His father was, however, already tuning the strings, when his son went over to the still irreconcilable mother, took her needles away, kissed her, and wheeled her in the chair round to the table where the opened chess-board was arranged awaiting her. The father had already commenced the air, which at my solicitation he repeated, and afterwards played “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” The radiant faces of both parents gradually witnessed to their content; while the son beat time to the music, he paid no less attention to the game with the mother.

The two boys worked hard. They sat up all night long in Millais’ studio; they kept themselves awake with coffee; they encouraged one another with talk; when Millais was tired to death of his own picture he worked on Hunt’s, and Hunt on his. “Cymon and Iphigenia” and “The Eve of St. Agnes” were sent in to the Academy at eleven o’clock on the last night possible for sending in at all, and next day, in the exuberance of their joyful relief, they accompanied the Chartist procession to Kensington Common—Millais keen to see more of the fray than his companion thought prudent.

One great disappointment bravely borne by Millais, marked the Academy of that year; “Cymon and Iphigenia” was not hung. Hunt, however, gained an outspoken admirer in the person of an Italian student, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. “The best picture there!” said he, as he stood before “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and he said it loudly too. He did not admire it the less because the subject was taken from Keats, whom he adored. He loved and studied “the Golden Gates of Ghiberti”—another point of agreement. He was passionately fond of Art, but dejected by the enforced study of glass bottles under the stern guidance of Ford Madox Brown. What was he to do? He could not go on with those bottles. Hunt consented that they should share a studio: and he became an ardent, fascinating, but very troublesome learner. He hummed and moaned, rocking himself to and fro as he sat thinking; he raved and raged while he was painting, causing angelic little girl models to weep; he sat up night after night before his easel, eating or sleeping as the fit came upon him. He was perpetually encircled by a crowd of noisy followers, and he had a most inconvenient way of showing them everything in the studio, and asking them all to supper when the cupboard was bare—a very different friend from the un-Bohemian Millais, who in those days would not even smoke a pipe.

“I have always been told by artists that a pipe is of incalculable comfort to the nerves, that when harassed by the difficulties of a problem it solaces them.”

“That is the very reason, it seems to me, for not smoking. A man ought to get relief only by solving his problem,” said Millais.

Very different, too, from the genial atmosphere of his home was that of the Rossetti household, where there were strange gatherings of Italian exiles by the hearth.

“My types were of natural figures such as language had originally employed to express transcendental ideas, and they were used by me with no confidence that they would interest any other mind than my own. The closed door was the obstinately shut mind, the weeds the cumber of daily neglect, the accumulated hindrances of sloth; the orchard the garden of delectable fruit for the dainty feast of the soul. The music of the still small voice was the summons to the sluggard to awaken and become a zealous labourer under the Divine Master; the bat flitting about only in darkness was a natural type of ignorance; the kingly and priestly dress of Christ, the sign of His reign over the body and the soul to them who could give their allegiance to Him and acknowledge God’s over-rule. In making it a night scene, lit mainly by the lantern carried by Christ, I had followed metaphorical explanation in the Psalms, ‘Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path,’ with also the accordant allusions by St. Paul to the sleeping soul, ‘The night is far spent, the day is at hand.’”
W. H. H.

The picture hangs in Keble College Chapel, Oxford.

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