We met often and intimately during the progress of preparation, and I remember his almost child-like delight when we mounted to the painting-room at the Lyceum—where Hawes Craven was transferring to a wider canvas his beautiful design for the scene of the Queen’s Maying—as he insisted in taking from the scenic artist a brush of giant dimensions, and executing a passage in one corner of the backcloth so that he might be able to boast, as he laughingly declared to Craven, that he had partly painted the scene himself.
OPHELIA
From the picture by Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.
CHAPTER VII
MILLAIS AND LEIGHTON
Millais was not one of those to whom I had written after the publication of my article upon his work, and it was not till later at the Arts Club that I learned to know him personally.
Perhaps I refrained from addressing him at the time because I was conscious that my criticism could not be altogether agreeable to him, and I felt that I could hardly demand any assistance in the prosecution of my labours from one whose talent I had so severely handled.
Looking back now upon that youthful essay it seems to me, in the light of later knowledge and appreciation, to be disfigured to an extraordinary degree by arrogance of statement and intolerance of judgment. My mind had been so completely captured by the innate poetical feeling that marked the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that I was then scarcely ready to rank at their true value the splendid powers which Millais possessed. I could only think at the time, with something approaching resentment, of Millais’s apparent desertion of the ideal that inspired his earlier efforts, and I was not able to perceive that, in the line of development which he had followed, he was only conforming with absolute loyalty to the natural bent of his genius.
It was the accident of youth which set him for a while under the influence of men of a deeper spiritual tendency, and it was not his fault, nor indeed our misfortune, that when the period of youth had passed he should have applied himself with ever-increasing earnestness to the development of those gifts in portraiture and in landscape which have left him pre-eminent among the painters of our school.