Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (654 page)

Madox Brown was the most benevolent of men, the most helpful and the kindest. His manifestations, however, were apt at times to be a little thorny. I remember an anecdote which Madox Brown’s housemaid of that day was in the habit of relating to me when she used to put me to bed. Said she — and the exact words remain upon my mind:

“I was down in the kitchen waiting to carry up the meat, when a cabman comes down the area steps and says: ‘I’ve got your master in my cab. He’s very drunk.’ I says to him—” and an immense intonation of pride would come into Charlotte’s voice—” ‘My master’s a-sitting at the head of his table entertaining his guests. That’s Mr. —

Carry him upstairs and lay him in the bath.’”

Madox Brown, whose laudable desire it was at many stages of his career to redeem poets and others from dipsomania, was in the habit of providing several of them with labels upon which were inscribed his own name and address. Thus, when any of these geniuses were found incapable in the neighbourhood they would be brought by cabmen or others to Fitzroy Square. This, I think, was a stratagem more characteristic of Madox Brown’s singular and quaint ingenuity than any that I can recall. The poet being thus recaptured would be carried upstairs by Charlotte and the cabman and laid in the bath — in Colonel Newcome’s very bath-room, where, according to Thackeray, the water moaned and gurgled so mournfully in the cistern. For me, I can only remember that room as an apartment of warmth and lightness: it was a concomitant to all the pleasures that sleeping at my grandfather’s meant for me. And indeed, to Madox Brown as to Colonel Newcome — they were very similar natures in their chivalrous, unbusinesslike, and naïve simplicity — the house in Fitzroy Square seemed perfectly pleasant and cheerful.

The poet having been put into the bath would be reduced to sobriety by cups of the strongest coffee that could be made (the bath was selected because he would not be able to roll out and to injure himself).

And having been thus reduced to sobriety, he would be lectured, and he would be kept in the house, being given nothing stronger than lemonade to drink, until he found the régime intolerable. Then he would disappear, the label sewn inside his coat collar, to reappear once more in the charge of a cabman.

Of Madox Brown’s acerbity I witnessed myself no instances at all, unless it be the one that I have lately narrated. A possibly too stern father of the old school, he was as a grandfather extravagantly indulgent. I remember his once going through the catalogue of his grandchildren and deciding, after careful deliberation, that they were all geniuses with the exception of one, as to whom he could not be certain whether that one was a genius or mad. Thus I read with astonishment the words of a critic of distinction with regard to the exhibition of Madox Brown’s works that I organized at the Grafton Gallery ten years ago. They were to the effect that Madox Brown’s pictures were very crabbed and ugly — but what was to be expected of a man whose disposition was so harsh and distorted? This seemed to me to be an amazing statement. But upon discovering the critic’s name I found that Madox Brown once kicked him downstairs. The gentleman in question had come to Madox Brown with the proposal from an eminent firm of picture-dealers that the painter should sell all his works to them for a given number of years at a very low price. In return they were to do what would be called nowadays “booming” him, and they would do their best to get him elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. That Madox Brown should have received with such violence a proposition that seemed to the critic so eminently advantageous for all parties, justified that gentleman in his own mind in declaring that Madox Brown had a distorted temperament. Perhaps he had.

But if he had a rough husk he had a sweet kernel, and for this reason the gloomy house in Fitzroy Square did not, I think, remain as a shape of gloom in the minds of many people. It was very tall, very large, very gray, and in front of it towered up very high the mournful plane-trees of the square. And over the porch was the funereal urn with the ram’s heads. This object, dangerous and threatening, has always seemed to me to be symbolical of this circle of men, so practical in their work and so romantically unpractical, as a whole, in their lives. They knew exactly how, according to their lights, to paint pictures, to write poems, to make tables, to decorate pianos, rooms, or churches. But as to the conduct of life they were a little sketchy, a little romantic, perhaps a little careless. I should say that of them all Madox Brown was the most practical. But his way of being practical was always to be quaintly ingenious. Thus we had the urn. Most of the Pre-Raphaelites dreaded it: they all of them talked about it as a possible danger, but never was any step taken for its removal. It was never even really settled in their minds whose would be the responsibility for any accident. It is difficult to imagine the frame of mind, but there it was and there to this day the urn remains. The question could have been settled by any lawyer, or Madox Brown might have had some The Inner Circle clause that provided for his indemnity inserted in his lease. And, just as the urn itself set the tone of the old immense Georgian mansion fallen from glory, so perhaps the fact that it remained for so long the topic of conversation set the note of the painters, the painter-poets, the poet-craftsmen, the painter-musicians, the filibuster verse-writers, and all that singular collection of men versed in the arts. They assembled and revelled comparatively modestly in the rooms where Colonel Newcome and his fellow directors of the Bundelcund Board had partaken of mulligatawny and spiced punch before the sideboard that displayed its knife-boxes with the green-handled knives in their serried phalanxes.

But, for the matter of that, Madox Brown’s own sideboard also displayed its green-handled knives, which always seemed to me to place him as the man of the old school in which he was born and remained to the end of his days. If he was impracticable, he hadn’t about him a touch of the Bohemian; if he was romantic, his romances took place along ordered lines. Every friend’s son of his who went into the navy was destined in his eyes to become, not a pirate, but at least a port-admiral. Every young lawyer that he knew was certain, even if he were only a solicitor, to become Lord Chancellor, and every young poet who presented him with a copy of his first work was destined for the laureateship. And he really believed in these romantic prognostications, which came from him without end as without selection. So that if he was the first to give a helping hand to D. G. Rossetti, his patronage in one or two other instances was not so wisely bestowed.

He was, of course, the sworn foe of the Royal Academy. For him they were always, the members of that august body, “those
damned
academicians,” with a particular note of acerbity upon the expletive. Yet I very well remember, upon the appearance of the first numbers of the
Daily Graphic,
that Madox Brown, being exceedingly struck by the line engravings of one of the artists whom that paper regularly employed to render social functions, exclaimed:

“By Jove! if young Cleaver goes on as well as he has begun, those damned academicians, supposing they had any sense, would elect him president right away!” Thus it will be seen that the business of romance was not to sweep away the Royal Academy, was not to found an opposing salon. It was to capture the established body by storm, leaping as it were on to the very quarter-deck, and setting to the old ship a new course. The characteristic, in fact, of all these men was their warm-heartedness, their enmity for the formal, for the frigid, for the ungenerous. It cannot be said that any of them despised money. I doubt whether it would even be said that any of them did not, at one time or another, seek for popularity, or try to paint, write, or decorate pot-boilers. But they were naively unable to do it. To the timid — and the public is always the timid — what was individual in their characters was always alarming. It was alarming even when they tried to paint the conventional dog-and-girl pictures of the Christmas supplement. The dogs were too like dogs and did not simper; the little girls were too like little girls. They would be probably rendered as just losing their first teeth.

In spite of the Italianism of Rossetti, who was never in Italy, and the mediævalism of Morris, who had never looked mediævalism, with its cruelties, its filth, its stenches, and its avarice, in the face — in spite of these tendencies that were forced upon them by those two contagious spirits, the whole note of this old, romantic circle was national, was astonishingly English, was Georgian even. They seemed to date from the Regency, and to have skipped altogether the baneful influences of early Victorianism and of the commerciality that the Prince Consort spread through England. They seem to me to resemble in their lives — and perhaps in their lives they were greater than their works — to resemble nothing so much as a group of old-fashioned ships’ captains. Madox Brown, indeed, was nominated for a midshipman in the year 1827. His father had fought on the famous
Arethusa
in the classic fight with the
Belle Poule.
And but for the fact that his father quarrelled with Commodore Coffin, and so lost all hope of influence at the Admiralty, it is probable that Madox Brown would never have painted a picture or have lived in Colonel Newcome’s house. Indeed, on the last occasion when I saw William Morris I happened to meet him in Portland Place. He was going to the house of a peer that his firm was engaged in decorating, and he took me with him to look at the work. He was then a comparatively old man, and his work had grown very flamboyant, so that the decoration of the dining-room consisted, as far as I can remember, of one huge acanthus-leaf design. Morris looked at this absent-mindedly, and said that he had just been talking to some members of a ship’s crew whom he had met in Fenchurch Street. They had remained for some time under the impression that he was a ship’s captain. This had pleased him very much, for it was his ambition to be taken for such a man. I have heard, indeed, that this happened to him on several occasions, on each of which he expressed an equal satisfaction. With a gray beard like the foam of the sea, with gray hair through which he continually ran his hands erect and curly on his forehead, with a hooked nose, a florid complexion, and clean, clear eyes, dressed in a blue serge coat, and carrying, as a rule, a satchel, to meet him was always, as it were, to meet a sailor ashore. And that in essence was the note of them all. When they were at work they desired that everything they did should be shipshape; when they set their work down they became like Jack ashore. And perhaps that is why there is, as a rule, such a scarcity of artists in England. Perhaps to what is artistic in the nation the sea has always called too strongly.

CHAPTER I
I

THE OUTER RING

“7th November. — Dined with William Rossetti and afterwards to Browning’s where there was a woman with a large nose. Hope I may never meet her again. Browning’s conversational powers very great. He told some good stories, one about the bygone days of Drury Lane — about the advice of a very experienced stage carpenter of fifty years’ standing at the theatre, given to a young man who wished for an engagement there, but had not, it was objected, voice enough — the advice was to get a pot of XXXX (ale) and put it on the stage beside him, and having the boards all to himself he was first to drink and then to holloa with all his might, then to drink again, and so on — which the aspirant literally did — remaining of course a muff as he had begun. However I spoil that one! Browning said that one evening he was at Carlyle’s. That sage teacher, after abusing Mozart, Beethoven, and modern music generally, let Mrs. Carlyle play to show Browning what was the right sort of music, which was some Scotch tune on an old piano with such bass as pleased Providence — or rather, said Browning, as did
not
please Providence. An Italian sinner who belonged to the highest degree of criminality which requires some very exalted dignitary of the Church before absolution can be obtained for atrocities too heinous for the powers of the ordinary priest, Browning likened to a spider who, having fallen into a bottle of ink, gets out and crawls and sprawls and blots right over the whole of God’s table of laws.

“8th. — Painted at William Rossetti from eight till twelve. Gabriel came in. William, wishing to go early, Gabriel proposed that he should wait five minutes and they would go together, when, William being got to sleep on the sofa, Gabriel commenced telling me how he intended to get married at once to Guggums [Miss Siddall] and off to Algeria! and so poor William’s five minutes lasted till half-past two a m.... I went to a meeting of the sub-committee about the testimonial of Ruskin’s, he having noticed my absence from the previous one with regret. Ruskin was playful and childish and the tea-table overcharged with cakes and sweets as for a juvenile party. Then about an hour later cake and wine was again produced of which Ruskin again partook largely, reaching out with his thin paw and swiftly absorbing three or four large lumps of cake in succession. At home he looks young and rompish. At the meeting at Hunt’s he looked old and ungainly, but his power and eloquence as a speaker were homeric. But I said at the time that but for his speaking he was in appearance like a cross between a fiend and a tallow-chandler... At night to the Working Men’s College with Gabriel and then a public meeting to hear Professor Maurice spouting and Ruskin jawing. Ruskin was as eloquent as ever and is wildly popular with the men. He flattered Rossetti in his presence hugely and spoke of Munroe in conjunction with Baron Marochetti as the two noble sculptors whom all the aristocracy patronized — and never one word about Woolner whose bust he had just before gone into ecstasies about and invited to dinner. This at a moment when Woolner’s pupils of the college were all present. Rossetti says Ruskin is a sneak and loves him, Rossetti, because he is one, too, and Hunt he half likes because he is half a sneak but he hates Woolner because he is manly and straightforward and me because I am ditto. He adored Millais because Millais was the prince of sneaks, but Millais was too much so, for lie sneaked away his wife and so he is obliged to hate him for too much of his favourite quality. Rossetti, in fact, was in such a rage about Ruskin and Woolner that he bullied Munroe all the way home, wishing to take every cab he encountered.

“27th January. — To Jones’s [Sir Edward Burne-Jones] yesterday evening with an outfit that Emma had purchased at his request for a poor miserable girl of seventeen he had met in the streets at
2 a
m. The coldest night this winter — scarcely any clothes and starving after five weeks of London life. Jones gave her money and told her to call next morning, which she did, telling her story and that she had parents willing to receive her back again in the country. Jones got me to ask Emma to buy her this outfit and has sent her home this morning. Jones brought Miss Macdonald and I didn’t ask any questions. [Miss Macdonald is now Lady Burne-Jones.] This little girl seems to threaten to turn out another genius. She is coming here to paint to-morrow. Her designs in pen-and-ink show real intellect. Jones is going to cut Topsy [William Morris]. He says his overbearing temper is becoming quite insupportable as well as his conceit. At Manchester, to give one recording line to it, all that I remember is that an old English picture with Richard II in it was the only beautiful work of the old masters, and Hunt and Millais’s the only fine among the new. Hunt, in fact, made the exhibition. The music was jolly and the waiters tried very hard to cheat.”

Such were the daily preoccupations of this small circle as recorded — with a spelling whose barbarity I have not attempted to reproduce — in Madox Brown’s diary If the bickerings seem unreasonably ferocious let it be remembered that in spite of them the unions were very close. Rossetti, who called Ruskin and himself sneaks, put up with Ruskin’s eccentricities, and Ruskin put up with Rossetti’s incredible and trying peculiarities for many years; and Burne-Jones, who was going to cut Topsy for good, retained for this friend of his to the end of their lives a friendship which is amongst the most touching of modern times. And the secret of it is, no doubt, to be found in the spirit of the last passage that I have quoted. These men might say that so-and-so was a sneak or that some one else was the prince of sneaks, but they said also that so-and-so “made” an exhibition with his pictures and that the other man’s were the finest of modern works. It was the strong personalities that made them bicker constantly, but it was the strong personalities that gave them their devotion to their art, and it was the devotion to their art that held them all together. It is for this reason that these painters and these poets, distinguished by singular merits and by demerits as singular, made upon the Englishspeaking world a mark such as perhaps no body of men has made upon intellectual Anglo-Saxondom since the days of Shakespeare. For it is one of the saddening things in Anglo-Saxon life that any sort of union for an aesthetic or for an intellectual purpose seems to be almost an impossibility. Anglo-Saxon writers as a rule sit in the British Islands each on his little hill surrounded each by his satellites, moodily jealous of the fame of each of his rivals, incapable of realizing that the strength of several men together is very much stronger than the combined strengths of the same number of men acting apart. But it was the union of these men in matters of art that gave them their driving force against a world which very much did not want them. They pushed their way amongst buyers, they pushed their way into exhibitions, and it was an absolutely certain thing that as soon as one of them had got a foothold he never rested until he had helped in as many of his friends as the walls would hold. With just the same frenzy as in private and amongst themselves these men proclaimed each other sneaks, muffs, and even thieves — with exactly the same frenzy did they declare each other to picture buyers to be great and incomparable geniuses. And, as may be observed by the foregoing quotations, for any one of them to leave the other of them out of his praises was to commit the unpardonable sin. So, bickering like swashbucklers or like schoolboys, about wine, women and song, they pushed onwards to prosperity and to fame.

In those days there was in England a class of rich merchant which retained still the mediæval idea that to patronize the arts had about it a sort of supervirtue. Such patronage had for them something glamorous, something luxurious, something splendid. They were mostly in the north and in the midlands. Thus there was Peter Millar of Liverpool, George Rae of Birkenhead, Leathart of Gateshead and Plint of Birmingham. And whilst the artists strove amongst themselves so did these patrons, each with his own eccentricities, contend for their works. They were as a rule almost as bluff as the artists; and they had also almost as keen a belief that the fine arts could save a man’s soul. Here is a portrait of one of these buyers — Mr. Peter Millar, a shipowner of Liverpool who supported out of his own pocket several artists of merit sufficient to let them starve. His name should have its little niche amongst the monuments devoted to good Samaritans and to merchant princes:

“I may notice that Mr. Millar’s hospitality is somewhat peculiar in its kind. His dinner which is at six is of one joint and vegetable w
ithout
pudding. Bottled beer for only drink — I never saw any wine. His wife dines at another table with his daughters. After dinner he instantly hurries you off to tea and then back again to smoke. He calls it a meat tea and boasts that few people who have ever dined with him have come back again. All day long I was going here and there with him, dodging back to his office to smoke and then off again after something fresh. The chief things I saw were chain cables forged and Hilton’s ‘Crucifixion,’ which is jolly fine.... This Millar is a jolly kind old man with streaming white hair, fine features and a beautiful keen eye, like Mulready and something like John Cross, too. A rich brogue, a pipe of Cavendish and a smart rejoinder, with a pleasant word for every man, woman or child he meets in the streets, are characteristic of him. His house is full of pictures even to the kitchen, which is covered with them. Many he has at all his friends’ houses in Liverpool, and his house in Bute is filled with his inferior ones. Many splendid Linnells, fine Constables and good Turners, and works by a Frenchman, Dellefant, are among the most marked of his collection plus a host of good pictures by Liverpool artists, Davis, Tonge and Windus chiefly.”

These extracts from Madox Brown’s diary belong to a period somewhat earlier than that of which I wrote in the preceding chapter. They show the movement getting ready, as it were, to move faster but moving already, and they reveal the principal figures very much as they were. And gradually these principal actors attracted to themselves each a host of satellites, of parasites, of dependents, of disciples. Some of these achieved fame and died: some of them spunged all their lives and died in the King’s Bench prison: some achieved fame and disgrace: some, like Mr. William de Morgan, still live and have honourable renown: some, like Meredith and like Whistler became early detached from the great swarm, to shine solitary planets in the sky. But there are very few of the older or of the lately deceased men of prominence in the arts who were not in one way or other connected with this Old Circle. Thus, Swinburne, young, golden-haired, golden-tongued and splendid, was the constant companion of Rossetti and his wife, the almost legendary Miss Siddall, and later a very frequent inmate of the house in Fitzroy Square. And indeed the bonds between this poet and this painter were closer than any such statements can imply. Meredith’s connection with the movement was, as to its facts, somewhat more mysterious but is none the less readily comprehensible. What has been called the famous “ham-and-egg story” seems to put Mr. Meredith in the somewhat ridiculous position of being unable to face the spectacle of ham and eggs upon Rossetti’s breakfast table; but this was very unlike Mr. Meredith, who, delicate and austere poet as he was, had as a novelist a proper appreciation for the virtues of such things as beef and ale. The position of Mr. Meredith in the household at Cheyne Walk — a large mansion that in Tudor days had been the dower-house of the Queens of England, and in which at one time D. G. Rossetti, William Rossetti, Swinburne and Meredith attempted a not very successful communal household — the position of Mr. Meredith in this settlement remains a little mysterious. The ham-and-egg story made it appear that Mr. Meredith did not stop for more than one minute in the establishment, but fled at the sight of the substantial foods upon the table. In a letter to the
English Review
of last year Mr. Meredith altogether denied the ham-and-egg story, pointing out that his version of the affair would be that, during a stay of an indefinite period in the household at Cheyne Walk he had observed with alarm Rossetti’s habit of consuming large quantities of meat and neglecting altogether to take exercise. Mr. Edward Clodd, on the other hand, informed me the other day that Meredith had assured him that he had never lived with Rossetti at all. I have, however, in my possession letters which, by their date prove that Mr. Meredith lived for at least one month in the household at Cheyne Walk. Madox Brown’s own version of the episode — and he was so constantly at Cheyne Walk that his story, if picturesque, has in it the possibility of truth — Madox Brown’s story was as follows:

The Pre-Raphaelite painters and writers were attracted earlier than any other men by the merits and charms of Mr. Meredith’s poems. From this connection sprang an acquaintanceship between Rossetti and Meredith, and the acquaintanceship led to the suggestion by Rossetti that Meredith should make a fourth in the household. This suggestion Meredith accepted. The arrangement was that each of the four men should contribute his share of the rent and of household bills; but Mr. Meredith was at that time in circumstances of an extreme poverty, and, whilst paying his rent he was unable, or unwilling, to join in the household expenses. Thus he never appeared at table. This may have been because he disliked the food, but the Pre-Raphaelites imagined that he was starving himself for the sake of pride. They attempted, therefore, by sending up small breakfast dishes to his room and by similar attentions to provide him with some measure of comfort. It is possible that these dishes disgusted him, but it is still more possible that they disturbed his pride, which was considerable. According to Madox Brown, the end came one day when the benevolent poets substituted for the cracked boots which he put outside his door to be cleaned a new pair of exactly the same size and make. He put on the boots, went out, and having forwarded a cheque for the quarter’s rent, never returned.