There were some other children, who were friends of mine and also of a bishop, who was an old friend of their father. One day they told me, “Bishop’s coming to-morrow.” And thoughtlessly I said, “Give him my blessing, then.” Next time I saw them, they said in rather a puzzled way, “We gave the bishop your blessing, but he didn’t seem quite to like it.”
My acquaintance is not limited to children. There are not many lexicographers about; yet I number two of them among the friends who come down here to stay with me. One of them has dealt with Chinese, and the other with Egyptian hieroglyphics.
In my earlier years I heard a good deal of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as embodied in William Holman Hunt. When he was painting his Eve of St Agnes in 1847, he wanted a couple of blood-hounds to complete the picture. Meeting a couple in the road, he tracked them to their lair, which was the house of John Blount Price, an old friend of my father’s and god-father to me. He lent his dogs, and thus began a friendship which lasted till his death in 1889.
My portrait was painted by Emily Holman Hunt in 1868. She was William’s sister, and had acquired all his mannerisms. My hair sticks out like wrought-iron railings round my head; and I have my old nurse’s authority for saying that I never wore such an ill-starched collar in my life.
There is also a water-colour of his here, which looks like the estuary of the Teign near Newton. I asked him if it was, 7 February 1909, and he told me that he remembered doing it while on a walking-tour in 1860, and it was somewhere between Falmouth and Exeter, but he was not certain where. He sketched the scene by moonlight, and put notes in pencil of the colouring of the various parts; but he did not rub the pencil out when he put the colours on, and now these notes show through the colouring. He said he knew they must come through in course of time. Unless they had, I should never have guessed what tint would be described as dusky pink.
On hearing people talk of the Pre-Raphaelite movement now, one wonders if they realize how thoroughly Post-Raphaelite the world was, when that movement started (1848) and for long years afterwards. Here is an extract from my diary, 22 August 1874, on my first visit to Dresden. I was only sixteen then, and have never been a judge of pictures, though they have always interested me; but I think it gives the point of view from which most people saw things at that time. “To the picture-gallery in the Zwinger, and at once went to the Sistine Madonna, which has a room to itself at one end of the building. After seeing many bad or indifferent copies of a picture, it is difficult to appreciate the original at once: it is certainly a most wonderful production, and, as a painting, far surpasses anything I have yet seen, but, as a composition, I do not like it so much as Titian’s Assumption or Murillo’s Immaculate Conception.” [I never understood the composition till I did what very few people take the trouble to do—went to Piacenza, 7 August 1898, and looked at the church of San Sisto, for which the Madonna was painted. On seeing the rectangular windows and their curtains, I understood the composition at once.] “Then went to Holbein’s Madonna, a Dutch lady in black velvet and frills: not very impressive after Raphael’s. The other principal pictures are Correggio’s La Notte, a wonderful composition of light and shade, Titian’s Tribute Money, Carlo Dolce’s Christ blessing the bread, and Battoni’s Magdalene.”
People care no more for Pompeo Battoni now than they cared for Botticelli then. The fashion is all the other way; and concessions must be made to fashion, even in a picture-gallery. And in most collections now the later works have been displaced by early works, almost always inferior in execution, and very often inferior in conception also. At the Uffizi the works of Botticelli now have a room apart; but for many years after I first went to Florence the Birth of Venus was hanging in the outside corridor, and did not even get a star in Baedeker.
In his essay on Botticelli, written in 1870, Walter Pater termed him “a secondary painter,” yet found so much in him to praise, that people hardly noticed this. And that was the beginning of the craze, at any rate in England. I knew Walter Pater, and always found him much more level-headed than people might imagine from his style of writing. And he had no illusions here. It is just the old story:—Wilkes never was a Wilkite.
All my earlier views of art were dislocated by the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, 1 May 1877. By that time I had seen all the great galleries of Europe, except the Hermitage, and thus had material for forming an opinion, though the opinion may have been quite wrong. Anyway, I recognized there a style of art that certainly was great, and yet could not be classed with the Old Masters or the Modern Painters, or even as Eclectic. The style is hackneyed now; but in 1877 the Days of Creation was as great a surprise as Sartor Resartus in 1833 or Pickwick in 1836. Carlyle and Dickens were established long before my time, and were suffering then from imitation; and I could not see the reason why those books were praised so lavishly by the people who read them when they first came out. And now the younger generation cannot understand such praising of that picture and the others that were with it. This generation has grown up in a sort of “greenery-yallery” Grosvenor Gallery, and has never had to face the pea-greens and vermilions of the past.
Art has made strange moves since then. Personally, I am always glad of the impressions of a mind that is brighter than my own, but I do not want the impressions of a mind that is still duller; and I get impatient, when the dull mind goes with a clumsy hand, so that the artist cannot even give me such impressions as he has. When honest critics praise such work, I fear their minds are very dull indeed.