A portion of the essay on Burne-Jones was originally designed as an introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his collected works held, shortly after his death, at the New Gallery. The essay on Sex in Tragedy was written on the occasion of Sir Henry Irving’s last revival of the play of Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre.

CONTENTS

PAGE
Bohemia Past and Present[ 1]
Some Memories of Millais[ 12]
At Home with Alma-Tadema[ 26]
With Rossetti in Cheyne Walk[ 42]
Edward Burne-Jones[ 56]
James M‘Neil Whistler[ 89]
The English School of Painting at the Roman Exhibition [ 101]
With George Meredith on Box Hill[ 134]
The Legend of Parsifal[ 147]
Sex in Tragedy[ 162]
Henry Irving[ 199]
A Sense of Humour[ 213]
Sitting at a Play[ 227]
Sir Arthur Sullivan[ 242]
The Junior of the Circuit[ 253]
By the Side of a Stream[ 264]
Index [ 279]

BOHEMIA PAST AND PRESENT

The papers which compose this volume make no claim to any sort of ordered plan in their composition. They reflect in some measure the varied activities of a life that has been passed in close association with more than one of the arts, and therein lies their sole title to so much of coherence as they may be found to possess.

Lord Beaconsfield once defined critics as men who had failed in art. The reproach, however, is not always deserved, for youth is often confident in its judgment of others at a time when it is still too timorous to make any adventure of its own. For myself I may confess that I had adopted the calling of a critic long before I had found the courage to make even the most modest incursion into the field of authorship. My first essays in journalism, made at a time when I was still a student at the bar, were chiefly concerned with the art of painting, and I look back now with feelings almost of dismay at the spirit of reckless assurance in which I then assumed to measure and appraise the achievement of contemporary masters. A little later in my career I was brought into still closer contact with the art of the theatre, and in both these worlds, as well as in that of literature itself, I was fortunate in the formation of many valued and enduring friendships which have enabled me, in such of the following chapters as bear a distinctively biographical character, to record my personal impressions of some of the notable figures in the literature and art of the later Victorian era.

The reader who accompanies me in my voyage along the shores of the Bohemia of that time will quickly realise that it is not quite the Bohemia of to-day. Indeed since Shakespeare first boldly conceded to the kingdom a seaboard, each succeeding age, and almost every generation, has claimed the liberty to refashion this enchanted country in accordance with its own ideals. The coast-line has been recharted by every voyager who has newly cruised upon its encompassing seas, and in recent days its boundaries have been enlarged by the occasional incursions of Society which has lately condescended to include the concerns of art within the sphere of its patronage. But although no longer retaining its old outlines upon the map, there is enough of continuity in the character of the inhabitants and in the subjects of their preoccupation to render a brief survey of earlier conditions of something more than merely archaeological interest. If much has been gained, something also has been lost, and the traveller who survives to set down the experiences of that earlier time may perhaps be pardoned if he cannot always accept the changes which have transformed the face of the country, or modified the mental attitude of its citizens, as improvements upon the prospect that first dawned upon his vision forty years ago.

I read the other day a confident pronouncement made by one of the apostles of the more modern spirit which gave me the measure of the revolution that has been effected in all that concerns our judgment upon matters of art. “Art,” declared this authority, “cannot stop: the moment it rests and repeats itself, or imitates the past, it dies.” There is here no faltering or uncertainty in the assertion of those principles of faith and criticism which are embodied in the newer gospel, and it took me a little time to steady myself in the face of a declaration which seemed to overturn the settled convictions of a lifetime. But after much pondering my courage returned. I perceived that apart from the underlying truism that life implies movement, and that art as its image must share its vitality, there is nothing here that is not highly disputable or wholly false. Art indeed never stops but it does not always go forward: the movement perceptible at every stage of its history has been as often retrograde as progressive, and although it can never repeat itself, there have been again and again long seasons of rest when after a period of great productivity the land which has yielded so rich a harvest lies fallow.

But the final clause of the proposition, that imitation of the past heralds approaching dissolution, is demonstrably untrue of every great epoch of artistic activity. A fearless spirit of imitation, born of the worship yielded to the achievements of an earlier time, may, on the contrary, be claimed as the hall-mark of genius, and is indeed most frankly confessed in the work of men of unchallenged supremacy. Raphael exhibited neither shame nor fear in the frank reliance of his youth upon the example of Perugino: the painting of Titian, with an equal candour, confesses the extent of his debt to Giovanni Bellini, and Tintoret, who certainly could not be cited as a man deficient in the spirit of independence, made it his boast that he combined the design of Michelangelo with the colouring of Titian: while of Michelangelo himself we have it on record that in one of his earlier efforts as a sculptor a deliberate imitation of the antique carried him near to the confines of forgery. And when we pass from individuals to the epoch which produced them, was not the main impulse which governed the movement of the Renaissance inspired by a renewed sense of the beauty that was left resident in the surviving examples of the Art of the antique world? And all later time yields a similar experience. That newly born spirit in modern painting associated with what is known as the pre-Raphaelite movement rested upon the untiring effort of its professors to recapture the forgotten or neglected qualities of the painting of an earlier time, not indeed of the time which was its immediate forerunner, but of that still younger day when by simple means and with technical resources not yet assured, the earlier painters of Italy sought to interpret the beauty they found in nature. The spirit of imitation, conscious and unabashed, was of the very life blood of the movement, and it was in their devotion to that period in Italian painting which preceded the crowning glory of the Renaissance that the artists whose work constitutes the most important contribution to the painting of modern Europe were led to a stricter veracity in the rendering of the facts in nature which they sought to interpret.

But the men who laboured in that day were not greatly affected by the declared ambitions of the present generation. Originality had not yet been accepted as the cardinal virtue in any of the fields of imaginative production, and the illusion of progress, which may be said to rank as the special vice of the moment, found no place in the teaching of the time. Thinking over this widely desired and much vaunted quality of Originality in art, I was minded to turn to old Samuel Johnson to discover what particular meaning was then attached to a term that is now in such constant use. But my curiosity was baffled, for I discovered to my disappointment that this much treasured word finds no place at all in the pages of his Dictionary. The world is therefore free to conjecture in what way, if he were living in this hour, that sane and virile intelligence might have sought to describe it. As applied to matters of art, whether literary or pictorial, he would perhaps have been tempted to define it as “a word in vulgar use employed to indicate a vulgar ambition.” But without burdening the great lexicographer with views which the exigencies of the time did not provoke him to express, this at least may be confidently affirmed, that the pursuit of whatever virtue the word implies can have no place in the conscious equipment of any great artist. Certainly it was unknown or unregarded in every great epoch of the past. It is impossible to think of even the least of the mighty race of Florentine painters, from Giotto to Michelangelo, sparing one foolish moment from the eager intentness of their labour to ponder whether the judgment of aftertime should hail their work as original. That work, in common with all else that is produced in obedience to the impulse which is constantly shaping the beauties of the outer world till they are tuned into harmony with the spirit resident in the breast of the artist, had no need of any spur to production beyond that which is provided by a reverent love and an unceasing devotion, and it survives to prove, if proof were needed, that this boasted attribute of Originality, though it may fitly find a place in the epitaph upon an artist’s tomb, never since the world began formed any part in the impulse that governed the work of his hand.