Small Talk at Wreyland. Second Series

by Cecil Torr

When models sit for great artists, they will ask them now and then why they do this or that and why they do it one way rather than another. Thinking the answers over and comparing them, the models get an insight into things that few critics understand. I have generally found professional models acuter than professional critics in their judgments upon works of art.

In the days of the Pre-Raphaelites the professional critics did their best to crush the young men who could paint, and now-a-days they praise the young men who can neither paint nor draw. Both methods are annoying to real artists, though they will some day make their mark, whatever the critics may say. But the new method is more harmful, as it gives the scamps their chance. They see that critics can talk the public into giving 50 or 100 guineas for things that would not otherwise fetch more than 18 pence; and they can easily hoax the critics.

I believe that public taste is guided more by Baedeker than by any other man or body of men or books. When I go sightseeing abroad, I see people of all nations relying on his Guides. They hardly look at anything unless it has a star *, and when there is a double star **, their admiration knows no bounds. Stars, however, rise and set, and single and double sometimes interchange. I have compared his treatment of the Brera at Milan in his Northern Italy in the first English edition, 1868, and in the fourteenth, 1913. (I had these with me on the earliest and the latest of my visits there.) In 1868 six pictures have a star, and one has a double star. In 1913 the double star remains, and two of the single stars, but the other four have disappeared; and there now are stars to seven pictures that had none in 1868. And people go star-gazing just the same.

My father made old Baedeker’s acquaintance in 1839 or ’40, and formed a very high opinion of him. At that time he was a bookseller in Coblence, and little known outside the Rhineland, the subject of his earliest Guide. Thirty years ago I thought that Hendschel would oust Bradshaw just as Baedeker had ousted Murray; but the Continental Bradshaw was afterwards brought up to date, and Murray’s Guides were not.

There was a big statue of Wellington at Hyde Park Corner, where there is a little statue of him now; and the big statue stood upon the Arch until the Arch was taken down and set up further back in 1883. A great-uncle of mine writes to my maternal grandmother, 23 March 1847, “I have seen the Wellington Statue. It is not at all too large for the Arch, and is a noble thing indeed.” It was new then, and everyone was finding fault with it. It was much too big for the Arch, and it was not a noble thing; but the present statue of the Duke is an ignoble thing. If things are bad, by all means do away with them; but do not replace them by things that may be just as bad, though with another kind of badness. Look at the great west window in Exeter Cathedral: the new glass has not the same demerits as the old, but as a work of art it is every bit as bad, and it is much less interesting.

While the new Cathedral at Westminster was being built, I went in several times to see it, and once I tested its acoustics very unexpectedly. The chancel steps had not been built, so I walked up a plank; and the plank came up like a see-saw when I reached the higher end. It jerked me off, and I said something suitable. And then my words ascended to the apse, and were rolled back along the nave and aisles like a thunderous Amen.—I remember three designs for that Cathedral. First it was to be a Gothic building, rivalling the Abbey. Then it was designed as a Basilica, rather like St Paul’s at Rome as rebuilt since the fire. And then came the Byzantine thing we know: like all Byzantine things, far better inside than out.

An architect in London designed a house near here, and a specification was sent down from town: all walls to rest upon a concrete bed of specified size. The site was solid rock; and tons of granite were blasted out to make way for the concrete bed.—I happened to tell this to a ship-owner, and he remarked with some surprise, “I thought it was only Government officials who did that kind of thing.” And he told me of a ship of his that was employed in carrying troops. The regulations said that there must be (I think) eight feet clear height between the decks, and this ship of his had more, say ten. And temporary decks were built two feet above the permanent decks in order to reduce the height to eight.

There is a letter to my mother from one of her aunts, Southsea, 4 October 1861, “We went to see ‘the Warrior’ in dock, and a most beautiful sight she is. We went all over her, she is immense! It is thought she must roll much in anything of a heavy sea, and Kit and other Naval men think she ought not to be sent into danger, such ships being fitter to defend the coasts instead of new batteries. That unhappy ‘Great Eastern’! Will anyone ever venture in her again?” The Great Eastern had been caught in an Atlantic gale three weeks before, and the passengers found it very uncomfortable—“The two cows that fell with their cowshed down into the ladies’ cabin were killed by the violence of the shock.” I remember the Great Eastern very well, and also the Warrior—I saw her first in 1864, in Torbay. She was the earliest of our ironclads, and was completed in 1861.

In the old days of little wooden ships this part of England had a much larger share in shipping. Before Lloyd’s Register began, there were two rival registers of shipping—the shipowners’ red book, which began in 1799, and the underwriters’ green book, which began some years before, but lost many of its supporters by changing its system of classification in 1797. The underwriters had kept surveyors at twenty-four ports in Great Britain and Ireland; and six of the twenty-four were less than twenty miles from here—Dartmouth, Teignmouth, Exmouth, Starcross, Topsham and Exeter. And in 1799 the shipowners put surveyors at twenty-two of these, omitting Exmouth and Starcross, and adding six other ports, making twenty-eight in all. There were eighty-eight surveying ports in 1834, when Lloyd’s Register was started; and these included Dartmouth, Teignmouth, Topsham and Exeter, but the two last had only one surveyor between them. In another fifty years all four had ceased to be surveying ports, and the nearest surveyor was at Plymouth.

I wrote the article on Ships in the great Dictionnaire des Antiquités edited by Daremberg and Saglio; and while at work on it, I found that I was cramped for space, and therefore asked for more. But the answer was that they had given me as much space for ‘Navis’ as they had given Navarre for ‘Meretrices,’ and my subject could not possibly require more space than his.