he could always avoid any halt or confusion in the arrangement of the matter upon which he was speaking.

Yates, I fancy, though his delivery was always admirable in effect, was accustomed to learn his speeches by heart, and in this respect resembled the late Sir Frederick Leighton, though with the latter the secret was not so well kept.

William Beatty-Kingston, the last of the special correspondents to whom I referred, had no aptitude for public speaking, but he was in many ways highly accomplished. As an amateur musician I should think he had few equals, and his absolute enjoyment when he was seated at the piano, passing from the work of one great master to another, was a delight to witness. I remember that one evening my wife and I had invited to meet him a very gifted young Italian violinist, and it was a suggestion of ours that after dinner they should try over some of the duets of the great composers.

It was easy to see that at first they took no liking for one another. The Italian, as a recognised professional, hardly concealed his sense of superiority over the amateur, and Kingston, I knew, harboured a lurking suspicion that the violinist would not be deeply interested in the work of the great German composers to whom he was enthusiastically attached.

The brief passage of the dinner was for this reason a period of armed neutrality, amusing enough to watch; and when afterwards they were persuaded to make an adventure together it was done reluctantly, and with no great hope on the part of either that the evening would present any real enjoyment. It so happened, as they both knew, that my wife and I were bound to make an early departure for a great fancy-dress ball which had been organised by some of the foremost painters of the day, but of course we invited Kingston and his companion to stay as long as they liked, and leaving them with a sufficient store of whisky and soda and cigars, we set out upon our more frivolous excursion.

The ball was kept up till late; it was past five o’clock before we returned, little thinking to find our guests still in possession; and our surprise was the greater when, on mounting to our single sitting-room in Great Russell Street, we found, in the light of the sunshine that was streaming into the room, Kingston and his companion, both with coat and waistcoat removed, pounding away as hard as they could go at some difficult composition which they were trying over for the third time. The two artists, whom we had left with some misgiving in an attitude of veiled hostility towards each other, were now, as we discovered to our surprise, the closest friends, and, although the morning was well advanced, Kingston insisted that we should sit down and listen to one or two of the gems which they had been performing, and which were now repeated once more for our benefit—the most persuasive plea he urged being that in half an hour the public-houses would be open, and that we could then replenish our slender store of whisky which they had already exhausted.

Kingston had been for some time a special correspondent to the Daily Telegraph in Berlin, and afterwards came to London as its foreign editor. Apart from his musical talent, he spoke with ease many foreign languages, and in this respect resembled Sala, whose facilities as a linguist were great, though, as he once confessed, he inclined by preference to the languages of the Latin races. As he himself picturesquely put it, “My tongue is hung in a Southern belfry.”

Of all the editors with whom my journalistic experience brought me into contact, the man who stood nearest to me as a friend was Professor Minto of the Examiner.

On the Examiner I felt free and unfettered, free to choose any topic that pleased me, and to treat it in whatever way seemed to me best. I have always thought that Minto’s great powers as a critic of literature have never been sufficiently recognised. His separate volumes on the Poetic Writers and the Prose Writers of England contain some of the best criticism of our time, and, in especial, the section in the former devoted to the tragedies of Shakespeare has hardly been equalled in fineness of perception and in sustained eloquence of style.

Though in many ways characteristically Scotch, he had a liberal and supple mind, with a wide grasp and a generous outlook on political affairs, and an appreciation even of lighter works of literature that was hardly to be suspected from his grave and sober personality.

Very delightful were the little smoking evenings he instituted in the offices of the Examiner, which were then situated near Wellington Street in the Strand. There it was that I first met the late Bishop Creighton, who was at the time a constant contributor to the paper. Theodore Watts-Dunton was also a pretty regular visitor on these simple social occasions, and there, too, I met that strangest of accomplished scholars, “Student Williams,” who had long been known as an Oxford coach, and who was now devoting himself to a journalistic career.

It is strange to reflect what a complete revolution has overtaken English journalism in the period of thirty years that has passed since the time of which I am speaking. Literature and journalism have now almost parted company, and although the older tradition still honourably survives in individual instances, it is impossible not to be conscious that the function of a journalist, as it is now most widely accepted, has entirely changed its character.

The sort of article that was eagerly sought for then is now rarely welcomed, and when we recall the names of the men who wrote for the Saturday Review, and the great body of accomplished writers who lifted the Pall Matt Gazette in its earlier days into a foremost position among English journals, it will readily be conceded that the revolution is already complete. Reporting has largely taken the place of criticism, and the modern newspaper office, ordered on popular lines, more nearly approaches day by day to a powerful agency for private inquiry and detection.

CHAPTER IV
THE BAR

While this journalistic work was in its earliest stages, I was still seriously engaged in trying to fit myself for work at the Bar. My earlier knowledge of the Law had been gained under the tutorship of Professor Stewart Brice, who had successfully prepared me for my examination at the London University. And now, during the last six months of my studentship, I read in chambers with Charles Crompton, who was a prosperous Junior of the Northern Circuit. Charles Crompton had taken high honours at Cambridge, and was an accomplished lawyer; but his gift of speech was small, and would always have left him unfit for the higher honours of leadership. It was through his influence that I was elected as Junior to the Northern Circuit, which then covered a larger area than is assigned to it now. When I was Junior the towns visited included Appleby, Durham, Newcastle, Carlisle, Lancaster, Manchester, and Liverpool, and until I began to feel the pinch of the great expense which these Circuit tours involved, I keenly enjoyed every hour of the time in which, by my patient presence in the Courts, I was endeavouring to master the principles of the Law.

But before I joined the Circuit, I had already received my first brief from a cousin who was desirous of encouraging me in my new career. I was to appear in the Divorce Court in an undefended case, and my cousin endeavoured to stiffen my nerves for the ordeal by assuring me that the proceedings would be merely formal and the verdict would follow as a matter of course.

It was before Lord Penzance that the trial took place, and when the pleadings had been opened and I had made the statement that the case was undefended, a voice from the well of the Court retorted in acrid tones, “I beg your pardon!” and then a little man rose whom I gathered, in my confusion, to be the respondent. My amazement and dismay are beyond words to describe, and if it had not been for the Judge, who realised the situation and came to my rescue, I think my first brief would have been my last.

As Junior of the Circuit I was brought into close contact with some of the greatest advocates of the time—Holker, Russell, Herschell, Sam Pope, among the leaders; Gully, Henn Collins, Bigham, and a host of others of the Junior Bar who have since risen to distinction. The present Lord Justice Kennedy joined the Circuit at the same time as myself and we shared our lodgings in several of the northern towns.

The post of Junior rather attracted me. According to tradition, that officer is supposed to represent the interests of the Junior Bar, and it is recognised as part of his duty on every occasion that offers that he should keep in check the superior pretensions of the Queen’s Counsel.

As Junior also I was one of the recognised spokesmen for the Circuit on the occasion of all public banquets and entertainments; and I remember that it was at a dinner given by the late Lord Armstrong in his capacity as High Sheriff of the County, a dinner served in the great banqueting-hall at Jesmond Dene, the walls of which were richly decorated with many important examples of modern art, that I made my first essay as a public speaker.

But what interested me most keenly at the time was the opportunity which the daily working of the Courts afforded of appreciating and distinguishing the great talents of the men who then graced the Circuit.

The first who won my admiration, and it was not wonderful, was Charles Russell, and I remember, in the constant discussions which occupied the Junior end of our table at the evening mess, I always stoutly maintained that he would prove the greatest advocate in England.

He already possessed that dominating personality which was felt by Judge and Counsel alike, and an instance of his imperious temper came to me very early in our acquaintance. Though I had seen and admired him constantly in Court, I had not been introduced to him till I met him one evening in the rooms of Mr. M‘Connell in the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool. Russell was always a keen cardplayer, though I am assured by those who are better able to judge, a player not distinguished by any exceptional skill. There were four of us present that evening, and Russell at once insisted that the table should be brought out for a rubber of whist. I nervously explained to him that I knew scarcely anything of the game, but my objection was curtly overborne in a manner that left me no alternative. By an unhappy fate Russell cut me as a partner, and the blunders which I had clearly foreseen must occur, endured at first with some semblance of equanimity, at last ended in an explosion of rebuke that only made the more inevitable a series of even worse blunders in the game to follow.

By this time Russell had lost all patience, and, to say the truth, so had I, and with a courage and audacity, which I certainly could not have exhibited had I then known him better, I pointed out to him that the fault was his own, that I had warned him of my incompetence, and yet in the face of that confession he had forced me to join in the game.

To my utter amazement he became suddenly gentle and self-controlled, and said, “Yes, yes, you’re right. I had forgotten that. I had no business to speak to you like that.”

Other instances of Russell’s commanding personality, though they belong to a later time, come back to me now.

During the progress of the famous Belt trial, through the kindness of Sir George Lewis I one day found my way into Court; but I had scarcely taken my seat when Russell, with an imperious gesture, beckoned me to his side. “Carr,” he said, “you know about Art?” and before I knew whither his statement tended I found myself in the witnessbox confronted with the two test busts on which the issue in the case mainly depended.

The last time we met in public was on the occasion of a dinner to be given to Sir Henry Irving on his return from America, when Sir Charles Russell was in the chair. As I entered the anteroom where the guests were assembled Russell took me by the lapel of my coat and drew me aside. “You ought to be doing this,” he said. “You can do this sort of thing; I can’t.”

That portion of the statement which concerns himself was, at any rate, partly true. Russell was never quite at home in these lighter ways of oratory. It needed the pressure of a great issue to exhibit his powers of eloquence at their best, and even in the House of Commons I fancy he never quite justified his unrivalled position at the Bar.

But in that special gift of eloquence that makes for power in advocacy there was surely no man of his time who could claim to be his equal. Within the arena of the Court his personality imposed itself; in the stress of conflict it could even be menacing. It exercised its influence upon the jury; it was not unfelt upon the Bench. Like all great advocates, he was at his best when the gravity of the issue summoned all his resources. He was only fully inspired when his individuality was fully and deeply engaged, and for that he needed the spur of something definite, concrete, and individual. His gifts of oratory were conspicuous. In those northern Circuit days I used constantly to notice a greater freedom and picturesqueness of gesture, a more complete surrender to a mood of passionate utterance than any of his fellows could command. These things were his in virtue of his birthright as an Irishman. But they were not at his service upon an issue that was coldly intellectual or remotely abstract. There was in his nature that purely combative element that could only find its full expression in the battle of litigation; the clash of ideas left him comparatively cold: he was so far an artist that he needed to be moved and stirred by facts that were moulded into a definite story of individual fortunes—then, and only then, the full force of his personality came into play. At such moments his strength far outmeasured the weight of gifts that were merely intellectual; such gifts, however considerable, were then enforced by qualities of character and even of temper very difficult to define but still more difficult to resist.

In after years he once told me that his habit had always been to prepare his cases chronologically. He wanted to know what was missing in the story he had to tell, to be prepared in anticipation for any surprise coming from the other side that might suddenly be brought to fill the vacant gaps in his own narrative. And this simple process of preparation showed itself in his methods as an advocate. His power of presenting his case had something of the charm a story-teller can command. It was always lucid, direct, and consecutive, never halting or confused. Sir William Gilbert once told me that on a certain occasion he was in Court listening to his own counsel opening to the jury the story of his own case. He said he was charmed, by the interest of the narrative as it was gradually developed, and that the only criticism that occurred to him was that the substance of the speech bore no relation to the contention he had come into Court to establish. Such a reproach, I think, could never at any period in his career have been made against the late Lord Russell.

I did not at first recognise that Russell had in his constant opponent, John Holker, a man of intellectual power, as great, or perhaps even greater, than his own. Holker had little of the grace that Russell could boast; his personality was outwardly heavy and uncouth; his language, rarely eloquent, was sometimes even rough and halting. But in his grasp of every case presented to him, and in his power of imposing the view he sought to uphold upon a northern jury, even Russell was not his equal. A man of great physique, in person cumbrous and heavy, and in facial expression unalert and uninspiring, he sometimes gave to his hearers rather the impression of a giant talking in his sleep.

But as I watched him from day to day, it very soon became convincingly clear to me that the giant was there. He seemed to notice nothing, and yet nothing escaped him. His method of appeal to the jury had something almost of cunning in its apparent helplessness.

Even when he was nearing success, and the verdict was within his grasp, he still retained the air of a man whose cause was in danger owing to his inferior grace of style and his halting powers of eloquence. He had that persuasive art of convincing the jury that he was a plain man like themselves, and that the cause of justice was likely to suffer by reason of the superior intellectual attainments of his opponents, unless he and they laid their heads together as plain men, and stood shoulder to shoulder in earnest endeavour to vindicate the right.

It was only afterwards that I got to know that beneath this heavy and impenetrable exterior there lurked a keen and supple sense of humour. On the occasion of the annual Grand Night the leader who presided did not always take the personal trouble to invent or devise the sort of burlesque address interspersed with lyrical effusions which was deemed appropriate and indispensable. I remember my friends, the late Mr. M‘Connell and Hugh Shield, who was known as the laureate of the Circuit, very often came to the assistance of the leader who felt himself unequipped for this lighter task imposed upon him.

But when it came to Holker’s turn, despite the fact that he was engaged on nearly every case sent up for trial, he chose to do the whole himself, and very admirably it was done.

Herschell’s intellect differed widely from both. In power of logical statement, in clear and coherent reasoning, and in the ability to conduct an argument without a flaw from start to finish, he was certainly not the inferior of either. But his nature on the emotional side, as far at least as advocacy was concerned, was poorly furnished. He lacked the warmth to sway a jury. He was unable to realise any disability in others that he did not possess in himself, and the consequence was that he had often concluded his address to the jury before these unfortunate gentlemen had apprehended the essential features of the case he was trying to enforce. And for this reason his appeal as an advocate was far less potent than that of either of his two great rivals. The cold steel of his intellect never reached white heat. His eloquence lacked the picturesque adornments which in their different ways they could both command, and in this respect he stood in even more striking contrast with Sam Pope, who, in a brief flight of advocacy, once or twice impressed me more than them all.

The duties of the Junior of the Circuit sometimes placed me in somewhat ludicrous conflict with authority, and it happened that on my first Circuit I was forced, as the spokesman of the Bar, into a somewhat heated controversy with the Attorney-General, the late Lord Coleridge.

Charles Russell had been sent by the Crown with a special retainer to prosecute Mrs. Cotton, the notorious murderess who had poisoned a number of her nieces and nephews for the sake of small village insurances she had effected on their lives. This aroused the indignation of the Bar at Durham, who thought that Mr. Aspinall, who held the position of Attorney-General for the County, was entitled to the brief. And it was Herschell who prompted me in the letters of protest which I was instructed to send to Lord Coleridge, and which were afterwards published in the Times.

That same trial of Mrs. Cotton stands out vividly in my remembrance from among the many criminal cases which I have witnessed in the Courts. I remember Russell telling me afterwards that the several cases actually proved against her, amounting, I think, to five or six, were only a few from among many others in which her guilt was equally assured; and yet, during her trial, this elderly woman, who in appearance resembled rather a comfortable monthly nurse, never evinced the smallest trace of emotion or concern.

It was proved that she had sat up night after night assiduously nursing her victims, as, one after another, they succumbed to the poison she had administered. And yet it was only when her advocate, whose case from the first was hopeless, endeavoured to appeal to the jury by a purely fanciful picture of her constant affection for these helpless children, that Mrs. Cotton—moved rather, as it would seem, by the artistic skill of his eloquence than by any deeper feeling—shed a few tears such as might have been wrung from a spectator at a play.

My own experiences as a barrister are too slight to deserve any record. Mainly through the kindly influence of Charles Crompton I appeared in one or two civil causes, but these were before an arbitrator and not in open court. Once, and once only, I was entrusted with a brief to defend a person who was accused of having stolen a moth-eaten pillow from a passing barrow containing the household effects of a neighbour who was shifting her quarters.

I was assured by my friends on Circuit that had I chosen to pursue my career I should have made an effective advocate. But the expenses incident to this side of my calling were already beginning to press heavily upon me; and as I was then almost entirely dependent on what I could earn for myself, I rather grudged the constant drain upon my income as a journalist which my life at the Bar involved; and when in the month of July 1873 I became engaged to be married, I quickly perceived that the only speedy prospect of making a home for my wife was to devote the whole of my energies to literature and journalism, in which I had already made a successful start.

But the profession of the Law, so eagerly adopted and so speedily abandoned, has always had for me a strong fascination, and among its professors, both past and present, I have counted many of my closest friends.

Emery Walker

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

From the portrait by himself in the National Portrait Gallery.

To face page 59.

CHAPTER V
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

I can hardly say what it was that gave to my early efforts in journalism a decided bent towards the study of Art; for although my first experiments, as I have already said, were made as a dramatic critic, I very soon found myself employing the best of my energies in another direction.

My elder sister had already begun a serious study of painting, and that no doubt partly influenced my taste as a boy. Not that my keen interest in the drama ever lapsed, even during the period when I was qualifying myself as an Art Critic; but it lay dormant for a time, in so far at least as my journalistic occupation was concerned; and apart from my daily work upon the Globe, and those lighter essays on general and social topics contributed to the Examiner and the Saturday Review, my main energies for several years to come were destined to be employed in the criticism of pictorial art.

It is not quite easy now to realise the extraordinary interest with which the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy were then greeted by those whose minds had been awakened to the new movement in painting.

I can remember year after year, from the age of sixteen, presenting myself on each opening Monday at eight o’clock in the morning at the doors of Burlington House, and snatching an hour there before making my way to the City. The pre-Raphaelite movement had begotten a freshly awakened spirit, not only in the workers themselves, but in those who worshipped them. The advent of Ruskin had kindled a new flame which made a study of Art something more than mere dilettantism. It was with something almost of religious fervour that we awaited the advent of a new Millais or Holman Hunt, for it was then only on rare occasions that we had the chance of seeing an example of the work of Rossetti.

Art in more recent days has come to make, even in the hands of its greatest professors, a more technical appeal, and those of us who are not of the calling are now somewhat sternly bidden to confine ourselves to dumb appreciation, and are severely warned not to venture to deliver opinions on matters in which we are not qualified by special study.

This is the fate of all art, either literary or pictorial, at those seasons of impaired vitality when it falls under the domination of men of the “métier.” It is the assured sign of a passing period of decadence. The moment when the artist has missed the spirit which links his work with the wider emotional movement of his generation, is always the moment when he most zealously and most loudly acclaims the detachment and independence of his calling.

He is always most eager to be judged by the comrades of his craft when he realises, though perhaps only half consciously, that his appeal is no longer to the simple. It is the moment when art leans towards bric-a-brac, when the painter or the sculptor is no longer spurred by the larger desire to have his work understanded of the people, when he is content in each little coterie with the appreciation of his disciples who in their turn aim at nothing better than the approbation of their master. That any work worthy of the name, whether in literature, painting, or sculpture, must of necessity conform to the irrefutable laws of the medium in which it is expressed, is little better than an outworn platitude. But to concede so much is only to admit the inevitable limitations of every art; it is the acceptance of its inherent conditions, not the definition of its essence; and the endeavour to refuse to artists rightly equipped for their task the larger function of imaging the wider passions of life, is simply to rob the record of the past of its greatest and most enduring achievements.

For my own part I have never made any pretence of bowing before these inordinate pretensions of the masters of mere technique. They form part of a gospel that has always been widely preached: in my youthful day it spread upon its banner the specious motto of “Art for Art’s sake”; but it reappears under many disguises, and rests ultimately and always upon the assumption that the men of the “métier” are the sole and exclusive judges of the worth of any artistic product.

Certainly, if this dictum had prevailed in the time I am recalling, the great movement which won all our youthful enthusiasm, a movement beyond question the greatest and most influential in the Art of Europe during the nineteenth century, would never have found strength to develop. Never did young men of their calling meet with more embittered opposition from the accepted masters of the time; and if it had not been that a true impulse inspiring their work stirred a deeper response in a section of the public than was accorded to them by their fellow-painters, they would most surely have lacked the encouragement and the praise which to every artist is as the breath of his life.

The thought and feeling of the time, as it found expression in every art, was moved by something deeper than the merely artistic impulse. That much-bespattered Victorian Era, whatever its limitations, could claim at least this cardinal virtue, that the men who are its foremost representatives were able to forge anew the links that bind life and art together. The gifts they owned were too great to let them stand in any fear of the threatened danger of “the literary idea”; and if occasionally they had to acknowledge a measure of failure, the fear of such failure never drove them to take refuge within the safe confines of mere technical accomplishment.

The spirit of poetry, re-awakened in literature, had found its way into art, and themselves the comrades of the poets of the time, the leaders of the little band whose efforts were destined to revolutionise English painting, gladly confessed in their own work, though in varying measure, the newly kindled ambition to embody in art that quality of imagination that had hitherto found expression only in literature.

And this movement towards a wider idealism was helped, not hindered, by the strenuous desire for the faithful presentment of actual reality which stood as a dominant article of faith in the pre-Raphaelite creed.

At the head of this revolution in taste, which has left a lasting mark, not only upon the painting of England, but also in some degree upon the art of all Continental nations, two names I think stand pre-eminent, those of G. F. Watts and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. From them came the poetic inspiration which lay at the root of all the greatest achievements of the time. Others there were, like Millais, more greatly endowed with the painter’s gift, but even he, whose genius was destined ultimately to find its own more congenial exercise in portraiture and landscape, confessed in his earlier days the commanding domination of men who, in intellect and imagination, were his leaders and his masters.

The work of Mr. Watts, based on an earlier tradition, was open to all the world, but it was only by rare chance and good fortune that the student of that day had the opportunity of making acquaintance with the paintings of Rossetti. I remember it was while I was on Circuit that I had my first sight of some examples of his work in the collection of Mr. Rae of Birkenhead, and there, too, I found pictures of Madox Brown, another of the group who did not publicly exhibit. I think it was a study of Mr. Rae’s collection that induced me to publish in the Globe newspaper a series of articles on painters of the day over the signature of “Ignotus” in the year 1873.

Certainly it was the publication of these papers that formed the occasion of my making the acquaintance of several of the artists whose talent I had endeavoured to appreciate. It was my intention at the time to refashion the series and to issue them as a separate volume, and with that view I wrote to several of them asking them for some personal details of the earlier days of their studentship. The answers I received were in nearly every case characteristic, and it was by means of my correspondence with Rossetti that I afterwards became a visitor at his house.

It was through my friend Mr. George Hake, who was at that time staying with him, that I first obtained a personal introduction to Rossetti, but we were already known to each other by correspondence.

In his letter to me dated from Kelmscott in November 1873 he writes: “As a painter, and I am ashamed at my age to say it, I have never even approached satisfaction with my own progress until within the last five years. My youth was spent chiefly in planning and designing, and whether I shall still have time to do anything I cannot tell.”

As a matter of fact, Rossetti had at that date produced most of the work by which he will be best remembered. As a lad of twenty he had painted “The Girlhood of Mary the Virgin,” followed shortly afterwards by “The Annunciation”; and some of the most beautiful of his drawings, the exquisite portrait of “Miss Siddal,” the “Hamlet and Ophelia,” and the large drawing of “Helen arming Paris,” already stood to his credit.

At the time I first knew him he had already painted “The Loving Cup,” “The Beloved,” “Mona

Hollyer

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

From the painting by G. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.

To face page 65.

Vanna,” and “Lady Lilith,” and in the earlier part of the period to which these works belonged he had given to the world that exquisite series of watercolour paintings in which “Paolo and Francesca” and “Heart of the Night” stand pre-eminent.

It was “The Beloved” and “Mona Vanna” that I particularly remember as forming part of the collection of Mr. Rae, and it was mainly upon these two paintings, and a knowledge of some of the drawings in Black and White, that I had founded my first enthusiastic appreciation of the painter’s genius.

The common impression of the time, which I indeed partly shared, was that Rossetti’s individuality, however finely it might be endowed with poetic imagination, was not of the most virile order. For this he himself was in a great degree responsible. He had deliberately withdrawn from all public exhibition of his work, and even later, when I became connected with the establishment of the Grosvenor Gallery, he still held fast to his earlier resolution.

The man, as I came to know him in the flesh, was therefore something of a surprise to me, and I quickly perceived, as I learned to know him better, that, whatever may have been the source of his reluctance to expose himself to the fire of criticism, it certainly was not due to any lack of masculine strength.

On the occasion of my first visit to Cheyne Walk, it was indeed the breadth of his sympathy both in literature and art, no less than the fineness and delicacy of his taste, that most impressed me. Those never-to-be-forgotten evenings that I passed in his company became at the time a sort of enchantment. His talk was assuredly more inspiring than that of any man I have ever known; most inspiring certainly to a youth who had ambitions of his own, for, although intolerant of any utterance that was merely conventional, and quick to detect the smallest lack of sincerity, he was ever patient with the expression of any enthusiasm however crude, and was as ready to listen as to reply.

I can see him now as he used to lie coiled up on the sofa in his studio after dinner, and can hear the deep tones of his rich voice as he ranged widely over the fields of literature and art, always trenchant, always earnest, yet now and again slipping with sudden wit and humour into a lighter vein.

I remember that one afternoon as I sat beside him while he worked, the late Mr. Virtue Tebbs came in fresh from an exhibition of the old masters at Burlington House, and full of enthusiasm for a picture by Turner which he insisted that Rossetti must speedily go and see.

“What is it called?” asked Rossetti.

“‘Girls Surprised while Bathing,’” replied Tebbs.

“Umph!” returned Rossetti. “Yes, I should think devilish surprised to see what Turner had made of them.”

On one point he was always absolutely emphatic.

“A picture,” he used to say to me, “is a painted poem, and those who deny it have simply no poetry in their nature.” It was, I think, the absence of this quality that made him intolerant of the work of artists like Albert Moore.

“Often pretty,” he said, “pretty enough, but sublimated café-painting and nothing more.”

But he could be unstintedly generous in his praise, as he was searching and even scathing in his criticism. Of Millais he once said to me:

“I don’t believe since painting began there has ever been a man more greatly endowed with the mere painter’s power.”

And of Burne-Jones, not once, but often, he spoke in terms of the warmest and highest praise.

“He has oceans of imagination,” he used to say, “and in this respect there has been nobody like him since Botticelli.” And then, reverting to his favourite maxim, he added in those round and ringing tones that seemed at once to invite and to defy contradiction: “If, as I hold, the noblest picture is a painted poem, then I say that in the whole history of art there has never been a painter more greatly gifted with poetic invention.”

Of Leighton he was wont to speak with genuine respect and sincere appreciation. There was only one point, and that concerned not the character but the manners of the graceful and accomplished President, on which he was not quite tolerant.

“Leighton,” he said one night, “is undoubtedly one of the most gifted and accomplished creatures of his time. There’s scarcely anything which he can’t do, and can’t do well. He has, besides, a very high sense of duty which I know to be sincere, and even as a painter he undoubtedly deserves to some extent the position he occupies, but as to manners——”

And then in a few trenchant sentences he would give his own, not very flattering, impression of what he considered to be Leighton’s imperfections on this score.

At the simple dinners to which I was at that time hospitably bidden, Rossetti, as he sat at the head of his table, was always amusing to watch. His inability to serve any dish set before him was pathetic in its helplessness. He would lunge at a joint as though it were a hostile foe, driving it from one end of the dish to the other till he got it securely cornered in its well of gravy, and then plunge his knife into it with something of deadly ferocity.

It is related of Rossetti, though I myself was not a witness to the incident, that on one occasion he was so entirely oblivious of the contents of the dish before him, that, wishing to prove its value as a specimen of oriental porcelain, he turned it over to examine the marks on its back, and all unconsciously deposited the turbot on the table-cloth.

I remember he very greatly admired some literary review which I had published in the columns of the Globe, the subject of which I now forget; and in the talk that followed he spoke with rare eloquence of the poets of the dawn of the last century, dwelling especially upon Keats, whom he knew I loved deeply, and coming at last to Landor, whose work, however beautiful, has never warmly appealed to me.

“What do you think of Landor?” he inquired.

I answered, “It seems to me through all his poetry that his genius is impersonal without being dramatic,” and Rossetti, who was always generous in his appreciation of youth, answered with a phrase that sent me home that night happy and contented.

“By Jove,” he said, “that’s the finest criticism ever made on Landor!”

I make no pretence that it was: it was enough for me then that he thought so, or that he said so.

But this friendship with Rossetti, so dearly prized by me and so indelible in its lasting impression, was not destined to endure for long. During the later days of our association he was already to some extent a sick man. Little by little the invitations, once so freely extended to me, slackened in their warmth of hospitality, until the day came when I realised the fact that my visits to Cheyne Walk were no longer welcome. It was not until years afterwards that I learned the cause, and if I give it here, it is only because it curiously illustrates that almost morbid sensitiveness of character which lay side by side in his nature with the most masculine grasp of the problems of life and art.

He had, it seems, as I had learned from the lips of a friend whose devotion to the poet endured till his death, a very high opinion of my judgment as an art critic, and he had conceived the belief, perhaps true at the time, that I thought more highly of the work of Burne-Jones than of his own. And although he himself had often said to me things of Burne-Jones’s genius which no word of mine could out-measure in generous praise, it fretted him, in the supersensitive condition in which suffering and ill-health had consigned him, to be reminded by my presence of a judgment that in his own person he would not have resented.

It may, as I have said, have been true then—though I was unaware that I had ever betrayed the feeling to Rossetti—that Burne-Jones stood foremost in my appreciation of the painters of the time. It is certainly not true now in any sense that would consign Rossetti to an inferior place; for I have come to think, in the light of later study of the two men’s work, that, in some undefinable and yet indisputable quality of genius, especially as exemplified in his earlier work not then so well known to me, he stands pre-eminent among those who influenced his generation.

As a colourist in that supreme sense in which colour is inspired by the purpose of the design, he had in his earlier period no equal among them all. In later life, under the shadow of suffering and sickness, the tones he employed had lost the first glowing radiance of the dawn. But an artist lives only by his best; and if the best of Rossetti be fairly measured and appraised, it will, I think, be hardly possible to dispute his right and claim to have been the foremost leader in the movement with which his name is associated.

CHAPTER VI
EDWARD BURNE-JONES

My intimacy with Burne-Jones struck deeper and lasted without interruption from those earlier days of the “Ignotus” articles in the Globe to the time of his death in 1898. We were friends for more than twenty-five years, and during the greater part of that period the closest and most affectionate friends.

To him also I had written when I thought of enlarging that first crude criticism of his work. I was a stranger to him then, although my elder sister had already made his acquaintance, but his letter in reply to my application is delightful in its considerate tolerance towards the somewhat audacious challenge of a boy to be supplied with the particulars of his early career.

Referring to the pictures which I had specially selected for notice he writes:

“I need not say that such a flattering review of them gave me pleasure, for, whatever cause I have to see them with disappointment, such sympathy as you express cannot be anything but most welcome. But there is so little to say of the kind of information you ask for, and I should like to say nothing, for a sudden feeling of being ridiculous overwhelms me. At Oxford till twenty-three, therefore no right to begin art at all, never having learnt one bit about it practically, nor till that time having seen any ancient picture at all to my remembrance. Provincial life at home, at Oxford prints of Chalons and Landseer—you know them all. I think Morris’s friendship began everything for me, everything that I afterwards cared for. When I left Oxford I got to know Rossetti, whose friendship I sought and obtained. He is, as you know, the most generous of men to the young. I could not bear with the young man’s dreadful sensitiveness and intolerable conceit as he did with mine. He taught me practically all I ever learned; afterwards I made a method for myself to suit my nature. He gave me courage to commit myself to imagination without shame, a thing both good and bad for me. It was Watts much later who compelled me to try and draw better. I quarrel now with Morris about Art. He journeys to Iceland and I to Italy, which is a symbol. And I quarrel too with Rossetti. If I could travel backward, I think my heart’s desire would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli. I do feel out of time and place, and think you should let me go crumbling and mouldering on, for I am not fit for much else but a museum. You see I am writing in front of my work and ought to know, and I do know.”

The letter ends with a courteous invitation to visit his studio, where he promised to show me the work he had completed during the year. Needless to say with what delight I accepted, though I scarcely realised then that that visit was destined to date the beginning of a friendship that endured without halt or flaw till the time of his death in the summer of 1898.

When I first knew him in 1873, his appearance corresponded almost exactly with that which is imaged in Watts’s beautiful portrait. His eyes then, as always, were the dominant feature of his face—pale blue eyes, that revealed in their changing expression the sympathy, the gentleness, and no less the strength, of his nature.

From the time I am speaking of, I became a constant and always welcome visitor to his studio at the Grange, and at those simple Sunday luncheons to which his intimate friends were bidden Burne-Jones very soon made known to me a side of his character scarcely to be suspected by those who knew him only from his work.