Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

Mrs. Robertson was a daughter of an old friend of mine, that remarkable man Joe Knight, who always seemed to me as if he ought to have been Henty’s brother. As dramatic critic of three leading newspapers, the Athenæum, the Globe, and I forget the other, he had almost as much power to make and unmake as Clement Scott had. He used his influence most generously. At the same time he was a scholar of omniscience; he performed the Herculean task of editing Notes and Queries for the proprietors of the Athenæum; and he had a daughter so good-looking and charming that I always thought of her as Romola when I thought of her with him. I have no doubt that before she married Ian Robertson she had made herself as useful to the scholar as Romola.

Their daughter, Beatrice, has made a distinguished name for herself on the American stage.

It was an odd thing that I should not have met (Sir J.) Forbes-Robertson at Jerome’s, considering how much they have done since to make each other’s fortunes in the Third Floor Back, for which Jerome, as he always does when I am in England, sent me stalls on one of the opening nights. But, as a matter of fact, I met Forbes-Robertson at Palermo in the Venetian palace which Joshua Whitaker, the head of the great Marsala wine-firm, built for himself, adjoining the old Ingham house in the Via Bara. Forbes-Robertson was staying there, and I am in and out of the Whitakers most days when I am in Palermo. He was convalescing from a severe illness, and we went about, the little which he could manage, together in Sicily, and afterwards for a whole week together in Venice.

He was, I remember, very tickled with one trip which he took in Sicily when he got stronger. A nephew who lives in England, but has very large possessions in Sicily, came out to stay with the Whitakers. They wished him to visit his various properties in the interior when he was there. But the thing did not interest him; he was a subaltern in the Guards, taken up with much more important thoughts. But he was an ardent admirer of Forbes-Robertson on the stage, and he was willing to go wherever his uncle desired if Forbes-Robertson would go with him.

Forbes-Robertson was eager to oblige his hosts, and captivated with the manner of the expedition, for, as they were going into brigandy parts of the island, and the person of a great landowner is the favourite prey of the brigand, they had to have an escort, and sit with loaded revolvers on their knees.

Everything passed off happily, and Forbes-Robertson came back with the knowledge that an orchard in which pistachio trees bear freely is as good as a gold-mine.

In Venice he was quite well again, and spent all day in letting us show him the artist’s bits of Venice, for there was a time when, like another of our leading actors, he expected to make his living as a painter, not as an actor. He was educated at the Royal Academy till he was twenty-one, after leaving the Charterhouse, where he was four years the senior of Baden-Powell.

He was especially delighted with the gondola expeditions we made to the back canals of Venice. One day it would be along by the lagoon, where the timber-rafts lie floating, and collect weeds and local colour, past the ruining abbey of the Misericordia and Tintoretto’s Church, S. Maria del Orto, to Tintoretto’s house, now woefully humiliated by being a “tenement,” but unrepaired and unaltered since that prince of painters lived and worked in it. It may easily be found, since it is near the Camel sign of a mediæval Moorish merchant. Another day it would be across the Giudecca, where the big Adriatic fishing-boats, with figures of saints and monsters on their scarlet and orange sails lie anchored, generally with their sails flapping against their masts, as if they knew that they were there for ornament to the landscape. Across the Giudecca there was the famous Redentore Church, with its three far-famed Madonnas by the pupils of Bellini, and there was more than one house with that rarity for Venice—a garden.

Over the other side of the Giudecca we all went into the great old garden of some Marchese. Venice has gardens there, but the Venetians are so unused to gardens that they abandon them to dull evergreens, when, having nothing to overshadow them, they might be as full of gay flowers as a sarcophagus in Raphael’s pictures of the Resurrection. The only person I know who does make use of his garden chances is Dr. Robertson, the Presbyterian Minister, who wrote that wonderful book, The Bible of St. Mark’s.

I think Forbes-Robertson enjoyed the visit to Tintoretto’s house best of all. The well-head in the court was untouched except by the soft fingers of three centuries; the studio, with its open timber roof and huge fireplace, had nothing about it to distract the eye from memories, for it was a bare tenement of the poor. And it was such a very little way from S. Maria del Orto, a name made classic to the British public by the robbery of one of the most precious Madonnas of John Bellini—Santa Maria del Orto, which contains a frescoed choir by Tintoretto, and his “Presentation in the Temple,” and his tomb. When we were looking at the immortal Venetian pictures in the Accademia and the Doge’s Palace, or studying the faded marbles which jewel the interior of St. Mark, he was so overcome with reverence that it seemed almost a pain to him. He had not, I think, been in Venice before. At all events, he did not know it as I did—I could take him to any point of interest in the city by a few minutes’ walk, and perhaps crossing the Grand Canal by a traghetto. I have written half a book about Venice, and some of my best writing is about it. I do not know why I never finished it.