“I hope later,” he said, “to do something that will really please you.” But the time left to him was shorter than either of us could have guessed, and within only a little while his career was ended. He was a very lovable man, full of high ambition, and inspired in the happier moments of his life with a just confidence in his great powers. But these more buoyant moods alternated with seasons of great depression, and in this respect his temperament showed a marked resemblance to that of Fred Walker.
His spirit fed upon itself, and his hunger for success, linked with a still nobler desire to realise the many dreams of beauty that thronged his brain, left him with but little leisure for repose. I think the eager intensity of his nature was sometimes a terror to himself, and although the end came more swiftly than I had divined, it was scarcely wonderful that the constant excitability of his temperament should have prematurely worn down a physique that never was robust.
CHAPTER XII
ART JOURNALISM
My connection with the Grosvenor Gallery was due, in the first instance, to a series of articles upon the reform of the Royal Academy published by me in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette. These papers had attracted the attention of Sir Charles Dilke, who based upon them a motion brought forward in the House of Commons, which, however, had no practical result.
They had also been seen by Sir Coutts Lindsay and Mr. Hallé, and these gentlemen invited me to associate myself with them in the future conduct of the Grosvenor. This new vocation, however, in no way interrupted my career as an Art Critic. Already established on the Pall Mall Gazette, I began at the same time to widen the range of my writings on the subject of art, and in this way, at the invitation of Mr. Samuel Carter Hall, became a regular contributor to the Art Journal. At the same time I was offered and accepted the post of Art Critic on the Manchester Guardian, and in the year 1875 I was appointed as the English editor of L’Art, a periodical so luxuriously produced that it could not be destined ever to win a very large public.
Mr. S. C. Hall was a quaint and curious figure of the time, whose acquaintance never ceased to afford me a certain humorous enjoyment. He was supposed to be the model upon which Dickens has based his superb creation of Mr. Pecksniff, and there were points in his character which readily lent themselves for exploitation at the hands of such a master of humour.
For a time our relations on the Art Journal were friendly and undisturbed, and Mr. Hall was good enough to express in unstinted terms his appreciation of my work. But it was impossible, even at that time, in personal converse with the man, not to be haunted by the suspicion that his constant assertion of the most ideal aims in life were consistent with an occasional reference to more mundane considerations.
Both he and Mrs. Hall must have sometimes laid themselves open to the charge of taking themselves too seriously, for I remember Edmund Yates telling me that he had once asked Charles Dickens whether he thought they were ever conscious of playing a part, to which Dickens had replied, “I think once a year they exchange a wink, possibly on Carter’s birthday.”
Purnell used to relate an anecdote of the gravity of their entertainments having once been broken up by an unintentional flash of humour on the part of Mrs. Hall herself. At one end of the dinner-table Mr. Hall, in his most solemn tones, was announcing to the company his unswerving faith in a future life, and in conclusion expressed the hope that in that other and happier world he should rejoin his dear wife; upon which Mrs. Hall, from her place at the end of the board, interjected, in strong Irish accents, the somewhat disconcerting answer, “No, Carter; I shall go to Jesus.”
Mr. Hall’s appearance, with his wealth of white hair and dark eyebrows, seemed to give a certain stamp of authority to the unctuous platitudes in which he was wont to indulge. He used constantly to say to me, “My object, my dear sir, is to do as much good in the world as I can,” and in such utterances as this there was never, I am sure, even the lurking suspicion on his part that he was exposing himself to the shafts of ridicule.