Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

To face page 87.

were passed under the shadow of a mortal sickness, a delightful buoyancy of character that was enchaining and infectious. In his view of his own art there was occasionally something of the victorious arrogance of a school-boy who has lately carried off the first prize, an arrogance that was nevertheless consistent with a deep modesty of character that showed itself in his reverent attitude towards nature, where he was ever ready to admit that he had found his rival and his master.

As far as my own experience of him went, he was never very eager to discuss the work of his contemporaries, although he could be amply generous on occasion towards the earlier experiments of younger men. When he referred to the works of the older masters it seemed to me that there was something of defiant challenge in his tone, as though he were ready to do battle with any one of them in his own person and in his own painting.

Of the men with whom his career had been so closely linked in the earlier days of his studentship he spoke but little, but even in the little that he said I always felt there was an underlying conviction on his part that, as a painter, he had easily outstripped them all. And perhaps he was right. That, at least, was Rossetti’s opinion, as I have already stated, nor is it possible, I think, in fairly reviewing the art of his time, not to set Millais, in virtue of his powers as a mere craftsman, in a place beyond the reach of rivalry.

It was difficult at the period when I first made Millais’s acquaintance to realise that the earlier stages of his career had sometimes yielded periods of deep depression, and yet it is only necessary to turn to his own letters, written in the earlier part of the year 1859, to realise how, for a while at least, discouragement sat heavily upon him. And it is no less characteristic to note how swiftly that darker mood passed, for in the letter dated May 16 of that same year he says, “I have now enough commissions to last me all next year, so I am quite happy.” And then a little later, though he had received no vote at the Academy election, he adds in his characteristically confident temper, “It’s really a matter of entire indifference to me, as my position is as good as any except Landseer’s, and this they too well know.”

The charm of Millais’s nature, with its swift alternation between absolute confidence in his own powers—in the form of its expression sometimes verging upon harmless arrogance—and those rarer moods of discouragement and self-abasement, was aptly imaged in his person and bearing. I have been told by one who knew him in his youth that he had the beauty of an Adonis, and even in the year 1875, when I first met him, his appearance was singularly handsome and attractive.

The frankness of his outlook upon the world was aptly mirrored in his face—eyes that were keen yet kindly, and a mouth delicately sensitive for all its firmness, forming the essential features in a countenance that could not fail to win both sympathy and regard.

Occasionally in walking home with him from the Club he would tell me something of the men he had known well in an earlier period of his life, but for the most part it was not especially of painters that he spoke. Talking in this way of Thackeray and Dickens, and other notabilities of their time, he remarked to me that “the greatest gentleman of them all was John Leech”; and then, for a quarter of an hour or more, he ran on in affectionate appreciation of the great caricaturist, enlarging upon the extraordinary fascination and charm of his manner and the delicate refinement of his nature.

When the time came for the gathered exhibition of his work in the Grosvenor Gallery, I saw Millais more often and more intimately. Day by day, as Hallé and I were engaged in arranging the pictures upon the walls, Millais would come in with his short wooden pipe in his mouth and wander round examining the rich record of his own career; sometimes elated to the verge of enthusiasm, and sometimes as frankly confessing his own dissatisfaction with this work or that. Taking me by the arm one day he drew me round the room, and pausing before the “Knight Errant” he said: