ROMNEY’S HOUSE. HAMPSTEAD.

Though Romney was then in the decline of his life, he was at the height of his fame. He had married at the age of nineteen, and six years later set out for London, leaving his wife behind at Kendal. He had no intention of deserting her, but in London his genius soon won recognition, he began to move in good society, and partly because Sir Joshua Reynolds had once said that “marriage spoilt an artist,” partly because he became infatuated with Nelson’s enchantress, Lady Hamilton, he neither brought his wife to London, nor visited her, nor ever saw her again until he was dying. On April 28, 1799, Hayley called on him for the last time at Hampstead, and thought that “increasing weakness of body and mind afforded only a gloomy prospect for the residue of his life.” Then in July Flaxman saw him, and says in one of his letters, “I and my father dined at Mr. Romney’s at Hampstead last Sunday, by particular invitation, and were received in the most cordial manner; but, alas! I was grieved to see so noble a collection in a state so confused, so mangled, and prepared, I fear, for worse, and not better.” Very soon after this Romney left London for ever, and returned to Kendal and the wife he had neglected since the days of his obscure youth, and early in 1801, by his directions, “the collection of castes from the antique, a very fine skeleton, and other artistic properties of George Romney, at his late residence, Hollybush Hill, Hampstead,” were sold by Messrs. Christie.

Meanwhile, his wife had pardoned him and was caring for him. “Old, nearly mad, and quite desolate,” writes Fitzgerald, “he went back to her, and she received him and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney’s pictures!—even as a matter of art, I am sure.” It is this beautiful devotion of hers that gave Tennyson a subject for one of his later poems, Romney’s Remorse; in which the dying painter, rousing out of delirium, says:—

“There—you spill
The drops upon my forehead. Your hand shakes.
I am ashamed. I am a trouble to you,
Could kneel for your forgiveness. Are they tears?
For me—they do me too much grace—for me?...
My curse upon the Master’s apothegm,
That wife and children drag an artist down!
This seemed my lodestar in the Heaven of Art,
And lured me from the household fire on earth....
This Art, that harlot-like,
Seduced me from you, leaves me harlot-like,
Who love her still, and whimper, impotent
To win her back before I die—and then—
Then in the loud world’s bastard judgment day
One truth will damn me with the mindless mob,
Who feel no touch of my temptation, more
Than all the myriad lies that blacken round
The corpse of every man that gains a name:
‘This model husband, this fine artist!’ Fool,
What matters! Six feet deep of burial mould
Will dull their comments! Ay, but when the shout
Of His descending peals from Heaven, and throbs
Thro’ earth and all her graves, if He should ask
‘Why left you wife and children? for My sake,
According to My word?’ and I replied,
‘Nay, Lord, for Art,’ why, that would sound so mean
That all the dead who wait the doom of Hell
For bolder sins than mine, adulteries,
Wife-murders—nay, the ruthless Mussulman
Who flings his bowstrung Harem in the sea,
Would turn and glare at me, and point and jeer
And gibber at the worm who, living, made
The wife of wives a widow-bride, and lost
Salvation for a sketch....
O let me lean my head upon your breast.
‘Beat, little heart,’ on this fool brain of mine.
I once had friends—and many—none like you.
I love you more than when we married. Hope!
O yes, I hope, or fancy that, perhaps,
Human forgiveness touches heaven, and thence—
For you forgive me, you are sure of that—
Reflected, sends a light on the forgiven.”

Another famous artist who is closely associated with Hampstead was John Constable. In 1820, writing to his friend, the Rev. John Fisher (afterwards Archdeacon Fisher), he says, “I have settled my wife and children comfortably at Hampstead”; and a little later he writes, again to Fisher, “My picture is getting on, and the frame will be here in three weeks or a fortnight.... I now fear (for my family’s sake) I shall never make a popular artist, a gentleman and ladies painter. But I am spared making a fool of myself, and your hand stretched forth teaches me to value what I possess (if I may say so), and this is of more consequence than gentlemen and ladies can well imagine.” He was then living at No. 2 Lower Terrace, a small house of two storeys, and writes from that address, again to Fisher, on the 4th August 1821, “I am as much here as possible with my family. My placid and contented companion and her three infants are well. I have got a room at a glazier’s where is my large picture, and at this little place I have many small works going on, for which purpose I have cleared a shed in the garden, which held sand, coals, mops and brooms, and have made it a workshop. I have done a good deal here.” Lower Terrace is within a few minutes’ walk of the Heath, the scenery of which appears in so many of Constable’s paintings. He removed presently to Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square; one of his pictures exhibited in the Louvre made him famous in France, and his fame was spreading in England when he went back to Hampstead in 1826, and after staying for a while at 25 Downshire Hill (which has since been rebuilt) was “at length fixed,” as he wrote to Fisher, “in a comfortable little house at Well Walk, Hampstead.... So hateful is moving about to me that I could gladly exclaim, ‘Here let me take my everlasting rest.’ This house is to my wife’s heart’s content; it is situated on an eminence at the back of the spot in which you saw us, and our little drawing-room commands a view unsurpassed in Europe from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend. The dome of St. Paul’s in the air seems to realise Michael Angelo’s words on seeing the Pantheon—‘I will build such a thing in the sky.’” In Constable’s time the house was not numbered, but it has been identified as the present No. 40, and after his wife’s death he kept it as an occasional residence until he died in 1837. He is buried not far from it, in the Hampstead Churchyard.

JOHN KEATS

CONSTABLE. CHARLOTTE STREET.