Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (664 page)

Madox Brown had for long been away from London, and came of a generation of artists incomparably older in tradition than any that were then to be found alive — he the erstwhile disciple of David, the pupil of Baron Wappers, who had had his first training at the hands of the Grand School, a whole of a lifetime before. Madox Brown had simply never heard that a studio was a place where, amidst stuffed peacocks, to the tinkling of harmonious fountains falling into marble basins half hidden by orange trees, beneath an alcove of beaten copper and with walls of shining porphyry, you sat about in a velvet coat and had eau de Cologne squirted over your hair by a small black page. A studio for him was a comfortable place that no housemaid dare enter, a place to which you retired to work, a place in which you treasured up every object you had ever painted, from a rusty iron candlestick to half-a-dozen horse’s teeth — a place with a huge table on which stood all the objects and implements that you had ever used, waiting amidst tranquil rust and dust until it should be their turn again to come in handy. So that he could not for the life of him imagine what it was Mr. Quilter did want. He didn’t in fact know what advertisement was. Mr Quilter, on the other hand, had come across artists who mostly knew nothing else. In the matter of the studio they were thus at cross purposes. It wasn’t a sign of poverty, it was just a symptom of an unbusiness-like career.

Madox Brown in fact was the most unbusinesslike of men, and he had less sense of the value of money than any person I have ever met. He had indeed a positive genius for refusing to have anything to do with money that came at all easily. When my mother was granted a pension from the Civil List upon the death of my father, Madox Brown greeted the two gentlemen who rather timidly brought the news with such a torrent of violent and indignant refusals, that one of them, poor dear Mr. Hipkins, the most beloved of men, to whose efforts the allowance was mainly due, became indisposed and remained ill for some days afterwards. Thus my mother never received a penny from her grateful country. A number of gentlemen, all of them artists, I believe, subscribed a considerable sum amounting to several thousand pounds, in order to commission Madox Brown to paint a picture for presentation to the National Gallery. Such an honour they very carefully pointed out, had been paid to no English painter with the exception of Maclise, though it was frequent enough in France. The ambassadors on this occasion approached Madox Brown with an almost unheard-of caution. For three days I was kept on the watch to discover the most propitious moment when my grandfather’s humour after the passing away of a fit of the gout was at its very sunniest. I telegraphed to Mr. Frederick Shields, who came at his fastest in a hansom cab — a vehicle which I believe he detested. And then an extraordinary row raged in the house. Madox Brown insisted — as he had insisted in the case of my mother’s pension — that it was all a plot on the part of the damned academicians to humiliate him. He insisted that it was a confounded charity. He swore incessantly and perpetually, upset all the fire-irons which Mr. Shields patiently and silently replaced. The contest raged for a long time; it continued through many days. I cannot imagine how Mr. Shields supported it, but, the most self-sacrificing of men, he triumphed in the end by insisting that it was an honour, an unprecedented honour. The four or five Academicians who had humbly begged to be allowed to share in the privilege of subscribing, had each solemnly and separately mentioned the precedent of Maclise. In short, pale and exhausted, Mr. Shields triumphed, though my grandfather did not live to complete the picture.

Of the many devoted friends that Madox Brown had, I think that Mr. Shields was the most devoted and the best. Honoured as he is as the painter of the mural decorations in the Chapel of Ease near the Marble Arch — Sterne, by-the-by, is buried in the graveyard behind the Chapel,
his
tombstone having been provided by subscription of Freemasons, though I do not know whether this is the first honour of its kind ever paid to an author and a clergyman — I should still like to relate one fact which does much honour to this painter’s heart, an honour which I believe is unshared and unequalled in the annals of painting. When Madox Brown, by the efforts of Mr. Shields and Mr. Charles Kowley, was, after many storms, commissioned to paint six of the panels in the great hall at Manchester Mr. Shields, himself a native of that city, was nominated to paint the other six. He accepted the commission, it was signed, sealed, settled and delivered. Madox Brown began upon his work; he finished one panel; he finished two; he finished three, the years rolled on. But Mr. Shields made no sign. And Manchester was in a hurry. They began to press Mr. Shields, Mr. Shields said nothing. They threatened him with injunctions from the Court of Chancery; they writted him, they began actions, being hot-headed and masculine men, for the specific performance of Mr. Shield’s contract. All the while Mr. Shields lay absolutely low. At last in despair of ever getting the Town Hall finished the city of Manchester commissioned Madox Brown to complete the series of frescoes. This again was Mr. Shield’s triumph. For from the first he had accepted the commission and he had remained silent through years of bullying, having in his mind all the time the design that the work should fall to my grandfather whom he considered an absolutely great artist. Had he at first refused the commission it would have been taken by some painter less self-sacrificing. He took it therefore and bore the consequences, which were very troublesome.

I was once walking with this fine gentleman when he became the subject of a street boy’s remark which should not, I think, be lost to the world. That Mr. Shields is of this opinion I feel fairly certain, for I have many times heard him repeat the anecdote. A deeply religious man, Mr. Shields was at the time of which I am writing eminently patriarchal in appearance. His beard was of great length and his iron-grey hair depended well on to his shoulders. This attracted the attention of an extremely small boy who scarcely came up to the painter’s knee. Both his eyes and mouth as round as three marbles, the child trotted along, gazing up into the artist’s eyes until he asked:

“What is it, my little man?”

Then at last the boy answered:

“Now I knows why it was the barber hung hisself!”

Mr. Shields was not in any way embarrassed, but when I was extremely young and extremely selfconscious, he once extremely embarrassed me. Being of this picturesque appearance he was walking with myself and Mr. Harold Rathbone, the almost more picturesque originator of Della Robbia ware pottery. This was a praiseworthy enterprise for the manufacture amongst other things of beautiful milk jugs, which, at ten-and-sixpence a piece, Mr. Rathbone considered would be so handy for the Lancashire mill girls when they went on a day’s outing in the country. We were in the most crowded part of Piccadilly; the eyes of Europe seemed to be already more than sufficiently upon us to suit my taste. Mr. Rathbone suddenly announced that he had succeeded in persuading the Liverpool Corporation to buy Mr. Holman Hunt’s picture of “The Triumph of the Innocents.” Mr. Shields stopped dramatically. His eyes became as large and round as those of the street child:

“You
have
, Harold!” he exclaimed, and opening his arms wide he cried out: “Let me kiss you, Harold!”

The two artists, their inverness capes flying out and seeming to cover the whole of Piccadilly, fell into each other’s arms. As for me I ran away at the top of my speed and hid myself in the gloomy entrance under the steps of the orchestra at the back of St. James’s Hall. But I wish now I could again witness an incident arising from another such occasion.

CHAPTER VII
I

VARIOUS CONSPIRATORS

THE earliest Pre-Raphaelites bothered themselves very little therefore with politics, Rossetti himself less than any of the others, though most of the Rossettis had always views of an advanced character. How could it be otherwise, with Italians whose earliest ideas were centred around the struggle for Italian freedom? It has always seemed to me a curious conjunction that Napoleon III, when he was a pauper exile in London, was a frequent visitor at the little house in Charlotte Street where the Rossettis lived in an odour of Italian conspiracy. And it has sometimes occurred to me to wonder whether the germs of Napoleon’s later policy — that Utopian and tremendous idea that was his of uniting all Latin humanity in one immense alliance under the ægis and hegemony of the eagle of France — that tremendous idea that, appearing amidst the smoke of Solferino and Sadowa, fell so tragically upon the field of Sedan — whether that idea did not find its birth in the little room where Rossetti the father sat and talked continuously of Dante and of
Italia una.

I remember hearing an anecdote concerning Mazzini that has nothing to do with Pre-Raphaelites — but it is one that amuses me. In the time of Mazzini’s exile in London, he was in circumstances of extreme poverty. One of the sympathizers with the cause of the liberation of Italy allowed the refugee to live in the attic of his office. He was a Mr. Shaen, a solicitor of distinction, and his offices were naturally in Bedford Row. He rented the whole house but used only the lower rooms.

Years passed; Mazzini went away, died, and was enshrined in the hearts of his liberated countrymen. More years passed; Mr. Shaen died; the firm which Mr. Shaen founded grew larger and larger. The clerks invaded room after room of the upper house, until at last they worked in the very attics. One day one of the partners was dictating a difficult letter to a clerk in such an attic. He stood before the fire, and absent-mindedly fingered a dusty spherical object of iron that stood upon the mantelpiece. Getting hold of the phrase that he wanted, he threw, still absent-mindedly, this iron object into the fire. He finished dictating the letter and left the room. Immediately afterwards there was a terrific explosion. The round object was nothing more nor less than a small bomb.

With such objects Mazzini had passed his time whilst, years before, he had dreamed of the liberation of Italy. He had gone away; the bomb, forgotten upon the mantelpiece, had remained undisturbed until at last it found its predestined billet in the maiming of several poor clerks. I do not know that there is any particular moral to this story. It certainly does not bear upon what was the great moral of the Pre-Raphaelites, as of the Æsthetes.

It is true that this great moral is nothing more nor less than the mediaeval proverb: “Let the cobbler stick to his last.”

Indeed, it was in exactly those words that my grandfather replied to O’Connell when that ardent champion of the cause of United Ireland requested Madox Brown, Rossetti and Holman Hunt to stand for Irish constituencies. O’Connell’s idea was that if the cause of Ireland could be represented in the House of Commons by Englishmen of distinction in the world of arts and intellect, the cause of Ireland would become much more acceptable in English eyes. In this he was probably wrong, for England has a rooted distrust for any practitioner of the arts. Rossetti, in any ease, replied that his health would not allow him to go through the excitement of a parliamentary election.

This was probably true, for at the time Rossetti was at the lowest pitch of his nervous malady. Madox Brown, however, answered in a full-dress letter which was exceedingly characteristic of him. He refused emphatically to stand, whilst pointing out that his entire heart went out to the cause of Ireland, and that he sympathized with all uprisings, moonlightings, boycottings, and any other cheerful form of outrage. This was Madox Brown the romantic! Immediately afterwards, however, he got to business with those words: “Let the cobbler stick to his last.”

He continued — that the affairs of Ireland were exceedingly complicated, that in Ireland itself were many factions, eaeli declaring that the other would be the ruin of the nation, and that he had to pay too much attention to his brushes and paints ever to tackle so thorny a question. He sympathized entirely with freedom in all its forms, he was ready to vote for Home Rule and to subscribe to the funds of all the Irish parties, but he felt that his was not the brain of a practical politician. What Mr. Holman Hunt wrote I do not precisely remember, though I have seen his letter. It put — as it naturally would — Madox Brown’s views in language much more forcible and much less polite.

And indeed, until William Morris dragged across the way of Æstheticism the red herring of socialism, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Æsthetes, painters, poets, painter-poets and all the inhabitants of the drawingrooms that Du Maurier illustrated in
Punch
— all this little earnest or posing world — considered itself as a hierarchy, as an aristocracy entirely aloof from the common sort.

It lived under the sanction of the arts and from them it had alike its placidity and its holiness. When poor Oscar Wilde wandered down Bond Street in parti-coloured velvet hose, holding a single red flower in his hand, he was doing what in those days was called “touching the Philistine on the raw.” In France this was called
épater le bourgeois.
Maxime du Camp, whom I have always considered the most odious and belittling of memoirists — who has told us that, but for his illness, Flaubert would have been a man of genius — this Du Camp does in his carping way give us a picture of a sort of society which in many ways resembled that of the Æsthetes towards the end of the last century. In Flaubert, Gautier, even in Mérimée, and in a half-score of French writers just before the fall of the Second Empire, there was this immense feeling of the priesthood of the arts. I do not mean to say that it was limited to the coterie that surrounded Flaubert. Victor Hugo had it; and even Alexandre Dumas
qui écrivait comme un cocher de fiacre.
Du Camp, the whole of whose admiration was given to the author of Monte Cristo, ought by rights to have been an English critic.

Indeed it was only yesterday, that I read in my daily paper an article by the literary critic who today is most respected by the British middle classes. Said this gentleman: “Thank Heaven, that the day of Flaubert and the Realists is passed for England and that the market is given over to writers of the stamp of Mr. A — to writers who, troubling their heads nothing at all about the subtleties of art, set themselves the task of writing a readable story without bothering about the words in which it is written.”

These words might well have been written by
ce cher Maxime!
The same English writer, in reviewing the Memoirs of Mme de Boigne, goes out of his way to poke fun at the duchess who surrounded Chateaubriand with an atmosphere of adoration.

This seemed ridiculous to Mr. — . It would not have seemed ridiculous to Du Camp.

But be these matters how they may, it is pretty certain that, outside this æsthetic circle, we have never had in England any body of people, whether artists or laity, who realized that art was a thing that it was in the least worth putting oneself out for; and when Oscar Wilde wandered down Bond Street in a mediaeval costume, bearing in his hand a flower, he was doing something not merely ridiculous. It was militant.

Wilde himself I met only in his later years. I remember being at a garden party of the Bishop of London, and hearing behind me a conversation so indelicate that I could not resist turning around. Oscar Wilde, very fat, with the remainder of young handsomeness — even of young beauty — was talking to a lady. It would be more precise to say that the lady was talking to Wilde, for it was certainly she who supplied the indelicacies in their conversation, for as I knew Wilde he had a singularly cleanly tongue.

But I found him exceedingly difficult to talk to, and I only once remember hearing him utter one of his brilliancies. This was at a private view of the New Gallery. Some one asked Wilde if he were not going to the soirée of the O. P. Club. Wilde, who at that time had embroiled himself with that organization, replied: “No. Why, I should be like a poor lion in a den of savage Daniels.”

I saw him once or twice afterwards in Paris, where lie was, I think, rather shamefully treated by the younger denizens of Montmartre and of the Quartier Latin. I remember him as, indeed, a tragic figure, seated at a table in a little cabaret, lachrymosely drunk, and being tormented by an abominable gang of young students of the four arts.

Wilde possessed a walking-stick with an ivory head, to which he attached much affection — and, indeed, in his then miserable poverty it was an object of considerable intrinsic value. Prowling about the same cabaret was one of those miserable wrecks of humanity, a harmless, parasitic imbecile, called Bibi Latouche. The young students were engaged in persuading poor Wilde that this imbecile was a dangerous malefactor. Bibi was supposed to have taken a fancy to Wilde’s walking-stick, and the young men persuaded the poet that if he did not surrender this treasure he would be murdered on his way home through the lonely streets. Wilde cried and protested.

I do not know that I acted any heroic part in the matter. I was so disgusted that I went straight out of the café, permanently cured of any taste for Bohemianism that I may ever have possessed. Indeed, I have never since been able to see a student, with his blue béret, his floating cloak, his floating tie, and his youthful beard, without a feeling of aversion.

One of Wilde’s French intimates of that date assured me, and repeated with the utmost earnestness and many asseverations, that he was sure Wilde only sinned
par pure snobisme,
and in order to touch the Philistine on the raw. Of this I am pretty well satisfied, just as I am certain that such a trial as that of Wilde was a lamentable error of public policy on the part of the police. He should have been given his warning, and have been allowed to escape across the Channel. That any earthly good could come of the trial, no one, I think, would be so rash as to advance. I did not like Wilde, his works seemed to me derivative and of no importance, his humour thin and mechanical, and I am lost in amazement at the fact that in Germany and to some extent in France, Wilde should be considered a writer of enormous worth. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that his fate was infinitely more bitter than anything he could have deserved. As a scholar he was worthy of the greatest respect. His conversation, though it did not appeal to me, gave, as I can well believe, immense pleasure to innumerable persons; so did his plays, so did his verse. Into his extravagances he was pushed by the quality of his admirers, who demanded always more and more follies; when they had pushed him to his fall, they very shamefully deserted this notable man.

On the afternoon when the sentence against Wilde had been pronounced, I met Dr. Garnett on the steps of the British Museum. He said gravely: “This is the death-blow to English poetry.” I looked at him in amazement, and he continued: “The only poets we have are the Pre-Raphaelites, and this will cast so much odium upon them that the habit of reading poetry will die out in England.”

I was so astonished that I laughed out loud. I had hardly imagined that Wilde could be called a Pre-Raphaelite at all. Indeed, it was only because of the confusion that existed between Pre-Raphaelism and Æstheticism that the name ever became attached to this group of poets. Pre-Raphaelism as it existed in the ‘forties and ‘fifties was a sort of Realism inspired by high moral purpose.

Æstheticism, which originated with Burne-Jones and Morris, was a movement that concerned itself with idealizing anything that was mediaeval. It may be symbolized by the words, “long necks and pomegranates.” Wilde carried this ideal one stage further. He desired to live upon the smell of a lily. I do not know that he ever did, but I know that he was in the habit of sending to young ladies whom he admired a single lily flower, carefully packed in cotton-wool. And the cry from the austere realism of my grandfather’s picture of
Work,
or Holman Hunt’s
Saviour in the Temple
, was so far that I may well be pardoned for not recognizing Wilde at all under the mantle of a
soi-disant
Pre-Raphaelite.

But looking back I recognize how true Dr. Garnett’s words were. For certainly at about that date English poetry died. It is really extraordinary the difference that has arisen between those days and now — a matter of not twenty years. The literary life of London of the early nineteenth century was extraordinarily alive and extraordinarily vivid. To be a writer then was to be something monumental. I remember almost losing my breath with joy and astonishment when Mr. Zangwill once in a railway carriage handed me a cigarette; to have spoken to Mr. William Watson was as glorious a thing as to have spoken to Napoleon the Great. In those days writers were interviewed; their houses, their writing desks, their very blotting pads, were photographed for the weekly papers. Their cats, even, were immortalized by the weekly press. Think of that, now!