SOME MEMORIES OF MILLAIS
There are men in every walk of life who would seem deliberately to shun the outward trappings of their calling. During his later years, when I knew Robert Browning well, it always appeared to me that he was at particular pains not to make any social appeal which could be held to rest on his claims as a poet. The homage that fell to him on that score he accepted as his due, but always, as I thought, on the implied understanding that in the daily traffic of social life the subject should not be rashly intruded. In the many and varied circles in which he moved he made no demand of any formal tribute to the distinguished place he held in the world of letters; and it was sometimes matter for wonder to those who met him constantly to note with what apparently eager and sincere interest he entered into the discussion of any trivial topic in which it was not to be supposed that he could have been very deeply concerned. Like Lord Byron, whose gifts as a poet he held in no great esteem, he was rather anxious—at any rate, in the earlier stages of acquaintanceship—that his position as a poet should be regarded as a thing apart; and he was apt, I think, to be embarrassed by any persistent endeavour to penetrate the outward shard of the man of the world, wherein he preferred to render himself easily accessible to a wide circle of friends, few of whom would have deemed themselves competent to enter into any sustained discussion of literary topics.
Among the painters of his time Millais would, I think, have owned to a like inclination. Neither in his personality nor in his bearing was he at any pains to announce himself to the world as an artist; and if not in his earlier days, at any rate at the time I first began to know him, he seemed to seek by preference the comradeship of men whose distinction had been won in another field. In self-esteem he was certainly at no time lacking; he could accept in full measure praise of his own work from whatever quarter it came; and in that respect he differed from Browning, whose nature seemed to stand in less need of flattery, or even of expressed appreciation. On occasion, indeed, and with only moderate encouragement, Millais could be beguiled into a confession of confident faith in his own powers that might sometimes seem to border on arrogance, but at the worst it was no more than the arrogance of an overgrown boy, put forward with such genuine conviction as to rob it of all offence. At these times he would give you the impression that, having won the top place in his class, he intended to hold it. He could not readily endure the thought, or even the suspicion, that there was anybody qualified to supplant him, and he was apt to be impatient, and even restive, when other claims were advanced, as though he felt the world was wasting time till it reached the consideration of what he was genuinely convinced was a higher manifestation of artistic power. And yet thee judgments upon himself, even when they were delivered in the most buoyant and conquering spirit, never left the savour of pretentious vanity. There was an air of impartiality that I think was genuine, even when his self-esteem was most emphatically expressed, as though he were recording the award of a higher tribunal, in whose verdict his own personality was in no way involved.
And then there was so much that was immediately lovable in the man himself as distinguished from the artist! I have heard it said by an older friend who knew him in the season of his youth that when, as a mere boy, he quitted the schools of the Academy to begin the practice of his art, he had the face and form of an Adonis, and his handsome and commanding presence when I first met him, toward the close of the seventies, a man then nearing fifty years of age, made it easy to believe that this record of the charm of his youthful appearance was in no way exaggerated. And yet the frank outlook of the face, with its clear blue eyes, and firm, yet finely-modelled mouth, though it spoke clearly of power and resource, and betrayed in every changing mood of expression the unconquerable optimism of a nature that retained its full vitality to the last, did not, I think, then, or at any time, yield any decisive indication of the direction in which his gifts were employed. Afterwards I learned to find in his features the true index of the finer qualities of his genius, but at our first encounter it seemed to me rather that I stood in the presence of a robust personality that had been bred and nurtured in the free air of the country.
It was always, indeed, easier to think of him as one of a happy and careless company during those annual fishing and shooting holidays in which he so greatly delighted, than to picture him a prisoner in a London studio, arduously applying himself to the problems of his art. And, in point of fact, he always brought something of that sense of breezy, outdoor life into the spacious studio at Palace Gate. Perhaps, if he could have followed his own inclination, he would have passed a greater part of his life on the banks of the northern river that he loved so well. Quite in the later years of his life, when he was rebuking his old friend and comrade, Holman Hunt, upon a too obstinate indifference to the taste of his time, he said to him: “Why, if I were to go on like that, I should never be able to go away in the autumn to fish and shoot. You take my advice, old boy, and just take the world as it is, and don’t make it your business to rub up people the wrong way.” Millais’s ready acquiescence in the demands of his generation was to some extent an element of weakness in his artistic character, leading him occasionally, as he more than once confessed to me himself, into errors of taste that he was afterwards shrewd enough to detect and candid enough to deplore; but however far he may on occasion have been led astray towards a certain triviality in choice of subject, this tendency never impugned or injured his integrity as a painter in the chosen task he had set himself to accomplish. The presence of nature, either in human face or form, or in the facts of the external world, proved a tonic that sufficed to restore his artistic conscience, and I do not think he was ever satisfied by the exercise of any acquired facility, for it was both the strength and the weakness of his art that his ultimate success in any particular adventure largely depended upon the inspiration supplied by his model.
One day we were talking of technique, and I remember Millais, who was at the time in some trouble with a portrait that he could not get to his satisfaction, roundly declared that, for an artist worth the name, there was no such thing as technique. “Look at me now,” he said; “I can’t get this face right, and it has been the same with me all through my life—with every fresh subject I have to learn my art all over again.” Such a confession came well from a man who, from the earliest time of his precocious and marvellous boyhood, had in the native gifts of a painter clearly outpaced and outdistanced the most accomplished of his contemporaries, and yet it was made in no spirit of mock modesty, but out of a clear conviction that an artist’s conflict with nature is ceaseless and unending, no matter what degree of mastery the world may choose to accord him.
We first met at the Old Arts Club, in Hanover Square. He was not a very constant visitor there, for his inclination, as I have already hinted, did not often carry him into a mixed company of his fellow-workers; but he occasionally looked in of an evening after dinner, and sometimes I used to walk away with him towards his home in Kensington. In his talk at the club he was apt to exhibit a genuine impatience of any desponding view of the present condition or the future prospects of English art, and the unbroken success of his own career—for at that time he had long outlived, and perhaps almost forgotten, the struggles of his youth—made it, I think, really difficult for him to comprehend that the arena in which he had won his undisputed place was not the best of all possible worlds. But this overbearing optimism of view was not always entirely sympathetic in its appeal; he was apt to brush aside with imperfect consideration the comparative failure of his less fortunate contemporaries, and it was not until long afterwards that I grew to realise that this apparent indifference to the fortunes of others sprang less from any natural lack of sympathy than from an intellectual incapacity to understand the possibility of real merit failing to secure recognition. Something of an egotism that was at times almost aggressive must indeed be allowed to him—an egotism which I believe left him with a genuine belief that nearly all other ideals than those he followed were misguided, and that lesser achievements than his own scarcely merited prolonged consideration.
But when we had left the club and were alone together in the street the more human and sympathetic side of his character often came into play. Not that he was, even then, apt to lavish extravagant praise upon his immediate contemporaries, but he could speak often and lovingly of the men with whom he had been brought into association in his earlier days, both in literature and in art, always reverting, in terms of special affection, to his friendship for John Leech, of whom he was wont to say that he was “the greatest gentleman of them all.” Dickens, too, he genuinely admired, though the great novelist had failed to recognise the earlier efforts of his genius; and he had many interesting anecdotes of Thackeray, with whom he had been brought into close contact during the time when he was engaged in the practice of illustration, telling me how, during periods of illness, he would be summoned to the distinguished editor’s bedside to receive instructions for the drawings he was commissioned to execute for the Cornhill Magazine.
It was during one of those talks about Thackeray that he related how he came to make his first acquaintance with the name of Frederic Leighton, in an anecdote which he afterwards told with telling effect, as part of a speech at the Arts Club, on the occasion of Leighton’s election to the post of President of the Academy. He recounted how Thackeray had warmly praised the talents of the young painter, whom he had met in Rome, prophesying for him the final distinction he afterwards achieved; and Millais confessed how, even then, he had felt a certain measure of jealousy in the novelist’s warmth of appreciation, conscious that he already cherished the idea that he himself would one day occupy the presidential chair. And so, indeed, he did, but the honour fell upon him almost too late, when he was already in the grip of the malady that was destined to carry him to the grave. But his reference to the work of other painters, however distinguished, was, as I have already hinted, comparatively rare, and the dominant impression left from all our talks of that time was of a man whose own ever-increasing prosperity had left him partially blind to qualities in others that had missed an equal measure of recognition. He could perceive little or no flaw in a world which had accorded to him his unchallenged position.
The finer and gentler side of Millais, half hidden from me then under an overpowering and impenetrable armour of optimism, I learned to know better when, as one of the directors of the Grosvenor Gallery, I assisted in the arrangement of the collected display of his life’s work. That was in the year 1886, and I can vividly recall with what easy self-complacency he anticipated the pleasure which he would derive from this long-looked-for opportunity of seeing the product of many years of labour displayed in a single exhibition. Before the arrival of the paintings themselves, many of which he had not seen from the time they had left his easel, he was afflicted by no trace of the nervous apprehension which I have found not uncommonly betrayed by other artists in similar circumstances. But the triumphant buoyancy of this earlier mood was replaced by many an hour of deep dejection when the works themselves appeared in their place; and that dejection again was sometimes as swiftly replaced by a spirit of almost unlimited self-esteem as he discovered in some particular example qualities greater than his recollection had accorded it.
The essential charm of the man’s nature shone out very clearly during that fortnight of preparation, and the invulnerable armour of self-esteem in which he was wont to appear before the world would sometimes fall from him in an instant, leaving in its place a spirit of humility that belonged to the deeper part of his nature. It was sometimes almost touching to note the mood of obvious dejection in which he would quit the gallery at the close of the day’s work, and no less interesting to observe with what alacrity the next morning he would recapture the confident outlook that was a part of the necessity of his being. He would sometimes be in the gallery half an hour or more before the usual time for the work of hanging to begin, and we would find him on our arrival with his short cherrywood pipe in his mouth surveying with evident satisfaction the pictures already placed upon the walls. And on those occasions he would often run his arm through mine and draw me away to compel my admiration of some forgotten excellence in this picture or in that, the renewed vision of which had sufficed completely to restore his self-complacency.
But these moments of exultation were not long-enduring, and it was an integral part of the fascinating naïveté of his character that he could with equal emphasis in the presence of some less desirable performance accuse himself roundly of having slipped into vulgarity and bad taste. There was one thing, however, he never could endure, and that was the suggestion that his latest achievement was not also his best, and this conviction so entirely possessed him that he set himself in very vigorous fashion to the task of correcting what he conceived to be the faults of some of his earlier works. I confess I looked upon this adventure with something approaching dismay, for it was evident enough, though he was in no way conscious of it, that the Millais of 1886 was not the Millais of thirty years before, who had laboured under the influence of earlier and different ideals. Happily the emphatic protests of one or two of the owners from whom the pictures had been borrowed cut short this crusade of fancied improvement upon which he had embarked, and in one instance, although sorely against his will, he was forced to remove the fresh painting from the surface of the canvas.
Some of the essays of that earlier time of youthful impulse and more poetic design had grown unfamiliar to him. Many of them he had not seen from the date when they first left his studio, and I recall in particular with what eager and yet nervous expectation he awaited the arrival of “The Huguenot,” a picture that had served as the foundation of his fame as a young man. I think as he saw it unpacked, with its delicate beauty untarnished by time, that for the moment his faith in the uninterrupted progress of his career was partly shaken. I know at least that his voice trembled with emotion as he muttered some blunt words of praise for a picture which, as he said, was “not so bad for a youngster,” and I remember that as it took its place upon the wall, after gazing at it intently for some time in silence, he relit his pipe and took his way thoughtfully down the stairs into the street.
Millais used to contend that, until the advent of Watteau, the beauty of women had found no fit interpreters in art, and he would cite the example of Rembrandt as showing how poorly the feminine features which he portrayed compared with the lovely faces imaged by Reynolds and Gainsborough. Perhaps he was hardly equipped to deliver final judgment on such a subject, for I do not think he leaned with any enthusiasm towards those finer examples of Italian painting wherein the subtleties of feminine beauty have certainly not suffered by neglect. But these dogmatic assertions of men of genius, if they are not irrefutable in themselves, are often instructive in illuminating the finer tendencies of their own achievement; and it will remain as one of Millais’s indestructible claims to recognition that both in his earlier and in his later time he was able to interpret with matchless power the finer shades of emotional expression in the faces of beautiful women. When the chosen model rightly inspired him—and without that model his invention was often vapid and inert—he could succeed in a degree which no other artist has matched or surpassed in registering not only the permanent facts of beauty in form and feature, but in arresting with equal felicity the most fleeting moments of tender or passionate expression.
In the later days of his life it was at the Garrick Club that I saw most of Millais, for there, in the card-room, he was to be found nearly every afternoon, and as we both then dwelt in Kensington we often wandered homeward together. The buoyancy of his youth and early manhood never quite deserted him, even at that sadder season, when he was already in conflict with that dread opponent against whom his all-conquering spirit was powerless, and I never heard from him, however great the dejection of spirit he must have suffered, a single sour word concerning life or nature. His outlook on the world was never tainted by self-compassion, never clouded by any bitterness of personal experience, and one came to recognise then, as his life and strength gradually waned and failed, that the spirit of optimism which seemed sometimes unsympathetic in the season of his opulent vigour and virility was indeed a beauty deeply resident in his character, which even the shadow of coming death was powerless to cloud or darken.