Another pioneer of art who used to come to Addison Mansions often, when he had a studio in Brook Green, was Francis Bate, the moving spirit of the New English Art Club. His influence on art has been profound. The new English Art Club may have been identified with a certain extravagant phase by scoffers, but it has embraced men like Sargent and Shannon, as well as apostles of stiff blue cabbages.
The public were quick to appreciate the charm of the soft grey studies, in which so little was indicated and so much implied, of Theodore Roussel and Paul Maitland. Maitland, in spite of his delicate health, was a student as well as a painter. He was a very clear thinker, like the late Sir Alfred East, another Academician who often joined our symposia. I always felt that East could have made his name as easily in literature as in art.
The artist who has played the greatest part in the book life of his time is, of course, Walter Crane, a really profound student and thinker, who has held all sorts of most important directorships in art, and delivered lectures of historical importance. No artist has such a record in Who’s Who, for Crane is not only an illustrator of books, but a writer, and as eminent a socialist as he is an artist. He describes himself as “mostly self-taught,” but he was apprenticed to W. J. Linton, and exhibited in the Royal Academy when he was only sixteen. He lives in ideal surroundings, in a rambling house, more than two centuries old, in Holland Street, Kensington. The thing which always struck me more than the old curios which find such a fitting niche in the house, are the rubbings of the brasses of his ancestors, for Crane has a long line of knightly ancestors, one of whom was Chancellor of England in Stuart times. Of his work I need not speak, for he has founded one of the schools of modern English Art.
When I asked Walter Crane if he had been turned into an artist by any sensational incident, he said—
“My progress—if I may so call it—has been very gradual and quite unsensational, I think—except to myself. I had the great advantage of having an artist for a father, and never remember the time when I did not handle a pencil of some kind, though it was often a slate pencil. I had no early struggles to have my wish to be an artist allowed and encouraged, or any strife about the realisation of that ideal with a bourgeois-minded family, as one so often hears about in artists’ histories. I never started for anywhere with half-a-crown in my pocket—anything of the sort usually quickly burnt a hole in what little pocket I may have had—and no doubt that is the principal reason why I remain poor.
“My early fondness for drawing animals caused confident and friendly critics to say, ‘He will be a second Landseer!’ and nothing could have had a more glowing prospect for me at the time; but times have a way of changing, and ideals change with them, especially when one is ‘growing up.’
“At the age of sixteen I had what might be called my first picture accepted at the Royal Academy—first time of asking—but the subject was ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ and my source of inspiration was by no means Landseer, but rather the pre-Raphaelites, and I was already deeply read in Ruskin.
“You speak of the ‘paradox of my being a socialist’ in spite of my descent. Why should it be a paradox for one who loves beauty and harmony, and strives to realise it in his work, but who sees around him a world scrambling for money, glutted with riches at one end of the social scale, and penniless and destitute at the other, while all the time the bounty of Nature and the invention and labour of man provides abundance—but only for those who can exchange the necessary counters, and for those who hold the keys of the means of the maintenance of life?
“Socialism does not mean lowering the standard of life, but raising it, and with the abolition of the struggle for mere bread, and the substitution of co-operation for competition, it will be possible to build a society founded upon some better basis than cash, a surplus value. Indeed, it may be said that a true aristocracy might then become possible, since personal qualities and character would then have their real value, purged of the harrowing, selfish burden of private ownership of the means of life, and estimated by service to the community.”
My most intimate artist friend is Réné de l’Hôpital, who, in spite of his name and his descent, speaks not a word of French. De l’Hôpital is one of those happy portrait-painters who can get a likeness; but he is more than that; if he had a literary turn, he could write as good a book as any one on “collecting” economically, for he has a wonderful knowledge of old furniture and its West-end and East-end values. I know the extent of his knowledge because he and my brother-in-law, the late Frederick Robert Ellis, were my advisers when I sold the contents of Phillimore Lodge, and the auctioneer said they fetched half as much again as they were worth, because we knew their value and their points were so well brought out. De l’Hôpital owed his knowledge partly to the fact that he was born in a great old house full of treasures. Having known what it was to struggle himself, when he became an artist against the wishes of his family, he does a great deal for the poor.